Baskin Dim Bulb branding advertising social media business strategy

The Yahoos At Yahoo

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Word has it that Yahoo is going to debut new branding in the fall, courtesy of a newly-hired CMO who has a newly hired coterie of her favorite branding gurus.  There's nothing surprising about this news: one of the first things new top marketers usually do is hire new vendors to reinvigorate or change the brand.  It's what they do.

Here's what usually happens next:

• Within about 18 months or so, she or he gets fired because the beautiful new branding didn't have any measurable impact on the business
• The exec swaps jobs with another similarly failed exec at another company
• They trade vendors, and hire new teams to do new branding, and
• Repeat

There's a thriving ecosystem to support this carousel, from large branding firms, like Interbrand and Landor, and major ad agencies, to smaller shops and one-person operations.  Everybody has a proprietary methodology, approach, or process to churn through client money; most, if not all, rely on lots of surveys and studies of various interested parties -- often called "stakeholder groups" -- to discover what they think about the brand.

Then some fresh, new branding is invented and revealed to the world via a company's web site, advertising, logo, and any other point where the brand touches said stakeholders (usually called "touchpoints," not surprisingly).

Here's the conundrum: it doesn't matter. 

I wrote an entire book about why this approach to communicating business purpose to consumers is not only outdated, but effectively damaging to the qualities of authenticity, relevance, and meaning upon which purchase decisions rely.  The traditional approach to branding, no matter how expertly or creatively realized via new media, is still an old, failed idea.  You need look no further than all the money the Detroit automakers have spent ($6 billion in 2008 alone) to see proof of this truism. 

There's absolutely nothing that a new branding campaign from Yahoo can tell its consumers, or would-be purchasers.  Period.  Carol Bartz, the new CEO, has effectively said as much, telling a reporter at an event in march "The best way to change the perception is to do a good job and then talk about it." 

The thing is, Yahoo doesn't need new branding to talk about whatever it's doing that's worth talking about.  It just has to do it and then talk about it, using all of the tools at its disposal to be authentic, relevant, and meaningful. 

What's worth talking about is operational reality, and the participation of third-parties that can confirm those truths.  The branding emerges from that stuff, and isn't a glossy label slapped over it.  And it can’t precede that stuff, either, which is exactly what I worry Yahoo is going to do.

Hiring the big gurus to do their branding thing belies a fundamental unawareness or misunderstanding of the reality that Ms. Bartz herself has referenced...or a blithe willingness to put the company's marketing way out ahead of what the business can deliver. 

I guess it doesn't really matter, in the end: people will choose to use or ignore Yahoo based on what its business delivers, irrespective of what the branding says.  The branding really only matters to the people it enriches. 

If the business succeeds, the branding folks will take part of the credit.  If profits don't materialize, the marketers and their agencies will walk away, their heads held high and certain in the belief that they were right (and consumers were wrong)...and then go do the same thing to the next company.

What a bunch of yahoos!

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Nutcase Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to connect unrest to Obama and America, after so vociferously accusing the Brits of meddling that they've pretty much quit the country (we've not been there officially since Iran's "students" gave our embassy staff the invitation to stay indefinitely).

He has no other choice, really.  As the spokesmodel for a totalitarian theocracy, his job is to keep the people in a constant state of fear, and thus the state constantly at war.  There's just no good explanation for the direct experiences and subsequent posts, tweets, and vids of violent repression unless:

1. The victims were really the perpetrators, and
2. The government was protecting everyone else

It's wacky logic, but it's nothing new.  The Nazis and Soviets used the strategy to turn much of the 20th Century into a mindless bloodbath.  The North Koreans are doing it right now, as are many of the more petty, but no less evil dictators who haunt the people of Africa.

It's a social strategy, too, in that it depends not as much on enforcement as it does on complicity; sure, there are the KGB, brownshirts, and Basij thugs who carry and use the guns and clubs, but it's the wider, general awareness of their existence that vests a citizenry in tolerating, and thereby maintaining, the Status Quo.  A specific instance of violence or other crime becomes less shocking because people sort of knew it could happen, or that it had already happened before.

