Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 101

Today LinkedIn announced that they are creating an exclusive list of 150 celebrities and influencers who anyone will have the ability to “follow.” There will be no pesky 140 character limit on what these influencers can post (there’s a new blogging feature too) and the assumption is that they will share mostly business-related thoughts. Some critics see this as yet another attempt to Klout-ify the web with artificial influence rankings, but the real significance of LinkedIn’s announcement may...

The day after Bill Clinton delivered his speech at the Democratic National Convention, the reaction from both sides of the political aisle were swift. Amongst the noise of disagreement, President Obama essentially summed up what anyone watching that speech might have thought when he joked that he might make Clinton the “Secretary of Explaining Things.” Actually, we need one of those in the business world.

Too often that skill is critically missing, particulary when it comes to professional adv...

There is a game my brother and I used to play when we were kids and my guess is that you played it too. It had its own set of rules that we all knew, and they were irrefutable. Get within visible distance of your car, and then the first person among the passengers to call “shotgun” would sit in the front seat. Everyone else would battle to avoid the middle back seat. It’s a silly game, but it also explains how social media evolved in many corporations. The person or team who called “shotgun”...

It was quite a scene last night. On Monday Night Football, on the final play of a game between the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks, a ball was simultaneously caught by two guys. As they struggled for it in the end zone, the Green Bay player appeared to have it – which would have ended the game. But they were playing in Seattle, and to the delight of the more than 50,000 screaming fans – one referee on the field slowly raised his hands to signify it was a touchdown. To anyone watchi...

Several weeks ago I saw a television special about television (no, that wasn’t a typo!). It was one of those programs where they look at old shows and interview the actors about what their lives are like now. When they came to Garry Shandling, the former star of the self-created Larry Sanders Show – this is what he said: “the curtain is a metaphor. On the other side of the curtain is when we are ourselves.” Last night I had the chance to watch an extremely powerful video from comedian Anthony...

If there is one fact I have seen over and over from just about anyone who runs a website … it is that we all are constantly dreaming about redesigning our sites. Almost from the day we launch, we can’t help thinking about all the things we would like to add to our sites and what we would change if we could start over. For me, that process started more than 8 years ago when I first launched my blog. Back then, I titled it “Influential Interactive Marketing” and thought I would focus on user in...

I have been a fan of the Amazon Kindle device for some time now ... and I ordered the new 7 inch Kindle Fire the day it was announced. This weekend I had the chance to try it out, and have been fairly happy. What I didn't expect, though, was to take away quite so many marketing lessons from the announcement and launch of the device itself. In the leadup to the launch as well as after I had the chance to try out the device, there were a few extremely smart marketing choices that stood out to m...

There is a military technique described by the acronym LTD which you should know about. It stands for Laser Targeting Designators and it is basically a laser light source which is used to designate a target. In other words, by "lasing targets" - you put a marker on something so that when you shoot at it, you are more likely to hit it. Marketing people are fond of using military terms like campaigns, targets and hits to describe what we do. For all of our militaristic language, however, most o...

Not a lot of people know this, but 2002 I did my Masters Thesis on the topic of web usability. It was the "appfication trend" of its day ... a topic that every business was talking about and spending more and more money to get right. Jakob Nielsen was a household name in web development teams - and "Information Architect" and "Usability Expert" were considered careers for the future. Then one day usability started to fade into the background. It became more of an afterthought. When is the la...

People love numbers. We respect #1 best sellers. We believe in a product if four out of five dentists like it. And every week there is new Presidential election polling in the US to give the media real time numbers to spend hours "reacting" to in live talk shows. In today's world, numbers are used to prove anything to anybody. Why make an argument when you can find a number to do it for you? If a picture is worth a thousand words, the right number seems to be worth a thousand pictures.

Thi...