Posts Tagged ‘News’

2 August 2010

Would You Want to Know Your Competitor’s Strategy?

by Bill Alberti

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All posts by Bill Alberti

A story surfaced today on TechCrunch.com claiming that a Facebook employee boasted the company “has obtained copies of proprietary Google documents outlining their social strategy.” Besides being way uncool to yammer on about at a cocktail party, it poses an interesting question: Would you even want to know your competitors’ plans?

A story surfaced today on TechCrunch.com claiming that a Facebook employee boasted the company “has obtained copies of proprietary Google documents outlining their social strategy.”  Besides being way uncool to yammer on about at a cocktail party, it poses an interesting question: Would you even want to know your competitors’ plans? 

Wouldn’t it limit your thinking – from offense to defense; from what you believe to what your competitors believe?  Chasing competitors who are behind you is a dangerous business.  Might you lose focus on your customers by thinking too much about your competition?

What do you think?  Would you want to know their plans?

2 Responses to “Would You Want to Know Your Competitor’s Strategy?”

  1. Brad Mampe says:
    August 2, 2010 at 3:00 pm

    I read this and immediately thought, “Runners on second still try to steal the catcher’s signals.” That’s not 100% analogous, but it’s a good start. And sports and games serve as a useful analogy in and of themselves: More often than not, the person who acts last often has an advantage, as they get to plan their own strategy based on the actions of their opponent. That’s ignoring any assumptions about the time involved, of course – in football, you wouldn’t elect to kick the ball if you won the coin flip in overtime.

    There is tremendous value in understanding what your opponent is doing. Unlike the sports and games analogy, though, in a business context, you’re not limited to a single opponent, and spending time to evaluate how to best proceed can be costly.

    Consider risk/reward propositions. The risk part is the cost associated with being wrong; the reward part is comprised of the gain associated with being right. The more I understand the hows and whys of what my competitor is doing, the better I can devise an approach that effectively counters it. While I can’t quantify it, I’m guessing these gains more than outweigh the losses of plodding ahead without knowledge of what my competitors do. I’m taking the insider info virtually all the time.

    Of course, all this is assuming that knowledge is absolutely legitimate. If there’s even a small chance of deception, then the choice is much more interesting – but that’s a topic for another blog post.

  2. Rich Weiss says:
    August 2, 2010 at 5:16 pm

    Bill, could not agree with you more. There is a mystique to not knowing that pushes you to wanting to stay ahead. While I’m sure it would be nice to have insight into their plans, I’d much rather have a wild imagination and plan for the worse.

    Also, the pragmatist in me wonders if I were to stumble across this information, is it real or a set up? I say know who you are, what your values are, and build your strategy with that in mind instead of chasing your tail.

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30 July 2010

Trust Me.

by Rocky Prozeller

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All posts by Rocky Prozeller

Did you know there are currently 10 elephants enrolled in painting schools in Thailand, and among the trunks toting paint brushes, the overwhelmingly preferred color is purple?

Did you know there are currently 10 elephants enrolled in painting schools in Thailand, and among the trunks toting paint brushes, the overwhelmingly preferred color is purple?


Having trouble sorting fact from fiction? You’re not alone.

According to the 2010 USC Annenberg Digital Future Study released earlier this week, nearly 80 percent of Web users rely on the Internet as a rolodex for informed reading, but a significantly smaller segment believes the spouted stats are sincere – and those digits are dropping annually. Ten years ago, 55 percent considered the majority of material concrete; in today’s edition that number dropped to 39 percent, a new low for the Digital Future Project.

Even search engines such as Google and Yahoo – traditional stalwarts of online sincerity – have lost some of their luster, dropping 11 percent on the reliability register. But what’s most stimulating (or simply scary) is the significant slide in trust even among websites we choose to visit regularly, a stat which trickled down for the third time in as many years.

If consumer confidence in online information continues to erode, how long do companies have before the lack of faith moves beyond the one medium and infects a brand’s overall believability? This raises the real question of how to win that confidence back and attain the vaunted status of ‘old faithful’.