This makes them at least passive supporters of a regime, in that they share a risk that any revelation of its crimes would reveal their guilt, too, whether prosecutable, or simply moral.  They might be desensitized to the evil, but they are unable to disassociate themselves from it. 

This is how dictatorships socialize their control.

This explains why all the tweets documenting the horrible events in Iran didn't really change anybody's actions, and why Ahmadinejad's lastest mad rants probably will: neither is a surprise.  Both fit into the ongoing narrative that everyone already knew.  Sure, terrible things happened, but foreign agitators were behind it.  They had to be. 

There's a bigger social milieu that goes beyond the mechanisms of chatting and sharing also explains why conversation itself is powerless to change this sort of Status Quo, irrespective of how advanced or engaging the social tools might be.  People can't talk themselves out of it.  Only force works, either directed from outside (as in the Allies bombing Germany into rubble, so it simply couldn’t fight anymore), or inside (the Soviet system no longer able to feed, clothe, or house its people).

From what I hear, the economics within Iran are not good, so maybe it's inching toward a collapse a la East Germany.  Depressed oil prices are probably far more important to the future of that country than Twitter or Facebook.  

Are We Serving Conversation?

Consider this: conversation is to selling what cooking is to eating. 

Process.

Not ingredients, nor consumption. 

How, not what. 

You wouldn't know it from the hype and confusion that surrounds the social media space, though.  Conversation is an absolute good, an ideal that, once achieved, spins off numerous lesser benefits.  It's a synonym for selling.  If only our businesses talked to consumers more often, the brands would be strengthened, and the bottom-lines improved.

Well, I've had some conversations in the last week with marketers -- my consumers -- that really made my stomach churn. 

It seems that lots of them buy into a Conventional Wisdom that goes something like this:

• Consumers have rejected the distribution methods we once used to sell stuff to them; they don't like ads, and they want to do much more talking and creating, and less of the watching, listening, or obeying that once constituted our approach of telling them why they should care about our brands
• So we have to migrate our efforts to new, conversational media, in which we no longer sell our brands, per se, but encourage people to talk about our branding.  They will propagate our marketing by their very act of being social, and our active engagement with them has a benefit that replaces our old-fashioned efforts at declaring benefits
• This POV doesn't stop with marketing; we can't really talk about social media without reconfiguring the way our entire companies do business.  So we aren't just stopping the crude selling our marketing used to deliver.  We need to get everyone else in the enterprise to change what they do, too

More than a few times last week, I suggested that while this was such an uber-cool new perspective on the cosmos, didn't we have get back to selling stuff?  One marketing expert told me "if you try to sell stuff, you won't."

Humm.

I asked another friend "does it make sense to tell your entire organization it has to change before you can sell something?" to which she responded "social media are transformative, so there's no other choice."

Ah.

I challenged a third contact that maybe consumers hadn't rejected the media of traditional ad distribution -- as they're behaving the same inert watching and consuming on YouTube and Twitter that they once did via broadcast TV -- but rather that they'd just given up on all the branding nonsense we'd thrown at them.  They didn't like ads because we'd stopped telling them stuff that mattered.

"No, today's consumers are different," he replied.

I get it.  The world is different, and marketers have to reconfigure their entire organizations, and redefine everything they themselves once did.  Only then will the ultimate purpose and benefit -- sales -- emerge from their efforts. 

I'm seeing lots of cooking.  Great recipes.  Inventive combinations.  Creative names for new dishes. 

Only have the cooks forgotten to stay focused on the ingredients, and neglected to figure out if anybody wants to eat what they're cooking?

The Last Shuttle

Boeing has just delayed test flights of its new 787 Dreamliner, and we should pay attention to what's going on, so we can tell our grandchildren: like NASA's space shuttle, this aircraft is the last of its breed. 

