Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 339

Force And Friction

The more actions you force on the consumer, the more friction you cause.

There was talk a awhile back about forcing people to give up their email address to have access to content. I've seen this executed many ways. In one instance, you can't see anything unless you offer up your email address. I've seen other instances, where you have access to partial content but full access when you give up your email address. There are still some Blogs that require you to register to leave a comment.

These types of tactics create friction.

In some instances, the friction is good. Traditional newspapers feel that by forcing readers to register to leave a comment - and this includes a level of verification - that they're keeping out the riff raff and ensuring a higher level of quality in terms of discourse. Others might argue, that the work of registering probably turns off many people who may be able to add value to the conversation (personally, I can't be bothered to take the time to register and be validated to leave a comment on a newspaper website or Blog). Brands like The Economist know the intrinsic and unique value of their content, so the layers of friction to become a paid subscriber to their online content works for them.

One of the most challenging marketing efforts is figuring out whether or not your friction is working for you.

Adam pointed me to a service that forces you to tweet about a video on YouTube before being allowed to watch it. Avinash Kaushik (author of Web Analytics - An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0) calls this "the selfish lover" (when you reach climax before your partner... and that's all you care about doing). Common logic would tell you that forcing someone to tweet about a video before they get a chance to view it could create a level of resentment. Common logic will tell you that if the video is good, people will naturally and intuitively want to share it. The moment of truth will come in figuring out if this friction doesn't cause resentment.

Remove the friction. 

Great products have the marketing built into it. This isn't anything new. Seth Godin has talked about it forever. Tom Peters has talked about it forever. If you remove all friction, if you let people truly connect and dive deep into what you have to offer, people are both smart and kind. They buy from you, they will become loyal to your brand and they will talk about it. This is the compassionate lover (first you, then me). It seems a little disingenuous to try and force it out of the gates - especially if you don't have a established brand or credible reputation in the market.

But then again... I could be wrong .

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The Value, Cost And Time Of Creativity

Episode #283 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

This is also episode #19.20 of Across The Sound. Joseph Jaffe is widely regarded as one of the top Marketing Bloggers (Jaffe Juice) and Podcasters (both Jaffe Juice in audio and Jaffe Juice TV in video). He is the author of three excellent books (Life After The 30-Second Spot, Join The Conversation and Flip The Funnel). A long-time friend (and one of the main inspirations behind the Six Pixels of Separation Blog and Podcast), we've decided to hold monthly conversations, debates and back-and-forths that will dive a little deeper into the Digital Marketing and Social Media landscape. This is our 19th conversation (or, as I like to affectionately call it, Across The Sound 19.20). Can great creative happen fast or does great creative take time? Can great creative be paid for in hours (the traditional agency model) or is better to be paid for value? We were both inspired by an Ad Age Blog post titled, Great Ideas Don't Take As Much Time As Many Ad Agencies Claim, by Scott Montgomery and this is what unfolded. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #283.

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across the sound

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advertising

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blog

blogging

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book oven

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cc chapman

chris brogan

christopher s penn

digital dads

digital marketing

facebook

facebook group

flip the funnel

hugh mcguire

in over your head

itunes

jaffe juice

jaffe juice tv

join the conversation

joseph jaffe

julien smith

librivox

life after the 30-second spot

managing the gray

marketing

marketing over coffee

media hacks

new marketing labs

online social network

podcast

podcasting

pressbooks

scott montgomery

six pixels of separation

social media 101

social media marketing

strategy

trust agents

twist image

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #77

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

RIP - The Movie Camera (1888 - 2011) - Salon . "I went to see The Ides Of March recently. It was the first film I'd seen since getting Lasik surgery in the summer. As the trailers started, I noticed some really cheap titles -- poorly rendered, so I could see the pixels of the letters. But as trailer after trailer -- and then the film itself -- suffered the same flaw, I realized that my newly-minted eyes were simply seeing the artifact of the digital projector. And I may be stuck with this admittedly first-world problem, because someone, somewhere, has the last film movie camera ever made." (Alistair for Hugh).

What Business Can Learn From Organized Crime - Harvard Business Review . "Marc Goodman was a huge hit at Strata in New York. He spends his life understanding how criminals think and act, and in this Harvard Business Review article, he looks at how criminal enterprises run so smoothly -- and what their more legitimate counterparts can learn." (Alistair for Mitch).

