Check out the guy in the background photo. Doesn’t he look like the coolest thing on two feet? Well…he actually is (no, that is not me)…and one of his deepest passions is surfing. Not too long ago, he dragged me and one of our mutual friends down to San Diego for a weekend of surfing and relaxing. I had only surfed once before, and although I couldn’t even paddle past the break, I really enjoyed myself. Seeing how deeply he loved the sport, and that he had converted one of my best friends to the religion of the surf, I figured I should give it another go.

San Diego was a blast…but not because of the surfing. It turns out we were there (oh so conveniently) for the biggest storm they’ve seen in 100 years – think Point Break. I did manage to “get up” on the board eventually, and I did love the experience. Sitting on your board waiting for the right wave to come in is an incredible and introspective occasion, and the apres-surf culture is second only (in my opinion) to skiing. It would seem that this sport would be perfect for my personality. And maybe it would have been if I had found it 10 years ago.

Now that the New Year has come and gone, I’ve been thinking a lot about the big red surfboard. How much time and commitment can I afford to put into surfing in order to get what I would want out of it? Sadly, not enough. As I look at my 4 1/2 month old, holder her in front of a mirror, I can only hope that she’ll be able to do everything that she wants to do. Unfortunately, I’m staring at myself in the same mirror…aging. I do have a few newer interests that I’ll be exploring this year…unfortunately, the big red surfboard won’t be one of them. Maybe 2013?

Every couple of weeks or so, I’ll deliberately go to YouTube (vs. the mid-day popover to watch a TED video or an EPL highlight) to check out the most viewed videos from this week and this month. I’m trying to keep up with “the kids” to understand what their interests are. But I have to say, I don’t. Today’s most popular video comes from BlueXephos, and as I viewed it (the first 12 seconds of it, actually) it had already received 393,580 views (it was posted 2 days ago). BlueXephos has 2 of the top 4 most viewed videos so far today,

the fifth most viewed video of the week (with 760,243 views), and 4 of the top 30 most viewed videos this month (each with ~1 Million views). They also have ~1.4 Million subscribers to their YouTube channel. Their videos are consistently getting some of the most views out there.

So who is BlueXephos?

They are a group of gamers who record their game play while overlaying commentary of their exploits.

Unless there are “viewership farms” in China building up their rankings, I just don’t get it.

The value of content is, of course, subjective. Some folks may find BlueXephos’ video content entertaining, amusing, or thought provoking. I find it flat out annoying. Especially since it blocks my discovery of other interesting content (like @CGPGrey’s Informational YouTube videos). And even more frustratingly, there are a trove of other folks posting videos of similarly useless content. With 1.5 Billion pieces of Facebook content, 140 Million Tweets, and 1.6 Million blog posts published DAILY, and folks “voting” for BlueXephos as the most important content out there…Houston, we have a problem.

There is no such thing as a perfectly designed item. There are those that are well-designed and should be admired for their aesthetic beauty, functional aptitude, and/or general improvement of a specific experience, but every item (products, websites, content, processes, …) can be improved in some way or another. Every one of them. What was your initial reaction when you first interacted with a first generation iPhone? It was likely that you were stunned by an incredibly beautiful and wonderfully intuitive device. But the iPhone 4 is undoubtedly an improved (yet still imperfect) product.

And “well-designed” doesn’t mean that the item has to be particularly beautiful to look at. Take fonts for instance. The choice of font can make a huge impact on everything from brand recognition to content readability. I recently ran across an article that described a font designed specifically for individuals that suffer from dyslexia. Use of the font has been proven to dramatically decrease the number of reading and comprehension errors a dyslexic individual makes. Well-designed indeed. Kudos to StudioStudio for taking this project on.

And what about other, more mundane items? One of the original designers of the iPod, Tony Fadell, created a company called Nest that has redesigned the thermostat. There’s no question that his product is beautiful. And if it is easier to use than the archaic blocks that most of us have in our homes, Tony will make a serious business out of it.

