With a strong opening weekend behind them, the movie Julie & Julia about the author’s quest to recreate all of the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking while blogging about it is already the stuff of urban myth. In the interview, Julie cautions others to not get caught up in the social media aspect of the process. (more…)

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It would be difficult to find a more succinct definition of how this works than in Brian Clark’s new report, Authority Rules. Brian notes that “Many people think the main barrier to online marketing success is a lack of traffic. But it’s really a lack of trust.”

Brian was one of the early champions of the “Teaching Sells” philosophy and is now one of those authority figures in successful online marketing. If you’re just meeting Brian for the first time, you will do both yourself and your company a favor by spending time on his website trolling through the hundreds of pages of knowledge that he willingly shares with his audience.

P.S. Educating your customer is selling.

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In this case, the abject mea culpa by CEO Jeff Bezos on the Amazon website the other day is a model apology to customers for a colossal mistake (again a unilateral decision -this time much more far reaching than the one mentioned above). (more…)

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There was not one breakthrough technology that dominated NECC conversation. In fact, the greatest energy surrounded the battle of the interactive white boards. The inherent challenges in helping educators utilize white boards as more than a chalkboard replacement are detailed in this post from Lee Wilson who focused on a publisher’s comparison of the two leading companies - SMART and Promethean.

Another favorite topic centered on the challenges in engaging students with technology when we have them power down all their devices when they cross the school building threshold. Among the ed-tech community there is general agreement about the need to incorporate more virtual learning opportunities for students everywhere, but the challenges of championing a new learning model are manifold in schools and districts across the country.

Kudos to ISTE (International Society of Technology in Education) sponsors of NECC, for the integration of audio, video, and social media into the conference including an ISTE Connects blog that was launched in January. Keynoter Malcolm Gladwell wrapped up his presentation with a challenge to educators to use their energy, enthusiasm and creativity to make their individual learning environments as meaningful as possible.

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This is the basic premise of Collapse of Distinction by Scott McKain. Each of us can list on one hand the times and companies that have delivered to us a customer experience that was memorable or distinctive. Why is that? The author argues that it is because businesses, for the most part, are focused on achieving their sales goals and not on creating value for the customer. “It is overwhelming how many companies focus on not losing to the competition rather than on delivering what customers really want.”

In McKain’s opinion, the truly successful companies are focused on providing value to the customer at every point of the relationship. There is a difference between customer service and creating the “ultimate customer experience.” Even if you implement “customer-focused” strategies – “distinction is created by developing a customer experience focus. In other words, concentrating on customers is not enough if you want to become a true market leader. You must take it to an even higher level and focus on the creation of experiences for your clients and prospects.”

Imagine a three-leveled pyramid with “sameness” at the bottom (the largest group); differentiation in the middle (a smaller group); and distinction at the top of the pyramid - the most select group.  The author uses Apple and its line of MacBooks as an example of company who has achieved distinction. They have created their own category - separate and distinct from any other group. McKain calls this the ‘Ebert Effect’ named after the film critic Roger Ebert.

“The Ebert Effect:  When people, from their perspective, are inundated with indistinguishable choices, they perceive a product, service, approach, or experience with a specific point of differentiation to be superior.”

McKain reminds us at several points that it doesn’t matter what we believe about our product or service.  The customer’s perception is the only thing that matters.

“Product focused companies have diminished their value because their “customers focus less on the facts about the products and more on their customer experience and on how they feel about dealing with you.”

There is not a lot to argue with in McKain’s theory. It makes sense. It strikes a chord. It reminds us of those handful of times when we’ve had a unique and distinctive customer experience. Understanding it and delivering it are clearly two different things. There are so few companies that do it well. That’s what makes it notable when it happens.

Creating a company of distinction must be an integral part of every action of the company. McKain reminds us that it must be embedded in the company from the vision to the execution. It is not a separate function. He challenges us to examine our people, our strategies, our processes and our abilities to create compelling relationships with our customers.

Because, here is the end goal: to create a business that delivers customer experiences that are so compelling that customer loyalty and profitability are guaranteed. Easier said than done, of course, but well worth the effort. Invest a little time in Collapse of Distinction. It will challenge your thinking about your own company.

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Anyone know any high school or middle school history teachers doing the same thing? Thanks to Darren Rowse at Twitip for sharing this wonderful application of Twitter in the classroom.

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Here are four different perspectives on the importance of collaboration:

10 Ways to Collaborate in a Down Economy  - 21st Century work skills like collaboration have never been more important according to Mike St. Pierre.

Four Web 2.0 Collaborative-Writing Tools -  Although written from a teacher-student perspective, these tools are just as valuable for collaborative projects in today’s business environment according to Tech Learning.

A different perspective on building community with your blog -  Joanna Young discusses reasons why you would not want to create community and collaboration on your blog.

Are you Listening? Influence and Participation Above the Noise? - Liz Strauss believes that listening is the cornerstone skill for collaboration.

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I’ll preface the rest of this post by stating that there are a surprising number of traditional publishers who are still “learning” that the world has shifted and that they are in great danger of becoming dinosaurs. At the conference I attended, there were plenty of people who have sailed into new interactive waters of online publishing and social media. These were best represented by some of the vendor offerings and some of the panelists. But many of the attendees from small to large publishers seemed to be hearing about the shifts in the rules of engagement for the first time. (more…)

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Someone said yesterday, “if the new up is flat, then we’re up.” It’s a bit of black humor that gets to the heart of today’s business climate and that is, if you haven’t lost ground, then you’re doing pretty well. After listening to publishers’ experiences these last two days, it seems to me that even jumping into the fray, investing-scrapping-reinvesting yields more benefits than inertia. The worst outcome for a company is losing relevance to its community while sitting on the sidelines.

Josh Gordon, sales expert and speaker, cited studies that found that both fear and uncertainty light up the “fear” center of the brain. It also lights up when running against the crowd. The way to overcome this fear and uncertainty from a sales perspective is to provide more proof, reassurance or guarantees. Isn’t that what we all are really looking for? Some guarantee that things are going to be fine? That we will all navigate troubled times and find ourselves leaner but stronger at the other end?

Students of business history know that companies that continue to market during economic downturns fare better than companies who don’t.These companies can move into their industry’s lead position during this time. It takes courage and conviction to continue to invest in your business when you can’t predict the outcome.

But the real risk in non-engagement is not losing sales during the span of the recession (although that is certainly a reality), but putting the company’s relationship with its community at risk during a time when the community needs reassurance from its leadership that things will, in fact, be fine. It is that relationship and relevance to the community that is the more extreme loss to a company, because the community has already moved on to some other industry leader that stayed the course and provided some level of assurance by the way they continued to operate that all would be well in the end.

Understanding both your core business strengths and your value to the community you serve is a key element in mitigating the cost of fear and uncertainty to your business.

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