Blog Yes & Know

Don’t Throw Your Influencers Under the Bus Just Yet

One thing the marketing industry and the tech industry have in common is that they're both periodically swept by fad ideas (call them memes if you want to sound hip) that enchant everyone to the point of obsession. That obsession then produces a backlash that causes everyone to swing the other way and completely dismiss the original idea. We're going through one of those cycles right now with the idea of influencer marketing. As usual, the reality is somewhere in between the hype and the backlash--influencer marketing is not the be-all that some people made it out to be, but it's not bunk either.

Making Money via Mashups

Dial back a year or two and there were lots of questions about whether mashups supported a viable business model. Concerns centered around: low barriers to entry, copyright issues and the risk of someone else owning the data. While all are legitimate concerns, none seems to have derailed the mashup phenomenon. So what's going on? Do developers no longer care about making money? Hardly.

Strategy in a Downturn

Here's a rule of thumb: During good times people think it is their strategy that's good, and in bad times, people think it's the market. During a downturn, many executives are much more likely to think a redirect is necessary. In a similar fashion, during times of great growth, we assume that what we're doing is causing the desired results so staying the course makes sense. Neither point of view is really true. They reflect our perception of what we believe to be true.

Piracy and Revenue Optimization

A winning business model requires a unified and all-encompassing approach that goes far beyond how monies are collected and products or services are delivered. In an earlier article, I mentioned a long list of functional areas that must align around a winning business model, but neglected to include Legal. How the legal eagles affect business models is critical and deserves an article of its own. That's right--even the legal team is part of a winning business model.

SCU Talk

There's a great conference that the SCU does every year. I've wanted to actually go and participate because of the range of topics and speaker quality. A client of mine …

Pay it Forward: The Valley Ethos

Before the holiday break, I met the founder / chairman (and former CEO) of a consumer electronics company to talk about what the future might hold and what was next for him. It's a classic Silicon Valley tale: he founded a cool company, got it funded, built the product, and then hired a CEO to take it to the next level. And, for various reasons, it became clear it was time for him to step back and attempt to guide the company from the Board.

Better than Free

Kevin Kelly has a thought-provoking post on what adds real value in an Internet-centric world. He likens the Internet to a giant copy machine. If books, music, even ideas, can be freely copied so that they are free, where will value reside. To answer the question, he lays out eight "generatives"--or things that cannot be copied, and thus remain valuable. Read the whole thing.

Listen to the Oppressed

We listen to the rich, but we need to learn to listen to the oppressed. The voices that are often not heard are the ones that can add a dimension to a growth strategy that can't be found at the top of the organization. It's not glamorous and it likely won't make it into the PPT slide that goes to the CEO or to the Board. It will however make a difference in how that strategy actually becomes reality. And you've heard me say it before. A strategy not made into reality is just a set of theoretical slides. Strategy has to be about the outcomes that are created.

Amen, Brother

"Don't envy your competitors; this has done more for hurting AMD than anything Intel could do to us."