The 787 has at least three determinants of extinction written into its DNA:

First, its design.  The 787 is the most complex airplane ever conceived, which defies even the most basic paradigm of design science: solutions should get simpler over time, not more complicated.  Creating a new flying machine isn't the same as, say, improving the reliability of a coffeemaker, or even finding ways for car models to share platform parts.  But the physics of flight haven't changed since the Universe was created, let alone the first 777 rolled off the assembly line.  This new plane should do all the things it needs to do more effectively and efficiently, shouldn’t it? 

Now, it probably will also do a lot of things that previous models didn't do, and this raises an intriguing question regarding the viability of manufacturing complex technology products.  The space shuttle was outdated the minute the first one arrived at Cape Canaveral; of the many things it did, many could have been done better (and cheaper), combined thereupon, or delegated to handheld and/or ground-based operation.  There's a math here that suggests

• The more things a device tries to accomplish means
• The more complicated it becomes, which
• Makes its creation take longer (from inception to delivery), and
• Heightens the risk said creation will be outdated and overly costly by the time it arrives (not to mention more prone to failures)

My prediction is that the 797 will do less than the 787, not more.

Second, its production.  While qualifying as a manufacturing job rivaling the Tower of Babel in its complexity, Boeing chose to model its production after the Biblical story, and outsourced manufacturing to disparate locations around the world. 

I know.  It sounds insane, and probably only appeared sensible on some management consultant slides that reduced the distances between factories in Seattle and Outer Mongolia to nothing more than a VOIP chat.  Making an airplane is a tough, exacting deal on a good day -- and in one place -- and the experience of trying to manage and then assemble pieces from all over the world has proven to be a major obstacle for Boeing (and why the plane is already behind schedule).

Think of what it'll do to maintenance.  With more parts and systems relying on a greater variety of sources could mean that keeping the things flying will be a challenge.  I'm all for a full-employment act for airline unions, but I wonder if the carriers are fully prepared for what that workload might entail.  I'm sure Boeing is getting ready, because it senses a lot of profit in that work.  The smart money would be on the 797 having fewer "moving parts," both literally and figuratively.

Thirdly, the marketplace.  Let's face it, air travel as an activity has less promise than it ever had before.  Whether environmental impact, cost, inconvenience, or the ready availability of alternate means of communication ("hello, avatar, meet mine"), the world isn't going to need passenger planes like it once did.  Of course there will always be a need for them -- and lots of aging planes the need to get replaced -- but there are also a number of new options for those requirements: commuter jets. 

The 787 represents the pinnacle of achievement for a big, highly complex, massively difficult maintenance approach to building technology gizmos. 

I suspect it will never be topped. 

What Comes After Innovation?

For all of you dim bulbers who are students of business fads and buzzwords, I think we're about to witness one of the major turning points in our chosen field of dabble:

"Innovation" is about to get replaced with something else.  I don't know what it is, or when it'll happen, exactly.  But I can just feel it.  Can you?

Innovation has had a great run, mostly because it's so gloriously vague; in fact, it has a conflict inherent in its definition, as "to innovate" is to try to somehow update something that's already established.  That old/new thing is manna from heaven for a business fad because such dichotomies scream out for endless explanations, amplifications, and projects that require complicated gantt project management charts to describe what defies simple, declarative sentences.

Companies have been challenged on innovation much the same way as comrades in the Soviet Union were dared to be patriots.  It was never an end result that could be measured, but rather an aspirational ideal, pursued via an incessantly variable process that was never properly realized, or thereafter durable. 

Like party officials, a generation of management consultants and business school grads made a comfortable living lecturing companies on innovation and, like all really good buzzwords, companies incorporated it into their values, mission statements, messaging, and the other subtle strains of branding nonsense.  A generation of middle-managers had their job descriptions rewritten so they could focus on educating and monitoring their fellows on their innovation-ness.

Only now, most of the those middle-managers have been let go; companies large and small are well along dismantling the Berlin Wall of Innovation -- separating the purity of business fad from the realities of the marketplace -- because, like their brethren in East Germany, they effectively awoke one morning to see that there was no there there.  Lives aren't better.  Stuff doesn't get sold more often, or more profitably, just like all those mock-heroic propaganda posters couldn't distract a population from the unpleasant reality of their lives.   

