One of the things I advise companies is that sometimes the best marketing is not marketing at all…it’s simply a matter of doing what is right. LEGO is now my poster child for that advice.
And a spot-on post by B.L. Ochman -> “Lego: a company that doesn’t have to force customers to Like them on Facebook“
Slides from my closing keynote at The Social Business Future Conference yesterday.
Redmonk founder Stephen O’Grady posted a great recap of Monktoberfest 2012 (complete with the list of amazing, impossible-to-find beers they served). I’m slightly partial to this paragraph:
Mike Maney, a longtime Friend of RedMonk, arranged and shot the video for the conference on his own. He and his colleague Matt Helmke turned their travel to the Monktoberfest into an epic 7 state roadtrip, featuring stops at craft breweries all the way from Delaware to Maine. From Riverhorse to Olde Burnside to Harpoon, they went from brewery to brewery, collecting stories and – thanks to some very gracious donations – beer.
Crazy un-marketing ideas like this — the kind where you do what is right for the communities you do business in — aren’t possible without the support of forward-thinking executives like Laura Merling and the sure-what-the-hell-why-not participation of great pros like Matt Helmke and Justin Tormey.
The pro peloton rode into town this weekend for the last stop on the 2012 UCI America Tour. A strong contingent of local riders camped out at the midpoint of the king of the hill climb on Wismer just out of Carversville. Feedback from the riders and their support teams echoed what so many of us who live and ride in the area know all too well: tough climbs, fast flats and one of the best areas in the country to ride.
I’m a big fan of citizen journalism…but an even bigger fan of seeing my images in the press. Caught this shot while riding on the new Route 202 Parkway on a lazy Sunday while it was open to cyclists and pedestrians. This guy was decked out in his finest Little House on the Prairie attire and cranking circles on a wooden bike.
As someone who has written a number of speeches in his career, last night’s oratorial tour de force by President Bill Clinton was, in my opinion, the greatest speech he’s ever given and, likely, one of the top three political speeches delivered over the past decade.
And a great job by The New York Times turning on the multimedia spigot to annotate the video.
Know what’s fun on a rainy Labor Day? Catching up on a weekend’s worth of links from Twitter. Know what’s even more fun? When one of your favorite bloggers writes about how we’re on the precipice of a period when “machines will communicate in increasingly human-like ways.” Know what’s even more fun than that? When a duo of big brains do near instant follow-up posts that build on that thought.
That’s what happened this afternoon as I first caught Alex Williams’ thought-provoking post on the eventuality of a future where machines get all Facebook’y and build friend lists of their own (“How Machines Will Use Social Networks To Gain Identity, Develop Relationships And Make Friends“).
Which led me (via Twitter) to a post by rye connoisseur, pit master and jiu jitsu warrior Christopher Hoff. In his post, Christopher expands on the sociality of human/machine interaction by positing that ““how humans are changing the way we interact will ultimately define how the machines we design will, too.” In other words, up until now, we’ve been focused on how machines change human behavior; we’re on the cusp of seeing how humans change machine behavior.
And then one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, Christian Reilly, threw his gray matter into the mix with a post that put real-world context around the discussion. Christian writes that a “colossal, ad-hoc network of sensors” will make buildings — yes, actual inanimate things — smarter…something he’s dubbed “smart maintenance.”
The idea of sensors everywhere creating a global (cosmic?) data fabric is an idea that I helped promote a decade ago during the early days of IBM’s pervasive computing initiative. Over the past 10 years, its core has evolved into the technological foundation underneath business and society today: cloud computing, APIs, open source and big data. Millions and billions of people and things sensing, learning and adapting. IBM once referred to the server-centric version of this as autonomic computing.
The pieces required to create the future Alex, Christopher and Christian map out are here. Computer chips and logic are already embedded in everyday objects (and getting smaller and faster by the day). Networks are getting wider and smarter with the rollout of technologies like LTE. APIs are liberating data. And software (and humans) are taking that data and turning it into information. And despite the non-society-contributing, advertising-focused business models of today’s social networks, the personal and societal connectivity enabled by the likes of Twitter and Facebook is unassailable.
We’re on the cusp of a future where this bouillabaisse of technology and society combine into a single pot. A pot where an airport becomes the social network and thermostats friend other thermostats.
Image Credit: Benedict Campbell. Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0 UK
Becoming a big fan of Starbucks…not for its coffee, but for its bold approach to PR. Traditional PR strategy would advise the CEO to avoid conflict at all costs; their modern approach is one of take a point of view – if even unpopular – and say what needs to be said and what others are afraid to say. Huge brand cred, IMHO. And lessons to learn for other organizations and PR pros. Having a strong position on an issue and doing the right thing is not the sole domain of national politics.
Mike Maney 