My presidential campaign picked up a lot of steam in 2008, but of course I came up short.
Should I make another run for the presidency in 2012?
If you didn’t know I was a front-running presidential candidate in 2008, check out the video:
SORRY – THIS ISN’T AVAILABLE ANY MORE
(which is too bad because it was very cool)
Of course I am kidding, but I was rifling some through old posts and I came across this video. This campaign was one of my favorite pass along marketing campaigns of 2008. It allows you to embed your name or a friend’s name visually in the video in several spots and send the video to them. I thought it was a lot of fun, and probably money much better spent than if they had bought a commercial on the Super Bowl.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
The operational model for charities in this country is an ideal candidate for disruptive innovation. It strikes me as odd that charities, the organizations that really have the least to spend on marketing, spend such inordinate amounts of money and time on marketing to raise money. Does spending lots of money on fundraising actually work?
Let’s stop for a moment and look at how AIP defines acceptable charity performance:
Spending 60% or more of a charity’s budget on programs, and spending $35 or less to raise $100 in public support
Groups included on AIP’s Top-Rated list generally spend 75% or more of their budgets on programs, and spend $25 or less to raise $100 in public support.
Unfortunately, many charities don’t even meet the acceptable charity performance definition:
“It is sad that cancer charities, one of the most serious and popular giving categories, perform so poorly – half of the cancer charities that AIP rates in this Charity Rating Guide receive a D or F grade and only 37% receive an A or B.”
If we look across charity organizations as a whole, it is not a stretch to imagine that the aggregate reality is probably somewhere around spending 50% or less of their budgets on programs, and spending $50 or more to raise $100 in public support.
What greater positive benefit could we have on society as business innovators than to help create a disruptive business model for charities? What if we could stand the traditional, and hugely inefficient, model of list rental, telemarketing, direct mail, and list saturation on its head and instead imagine something different?
There has to be a better business model that we could collectively create as a gift to society that would increase the percentage of charitable revenue that actually goes towards the charities’ intended missions. If we created a new best practice that could be adopted across the industry, think about the impact we could have (equivalent of up to a doubling of monies raised).
I think we can distill the disruptive possibilities down to the following five key principles:
Give consumers a way to offset negative side effects with a positive action
Link fundraising efforts more closely to the benefit delivered
Reduce fundraising friction
Maximize existing communication channels to highlight benefits that others provide
Improve Efficiency
Please download and read the white paper to look at the disruptive possibilities and charitable innovation opportunities each one presents.
And, if you would like to help evolve the ideas in the white paper, please post a comment with your thoughts, additions, or refinements, or join our Innovation Excellence group on LinkedIn and contribute to the discussion there.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
“It’s not about breaking the rules. It is about abandoning the concept of rules altogether”
– Paul Lemberg
– Submitted by Bill Dobbins
“Innovation is a team sport and everyone is innovative in their own way. Hopefully when you look at The Nine Innovation Roles it reinforces that you too can contribute to innovation success and that the lone innovator myth is just that – a myth.”
– Braden Kelley
“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.”
– John F. Kennedy
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
The twittersphere erupted with news of GM’s announcement that it was refusing to pay for 2013 Super Bowl advertisements and $10 Million worth of advertising on Facebook.
Much of the popular press and self-proclaimed social media experts are jumping on the bandwagon and calling GM “idiots” for ending their advertising of Facebook and talking about how GM “doesn’t get” social media. If you listen to the amount of noise out there you would think that there was consensus that GM was wrong in making these moves.
I disagree. GM is making the right move.
Companies need to re-think how they spend money on marketing and advertising to make money in the showroom. Traditional advertising is becoming more expensive all the time and as the saying goes “I know I’m wasting half of the money I spend on advertising, only I don’t know which half.” The key here is that with advertising you pay to blast everyone that sees it with a single message – including people who just bought what you sell and those who will never buy what you sell just to hit the people who are considering a purchase of what you sell. As a result it is expensive and nearly impossible to place the right message with the right people at the time (and only those people). So I am not surprised at all that GM is re-evaluating its advertising spend, possibly investing more (not less) in the future in social media. Done well, you can be more impactful with pull marketing and social media than you can with push marketing and advertising.
So, personally it seems odd to me that so-called social media experts are in favor of a company spending money advertising on social networks. Wouldn’t it be smarter for them to advocate that GM spend money on build an interactive, engagement-driving social media campaign instead of spending money on advertising?
Something like the Chevy Game Time App?
Wait a minute, did the same company that doesn’t “get social media” launch an app built by hometown company – Detroit Labs – before Super Bowl 2012 that rocketed into the Top 10 free apps for the iPhone on Apple’s App Store (a top 10 that included Facebook and Instagram)?
“For all intents and purposes, all of the expectations that we had and that GM had were far exceeded… in a positive way!”
– Henry Balanon, Detroit Labs Co-Founder
Hmmmm…
First let’s be clear. Social networks and social media are two separate things, but people talk about them as is if they were one thing.
