Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Marketing Jobs of the Future

I was having a conversation with my friend Marshall Sponder the other day about marketing jobs being cut from marketing groups in a lot of places. These functions are being consolidated and, in many cases, outsourced to agencies. [data provided by SimplyHired, a search engine for jobs.] Many companies think they can do more with less - resources (including budgets) and people (including those who really get your business). We've been over that in a couple of economic cycles already. Yet, I think this cycle is different for a variety of reasons. Marketing Itself is Changing It's not going away,... Read more →

Integrated Marketing: Digital Music Magazine Idiomag

While the future of ad-funded print journalism might be at risk, the future of digital magazines is just dawning. Link to the video here from your reader. Thanks to RSS and to that beautiful, self-centered, concept we call personalization, you can now have your unique digital magazine delivered daily to your in box. To do that, UK publication idiomag uses two technologies: (1) an automated publishing system that aggregates the content via internet; (2) a personalization system of weighed tags that allow both the content and the advertising to be customized to a reader's preferences. It works with you selecting... Read more →

Power and Collaboration

Orchestrating Collaboration is the title of a talk Ben Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2008 [9 minutes]. Long after we will be done pounding the meaning out of the term conversation, the Zanders' will continue to inspire generations of students of The Art of Possibility. It's timeless. It's very much a business book, I like to think of it as a marketing book. With its many lessons for those of us who are eager to move beyond the mere mechanics of what is, to what could be. When... Read more →

The Kindness of Strangers

I almost lost my head yesterday. There were too many screens open on my laptop, too much work piled on my desk, and too many people suffering from "I need it now" syndrome, and my blog got out of kilter - or as they say in technical terms, something went wrong with my domain mapping. I was the one who got unhinged. It was about lunch break, breaking point for me. You've been there. When you are juggling three things with your left hand, and you just lost your right hand (my lovely and very capable marketing specialist moved on... Read more →

1/3, 1/3, 1/3 - Web Presence of the Future

I've been doing some research around the Web presence of the future. In my current capacity, I'm working on a complete rewrite and redesign of a corporate Web site, my fifth major effort for a company. Each project was both exciting and challenging for a variety of reasons. The content varied depending on the industry - risk management consulting, financial services, Web technology, chemical products, and regulatory. Each time I learned the business cycles, language, and context of an industry to be able to articulate clearly what the conversation was about. My current project is probably the most complex and... Read more →

Can You Push RSS?

You are smiling right about now. You know the answer to that question. Social media was meant to be about our customers (and readers) selecting to receive the content we produce where and when they (we) choose to look at it. There was supposed to be none of that push thing that has so annoyed everyone in marketing 1.0. Or so we thought. Marketing RSS by placing the icons prominently on your blog and site, or in your email signature are what we'd consider normal. Whenever I am on a site that has good content, the first icon I look... Read more →

Knowing What to Do is Very, Very Different than Actually Doing it

This line concludes the thought on a pretty comprehensive and easy-to-digest list of things that every marketer should know. Seth wrote it three years ago and like many obvious and somehow hard to do things it is still excellent advice today. Excellent because so few do it. It may be the knowing vs. doing gap's fault, or it may be the new shiny objects syndrome that has marketers try to reinvent and complicate things all the time. For the benefit of my readers, I'd like to highlight a couple of his points and add some commentary about each: If you... Read more →

Be a Renaissance Woman: we Are Back to the Middle Ages

Lists don't do it Not really - even the ones created with the best of intentions can have unintended consequences. Lists don't tell a story, they are merely a compilation of different things grouped with the specific intent of cataloging. When the list is hierarchical, it highlights at best one characteristic of the items in question thus potentially reducing the intrinsic value or worth (to you) of each to that item's relationship to the others. What happens when there is really no equivalence? You get lost in compilation. Statistics don't do it Even though there are more women than men... Read more →

Words Matter - Upon Trajan's Column

You're looking at the inscription from Trajan's Column, circa 113 A.D.. The person who engraved these letters, the Senate and the People of Rome who dedicated them, and Trajan himself are long since dust. But the words remain. This particular set of characters happens to be the basis of modern typography: an unintended consequence, but true. Typesetters have long considered Trajan's column to be the gold standard of Roman capital letters. Every printed word in a Western language owes a little something to this bit of Second Century political adulation. Which goes to show the persistence and power of words... Read more →

How to Attend a Conference

I've attended my share of conferences and events over the years. Whether local professional association gatherings, or one-week long affairs in a remote locale, I found that the best way to get the most out of your money - energy and time - is to prepare in advance. As I wrote in 5 tips to maximize event attendance, you start with why you are going, do your homework, stay in the present at the actual conference as you meet people, are specific about what you seek, and follow through once you get back home. Preparation allows you to have the... Read more →