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MikeTrap
Boston, MA
Marketing guy. Entrepreneur. Lyrical gangsta.
Interests: Startups, Brands, Marketing, Boston, Venture Capital
Recent Activity
This is awesome. Well done, Chip.
If I were a Founder
Inspired by a tweet stream of consciousness by Danielle Morrill, the Founder of Mattermark, on what she would do if she was a VC, a jotted down a few notes on what I would do if I was a founder. These first went out as tweets on @chazard, but here is the full list in one place: I would aggress...
Late to this post, but it's a good 'un. We say Listen, Curate, Create, Engage, Activate. Should probably add Iterate to the list...
Continuous Digital Strategy
For the last three years or so I have been writing various articles on branding, strategy, social media and general marketing. And I was thinking that I was contributing to a body of knowledge about HOW to go about the hard work of using digital spaces to change the way that people behave. Af...
Indeed we do. And we forget this at our peril...
Miles To Go Before We Sleep
I am fortunate to have far flung family and friends who work in a wide range of industries. Over Thanksgiving and Christmas I traveled to see or hosted many of them and got an interesting and sobering perspective on how socially mature our organizations are in general. The reality is that we hav...
There's a lot of insight here, Ro, but in some ways less would be more.
Among these, which are the 3 most significant?
You could bucket these into Simplification, Personification (or brands, celebs, etc.), and Integration (breaking the lines between online and off.) In some sense I think those are the themes in play for 2011.
The Top 15 Marketing & Social Media Trends To Watch In 2011
Now that we are in the new year of planning, marketing teams everywhere are crafting and executing their plans for the next 12 months. It's going to be a busy and competitive year, and in looking back at 2010 there were plenty of big developments that point to a 2011 year filled with innovation,...
Thats a powerful story, Jeff, thank you for sharing it.
Sincerest condolences to you and your family at his difficult time.
The Troiano Family
A Tribute to Courage, Entrepreneurship, Grace
My father-in-law, Michael Doctoroff, passed away last week of ALS. It's been a sad series of days in the Bussgang household and we are just beginning to recover and transition back into the real world. I am finding that when you lose a loved one, it's hard to make the switch back into our ...
I don't know... It's pretty hard for companies to prioritize their own ideas, let alone jump on a feature bandwagon that originates on a competitive site.
In general I think the potential upside of open innovation outweighs the potential downside, but YMMV.
Great post, and great blog. Just subscribed.
What could be next for Foursquare?
An interesting interplay around Foursquare’s development strategy took place on Twitter Saturday evening when @Kris recommended to Dennis Crowley (CEO) and Tristan Walker (Head of Biz Dev) an idea that got the company’s leaders pretty jazzed up. On one hand it’s fascinating to see Foursquare’...
If you mean what accounts for the bill rate gap between McKinsey and McCann-Erickson, I'd say it's 5 decades of marketing folks being little more than pretty picture people. And pretty picture people just aren't worth as much as Big Picture People.
I say this with sadness, Jeff... your average marketing guy is a sales guy who's never been accountable for anything. The plain truth is that most marketing people are worthless. If that weren't true, marketing spend would go up in a tough economy, not down.
Marketing needs to be about driving revenue, not just making advertising. It's the only way back to a seat at the grown up table.
The Demise of the Mad Men
I don't watch alot of TV, so I'm usually a late adopter when it comes to great television shows. Mad Men is no exception. Although the show is entering its fourth season, I'm just getting around to watching Season 1 and I am falling in love with the show. It reminds me of the Sopranos - flawe...
Wow, David... Did not know you'd landed. Good for you, let's catch up offline.
In terms of your question... I want to know what the value chain will look like. In a world where "authentic" communication plays a more important role in the communications mix, how much of that communication will come from within "clients" themselves? What will be the agency's role? What kinds of agencies will play it? What technologies will be essential on both sides, and in coordinating the activities of the two?
That's the big picture stuff I wrestle with. Nice to have someone corrupted by the real world wrestling with it full time.
Best of luck to you, sure we'll talk soon.
A New Voice With a Ring of Familiarity
This is my first blog post as a Principal Analyst at Forrester, but not my first time writing for the company. When I left Forrester in 2002, blogs were just getting on the radar, Facebook was still based in Cambridge (and you needed a .edu email) and Interactive Marketing, eCommerce and Broad...
Brilliant, thanks for sharing.
"Social Sigma" is a little pretentious, but the idea is huge. Businesses will need to corrupt their vision, strategy, products, and people with the external reality in a way that wasn't possible pre-Gateway. And creating the semi-permeable membrane around these businesses will require a complete re-think of how they communicate with customers and the world.
The Gateway Recession: What CEOs Will Face Next
We’ll look back on this recession as much more than an ugly economic moment. History will view it as The Gateway — a portal connecting two very different eras. When the economic clouds clear, many prevailing elites will have been swept away, organizational structures will have fallen, and many ...
Great post, exactly right.
It's happening on the social media measurement front as well, as more sites try to convert the deluge of data first into information, and finally into *meaning.*
Check out Crimson Hexagon when you have a chance. They're doing some cool stuff for CNN, available on their blog.
Web 3.0 is about taming the deluge of data.
Frankly, I get pretty annoyed with Web jargon, especially when it seems like it's being propagated mostly to sell e-books and consulting services. That's one reason I've chafed at the phrase "Web 3.0," which gets bandied about almost any time people talk about "what's next." But the truth is t...
Wisdom in the post, and the comments.
It's appropriate for a CEO to take a pay cut before asking anyone else on his/her team to do the same, but the same principle applies one level up.
Outraged by Executive Compensation? Put Entrepreneurs In Charge.
Every time there’s an economic downturn, the spotlight shines on the super-rich and their out-of-touch lifestyles. The iconic moment of the 1991/1992 recession was then President George Bush looking bewildered at the supermarket checkout line during the 1992 “It’s the Economy, Stupid” president...
"Fly Ball Effect." Love it, that's exactly it.
Social Media's 'Fly Ball Effect'
As this piece in Adweek states, 'there is a major disconnect between the way most organizations collect customer feedback and then utilize it.' According to the CMO Council study, only 33% of CMOs think their companies are good at resolving complaints. Only 31% highly rate their organization's c...
Clever. But I feel rickrolled.
iPhone Add On for Live Streaming Video
Lots of people are interested in streaming live video using the iPhone. I rigged up this add on that works pretty well. :-) Formats available: YouTube, Quicktime (.mov), MP3 Audio (.mp3), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v) Tags: iphone, live, streaming, video, add, on, how, to, nokia, n95,...
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