Supermassive black holes are largest ever discovered - The Guardian . "Think your problems are big? They aren't as big as these two supermassive black holes, which are billions of times more massive than our sun. That's big." (Hugh for Alistair).

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - Cat V . "This is actually a wonderfully useful bit of writing, for anyone who spends any time interacting professionally with other people. While it might be construed as tongue-in-cheek, it seems to me it is perfectly serious and just great general advice." (Hugh for Mitch).

Earth-like planet found in distant sun's habitable zone - cnet . "It's hard to watch the news on TV. Let's be honest here: how many people saw this news item plastered all over their 6 pm telecast or in their morning newspaper? That's right, they discovered a habitable planet like the Earth, but it's very, very far away. To me, this is the kind of stuff that needs to be in the news and getting kids excited about science, math and our future. Then again, kids are probably seeing this on cnet and Reddit because they're not watching the news or reading newspapers." (Mitch for Alistair).

The Internet, innovation and learning - Joi Ito . "Think that the Internet is a technology? It isn't. Joi Ito (from MIT Media Lab ) argues that it's a philosophy. I love philosophy... and I love Joi Ito's philosophy. Now, we just need to get everybody else to understand this." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

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alistair croll

bitcurrent

black holed

cat v

cnet

complete web monitoring

gigaom

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human 20

iambik

joi ito

librivox

link

link exchange

linkbait

managing bandwidth

marc goodman

media hacks

mit media lab

pressbooks

reddit

salon

story

strata new york

the book over

the guardian

the ides of march

year one labs

The New Disruption

When digital mingles with our physical lives, everything changes.

I'm a bit of a bookworm (#nerdalert). I'm doing my best to read one book every week (but failing miserably). The way I buy books has changed dramatically in the best few years. I used to love my book collection. I loved it so much, I would sometimes buy both the hardcover and paperback versions just to support the arts and the authors. After my last move, I stopped loving my book collection. The packing, the weight, the organizing, etc... seemed very antiquated to me. My current book reading is done on the Kindle app. I don't own an Amazon Kindle, I read books on my iPhone with the Kindle app. I hardly use my iPad anymore as I travel with the MacBook Air and I don't like reading books on the computer (just yet). While I often peruse the Kindle and iBooks app to see what's new and exciting, I still love heading into bookstores to flip through the books and wander the aisles. When I've made my purchasing decisions, I'll crack open the Kindle and iBooks app and buy my books - right then and there - on digital format. Being a retail creature of habit, I realize how bad this is for the retailer, but the truth is that reading, buying and storing my books in the cloud trumps all.

Retail is going to have to change. 

Amazon just released a new mobile app called, Price Check, that allows consumers at the retail level to use barcode scanning, their camera or speech to text search to price check and compare with Amazon (and their merchants). Imagine the possibilities here. Once again, Amazon is changing not only online shopping but the entire retail experience. I am a huge fan of Amazon Prime  because it not only allows Amazon to build a very strong and targeted loyalty and analytics platform, but it turns every purchase into an impulse buy. If you can have something shipped as fast as possible to you and can return it - no questions asked - then the retail game changes. Price Check does this as well. It forces retailers to pay attention to their pricing. It forces retailers to know that everyone now has a price gun on their smartphones, only this price gun is plugged into one of the largest and most aggressive retailers in the world. It also forces retailers to think differently about their in-store experience. If a better price can be had somewhere else, there needs to be more... a reason to keep on coming back. We can hold up the Apple retail experience as a Golden Child in this instance simply because they rarely put things on sale and their environment is not crowded with merchandise. Their retail experience is much more about creating a direct relationship with their consumers than it is about selling them something.

The gold is in the data.

Amazon is not hiding how they benefit from Price Check either (and it goes well beyond them selling another book). They are in it to capture data and this, particular, data set is pure gold. If millions of people start using Price Check (and if you have a smartphone, why wouldn't you?), imagine Amazon's understanding of the market, pricing (by location and down to consumer) in terms of which stores are not only selling a product at a particular price, but they're also better able to understand consumer buying habits and trends in real-time. Who else will have this kind of data and access? If Price Check takes off (and I think it will) it could change retail forever... or least force retailers to face the digitization of everything.

Disruption will continue. What brands do about it will be very telling.

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The Best Response

It's getting harder and harder to respond back to everyone.

