Popular Posts
Popular Posts:- Guest post: As Undercover Boss Returns, So Do Lessons on Enterprise 2.0
- 10 things your grandmother can teach you about social media
- How to blog so people will listen
- Why social media is the ultimate customer feedback tool
- 20 qualities that made Tony Soprano a successful business leader
- Why experience does not equal expertise
- Why you can’t force your influence to grow
- 5 Reasons Why Copyblogger is the best marketing blog
- Why mobile check-in services aren’t providing value
- 8 signs you are heading for a social media disaster
Web Site: http://ericfulwiler.com
Posts by EF:
On a break to focus on work
September 11th, 2011Will be back to this soon, but need to dig in on some other stuff right now. As always, thanks to everyone who keeps up with me here. I’m always on email, twitter, etc. Looking forward to hearing from you there!
-ef
Why ambiguity is so easy and so dangerous
September 5th, 2011Communication is about explicitness and concision. The most efficient communicators and communications say specifically what needs to be said in the least amount of expression possible. But both of these qualities are also those that most expose us to being wrong, something any human irrationally fears. Saying something that leaves room for a grey area between the black and white, either through the quality or quantity of our words, provides us an out, and puts the onus on the receiver to potentially misinterpret or fail. It’s natural, but it’s inefficient, and has no place in business especially.
If your argument is based on should, you should shut up
September 4th, 2011I hate the word should. Its use means that someone is applying an alternative reality to whatever they are talking about. Should means that something doesn’t exist, but ideally you would want it to. Which, as we learned when we were three years old, means absolutely nothing. Should is the cause of so many of the world’s problems, and so much wasted potential. It has its place, but as a means of last resort and only when supported by examples and context from this reality, not another.
Do you really care if people use your info?
September 3rd, 2011Privacy concerns are very real on the web, as they should be. But it seems the stigma with tracking has at least some roots in the illogical. In theory, there is nothing wrong with someone knowing more about you; the real question is how they get that information and what they choose to do with it.
There is absolutely no question that the web will be a better place for everyone (consumers and companies alike) if information is shared more freely, yet people tend to forget how that greater good will affect their own choices. Privacy isn’t naturally better than no privacy, it depends on the situation. And in the situation of the web, privacy isn’t natural and it isn’t healthy. We are analyzing privacy concerns through the lens of the real world, but the web isn’t the real world; it’s a digital world with different economics, different social incentives, and different politics. Stop reacting, start thinking.
Why you and I are directly responsible for big business practices
September 2nd, 2011There seems to be a perceived disconnect between the normal person and the corporation. People get riled up from stories about low pay, cost-cutting, and other “disgusting” or “despicable” big business practices. But why do you think businesses act this way? They act this way because of you and me and everyone else who demands more for less every time we buy.
Corporate incentives are directly shaped by consumer preference. When we decide we want to pay 1.99 instead of 2.49 we are telling these corporations to seek out options for lower pay and cutting costs. This is how the capitalist world works: self-interest maximization shapes the entire spectrum of reality from household to conference room. There is no us vs them, and certainly no victim. The world is built around dollars because we are built around dollars. It’s not as sexy as exploitation or conspiracy, but you don’t get to pick your reality, especially when you are responsible for it.
Why middle-aged men take softball so seriously
September 1st, 2011People of all ages love sports, but middle-aged men especially. There are many reasons for this, but a large part of it is the natural human search for meaning in life that increases as we age.
Sports is condensed meaning. For two hours a week, it’s not about obscure, relative objectives like happiness or purpose, it’s about three strikes, nine innings, and more runs than the other team. In softball, everything has a place and nothing is obscure. We all appreciate anything that can accomplish this in our lives, even for a short period of time.
And successful marketing tends to exhibit the same emotional offering as softball: it makes sense and it makes things easier, taking you away from the what ifs and unanswerable questions that plague our daily lives. A good ad offers condensed meaning to the viewer in the same way softball does to so many middle-aged men.
There’s more to decision making than right and wrong
August 31st, 2011Everyone gets caught up on right and wrong, and for good reason. Perfect dichotomy is one of the easiest things for the human mind to understand. With context, a clear rating system, and a specific point of differentiation, the dumbest person in the world is just as capable as the smartest at determining right from wrong.
But decision making, especially in business, has a second spectrum that is largely ignored, but just as important: more and less. Making more decisions is essential to efficiency of production and learning. In order to progress, time and thought must be invested in the quantity of decisions we make as well as the quality.
