Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 105

Earlier this morning the team at SocialMediaExaminer.com released their annual report on the state of Social Media Marketing. Based on the responses of over 3800 surveyed marketers, the report offers an interesting look at how businesses are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. As with any surveys of this type, you have to remember that the people who responded are already a self selected audience of business owners who care about social media.  So it's not surprising...

How much time do you spend trying to be ordinary or obvious? Probably not a lot. In fact, most marketing people actively avoid talking about the ordinary or obvious qualities of their business. Instead we spend days in creative brainstorms trying to create new messages find that brilliant unique thing that no one else has. We want to use new and sexy social media tools and find a winning creative idea that will get everyone's attention. And we forget the ordinary and obvious stuff.  

But...

The last thing I expected to do as I headed down to Austin last week for the SXSW Interactive Festival was to see a film. As a marketer, the fact that SXSW is actually a huge Film and Music festival is a point that I have often easily forgotten. Amongst the sea of startups promoting everything from "social weather" apps (that let you share your mood when it rains), to new indestructible iPhone cases - it is easy to get lost in the hype.

But on Sunday morning at SXSW, I made my way out to the...

This might surprise you, but Zappos doesn't offer standard overnight shipping. But for years customers of the site have been getting overnight shipping even though they didn't ask for or even pay extra for it. The reasoning is simple, if your customers have lower expectations - it is easy to consistently exceed them. We feel delight at getting the product overnight because it is faster than we thought it would be. 

This simple behavioral insight is something that most companies have done a...

My life would be a lot easier if I could give the same talk to everyone. I would just show up at an event or a client site, or get onto my webcam, and say the exact same thing to everyone. But I know I'll never do that. One of the main reasons is because I obsess over any presentation I work on. I spend hours thinking about the flow. I have a personal library of hundreds of images purchased from various places like iStockPhoto. Anytime I find an interesting marketing idea or website, I take...

I'm not really sure when I started getting Reader's Digest delivered to my home, or even if I subscribed to it. I am a sucker for magazines and always have been. So chances are I subscribed thanks to some sort of Grouponesque deal that I found online. Call it a marketing weakness, but if I get a magazine in the mail I can't help opening it. I always flip through - and I look mainly at the advertising.

The problem when I did that looking through Reader's Digest is that I started to get...

Here's a sad fact about SXSW - at any given time there are at least 16 other talks, events or meetups that you could be attending besides the one that you do make it to.  That's assuming you even make it to any events at all.  But whether you are ambitiously aiming to make it to a long list of events, or not going to SXSW at all ... the fact is that the range of talks offers a really interesting spotlight into trends and insights for anyone working in a digital or business role today. 

Some...

This morning I watched an amazing TED video of flying robots that can operate autonomously and collaborate with each other at the same time. It is exciting technology ... just the kind of thing you would expect to come out of a TED event. As I write this, the video (and its big finish where the robots play a song together) is rapidly going viral online, and I have to admit I love watching things like this. The only problem is, I'm not sure what I can do with this mind blowing example except...

Jerry Weintraub, the producer of Ocean's Eleven, has a dirty little secret. When he talks about getting the first of the Ocean's movies made in 1998, he admits it had very little to do with the script and everything to do with the first two people that he convinced to agree to being part of the project ... Director Steven Soderburgh and actor George Clooney. The two of them used their personal relationships to recruit the rest of the dozen actors who would make up the all star cast which...

Sitting in a hotel room tonight putting the finishing touches on a presentation I am giving today on storytelling, I got an irresistable update to a new blog post over on Tim Ferriss' blog featuring a podcast interview with one of my longtime inspirations as a writer - Paolo Coelho.  His book The Alchemist is a life changing experience for anyone I know who has read it (including me). So when Tim published his interview, I immediately listened to the whole thing. I highly recommend it. 

In...