I often send out tweets, Blog comments or Facebook messages thanking people for leaving comments on this Blog, retweeting my tweets or linking to me (and my content) in one way, shape or form. I'm also very candid that I suck at the repartee and the back and forth online. I read each and every piece of content and I see all of the Blog comments, but I grapple with how to respond and feel silly simply saying, "thanks" to each and every comment. I've also Blogged about this topic quite frequently.

Comments, content and conversation is everywhere. 

While recognizing, acknowledging and accepting that this Blog would probably be that much more popular if I did engage, respond and connect to each and every comment, I'm now grappling with a world of comments that are everywhere and anywhere. This is a real-life scenario that made me realize how fragmented content has become and how challenging it will be for brands to truly stand up and be as active as possible. We used to live in a world where consumers said something, somewhere online and a brand could engage and connect and have it live there for others to see. No more. In the past few months, I've noticed a trend that will make it increasingly difficult for a brand to be successful in reacting and responding to a consumer. Through the power of notifications, I've seen multiple instances where one individual saw a Blog post of mine and then...

Posted a comment on my Blog.

Tweeted about the Blog post.

Posted about it to their LinkedIn profile.

Posted about it to their Facebook page.

Posted about it to Google+.

That's five different and diverse spaces from one person for one piece of content.

Flattering? Yes! Thankful? Of course! Blown away by their interest in my content? You know it! But how does one respond? Do you thank them everywhere? It seems a little "stalky", no? Especially if you're a brand. Respond in only one place? In that case, do I do it on my own Blog versus their own spaces? It seems a little narcissistic to only respond in my spaces (instead of theirs). Now, the biggest challenge/problem: what if the majority of this person's interactions happen on Google+ and I don't respond or comment there? Isn't that a cardinal Social Media sin to not have any acknowledgement?

If every person creates five times the amount of content, how (and where) does a brand respond?

It's going to get worse and more complex. More and more places to publish in text, images, audio and video. We can do it in real-time. We can do it from our mobile devices and publish it across multiple platforms. When it first came to content we talked about "filter failure"... we're heading into a world of "response failure." It will be challenging for brands to not only have positive outcomes with these types of scenarios, but then to benefit from all of the virtual foot traffic that comes from the other people traipsing in and around these comments and posts (so if the brand doesn't respond in all spaces, there could be both a negative perception by people like you and I along with not getting any sort of search benefit).

It turns out that there may not be any kind of best response if this type of multi-platform commenting becomes the norm.

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Hurts So Good

What do you do when a brand is so good no matter how bad it treats their customers?

While on vacation, I frequent a particular restaurant. It's a basic health food restaurant (salads, smoothies, sandwiches, etc...) and everything is fresh and delicious (no kidding). The problem? The wait staff is terrible. To the point of embarrassment. The service is also slow (have you ever waited 45 minutes for a salad?). The owner doesn't seem to care (I've seen this person have multiple fights with either customers or staff in the middle of the restaurant). If you head over to Yelp, you'll see comments that not only agree with my sentiments but expand - in graphic details - on the challenges that this establishment faces.

Do you think this brand cares?

It doesn't. They don't respond on Yelp and if you complain at their location, they seem unaffected. How bad is it? I actually had great service there by one of the wait staff and when I told them how impressed I was, their answer was, "thanks... I know that we have a reputation for terrible service." Imagine that: the staff is letting their customers know that they have terrible service. On another trip, I did a take-out order (thinking that it might ease the pain). After having my order taken by a young woman who may as well have been doing her nails and speaking on her iPhone while taking my order, I wasn't surprised that three items were missing. When I asked for them politely, she snarled back at me, "are you sure you asked for this stuff?"

The Soup Nazi.

It's not a new story. The food is so good that we're willing to endure the torture. Or - as one very prescient reviewer on Yelp says: "there have been times that I've tried to stay away (because of the problems with the service), but it's just so good, I can't! It's like a bad relationship... the abuse hurts, but making up just tastes so good!" Brands are taught to remove as much friction as possible, but when you think about it (and, I mean really think about it), when the product is superior, you're not only willing to let everything else go, you're willing to endure actual pain. That's the power of having a product that does more than simply doing what it's supposed to do. As miserable of an experience that I have when I go there, the food overcomes every other aspect of the friction. There's a lesson there for every Marketer: you can (literally) let everything else fall by the wayside when you have something unique (a non-commodity) that people want (and don't care what else they have to go through). Amazingly, some brands do have their very own Steve Jobs reality distortion field.

