"Thank God for screw-ups, for if life had adhered strictly to six sigma rules, we’d all still be slime." Gary Hamel

"Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation." Rosabeth Moss Kanter

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to management than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely the lukewarm defense in those who gain by the new ones." Nicolo Machiavelli

Today's image: canal by Banksy. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

It's the top line, stupid.

Broadcast leadership continues to be obsessed with tweaking the numerator.

My sense is too many are still keeping score like it's 1999. Preoccupied with optimization they continue to fail because they do not yet appreciate the critical importance of recognizing and unlocking the incredible value inherent in attempts at bold innovation. Truth be known, playing around with numerator has reached beyond the point of diminishing returns. To be blunt, optimization strategies for broadcast operators are well past their best used by date. Attention and resources continue to be invested in getting better at a game that is less and less relevant. Over the past ten years every department (and related function mission systems) at broadcast stations has fundamentally changed with one exception - sales. Proof of this abounds. Any candid accounting of results produced will tend to support this assertion. Let me suggest the best (and most important) evidence may be found by talking with buyers. How has the "broadcast buying experience" changed? How does this experience stack up when compared to other media options?

If you always do what you've always done,
you'll get what you've always gotten

Permit me to invoke an old saw from Zig Ziglar "Two sure ways to fail. Think and never do or do and never think." Broadcast leadership appears to have cornered the market on both. Enough! My thought (confirmed by recent experience) is the new game is getting really serious about changing the denominator. Sales development - the hard work of driving new top lines. Getting fresh and creative in perspective and approach. Experimentation. Discovery. Learning how to respect, appreciate and reward the art of failing faster in order to succeed sooner.

On the day job we have observed the best "return on imagination" begins with unvarnished discussion concerning the creation of new markets rather than the same old fights over how to grow an increasingly irrelevant metric - silo share of a declining market. Going to work to kill the guy across the street is simply not an effective strategy in driving top line development and the entire ball game is, plainly, to continually, consistently and creatively develop the top line without any excuse. To develop your top line you'll need to invest in developing your people.

Invite and encourage cognitive diversity in your organization

Paul Jacobs offers a writing that merits the attention of radio and TV leadership. Follow The (Shrinking) Money - his post on the Jacobs Media blog, is a call to action, to wit:

"...if we don't make major moves in our sales and marketing
strategies, we're in real trouble"

Read Paul's entire post, here. Kudos to Paul, he is right on the money. He presents a well-reasoned case for changing up the game and getting into a whole new reality, the competition that is measured media fighting for dollars at the dawn of the 21st century mediascape.

Congrats and cheers: Robert Feder, by far the best and brightest writer of his generation to cover the media beat, has returned. His new home is Vocalo.org, a new media venture of the Chicago Public Radio folks. More, in his own words, here. Welcome to the conversation, Rob. You've been missed.

Bonus: Cool kid Mary Meeker and her colleagues at Morgan Stanley delivered an important presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit. You may access the PDF of their presentation - Economy + Internet Trends - here. Bravos to Mary and the Morgan gang on a job well done.

Oldie but goodie: Malcolm Gladwell from 2004 on spaghetti sauce. Thanks, as ever, to TED.

"In the technology industry, change is a constant so it feels like there is always a gun to your head...You quickly learn you have to either adapt or die." Marc Andreessen

"A handful of men have become very rich by paying attention to details most others ignored." Henry Ford

"As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgments..." Malcolm Gladwell

Today's image: drama queen 2 by ash.g Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Word on the tweet
(It smells like money)

Social media: some lessons learned over the months of presenting my brief. Big and small ventures are making money using creative social media strategies. Today we note two firms using Twitter to generate business.

On Twitter, Dell Outlet has 967,871 followers (@DellOutlet). Naked Pizza has 5,329 followers (@NAKEDpizza). Dell does business worldwide. Naked Pizza is a one-location enterprise in New Orleans. Both have developed approaches to effectively monetize Twitter.


As reported in Ad Age (Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Business by Abbey Klaassen), in a test run on April 23rd, "an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day's business."

