Big ideas that got me thinking
If you want to have your mind expanded about marketing issues I recommend you check out the shows coming out of Alterian’s recent Engaging Times summit in Chicago. Interviewing the likes of Don Peppers, founder of Peppers and Rogers Group, and advertising’s elder statesman Stan Rapp, Chairman of Enguage, I was blown away by the
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How to feel confident spending $10m
We have had many interesting conversations about the “value” of social media and ROI of engagement lately, some more interesting than others. One most insightful was with Sid Banerjee, Chairman and CEO of text mining software company Clarabridge. He pointed out that beyond the numbers, there’s a wider benefit which is that knowing what customers
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Back to basics marketing still works
Recently we interviewed branding guru Jonathan Salem Baskin and he made the point that really marketing – and in particular advertising – has gone awol. He argues that companies are effectively wasting huge amounts of money communicating the imaginary benefits of their toothpaste, when the consumer a. Can easily find out on the internet that this
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The irony of “research in motion”
Tomorrow, I head to Berlin to speak at the annual BlackBerry EMEA Alliance Summit 2010. I’ll be there for the rest of the week. Between 250 and 350 of BlackBerry’s partners – from mobile networks to niche two man developers – will be attending, and there is a packed agenda. Research in Motion (RIM, the
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yBC becomes YouTube partner
We have been active on YouTube for quite some time, but earlier this week we received confirmation yourBusinessChannel has become an official YouTube partner. In addition to being the #1 video site in the world, YouTube is also the second largest search engine on the internet. That’s why we’ve been posting our great content on
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Video keeps online comms on-message
When bloggers pick up company press releases, more than ¾ of them distort the original company message, according to research from PR firm Burston Marsteller and reported in Emarketer. Burson-Marsteller looked at over 150 messages sent out by FT Global 100 firms, and discovered a significant gap between the message and the coverage. Distortion was highest
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Reverse factoring in Istanbul
This week I took a production team to Istanbul for a shoot with HSBC and their client Kraft Foods. Essentially we shot an editorial-style case study to document how HSBC contributes to Kraft’s success. I learned a lot about reverse factoring and the world of corporate finance – when intelligent people share their insight and
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Social media: what’s in it for retail?
My colleague and yBC founder Mark Sinclair recently spent a very interesting couple of hours speaking to a breakfast meeting of high-end retailers about social media opportunities. They came to the topic with little information but plenty of curiosity. His job was to answer that all-important question, what’s in it for me? The answer, we
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Gap teaches us “community” is a reality that needs dealing with
If you follow business news you’ll have witnessed some interesting issues management by Gap of late. Whether you think what happened is right or wrong, there is I think a greater lesson for everyone in business today. That’s the fact that today a (relatively small) group of customers can make a big noise and derail
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yBC’s social media is still about selling
Hopefully I’m not the only one who’s at a loss about how to have an engaging, authentic, non-selling, non-interrupting conversation with someone that ultimately leads to a sale and therefore justifies the expenditure? That’s what comes from spending an hour reading too many social media blogs. It’s Catch 22 – must engage but can’t talk
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