I bet you thought this Blog post was going to be about Apple , didn't you?

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You Are The Company That You Keep

It's a question of scruples: is what you do off of the company's time any of the company's business?

It's hard to answer "yes" to that question. We're entitled to do (and be) whoever we want on our own time so long as when we're on the job, we're doing everything we can to meet or exceed the requirements and expectations of our employers. The problem is that many of our lives are no longer all that private at all. I'm currently reading Jeff Jarvis' latest business book, Public Parts, and it is - without question - challenging me to think very differently about the concept of privacy. It's not just Jarvis. Increasingly, our jobs and lives are one. They're not delineated by the weekdays from nine to five. We have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and more where we are sharing anything and everything that we're up to. To say that you can separate which part of that life is work and personal is also becoming that much more fuzzy.

That being said, when you're on the job, you are the company (or at least a representative of it).

RIM (the makers of BlackBerry) don't need any more stress than they already have (for proof of that, please see this: Business Insider - RIM's Absolutely Awful Year). This past week, two of their executives got drunk on a flight, allegedly became belligerent, were restrained by airline staff and passengers, forced the flight to land and the story just keeps on getting uglier. I was surprised to see a Blog post on BlackBerry Cool called, The Air Canada Issue Has Nothing to Do With RIM that stated: "So two drunks were charged with mischief and had to be removed from an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing. Why is it relevant that they're RIM employees? Stories like this have been reported before, but the place of work for those charged is never disclosed because it's simply not relevant. Did RIM as a company have anything to do with them being drunk? Of course not. Also, have you ever taken a flight from Toronto to Beijing? I dare you to fly for 13 hours without getting blackout drunk. It's boring as hell."

It's not that simple.

These two executives were travelling on business for RIM... not pleasure. Their tickets were paid for by RIM (their employer). I would argue that they are ambassadors for the business that employs them 24 hours a day (especially because they are executives). I would argue even harder that if they're travelling for business, then they represent the business. This issue has everything to do with RIM because these two were "on the clock." Is RIM responsible for their behavior? No. But, these two should know that when they're travelling for business, they are the business. I believe that RIM's name was front and center in this story because of this.

In a twenty-four hour world. 

It's easy to run. It's easy to hide. It's easy to say that your private life is private. The challenge is when you're posting and sharing all of this "private" stuff for everyone to see, share and comment on. One simple way to work around this is to ensure that you and the company that you keep have shared values. This goes over and above your employment and your non-disclosure agreements. Think very seriously about your "private" actions and ask yourself, "if this should happen to get on YouTube, how will it be perceived in terms of my professional life?" While that may sound, harsh, cold, and/or impractical, we have to realize how much our world has changed. In the instance of RIM, it seems pretty cut and dry (considering that they were travelling for business), but this Blog post isn't about RIM... it's about all of us and how we think and act (day in and day out). In the case of RIM, the two executives (who pleaded guilty) were fired (more on that here: The New York Times - 2 RIM Executives Are Fired for Disturbance on Flight).

The lesson? You are the company that you keep.

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scruples

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Is Your Flinch Response Holding You Back?

Does your flinch response still protect you?

Tony Blauer is a a world-class close-quarters combatives instructor who now spends his days training law enforcement, military and civilians in his personal defense system (Blauer Tactical Systems) based in San Diego. I had the pleasure and honor of not only training with him for over a decade, but in also being one his coaches and friends. While training with Tony, I also spent time learning some of the more traditional martial arts at other local schools. While many of the traditional systems focused on defined motions and reactions, Tony's system (which he created and continues to evolve) is based on physiology, kinesiology and psychology. It's not one tactic that is taught to every individual, but rather training each individual how to best use what he or she has been given in a natural way. It's easy to train in a gym for what to do when someone comes at you with a knife, when you know you're in a gym and you know that the person is going to come at you with a knife. It's a whole different scenario when you get jumped in a parking lot. What Tony's system quickly taught me is that the real world is very different from the gym. It's both your emotional state and your ability to react and shift your fear mindset from that initial flinch, which will determine your ability to not just survive but to control a hostile environment successfully.

It's not easy work training in close-quarters combatives.

