Brilliant Noise

Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors.

Jason Fried is a founder and CEO of 37signals, a software company based in Chicago. Fried also treats 37signals as something of a laboratory for innovative workplace practices--such as a recent experiment in shortening the summer workweek to just four days.

If you’re a short-term thinker you’d think so, but we’re long-term thinkers. We’re about being in business for the long haul and keeping the team together over the long haul. I would never trade a short-term burst for a long-term decline in morale. That happens a lot in the tech business: They burn people out and get someone else. I like the people who work here too much. I don’t want them to burn out. Lots of startups burn people out with 60, 70, 80 hours of work per week. They know that both the people or the company will flame out or be bought or whatever, and they don’t care, they just burn their resources. It’s like drilling for as much oil as you possibly can. You can look at people the same way.

What’s the potential audience size around a Twitter hashtag?

in the early days of webs stats, reported figures tended to centre around the notion of hits, the number of calls made to a server via website activity.

Widespread social media monitoring/tracking is largely still in the realm of “hits” measurement. Personal dashboards for services such as Twitter typically display direct measures provided by the Twitter API, or measures trivially/directly identified from Twitter API or archived data – number of followers, numbers of friends, distribution of updates over time, number of mentions, and so on.

he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget.This is coming from the man who increased P&G's adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.

Note that P&G's revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company's costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.

n the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times. McDonald eventually said: As we've said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we're quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available. In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.

Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence, who recently stated that: “All advertisers need a lot more content so that they can keep the engagement with consumers fresh and relevant, because of the 24/7 connectivity. If you’re going to be successful around the world, you have to have fat and fertile ideas at the core.”

Recent reports suggest that for every £1 spent online, the internet influences £3 spent in stores. Google and others are working to bring all the tools that made finding great products online easy and rewarding to the real world.

Jim refers to ideals as the 400 percent advantage. Why? Because the brands identified as The Stengel 50 by Millward Brown Optimor have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of four over the past decade. Representing a wide variety of product and service categories they are united by one common factor; they operate in harmony with their ideals.

Ideals provide the “North Star,” the compass bearing by which these companies steer through good times and bad. Particularly noticeable from the chart comparing the Stengel 50 and the S&P 500’s performance over time is the rapid recovery of the Stengel 50 from the recession in 2008. These companies are not hindered by their ideals in tough times, they are helped by them.

Ideals probably have their strongest influence through the people who work on a brand, but can also have a positive effect with customers and consumers, not least in how their communications are received. In Grow, Jim reports work conducted by Millward Brown’s neuroscience practice, showing that people find the Stengel 50 brands to be more empathetic, more ideals-based and more memorable in what they stand for than their competitors. The end result, people are more likely to want to share the advertising with others.

Optimizing Social Media Across the Customer Lifecycle

"Executives who said their companies had established an extensive social media presence reported a return on investment that was more than four times that of companies with little or no social network engagement activity."

Do the homework and continue to study how your brand can continuously and holistically optimize content and social media participation to attract, engage, and inspire your customers. The result? More sales and longer, more meaningful customer relationships.

But spare a thought for the poor admen. Their industry is going through a particularly difficult time. Not only are they confronting a proliferation of new “channels” through which to pump their messages; they are also having to puzzle out how to craft them in an age of mass scepticism. Consumers are bombarded with brands wherever they look—the average Westerner sees a logo (sometimes the same one repeatedly) perhaps 3,000 times each day—and thus are becoming jaded. They are also increasingly familiar with the tricks of the marketing trade and determined to cut through the clutter to get a bargain. Scepticism and sophistication are especially pronounced among those born since the early 1980s.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that 46% of American “millennials” use their smartphones to check prices and online comments when they visit a shop.

Many companies want to go further and bypass conventional ad campaigns altogether. It has long been known that “earned media”—word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family and news articles—are highly trusted. Nielsen’s studies show that strangers’ comments on social media and online forums are also now seen as credible sources, rivalling traditional “paid media”.