Naked Pizza is micro-targeting. They're marketing to people within a three-mile radius of their shop. As shown in the photo at left, they have put up a billboard featuring the Twitter logo with the line "Follow us for specials" and their Twitter handle. This new creative replaced their previous, more conventional, "call for delivery" message.

A second Twitter-only promotion ran on May 29th asking customers to mention Twitter when ordering. That promotion set an overall one-day sales record. "68.6% of total dollar sales came from customers who said 'I'm calling from Twitter.' (Pizza by tweet by Richard Slawsky)

Stay tuned. The little outfit that promises the "World's Healthiest Pizza" and is devoted to creating "Pizza 2.0" may be going national. They enjoy the good fortune of having net savvy Mark Cuban as one of their investors.

We go from the single DMA Mom-and-Pop to the successful global brand that is Dell Computers. The cool kids at Dell Outlet are making millions on Twitter. By offering Twitter-exclusive deals and deep linking to coupons, Dell is able to track traffic and sales originating via Twitter. As of this writing, Dell has attributed over three million dollars in sales to their DellOutlet Twitter channel. (See this earlier article on Mashable, Making Millions via Twitter by Ben Parr)

There's no good reason why you should not be using your digital assets, including social media, to generate business. A media client we work with is in the process of a major site makeover. They have replaced their web site with a single splash page containing a link to their Twitter page. Twitter has become their primary web communications channel. Not surprisingly they are gaining followers daily. Most important, they have conducted several very successful Twitter-only promotions that are leading them to wonder "Why didn't our expensive web site produce these kind of results?" Good question. What exactly are you doing to build your business on Twitter?

Extra credit: 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business by Meryl Evans, Web Worker Daily.

Good stuff: Direct from the Twitter gang - Twitter 101 for Business - A Special Guide.

P L A Y

Getting truly serious about your Twitter (and any of the other social media) starts with getting totally serious about that four letter word.

Mind the words of John Cleese "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."

Read about the amazing power of play: play. How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown, M.D. (Amzn info)

We're all making this stuff up as we go forward

(What's important is you're in the game, your team is playing. As Woody Allen famously said "Eighty percent of success is showing up.")

P.S. for broadcasters. Helping your clients get the best return from their social media initiatives begins with leading by example(s).

P.S.S. Please read this, study this, share this, discuss this > I now pronounce you monetized: A YouTube video case study, here. Related parody: JK Divorce Entrance Dance (natch).

Bonus: The Malcolm Gladwell quote used at the top of today's post was taken from his recent writing in The New Yorker - Cocksure. Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence. It's a good read which you may find here.

Wayback bonus: Remembering Milwaukee rock radio in the 1980s. Sometimes floods are good by radio programming and marketing ace Lee Arnold. (July 2006), here.

Danna Walker, Ph.D. The Seven Laws of Journalism - This Semester 1. Journalism isn't dead 2. Money counts 3. Grow a pair 4. Life is hard (so deal with it) 5. You're a story factory 6. Use technology as a means to an end 7. Ok, the whole democracy thing (sorry).

Detritus: Number of times my talk on social media has been given - 26. Average rating (1-5) = 4.84 Average rating (1-10) = 9.23 Best comment (five scale) - "Can I give this a ten? WOW!!!...killer content...lots of solid very practical take away" Worst comment (five scale) - "Deserves a zero or maybe a minus 5...social media sucks way too much time and attention...the worst kind of fad media crap. Facebook will be gone by next year. Hello, Friendster, DUH...Next!...this was total waste of time." My favorite so far "The station kicking our butt at 11 could give a rats ass about Twitter or Facebook...110% of their energy is laser focused on crushing nightside not wasting time on stupid web junk or mobile app trash" (FYI - the station leading at 11 dominates both Facebook and Twitter among broadcasters in their metro, they also happen to have a pretty cool site given they are using an O&O template)

"What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance. What the consumer thinks he is buying, what he considers 'value' is decisive." Peter Drucker

"Limiting one's pursuits to one lone avenue without benefit of change or diversion can result in a form of vapidity which sometimes deadens imagination." Edwin Uhl

"The virtue of imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things." John Ruskin

Today's image: Ordinary magic by IrenaS. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Good reads: Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin [Amazon info]. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell [Amazon info]. Fiction, worth reading, again: The Road by Cormac McCarthy [Amazon info]

Live ammo: You have a talent working for you. A well known talent with a history of thirty years in the market. The talent has consistently delivered top ratings for decades under diary measurement. Since the introduction of PPM the talent has failed to show the same winning numbers. The most recent monthly numbers show the talent is ranked 20th in demo a year after being moved from afternoons on one station into a morning drive shift on another station. You have two and one-half years remaining on the talent's agreement, an obligation of approx three million dollars. You play or pay the talent? In the case of CBS they made the decision last week to pay the talent, Steve Dahl, rather than continue to play him. Your thoughts? Back to blog about this Monday.

