…Ten Months Later…

Its very hard to believe, but “Soon to Be a Major Trend” hasn’t fed any new ideas to the blogosphere in the past ten months.


First off, its good to see the Web in general and the blogosophere in particular has survived without my contributions. Whew.

Second, there are so many other distractions in this world. Family is a great one. Twitter and Facebook are effective distractions but less great. I do admit to dabble with each on a professional and social level.

Third, I still have ideas–lots of them–worth blogging about. Marketing automation is a recent fascination for me. I have a lot of great stories (fact-based, of course) as a result of the success of Appcelerator’s use of compelling content, one to many communications, and measurement of web behavior. Enterprise software moving to the cloud and business models moving to subscriptions are other important topics. And, content, as always, is key. During the year I have toyed with video, audio and javascript to augment the written word.

One final thought for all of you: the fuel for blogs are comments. Think about it. If you have a nice meal with good service in America, you leave a tip. Now extend this metaphor to blogs.  If you read a blog that informs, inspires or amuses, please leave a comment.

So, kind readers, join the conversation. What do you want to hear about?  Comments welcome.

A Nostalgic Look at ’90s-style Mass Marketing

Remember when consumers used to complain about bulk mail? You know, the kind that fills your real mailbox at your real address.

This entertaining Saturday Night Live skit looks back to those simpler times. Its cute how the writer tries to appeal to the youth audience by mentioning modern concerns including the green economy and invasions of privacy. Harrumph.

[vimeo width=”400″ height=”300″]http://www.vimeo.com/4192821[/vimeo]

What a hoot! Give it a watch.

Pure Fun: Wordle.net

I’m a little late to the Wordle party, but happy to find this gem of a toy.  Wordle generates a stylized “word cloud” from provided text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

wordle_bfstbat1

Above is a Wordle rendering of Bill Freedman’s Soon To Be A Major Trend.  It takes text, RSS or a URL as input and provides countless variations of fonts, colors and alignments for hours of family fun.

Enjoy.

“Take a Stand” Branding

I saw the juxtaposition of the words “brand” and “stand” the other day and my mind took a detour about how corporate action can speak louder than brand identities.

To me the word “brand” connotes the brand identity created and nurtured by corporate marketers. For example the distinctive logo and curved bottles associated with Coca Cola or the slogan “We try harder” associated with Avis Rent-A-Car. The branding concept is a cornerstone of marketing practice today thanks to the lifetime of work and writing of Al Ries. His long-term research on brands and profitability and short-term analysis of questionable brand marketing decisions are persuasive and valuable.

The word “stand,” as in “take a stand and defend it” seems to be a powerful evolution of the branding concept. In particular, I’m thinking about the purposeful actions and positive outcomes associated with taking a stand.  The positive sides of taking a stand is that you are authentic, principled and an agent of change. On the negative side, you are uncompromising, polarizing and “at risk.” Interestingly, the iconic Malcolm X said this about stands, “If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”

In terms of business brands, Apple takes a stand on human experience innovation as evidenced by their rabidly loyal fans and large R&D budgets.  Federal Express takes a stand on honoring its on-time delivery service level agreement by investing in large delivery fleets and tracking technology. Both these companies tie their brand identities to their stands. In other words, they put their money where their mouth is. These are two simple and successful examples. Clearly there are others, including failures.

It seems that taking a stand is frequently riskier than relying on the more static concept of brand. As with many things in life, the path one chooses for themselves and their businesses is highly correlated with one’s inner calculator with regard to risk and reward.

When I started writing this, I wasn’t sure I was on to something. Perhaps I’m just wallowing in  the semantics and simple rhyme. At this point I’ve persuaded myself to dig deeper and run a few experiments to test these hypotheses.

Back to Blogging

Hello 2009. I’m welcoming in the new year by restarting my blogging here at Bill Freedman’s Soon To Be A Major Trend.

My heavy writing, mentoring and community building activities in other venues resulted in a bit of silence here. That’s changed now. You can once again look forward to reading about novel ideas on persuasion, business-to-business marketing, bootstrapping, and growing sustainable businesses right here.

I invite you to take a moment right now to add my RSS feed (https://www.showcasemarketing.com/ideablog/?feed=rss2) to your favorite personal start page, portal or news reader.