Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 98

How Bracelets & Intuition Offer 3 Keys To Using Big Data Successfully

Imagine if Buzz Lightyear walked up to you and wished you Happy Birthday at a Disney Park. Or if a smart app could predict when you might be hungry based on your last meal, and proactively send you an alert with a coupon to a restaurant you happened to be walking past.

This vision of a nearly sentient and automated marketing world (dramatically visualized in the film Minority Report) is one of the future scenarios that increasingly data-centric organizations of all sizes imagine these days.

Whe...

How Dyson’s Winning Strategy Depends On Who They DON’T Hire

The “Ballbarrow” was never really a product destined for greatness.

Replacing a wheel in a traditional wheelbarrow with a ball hardly qualifies as a groundbreaking technological innovation. But it does solve a problem. Great inventions usually do. And when James Dyson first created and produced his Ballbarrow, it was a hit with gardeners seeking an alternative that wouldn’t leave wheel shaped trenches in their garden. The problem with the Ballbarrow was that it was too easy to copy … and compe...

10 Smart Ways TurboTax Helps Users Suffer Less

TurboTax is like the financial equivalent of anesthesiabefore a surgery … you know you are about to do something painful, but at least you can suffer a bit less. Yesterday was tax day in America, and for millions of users of the most popular tax software – it was a little easier to get this necessary chore out of the way thanks to TurboTax.

Aside from helping with taxes, though, the consistently optimized user interface offers plenty of interesting lessons for anyone who builds or manages thei...

Why Simplicity Saved Apple, But Couldn’t Save JCPenney

Simplicity always wins.

If there is one lesson the modern business world teaches us, it is that complexity kills and simplicity wins. Apple, Flip Camera, Twitter, Uber, Walmart — all are examples of companies that owe their success at least in part to their ability to simplify a service or product to an extreme level. I have written often about how the business world loves simplicity, though it is often portrayed as difficult to get right … particularly for smart people.

For example, there is a...

7 Ways Millionaire Self Help Gurus Make More Money Than Social Media Experts

Last week no one cared what my Twitter name was – and I was thrilled about that. At dozens of social media centric events, the Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or Pinterest question has become the de facto proof of purchase. People write their Twitter names on their nametags. They try desperately to distill their own social credibility into a virtual chest tattoo. Like many others, I’ve lost my patience for that.

Being social media famous just doesn’t mean that much anymore.

On April 3rd in San...

Aziz Ansari’s Simple 30 Second Marketing Trick

Aziz Ansari wasn’t planning to stick around after his show for photos. Most of the people in the packed theater in Washington DC where I saw him perform his Buried Alive Comedy Tour last week probably weren’t expecting that anyway.

Despite social media breaking down virtual barriers to conversations with unreachable people (and Aziz has plenty of them with more than 2 million Twitter followers), in real life – most people understand a level of unapproachability in our celebrities. Aziz can’t g...

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...