2010

Social Media Risks: Restoring trust when your brand mascot is a killer (whale)

March 2, 2010

Tweet The challenge of being authentic on social media can be scary. Many organizations are afraid of being ‘on’ social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where they (or their representatives) are accessible and active in real time. They worry that participating in real time on social media platforms will expose them as unthinking, out […]

Read the full article →

Useful research, if you are a gang member

March 1, 2010

Tweet Oh how I love empirical research– the chance to answer burning questions, with real data, so that you can act more effectively. Consider this new tidbit of info that I picked up over the weekend: Full beer bottles break with less force than empty ones, so if you are going to hit someone in […]

Read the full article →

What Keeps Women From Moving Up the Ladder? Not “experience”, but corporate laziness

February 24, 2010

Tweet This just in from Forbes Magazine — yet another article about why “women” don’t get promoted. (hat tip to my friend @ShaunRSmith) Orit Gadiesh and Julie Coffman, in Why Women Don’t Make It Up The Ladder summarize several of the arguments that are advanced to explain why so few women, relative to men, get […]

Read the full article →

Why So Much Anger at the Girl Scouts?

February 22, 2010

Tweet Ever since I poked the beehive back in August with my post about Walmart and Girl Scout cookies, my blog and I have been receiving angry comments from people who just hate the Girl Scouts. It’s one thing to be angry at Walmart, but the Girl Scouts? I don’t understand… Why is there so […]

Read the full article →

Fix the Brand of Men’s Figure Skating: Send Out the Clowns, and get me Johnny Weir

February 19, 2010

Tweet The ‘Brand of Men’s Figure Skating’ is broken. The brand lacks coherence, it isn’t compelling, and sometimes it isn’t even attractive. And it’s all because of what those guys wear. In an ideal world, the Brand of Men’s Figure Skating reflects a hearty frisson between between the brand’s two defining attributes: Athleticism & Artistry. […]

Read the full article →

Girl Scouts Rebrand Their Cookies: “Every Cookie Has A Mission”

February 18, 2010

Tweet The Girl Scouts have been busy with their organizational re-branding efforts. With the start of the 2010 Cookie Season, they have a new branding campaign specifically designed to make Girl Scout cookies meaningful. Back when I wrote the post Wal-Mart Knocks Off the Girl Scouts, about Walmart entering into competition with the Girls Scouts […]

Read the full article →

Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand

February 17, 2010

Tweet What do fledgling entrepreneurs need to know about creating authenticity? And what, if anything, does this have to do with cupcakes? I had a chance to try to boil it all down to a few key ideas when I taught two classes of an undergraduate Entrepreneurship course at NYU’s Stern School of Business. My […]

Read the full article →

Readers’ Question: Can we shift to more authentic communication?

February 11, 2010

Tweet Last weekend Bob Sutton and I got a pair of emails from readers who are frustrated by a specific kind of inauthentic participation within their organization. They wanted some ideas on how to name this behavior, in the hopes that labeling the behavior would help them get a handle on it. Here’s a snippet […]

Read the full article →

Ponies in the Snow

February 10, 2010

Tweet Heaven help you if you are a business that I care about, even if your business is no business of mine. I just finished up a 24-hour email exchange with the folks at the Virginia Camp where my daughters and I do our mother-daughter riding weekends, and where they’ll be going to camp this […]

Read the full article →

Girl Scouts: Limiting Cookie Sales by Strengthening Their Brand?

February 8, 2010

Tweet Good news for you and your Thin Mint Addiction! The Girl Scouts are making it easy to find out where those dang cookies are being sold! (Now I don’t have to drive to Walmart and get the cheaper but less meaningful generic imitations!) The Girl Scouts have an online cookie locator– just type in […]

Read the full article →