photo from Donald McMichaelWhile I never going into depth about the finds, I do encourage you check them out if they sound interesting.
OK, now I didn’t see this coming…but then again I tend not to multitask. But if you do and one of your habits is to surf the web while watching television do you tend to hit the sites of commercials that interest you? Come on be honest. Well we might not hit the suggested site but a recent study shows that TV commercials influence the terms one uses to search on websites like Google and Bing. A connection that isn’t supported in the media support service structures of most companies. “Right now, most marketers have one agency for TV, and a different agency for online searches. They should seriously consider integrating those two functions,” said Ken Wilbur, a marketing professor at Duke and one of the reports co-authors.
This post is from Greg Satell (DigitalTonto.com) and dives into reemergence of professional content. You know the highly research, scrubbed, and polished product from more traditional media companies. What’s driving it and does it mean the end of crowdsourced and backyard crafted material? Probably not, but checkout Greg’s take on entire eco-system.
There has been a lot of noise over the last several months made by people mashing up the Business Model Canvas with other business analysis to craft “proprietary” analysis stacks [methods]. In this post Alexander Osterwalder, the key driver behind the Business Model Canvas, steps forward to lend his insight to, as he put it, keep others from going down the wrong path. If you are not familiar with his work I suggest that you check it out. I find it to be a great way to think about, test, and improve a business prospect for success or reinvention.
I put a quick status update on LinkedIn concerning this the other day. In short if your focus is on crafting a small highly connected network you might want to checkout this article. It makes a case for pushing into new relevant networks. By doing so you exponentially increase the potential value of you network. I said ‘potential’ because you still have to know how to care and feed it if it is to produce the results you desire. Exactly how to manage you network is beyond the scope of the article but if you are interested in learning more about it I suggest checking out Keith Ferrazzi’s work.
Steve Blank takes a look at how the expansion in the number of VC firms has resulting in anything but a uniformed standard of professionalism. The most value destructive of these is the fact that often there is no avenue for portfolio companies to bring overseeing partner problems to light. The company’s incentive to workout any problem is huge because they face death if left unresolved. The VC firm on the other hand as 10 to 30 other active investments thus can push off a company’s discontent because they have a large enough pool of potential success to bury the failure. What to do? See Steve’s post and his blog for a Sand Hill veteran’s insights.