Marketing ROI can be one of those arbitrary phrases that sometimes has no real meaning. It is kind of like trying to put a finger on what corporate culture means. How does one define it? Measure it?
Does the term only exist so that us marketers could prove our existence… our worth to the rest of the organization? Or does it even matter what the organization feels about marketing; since every other organization in the world seems to have some sort of marketing department? And so, often I would find marketing would mean creating flyers. Or worse, doing support tasks for sales teams.
Due to scenarios such as these, Marketing ROI quickly became the de facto standard for proving the value and worth of certain marketing activities. It became a quantifiable way to prove that what we did as marketers – mattered.
I want to open with the fact that TechCrunch’s decision to use Facebook for comments is both short-sighted and paranoiac on their part.
I can certainly see the appeal of using Facebook comments – I think that given the number of people that are on Facebook as well as the number of people that use Facebook as their digital/ online identity – certainly makes a case for inclusion. However a decision to move exclusively to Facebook comments and Yahoo is extremely limiting.
In a nutshell, Facebook Comments does not solve the problem of anonymity.
Sure, there’s all the obvious stuff about how you won’t get any sleep when you are working on a startup, how you might end up neglecting your family, friends, girlfriend or boyfriend, how you will need to develop an unimaginable tolerance for risk, how you will have to learn to live in a shoebox or worse – with your co-founder, only to work through nights while eating left over pizza slices… and many more along the same lines.
Even though we know all this; it is always the emotional aspect of startup entrepreneurship that always gets us.
Learning to deal with this early on and being prepared for some low-blows while you build, iterate and make connections, will help you get there faster while saving you some stressful moments. Hopefully.
The 123rd Annual Dinner, a highly anticipated soirée and a premier event in the city of Toronto, was an entertaining and spectacular night as suspected.
It was an absolute honor to have been present at this beautiful gala event hosted by the Toronto Board of Trade, featuring Jian Ghomeshi as emcee and Guy Laliberté as the keynote speaker. Yes, this is the one and only Guy Laliberté who founded the famous Cirque du Soleil – watched, enjoyed and applauded my millions of people around the world.
This is a video response to Robert Scoble’s recent blog post on how Angry Birds could be the next major identity player.
What he means is – next time you try to log into Disqus, Seesmic, Quora or even Facebook for that matter, you might just find yourself logging in with your Angry Birds account.
Watch my 4 min video response and let me know if you agree or disagree.
What do creativity, music and innovation have in common?
I recently watched a TED talk by researcher and musician Charles Limb, who conducted a bunch of experiments on jazz musicians and rappers – highly creative people – to see if the functional MRI scans of their brain activity was similar. He wanted to try and determine (and tap into) the secrets of the creative mind.
From what I understood, there were 3 startling revelations:
#1: While being creative, a portion of our frontal lobe lights up and becomes hyper active while a large part of it shuts down. This happens to the creative brain so as to shun impulses like rationale, embarrassment, logic etc from interfering with our creative process.
Big companies spend big money – sometimes outrageous sums of money – on advertising. Fortune 2000 companies, especially those in the B2C and/or CPG space, spend much of it on traditional advertising channels such as TV, radio and newspapers.
The global advertising market equates to a cool $450 billion, with online advertising adding up to just about $50 billion. This means that traditional advertising channels still dominate the world.
After reading a recent Forrester report on how Americans and Canadians now spend as much time on the Internet as they spend watching TV; I did some internet trolling to see how exactly advertising spend is split between online and offline in North America.
The perception that User Experience design is simply an enhancement or something to think about down the line is misplaced. User Experience is really about creating products that people want to use and continue to use. Good UX design is not about decoration or graphics and visuals, it is about knowing your customer and being strategic with your product and business.
Having great User Experience is a great way to get control of your audience while satisfying user needs. It all comes down to how much importance you give to user engagement, customer satisfaction and solving process-related problems.
Since we’re coming to year-end, it only seems fitting that I identify and profile my top 5 picks of 2010 for the Best Overall User Experience.
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Google. I’ve mentioned the giant (err, whale) in 2 of my last 5 posts! (I see a trend developing here). Since I’ve been thinking about them so much, I figured it would only be fitting to have a running list of all the companies they have acquired in 2010. I say “running” list, because the year is not over yet!
In any case, happy holidays everyone, check out the list and feel free to comment if I have missed any acquisitions.
Here we go, Google Acquisitions in 2010:
Marketing ROI can be one of those arbitrary phrases that sometimes has no real meaning. It is kind of like trying to put a finger on what corporate culture means. How does one define it? Measure it?