You wind up spending the majority of your time not trying to do a flying roundhouse kick, but in reprogramming your body's natural flinch response. In it's simplest form, you're trying to turn your natural flinch (a sudden scare or shock that makes your recoil) into a proactive motion (usually moving into the danger instead of away from it) that primes you to proactively control and hopefully end the confrontation. That specific training (which is as much psychological as it is physical) serves me well to this day when confronted with both challenges and opportunities in my business life.

It seems to have caught the attention of others as well.

Julien Smith is known to some as being one of the original Podcasters in the New Media world. His hip-hop music show, In Over Your Head, has become a cult classic and he still continues to Blog about all things media and mindfulness over at In Over Your Head (he's also a regular co-host of the Media Hacks podcast). Others know him as the co-author (along with Chris Brogan) of the New York Times best-selling business book, Trust Agents - a book about using the Internet to build influence and improve your reputation and, ultimately, earn trust. While Brogan and Smith prep their second book (tentatively titled, The Impact Equation, due for release this coming summer on Portfolio), Smith found himself thinking about the flinch response and how it seems to hold us back from many of the things that we should be moving towards (instead of away from) in business and in life.

The Flinch. The Book.

"No matter their apparent confidence, every single person has anxiety to deal with, whether in social situations or physical ones," says Smith who is about to launch his next book (and first as a solo author), The Flinch, via Seth Godin's The Domino Project book publishing imprint in digital format only on December 7th. "I've personally worked with some of the world's best coaches - from Sweden to Thailand and here in Canada as well - and continue to seek them out in order to understand the flinch better. The reality is that the work to understand your own reactions never ends, but that even a small amount of this work leads to a much deeper understanding of what we're truly capable of doing. I wrote The Flinch because people who flinch are making decisions in a business environment, and those decisions are influenced by emotion, either consciously or not. Understanding the flinches behind our business decisions is essential. Businesses can't predict the future effectively because it's hard to examine the blind spots... or even understand them. The businesses that work through the flinch can see their blind spots and make better decisions because of it. I wanted a book to not only explain the notion of the flinch, but a place to provide exercises on how to overcome it."

For Smith, understanding your own flinch response is also a core component that he has identified as a metric for business success.

"The flinch - as many know it - is a startle-flinch response. It's a reflex and it's necessary to survive," he explains, "but we also flinch as a learned reaction to change or the unknown. It's this second, learned response that I address in the book. Much of what we have been taught is dangerous is wrong or outdated. Understanding our natural protective reaction is a part of being able to adapt to an increasingly fast-changing world. Those that unlearn their flinch reactions tend to have better careers, businesses, and even family lives because they aren't afraid of asking themselves hard questions."

Better decisions. Better reactions.

Malcolm Gladwell talked about better decisions in Blink. Julien Smith is now attempting for all of us to rethink how we flinch in direct response to things that startle us. All in all, we live in a very fast-paced business environment. The digitization of everything is making many of us recoil and flinch. The future may be less about technology and rapid change and much more about how we not only adapt to this brave new world, but also reprogram how we think, behave and push forward in a proactive (instead of reactive) motion.

Time to hit the gym.

The above post is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation . I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Managing 'the flinch' can open doors to personal success.

Vancouver Sun - Not yet published.

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blauer tactical systems

blink

blog

book publishing

brave new world

business

business book

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chris brogan

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emotional state

flinch response

in over your head

julien smith

kinesiology

law enforcement

malcolm gladwell

martial arts

media hacks

military

montreal gazette

natural protective reaction

new business

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personal defense

physiology

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the flinch

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tony blauer

trust agents

vancouver sun

A Conversation With David Meerman Scott

Episode #282 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Is there a way to ride on the coattails of a major breaking news story for your brand's benefit? It sounds crazy (maybe even a little sketchy), but it's all in the execution. Best-selling business book, author, David Meerman Scott (author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, World Wide Rave, Real-Time Marketing & PR, etc...) just launched his latest book, Newsjacking - How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage, in digital format only, with a major book publisher (Wiley), for under eight dollars. How did he do it? He launched it on the same week as Amazon's Kindle Fire in the hopes of capturing some exposure. It's something that brands have been doing forever, but now everyone can take part in (so long as they truly understand the opportunities and how to do it wish class and expertise). Never one to mince words, David is always entertaining and engaged in pushing our marketing industry forward. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #282.

