Attention is a powerful filter. Sometimes too powerful.

March 23, 2009

There’s a very interesting post up at Psyblog about the cocktail party effect, the remarkable ability we humans have to tune into just one thread of input among many others — and tune OUT all the rest. The most famous demonstration of this probably “did you see the moonwalking bear?” (watch it if you haven’t) [...]

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What outrageous thing will you do today?

March 23, 2009

Here is a lovely, life-affirming idea from Gloria Steinem: I will claim today’s pavement seed-gathering expedition with my children as my first outrageous act. And tomorrow I will plan an unrealistically ambitious fundraising campaign for Rape Crisis Cape Town. What will you do? Ideas and feedback welcomed here and at Feministing.

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Upgrade your bullsh*t detector: learning from “Twitter Unveils New Premium Accounts”

March 19, 2009

It’s been an amusing morning watching the waves caused in the Twitterverse by Brian Brigg’s satirical post on Twitter’s business model. A LOT of people passed the news on without any apparent awareness that it was satire. There was concern and even outrage at the idea of 500-character tweets. Some people were doing it with [...]

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WordCamp SA roundup

August 24, 2008

My edited notes from WordCamp SA in Cape Town yesterday. The roundup of live Twitter coverage is here. Vince Maher on the M&G’s blogs: Thought Leader worked because it has created a platform for “attention transactions” – writers are willing to trade their time and effort for attention, looking for peer recognition. With that as [...]

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A brand is what people think it is

May 13, 2008

I never formally studied marketing; I came into it via a complicated route that involved, somewhere at the beginning, reading a lot of eye-wateringly complex philosophy (Quine, anyone?). All that language about language, combined with a certain natural skepticism, has led me to spend a lot of time pondering the sometimes very large gaps between [...]

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“But honestly, would social media really work for my plumbing / building / aromatherapy business?”

May 12, 2008

I get this question a lot. It’s a question I ask of myself a lot, as well. I’m betting on the answer being yes, with some caveats depending on exactly who and where your target market is and what the best way might be to reach them. My “yes” is not yet authoritative, but it’s [...]

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A golden rule: Make good stuff, listen, be nice

April 17, 2008

The second day of Nomadic Marketing was considerably more difficult that the first (in a good way); a huge diversity of content, style, opinion and perspective. But if there’s one message that’s emerging clearly from absolutely everyone it’s that the rules of success in social media are not very different from the rules of success [...]

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Roundup of Nomadic Marketing 3, Day 1

April 16, 2008

The first day of Nomadic Marketing has been interesting and challenging in unexpected ways. On the one hand I’ve not encountered anything particularly new — in fact, one of the biggest surprises was discovering that the idea of markets as conversations is not universally accepted as blindingly obvious. Listening to various stories of corporate obliviousness [...]

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Transfixed by a storm in a teacup very far away

March 10, 2008

I was about to go to bed last night when I picked up a comment on Twitter that suggested there was something interesting going on at the SXSWi conference* in Austin, Texas, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed live on stage by a journalist called Sarah Lacy. The story in a [...]

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A useful primer on the “conversation economy”

March 9, 2008

This BusinessWeek piece by David Armano from last year is a useful starting point summary of the conventional wisdom on whatever this thing is that we’re talking about (what is the difference, exactly, between a “conversation economy” and an “attention economy”?) It’s the conversation economy, stupid. One of the engines that is driving “2.0″ growth [...]

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