What we're left with are the empty concrete high-rises, and the drab mediocrity of balance sheets leaden with a has-been fad. 

Innovation was never a stand-alone philosophy, religion, or management approach, any more than globalization, outsourcing, or customer-centricity.  It was simply the catchy patina of insight and poetry that smart marketers -- in academia, and in the services vendors who feed in the wake of its affirmation -- applied to the boringly constants and unsexy truths of business management. 

God forbid Harvard Business School or McKinsey admitted that the keys to effective competitive business strategy now were no different than they were 100 years ago; the details have changed, but that's the stuff of vocational training.  And there's no serious money in that business.

So as companies today are reevaluating the resources they commit to pursuing innovative purity, I'm sure the gurus are dreaming up the next fad and commensurate buzzword.  My pick: collaboration.  All the nonsense of social media -- from the technology, to the social and as-yet incomprehensible economics -- seems just tailor-made for something far more than a marketing department experiment.

Companies will get lectured on its importance above all else.  Graduate courses will be taught, and expert consultants will create immense slides and charts on what it means.  Perhaps the next generation of employees, though a smaller group, will get their lives committed to this higher ideal.  Everyone will focus on enabling it the "right" way.

Come to think of it, that's innovation!

Amazon’s Ad Contest

Amazon has announced a competition for customers to create their own 30-second video commercials for the brand.  Two winners will each get $10,000 Amazon.com Gift Cards, and their work will be screened at "a U.S. film festival." 

Forget for a moment that the whole point of a social media campaign like this isn't to create the ads themselves -- in Amazon's case, it has never needed ads of any kind before, and isn't likely going to get particularly good ones from the crowd anyway -- but rather to use the promotion to get the attention of a wider, non-UGC-creating audience. 

So do you think anybody cares about it?  The announcement got picked up in PR-Inside.com, the virtual ghost of the Seattle PI, and the leading source of the best ways to waste marketing dollars, Brandweek.  As of last weekend, there were a whopping 13 posts in the company’s forum on the topic.

I'm surprised that Amazon would do something so dull, but then again, it often does things that are really smart.  While other businesses are "experimenting" with the conversational thing by prompting consumer conversations about conversing, Amazon has been quietly building dialogs based on its core function: recommending and selling books.  Instead of running ads to make the usual brand promises, it has made its browsing and purchasing functionality just shy of perfect (at least compared to the messy, uneven experiences available at bricks-and-mortar retailers).

The branding we get from Amazon is all about doing things at the site, not trying to frame or describe them.  It knows that the conversation aspect of business arises from the conduct of commerce, not parallel or separate from it.  Its site isn't the most beautiful, but it simply works beautifully.  This is directionally relevant knowledge for all brands, not just those that retail online.

Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of opportunities for Amazon to do fun, engaging marketing.  I can think of at least three ways it could have conducted a UGC ad contest that would have been far better grounded in the reality and strength of its brand:

First, why not challenge reader communities to create ads for various genres?  Get mystery fans to produce a spot, and sci-fi readers another.  People usually feel strongly for their favorite sort of books, and are interested in sharing their obsessions with one another.  The resulting commercials could be redundantly similar, or diverge so wildly in content and/or construction that they could come from different companies.  Who'd care?  The point would be to get lots of readers involved, and use that engagement to possible attract potential readers who might get drawn to the Amazon platform by a genre interest vs. a generic one.

Second, why video and the outdated convention of a TV commercial?  It's kind of like the early Ford Motor Co. hosting a competition for the best horse riding.  Considering its aspirations for the Kindle Reader, how about a UGC contest for every historic media distribution tool?  Celebrate its digital book transmission with spots celebrating radio, kinescopes, dauggerotype photos, even print set by linotype?  What about hand-drawn and decorated pages on vellum?  This would position digital at the end of some historical path, and probably produce really interesting stuff.  Make history the topic, not just personal expressions of the company's branding.

Finally, wouldn't the cool challenge be to write something cool and compelling about a company that sells books?