Solid relationships require true trust – an attribute earned, not owed. The one direction offered by websites, purely pushing information out, isn’t engaging enough to build the requisite rapport needed to create certitude – that requires a two-way dialogue. Dynamic conversations allow consumers to think, test and ultimately interact with a concept; the ability to challenge inspires confidence.

Providing a platform for pondering back and forth is a means for entertaining the elephant in the room, that way we can sort fact from purple propaganda.

– 

Here’s to wishing readers from sea to shining sea a whale of a weekend as we jump out of July and attack August!

One Response to “Trust Me.”

  1. Janet Bednarz says:
    August 1, 2010 at 12:44 pm

    Well, I don’t care what other people say – I think Mr. One Eye is real.

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27 July 2010

Can McDonald’s Pull Off “Local”?

by Lou Tamposi

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Local is all the rage right now. Everywhere I turn, I see restaurants and stores pitching their food as locally grown and sold. I think this is pretty fantastic (though it certainly can get out of hand—I recently saw a “locally raised and organically fed filet of rabbit with a side of natural root of summer squash and a home-grown fat of pig garnish”), so I was especially intrigued when I saw that McDonald’s has recently launched a “locally sourced” food campaign in Washington state.

Local is all the rage right now. Everywhere I turn, I see restaurants and stores pitching their food as locally grown and sold. I think this is pretty fantastic (though it certainly can get out of hand—I recently saw a “locally raised and organically fed filet of rabbit with a side of natural root of summer squash and a home-grown fat of pig garnish”), so I was especially intrigued when I saw that McDonald’s has recently launched a “locally sourced” food campaign in Washington state.

The premise is simple—McDonald’s claims that 95 percent of the fries and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and 88 percent of its apples served in Washington come directly from within the state. These are pretty interesting statistics, especially because McDonald’s is seen by many as a big bad corporation—the antithesis of local. If you take a look at the microsite for the campaign, you can see the full list of specific products, and where they come from in Washington. Nifty stuff, and, if nothing else, they’re offering a free medium fries just for checking out the site. You can bring that one right to your nearest Washington McDonald’s for about 28 free fries from Washington, and 2 from god knows where else.

The question is—does a big company going local mean anything to you? If you heard that your local McDonald’s used locally sourced ingredients, would you be more likely to succumb to your Big Mac cravings? Or, do you think this campaign, with its varying “participation and duration” clause, is a sham to “localwash” consumers? If it’s successful, should McDonald’s try to expand the idea throughout the country? You tell us!

2 Responses to “Can McDonald’s Pull Off “Local”?”

  1. Nina Kentsis says:
    July 28, 2010 at 8:49 am

    This is interesting because many large companies are trying to do this, including Wal-Mart. While I don’t eat at McDonald’s, and I’m not sure how many people like me would be swayed to do so because of a campaign like this–or even how many regular customers care about this kind of information–I think it’s a good thing. Companies like this have the power to move markets and to change the way we eat. For example, when Starbucks decided it didn’t want the milk that it served to have rBGH, I’m sure it had an effect on milk production in this country because Starbucks buys so much milk.

  2. Geri Koeppel says:
    July 30, 2010 at 7:43 pm

    I don’t care if McDonald’s grows their own food in their parking lots or on their roofs; I won’t eat it because it’s uber-processed and full of chemicals. They are missing the point of eating locally and seasonally, and attempting to pander to a demographic that probably never will be customers anyway. Or, more likely, they’re giving current customers a way to justify their bad eating habits, which they don’t need — folks who eat fast food will eat it no matter what. Either way, I think it’s wrong-headed.

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8 July 2010

Climbing the Great Wall of China: Version 2.0

by Christina Belsito

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There is something romantic about writing a blog. One shares his or her thoughts, stories, art and experiences with the world simply by clicking a mouse. Blogs have redefined what it is to be a writer or a journalist simply because “works” are published instantaneously. Whether or not the blog is actually read by anyone else but the blogger, the writer feels a sense of accomplishment and pride – he or she is, to a certain extent, an international superstar.

There is something romantic about writing a blog. One shares his or her thoughts, stories, art and experiences with the world simply by clicking a mouse. Blogs have redefined what it is to be a writer or a journalist simply because “works” are published instantaneously. Whether or not the blog is actually read by anyone else but the blogger, the writer feels a sense of accomplishment and pride – he or she is, to a certain extent, an international superstar.