A social network is a place where people connect online and interact, whereas social media is content that is created to be shared. But, many so-called social media experts confuse the two, and confuse advertising with social media too. Advertising on a social network is not a social media strategy – it’s still advertising. Identifying the content that you should place on your Facebook page or other digital destination and creating a reason for people to tell others that they should come to that digital destination, well that’s a social media strategy.
Now, I must disclose that I specialize in helping companies creating pull marketing strategies to drive an increase in inbound sales leads by researching the customer purchasing journey online and then helping them attract and engage customers, partners, or employees by placing the right content in the right places at the right time. Part of this is achieved by using my proprietary single content input, multiple content output methodology and yes, that sometimes includes using social media. But social media is a tool not a religion, and it needs to be used only when appropriate.
I think GM made the right call in ceasing to advertise on the Super Bowl and Facebook and here’s why:
Super Bowl advertisements are expensive and for GM much of the cost is allocated against people who will probably NEVER buy a GM car
Facebook advertising is not very prominent or engaging
Their Chevy Game Time App experience should have given GM an idea that next year they can drive huge engagement during the Super Bowl (without advertising)
If GM is so clueless at social media, then why does the Facebook page for Chevrolet look so much better than the Facebook page for Ford or Toyota or Dodge. Honda is the only one I looked at amongst the car companies that had a more social feel at first glance, oh and Honda has the most likes of these companies too – go figure. But the engagement of people on Facebook around these brands is tiny in comparison to BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Harley-Davidson – both in terms of the numbers of likes and the number of people talking about them.
So, yes GM still has things to learn about engaging on social media (and about building better products too), but then so does every company. Social media and pull marketing are two new tools in the toolbox for every CMO, brand manager, and product marketer, but as long as we all continue to instrument for learning, as marketers we will continue to get better at utilizing these new tools to attract, engage, and retain the people who will love our products and services as much as we do.
Keep innovating!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
“Before the industrial revolution, most businesses in the United States were sole proprietorships or small family run businesses. In those days, every member of the business was in direct contact with the customers and had the opportunity to passively or actively hear the voice of the customer.
The voice of the customer tells us what about our product or service that customers find valuable, and what they find annoying or useless. By focusing on what customers found valuable and removing or reducing what they found annoying, these small businesses could accumulate financial success and customer loyalty.
In today’s interconnected world, we are in the midst of a customer revolution. Today’s customer has unparalleled access to pricing and product information to enable a more informed and economic purchasing decision. Today’s customer benefits from marketing developments such as mass customization, mass personalization, and micro-segmentation. In addition, they have unrivaled access to communication channels to make their preferences known. But, who is really listening?
We live in a world of corporations and conglomerates, where most of the employee class has no direct access to the voice of the customer. The man or woman stitching up your clothing has no idea whether the stitching method worked well for you, or if you were happy with the product. They only know whether or not they made their daily quota and how much failed Quality Control. If the person stitching your clothing had access to the voice of the customer, would they do their job differently? Would they feel differently about their job?
In many of today’s companies, the job of listening to the customer falls to someone in the marketing department, possibly even someone who does nothing but focus on brand and customer research. This person usually works with product management and possibly research and development to inform product revisions and new product development. Often, very few people outside of that core team have access to the voice of the customer. But why restrict customer feedback to a select few?”
Or even better, hire me to create thought leadership for you to help increase your inbound sales leads, or to create a pull marketing strategy to increase your revenue.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
“Comic books had it wrong. It didn’t take a trauma or cosmic rays or a power ring to make a super hero, just the perfect combination of optimism and naivety.”
– From the Movie “Kickass”
“The heart and soul of the company is creativity and innovation.”
– Robert Iger
“Successfully building a strong culture of continuous innovation also represents a huge opportunity for an organization to attract the best talent, to lower costs, to continuously add new revenue streams, and to better achieve competitive separation.”
– Braden Kelley
“The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.”
– Kevin Kelly
“The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.”
– Michael Faraday
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
A few years ago I published a white paper on “Effective Conversational Marketing” and it is still relevant today as my service offering evolves to a B2B Pull Marketing focus.
Here is an excerpt:
“Introduction
What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is relationship marketing for the social media age. Thinking about your marketing efforts in terms of a conversation changes the approach and better integrates social media. Relationships are something that are formed, but conversations are ongoing and evolving and require both sides to participate.
How Social Media Fits In
It seems like I can’t get through a day right now without hearing somebody in the media or on the street talking about social media. I think it is great that social media has captured people’s attention, but will having more communication channels improve conversational marketing?
Only if properly integrated into the conversations between consumers and companies.
To do this, social media must be established both as part of your on-going conversational marketing programs (on-boarding, loyalty, retention, etc.) and also integrated into your ad hoc or seasonal marketing campaigns.”
One thing is for sure. Effective conversational marketing is central to successful pull marketing strategy and your overall marketing investments.
Contact us if you’d like to hire me to create thought leadership for you to help increase your inbound sales leads, or to create a pull marketing strategy to increase your revenue.
Image Credit – NoLifeBeforeCoffee
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
One of the best Twitter names that I’ve come across in the past few years is @ShowerThinker – almost as cool as mine – @innovate. It’s an account for an inventor that makes post-it notes for the shower called Aqua Notes.
