Business Insight Zone

I’ve been fishing on the Internet. Here are some bullet points for your delectation:

• Who says print magazines are dead? You just have to find the right niche, like Uptown has. [Belatedly, on Saturday: I forgot to give the appropriate hat-tip to Chartreuse.]
• “When you do what I do, you expect to be covered in mud.” That’s Baz Luhrmann, talking about the critical reactions to his new film epic, Australia.
• Writing on WorldChanging, my friend Jon Lebkowsky talks about the “Evolution of the Web,” and touches on a simple but vital point: “For businesses, though, the web is no longer just about sales and marketing . . . All business is moving to the web — not just sales and marketing, but all business processes.” It’s easy, if you spend much time reading about social media, to think that all social media is social-media marketing. Jon reminds us that it’s much more than that, while also making apt comments about the loss of corporate control that seem to jibe with thoughts of my own.
• Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research has a nice post on “How to be a human.” In it, he makes an observation that matches everything I’ve ever experienced as a consumer, yet somehow remains mysterious to many companies in their marketing efforts: “When people treat me like a human and not a ‘marketing target,’ I like that. Not only that, when I make a human connection with somebody, whether it’s the client building a social application strategy or the person checking me in for my flight, it goes better.” Seems simple, right? Yet as Josh also points out, for many companies, “treating people as a mass is more efficient than treating them as humans.” More efficient, but not more effective. How long will your company wait before it realizes this distinction?

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Image via trialsanderrors.

Category: Internet, Marketing & Sales, Media