But what about in a place where such stardom can be seen as a threat? Enter: China.

To some, the expansion of the Internet in China was a surprise. How would a country that encourages censorship incorporate the World Wide Web – the epitome of freedom of speech – without chaos? Naturally, regulations were put in place (the second Great Wall of China), and many websites were blocked. These include Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, and most importantly for the purpose of this blog entry, Blogspot and Blogger.*

Despite the limitations, there are millions of bloggers in China (an estimated 30 million in 2005). Some are political; others are, well, unusual, but the majority of China-based bloggers use blogs to talk about themselves – the type of self-expression that would be seen as ludicrous 50 years ago. And no doubt, Chinese bloggers take their “right to blog” quite seriously.

In 2008, in order to outsmart Chinese government censors, bloggers began to use software that would allow them to write backwards. Others attempted to write in the ancient vertical form to confuse the technology. Today, bloggers are playing a game of cat and mouse with Internet police by creating multiple accounts under pseudonyms or by purchasing software that allows them to climb over the firewall. Another trick? Modifying the blog content to avoid being caught using one of the 1,083 characters that are filtered by security forces, which is not quite as simple as misspelling a word or adding an extra number or letter to the end. (When using characters, this blogger assumes that Chinese bloggers use either a similar character or an entirely different character with the same pronunciation as the intended word. Confusing as it may be, readers can still gather the sentiment behind the code.)

Of the 136 jailed journalists worldwide, 24 are imprisoned in China. Clearly, the government means business.

It makes you wonder… what drives Chinese bloggers to keep writing when the risks are so high? What are your thoughts?

*It should be mentioned that despite these regulations, certain people are allowed access to these websites, and many more have found ways around the “Wall.”

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2 July 2010

Please Mr. Postman

by Rocky Prozeller

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Communispace is a company fundamentally founded on listening, and if I’ve heard it right, active listening requires reacting to what’s been said. So this week the bullhorn is being put down in favor of recapping a few of the righteous reads friends of Verbatim have been kind enough to kick over to me. Allow me if you will, to mail in this week’s post.

Communispace is a company fundamentally founded on listening, and if I’ve heard it right, active listening requires reacting to what’s been said. So this week the bullhorn is being put down in favor of recapping a few of the righteous reads friends of Verbatim have been kind enough to kick over to me. Allow me if you will, to mail in this week’s post. 

  • Think you’re familiar with the phrase: ‘if you think that,  you’ve got another thing coming’? Think again. It turns out ‘thing’ is actually ‘think’, as in you’ll have to re-think your original thought. This pondering was provided by Grady Ruster’s Dad – thanks for giving us something to think about.  
  • Vuvuzela’s stormed South Africa, but that was just the beginning of the buzz. The Florida Marlins tried a marketing gimmick in bringing them to baseball, and BP is about to be blasted by a picketing posse, but the most bizarre (and arguably best) use of the mighty musical instrument goes to YouTube for their introduction of the Vuvuzela button, a fancy functionality allowing viewers to add the call of the crowd to any clip. Cheers to Peter Chapin for providing the sound idea.
  • Why should Pampers consider promoting themselves roughly nine months after the World Cup? According to a little fertility factiva, Germany’s success in the 2006 World Cup led to a lot of scoring … and a baby boom. Thanks to D-Rom for delivering that little ditty. 

The fun exists beyond a few facts –  an encyclopedia is loaded with little bits, but it’s not necessarily entertainment – rather the real story is the sharing. People prompt conversation by piping info that inspires interaction. The ‘what’ is rarely as revealing as the ‘who.’ Learn to listen and you may just understand why.

The spirit of sharing continues in the form of this week’s fireworks designated by dame Fitz-Gerald; enjoy the fourth (and fifth) everyone.

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24 June 2010

Crabby Bill’s: A Gulf Coast legacy

by Mike Jennings

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Yesterday I was flipping through my photos and came across the one you see here. It was taken on a typical day in my career as a Gulf Coast visitor, which starts on the beach and ends at Crabby Bill’s in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida.