How about those genre fans collaborate on a crowdsourced short story or something? Conversely, it could be a competition to scribble "the perfect sentence."  Think poetry, or a variety of written art forms.  This UGC would be a lot easier to update and share, and lots more people could get involved.  Why not allow every purchaser to contribute (or give shoppers a minimal discount if they pitch in)?

I suspect Amazon's ad contest is the result of them just not being good at doing this sort of nonsense, which is a credit to their business model.  But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to make it work. 

The Revolution Will Be Fetishized

Now that the refrains of "Twitter Revolution" and "the first uprising powered by social media" are fading into the distant memory that is 24 hours ago, we can start debating what impact, if any, it had (or is still having) on events in Iran.

Social movements are, well, social, by their very definition; people have been agitating and acting together since the platform tools to do so were quill pens, inkwells, and whispering in one another's ears.  Nothing new there.  So the first question to ask is whether new media changed the conduct or outcomes of the social event itself (i.e. in Iran). 

I'm not sure it did.  Residents of Tehran used technology to make one another aware of the protests that emerged last week, but the activities were hardly oblique secrets.  If there was a flashmob component to the marches, it was an extension of what could have been accomplished by other communications means; faster, perhaps, but not fundamentally different.

Did real-time posts convince otherwise disinterested people to get involved?  Perhaps.  Will it have made a long-term impact on perceptions and beliefs among non-participants?  Very possibly.  But again, these are impacts that could be achieved by any communications medium.  There’s nothing interactive or social about it.

It's interesting that despite the use of social media, copycat protests didn't immediately emerge in other Iranian cities.  There's no way of assessing that as a failure of social media, the success of the government's clampdown on it, or the simple fact that interest in political disobedience was limited to the folks in Tehran.  Those ex-Tehran protests started over the weekend, and could have been prompted by messages carried by donkey.

The thought-experiment riffs on the above are really intriguing, but I'm not sure they reveal anything.  So what if George Washington's troops had tweeted about their suffering at Valley Forge, or the Mensheviks had similarly described the cruelty of their Bolshevik brethren.  Would subsequent events have turned out differently? 

Such analogies are less illustrative tool, and more unanswerable question; there are lots of variables that separate "awareness" from "behavior," and the latest figures on social media usage suggest that the vast majority of people tend to like to watch, not act.   

Now, what about the impact social media have had on everyone else's experience?

This is a tougher issue to deconstruct.  We all saw the unmediated content of the protests as it was recorded at ground zero, but what did we learn?  Without context, they were just snippets from a narrative that escaped us.  The "voices" we heard from were qualified by their desire to be heard, and not any other authority; we got first-person opinion, not anything even close to first-hand reporting. 

In fact, social media didn't tell as much as it prompted interpretation; what little we learned directly originated in immediacy, and didn't necessarily lead to understanding.  We know no more today than we did when the crisis started.  We've just known less quicker.

And then there's the question of what we’ve done with that information.  Not much, from as far as I can tell.  Our participation, as spectators of events in Iran, amounts to a lot of tsk-tsking.  Have people patched together imagery, or timelines, or otherwise assemble the bits of information into coherent pictures (literally and figuratively)?  Did that information get shared with the folks back in Tehran in truly social give-and-take? 

Or is the big idea that we can color our Twitter profile pics green, to better show our support to, er, ourselves, as we watch the show?

If there's something really meaningful going on via social media right now, other than people trying to avoid the very real efforts of a very dangerous totalitarian theocracy that doesn't want its victims tweeting anybody, I want to know.   

Ultimately, I'm an optimist, and I hope that social media would make more of a difference.  Imagine if we'd had real-time tweets of ethnic cleansing in African or the Balkans, or abductees in our nation's rendition program could narrate their capture and transport.  People might actually demand investigations, if not outright action.  Or would they?  Again, these tidbits of fact are no secret, and have been shared via blogs, web sites, snail mail, and printed agendas for major global meetings. 

Here’s one for you: what if it were Florida in 2000?  A candidate wins the popular vote (vs. the Iranian pretender losing by 20 million or so), and then a court made up of unelected lifers decides that the other guy won.  I wonder if there'd been tweets of the protesters there would have been more protests...or a greater popular uprising?