This Twitter name captures a well-understood fact – that a lot of great ideas (and ultimately innovations) come to us not from brainstorming, but from the connection to our subconscious that occurs in the shower (or pretty much anywhere else in the bathroom). If so many great ideas come to us when our active mind is elsewhere, then why is such little attention paid to this source of innovation.
A lot has been written about creativity and the brain, left brain vs. right brain thinking, and how often the brain just needs to get out of its own way for creativity to occur as there is no single creative area of the brain.
In my own cuarto de bano moment, I came up with this contrasting phrase to help us frame the conversation – Instinctual Innovation versus Intellectual Innovation.
Intellectual Innovation begins with active efforts to capture and develop ideas using techniques such as brainstorming, greenhousing, etc.
Instinctual Innovation springs forth from a collection of sometimes un-connected information that collects in an individuals brain. Often ideas that form the basis for instinctual innovation rattle around as part of a collection of problems in search of solutions for a long time before emerging.
I’ve created this table to lay out some of the differences:
Innovation has garnered a lot of attention in the press over the past couple of years, and many executives have the word rolling off their tongues quite easily now. In some organizations this has translated into employees being trained to be better intellectual innovators, or into creativity consultants helping stimulate the organization’s intellectual innovation for a particular project.
But much less attention is being paid to instinctual innovation. To build sustainable instinctual innovation you have to train members of your organization to be business innovators. You also need to provide members with a set of clear and actionable innovation goals along with a simple visual framework to decipher them. And, most importantly you have to invest in the organizational change necessary to create a culture of continuous innovation.
Then, and only then, will instinctual innovation be best able to emerge from any part of the organization on its own timeline and integrate with the intellectual innovation that is also going on at the same time.
Intellectual innovation can help drive the short-term growth of an organization. But, when combined with instinctual innovation, the two together can create an innovation engine to power the organization now and into the future.
What do you think?
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
“Companies do not fall primarily because of what the world does to them or because of how the world changes around them. They fall first and foremost because of what they do to themselves.”
– Jim Collins
“To innovate continuously, you need to be open to receiving great ideas from anywhere in the company, and must have systems and processes to manage idea gathering, evaluation, and development. Often this requires a financial and personnel investment.”
– Braden Kelley
“Somehow I can’t believe there aren’t many heights that can’t be scaled by one who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret can be summarized in four C’s. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy, and the greatest of these is Confidence.”
– Walt Disney
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
I’d like to start today with a quote from a NASA article in Fast Company – “But sometimes the better part of innovation, is not invention but effectiveness.”
I’ve detailed my views before on how invention is not the same thing as innovation, but to build upon them and the quote above – sometimes progress or innovation is achieved by taking value out of a product or service. Southwest Airlines created innovation not by giving passengers more food, more legroom or more options, but fewer. Apple succeeded with the iPod, not by providing more capacity or more features, but by making the features they provided more beneficial than the competition.
People ultimately do not care whether a product or service is better at the tasks it is asked to perform, but whether it more effectively meets their needs. These are not the same thing, and in fact make success far more difficult.
A sponge may clean better than all other sponges at absorbing liquids, but if to do so it has to smell like a wet troll, it is ultimately not going to be the sponge most effective at meeting customers needs (or likely to make repeat visits to their shopping baskets). Success becomes more difficult because customers don’t always surface their needs. Chances are your market research wouldn’t have surfaced their need for a sponge not to smell like a wet troll. But if succeeding becomes more difficult when success is not purely a technology challenge, then this is a good thing for the truly committed, because difficulty creates opportunity.
So during the product development process, don’t ask yourself “How can we make X do Y better than the competition?”. Instead focus people’s attention on asking “How can we better meet our customers’ needs?”. If you focus on the second question, the competition becomes almost irrelevant, and you will become better at creating products or services that are more likely to be valuable instead of merely useful, and that is where true innovation lies.
What do you think?
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
My presidential campaign picked up a lot of steam in 2008, but of course I came up short.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
The operational model for charities in this country is an ideal candidate for disruptive innovation. It strikes me as odd that charities, the organizations that really have the least to spend on marketing, spend such inordinate amounts of money and time on marketing to raise money. Does spending lots of money on fundraising actually work?
The twittersphere erupted with news of GM’s announcement that it was refusing to pay for 2013 Super Bowl advertisements and $10 Million worth of advertising on Facebook.
A few years ago Business Strategy Innovation published a white paper to its web site on “
We live in a world of corporations and conglomerates, where most of the employee class has no direct access to the voice of the customer. The man or woman stitching up your clothing has no idea whether the stitching method worked well for you, or if you were happy with the product. They only know whether or not they made their daily quota and how much failed Quality Control. If the person stitching your clothing had access to the voice of the customer, would they do their job differently? Would they feel differently about their job?
It seems like I can’t get through a day right now without hearing somebody in the media or on the street talking about social media. I think it is great that social media has captured people’s attention, but will having more communication channels improve conversational marketing?
I’d like to start today with a quote from a