Servant of Chaos

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

If you could only read five articles online each week – where would you turn? Would you turn to the mastheads, to Twitter or to your RSS reader? Would you wait for the updates to come or would you go and seek them?

I’d be lost myself, without my trusted Feedly reader … it’s become my must have start to the day. Interestingly, however, I have yet to try it out as an iPhone app – even though it is installed. There is something that I prefer about the big screen – but then, that may change at any moment.

I hope you enjoy these five must-reads from last week!

1. It has been an amazing week – for some unforgettable. So I’d like to lead out with this powerful anti-gun rant by Jason Alexander. Well worth a read.
2. On a lighter note, Mandi Bateson shares 3 easy ways to annoy a social media expert guru. Awesome and funny.
3. Many brands and businesses treat social media like any other form of media – something to yell at your audience. Robin Grant suggests that social is a waste of time unless you can engage your audience.
4. Years ago I wrote that “blogs were the new CVs” – but Doug Gross now asks are social media making the resume obsolete? What do you think?
5. Every wondered how Wikipedia should fit into your marketing strategy? David Meerman Scott shares some suggestions and a link to the CIPR guide for PR best practices.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

This week is like a bag of mixed treats – delicious snacks that you can savour individually or dive in by the handful. Some are good for your brain, some for your heart and others will make you want to get out and try things for yourself.

I Hope you enjoy reading these – and that you find something that hits you in the right spot.

1. Have you ever wondered why your press release doesn’t get an airing with the media? Trevor Young may have the answer for you! Take a look at his Five Tips for Pitching the Media.
2. I used to work with someone who was difficult to interview. Knowing that I was going to write our conversations up, he’d try and talk as if he was writing. It was weird. As Bill Delaney says, Talking Isn’t Writing.
3. Does your brand have a reason for being beyond the profit motive? Maybe you should rethink what you do and consider storybranding, says Jim Signorelli.
4. Stories remind us that we are human – fallible and mortal. Valeria Maltoni shares some of the cultural assumptions that underpin the way that we construct our most important stories.
5. The always brilliant Ann Handley shares a personal reflection on the history of the future – life with and without your loved ones. Read it. It will make you cry as well as smile.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

As I surf the web, I normally keep a few tabs open with links to the best stories I find. But last week, there were so many that I just had to start writing this post early – or risk Chrome crashing through over work. These were the best five I could find. Enjoy!

1. There are many who analyse, rate, rank and make decisions based on various “measures” of influence – from Klout to Kred and back again. But Danny Brown suggests that it’s not influencers we seek but instigators.
2. Most businesses claim to seek out and nurture creativity – yet, in practise, creativity in the corporation can prove to be not only risky but career limiting. David Burkus takes it further, suggesting that traditional organisational structure – hierarchies – kill creativity. Does this gel with your experience?
3. In Australia, a price on carbon came into effect over the last weekend. Will it mean that our country will be transformed into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max style landscape? Jim Parker shares his vision of this new world order – and it doesn’t look pretty.
4. I have always thought that great marketing tells a story. But Jim Signorelli explains exactly why marketers should care about stories.
5. Can you use social media to find a job? Dave Cutler shares five personal branding best practices.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

This week I’m all about creativity – what makes it, what bakes it and what fakes it. Sometimes we need to follow our hearts and sometimes we need to think through problems and issues in more complex ways.

1. Remember Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class? At its heart was a concept that I loved – and deeply wished to believe in. But it always seemed a little hollow for me. Frank Bures explains why in the Fall of the Creative Class.
2. “The best art is neither socialist nor indifferent to the needs of others”. Ben Irvine writes persuasively about the social entrepreneurial role of artists – and may just change the way you think of innovation and the role of creativity.
3. I’ve been loving Saul Kaplan’s The Business Model Innovation Factory – but as he points out in this post – the hardest question any leader can ask is one we must all ask ourselves.
4. To be creative means to be fearless – or rather it means taking your fear and channelling it in a different way – away from paralysis and into action. Amber Naslund shares her thoughts On Fearlessness.
5. One of the most compelling transformations that are driving our behaviours and sense of identity is the notion of trust. Just think about who we trust and why. Venessa Miemis asks how do we trust each other without proof?

