Entries Tagged 'marketing' ↓

When an organization is still in the small, startup phase, it’s not hard to have employees that each feel like they have a stake in the company and are willing to rally behind it. As the company grows, however, subsequent employees get distanced from management and from company success, so it is easier for them to treat the job less like their own undertaking, and more like a paycheck. Too many employees treating their work as just a job will end up affecting company culture and ultimately, product. Identifying and rewarding torchbearers helps to ensure that the cultural message is effectively conveyed and carried out at all ranks.

Last week, while I was making sure my privacy settings were fined-tuned after reading all the buzz about Google Buzz, I stumbled onto a neat feature of Google Accounts that I hadn’t seen before. It’s called Dashboard, and it’s a great concept: most of the information that Google has accumulated about you is collected in one place, and you’re given options to manage how you share it all.

If you’re like me, you have almost a dozen Google services — Gmail, Picasa, Voice, Reader, Checkout, Alerts, Analytics, etc. Making sure that everything is set up correctly and not inadvertently exposed to the world is an otherwise painful task that is made easy with Dashboard. By scrolling down and glancing at the summaries of your various services, you can make sure that the pictures of Grandma’s birthday party aren’t visible to the world.

So, despite some other privacy setbacks (really what were they thinking with Buzz?), I think this is a leap forward for a company to expose the data they have about you and give you choices about what they do with it. Imagine the grocery store doing this with your preferred card or your phone company with the data they collect from your wireless bill (and location data they get from your GPS). It’s great when consumers have the choice about how their information is used, and kudos to Google for getting this one right. They still have some work to do given how much info we end up giving them, but definitely a step in the right direction.

The most successful companies are the ones that work every day toward building what I call a “culture of ideas”. Google is the prime example of this — if you work at Google, you’re encouraged to spend 20% of your work time on ideas that interest you. Think about this — Google “loses” one day a week of productivity from their workers while they pursue projects that they find interesting!

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

The New York Times today has an article about how YouTube is transforming the nightly news. As more high-quality, user-generated content is uploaded to YouTube by professional news networks, semi-professional hobbyists and amateur aspiring Ron Burgundys, the potential for customized, localized news delivered directly to your computer whenever you want it becomes a reality. Google, which owns YouTube, has already built out Google News to deliver fresh and personalized news that they’ve harvested from news sites around the web, and YouTube video news is a logical next step.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim.

I have a ton of photos that I’ve taken over the years, and managing them is a constant challenge. Part of the problem is simply the fact that there are so many great things you can do with digital photos — view them online, make cool photobooks, create collages, order prints, send them to friends and family, etc. There are many different applications that are useful for photos, and while some of them come close to doing it all, there still isn’t one solution that works for everything.

I just got off the phone with 1-800-Flowers.com. I had tried to get flowers sent to the hospital yesterday, but they failed to deliver them, so I canceled the order. I called back today to try to re-enter the order with a different address, and finally gave up after speaking to several apathetic employees and getting left on permanent hold. The pivoting issue was a minor one related to a gift code, but their seeming unwillingness to even attempt to solve my problem ultimately caused me to go elsewhere.