John Naisbitt: "Don't get so far ahead of the parade that they don't know you are in it."

Crossposted from Fremtidens Relationer.

I first "met" John Naisbitt at about 0200 on a Sunday morning in 1983, in the bowels of the US Naval Intelligence Processing Systems Support Activity (NIPSSA) in Suitland, Maryland, USA. Looking for something to read on a slow mid-watch, I borrowed Megatrends from the senior watch officer.

What an awakening! 24 years ago, few spoke of globalization or the deindustrialization of the US, EU and Japan. Few contemplated how hierarchies would be affected by the rise of networking. Nobody said stuff like "the new source of power is not money in the hands of the few, but information in the hands of many." Yet, these concepts and more are the running themes in Megatrends. More to the point, they are the running themes today, in 2007, in The Economist, Fortune, Wired, the Financial Times, and the Hindustan Times.

I wish I could say reading Megatrends was an "A-Ha!" moment for me. If I had been perceptive enough to give the book far more thought, I might have made some very different choices at an age where even small choices have great effect. But I was 21, a Cold War was on, and while I helping run a communication network most civilians wouldn't see the likes of until the late 1990s, I hadn't the imagination to mull over what would happen when it did go mainstream.

(An aside: roll forward to 1995, IABC's International Conference in Boston. Jeff Hallett gives a speech on networked communication that prompts more than one communicator present to think seriously about how networks, the Internet, will affect business. I realize, now, it's no coincidence Hallet is the first person Naisbitt acknowledges in Megatrends.)

So Naisbitt's keynote at CIFS' Don't Stop 02 conference was a must-hear for me. Naisbitt, who speaks without slides, notes, lectern or podium, sketched out several trends or "mindsets" from his new book Mind Set.

Visual on the rise, text receding

Globalization is a big driver here. Globalization means almost any ordinary good can be produced so cheaply that almost no one can compete on price. Quality, too, is no longer the preserve, and thus the competitive advantage, of the few. So design, an entirely visual attribute, and one inherently unique, is now far more important.

• Naisbitt pointed to the trend of "upscale designs for common goods." That's certainly true enough; the Moleskine is nothing but a notebook on design steroids.
• He pointed to the rise of "photography as fine art," noting that while many of us carry cameras around all the time (on our phones), photographs made the old-fashioned way are fetching USD 1.7 million at Sotheby's.
• Architecture: "the most important of the visual arts", taking on new significance
• Graphic narrative: fastest growing publishing area. 9/11 Commission report issued in comic book form

Sequence is the enemy of making connections

4..14..23..34..42.... what comes next in this sequence of numbers? I'll get to it, but first....

Naisbitt explained that, at the end of the 1800s, Queen Victoria was told that London would stop growing at population of 4 million, as it would simply be impossible to remove the droppings of the horses required to service a larger city. Already then,100 tons of dung were carted away daily. London's population today is 8 million -- Victoria's advisors failed to foresee the automobile, even though it had been invented.

Naisbitt: "look at things as a picture puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing sequential here. If you look sequentially, you won't make connections."

If you are looking for a mathematical solution to the problem Naisbitt posed, you may as well give up. 50 is the correct answer, and the sequence is the stops on the 8th Avenue Express of the New York subway. "Sequence is the enemy of making connections."

You don't get results by solving problems. You get results by exploiting opportunities

Naisbitt: "people can be divided into opportunity seekers and problem solvers." The Indian IT industry is an example of opportunity seeking. When Y2K loomed, IT labor capacity in the West was tight. So the Indians, seeing opportunity, offered Western companies an enormous pool of IT skills. When the dot-com bubble broke, Western countries slashed their IT budgets -- and the Indians, seeing opportunity, offered to provide the same services as Western providers, but at much lower cost.

Naisbitt calls Hillary Clinton an example of a problem solver. When President Clinton was elected, Hillary Clinton used enormous political capital trying to "solve" the US health-care problem, a problem that simply cannot be solved. He calls Arnold Schwarzenegger an example of an opportunity seeker. Usually, it would have been impossible for him to climb the ranks of the California Republican party to become governor. But by seizing the chance offered by the recall referendum on Gray Davis, he leaped past the Republican organization and was elected after a 76-day campaign.

Another opportunity-seeker is Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx. While US policy makers debated how to "solve" the problems of US Postal Service, Smith saw and exploited an opportunity to build a new, private service based on time and reliability.