Lastly, here’s a different sort of redesign to tickle your brain with…the revamping of the supermarket experience. Tesco’s “virtual supermarket” in the subway of South Korea is nothing short of genius.

A recent survey from glassdoor.com, indicates that the answer is yes, as 3 out of the top 10 companies listed (including the top 2) are Consulting organizations. Having previously worked for both big and small firms, I know that the Consulting industry can be at times amazing and at other times quite cruel.

First, a shout out to Slalom Consulting. How you managed to breach the top 10, besting cosmically cool brands such as Apple and Nike, I will never know. What I do know is that your model of providing local homes for (ahem) aging “big time” consultants is a good one. Kudos.

Good consulting firms do a few things extraordinarily well. Most importantly, they have mastered the recruiting of their pre-defined target profiles. The mostly young and consistently intelligent, attractive, and motivated individuals that they hire end up working and playing together extremely well. Their clients are also usually left satisfied as they benefit from a temporary (although expensive) workforce, the quality of which they likely would not have been able to attract on their own. The best firms have used this point to help fuel an elitist culture, the spirit of which is woven deep into each employee’s mind-set.

Those facts, paired with short-lived project assignments and a well defined (although increasingly prolonged and decreasingly lucrative) career path, keep many Consultants very motivated. On the flip side, there’s no denying that Consulting is a difficult industry to stick with. Years of out-of-town assignments, outlandishly aggressive project timelines, and difficult client personalities make it a challenging place to be long term. Congrats to Slalom, along with Bain and McKinsey, for addressing some of these most difficult of issues and making their employees feel great about where they work.

I’ve been following Seth Godin for many a moon now, and he publishes at least 2-3 posts per month about failure. I usually interpret his writings on this topic in relation to large and significant initiatives…big risks (like starting your own business) and big efforts (like taking responsibility for a critical and highly visible work project). The lessons from large-scale failures are certainly valid, but they are also interesting to consider at a much smaller scale. Over the course of 2011, I’ve initiated several small projects. All of them have been failures. And all of them have been more than worthwhile.

Early in the year, I purchased a new camera to explore a subject that I’ve connected with for a long time, photography. With a baby on the way, I had even more incentive to take it up. Since I’ve started, I’ve taken a total of 2 shots that I’m pleased with. Would you call that a success? Maybe. But what about the other 5k bad photos that I’ve taken?

And then there’s this blog…my third such effort. My commitment level has been relatively high, which I am pleased about. But a success? Nope. I had a vision for the project, the aesthetic and implementation of which I haven’t been able to get right.

But with failure comes insight and understanding. The lessons are immense, even from the most minute of exercises like taking a terrible photograph. Which is why I stick with them. I will continue to take bad photographs in 2012. And I will continue to tweak, evolve, and likely completely redo my blog in 2012. I’ll surely fail again. I’ve even got a new project, learning how to draw, on the cards for the coming year. Is that even possible as I stare age 40 in the face? Probably not. 2012 is a green field for achieving these and other failures. And I can’t wait for them. What failures will you achieve?

It’s that time of year again. One of optimism and anxiety. If you work for a modern, aggressively-minded, technologically-savvy company, it’s a time to dream. Visions of the new Marketing programs, software, and gizmos that can be put together over the course of the next year to generate interest and buzz in your company’s offerings are surely sailing through your mind, along with the most advanced mechanisms for tracking and measuring the success of each of them. If you’re like the rest of us, especially in an uncertain economic climate, budgeting can be a scary time indeed.