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

Quite a mixed bag of topics this week … with posts on innovation, SEO and Edgerank, collaboration and crowdsourcing. But you’ll find each of these articles useful in creating customer value and generating strategic advantage for your business or clients. Well worth a quick scan or even a deep dive.

1. One of the great ruptures that is coming or already upon most businesses is the great demographic shift that will see Gen Y succeed the incumbent Baby Boomer generation. Rather than controlling Gen Y, Sarah Miller Caldicott suggests we need to embrace their need for progress in order to drive innovation.
2. One of the challenges for marketers is keeping up with the changes that are constantly being made to Google’s search engine or to Facebook’s Edgerank algorithms. And Google’s recent changes (code named Panda and Penguin) will have a huge impact on those who have focused on quantity of inbound links rather than quality content. Craig Wilson explains the impact on link building for SEO.
3. And speaking of Facebook Edgerank, Ken Mueller suggests that we should keep creating and sharing great content, understand what and when we are posting on Facebook and work to really understand what Edgerank is about. He says its a common sense approach to Edgerank.
4. Anyone who starts a business blog post quoting Jay-Z is alright by me. And Trevor Young’s article on collaboration makes it even better.
5. Can companies bring crowds to their causes? The folks over at Realized Worth say yes – and remind us all that Facebook is a tool not a strategy.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

Towards the end of each summer I start thinking about the joys of cooler weather that come with winter. But last summer in Australia was so wet, I really was just waiting for summer to start when winter abruptly arrived. And normally winter is a time of reading – but over the last couple of weeks – a series of colds and fevers has kept me well away from such lovely pursuits. So it was nice over the weekend to start feeling better – and to find that so many smart people around the world keep sharing their insight, intelligence and creativity. It’s like a pep-shot for creative lethargy. Hope you enjoy these:

1. In marketing, we have become much more focused on niche networks and the power of influence. Neil Perkin explains why you should choose your friends carefully. Especially when they are Friends not friends
2. Kris Hoet ponders the nature of value and the power of creative work. Sharing a video of TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Lee Clow, he asks how do we create value and value creative?
3. Are you on Twitter? Does it have a strange hold over you? Does it make you feel alive, connected and energised? Kate Carruthers suggests that this constant ambient connection is creating a new kind of normal
4. We all talk about the power of stories – and their importance in the life of a brand. But how do you create a brand with values that allow stories to resonate with your customers and audiences? Jonah Sachs has some ideas
5. Do we want fame or do we want community? Most brands confuse the two – pushing for fans to “like” their Facebook pages or subscribe to their newsletter. But the two are very different. Chris Guillebeau explains some of the distinctions.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

I was out most of last week with a bad, bad cold. It seems it’s going around (ie the really viral). But I was still able to find a few gems to read in between heavy nanna naps.

1. Some snappy writing and a barb in the tail of Jim Parker’s writing. He explains why journalists fear academics and shines a light on the process of opinion making and influence wielding in the Australian media. You’ll love it.
2. Greg Verdino takes us behind the scenes with the American Express OPEN Forum and shares the four principles that keep it fresh and focused.
3. Is branding something that only your customers experience? What if you treated your employees first? In Let’s Go to Work, Katie Chatfield talks about what this might mean.
4. Despite our interest in authenticity, it can be hard to live by. Mark Schaefer shares a recent conference experience and explains why.
5. Is Facebook the New Big Mac? Tim Longhurst casts an accusatory eye across the over-hyped Facebook IPO to tease out the sense, if not the dollars, underlying the valuation and market expectation.

