Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 94

One Common Mistake That Can Ruin Any Conversation

There are two kinds of coaches in sports. There are coaches who create a playbook before a game and follow it – and there are coaches who make their playbook for a game based on watching the game and making adjustments based on what is happening. Guess which kind of coach usually leads more successful teams? Being flexible is never easy – but there is one mistake that most of us make everyday that leads to inflexible thinking, boring panel discussions and limited conversations.

The biggest mis...

BullScanner – A New Product To Prevent BS In Business

For years I have given students in my classes at Georgetown one basic rule for writing assignments: there is no minimum word count. Why? Because the more words you use, the more likely it is that many of them will be meaningless corporate-speak.

Today I’m excited to share that I’m part of the team behind a product that the business world has desperately needed for years now: The Bullscanner.

The BullScanner finds and eliminates BS from business documents.

How does it work? Just press one button...

ePatient 2015: A New Research Report On The Connected Patient Of The Future

The FDA might be accidentally brilliant.

Every now and then for the past several years, that thought has crossed my mind. Without context, it may seem like a strange conclusion to make about any government agency. For anyone who was there in DC on November 12, 2009 when the FDA held their first public hearing on social media marketing- this conclusion would seem even stranger.

On that day dozens of speakers (including myself) sharedour ideasfor how to regulate online healthcare communications....

How To Create Visionary Measurement For Social Media

We often use the word “visionary” to describe leaders or companies, but rarely in connection to metrics. If the typical communications strategy is dispersed via Powerpoint within a large organization, usually measurement is the last slide before the end.

We need to transform our relationship to measurement.

The problem is, marketing people are typically guilty of seeing measurement as a necessary evil. It is something to suffer through, and never fully understand. Despite the pioneering work of...

Iron Chef, Truffles and Surviving Clueless Criticism

Imagine you’re a chef. You have spent the last twenty years learning your craft. Studying ingredients and cooking techniques. Working for sometimes maladjusted and dictatorial restaurant owners or lead chefs. And now you’ve made it. You have your own kitchen that you lead – and you’re recognized. Your food has made it onto the plates of celebrities and maybe even world leaders.

Sounds good, right? Not so fast.

Now imagine you accept an invitation to appear on one of the most popular reality coo...

5 Tragic Ways To Lose An Audience Despite Telling Great Stories

There is plenty of advice out there on how to create a great presentation. Most of it centers on two pretty common pieces of advice:

Tell more stories.
Use bigger fonts.

Neither is always easy to do, but the more events I attend – the more I realize a single fact that still manages to surprise me about why people do (or don’t) connect with you as a speaker.

Having a good story or great visuals is not enough.

Presenting in front of an audience (whether it happens to be 3 potential investors or 3000...

The Underappreciated Reason SXSW Matters (In A Word)

It is tempting to search for the next big thing. There were no shortage of journalists sent to SXSW this past weekend for their annual quest to answer exactly that question. And this year many came up empty — or at least indifferent. Some even skipped the event completely. Of course we like to see winners and losers. And SXSW certainly has the track record of a kingmaking conference (Twitter and Foursquare both launched there).

The reason SXSW actually matters, though, has almost nothing to d...

How Men Can Change The Business World For Women

About four years ago I started getting a lot of unsolicited emails from women. My first book, Personality Not Included, had just come out and readers were emailing me with their own stories of how having a personality had made a difference in their own careers. While school often teaches us that we must remove our personality from “professional” communication – the truth is, faceless companies simply don’t work.

Forgettable people tend to have forgettable careers.

The thing I didn’t predict was...

Why Snow Days Make Us MORE Productive

Today was the first snow day of the year for those of us living in the Washington DC area. And though theamountof snow that caused schools and businesses to shut their doors for the day would make any of our Northern neighbors laugh out loud … it was still a big day. As much as kids love being able to stay home from school, snow days can seem like something of aninconveniencefor the rest of us – causing work to pile up like the snow on our driveways.

What if snow days actually make us MORE pro...

14 Lessons From The Best and Worst Websites In The Travel Industry

I’m going to break one of my own rules today. Usually, my philosophy for sharing marketing insights is to always use a positive tone. Even when a strategy is executed poorly, I would rather focus on missed opportunities than write about the negative. That usually works for me … but not this time.

What doesn’t work is when a brand is proudlybad. Successful brands don’t offer their customers bad experiences and pretend they are great.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what United Airlines has done o...