More Naisbitt Mind Sets to come in a later post!

Technorati : conference blogging, copenhagen institute for futures studies, desirable roasted coffee, don't stop 02, futures studies, futurists, instituttet for fremtidsforskning, jeffrey hallett, john naisbitt, megatrends, mind set, nipssa

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:39pm in Books, Business, Conferences, Management, Society, Writers | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3)

Lee Hopkins is not a dog... this way, folks, to the Egress

Yesterday, in show #2 of the Better Desirable Roasted Communications Café Podcast, Lee Hopkins and I talked about virtual project teams . I believe smart independent communicators, meeting each other in the PR/communication Oort cloud, will soon form temporary, virtual "agencies" to serve clients.

We've seen a bit of this already. Neville Hobson and Fredrik Wackå serve a client together, and Hugh McLeod and David Parmet work together on both English Cut and Stormhoek.

Lee, who describes himself as "one of Australia's leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment," a claim I have chosen not to examine closely, rightly points out an obvious issue, one raised in the old New Yorker cartoon: on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog. Lee notes:

"With an example of the requirement to launch a multi-country PR or marcom campaign, Allan correctly suggests that two consultants in different parts of the world, say, Adelaide and Copenhagen, may well know more about each other and be of more value to a campaign than two senior executives from a global PR company with offices in Sydney and Copenhagen.

"The obvious leap is that should that campaign require (from a European base) an Australian element, a North American element, a Canadian element, inter alia, then the Euro-based PR consultant would be able to tap into the local expertise of people he/she already knows and has built a relationship with, rather than the faceless executives of a global firm.

"However, having slept on the idea, I can see a ‘challenge’.

"Despite the ‘trust’ relationship that might be built up between two online-corresponding consultants, let us not forget that on the internet no one need know that you’re a dog. I can create any persona I like, and if I creatively or schizophrenically hold ‘true’ to that persona, over time I will cement that personality into the hearts and minds of others who repeatedly correspond with me.

"So too with Allan’s virtual global PR team comprising of a free-moving, project-based, fast-evolving and fast-dissolving amalgamation of consultants. Whilst the executives from the global PR firm may not know each other, they do have the ‘trust’ base of being employed by the same company, with hopefully the same values and measures for success, and disciplinary measures for failure."

I don't think any responsible consultant would entrust a client to a colleague who is only an online correspondent. But let's say Lee wanted to hire me to handle some work for him here in Copenhagen -- would we have to meet? Well, no, because much of the PR/communication Oort cloud is connected through past experience, work, personal knowledge, professional credentials. In this case, I could suggest to Lee: a) "A.B." a  highly-credentialed IABC colleague, whom we both know, sent me to Berlin to do focus groups and seemed satisfied, b) "C.D.", another highly-credentialed IABC colleague, and I have worked together, on several association tasks c) "E.F.", another IABC leader, might be worth asking.

(Of course, at this point, it can become maddeningly difficult to put the nail in the quicksilver. A.B. and C.D. could truthfully say they've "known" me 13 years... but would have to confess, on cross-examination, that they've been in the same room with me.... probably not more than 18 hours in 13 years. And there are IABC leaders who shudder at the thought of 18 hours in a room with me. But let's leave that, and move on.)

Lee's point, of course, is do your due diligence. I believe that is fairly easy to do in the blogosphere, and more easily than in an international agency, for a couple of reasons. First, I think it's hard, though certainly not impossible, to fake it in the blogosphere. Stru***tte tried, did a pretty good job at the outset, but was outed in less than a week. Second, most of the PR/communication cloud has been around a while. Due diligence is easy enough. Many of the people I read are IABC and PRSA leaders (past and present), award winners (easily checked), or show up at conferences where, in some face time, you get a sense of them.

Frankly, after the PR agency scandals we've been seeing? I'll take that any day over agencies "hopefully with the same values and measures for success, and disciplinary measures for failure."

Technorati Tags: Allan Jenkins, Better Desirable Roasted Communications Cafe, communication ethics, Lee Hopkins, Tag 10, virtual teams

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 04:01pm in Career management, Communication, Management | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (4)

Welcome to the world of Karl Marx

"Welcome to the world of Karl Marx" is Arie de Geus' greeting to corporate leaders. "Capital is a commodity. Human talent is not."

