Archive for January, 2011

Thanks to the FM Blog for the pointer. Great look at marketing stats from 2010. Worth noting for benchmarking.

• Kristen says her lunch at Soleil was great. New York Times seems to agree. Will give it a try soon.
• Had Ceviche from TacoShack today – thanks Bryan! – was outstanding. Small but spicy and fresh. Yum!
• Listening to my Kiwi friends complain about American coffee, I often wonder where they get their coffee when in the US. In Austin, I highly recommend (and my standards are ridiculously high):
  • Mellow Johnny’s bike shop – owned by none other than Lance Armstrong – has a terrific coffee bar – Juan Pelota’s Cafe. And get this, they even have a Kiwi Blend developed for a couple of the mechanics in the shop from NZ.
  • Houndstooth is fantastic. They know how to brew it and make it. With the added twist it is a short skip from one of Austin’s finest Sushi joints, Uchiko.
  • Down the road from me in Westlake is Lola Savannah – very good coffee and normally prepared well.

• Fun site for discovering what people have in their bag… great idea
• Improve your productivity using the Pomodoro technique
• All kinds of Pomodoro timers for your computer
• France predicts NZ World Cup win… heard that before…
• The Cloud is not a Contract… if there is one sport we all enjoy, its a little Magic Quadrant bashing…

I’m obsessed with pipeline creation. Every marketer should. And this is a brilliant tool for doing funnel calculations. Love it.

Thought this was an interesting perspective on Ballmer’s leadership of Microsoft and the communications strategy deployed at CES. The basic message, if you believe you are the leader you are, don’t let others or the river of news dictate your communications agenda.

Ballmer was right not to make any major tablet announcement, showing off something that wasn’t ready. Any zealous tablet push would have led to bloggers, journalists and Wall Street analysts making iPad comparisons. By staying away from Apple and iPad, Ballmer kept the message pure, which is good marketing. Ballmer set the keynote agenda on his terms rather than taking the position of following a competitor. Surely there was temptation, and pressure, to directly respond to iPad. Ballmer showed leadership by waiting.

I was also surprised by the tone of the Muglia announcement. Ok, we tend to read too much into these things, but it really did two things – asserted who was in charge while demonstrating that assertion.

Bob Muglia and I have been talking about the overall business and what is needed to accelerate our growth. In this context, I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB…In conjunction with this leadership change, Bob has decided to leave Microsoft this summer. He will continue to actively run STB as I conduct an internal and external search for the new leader. Bob will onboard the new leader and will also complete additional projects for me.

Here the message is clear. And the message isn’t just that someone is leaving. Too many companies miss this opportunity in their communications – that is, to say what is actually going on.