The Cluetrain Manifesto, 10 Years Later - A Conversation with Doc Searls - Valeria Moltoni

This is the mother of all conversations, to borrow from a title to a post Doc Searls wrote, which I link to down below. He's among my personal heroes for thinking about the buyer's side - and doing something about it. Something hopefully radical and, if you're paying attention, really important. He writes about independence, and about providing tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations. Personal tools for people to collect their own data, control it, share it selectively, assert their own terms of service (TOS), and give them means to express their own demand in the open market. In the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto he writes about these points and says: base relationship-managing tools on open standards, open APIs (application program interfaces), and open code. It's what he calls the Intention Economy.

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A Plan To Invent Marketing for Today - MIT

Click here to read an excellent article from MIT Sloan School of Management written in 2008 proposing seven strategies that make marketing relevant and rigorous to-day. 

IDEO's Tim Brown on Using Design to Change Behavior - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Many large-scale phenomena are the sum of individual actions — sometimes millions or even billions of them. Apple's recent celebration of 10 billion songs downloaded represents 10 billion choices made by consumers to download a song rather than buy it in other formats. In the healthcare space, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported a 50 percent drop in respiratory infections in children, a drop attributable (in part) to the group's campaign to educate millions of children to change their behavior: To wash their hands. But what does it take to bring about such mass behavior shifts? Are there approaches that businesses could use, too, to influence behaviors on a micro level, and gain benefits on a macro one?

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10 steps to customer journey mapping - Mapping out customer experience excellence

A product or service is merely a means to an end. The real deeper value lies in the story attached. I don’t want to own a coffee maker - I need to wake up early with a little help from a cup of coffee. I don’t want to use a train - I want to get home to my wife and children. I don’t want to go to a store and buy a stereo set - I just want to listen to my favourite rock music when I’m home, it makes me unwind after work. Unfortunately, most organisations are not capable of listening to stories. And this is why the gap between "inside and outside" has grown too wide. To stay competitive and survive the changes organisations are presently facing, they need to reassess the way they are structured, function and build relationships with customers. Closing the "reality gap" between organisations and people (employees and customers alike) should be the number one priority. And for this we need a new set of skills, methods and tools.

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Why Crowd-wisdom fails businesses

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki popularized the notion that, under the right conditions, canvassing the aggregate opinions of many people could be more efficient than relying on the expertise of a few. Jeff Howe applied this approach to decision-making using the buzzword ‘crowdsourcing’ in a Wired article in October 2006. Crowdsourcing assumes that customers know best what they want and need. Hence, more heads are better than one. We discuss why crowdsourcing may fail in a few important situations that concern social media.

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