Here are my notes from the Don'tStop01 Business Innovation Conference we are holding here in Copenhagen. Arie de Geus was head of Shell Oil's Planning Unit for 38 years.

People have little loyalty to companies:

New MBAs stay in their jobs less than 5 years
CEOs stay about 2-3 years.
Shareholders hold their shares about a year

This isn't loyalty.

Why is this? What does it mean.

It's certainly very contrary to the view that I have of what constitutes a successful company. My view is very different... my view is based on some interesting things we learned at Shell.

In the 70s, we asked ourselves "who should be our example?" What companies should we look up to?

We made a study. We asked a team to go out into the world, and find companies that were older than Shell, more than 100 years old, who were leaders in their industry, and who still had their corporate identies intact.

27 companies met the definition.

Siemens, more than 150 years old
Dupont, more than 200 years old
Mitui, 300
Sumitomo, 400
Stora, 700 years old

What characterizes these old companies? What let's them survive. It's clearly not "cultural" because we have American, Swedish, German, and Japanese companies on the list.

We found they shared these traits:

1) Financially conservative. This is bad news for investment bankers. These companies want to keep their own money in their own pockets, and don't want someone else's money. Surviving for centuries means never having a banker pull the rug out from under you.

2) The leaders of these companies are sensitve to the world around them. Leaders were outward looking people, and are often highly active in the society around the company. Dupont has produced generations of US senators. If your leaders are out there in the world, active, they will note changes in society and keep asking "what will this mean for the company?"

3) Strong sense of cohesion and company idenity. Leaders and staff know what the company stands for, and are happy to identify with those values.

4) Management style of tolerance. Lots of space on the margins for new or different activities.

That led me to my definition of a corporation: a good firm is financially conservative, has staff that identifies with the company values, and has management that is tolerant and sensitive to the world in which they live.

That's not what they taught me in the economics department when I was in university in Rotterdam. There we were taught that  companies are institutions that produce goods and services for which other people are prepared to pay a price. The successful company combines labor, capital and land in an optimal way: Minimize cost, maximize price, maximize profit.

This is still taught.

Three definitions. Three different implications.

1. Where there is no loyal relationship to the company, it's every man for himself. It becomes the tragedy of the commons. The measure of success is maximation of  shareholder value.

2. If we accept the classic definition, the one still taught, we must accept the company as an economic machine. The measure? Efficiency and maximization of profit at short notice.

3. And my definition: human work community aimed at continuity from generation to generation. Goal is survival and self-development in a changing world. Measurement is life expectancy.

Which is the right definition? Which company would you want to work for? If you lead a company, which would you want to create?

Let's think about three things.

1) A study done at Stanford in the early 1990s showed that long-living companies produced, on average, 15 times more profits over 60 years than the stock market average. Human work community meets the goals of life expectancy, profits, and shareholder value.

2) When we look at the oldest companies, we must remember the hundreds of thousands of companies that died. The average life expectancy of a company is less than 17 years -- as low as 4 years according to a recent UK study. If you have to choose what sort of comapny you want to create, your choice is quite stark. Choose wrongly, and your company will be dead before you are.

And let's not say "oh, that's just survival of the fittest, that's the market at work." The death of a company is not gratuitous. People suffer. And if we accept that companies are like people -- they get wiser and better as they grow older -- then the death of a company is a tragic loss of knowledge and wisdom.

You may say "survival of the fittes, free markets". But I cannot believe the death of a company is gratuitous. People suffer. And don't companies get better as they get older, much as we do in life.

3) Finally, we are in an age of fundamental change. Capital is now a commodity; it is no longer a scarce production input. This is enormously significant: in the last 50 years, we have had near constant GNP growth, and we have saved 20% to 30% of this a year. Our world is simply awash with capital. Capital is no longer dominant.

In fact, capital is a commodity -- the capital market is a buyer's market, not a seller's market. So if you are choosing what business to create, why on earth would you structure it to maximize the return to the supplier of capital, the shareholders? That is very short sighted.

No, today, labor -- human talent -- is the scarce production factor. And if you would succeed you must have a management style that makes the most of that human talent. 

Corporate leaders: you live in the world of Karl Marx. Your core asset, the asset that is the value of your company, goes out the door every day. I really wonder how you sleep at night, because you have no idea if they will come back. So you better create the conditions so that they do.