"The future ain't what it used to be." Yogi Berra

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Niccolo Machiavelli

"That which the fool does in the end the wise man does in the beginning." Richard Trench

Today's image: 0092 by emiliebjork. Great shooting. Thank you for sharing.

"How much potential out there
is being ignored?

How much raw talent remains uncultivated
and ultimately lost because we cling
to outmoded ideas of what success looks like
and what is required to achieve it?"

The words are those of Dr. David A. Shaywitz taken from his review of Outliers, the new Malcolm Gladwell book. Read the good doctor's review, The Elements of Success, here via WSJ. [Amazon info] Highly recommended.

How much potential inside your organization is being ignored?

My sense is 2009 should be the year that you and your team commit, entrust, confide in a game-changing mission - one that is laser focused on bringing out the best in others.

Mission not initiative, since the latter is much too small a word to embrace this opportunity.

A mission to help, assist, encourage, abet, incite, spark and otherwise do everything within your power to enable people to make real, measurable progress in reaching their potential.

The secret to growing your business in 2009 is being obsessed now, daily going forward, with growing your people.

"All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions." George Bernard Shaw

"What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary." David Hume

"Life is like a game of poker: If you don't put any in the pot, there won't be any to take out." Moms Mabley

Today's image: Edge of the Earth by Zack Schnepf. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Let me bring two items to your attention. A must-see video by Malcolm Gladwell on hiring, here. The outstanding must-read piece in yesterday's NYT Magazine by Clive Thompson. I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You...

“The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you...“You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Read the entire article here.

Super-sizing sellers: Mel Taylor blogs about online revenue strategy for local media and he brings a wealth of practical experience to the subject. In his latest post Mel proffers the notion that you are better off with a team of "Super Sellers"...

"Competitors like Google, niche sites, directories and others, are looking to grow their local online share at the expense of Broadcast and Newspaper. Traditional media must leverage the assets that these players do not have at the local level: dominant reach, client relationships, sales force, marketing muscle, and a trusted brand."

Mel goes on to suggest a four point plan of action. Read Separate Web Sales...Or Super Sellers, here. Kudos, Mel. Well done. My sense is the most important point you make is ensuring that managers have the knowledge needed to lead the charge. In perhaps too many cases the managers don't know what they don't know. Accordingly, the first step in getting serious about developing multi-platform revenue is a rather radical one, learning to accept our ignorance. The second step is to foster experimentation. Give Mel's concept a go keeping in mind your focus should be on getting different not on getting better. Properly, the mission would seem to be one of changing your selling strategy rather than tweaking your current tactics of best practice.

HR is broken: Giving Mel credit for his approach, however, what will be required for his strategy to work is an investment in HRD (i.e., human resources development). As blogged here previously, media is not doing a good job of investing in training or development. The paradox is at a time when there is a great abundance of resources available there is a scarcity of dollars chasing those resources. I know of a smart station exec who is paying their own way through the RAB Digital course. This type of self-improvement investment tends to be the uncommon and rare exception. It seems to me that until the CEO recognizes and respects the critical importance of reinventing or at least rebooting HR and HRD making progress at the local level will continue to be be very difficult. Did you watch the Malcolm Gladwell video? The one mentioned above, first in today's post. You should. It's about hiring and will get you thinking. You should revisit your hiring process. What's your new hire batting average? If you really want to gain a sustainable competitive advantage invest in your people, especially now when others are not. The ROI is exceptional.

