Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Learning by Doing and Thinking Together

I have a confession to make -- some of my best learning, all the way to primary school, was situational, and the result of a group experience. The idea of individualized learning styles originated in the 1970s. The idea was that there are three main learning styles -- auditory, visual, kinesthetic or by moving around. Learning models developed thereafter, address both the human need for concrete experience as well as that of abstract conceptualization. Kolb's experiential learning theory also includes two related approaches -- Reflective Observation and Active Experimentation. Boiled down at the individual level, when it comes to learning,... Read more →

50 Blogs for Your Must Read List

If you're like me, you like to find stimulating and thought provoking content online beyond the obvious and often recommended small group. People who ask questions differently, or maybe from a new domain and subject matter. People ask me what I read all the time. It's been a long while since I've done one of my totally subjective list (more below). When I published the 100 PR people worth following on Twitter, the list received many reactions, public and private. There are many great lists of marketing blogs like AdAge Power150, business catalysts, and miscellaneous lists with blogs about PR,... Read more →

Doing the Right Thing, Use Value, and Marketing Mojo

I started this series of posts to show the increasing convergence of business and technology and this week's stories exemplify some of the emergent themes. As apps are going mainstream and more people are using them, tech companies grapple with inspiring confidence that their personal information is safe and won't be abused. This is as much a communication as it is a product design issue. Maybe you read about the sale value of your personal data and how you might profit for it as marketers are willing to pay good money to use it. Should you be running to claim... Read more →

t.G.i.f.

When you're talking about making connections online, it's not about Twitter (t), Google+ (G), or Facebook (f), it's about information/intent (i) -- the things you say, and those you intend to do. Small "i", not capital "I". The tools are there to help you do the most possible -- you get out of them what you put into them. They're very useful when powered by resources and thoughtful effort. The Web is a powerful tool that goes beyond social media. As Macrowikinomics author Don Tapscott explains (hat tip Gunther Sonnefeld), younger generations are using the Web to change the model... Read more →

Doing Work You Want to Feel Good About

Stop what you're doing, take 16 minutes to watch this Gel video of Noah Scalin about his "One Skull-a-Day" project. As I watched the whole thing twice, my first instinct was to go look for a skull I could contribute. By the third day in the video story, I had to make it a narrative. So I stopped and looked for an image I had saved of a skull that also happens to make an unmistakable brand promise. So there. Here it is. I want you to watch it because of what he says about the way things go on... Read more →

The Way You Look at Things Changes the Things You Look at

Dan Frommer at SplatF links to Apple's Tim Cook interview at the Goldman Sacks tech conference (the full interview is here). Frommer observes it's worth listening to because of how he says what he says. Cook delivers the message from where he sits, sense of humor included. His point of view, as I shared in a recent conversation about alignment between brand vision and product delivery, is truly operational. Look at things from the operational standpoint and you're doing marketing that makes business sense. His example of the iPad matched the uses we discussed at the recent social IRL event... Read more →

Announcing the First Ever Conversation Agent Workshop

Whenever I speak at a conference or summit, often people often ask me lots of excellent questions afterward. It's a similar dynamic to the conversation we have in the comments -- the comments themselves are a gem and help others see like challenges, which we can all apply our collective smarts to. In the last six months, I broke beyond the content I would normally use for a talk and developed a thinking framework for a more interactive experience. This is something I'm more comfortable with from the many years I worked on creating exchanges for and with customers (3... Read more →

Best Chocolatiers Miss Pinterest Opportunity on Valentine's Day

Espresso, red wine, and chocolate -- a delightful combination. With Valentine's Day upon us, I thought I would take a tour of some of the best Chocolatiers in the world via their Websites. My goal -- to create a Pinterest board aggregating their delightful offerings. The most challenging part of the task was to find visually delicious product photographs large enough to pin. The collection took me more than two hours to research and pin, partly due to small or no images and only flash sites. Larger images and stronger descriptions would have made the products pop more. Now that... Read more →

reThinking Business

The image of this cover could be interpreted as a frame, a box, a mirror, or a portal and conduit for creative connections. We ascribe meaning to situations based upon our guideposts and growth stage as well as the challenges we face in moving forward. Which is why frameworks are more useful than prescriptions. A couple of days ago, we talked about reThinking Business in the age of the Social Customer at Social IRL. It was a very rich and rewarding experience with many senior professionals from brands and agencies in the room. Tony Faustino pulled together five takeaways from... Read more →

Social Content, Writing Better, and Trusting People

The WSJ had a wake-up call when its Tiger Mother story on its Facebook page had more comments than the paper's online website, at over 50,000 comments. The Journal's YouTube channel counts 8 million monthly streams. A.J. Liebling said: “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” Who is a "person like me" today? Social content, writing better, and trusting people These questions are brought to the fore by the changing nature of context both for content and relationships in social networks. Every brand and publisher should... Read more →