Technorati: business innovation, dontstop01, Arie de Geus

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:35am in Business, Conferences, Copenhagen, Corporate Governance, Corporate Management, Management | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (5)

Common Sense Blogging Thoughts from NewComm Forum

Shel Holtz has written a great summary of Debbie Weil's Corporate Blogging Case Studies at the New Communication Forum (wish I was there soaking it all up).

It's all good, but one line I like came from Paul Rosenfeld, general manager of Intuit Quickbooks online notes:

[We have] posts to the blog from the employee who keeps the server up and running talk about server problems. Makes us human, imperfect, which people understand and appreciate (vs. companies that behave as though they're infallible). [Emphasis mine]

That's what I wanted to say today. Flemming Wisler and I were giving a presentation on social media, and while I believe I managed to make the same point, it sure wasn't as pithy as Rosenfeld's. But from now on, that's what I will say.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:52pm in Blogging, Communication, Management | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

“Don’t Stop” Business Innovation Conference asks Desirable Roasted Coffee to blog (and I said “yes”)

I love all my clients, of course, but I have particular affection for the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies.

My other clients are typical businesses: the halls are buzzing with folks rushing around to the next meeting, wrapping up from the last meeting, whacking out emails about that meeting, slapping their foreheads as they read the minutes from that other meeting they were too busy to attend.

Now, I don't want for a moment to imply that people at my other clients aren't "gettin' it done" -- they most certainly are -- but over at CIFS, you tend to see people just sitting quietly reading books. Staring dreamily out of the window. Writing books.

Because what they do is peer into the mists of the future and report back what they think they see. And not just for some ivory tower purpose; no, no -- their job is guiding businesses (including some of my other clients) into the future.

Pretty cool job, when you think about it -- being paid to think. As Seth Godin et al note in the Big Moo, most of us run around all day frantically putting out fires and responding to other people. Just having an hour or two a day to think, to imagine, to wonder what if, would be immeasurably valuable for both ourselves and our companies. So imagine having that for a job!

So when CIFS asked me to blog and podcast from their upcoming Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow conference, I didn't need a second invitation.

I'll contributing to the Don't Stop blog leading up to the conference, too. Client Gitte Larsen posted her interview with speaker Adam Morgan, director of eatbigfish. Here's a taste:

"Why is it important continually to think about tomorrow?

Adam Morgan: There are probably obvious answers to that, but my interest is in challengers. I think one of the things that characterizes continuously successful challengers rather than those who fade away after a while, is that they are very restless people, naturally, and they are continually looking and searching for new opportunities to reframe the way they engage consumers on the respective markets. I think that restlessness and hunger are some of the things that certainly characterize continued success..."

Indeed, I believe that restlessness and hunger are two of the very few motivators for innovation -- whether you are a corporation or a home gardener.

Technorati: dontstop01, CIFS, Copenhagen, Denmark, futures studies, Adam Morgan, eatbigfish, Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:18pm in Conferences, Copenhagen, Denmark, Desirable Roasted Coffee, Management, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2)

Model Corporate Blog

Via friend Shel Holtz (apparently, Holtz got a little Kryptonite on his recent vacation; at any rate, he's finding the gems):

Niall Kennedy has seen enough of both to cobble together a demo blog to display the way a business can launch an effective blog dedicated to a product. He selected a real company and product—iRobot’s Scooba—and has developed an impressive blog to show what the company could do and to serve as a model for others considering a blog as part of a marketing effort. (Interestingly, this concept integrates quite well into a larger marketing strategy, contrary to Shel Israel’s contention that blogs don’t fit into an integrated marketing strategy.)

The demo blog is good... and it's a good idea to have one. This goes right into the toolkit. Thanks Shel and Niall.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:57pm in Blogging, Communication, Management | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (0)

Doctorow rips into Sony's EULA; Symantec finds Sony worm vulnerability...

Update 13 November 2005: Eric Eggertson is following this outrage pretty closely... I'd quote some of his stuff, but I would swear violently, and I don't like to do that on Sundays. Just go read.

Is Sony Music winning this week's Bacon's Information Cluelessness Award?

It would appear so.

Cory Doctorow uses his bully BoingBoing pulpit to tear apart Sony Music's EULA.
 

