United Airlines allegedly broke a passenger’s guitar and refused to pay for the damage. Unfortunately, he was a professional musician who knows how to gain a following. Join the millions who have heard his song and seen his video on YouTube:
Archive for the ‘Poutpourri for 200 Alex’ Category
A green GM logo won’t bring in the green
Monday, July 13th, 2009
It’s been reported in several media over the past week or two that GM is considering changing its logo to green to reflect a leaner, more environmentally conscious identity.
I can’t think of anything less meaningful to the company or its customers.
GM’s future has nothing to do with telling the world that it’s lean and green — which is what the new logo color is supposed to represent. The only thing that matters is whether the public comes to perceive that GM and its products reflect the right values.
Honda and Toyota do well in the U.S. (and most places) because, to a vast number of people, their brands have come to represent cars that are among the easiest and most enjoyable to own: affordable, reliable, durable and neither too ugly nor too fancy. People didn’t come to feel that way because Toyota and Honda continually told us that their cars were just right (even though they DO continuously tell us). People came to feel that way because their experience was consistent with all the wonderful things Toyota and Honda always say about themselves.
GM would argue that it’s making cars with these same wonderful attributes. Whether that’s true is irrelevant. What matters is whether people perceive that it’s true.
Further, it’s not enough for people to agree when GM says it. People have to assign these attributes to GM products without any prompting before GM can regain its role as a leader in the global auto industry. That’s what branding is all about. And it takes years — not just years of marketing, but years of consistency in what you promise and what you deliver. Today, GM is still too close to the Hummer for anyone to really believe that it cares a lick about lean and about that kind of green.
GM may engineer a financial recovery over the next couple years, and that will be a great thing. But it’s going to take far longer than that for people to know, in their bones, that GM stands for lean and green — if, in fact, that’s really what GM wants for the long haul.
And I don’t even think that’s the right message. Because in 15 years, green is going to be the price of entry in the car business; if your products aren’t environmentally responsible, then you won’t thrive. So is GM going to rebuild its very identity around meeting the next generation’s minimum standards?
Do Honda and Toyota really get respect for the energy efficiency of their fleets? Or do they get respect for pursuing a mission — building cars that people want to own — with so much focus that energy efficiency naturally became a part of it at the right time? Their fleets were energy efficient before the 2008 run-up in gas prices. The only thing that changed was the advertising.
If the new GM is smarter than the old GM, it will focus on the reasons people really buy cars — the perfect combination of price, style, durability, maintainability and lifetime affordability. Green fits in there for sure. But it won’t always be the headline. And even today, I doubt it’s the reason most people choose which car to buy.
A thought on leadership
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
Team Blue Thunder, rally in progress
I’m coaching my son’s youth baseball team. I’ve found that leading a group of 11-year-old boys is pretty much the same as leading a group of adult professionals.
In both cases, the job involves:
- keeping them focused
- keeping them motivated
- removing roadblocks to allow them to remain productive
- assigning each individual a role that benefits the entire team while complementing that person’s skills, interests and style.
Finally, here’s a quote on leadership, with which I wholeheartedly agree, that’s attributed to the book, The Four Agreements: A practical guide to personal freedom:
“The primal responsibility of leadership is to prime good feeling in the people we lead.”
How does one do that other than by helping them fill a role they enjoy, and then helping them to stay motivated, focused and productive?
OK, there may be one difference between adults and kids: Adults aren’t as motivated by the promise of pretzels and a juice pouch.
‘The King of Pop is Dead’ social-media time trial
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Who was first to report on Michael Jackson’s death?
It’s just after 9:30 p.m. EST on Thursday, June 25 — the day of Michael Jackson’s death.
The first tweet from my admittedly small ‘follow’ list came at 5:24 as a retweet from Daniel McCarthy, who I don’t actually know, but rather stumbled across him in a retweet from a former boss for whom I have a lot of respect. McCarthy’s tweet was a retweet of a source that claimed Michael Jackson died from a sleeping pill. Suicided, accidental overdose, adverse reaction?
C’mon, it’s 140 characters. Ambiguous to be sure. Call it an unfortunate aspect of the medium. Or the fog of war/celebrity reporting.
The next tweet with the news from my list came in 5:45 p.m. (+21 minutes from the first report/+19 minutes from the event) from TimAmikoff in Tehran, Iran (if I thought it was true, I’d ask if he doesn’t have anything else to do. And how did he end up on my follow list anyway?) TimAmikoff’s was a retweet from CNN Breaking News, linking to a CNN story online that cited the LA County Coronor as the source, with the death declared at 2:26 p.m. I’m considering that to be the original primary source. It said nothing about cause of death, other than a third-party quote from one of Jackson’s brothers that he had collapsed in his home. I’m inferring (because the full story was vague) the state times were local, which would be time of death of 5:26 p.m. EST — two minutes AFTER I received the very first tweet announcing his death.
Let’s say my computer clock is off two minutes. Practically a probability.
So while CNN’s story took about 29 minutes to make it’s way to my computer via Iran, the news was out to at least one source within a minute or so of Jackson’s declared death.
