THINKing

Clarion Call: Disintermediation

In 2006, I was introduced to the concept of disintermediation.The short definition is the removal of the middle man.  Since that time I have seen many examples of the Internet acting as a disintermediator in the producer and consumer relationship.

Futurist Gerd Leonhard, a consultant to the music industry, put it this way: “Had the Internet existed at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, marketing and distribution as we know it today would have never evolved.”  In essence, the producer and the consumer could have maintained a close and meaningful relationship.

One early example of disintermediation was the personal computer. Dell, Gateway and others used the Internet and quickly developed direct one-on-one relationships with their consumers versus using the traditional retail chain channels.Today, we see this as almost normal as Apple, the manufacturer who once distributed via local retailers, has taken full responsibility for their consumers and even gone so far as to create company-owned retail centers.

A current events example is a recent announcement from Bill Warren, founder of Monster.com, of his new online job search that will allow his membership organization of over 500 companies to post all of their jobs directly to their websites using a .jobs moniker. His program will continue to reduce the intermediation between the job seeker and the job provider.

Understanding this concept and identifying the intermediation components of business should cause any service provider from CPAs to web developers to take a long, hard look at their role and the client base they serve.

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The Rule Of Reciprocity

Are you using the rule of reciprocity?  I ran across this topic not too long ago, and it got me to thinking about how this rule applies to marketing and PR.

Much of what we PR people do is based upon this rule. Do something for someone else and they will turn around and do something of equal or greater value for you.

I’ve written about this before in a series of posts about networking and gaining new business.

Friend Brent Dees owns Focus Four, a three-year curriculum to teach business owners how to work on their business and not in their business. In the Focus Four class, Brent teaches you how to utilize this rule most effectively. Says Brent,

“You should identify the people who can do the most to assist you in reaching your personal and business goals and then find out what they are trying to achieve. Once you know this, your efforts should be directed toward helping them reach their goals. This is smart business and good public relations.”

Remember, you do it because you want to help them. Expect nothing in return from them. But guess what? They always return the favor a hundredfold. That’s how to put reciprocity on steroids.

How are you using this rule in your business or your life?

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Creativity 2010 - Week #8

More creativity links for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Creativity & The Idea Grid -  The Idea Grid has been a staple at agencies to illustrate how a product or company can differentiate themselves by occupying or owning  position that no one else is currently exploiting.

What Is Lateral Thinking? -  Lateral thinking is one of those terms that many people have heard of, but probably very few of us really know what it means.

Creativity Is At The Heart Of 21st Century Work - Creativity in Business Thought Leader Series interview number 11 is with celebrated New York Times best-selling author, Dan Pink.

Freewriting - A Method For Unblocking Creativity - Freewriting is a personal creativity technique that is particularly useful when you have hit a mental roadblock.

Harnessing The Creativity Of The Individual - Creativity is at the same time robust and fragile. Bold ideas seem to speak with their own authority and stir the imagination and spirits of humans.

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Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

Office worker 1: I just don’t have the bandwidth to get this done. I feel like I’m drinking from a firehose, and besides so many of these assignments are not in my wheelhouse, and they are neither game changers nor paradigm shifters. And we really haven’t baked in all the data yet.

Office worker 2: At the end of the day none of these deliverables is really actionable anyway. I want to bring to the table best of breed strategies to our centers of excellence and get buy-in from c-level, but I don’t think we’ll ever close the loop.

Office worker 1: Perhaps we could circle back next week, drill down on these items and disambiguate them.

Office worker 2: I think if we could set up some facetime to review the data at a granular level we could leverage our learnings to come up with an end-to-end solution that could gain traction in the market and help us leapfrog our competition. If we could monetize this mission-critical solution we would be heavily incentivized and perhaps kicked upstairs into a corner office.

Intern: Damn, I didn’t know I’d need a foreign language in this job.

What buzzwords do you hate? Let’s start the list…

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Creativity 2010 - Week #7

The Walking Advert - Here’s another idea designed to harness businesses’ lust for exposure: make yourself into a walking advert. Is this something you could customize to work in your business?

Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography - The perfect infography must synthetize complex information in a simple visual representation, which is not easy. The following examples take information architecture to another level by making it beautiful.

Increasing Creativity and Memory in 30 Seconds? -  There is a folk tradition that someone with shifty eyes is considered untrustworthy – as being devious or sneaky. The truth is,  purposely shifting one’s eyes back and forth for 30 second intervals was found to increase creative output as well as memory recall.

The Many Forms Of Creativity -  I am not a creative snob, I don’t think it is reserved to one area of life. I love it in almost every form, the only thing I ask in creativity is that it is easily accessible to the masses.