Some of my earliest memories are of waiting for a table while my extended family laughed, slurped shellfish and emptied pitchers of beer at the bar. Eventually we’d get seated at the long, communal picnic tables, and I’d always get stuck next to some stranger asking me questions about what grade I was in and what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t get it.

Yesterday I was flipping through my photos and came across the one you see here. It was taken on a typical day in my career as a Gulf Coast visitor, which starts on the beach and ends at Crabby Bill’s in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida.

Some of my earliest memories are of waiting for a table while my extended family laughed, slurped shellfish and emptied pitchers of beer at the bar. Eventually we’d get seated at the long, communal picnic tables, and I’d always get stuck next to some stranger asking me questions about what grade I was in and what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t get it.

I got older, moved from the nest and stopped attending the Florida family vacation. When my parents retired to the “Sunshine State” I started spending my major holidays there. Returning to the crab shack of my youth, I finally got it.

Lately I’ve been starting with the above – a Bloody Mary with the secret crab seasoning along the rim and a dozen oysters. Then I move to the stone crab claws, which you can get straight from the steamer with a side of drawn butter or chilled with mustard dipping sauce. After that I’ll order a grouper sandwich with a side of corn on the cob and rice.

It all gets walked off on the powder white beach across the street, where I’ll watch pelicans flop themselves into the Gulf as the sun sets on the horizon.

In a few months I’ll be heading back to Florida, and I wonder what I’ll find. If you look at the animated long-range forecast, it shows the oil staying just off the west coast of southern Florida, but unfortunately has it coming up the southeast Atlantic coast and out towards Europe. Either way, I’ll still make my pilgrimage to Crabby Bill’s, even if it’s just for the secretly-seasoned Bloody Mary.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the Loder family and all their employees at Crabby Bill’s. I know a lot of “snow birds” who are pulling for you.

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15 June 2010

BP Cares (about how much you think they care)

by Lou Tamposi

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All posts by Lou Tamposi

Besides catching up on sports scores and Blake Lively’s relationship status, I don’t really do as good of a job keeping up with the news as I should. Even in my self-centered shell, though, I’ve been hearing a lot about the BP Oil spill. It’s a terrible tragedy, not only for the environment and Gulf-area businesses, but also for BP’s Public Relations department. With public opinion of the company dropping faster than BP’s stock prices, it’s all but certain that the PR damage to the company is going to stick around long after the oil is finally cleared from the Gulf.

Besides catching up on sports scores and Blake Lively’s relationship status, I don’t really do as good of a job keeping up with the news as I should. Even in my self-centered shell, though, I’ve been hearing a lot about the BP Oil spill. It’s a terrible tragedy, not only for the environment and Gulf-area businesses, but also for BP’s Public Relations department. With public opinion of the company dropping faster than BP’s stock prices, it’s all but certain that the PR damage to the company is going to stick around long after the oil is finally cleared from the Gulf.

An interesting problem BP is now facing is a satirical Twitter account called BPGlobalPR. Presenting itself as existing “to get BP’s message and mission statement out to the Twitterverse,” the account has some hilarious “updates” on the cleaning effort. A new “Adopt an Oil Plume” campaign lets you donate $25 dollars to take 100% responsibility for a plume. Oh, and you get a free BP Cares t-shirt! It also urges us to remember that “[BP is] not killing animals in the gulf, [they] are creating fossils in the gulf,” and to “[have] a little perspective.”

While this is all fun and games for those not invested in the public opinion of BP, it spells trouble for the actual PR department within the company. While the official BP twitter page has about 12,000 follows, the BPGlobalPR account has more than 10x that amount—162,000 and counting. This means people trying to figure out what BP is doing are not getting the good news that on June 13th some 15,200 barrels of oil were collected from the Gulf; instead, they are finding out that BP just dumped 40,000 barrels of “BP cares” t-shirts into the Gulf.

How much does this parody cost BP? Well, the company is reportedly spending close to $10,000 a day to make sure their PR account shows up first in search results. That might be pennies to the oil giant, but it’s still a chunk of change that could better be put toward the cleaning effort, or heck, even reimbursing local businesses affected by the spill. This just goes to show, as beneficial as social media can be to a company, it can just as easily turn against you in a painful (and expensive) way.

