For those of you who haven’t seen Banksy’s latest exhibition in NYC, check this out.
Filed under: banking | Tags: banking, borrowing, global financial crisis, lending, new york times, nytimes, stock market, thomas L Friedman
A friend of mine sent me this article by Thomas L.Friedman of The New York Times this morning and whilst it relates to the current global crisis, it is also pertinent in light of the recent posting on the conundrum that was NAB’s foray into the social media space. As the world becomes more connected and businesses are forced to become more transparent, people become less tolerant and the why and the how become just as important as the what.
Enjoy.
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Here’s beginnith Thomas’ article ::
[You can check out the entire thing online here]
The Why and The How matters
I have a friend who regularly reminds me that if you jump off the top of an 80-story building, for 79 stories you can actually think you’re flying. It’s the sudden stop at the end that always gets you.
When I think of the financial-services boom, bubble and bust that America has just gone through, I often think about that image. We thought we were flying. Well, we just met the sudden stop at the end. The laws of gravity, it turns out, still apply. You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream — a home, for no money down and nothing to pay for two years — without that eventually catching up to you. The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters. I just hate the idea that such an ethic is more alive today in China than in America.
Our financial bubble, like all bubbles, has many complex strands feeding into it — called derivatives and credit-default swaps — but at heart, it is really very simple. We got away from the basics — from the fundamentals of prudent lending and borrowing, where the lender and borrower maintain some kind of personal responsibility for, and personal interest in, whether the person receiving the money can actually pay it back. Instead, we fell into what some people call Y.B.G. and I.B.G. lending: “you’ll be gone and I’ll be gone” before the bill comes due.
Filed under: Innovative retail, Marketing to women, new product, Innovative stimulus | Tags: Innovation, Marketing, beauty industry, cosmetics, women, innovative services, beauty
borrowed from Mark Drasutis @ Flickr
Ladies’ beauty salons are all the same - they talk about the miracles of some facial treatment or other, offer a variety of backrubs, take care of a bit of hairy leg action & generally try & flog you a bunch of product
with anti-aging properties that don’t work but will somehow help you to retain that special glow. Yawn…
When you take a squiz at teen products on the other hand, you’d think that a 16 year-old’s life consists mainly of acne, smelling good & well…acne.
Oh and everybody’s capturing the essence of pomegranate or some made up patented ingredient but just quietly, we think the beauty industry needs to lighten up…
We’d create a beauty salon just for teenagers because when you’re 15 & you’ve just been dumped via SMS, the best revenge is to show up at the next pashfest looking like the cat’s meow.
We’d offer a range of chick only services like::
* The – I’m so over him – facial
* The – I’m gonna get me some action – make over
* The – omigod it’s my first wax – waxing menu
* The – at least my nails look good – manicure & pedicure
Is there another part of the market your business is not personally servicing? If you put yourself out on a limb & went after one new target – how would you woo them?
Filed under: Digital culture | Tags: blogging, Google, posting, problogger, search, search engine marketing, search traffic, SEO, Social media, traffic, writing posts
A great post from Darren over at Problogger about getting more traffic to your blog that I thought I’d share with you. It’s a great post and good food for thought. When you think about it, it’s how we think about communication in general [or should do]. Who are we talking to? What interests them? How do we get their attention? Where do they hang out?
“What is the best way to get Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog?”
1. Search Traffic has been an important part of my blogging
The amount of traffic that the blogs I’ve worked on get from Search Engines varies considerably from blog to blog but on my two current blogs I get 25-35% of my traffic from Search Engines (largely Google).
Here’s a chart showing how Search Traffic fits into the mix of my photography blog traffic (from a couple of months back):
You can see that Search Engine Traffic is not the biggest source of traffic (social media takes that award) but it is significant considering the site gets over a million visits a month.
2. Search Traffic isn’t Everything
Looking at the above chart you see that if I was to only ever focus upon Search Engine Traffic that I could potentially be loosing up to 67% of my blog’s traffic.
