This concept is very applicable to change management. I think the idea of treating your follower as an equal is genius. Probably the most crucial point for any movement is its embryonic stage. It has not been emphasized enough in popular leadership theories as far as I can tell.  This video is entertaining and clever.

And so, I’d like to thank all of my Twitter buddies for “following me”:)

Very interesting that Apple iPad pitch is all about basic intuition uses lines like “holding internet in your hands” and “you don’t think about it, you just do!”. I think the next sustainable revolution is intuitive devices like these.

I find some bloggers to be somewhat introverted and that they use social media as a platform to express themselves. You probably want to avoid these guys on your brand. In general, I think some personality traits are more important than skills and experience.

In a community manager, I would look for conscientiousness, agreeableness and some level of extroversion as the desirable qualities. My most important question would be if their personality naturally fits my brand’s personality? Or even more importantly, do they talk the talk and walk the walk of my customers.

As far as experience and skills are concerned, they are really not as important. These things are extremely easy to learn and they will keep changing anyway. They probably have already changed since you started thinking about it.

When he mentioned the example of Cirque De Soleil, I instantly connected it to the Blue Ocean Strategy. We are kind of talking about the same thing. Just more creativity and intuition in decision making. I will read the book and post again. But I do think that people struggle with the idea of using too much intuition in business especially in public companies with stockholder pressure and a epitite for short-term gains.

At the same time, if wall street is OK with taking ridiculous risks with “mortgage backed securities” why not take a risk with some of these other “crazy” ideas.

Intense competition and caffeine overdose has pushed us into the era where good old creativity, gut-feelings are not enough to run a business; where dreams and passion are not all you need to invent something great. You have to know what statistical confidence really means and why yes and no are never the only two choices. As for the creativity, it may take a genius to create a successful business proposition for once or twice, maybe. But to do it every time, the way Apple or Google do it, there’s lot of math behind that creativity. There is definitely some statistical intuition going on over there!

(I really don’t know what that means though)

For a long time, I have been wanting to eliminate the confusion that creative people deal with. Is it art? Is it a science? Both? Let’s be clear we are not talking about advertising. We are talking about visual design or interactive design.

Recently I pulled out a book that I had read back in 1995, Designing Visual Interfaces by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano. Great book! It states what I consider to be the best definition of visual design process. The author compares it to the typical engineering methodology:

“An initial understanding of the problem based on a thorough background research is followed by an iterative cycle of generation and evaluation until the solution that best meets the requirements is selected for production.”

Can’t say it any better. Love it!

From an SEO perspective, there are 2 types of businesses: those with significant brand awareness and most consumers include their name in the search keyword phrase and those with the right product but haven’t gained the popularity they deserve. Most businesses fall in the later category. You can verify the types of your business by looking at the top performing keywords. Please note that performance has to be based on conversion metrics (revenue or downloads), not just total referrals.

With this in mind, you can identify your key SEO objective. Is it building brand awareness or selling some products? Well, it is both! right? Let’s assume that your key search marketing objective is to go beyond and attract new potential customers who may not have you brand in mind. The most important KPI for your Search performance is what I call:
Share of Fortuitous Keyword Referrals

Here is how to calculate it:

1. For any given period, extract a report of your top performing keywords that covers 95% of the total search referrals. For most cases, the top 100 keywords should do it. (Unless are a big long-tail business)

2. Start excluding keyword phrases that include one or more brand-related words. This includes your brand name and any possible misspelled words. You might be surprised by the number of misspelled brand words.

TIP for Google Analytics users:
At the bottom of keywords report, you can use the keyword filter to exclude certain keywords. To exclude multiple keywords, use pipe (|) as a separator.

3. It may be hard to get all the brand-related keyword permutations but you can stop after excluding the top few.

4. Divide the total referrals by the over all search keyword referrals.

This is your Fortuitous Keyword Referral Share, a much better marketing performance indicator for SEO. For the SEO tactics, you will find this “adjusted” report to much more useful and actionable than your regular keywords report.

I am sure this is common sense and most if you intuitively use this thought-process but I have not seen a KPI defined for this. What do you think?

I was happy to see that I pulled it off using on-page factors only. All white hat SEO and a simple approach that I think everyone knows: title, description and the right keyword density. Love It!