Of course Marketing budgets are not one-size-fits-all, and your proposal needs to be right for your company’s goals, maturity, etc. However, getting budget approval is undeniably tricky business, and you’ll need all of the ammunition that you can get your hands on to convince (ahem… beg & plead) “the powers that be” that you should have X number of dollars to achieve Y set of objectives.
Published industry metrics have always helped in this cause as most CEOs don’t want to be left behind what others are doing. Here are a few recent data points that I’ve come across that might help:

1. IDC’s 2011 Marketing Investment Planner (thanks to Microsoft for making this publicly available)
2. Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing BenchMark Report. You can download a very useful excerpt and buy the report for ~$400.
3. Ad Age Insights Whitepaper: What SBO’s Need to Know about Marketing
4. Schonfeld & Associates (SAI) Business Research Report of 2011 Advertising To Sales Ratios by Industry Sector

If anyone has any, I would love to see additional data points for my own “convincing” efforts!!!

I have been having an ongoing dialog with a close friend of mine regarding PowerPoint presentation styles for quite a long time now. He is a straightforward content presentation sort of guy and aims for the one thought per slide approach. One of his favorite presenters is famed Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. An example of Lessig’s presentation style can be found here. Effective indeed. The “rub” with this technique is that the presenter has to be quite a talented storyteller to be able to pull it off. I’ve seen folks try to emulate it and fail miserably.

Speaking of presentation failures, a company called Speechworks conducted a survey that had some not unexpected results. The #1 pet peeve from the survey is not surprising at all…”The speaker read the slides to us”. Can you imagine if Lessig read every one of his slides word for word with no other commentary? I’ve seen it happen. I’m sure you have too.

On the flip side, Fast Company ran an article not too long ago with a few guidelines from Guy Kawaski and presentation coach Jerry Weisman. There are some really interesting suggestions in there to think about. Test them out.

I try not to get too bogged down with rules and guidelines (the reason why many a golf swing fail), but I do aim for the following: 1. Design each deck for a particular audience, 2. Tell a story with a well thought through sequence of slides, 3. Use photos and “simple” infographics to get points across effectively, 4. after you’ve written your deck…”concisisize it” by cutting out all extraneous thoughts & slides. You probably can remove half of your deck. Every Time. Do it. I’ll close with a link to a recent Zynga presentation, which I think is successful for its intended audience, messaging, and aesthetic.

I’ve initiated a global identity rebranding effort for my company, and as a starting point, my team has completed some industry and competitive research. We found some interesting, although not unexpected, results, which I thought would be good to share. As we pretty much knew before we set out on this initiative, there are really two main color ranges that are used in Enterprise Software and Consulting brands…the “blue” (think IBM) and the “red” (think Oracle). The background graphic, which was a great visual tool for our CEO & Board, was developed to prove this point.

Pretty much everyone else in these categories have used slight variations…sometimes going as “bold” as adding a highlight color like Cognizant did with the green shadow of their “C” or WiPro’s rainbow effect. A standardized industry look is expected, though. Can you imagine SAP marketing themselves like a “bling bling” consumer brand would? For us, the main objective is to be perceived as “Enterprise scale” and “Mature” so that we can more easily assure our prospects that our solutions are as well.

Walk around London’s Covent Garden, however, and you’ll immediately see how effective bold brands work in the Retail industry…the yellow Selfridges bags, the purple Liberty bags, and the turquoise Tiffany’s bags. Bag envy everywhere.

Is Enterprise Software and Consulting ready for similar boldness? With “nontraditional” branding from companies like Salesforce.com (“No Software”) and with Web2.0 companies like 37Signals shaking things up, I’d say we’re moving the needle a bit. The question is how far are we willing to go?

I can’t answer that question. But the old 3-6-3 adage that goes something like: “Take deposits at 3%, lend them back at 6%, and be on the golf course by 3pm” will certainly soon be history. Direct deposit, ATMs, online bill pay are all great. Access to loans, mortgages, CDs, and safety deposit boxes is all goodness. But how much do we really care about which institution provides us with these services? The answer categorically (today) is that we don’t. The reasons why we stay with a particular Bank is that we are either too scared or too lazy to move our money around. But move we shall.