We can get thrilled about the events in Iran being a social media phenomenon, but they aren't.  They were, and are, a reality phenomenon, and waxing poetic on the communications aspect of its description takes away from what's really going on.  It could be a minor blip in the history that dictatorship, or a country-changing event. 

Social media won't be responsible for either outcome.

Video Games Need Their Oscars

Some of the biggest, well-know brands in the video game world announced new titles at last week's E3 trade show in Los Angeles.  Maybe you've heard of Halo, Mario Bros., or BioShock but, unless you're a gamer, you probably know little else about them. Countless hours are spend enraptured by this varied, multi-billion-dollar industry, yet it still operates like a niche community.  An acquired taste. 

I think that video games need their Oscars.

I'm not talking about another awards show, per se.  The world doesn't need another pointless TV special, replete with strutting celebs, and lots of insider jokes and thank yous. Pouring slime on somebody is a nice touch, I'll have to admit, but all it does is help sell advertising time between segments.  It doesn't help the creative industry, per se.

No, I'm thinking about the early days of Hollywood.

Motion pictures were a struggling, new medium.  There were no classics in 1927, but rather lots of experimentation, cheap yucks, and not just a few really, really silly movies.  "Real" theatrical entertainment was live, and usually sans amplification. Flicks were popular foremost with kids and those adults who enjoyed such low culture pursuits. 

In other words, movies were the video games of the early 20th Century.  

Hence was born the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. What a glorious hoity toity title for an industry in desperate need of credibility.  Yet, while first and foremost a shamelessly brilliant publicity tool, the Academy's awards established a sense of standards and professional self-respect.

It also helped dimensionalize the supply chain, adding layers of effort and expertise to an end-product in which such work wasn’t always evident.  These motion picture thingees were complicated, and their production the work of artists, not just oddballs.

Compare this to what we know about most video games.  If our interest passes the "oh, I'm not one of those" litmus test, they still come across as oddly generic and inert.  Do we know about all the brilliant technology underpinning them?  The artistry in rendering, not to mention the creativity in character and plot development?  Where is recognition for the best game musical score, or sound effects mixing?

Sweden's University of Gotland's Game Awards do something like this every year, and I'm sure there are others, so there's lots of good thinking already out there worth copying. 

It seems like video games are ripe for their own big, global evening celebrating games, not the business of making titles, nor the nutcases who love playing them (yours truly included).

MyPlan For MySpace

MySpace has fired 30% of its workforce, or about 400 people, just as parent company News Corp. scrapped a $350 million plan to consolidate it in a new office with the other components of Fox Interactive Media. 

Most of the business coverage sites blame falling advertising sales and traffic gains by Facebook.  As you may know, News Corp. is busy implementing a strategic overhaul to combat these two issues, having recruited a new CEO for all its digital operations from AOL (an expert in falling ad sales), and one for MySpace from Facebook (adept at prompting visits that make it no money).

Think about this for a minute:

• AOL tumbled from a valuation of $164 billion when it was bought in the 1990s by Time Warner, to something under $6 billion today (TW is trying to dump it)
• In the meantime, services like Facebook and Twitter have captured an inordinate amount of consumers' time: Facebook users in the U.S. alone chalked up 13.9 billion minutes on the site in April, 2009, while the nearly 300 minutes on Twitter were an increase of 3,712% over the same period last year
• Facebook and Twitter haven't yet figured out how to make money.  Twitter's founders have said they don't even care to try

MySpace is failing to make money competing with companies that give stuff away for free?  Humm.

Talk about a thankless proposition.

I've got to say that Rupert Murdoch deserves a lot of credit for taking it on.  It's scary that trying to make money is such an exceptional idea.  Doesn't anybody remember the Dot Com Bubble?  I bet it must drive Murdoch nuts that none of the business media coverage, nor expert [sic] analysis, ever points out the dichotomy of a for-profit endeavor competing in an industry that isn't really an industry, but more of a free lunch.  What are they competing on?  Favorable media clips?