Oh and if you are looking for one more, here’s my post on the future of work and the need to think like a teenager.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

This week there seems to be plenty of talk about disruption … about what it means and what the implications are. And while this feels true, disruption has always been the natural state in the creative industries (including advertising). It’s just that the waves of disruption now overlap and seem to hit us from all directions. Some of these articles may help you navigate this chaotic world.

1. Stories can have a powerful transformative effect on people and on brands – but many still fail to see the link with social media. Meghan Biro explains why brand humanization is not a social media fad.
2. It used to be easy to measure things when the only way to access the web was via a browser (let’s face it, WAP was a dud). But these days our experience is fragmented across a variety of branded and non-branded elements and varies according to the way in which we CONSUME that experience – TVCs, radio, print, website, app, social network etc. Is it any wonder we need help influencing the customer journey?
3. On a similar topic, Michael Brito steps us through some of the steps required to shift from traditional approaches to become more of a social business.
4. One of my favourite ways of explaining difficult concepts is through pop culture references. And Veronica Jarski shares some powerful business lessons from four Marvel Superheroes. Love it!
5. Edward Boches suggests that CMOs (and the rest of us) have to become a whole lot more tech savvy. With digital audiences and audience-focused platforms continuing to grow, the digital havoc will continue.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

Each week, as I click links, follow trails and read through my ever burgeoning list of RSS feed, I leave tabs open in my browser. That often means that I will have 60-70 tabs open at one time – which also means that my browser is slow to load each morning. In an ideal world I read, cull and move on – with only the best tabs left still open at the end of the week. It is from this list that I draw my five must-read posts. Here are a few that I just can’t seem to close:

1. In my mind there is no doubt that Search and all its variants is under pressure. We are slowly but surely coming back to our trusted networks to source knowledge, resolve issues and decide on the things that we buy. And because if this changing behaviour, it’s I also believe the interest graph is the future of social commerce 
2. And on that subject, as “the social customer” becomes clearer in our marketing lenses, it will no doubt require new ways of organising our businesses. Michael Brito shares this presentation on the shift to social business
3. We’re not just seeing a massive behavioural shift in the marketplace – we are also seeing a significant demographic shift. Augie Ray reminds us that the Gen Y tidal wave is on the horizon – and will bring with it even more discontinuous change. Time to dust off the longboard
4. How do you build your blog into one of the leading sites for your industry? Valeria Maltoni shares some of the secrets that have made her Conversation Agent site so successful
5. Remember when you weren’t so good at your chosen profession? Sometimes you need to work through some skills and build your capabilities before you can truly deliver for your employer, clients or customers. Sean Howard reminds us that you will suck, deal with it.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

I was pretty excited during the last week to read the great insight and ideas that are appearing again. It is nice to see some deeper levels of consideration and analysis appearing in articles across the web – rather than the more simplistic commentary that clogs up our brains and bandwidth. I hope you enjoy these stimulating posts!

1. We tend to trust what people tell us. Whether they are people from agencies, consultants that we are working with or friends, colleagues – or even competitors. But just because someone says something, doesn’t make it true. In the world of digital and social there’s a lot of bad advice floating around. Craig Wilson asks, what’s the price of bad advice?
2. Often we think about the behaviour of people – our customers, our employees and so on. But we often overlook the larger, connected behaviours of groups. Mark Earls suggests that we are missing the point and that we need to think about behaviour beyond the individual. Awesome.
3. And on the subject of “awesome” – this. Read it and weep in agreement. Understand it and know that the path ahead in your career is full of challenge. And then proudly go forth preaching the gospel according to Olivier Blanchard.
4. When it comes to managing a social media crisis you need to keep a level head. And one person who knows how to keep their head when many others are losing their is Matthew Gain. Here are his five best ways to respond to a social media attack.
5. It’s great to see creative industries ramping up on Newcastle, NSW. Gordon Whitehead shares the news that a new screen industry group has been started up and they’re looking for script ideas. Pull that dusty script out of the drawer and get about the Film Republic.