The job market, a new definition: PaidInterviews, a new site in the employment space, launches later today. Sarah Perez provides an advance overview here. Bravos, Sarah! She makes an excellent point that sites in the job vertical are boring. Just checked Monster for the first time in years and they're playing the same old tunes. Good luck to the PaidInterviews team.

Stay tuned: Katalyst Media, the Ashton Kutcher + Jason Goldberg venture, bows blahgirls. In the words of the Joker, Why so serious? Should one of the girls be smiling?

Bonus: 280 Slides - Create and share presentations online. Free.

Have a great week. Making something amazing happen!

"The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them." Mark Twain

"Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data." John Naisbitt

"He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!" Horace

Today's image: Childhood by Thomas Hawk. Outstanding. Thank you for sharing.

Go Big or Go Home: Business advice from Bono. From an article headed "New U2 album delayed till 2009"...

“We’ve hit a rich songwriting vein and we don’t want to stop,” Bono says on the band’s website. “It gets a bit dark down here but looks like we’ve found diamonds not coal. I thought a while back we might have the album wrapped by now, but why come up above ground now if there’s more priceless stuff to be found?”

Read the entire post by Tim Walker @ Hoover's Business Insight Zone. Kudos, Tim. Well done.

Bonus: Malcolm Gladwell - Video - How you hire the right person. Highly recommended.

Eaten alive: Giles Coren, restaurant critic for the Times in London, is known to engage others via email. His latest email rant to his subeditors is a classic. Read "I have never ended on an unstressed syllable" via the Guardian here.

Social media: Find Your Social Media Score - 12 Questions for marcom teams self-test here. Thanks to John Bell @ OgilvyPR.

Bill & Jerry: The first spot in the new Microsoft campaign is out and getting mixed reviews. It's been reported Jerry is being paid $10 mil to star as the talent in the $300 mil campaign. The 90 second spot left me cold. I'll await the considered opinions of Lew Lazare, Tom Asacker and Joseph Jaffe. In the meantime, you decide. Watch it here. [Related: Microsoft tries to explain Seinfeld ad - Deborah Gage, Microsoft Works to Perfect Windows Vista - Steve Lohr, First Microsoft/Seinfeld Ad Bombs - Sam Gustin]

"I'm not finished, because I'm still curious." Barry Diller

"Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion; let the artist be truly taciturn." Paul Klee

"However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words." Ivan Turgenev

Today's image: Claudia, lost in the Garage by Portrait and Fashion Photographer. Great shooting. Thank you for sharing.


Danger, Will Robinson: Thanks to Barron's scribe Alan Abelson we learn the updated report from those smart guys at hedge fund T2 Partners bears title language including "We are still in the early innings of the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles..."

Then there's the University of Michigan consumer confidence survey hitting a 28-year low, and that pesky $4-a-gallon gasoline. S&P 500 first-quarter earnings down 25.9% from the same quarter last year. [Up and Down Wall Street, 5/19]

The recent buzz about online rates is CPMs have headed south. My sense is online is still pacing up at 20 something percent. The danger for sellers is depending on the usual suspects to deliver their month. Sales leadership needs to be more focused on developing new business including new categories. While this environment is certainly challenging to sellers now is a great time for buyers to invest in advertising. Rates are attractive and you'll gain share of voice (especially valid should your competitors fail to spend). The most optimum time to advertise is when others are not. As baseball player Wee Willie Keeler famously said "...hit 'em where they ain't."

Buzz: Vegas odds say...Mr Softy buys Yahoo (at least Search now says Arrington) then Facebook (so say others). Stay tuned.

Pre-order: Outliers the new book by Malcolm Gladwell is now on offer at Amazon for $18.47 - info here. Related 800-CEO-READ

Say it ain't so: Firefox checks their own box. Do the custom install option and you can uncheck the box making Firefox your default browser. Shame on Mozilla. Opt-out, bad. Opt-in, good.