Fuck your funnel
August 30th, 2011Look, the argument has been made a million times, but that pie in the sky marketing funnel that flows fully connected from awareness to dollars hardly exists at all in this world. People are constantly perceiving the world around them in myriad places and on multiple levels of consciousness and understanding. We don’t even know all the variables that go into someone blinking much less deciding what product to by and which brand to buy it from — not to mention trying to control or isolate variables where key conversions happen. Some marketing funnels have been around so long that the fact that they are broken no longer matters; they are accepted. Fine, but don’t tell me my glass house has cracks when yours is just older, not less imperfect. Social media isn’t unique in the fact that it’s funnel is broken, it’s just new.
Why the click will become less important
August 29th, 2011Attention is the currency of the web, but clicks are the most trusted unit of value we exchange between buyers and sellers. But just like dollars, clicks only represent value; they are only valuable because we believe they are, as opposed to inherent value. Clicks are the same. We have essentially decided to trust that clicks represent value in order to build an economic system on the web. However, clicks are not the end all be all, they are simply the best we can do right now. The fiscal future of the web will be built around the ROI of attention investment: How much value is being delivered for each second/micro-second of your time? This value does tend to correlate with clicks, but it is not inherent to them. With the evolution of the digital economy, clicks will become less important as new units of value emerge that are more directly representative of the value exchanged.
Hugh Hefner: The original Tony Hseish?
August 28th, 2011Seriously, think about it. Hef was all about happiness. He wasn’t about politics or really even sex; other people made him into that. What he believed in right from the beginning was delivering happiness by offering people an experience previously shunned and excluded from his industry. His business was all about culture, and he never let go of what he believed in (whether you agree with it or now) even when under tremendous pressure to bend. Playboy is different from Zappos in a million ways, but I think there might be some surprisingly similarities between Hef and Tony.
Why the fact that your titles suck actually matters
August 27th, 2011When your title sucks, why would I read your first paragraph? And when your first paragraph sucks, why would I read your second paragraph?
Burying the lead is for failed journalists and bad fisherman. The value of any chunk of copy in the digital world must be obnoxiously aggressive. Show it if you got it, otherwise people will assume you don’t.
Did you know there are ads that people love to watch?
August 26th, 2011They’re called previews. Not everyone likes them, but when you compare previews at the movies to all other forms of advertising, I bet it’s not even close. Previews are ads that people love; so, what’s the secret? Two of the same secrets present in most successful advertising, just done extremely well: digestability and expectations. Previews are short, snippet summaries of the value a film has to offer, packaged up nicely into an entertaining segment that anyone can consume, interpret, and react to easily. They are also part of a larger movie-going experience, something the 13-dollar ticket-buying audience has already proven they enjoy. People wouldn’t pay to go watch two hours of previews, but when the previews are the opening act to the movie that everyone is excited about seeing, there is added expectation and emotion that is subconsciously invested into the preview. Digestability and expectations drive almost any human experience. And both qualities are ones that previews reach very well, and all marketers should strive to understand and leverage.
Why people dont make eye contact on the subway (and why its important for marketers)
August 25th, 2011The subway is an awkward environment. People are either super shy or super agressive, neither of which is fun to deal with. But the weirdest moments are when you make random eye contact with someone, usually followed by an immediate glance away to re-read that poster on laser surgery for the 20th time. But why don’t people make eye contact on the subway?
What’s the different between the subway and, say, a bar? Context. There is no context for a human connection on the subway. At a bar, everyone is there to socialize, and you know that people who are at bars are social people. On the subway, it’s a crapshoot of humanity, all awkwardly stuffed into a metal tube for different reasons and in different mindsets.
Context drives our experience with the world around us, especially the human world around us. For marketers, or anyone in business, the subway is an interesting case study of the power of context to confuse and disarm, which also makes it a case study of how to enlighten and encourage.
What will the next round of social media innovation look like?
August 24th, 2011Social media is still young, and the innovations we are seeing in the space are largely straightforward from a conceptual point of view. Facebook is college social life translated into the digital space, Linkedin is networking, Twitter is conversation. Social media innovation is still picking the low hanging fruit of our new digital world. But when all that fruit is gone and we must start reaching higher, what will the innovation look like? Social actions that can’t be translated into the digital space so directly and easily will need to be reproduced in a new way. These innovations will take much more creative thought and human study than the products we are seeing now.
Why we are all politicians
August 23rd, 2011I can’t think of anyone who loves politicians, but love em (if you’re out there) or hate em, we all need to understand how they function because to some extent we are all just like them. Politics has murky connotations, which is probably on purpose because the profession deals with something equally murky: the human mind.
Politicians have to navigate a world of human emotion, irrationality, and want, knowing what people want to hear, but also what’s possible. They acknowledge the weight and potential of each word and action they take, seeing consequences far further into the future than the average person. We all deal with those heavy realities and those future consequenes, but most of us don’t understand or foresee them as clearly.
We are all politicians in our daily lives, both personal and professional, but many times we just aren’t very good ones. Believe it or not, there might actually be something we could learn from them.