Mortgage and other lending brokers, offline and online, have taken away any loyalty an individual might have had to a Bank for loans. Intuit/Mint has made it easier than ever to have visibility into your money. Companies like Mobank in Europe have revolutionized the ability to access banking account information through mobile channels. So what’s left that a Bank can offer us? Better rates? Better service? Beuller? In his book, Bank 2.0, Brett King argues that Banks need to completely transform everything from the purpose of the branch to their approach to sales and advertising in order to provide

any real value back to their customers. Agreed. But I can also envision a world in which traditional Banks fade into the background, focusing solely on their mundane traditions of managing money. “Bank Brokers” pop up as a layer on top of the old institutions, playing an advocate role on behalf of consumers…enabling them with the ability to easily and regularly move money between various Banks to get the best interest rates and products for each consumer’s needs, while providing exceptional customer service. Add web & mobile account access and you’ve got a real proposition. What do you think?

Portions of an email responding to a series of requested software product naming changes:

“After reviewing the proposed names, I would suggest reconsidering whether this naming exercise is really necessary at this point. Even though one of your competitors is going in this direction, I’m not sure how much value that you will get out of doing the same. I would also question whether or not the 3rd objective (showing “perceived” maturity) would be met. I would actually argue that the names ____ and ___ might actually have the opposite effect.

“The real question to ask here is…how will you be able to most effectively position your products and communicate their value to your prospects and customers so that they would consider making a purchasing decision? I don’t think “cheeky” names will help achieve this goal. I would suggest using a more straightforward approach with your naming strategy…using names that succinctly represent what the product does. There is a lot of movement in the software industry to do just that…some call it the ‘outside-in’ approach…”

“An example of a company using this approach is SAP. SAP has been beaten up significantly by customers and analysts for all of their product name changes over the past few years, but their SVP of Marketing Communications recently explained where they are going with their product naming strategy…it’s an interesting article. If you look at their list of products/solutions, you’ll see that they use straightforward and industry-adopted terminology to more clearly represent what their products and solutions do.”

My recommendation is to do the same.

Adobe’s recent announcement that “We are no longer going to be actively developing the Flash Player for Mobile Browsers” has caused a lot of commotion across various web design & development communities over the past few days. I have to give credit to Mike Chambers, a Product Manager at Adobe, for his insightful, mature, and realistic commentary on the events. The big looming question is: what is going to happen to Flash for non-mobile? My first gut reaction was an emotional one: No Flash for mobile. No Flash.

Why would any company in its right mind develop a flash-based animation, visualization, game, banner ad, etc. if it couldn’t be “mobilized”? CPU, battery, and security concerns aside, Flash has, and will continue to be, the best technology platform for many applications out there…and will likely be for quite a bit of time. Although HTML5 certainly has a ton of potential, it’s not there yet. Less than 1/2 of all browsers support HTML5, and it doesn’t provide enough features yet to do everything designers need today. And have you seen when HTML5 will be “Finished”? 2022?

App design/development principles haven’t changed…don’t ditch them now because of a media frenzy. Figure out your technical and functional requirements, evaluate the various constraints for your initiative (time, budget, available resource skills, etc.) and then make your technology decisions. If you want to build a single animation for mobile and non-mobile…don’t choose Flash. If you’re developing for non-mobile and have talented Flash Developers in-house…continue to choose Flash. Cross-training some of your resources on HTML5 would probably be smart, though.

Amid all of the horrific press surrounding the cosmic string of blunders by Netflix recently, we as impatient consumers haven’t taken the time to take a step back and ask some important questions. Why did Netflix raise rates with no warning? Why was the rate hike so drastic? Why was spinning off the DVD-by-mail business necessary? Why oh why? And why was Reed Hastings the only one to be (pardon my pun) “placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds“?
But what if Reed Hastings was right?

First of all, Netflix is a public company…decisions that far-reaching are certainly not made by a single person. These matters were discussed, strategized, and concluded by upper management and the Board of Directors (where heavyweights including Ann Mather and Charles Giancarlo sit). They knew, as well as we do now, that Netflix’s streaming costs will continue to go through the roof…one analyst predicts a 10X cost increase between 2010 and 2012. Wow. And fighting the other content providers with the smallest war chest isn’t going to be easy.