That’s the one I got from Daniel McArthy, who was retweeting Wierd News, which linked to a Top News Stories site owned by Global Associated News — which seems to be an empty logo used by Fake-a-wish.com — a spartan website unencumbered by “About us” links — that in its entirety seems to be a dynamic content generator about fake celebrity news. Seriously.
The story said Jackson had died from a sleeping pill (later elaborated to “cardiac arrest after consuming more than two-dozen sleeping pills.”
At the bottom of the Wierd News Page was this disclaimer: (this story was dynamically generated using a generic ‘template’ and is not factual. Any reference to specific individuals has been 100% fabricated by web site visitors who have created fake stories by entering a name into a blank ‘non-specific’ template for the purpose of entertainment. For sub-domain info and additional use restrictions: FakeAWish.com.)
Can it be a coincidence that FakeAWish would generate this story even as it was happening? Or is somebody sabotaging FakeAWish by placing real big breaking news on it — within seconds of it becoming available, and then updating it?
At 6:22 (+58), CNN Breaking News tweeted that Jackson was in a coma — +37 from first reporting he had died.
At 6:30 (+1:06) TimAmikoff cited the LA Times as confirming Jackson’s death. CNN Breaking News followed within a minute, confirming from multiple sources.
A 6:42 (+1:18) the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he had been rushed to the hospital.
At 8:37 (+2:53) The Onion tweeted “The last piece of Michael Jackson dies.”
What it all means is that I still don’t know where the news really comes from. Except I didn’t get it from any of this. I was busy elsewhere. When I looked, it was all there, preserved by my Tweetdeck utility. But I learned the whole thing at about 7:00 in a phone call from my brother-in-law.
I have just reached the point at which…
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009I have just reached the point at which … … as I’m sitting down at the computer to work, I would rather spend an extra 10 looking for my reading glasses than just gutting through the session by straining my eyes.
That’s got to be some kind of tipping point.
Can Obama be good for business?
Thursday, May 28th, 2009Conventional wisdom among many of the people I know — regardless of how they feel about President Obama’s social agenda — is that his economic agenda is pretty tough on business.
As reported by Stacy Blackman at bnet.com, Dr. Robert Frank at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management and a New York Times columnist, feels othewise. I’m especially intrigued by his view on universal health care.
How fast can one company lose customers?
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009According to Shelly Palmer at imediabytes, Sirius/Xm Radio lost $36 million in Q1. And that’s nothing. It lost 400,000 customers — which I’m thinking is more customers than Johnson & Johnson lost back in the 1980s when someone started putting cyanide in its Tylenol products. 
I mean, 400,000 is a mid-size city. It’s a lot of customers. I’m not sure you could get rid of customers that fast if you paid telemarketers to call them up at dinner time and swear at them.
And if you’re the folks at Sirius/XM, it’s the kind of number that puts you into a full-blown panic attack. When you lose 400,00 customers in 3 months, you start asking questions like, “Are we doing the right thing here?” and “WTF?”
My personal experience is that I had been a subscriber for 2 years when I got a note from Sirius/XM in February 
warning me that I would no longer be able to access programming for free on my computer unless I paid for the full year in advance right away.
It annoyed me, and I immediately assumed it was a cash-grab. But I bought the 12-month subscription because I thought it was important to me. Two weeks later I lost my job, and a week after that, in an effort to cut all unnecessary costs — and because I was irritated at being leveraged in the first palce, I called to cancel my subscription.
Their response? The nice lady with a Punjabi accent asked if they could keep me as a customer if they reduced the annual subscription rate by 50%. Now I was really mad, realizing that all along I’d been paying twice what they were willing to take. I told her no.
A month later, I got a direct-mail piece asking me to come back at 4.99 a month for six months — 38% of the original price. I suppose this was supposed to entice me. But it made me feel even more stupid for having paid $12.99 in the first place.
There’s one other thing: All along, Sirius/XM has advertised that it’s commercial-free radio, which should be worth paying for. But it’s not true. If you listen to any syndicated programming that’s re-broadcast via satellite, you’ll get the same amount of commercial time as you would on commercial radio.
And if you listen to their original programming — some of which is really pretty good — you still get advertising. And it’s the most irritating kind: low-budget stuff for whole-body cleanses and businesses that you can run from home without any skills or experience required.
I originally bought my XM subscription because I didn’t want to be my own DJ; I’d rather have someone else do it for me. But these are hard times, you know. Worst times since the Great Depression. So now, when I get in my car, I plug in my i-pod or put in an old CD. I still don’t want to be my own DJ. But I’m guessing that 399,999 other people agree with me that it’s not all that bad a job.
Quote of the day
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009From Richard Mitchele, who just won a contest from Sailing Anarchy (without a doubt the best blog, forum and e-newsletter on earth devoted to racing sailboats). His prize was a ride-along on the Puma entrant in the Volvo Ocean Race during the closed-course races sailed in Boston as part of the round-the-world race’s only North American stopover.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out that I’d won the contest on SA. I was kind of thinking maybe I’d score a T-shirt or some other Puma swag. It was as if Jessica Alba called to say that the restraining order had been lifted, that she and Uma Thurman had talked it over and wanted to give my idea a try.”