One of the main points I made yesterday is that people shouldn’t become obsessed by Search. While it has amazing potential – I find that sites grow best when they have a variety of sources of traffic (including from Search Engines).
Here is another chart from the presentation which shows the four main areas that I put effort into when thinking about driving traffic – Search, Social Media, Community and Content.
Search Engine Optimization, participating in social media, building community and producing content are four important elements of building a site that gets (and keeps) high levels of traffic. When a blogger becomes obsessed by any one of them (to the detriment of others) the site can suffer (or at least not realize its potential). When the four elements come together a blog can grow quite rapidly.
Filed under: creativity | Tags: brainstorming, creativity, design, idea generation, ideas, ideation, IDEO, technique
Coming up with ideas is one the hardest things to do . . Unlike other more ‘cumulative’ work where you know what you will reap if you sow X amount of hours, ideas come and go without warning or time limits. Many a time I have sat down, sketch pad and freshly sharpened 2B in hand, only to find my mind wandering to shoddy second rate thoughtstarters and half formed shopping lists…
Even the most creative people find it difficult to come up with ideas day after day – whether it’s new product ideas, design ideas, the perfect copy or content – getting your neurons firing can be frustrating, especially on those days when your brain inconveniently turns itself off so I thought I’d share with you a bunch of tricks I use to get the juices going…
1. Brainstorm in front of the TV :: The more ideas you come up with the better. Plus, once you get all the crap predictable ideas out of your head, you’re more likely to come up with a cracker. There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank sheet of paper so I sit & watch TV and try and come up with an idea during every ad break. At the very least, at the end of my favourite show, I’ve got 8 or so crap ideas to get me started. Unless you’re watching the ABC…
2. Surf the net & steal with glee :: There’s a blog I love called ‘Talent imitates Genius steals’ and I like to think that there’s nothing wrong with ‘adapting’ an idea from another category & giving it a bit of a make over and dropping it onto your own pad. After all, a good idea is a good idea no matter where it came from. Surf the net & just let your mind wander . . . sometimes you can see the dots but it just takes you a while to join ‘em.
Filed under: Borrow this, creativity, Digital culture, Emergent media, Future of Media, Future of Work, Futures, Google, Innovation, Innovative stimulus, Looking for insights, Macro trends, open source, Social media, Thinking, Trends stuff | Tags: Advertising, Clay shirky, Google, Here comes everybody, insights manager, Lynette web, Russell Davies, the future of media, THe power of organising without organisations, typepad, UK
Another good piece of innovation stimulus from the lovely Lynette Webb, Insights Manager at Google who created a Flickr site called “Interesting Snippets”. I’ve profiled her before and this is the latest image to her collection. It comes to us with a great quote from Russell Davies’ blog entry about Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.
For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Clay’s book is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures. When the traditional obstacles are broken down and we can all connect, engage and speak freely. What does this mean for the way we interact? For the way media publishers direct content? What happens when our unrestricted right to access, to connect and to speak is not only realised, but assumed?
It’s worth checking out Russell’s post on the book here
And if you haven’t read Clay’s blog you should definitely wet your whistle with a little of this
Filed under: Future of Work, Futures, Gen Research, Gen Y, Macro trends, Oz research, Oz stats, Uncategorized | Tags: bernard salt, demographic trends, generation y, Global Skills Convergence report, global skills shortage, kpmg, skilled and unskilled labour, social trends, trends
For those of you data nerds who love a good bit of research, Bernard Salt and the smarties at KPMG have just released another ripping report titled ‘The Global Skills Convergence’.
‘In the report KPMG presents the thought-provoking notion that growth in the supply of skilled and unskilled labor in the developed world may slow in the next decade as Baby Boomers exit the workforce. More people exiting then entering the workforce leads to what author Bernard Salt describes as a ‘demographic faultline’.
Interestingly, one of the common themes emerging from the interviews in this study was the challenge of recruiting and retaining 20-somethings otherwise known as Generation Y.. here is a generation that requires – perhaps even demands– transparency of leadership and the development of individually tailored career plans.’
You can download the report from KPMG here