So maybe MySpace shouldn't look to said "industry" for ideas on what to do...any more than it should have looked to the archaic business of ad placement as a way to accomplish anything more than muck up its U/I.  Here's what it might consider instead:

• Find a purpose.  Lose the "a place for friends" tagline.  It's like subheading Ford with "vehicles for driving," or "Chicago, a place where there are buildings."  Then, define a purpose for the the space, or series of purposes.  Think something between a political campaign and a video game: the site's foundation in music might be a good place to start.  Dare to declare it, like "we’re going to find a million bands" or "listen to endless music," or whatever
• Build a community.  The latest reports on bloggers and Twitter users who create content for social media are far less than inspiring, and Facebook's lackluster user turnout to vote on a major structural change suggests that 1) most users are watchers, and 2) their presence is less about being in a community, and more like sitting in front of a TV watching Gilligan's Island.  A purpose for MySpace could be the prompt for visitors to actually do things that are unique and/or exclusive to the site.  Make membership mean something
• Nix the exploitation.  Stop the presses...MySpace isn't an ad channel, it's a place where people do things (check old tagline for a hint).  The opportunity is to monetize their behavior, not try to distract from it with advertising.  If the site were a place that people did things that had a purpose, you might actually be able to make those activities profitable.  The flip side would be an opportunity to clean up all the ads that currently clutter the site.

I know I'm just throwing out the thoughts of a dim bulb, and the details behind my three bullet points would be many and complex.

But the bright bulbs haven't really produced such shining results, have they?

Bandwagons Are Boring

Jack and Suzy Welch opined on their new love of Twitter in a recent international issue of Business Week, and I couldn't help but think of two rather snippy things:

First, can anybody say bandwagon?  Their discovery of Twitter came about as they were researching the article on it, and they found it useful to tweet people about tweeting.  This gave them the opportunity to mention a few Twitter handles for similarly famous celebs (like Suze Orman), and describe that you really have to use it in order to appreciate just how cool it is to use.

Wow.  So here's the guy who takes credit for inventing the modern industrial conglomerate telling us that his most profound insight into Twitter is that it's an in club?  You'd think Jack would riff a bit on how Twitter might have changed what he did at GE, for good or bad.  Really give it some analysis.  Similarly, Suzy probably has knowledge of hundreds of company case histories from her days at the Harvard Business Review, so I bet she has some real insight into the implications for micro-blogging.

Nope.  We get none of that from her.  Nothing novel, nothing particularly insightful or different.  No exploration about the phenomenon that 1) makes no money, 2) replaces no operational function, and 3) has really weird stats on who, how many, and why anybody uses it.  Instead, they both wrote an article about how much fun they were having with Twitter, and Business Week thought it important enough to print. 

Which brings me to my second gripe: so much of the commentary on business today is just so boring.

Between the economic meltdown and all of the transformation going on (outsourcing, environmentalism and, yes, social media, among other phenomena), you'd think the sage titans of industry would be:

• Challenging their very presumptions
• Daring one another to blow up their old models, and invent new ones
• Questioning rules and givens of operations
• Debating every notion
• Giving new consideration to old ideas, and repeatedly vetting new ones before anybody embraces them

Nope.

Instead, we get platitudes and drivel, whether from Welch, or Ted Turner, Richard Branson, or any of the other gurus who get booked on TV business shows, or quoted in magazines.

Think about it.  When was the last time you heard one of the business celebs say something truly amazing or revolutionary (instead of their advice that we all strive to be amazing revolutionary)?  In fact, a cover story for the international issue of Time recently focused on how Twitter will change our lives, yet the story was full of qualitative, buzzword-rich (that means heavy use of "innovation"), context-vacant commentary; Twitter is a miracle because, well, because it is! 

We should probably be suspicious of any event or supposed trend that allows everyone to embrace it without actually saying anything about it (i.e. being aware of any context, or providing real perspective beyond their own subjective wonder).  There's probably a mathematical ratio here: the more well-know celebs weighing in similarly on an issue, the less likely they're telling us anything useful. 

Bandwagons are just so boring.