I was fortunate enough to hear Lee Lefever of Common Craft speak recently at Mesh Marketing in Toronto. He spoke eloquently about his business (a fascinating story) and described that he has been able to achieve success through what he termed “Mass Democratization”. It is a world where cheap tools combine with a home based business and a web only audience to produce a real revenue generating and full time income stream.

Lee has a fascinating story and there is a full post coming on his “Explainer Network” but I wanted to focus on a few of the many great communication takeaways from his presentation. Continue Reading…

When was the last time you were deciding on a new restaurant, cafe or pub and didn’t turn to the Internet (whether at your desk or on your phone) to get directions, a review or even see who else might be there? Since I’m pretty nerdy the answer for me is that it would be completely out of character not to do a little online reconnasence work about the place before I suggest it to a group of friends. While I am on the far end of the spectrum that spectrum has definitely tipped to the point where I believe the majority of us now look up a place online before making a decision to go there. Continue Reading…

I have to admit that I quite enjoyed my own open letter to Starbucks, so I thought I’d bring back the format in this my open letter to Motorola.

Dear Motorola,

I don’t work for you and to be honest I haven’t owned one of your products for a while, but I know enough to know that you are undoubtedly the leader in bluetooth headsets for mobile phones.  I say this not to flatter you but to remind you that your market dominance is always at stake and that you can and should use your power in the market to continue to dominate. To that end, I’m here with a little suggestion for you and it goes something like this.

With all the states, provinces and other jurisdictions enacting laws that prohibit the use of cellular phones without a handsfree option there are going to be a mass amount of people who need to get in the market for your products quickly. Now of course you could take the traditional approach and offer some deep discounts right around the same time these various pieces of legislation pass, and I suggest you do. But here is where I think you can use your deep pockets to both make yourself look good and garner new customers. Continue Reading…

If you haven’t seen this post by Engadget you missed a good one. Obviously Microsoft got caught with their pants down so to speak. I can understand using different agencies in different countries and thus not having continuity in your marketing from region to region – even though you should. I recommend using the same agency globally for a product and then if called for regionalizing the message. What I do not understand nor recommend is using Photo Shop to crop an African American’s head for a Caucasian person’s head! And let me take it a step further and say even if the designer was going to be that callus and insanely lazy, could they at least have taken the time to change the colour of the man’s arms – cuz he’s pretty tanned on the arms in the second picture, oh wait its the same body as the first…Insanity. Score one for Engadget and another for social media for spreading this post.