Making Sense: What Was
- A Look Back At Why Blockbuster Really Failed And Why It Didn’t Have To. Digital Tonto: For all the excitement surrounding online social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, we really haven’t scratched the surface on the networks we encounter in real life: The networks of consumers that make up our brands and industries as well as the organizational networks that determine how things get done—or don’t get done—in our enterprises. And it’s imperative that we start thinking about them more seriously.
- 3 Mistakes That Ran Sears' Business Into The Ground. Business Insider: "Sears’s culture became characterized by infighting and significant strategic redirects," [...] Between 1998 and 2010, the number of competitors within a 15-minute drive from any Sears grew from 1,400 to 4,300 stores, according to Lewis. Sears could have fended off competitors by altering its strategy. Instead, the company became complacent, leading to a massive loss of market share.
Making Do: What is
- Inside the company that rebuilt Digg. Vox: Betaworks has developed a sophisticated set of software tools to scour the web for interesting content and then use a variety of signals — including attention on social media sites like Twitter — to judge which articles are most interesting. The software produces a feed of promising candidates that are then curated by human editors.
- 15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging. Anil Dash: There is absolutely no pattern to what blog posts people will like. [...] If there's a way to predict what response will be online, I sure don't know it. [...] The personal blog is an important, under-respected art form. [...] the reason I write is for those rare times, years later, when I get an email from someone I might only barely know, saying that something I wrote meant something to them.
Making it: What Could be
- After 30,000 posts, Big Picture blogger has figured a few things out. Washington Post: Mixing original content, intelligent criticism and curation (a.k.a. reading linkfests) has been a successful formula for me. I would describe it more like this: “First, here is something I CREATED which I think is worthwhile; second, THAT OVER THERE is wrong and not especially compelling and here’s why; and third, you should see ALL OF THESE. They are excellent.”
- Why is Thomas Piketty's 700-page book a bestseller? The Guardian: There’s been a bizarre phenomenon this year: a young, little-known French economist has written a 700-page tome about economic inequality – dense with data, historical examples from France, and a few literary references to Jane Austen. That’s not the strange part. This is: it’s a bestseller. Somehow, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty has become a conversation piece...
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.