But what do you think? Should BP keep spending thousands of dollars fighting bad PR? Or, should they let the rogue Twitter account run its course, and hope in the end the old saying holds true: All publicity is good publicity?

2 Responses to “BP Cares (about how much you think they care)”

  1. kai says:
    June 15, 2010 at 5:10 pm

    “It’s a terrible tragedy, not only for the environment and Gulf-area businesses, but also for BP’s Public Relations department.”

    Umm…

    :)

  2. Jason says:
    June 17, 2010 at 10:52 am

    Great post. They’re in the news everyday now and it’s so hard to keep track of what’s going on. However, I just saw the ads they’re running on TV with them helping out the people who lost their jobs. I think that’s more effective than worrying about where they show up in news feeds. I think the general public doesn’t care that much as long as the whole thing just gets fixed.

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11 June 2010

EVOlution

by Brad Mampe

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Despite being overcast, it was unusually bright last Friday at 5:45 a.m. I should say that my outlook was also bright. Third in line outside the Sprint store, I peered through the glass, anxiously waiting for Xanadu to open its doors. The HTC EVO 4G was just within reach.

Excited customers passed the time by punching the buttons on our familiar relics. However, the ephemeron of the moment was not lost on me, as whispers of the iPhone 4 were already circulating (and would officially be announced by Steve Jobs at WWDC three days later).

Despite being overcast, it was unusually bright last Friday at 5:45 a.m. I should say that my outlook was also bright. Third in line outside the Sprint store, I peered through the glass, anxiously waiting for Xanadu to open its doors. The HTC EVO 4G was just within reach.

Excited customers passed the time by punching the buttons on our familiar relics. However, the ephemeron of the moment was not lost on me, as whispers of the iPhone 4 were already circulating (and would officially be announced by Steve Jobs at WWDC three days later).

On the surface, it’s the same old story: NEW, SEXY PHONE RELEASED – BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO GET IT! But there’s more going on here because this phone has the potential to change the smartphone market. The HTC EVO 4G is the first 4G phone that’s commercially available, although Sprint is currently rolling this network out to major cities throughout 2010. While Boston will still have to wait a month or two for the phone, a 400 percent increase in download speeds awaits. Until then, you’re paying a $10 premium per month to access a network that isn’t available yet.

The real story, however, is the emergence of Android, which will continue to gain popularity with the arrival of the EVO. It’s already been announced that more smartphones ran Android than the iPhone OS during Q1 2010.

So what’s the big deal with Android? If you’re unashamedly nestled in the throes of geekdom, or even just a “wannabe-geek” like me, a lot more freedom over your device awaits. If Android develops a faster version of their OS, you can install it on the phone yourself, instead of waiting impatiently for the carrier to provide an update.

It’s this kind of flexibility that piques my curiosity in a similar way that Web 2.0 brought a greater degree of personalization and user-centered design. This ability to freely personalize your phone’s operating system might well represent the “Smartphone 2.0” era entering the mainstream. Android’s rise, combined with the super-slick design of the EVO, was just the alluring combination that prompted me to toss my old phone into the technological dust pile.

I’m not a developer. There are giant communities of “Fandroids” much more devout than myself and with a greater wealth of technical knowledge. Including my fellow Verbatim bloggers, these Fandroids could all write much more eloquently about the technical advantages of Android over the iPhone OS and Symbian, the world’s most popular smartphone operating system.

So while this gadget-head will continue to be placated by the fancy, new-fangled whizz-bang apps and widgets on my EVO, there inevitably will be a time where I’ll want to shift from the pure aesthetics of the phone and into a new, functional direction. And while I don’t know where that journey will lead, I have the confidence to transition when the time is right and take the path less traveled. And that, according to the wise Robert Frost, made all the difference.

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10 June 2010

Tired of Energy Fatigue

by Don Chanfrau

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It’s pretty hard to imagine now but, someday, I suppose we’ll lose our appetite for news about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Coast Guard could be referring not just to the federal government’s response to the oil spreading rapidly through the Gulf of Mexico (and beyond!), but also to our insatiable demand for media coverage, when they predict we’ll be “dealing with this for the foreseeable future”. Enjoy hearing about environmental disasters while you brush your teeth in the a.m.? Good. The Weather Channel has you covered.

