About those emailed holiday greetings…
I’ll admit: I’ve come full circle. Fifteen years ago or so, I wondered aloud why so many PR agencies and companies still sent, through the U.S. Postal Service, holiday greeting cards. In those days we still got barrels-full of snail mail every day, and the far more efficient and green email was just beginning to [...]
Renewal, reinvention and reinvigoration
We often attach significance (earned or not) to years ending in zero. Such it was (for me) with 2010. I turned 50, celebrated 25 years with the world’s most excellent woman, sold our house, moved to San Francisco, and changed jobs. (Oh, and my hometown baseball team won its first-ever World Series championship). But the [...]
Does the media have any value any more?
That was the question that Sam Whitmore essentially posited in an interview we did recently. He has clients who ask him the question. In short: In an era in which direct-to-customer communications and social media dominates, who needs the media, especially the trade press? My answer, for one, is the vendors themselves. I’ve written a [...]
Tiger Woods’ Branding Problem
Does Tiger Woods have a branding problem or do brands have a Tiger Woods problem? The Woods story will be one of the most important lessons in brand management in recent years simply because everything is so outsized: Woods as a personality and pitchman is big; the brands are big; the infidelity story is salacious. [...]
TechInsights’ latest reorganization
TechInsights, the former CMP Electronics Group, reorganized again last week. The news went largely uncommented on, which, in one sense was not surprising: The company has reorganized in recent years with a frequency by which one could set a watch. However, this one is important because it should, within a very short time frame, show [...]
Salivating over Social Media
All the cools kids are telling us that social media’s the place to be. While it’s a very important channel, it’s not the end game, and focusing too much on social media misses the point and endangers careers. A very interesting recent study (the 2009 Digital Readiness Report) shows why social media salivating is not [...]
Where’s the media?
I have a unique perch these days: I blog here and other places and am now building a community/social media strategy at Numetrics. I straddle the worlds of media and publicity/marketing, which is not a dull place to be. I’m a big proponent of vendor-as-publisher strategies, and I’ll write more about what we’re doing at [...]
The social media culture challenge (second in a series)
What’s the biggest cause of infant mortality among social media strategies? Culture. Social media strategies, like babies, need a lot of care and feeding early on by engaged people. But not everyone gets social media. How does a large organization with entrenched culture make it work? The cultural struggle over social media (questions today are [...]
DAC, EDA and the Unbearable Lightness of Blogging
Summary: The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry may be dead (or dormant) but its communications strategies aren’t. Engineer- and corporate-bloggers are finding their way very quickly through the evolving social media world. I pulled up to the Moscone Center for the 46th DAC this week and thought for a moment I was at the wrong [...]
The Changing Media Landscape at DAC
Arguably the highlight of this year’s Design Automation Conference (#46, if you’re counting and arguably the first “social media” DAC) was a program put together by Synopsys (kudos to Karen Bartleson, Rick Jamison and Yvette Huygen) called Conversation Central. It had a series of kitchen-table talks from engineer-bloggers and media folks on the changing nature [...]
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