Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

I’m busy updating some of the newsletters that I depend on most for updates, insights and thought-provoking ideas. Here’s what made the “keep list”.

• Kevin Rose – The Journal: Wish it was weekly.
• Tim Ferris: Five Bullet Friday – always take something useful from it
• Hiten’s SaaS Weekly – if you are into SaaS you need to read this
• PitchBook – good review of VC action and reads
• First Round Review – good reads, links and more
• Stratechery – you’ll need to pay but well worth it.

What do you recommend?

It doesn’t happen often anymore, but when someone asks me for my fax number I laugh, loudly. Blackberry users always elicit a light chuckle. Conference call dial-ins are just bemusing in an age of hangouts.

The prevalence of attachments though just baffles me. 

The idea of opening an attachment, adding comments, those comments not being able to be read given application incompatibility, waiting for the attachment to upload, endless searches for the right version of the doc… Attachments are bad. They are an artififact of another era.
Living in the cloud is a beautiful thing. We link to a doc in the cloud, we all edit and live in the most current version of the doc, comments are easy to see and resolve. Cloud docs are a productivity accelerant.

Attachments on the other hand need to be viewed with the same scorn as the fax machine – at one point useful, but today redundant.

 Social media is a trap – that’s the point. What many fail to appreciate is the consequence of the trap – once your in, the echo is so strong you don’t see or hear it. Speaking at a conference recently I called this the narrowing – where we think we are engaging in ever broader conversation because of all we are exposed to but in fact what we are exposed to is narrowing because the network of people posting are all alike.

But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap. Zygmunt Bauman: “Social media are a trap”

When Bauman speaks of “liquid modernity” the same is true of our brands – they are, as he says of society, based on “all agreements are temporary, fleeting, and valid only until further notice”. Social media accelerates liquidity by empowering the network to refer, rate and comment at speed.

A fascinating read…

 Commonwealth Bank, together won a Bronze 2012 Facebook Studio Award for Community Seeds.

This is a tremendous result given that there are only 11 winners from around the world – and we are the only Australian winner.

Thanks to all who worked on this.

Luntz is one of the best wordsmiths and thinkers on framing in America. Terrific piece in Businessweek on using language during the recession to communicate more effectively with employees and customers.

Focusing on “impact” also makes a listener pay attention. This one word causes people to assume they will see a measurable difference. People want results. Talking about “effort,” or even “solutions,” doesn’t work; Americans don’t care about good intentions. They want to know how well you execute.

Thanks to our growing dependence on electronic technology, coupled with dwindling free time, another word with increasing resonance is “reliability.” When it comes to such products as automobiles, cable television, and personal communication devices, reliability is now even more important among customers than price. In fact, it’s often a crucial factor in determining the price of a product or service. Value is now the sum of price plus convenience plus reliability.