Sony's EULA is worse than their rootkit
If you're unfortunate enough to buy music from Sony, you may think that the worst thing they'll do to you is screw you by infecting your computer with malicious rootkit software. Not so! Rootkits are only the beginning. If you want to see how Sony really gives its customers the shaft, have a look at these conditions in the license you have to agree to when you put a Sony music CD in your computer:

1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That's because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.

2. You can't keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a "personal home computer system owned by you."

3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids "export" outside the country where you reside....

There's plenty more.

Still  considering buying Sony CDs. Then ponder this from today's Boston Globe:

Computer Worm Exploits Software on Sony's CDs

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff  |  November 11, 2005

People who bought music CDs from Sony BMG Music Entertainment may have exposed themselves to a dangerous new computer worm.

Symantec Corp., the leading maker of antivirus software, said the worm has infected computers that played Sony BMG recordings. Two other antivirus firms, BitDefender Labs and Sophos PLC, also issued warnings yesterday.

The Sony BMG disks install software that is supposed to prevent the user from making illicit copies of the music and distributing them over the Internet. But the anticopying software conceals itself so that the computer user can't easily remove it.

Now someone has written a ''Trojan horse" program that exploits this feature of the Sony BMG software. The program, which is spread through spam e-mails, uses the Sony BMG code to hide itself. Then the Trojan horse uses the Internet to contact its creators for further instructions.

Eggertson calls for a Sony boycott: It will be a cold day in hell before I buy anything from Sony. I don't actually care if they are being scapegoated by bloggers and others. They deserve every bit of damage to their brand that they suffer.

Parmet asks: Why do companies act this way? And what makes them think that in the long run they can get away with it?

To which I can add only: Any company promoting Shakira, Ricky Martin, and Destiny's Child deserves an exclusive circle of hell.

Technorati tags:
Sony
Sony Music
Sony boycott
Sony virus
Bacon's Information

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:15am in Business, Intellectual Property, Is Tedious in the House?, Management, Marketing, Music | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (1)

When would you choose premium service over lower price?

Fellow MarCom Blog contributor Dale Wolf takes a look at the everyday tradeoff: would you rather pay for premium service, or opt for the lowest cost product?

Drawing on a recent Reveries article, Wolf unsurprisingly finds buyers opting for premium service when buying complicated stuff such as airplane engines. But -- and this surprised me -- they also pay happily for premium service in everyday transactions down at the local mall.

"Does this work just for complex business-to-business companies? Nope. Customer service gets right down to the level of the grocery store. An independent researcher discovered that the vaunted TESCO, the leading UK supermarket, is vulnerable to a competitor's superior customer service."

I don't like surprises, especially when delivered in the blogs of my fellow PR practitioners, so I examined my own buying habits.  By and large -- I opt for paying for customer service, without being entirely conscious of it. I never opt for "service" packages when buying computers, printers, or other technology -- but I seem to for almost any other purchase.

Is this rational? Or profligate?

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:16pm in Management, Marketing | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Sanctimony, not Kate Moss, Source of Fashion PR Headaches

For my first post on the MarComBlog (which I talked about yesterday), I've chosen to look at why any PR damage suffered by fashion houses in the Kate Moss affair is largely self-inflicted. Here's an excerpt. The headline takes you to the full post at the MarComBlog.

Sanctimony, not Kate Moss, the Source of Fashion PR Headaches

September 23rd, 2005 by Allan Jenkins

Kate Moss, supermodel, mom, poster-child for the waif look is presumably giving PR folks across the fashion industry sleepless nights.

If you're following the story, Moss was recently photographed dividing lines of cocaine in a dressing room, then enjoying a few of them herself. I don't know for whose coin she was working, or even if she was on the job, but her clients — department store chain Hennes & Mauritz, and fashion houses Burberry's, Chanel, Dior and Vanderbilt — have dropped her. She will no longer represent them, and that's a big chunk of Moss' £7 million salary gone. At 31, Moss is no "new face", as they say, and, anyway, the heroin chic look is out.

Friend and fellow MarComBlog Contributor Neville Hobson suggests on his Nevon blog that this presents a PR dilemma for high profile companies: what do you do when your A-list celebrity star self-destructs in public?

I agree: the Moss affair presents H&M, Vanderbilt et al. with a PR dilemma. But I'd go so far as to say it's largely, even mostly, one of their own making....