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How To Be A Great Radio Guest

Radio - despite changes in media habits - still is a great way to get in front of a lot of people. As a radio talk show guest on a national program, millions could hear your message. Talk radio listeners tune in about 20 percent more than the average radio listener.

Being a great guest takes some work on your part. Let’s review what you must do in order to attain great guest status.

Be Available. Journalists of all stripes complain about not being able to reach sources when they need them. With radio, it is not just a 9 - 5 job. The great radio guest will show up whenever he or she is needed.

Be Conversational. This goes beyond your ability to carry on a good conversation. You must speak clearly, concisely and in terms the average listener understands. Start throwing around business-speak like “that’s not in my wheelhouse” and get booted off the show before it starts. In fact, don’t talk like that when you are not on radio!

Be Ubiquitous. It was true when I was in radio and it is still true today, radio people follow their print brethren. If you have been quoted by a news magazine or newspaper, radio producers are more likely to have you on. And, help producers locate you. Make sure you have an online presence and that you have your media clips accessible so producers can determine if you are the right source for them.

Be In The Moment. If you are out pitching yourself, take advantage of the news cycle. If there is nothing happening currently that ties your expertise into the topic of the day, then wait. Your day will come.

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Squirrel!

Like Dug The Dog from Pixar’s movie, Up!, marketers too often are distracted by the latest shiny thing. In my view, strategy should dictate tactics. But tactics are fun and strategy is hard, marketers say.  And that’s the way it is with social media. More than half of all marketers are currently engaged in some form of social media, according to eMarketer, but do they really have a grasp of how it fits into overall business objectives?

“With so much intense interest and activity, the big question is, Are marketers doing it right?” said Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer CEO and author of “10 Best Practices for Success with Social Media,” one of the Insight Briefs in the series. “Since social media marketing has the potential to affect so many areas of an organization,” he said, “the enormity of this opportunity leads many marketers to chase after every technique, tactic and metric that passes them by.”

Social media is not about marketing, and that is why I believe an organization’s PR group should take the leadership. Good public relations has always been about dialogue, listening to your publics before you respond.

Do you agree? Tell us who you think should be responsible for social media.

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Creativity 2010 - Week #6

30 Seconds To Creativity - People who watched a target moving side-to-side for 30 seconds have been tested as producing significantly more ideas when immediately given a creative task. This technique is, “thought to increase the cross-talk between the hemispheres.”

Switch Off Your Social Self.  Switch On Your Creativity -  The paradox is that, when you’re being yourself, rather than trying to imitate success, you’ll be your most original and creative.

Were The SuperBowl Ads Any Good?  Let’s Ask Twitter! - Even in an age of social media there’s still something about Superbowl advertising that appeals to us all.

Need A Business Idea? Look For Pain - If you really want to innovate your business and improve your revenue look for the pain that customers face daily.

Why Design Matters -  All of the energy fed into the debate about the value of good design to the world of commerce would be better spent building ways to make holistic design a routine activity in business—and society.

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Put Away The Diamond Ring

It seems to me that many marketers are like the guy overeager to get married. That guy walks up to the first pretty girl he sees and immediately whips out the diamond ring, asking for the order, so to speak.

Marketers who ask for too much information from prospects the first time they meet is guilty of this, too.

I am always cautioning my clients about asking for too much information too soon.

If someone wants to sign up for your enewsletter, it’s OK if you initially just get an email address and a first name. That’s what I recommend. You can give the prospect the option to provide more but I only require those two elements.

As the prospect gets to know you and appreciates the content you are providing, then you can ask for a little more information.Or, if you want to provide them with some increasingly valuable content, then its appropriate to require a little deeper contact information.

FutureNow addressed this topic recently and I loved this line for their post,

Remember, it’s not about you or your sales process. Your visitors are volunteers in the process and are coming to your site with motivations and intent.

That’s dead-on. Those visitors are volunteers, there of their own accord. If you don’t provide them the information they need without asking them to marry you right away, your competition will. So, let’s put away the diamond ring until we are really sure about this whole marriage thing, OK?

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Front Page Coverage - That’s What I Want!

Does everyone in business seem to think all you have to do is call the local daily paper and they come out to do a page one profile of your business? With all the downsizing, it’s hard enough just to get the media to open your emails or take your calls. Getting a front page story just because you want it: priceless.

I was talking with a prospect once who tossed this off as if it was no big deal, “of course we’d like to have the paper come down, meet our principals and do a profile of our business.” Another one wants to become a “rock star-type celebrity” in his industry.

Well, I’d like to win the lottery, but at least I know I have to buy a ticket first in order to be in the running.

Got any thoughts on this subject?

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