If I give you my business card, do I give you the right to publish it on the internet? The Comcast-Plaxo, CBS-CNET deals and the important data portability issue (think last week's Facebook smack down of Google) gets thrown around and the discussion is nothing less than informative, if not plainly and purely entertaining (thanks to Steve Gillmor, Sam Whitmore, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Chris Saad, Marc Canter) in the latest Gillmor Gang podcast. Don't start tomorrow without it [Audio, MP3 Heads up, NSFW - language]. Bravos, guys. Good show! [Related: Marc Canter details his argument here]

Agenda item: The issues discussed in the Gillmor Gang podcast above are more important than one might first believe. We are at the beginning, the early days of a very real "data war." This amounts to nothing less than an arms race for some kind of control of user identity. Fair warning - get deep into this issue, now. What's in your ToS (and how well you play w/others) will play a role in the future of what's in your wallet.

Congrats & cheers: May sweeps winners, Fox leads 18-49, CBS leads in households and total viewers. The strike seems to have been the primary factor in 18-49 viewing being down almost 20% vs last year. The young guns of wireless being honored by Edison Media Research [names named here] Ken Fisher and team Ars Technica acquired by Conde Nast.[Ken's announcement]

Bonus x 3: 21 Accents + Ex-Boyfriend Jewelry + Ztail

Lost in space, the reality show: They call it "The Pioneer Anomaly." For reasons yet unknown something has dragged Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 a quarter-million miles off course. Robert Lee Hotz, WSJ's Science Journal editor chats about the anomaly in the following video. Could Newton and Einstein be wrong?

"I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial." Roy Lichtenstein

"What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you, but I know it's mine." Lennon-McCartney

"My capital is time, not money." Marcel Duchamp

Today's image: Day 4 - 25 Days of Christmas 2007 by Phil Peck. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing!

How to be creative

A fine writing by Hugh MacLeod...

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

For the full list of thirty-one "tips" (and more) read Hugh's entire writing with comments and illustrations here. Highly recommended! Bravos to Hugh!

Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

Today's image: Ad in NYT. My thanks to Michael Rosenblum.

Smart move by NBC News. Working with the NY Film Academy they develop skilled entry level players.

"What we see depends mainly on what we look for." John Lubbock

"The power of imagination makes us infinite." John Muir

"Either I will find a way, or I will make one." Sir P. Sidney

Mommy, make the boring conference stop: Dave Winer offers up a brilliant idea on involving the world in the upcoming LeWeb3 and Why most conferences suck here....

"...include people and places that are on the network defined by the conference. If it's like last year, there will be people tuned in from all around the world, and wouldn't it be great if we had a way to not only pull in their ideas (and we could do this better, btw) but also their imagery? It would give it a much richer world-wide feel.

One of the exciting opportunities for tech industry conferences is to find new ways to use networking on a world-wide level."

Bravos, Dave!

What Dave Winer says about conferences is important. The business conference is in serious need of reinvention. The architecture, the approach or format, used by most conferences has not changed in thirty years excepting improvements in AV. The panel of usual suspects (talking heads with concomitant ppts) is too often tired and played out. Some conferences are requiring attendees to pay good money to listen to what are nothing more than infomercial sessions. Two most often missing ingredients: interactivity (by design those attending must be involved), presenters held accountable for takeaway (evaluation - as judged by attendees).

The genius of Winer's notion is to involve all that wish to play - using the internet to transcend time and space. Now that's a BIG wow! And it's potentially game-changing.

Thanks to Dave we have verse from Paolo here. Kudos, thanks for joining the conversation!

A good part of my time is involved in adult learning. My colleagues and I believe evaluation is important. It's a significant tool for measuring and improving training impact. On the day job we use Level 4 Eval tools to keep us focused on improving our workshops. Most conferences fail to collect evaluations, those that do are not making the best of the process. For example, too many use the so-called "smile sheet" (i.e., did you like the session? how would you rate it on a scale of one to five?). This single method is not a meaningful evaluation. Smile sheets are one dimensional views that seek to capture how happy or satisfied people were with the session or the presenter(s). Yes, better than nothing. No, not a serious measure.

One thing has changed for me personally. At those conferences where I am invited to give a talk fewer and fewer give me reasons for staying around (beyond the social hang). While I love getting invited to play, I also want to learn. It seems, more often than not lately, that I'm in the night before and out the afternoon of my talk. Fewer agendas are inspired. Not just me here. Others who speak and/or attend have shared the same feelings. My thought is this is not a good sign.

Bonus: Gladwell is back! Kudos, a welcome return.