Excerpt crossposted from my full post  Sanctimony, Not Kate Moss, Source of Fashion PR Headaches  at MarComBlog.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 03:03pm in Advertising, Current Affairs, Management, MarComBlog, Marketing, People of Note, Public Relations | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

Rise of the Micro Multinational

Hal Varian discusses the rise of the micro multinational in this NYT article.  In it he describes how businesses with a half-dozen employees spread across 3 continents can still do business effectively, using socia media and micro-media.

He goes on to muse:

"The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus for the American economy. It allows the small players to have access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a few years ago.

"It is no surprise that many of these small, high-tech, international entrepreneurs are foreign-born. They have the contacts, the connections and that most critical ingredient, the ambition, to assemble the pieces needed to start a business.

"It is almost impossible for an entrepreneur to put a foreign development team together without some strong connections on the ground. Even large multinationals have found out that outsourcing is not the panacea it was proclaimed to be. Paradoxically, it is easier for the micro-multinationals to deal with the inconvenience of outsourcing than it is for the big international corporations. Entrepreneurs are willing to do things that big international corporations will not do - like staying up until 11 p.m. and using cheap voice-over-Internet technology rather than expensive international telephone service."

Hat tip to elearningpost.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:07pm in Communication, Corporate Management, Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Study Shows Instant Messaging Builds Workplace Relations

This may come as no surprise to those experienced in internal communication, but the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication recently published a Korean study indicating that use of IM builds cross-company relationships.

It's an academic report and hardly likely to sway reluctant management to install IM for workers. But communicators should be aware of it.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:48pm in Communication, Corporate Management, Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Evelyn Rodriquez Dispenses Sound Advice to Dot's Flowers

After a bit of vacation with visiting family, I'm returning to my post here at Desirable Roasted Coffee. I'll be catching up over the next couple of days.

Just before I went silent, I read Evelyn Rodriquez's post Dot's Flowers: Lack of Ethics? How About Lack of Imagination?. Like many in the blogosphere, Evelyn was offended by Dot's Flowers payoff to bloggers like Jeff Cutler:

''No more driving to the corner to buy flowers and hand-deliver them,"[Cutler]  wrote on his Web page. ''Nope. Now I go online to places like Dot Flowers.com and 1-800-Flowers. I like Dot a little better just because of the personal touch." - Jeff Cutler's quote, "For a fee, some blogs boost firms", Boston Globe, June 26, 2005 (thanks Tom for the tip!)

Nice recommendation any company would certainly cherish. This particular referral was made by blogger Jeff Cutler on his blog April 8th. Jeff's never actually ordered anything from Dot's. And he was paid $5 by Dot's ad agency USWeb for the blog mention, which he neglects to disclose.

Evelyn is surprised at the banality of it all: I'm too jaded to be appalled by lack of ethics, but I am amazed by the lack of imagination.

But Evelyn goes on to demonstrate why she "gets it" (as if that's ever been in doubt):

What are some alternatives? There's plenty. Here's an off-the-cuff one for starters.

Flowers are given during major life events like weddings and funerals and as symbolic gestures that signify 'I'm thinking of you.' They're given on special heart-felt occasions to people you're close to or would like to be closer to: you give them to your date at your prom, your partner of twenty-five years, your Mom on her birthday, your cousin on their graduation from law school. These are usually emotion-filled moments ripe with compelling story potential circling the biggies in people's lives.

I'm not clear on the campaign's budget (let's say it was 2000 X $5 = $10000). You could announce a story contest spread over the next six to twelve months.  Award $50 gift certificate for up to 200 bloggers on their best 'flower moment' stories. Real stories from real people. The certificate gives bloggers a chance to establish a real relationship with Dot's Flowers. The stories can encompass all sorts of universal "I'm thinking of you" moments.

There's more and it's all good. The point, of course, is that companies lame themselves by trying to use blogs and bloggers without a modicum of insight and imagination.

Thanks Evelyn!

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 03:30pm in Desirable Roasted Coffee, Ethics, Management, Marketing | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (0)

Steve Crecenzo Arrested; Flirts with Communication Heresy

We may need to burn Steve C. at the stake. Why? Communication orthodoxy holds that you can never communicate too much or too often, especially when you're telling employees bad news.

But bronchitis and a run-in with the law (somehow the "Dude Meets the Law" scene from The Big Lebowski keeps jumping into my forebrain) leads Steve to flirt with heresy.

Go here, leave comments, and bring our brother back into the flock.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:00am in Communication, Corporate Management, Management | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)