Regime of Humbug

Want to know where government's heading?

"Read Ayn Rand," says the chair of the world's biggest hedge fund firm, Ray Dalio.

"This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers," Dalio says.

"It wants to, and probably will, shift the environment from one that makes profit makers villains with limited power to one that makes them heroes with significant power."

Spirits, where are you when we need you?

The Content Marketer's Dilemma

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

— Henry Ford

What's a content marketer to do?

Scrape the web for feedback to create content customers search for? Or create content based on your vision of a better future?

We all know the merits of creating content based on web feedback.

Study upon study shows customers begin their "buying journey" by Googling familiar keywords... prefer those brands whose content they find... and find that content because it's stuffed with those keywords and conforms to their notions of a "buyer's guide."

And we all know the pitfalls of creating content based on a vision.

That kind of content isn't stuffed with all the keywords customers know and doesn't otherwise meet their expectations of a "buyer's guide." So they never find it; or, if they do, don't click on it. Like the tree that falls in the empty forest, content based on a vision makes no sound.

How do you create content?

Justice. There's No App for That.

The sides are forming: a union of haves versus a confederacy of have-nots. As Yogi Berra said, it's like déjà vu all over again.

So, during the holidays:

• Enjoy a little peace. Come January 21, peace is over.
  
  
• Subscribe to a source of real news. Deceit will be the government's weapon of choice.
  
  
• Be kind to women, gays, minorities, refugees and immigrants. Most wear targets on their backs.
  
  
• Prepare to mobilize. And I don't mean your iPhone.

Inch by Inch

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has always found ways to leverage technology—whether e-commerce, rockets, drones or cloud computing—to give his company's flywheel another jolt.

Who doesn't want to find the profit-turning flywheel Bezos runs, the one Jim Collins describes in Good to Great?

But the truth is, you don't find it; you cultivate it.

"No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop," Collins says. "There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution."

A flywheel is not the creation of the fast-buck "mercenary" (Bezos' term), but of the "missionary"—the patient, purpose-driven businessman or woman.

Yesterday

Does your meeting need a chief experience officer?

Samantha Whitehorne answers yes in Associations Now, and identifies three roles for the CXO:

• Attendee advocate. The exec who spots and fixes "small mistakes that could frustrate attendees."


• Listener-in-chief. The exec who studies live audience feedback and recommends adjustments in real time.


• Brand guru. The exec who polices branding before, during and after the event.

To Whitehorne's list of duties, I'd add:

• Guardian of truth. The exec who goads planners to up their game.

Want the truth? Attendees have zero tolerance for mediocrity.

Salesforce.com proves that fact in its new study, State of the Connected Customer:

• 80% of B2B customers say they expect real-time response
• 75% say they expect providers to anticipate their wants
• 70% say technology makes it easy to take their business elsewhere
• 66% say they'll abandon you if treated like a number

It's easy for planners to pine for yesterday, when the audiences were pliant; the competitors, pipsqueaks; the margins, porcine. But today's audiences want more.

"Excellence, quality and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves," Disney animator Ed Catmull says in Creativity, Inc.

The time is now to appoint a CXO for your event.

Indeed, it was yesterday.