Bad news is the quickest thing on earth and it carries more weight for consumers. Why? There must be an explanation.

Trust in the source is a significant key to processing information. News from known peers with relevant experience usually tops the influencer tree.

Perhaps it's safer to trust a negative? Perhaps positives are more often expressed as purely personal preferences whereas negatives are more often referenced to a particular cause.

There is certainly room for the examination of negative messaging w.r.t. products & brands.

Doing more important than talking.
Effort on eliminating negative reports.

I'm tired of the words marketing and strategy. People with status issues are scared of being called a salesman and yet at the end of the day that's what business is all about - selling stuff. Lets set aside the decades of trying to elevate it above its station and cut out all the c#@p that lets charlatans and the poor of talent waste our time and money.

Metrics - there's another red herring. Marketing agencies across the world are looking enviously at the self confidence of management consultants and investment banks and drawing the conclusion that solution to their insecurity is metrics. The possibility that this fundamental error may need to be explained is a very depressing.

The great heroes of selling stuff were the wild west preachers. They had belief! Their strengths weren't necessarily traits that nice people would like to foster in their children but they sure shifted the product. Bluster, bravado, charm, self aggrandisement, self belief they had it all and they rolled up their sleeves and took it to the people.

I've been reading a little about WOMM (Word of Mouth Marketing) and like it, not in its entirety but mainly because it draws you back to the roots of selling stuff, the back-to-basics facts of commercial life. It also takes you back to the traditional oral roots of communication, to story telling and 'family' groups.

This way of approaching sales will grow in importance as the social trends surrounding web 2.0 develop. As the approach to sales moves to meet the emerging social demand it may feed back into changes to the supporting corporate culture.

I read a very interesting debate posted on John Mackey's blog (see link) about the philosophies that drive business leaders. Overall my concern is that business leaders harried by competitive pressures will feel that this debate is overly academic and irrelevant to their situation. Not being a business leader of any sort myself I have to admit that this may be true, but I hope not.

Other than that I jotted down the following:

1. It is interesting to note the profession/industry of each of the commentaries. Nature or nuture?

2. Whole Foods is niche, low volume, high margin (relative to his grocery competitors). This typically allows some room for personality. If (or when if you are a believer) the market catches up will the company still have the time and energy to afford such a generous strategy?

3. Mr Mackeys argument is very attractive to me because unlike most he makes explicit the fact that it rests on a perception of human nature and secondly that the human nature he describes is one I recognise and accept.

Why do people keep trying to theorise real human beings out of the equation?

The FT's Lex column made the point: "Takeovers are to chief executives as war is to political leaders: an arena where they can bypass interminable bureaucracy and define history."

The learned writer of the column is referencing what no text book, case study or article seems ever to admit. Namely that companies are run by people with very human aspirations.

Climbers from every corner and cut of society practice their golf and seek out the best club memberships confident that deals are done before ever reaching the boardroom. Despite this common understanding when the time to talk strategy comes about any reference to the human realities is in a hushed whisper.

No one wants a spot light shone on their private affairs however if a self imposed blindness hobbles or disincentives key staff then opportunities will be lost or, potentially more damaging, rash decision may be taken.

UK business needs to rediscover what was a traditional strength in breeding success through understanding the strengths and motivations of exceptional individuals rather than trying to believe that 'safe-hand' practitioners of best practice, cut-and-pasting the latest case study can make world class leaders.

Another in a very long line of IT projects that under delivered. It seems like IT consultants are a bit like dodgy car mechanics who recommend that your Mondeo's flat tire be replaced by 7-spoke-alloy-low-profile-racing-rim and since you got those you must have a Ferrari F40 as well, to realise their full potential.

When will we get someone who scratches their chin and says something like, 'I reckon the platform's actually alright if a bit old, if we just simplify the document flow and use some incentives to draw more traffic onto the online transactions the we'd probably be well ahead'?

I think we're still suffering from the ingrained schoolboy (or girl) divisions of jocks, geeks and arty fartys. Never shall a geek squint myopically over his 21" hyper flat screen to see what the jocks are up to and never shall the jock cease his purposeful striding for long enough to actually figure out what the geek is trying to tell him.

Meanwhile anyone who does know enough to say something is busy with a calculator trying to figure out what their bonus will be and realising that workable solutions generally involve a little leadership and other things that don't allow for plausible deniability.

