Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Important Questions, Applicability, Mindset

Talent Imitates, Genius Steals: Four Chapters on Being Creative in the Digital Age from edward boches Making Sense: important questions On paying for promotion. Gina Trapani: This week, my company ThinkUp sponsored Daring Fireball. That means we paid John Gruber good bit of money, and in return we got a post about ThinkUp on Daring Fireball on Sunday night and we’ll also get a link to ThinkUp on DF on Friday. I was dubious about doing this. It was a costly investment for a small company that’s running lean. Like Gruber, I ran a high-profile tech blog for years. When... Read more →

Coming up for a Name for Doing the Small Stuff that Matters

Rory Sutherland makes the case for how paying attention to details helps us solve problems, the things we actually deal with in everyday life. [...] we don't spend nearly enough money looking for those things, looking for those tiny things that may or may not work, but which, if they do work, can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense, their efforts and the disruption they cause. And once we come up with a name for that, we should put someone in charge of it, say Sutherland. +++ Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and... Read more →

Culture Shapes Behavior

“The power of authoritative knowledge is not that it is correct but that it counts.” [Brigitte Jordan#] It is therefore a force or set of forces that impact how things are done and what people talk about. What shapes culture? Edgar Schein, professor emeritus at MIT and the father of the study of corporate culture offers a map: Artifacts -- visible, sometimes or often hard to decode Values (espoused and real) -- tested by investigating the gap between what people say and what they do; for example, If teamwork is a core value, why are individuals so competitive? If the... Read more →

Optimizing around Solving a Different Problem

One that may go away or lose relevance in the near future. Ben Thompson at Stratechery explains# the phenomenon I have called becoming very good at what used to work: The problem for PayPal is that, as noted, peer-to-peer payments is a “square”-shaped problem; all of PayPal’s internal incentives are designed to solve this problem first-and-foremost. That’s why when it comes to a new problem, like easily enabling an individual or small business to be a merchant, PayPal is markedly inferior to what is on offer from startups like Stripe (for e-commerce) and Square (for offline purchases). The thing is... Read more →

In Conversation with Ignite Spot

We don't do what we know deep down works, because we prefer to be sure it will work ahead of time. Ironically, working on it and iterating as we do it is one of the best ways to know. A couple of weeks ago I had this conversation# with Ann Whittaker and Eddy Hood of Ignite Spot, a firm that supports small business owners with accounting sevices. Their enthusiasm and engagement throughout was something worthy of remark. When was the last time you talked to someone who actually listened? They also have a strong content marketing strategy -- in the... Read more →

Thoughts on Future Direction of Technology in Marketing (and Business)

Last week at SMX East I had the opportunity and good fortune to connect with Scott Brinker for a long conversation on the convergence of technology and marketing. I am not a technologist, yet I follow many on Twitter. That is beacuse for many years I was the marketer on the client side, and it was clear then that technology was critical to marketing. From establishing strong inside sales teams to developing copy, images, and interactive tools to help prospective customers learn more about their needs from us and self-select when to have a conversation with a sales pro, to... Read more →

New Meme: blogging for 30 Days

Already spotted in two places this weekend --first at Matt Mullenweg's blog#, then at Om Malik's#. Blogging consistently is habit forming and a way to add a personal note to the material I read and share anyway. We used to participate in these kinds of memes often in the early days. If this meme could bring back some great thinkers to blogging, I would love to see Matt Dickman (now SVP, Global Digital/Social Strategy @MSL_Group), Peter Kim (now Chief Digital Officer at Cheil Worldwide), and Shiv Singh (now SVP Global Brand & Marketing Transformation, Visa Inc.) join the challenge. What... Read more →

We Need Media, Creative, and Technology to Work together

When we are in the business of organizing experiences, how we split the work on the back end should not bleed onto the front end. It is the same phenomenon that held and in some cases still holds company sites within the constraints of an organization chart. This short quote from an article in The Guardian# spells out the challenge: The first step in reimagining marketing is bringing every single marketing discipline and role together: everyone in the entire world of marketing. From retail to customer relationship management (CRM), branding to PR, SEO, media planning, experiential, product design and more.... Read more →

The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same

Even as improvements in the technology we use continues to make our lives richer. Which one is right for you? Making Sense The Ten Golden Rules of Argument. Farnam Street: Before starting an argument think carefully about what it is you are arguing about and what it is you want. This may sound obvious. But it’s critically important. What do you really want from this argument? Do you want the other person to just understand your point of view? Or are you seeking a tangible result? Liz Daley 1985-2014. The Cleanest Line: She was someone I could instantly connect with.... Read more →

Looking for the Trick

Another word for the silver bullet we seem to keep trying to find in the next shiny new object -- social media, content marketing, big data, automation, machine learning, you name it -- anything that will help sell more with less often in a one-to-one tactical swap. This excerpt by Paul Graham# [h/t Fred Wilson] has enough distance from the marketer's day-to-day to offer a dispassionate example of what many conversations look and sound like: [...] in a lot of classes there might only be 20 or 30 ideas that were the right shape to make good exam questions. The... Read more →