It’s pretty hard to imagine now but, someday, I suppose we’ll lose our appetite for news about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Coast Guard could be referring not just to the federal government’s response to the oil spreading rapidly through the Gulf of Mexico (and beyond!), but also to our insatiable demand for media coverage, when they predict we’ll be “dealing with this for the foreseeable future”. Enjoy hearing about environmental disasters while you brush your teeth in the a.m.? Good. The Weather Channel has you covered.

Yes, energy concerns have our attention. In a mid-May survey of 1,000 adults by the Pew Research Center, when asked to consider what issues are very important for Congress to act upon in the coming months, 67% of respondents identified “the country’s energy needs”. Of those respondents, 75% are Democrats and 61% are Republicans – a mandate in today’s political climate.

Of course, it could be that the polls merely reflect the relentless news coverage of the spill and that our priorities will drift with the slicks on the water. As in the sea, there are many undercurrents at play, just in the energy space. For sure, it’s a pocketbook issue; when petroleum, natural gas and electricity prices tremble, so do we. But not far beneath the surface, other major trends are apparent. The energy dilemma is about jobs, corporate and social responsibility, national security and public policy.

It’s also about public awareness and the acceptance of advances in technology. And some very smart folks with a track record in the technology community see a very, very big business opportunity. Venture capitalist John Doerr famously suggested that his recent energy investments are focused on “cars, coal, conservation and cattle”. Cattle? Could it be? Yes, HP Labs is exploring how to power sustainable data centers with cow manure.

Maybe it’s finally time to get beyond the superficial Sunday morning TV ads, PR campaigns and polls. After all, we can pass into law all the federal and state energy mandates we want, but we can’t achieve the goals they establish or collectively get to a better place without a dialogue exploring solutions that consumers can understand and act upon.

That’s if we have any energy left.

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6 May 2010

India: A window and a mirror

by Arjun Chawla

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I had the pleasure of attending the recent India Conference at Harvard Business School, a stimulating event that focused on the opportunities — and obstacles — of conducting business in India. This event provided a great window to the intricacies of the Indian business landscape. I found it especially compelling to see how this window actually mirrors issues that businesses everywhere face, particularly in the realms of CRM and new media. I’d like to present a couple of thoughts on these topics, based on insights from this event and ideas with which they have synergies.

A serious challenge for big retailers in India is competing with the endless tapestry of “mom-and-pop” stores that line every urban street. While not a new theme, I was struck by panelist/marketing guru Suhel Seth’s framing of it: He said this challenge arises because the mom-and-pop stores have mastered customer relationship management

I had the pleasure of attending the recent India Conference at Harvard Business School, a stimulating event that focused on the opportunities — and obstacles — of conducting business in India. This event provided a great window to the intricacies of the Indian business landscape. I found it especially compelling to see how this window actually mirrors issues that businesses everywhere face, particularly in the realms of CRM and new media. I’d like to present a couple of thoughts on these topics, based on insights from this event and ideas with which they have synergies.

A serious challenge for big retailers in India is competing with the endless tapestry of “mom-and-pop” stores that line every urban street. While not a new theme, I was struck by panelist/marketing guru Suhel Seth’s framing of it: He said this challenge arises because the mom-and-pop stores have mastered customer relationship management.

The importance of these “old-school” business dynamics is also conveyed in a Wall Street Journal interview with Pawan Munjal, Managing Director/Chief Executive of motorcycle company Hero Honda. In outlining the firm’s strategy in rural India, he states:

“We are visiting all villages in the country, trying to meet with the village elders, trying to convince them about the company, about its products and about why they should become associated with Hero Honda. Once the lead villager agrees the whole village follows and becomes a fan of Hero Honda.”

Isn’t this a social-media strategy? We have mentions of social networks, marketing messages, possible brand ambassadors/evangelists, leaders and followers. Customer relationship management (and perhaps cultural relationship management) is implied. The customer’s power over sales and brand culture is recognized. Thus, examples like this provide powerful reminders of what new-media strategies can learn from old-school dynamics. After all, in the words of Mr. Seth, India’s first example of social media — complete with user-group and word-of-mouth marketing — was Gandhi.

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