Apparently Sir Martin Sorrell has been highlighting rapid change in the media: Rupert Murdoch 'panic buying' online players, rapidly growing online advertising revenue and China as an advertising market.

The responses of Sir M & 'pert, each on different sides of the Chinese wall between media owners and advertisers, should tell us all we need to know about media futures however the message seems to stop at '...damn, thangs done change'.

The other side of the commercial divide, the world of web 2.0, believe that the new democratising force of free speech and massively increased interpersonal connections facilitated by Google, Apple and (despite their best efforts) Microsoft will bring down the old media order and replace it with something new and gloriously unspecified.

There is uncertainty, there is hype and there is sometimes a loss of perspective. The way to avoid this is to concentrate on the simple things. Going back to first principles it seems to me that there is a fundamental vacuum that has been building for many years as trust in brands and institutions has been eroded. Fundamentally Web 2.0 is successful because it allows communication between people who can trust each other because they have no axe to grind. Sadly the converse of this is that these neutral advisors also massively vary in quality.

As the web develops into a media as common as TV or newspapers then customers will become more comfortable with paying for content and paying for convenience. Advertising revenue can't fund the world and people who are trying to supply something for nothing will either collapse into one or two major players that the advertisers can support or evolve into niche, subscription services - rather like the offline world did many moons ago.

Naturally the question remains - which of the current major players will be killed off during the changeover?

(HEADLINE) The WWW finally has enough quality copy to be informative!

I like to keep up to date with techy things. From age 8 or so I've been mucking about with computers and it got to the point where I realised that being on top of it all would be a full time job so I switched to merely staying in touch with it.

Blogging has seemed like THE THING to me for a long time so i plucked up the courage to have a go myself (see previous post). Does everyone feel so insecure about posting their thoughts etc? Looking at that first post it seems soooo achingly self conscious. It was either traumatic or completely unrewarding (I cant remember) since I haven't bothered to try again until now. But blogs haven't gone away (and neither have I).

A few interesting things have crossed my radar in the last few days. Looking over it I must be well behind the cutting edge but a little ahead of the mainstream, anyway -

Flock:

First it was Mozilla, then Netscape, then Firefox (any connection to the book Firefox down?) and now its Flock. The Tom Peters site 'big upped' the idea which either means its pure genius or very very well funded hot air. I can't quite commit the energy to work out what it does exactly, but seems to revolve around 'social browsing'.

Since I'm too scared (and my computer is too stuffed to the gills already) to actually download their self-confessed monster trial program i can only make prejudiced guesses about it.

However, more interestingly, it has prompted me to browse through the blog/RSS-sphere and haply I can report that it is much much more interesting than in 2004. Unfortunately for the mass blogging unwashed the main improvement is the arrival of people and news sources worth listening to.

Speaking from a mainstream idea of what interesting news and views are I believe the tide has turned and that there now are enough high-quality facts and opinions out there to make it interesting for a media hungry punter to browse through. In the case of Flock that means that leveraging social networks to navigate them is worthwhile and well timed.

RSS:

In the last day or so I had another go at using RSS to keep me up to date with the news. I would like it to be the main source for all my current affairs interests (rather than the Evening Standard, Guardian, Sun, Daily Mail, FT Weekend Edition etc.). There are two ways I would like to use the service, 1) to browse and have breaking news items 'pushed' toward me & 2) searching for information in the news about events or people of particular interest.

The good news is that several of the papers I mentioned now provide RSS feeds so that helps the browsing. The bad part of it that when I try searching these feeds for things that are currently top of mind for me I get no good results and a Google news search is much more fruitful. Lexus Nexus may be threatened but there are no killer blows here yet.

Nancy Vonk & Neil French:

For my sins I work in and around marketing which is fascinating because its all about people and having some class of understanding about them. What happens when you outsource an integral part of your business to a company (in this context read - 'group of people') with a radically different culture? In fact, lets go a stage further and ask: What happens when you and the group-of-people you are working with have a radically different culture to those you are trying to market your goods to? I have been working in client organisations when 'the consultants' turn up. Trooping in single file across the floor in dark (expensive) suits, looking young and eager, clutching their laptop bags and (psychologically) cutting a gaping swathe through the deeply intimidated staff they will shortly be lording over. Of course marketing consultants rarely have this effect but the reverse is hardly less appetising.

Really good communication is either coldly factual or it plays on the icons and memes of culture. How can patriarchal, sexist (no matter how modern and well meaning) company cultures communicate with a domestic society that has left them behind?