Netflix must focus on streaming, and they need more revenue from their once adoring customers. Reed Hastings was right. Unfortunately, his mistakes carrying out the strategy were many, and some of them unforgivable. But what happens without Netflix? Allow video distribution to be controlled by a small handful of behemoth companies? Reed & Co. have built an undeniably customer-centric and technologically innovative service…pretty much rivaled by none. And a recent, barely mentioned report about bandwidth consumption confirms this. I for one don’t want them to go away. Do you? Really?

I picked up a great little book in the airport the other day called The Essentials, Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Reads. It’s a quick read, especially during the work commute since the book is basically a reprint of 10 of their most popular/effective articles written. I was pretty excited to read the writings of heavyweights like Peter Drucker and Clayton Christensen, but it was the article by Daniel Goleman that got me most excited.

If you’re anything like me, a large part of your “downtime” is spent thinking about life and your progression through it…children, job, finances, etc. I sometimes wish that I could fast forward 20 years to see where I ended up at the conclusion of my career. How far did I progress? Did I fulfill my potential? Did I have the stuff it takes to be a true leader? Goleman attributes great leadership based on what he calls emotional intelligence, which includes self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

I’ve led groups my whole life, but not because I was the most popular kid (I wasn’t), and not because my charisma enabled me to charm the pants off of everyone I meet (it doesn’t). I connected with Goleman’s position because it basically says that you don’t have to be Steve Jobs or Richard Branson to be a great executive. I’d like to think that someone like me has the potential to reach such high levels…with the right qualities, you just might be able to. Fast forward 20 years? Naw. That would take all of the fun away.

One of the benefits of working for a foreign-based company is the number of international experiences that I’ve been fortunate to have. Although these events are always immensely interesting, I am often times reminded of how different folks from different regions are. Another way to put it…I’m often times reminded of how “American” I am. Last week alone, I had the chance to meet with two software vendors that are potential strategic partners for my company…one Russian and the other Swiss. The dynamics of both discussions were fascinating.

The meeting with representatives from Moscow was surprisingly straightforward. They were intelligent and confident, and asked direct questions about how they might be able to expand their business into geographies that we were more familiar with. At the beginning of the meeting, one of them apologized for his inability to communicate well in English. He floored me with this “inability”, effectively explaining technical concepts such as SOA and the reusable components in his product’s framework. I’m sure he speaks 4 languages fluently. I speak 1. Uno.

And then there was the meeting with a British executive of the Swiss company. Towards the end of the meeting he highlighted the areas that we might be able to partner together on. His summary was insightful, but noncommittal. Foreseeing that the discussion would be difficult to move forward, I pressed him with the hope that he would show his cards. He didn’t. The meeting went exactly as it needed to go…it’s the first step of a long process. Events like these remind me of the wonderful cultural differences that exist in the world…which I’m often amazed by and alway respectful of.

After consulting with a “fair and balanced” news and media organization for almost 3 years now, I’ve become fairly obsessed with how online news items are discovered and digested by readers. Like most of us, the way I’ve gotten my news online has evolved significantly over time. I started back in the early internet days with lists of browser bookmarks. I’d constantly click through them to see if anything changed since the last time I looked (sound familiar?). Pointcast and Marimba had me super-excited about the possibility of getting news “pushed” to my desktop, but that fad died out quickly.

Then I turned to news aggregators. I was using one called popurls for a while, but scrolling through the headlines was, simply put, boring. I searched high and wide. While tablet-based offerings like flipboard got me enthused, browser-based alternatives were lagging severely. My hunt took me down a different path…to “social browsers”. The web browser and my email client are the two central applications that I use most regularly during a typical day, so having news fed automatically to one of them makes sense. The concept of a “social browser” was gaining steam.

