Not sure of the weather? Check Google. Need directions? Check Google. Currency exchange rates. Ditto. Definition of an unfamiliar word? Google. The credibility of a particular person? Yes, Google. When someone wants to understand more about you, Google can provide an interesting, and supposedly unbiased perspective. Unpacking the Google test [More]
I was talking to someone at a conference who had seen a presentation I had done on digital strategy, when he said that he, too, was a digital strategy thought leader. I was looking forward to finding out his background, so asked what he'd done before: he said that he [More]
One of today's mistaken beliefs is that traditional media (e.g. TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) have no value. While it is true that they have lost readers and viewers, and that without their audiences, that ad revenues have also continued to slide. For most people, traditional media still has both [More]
How you answer that question is a function of your age. If you asked your parents or grandparents, it would likely be 20-50 people, which would include their family, friends, and work colleagues. If you grew up in the 1970s to 1990s, it would be much larger -- maybe 500. [More]
While it is true that writing and speaking are both individual skills, this test isn't really a question of evaluating those skills. After all, sadly, "everyone" writes and speaks. The value of the test comes from two separate sources: 1) Third-party validation: To get a book published by a traditional [More]
Your title is an important signal to the marketplace. It describes your responsibilities as well as your scope of authority. But what is the connection to thought leadership? Unless the title is directly tied to your expertise ("Chief Science Officer", for example), there is absolutely no connection to thought leadership, [More]
Personas are usually built to understand the details (and motivations) of a particular segment. Experienced marketers know the typical persona questions: Who are they -- demographically and psychographically? What service or product features are important to them? What challenges do they have? Where are they located? How do we reach [More]
Contrast this, with this next screen shot, where the URL bar explicitly says Not Secure: The key difference between these two sites is that the first site (mine) is encrypted (look at the URL that starts with "https"), while the second example (Apache) is not encrypted at all. Yikes! While there [More]
It isn't hard to understand why so many refer to themselves in this way: it helps the ego, helps marketing, and shines a patina of professionalism and respectability on their activities. But just because these terms are used, doesn't make them true. A more useful approach is to consider that [More]
How much does your organization invest in marketing? Beyond thought leadership and inbound marketing strategies, there is advertising, promotional items, trade shows, CRM, marketing automation, the web and social media. Any way you look at it, the investment is substantial. Yet despite this focus, and despite all of this strategy, why [More]
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