Tags:

advertising

bite size edits

blog

blogging

blue sky factory

book oven

cast of dads

cc chapman

chris brogan

christopher s penn

david meerman scott

david usher

digital dads

digital marketing

facebook

facebook group

hugh mcguire

in over your head

itunes

julien smith

librivox

managing the gray

marketing

marketing lessons from the grateful dead

marketing over coffee

media hacks

new marketing labs

newsjacking

online social network

podcast

podcasting

pressbooks

real time marketing and pr

six pixels of separation

social media 101

social media marketing

strategy

the new rules of marketing and pr

trust agents

twist image

web ink now

world wide rave

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #76

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

It's Not China; It's Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs - Dyske . "The huge gains of the first half of the twentieth century came from several things, chief among them the entry of women into the workforce and the availability of cheap consumer credit. We were supposed to get a second boost from automation, and an information-driven society. And it looks like that may be happening -- unfortunately. In this post, designer and cultural critic Dyske Suematsu argues that the depressed job market may simply be the result of all that hard-won efficiency." (Alistair for Hugh).

The Stroop Effect: Not as automatic as was once thought - Cognitive Daily . "Your brain plays tricks on you. One of these is the Stroop Effect: It's hard to read a list of colors properly when the color they're printed in conflicts with the color they name. But it turns out that if you hypnotize people so that the name of the color is unreadable, they pass the test faster. This is a cool mind hack, but it also begs the question: is reading somehow involuntary? What does that mean for broadcast advertising and sponsored ads?" (Alistair for Mitch).

How Apple Disrupted Its Markets On A Shoe-String R&D Budget - Seeking Alpha . "I think it's safe to say that Apple is the most innovative tech company we've seen in the last decade. In addition to their former core business (growing nicely, thank you) of making 'computers', they utterly changed the face of two (formerly) unrelated sectors: music (with the iPod/iTunes), and mobile (with the iPhone); and invented a third new market, for tablets (iPad). According to this data, Apple spends a fraction of what other big tech companies (Cisco, RIM, Microsoft) spend on R&D, both relative to their net income, and in real dollars. The comments section on the article adds some cautionary context, but still the numbers are striking. My interpretation is that for Apple, R&D is baked right into the design process, that their product vision IS the 'blue sky thinking' that most other companies shunt off to the skunkworks basement. Whether you are building the iPhone (remember what came before it?), or the iTunes music marketplace, you're entire design process is focused on building the things that other companies would have let die in the R&D lab, because they were too 'out there'." (Hugh for Alistair).

The Era Of Corporate Profit - The Daily Beast . "Does it make me an anti-capitalist that stories like this enrage me so? Does it make me some kind of communist to say that the data shows that countries where tax receipts decline a certain amount relative to GDP, are countries that become less stable, and crucially, less prosperous overall? Does it make me a hater of the market to suggest that policies that pour an ever-increasing share of the wealth of our nations into the hands of fewer people is bad for *business* in the long run? Here is what I wish: I wish we had more voices from the 'left' and from the 'right' that proposed reasonable taxation levels not (just) for reasons of justice, but because is makes for a better economy. What 'justice' is, is a kind of moral judgment. But there is hard data that correlates tax levels and prosperity, and lower taxes does not always mean more prosperous." (Hugh for Mitch).

Magazines Pull Back on Tablet Bells and Whistles - AdWeek . "This is the exact kind of content that makes my blood boil. Tablets open up a whole new opportunity for publishers. The trouble is that they're thinking (and acting) like traditional publishers. Instead of trying to re-invent publishing, they're just doing the old CTRL-C CTRL-V move (copy and paste). When I read articles like this, all I can think to myself is that this is the exact same thing that happened when TV first went live. They had people doing radio programming in front of a TV camera instead of creating the type of programming you see today. Tablet publishing is a new beast. It's text, images, audio, video and it has a social layer that lies underneath it all. Why waste this opportunity by simply copying and pasting text? It seems like such a shame... and sham." (Mitch for Alistair).

The Branding of the Occupy Movement - The New York Times . "When we recorded the last episode of Media Hacks (you can hear it right here: SPOS #281 - Media Hacks #40 - Occupy Media ), the discussion went deep on the marketing and communications behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. I'm not sure if my message was clear on the Podcast, but I think what the mass media defines as 'no clear message,' is the way of the world for those who love the whole unconference movement (like me). This is a great peek behind the curtain and the perfect collision of modern-day marketing and a movement that's trying to change how we think about success, money and the future of our world." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

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