I started my investigation using a now defunct product called Flock, before turning to my now beloved Rockmelt. I’ve been using Rockmelt for a couple of months now and would go so far as to say that it has increased my multitasking productivity dramatically (that is… working while sifting through news, tech, and entertainment stories). I’m really starting to depend on it (read obsessed). Give it a shot and let me know what you think. There are a few other RSS Readers that I’m also pretty excited about…a product called Pulp leads the pack. How do you get your news online?

I’m always disappointed when I see someone pretending to be something they’re not. I was in the airport a couple of weeks back standing in the immigration line when I noticed a hip young couple…obviously European. He stood about 6’2″ and was rail thin. He was wearing a checkered button down shirt with chest bared, a slim-fitting jacket with collar turned up revealing a colorful fabric hidden underneath, slacks that fit just too snug, and pointy leather shoes with no laces. He stood with an air. His female companion was equally well put together, albeit a bit more simply.

And then I overheard this couple speak to each other. The woman was probing for conversation…the man barely responded. He was focused more on looking hip than living the moment. When he spoke, I detected a hint of a Midwestern-U.S. accent. My observations of European sophistication were quickly replaced with a feeling of disappointment. This guy was a poser. And probably from Minneapolis.
My problem with him is that everyone in his hometown probably hates his guts for his air of being better than everyone else, and folks in Europe think he’s just a wannabe.

It’s the same in the business world. I’ve seen really nice individuals pretending to be the pressure selling, name-dropping, hard negotiating “Sales Guy” fail time and time again. Then again, I’ve seen folks that really have that personality triple their quota. I’ve also seen the “nice guy” triple their quota…but by being nice.
Just be true to yourself…sincerity goes a long way.

(By the way, the guy in the photo is another American poser trying to look important in the Harrods food hall)

If you’ve taken any classes in Marketing, read any books on the subject, or are even peripherally interested in the topic, you’ve heard of Philip Kotler. He’s one of the masters. If you do a Google Search for top 10 Marketers of all time, he’ll come up in the list. Interestingly enough, he’s not in this one (although it is still a worthwhile read).

My take: too basic and academic
I’m not sure what I was expecting. Kotler’s most well known book, “Marketing Management“, is ‘the world’s most widely used graduate level textbook in marketing’ (from Wikipedia). I was looking to go back to the basics, but this was just too general for me. A lot of theory combined with few worthwhile examples. I appreciate that this book might be useful for folks outside of the Professional Services world (or those who have never done Sales & Marketing before), but sadly I would like the hours back that I spent with it.

A few favorite quotes from the book:

“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” – Philip Kotler

“Success is never final.” – J. Willard Marriott, Sr.

“Most people skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going to be.” – Wayne Gretzky

There are those precious few who possess pure, unbridled charisma. The moment these lucky chaps enter a room, they literally find themselves surrounded by strangers who hang on every word they utter. One of my roommates from college has this gift. Bastard. And then there are others who, although often times less charismatic, are gifted storytellers. They seem not only to have a natural ability to unfold a story beautifully, but also the intuition to stretch out a point or exaggerate with flair based on reactions from the audience.

Years ago I worked with such an individual…he would relentlessly tell the same story over and over again. Each time with a different twist. Each time just as enjoyable as the last. I’m mesmerized by such storytellers. But sadly, I (like most of us) am not one of them. Often times verbose. Inconsistent. Poor read of the audience.
In the business world, especially in sales and marketing, success is determined by the initial stories you tell. Whether done verbally or through powerpoint decks and collateral, your story needs to be direct, tight, and personal.

Occasionally, I find myself in “the zone”, capturing the interest and imagination of my listeners. I become the storyteller I’ve always wanted to be. I can’t explain why it happens sometimes and not others, but thankfully there are folks out there who can. Joey Asher is one of them, and he’s written several books on improving presentations. To paraphrase a few of his thoughts: 1. Start with the point to capture your audience early. 2. Tell the story chronologically. 3. Be concise. 4. Keep it personal, including specific names and details. and 5. (something my wife is quite adept at) Exaggerate. Often.