The Idea Blog

Want to know the real unemployment numbers? Paul Solman offered this excellent story on last night’s News Hour.

Here’s a great article in the Financial Times (actually, on FT.com), sent to me by my friend Peter.

Such challenges: advertisers want to get at Facebook users, but Facebook users threaten to stop using Facebook if advertising becomes an important part of its presence. Facebook users also don’t want to – and won’t – pay to use it. Facebook is clearly a phenomenon, but even with 250+ million users, how long can it or will it be relevant?

I think of Facebook like chocolate: it’s good, sometimes really good, but it has little, if any, nutritional value. I’ve “connected” with a number of people with whom I went to high school, but I don’t really know what to do with the connections. I haven’t spoken with most of them in nearly 40 years, and I doubt either they or I will do much speaking now. We probably don’t really care what each other is reading or watching or whose kid has a ball game or whose dog is nursing puppies. Do we?

My crystal ball tells me that Facebook and LinkedIn and the like will ultimately end up as truly valuable when one of them – or a new one of them altogether – ends up being an individual’s (and a company’s or brand’s) identity on the web. Here’s Mark Burris from Isle of Palms, SC. There’s his photo, his connections. Here’s who he is, what he’s done, what he’s read and is reading now … and so on. We’ll be drawn to the people who tell us what we need to know about themselves, and we’ll not be attracted personally or professionally to those who tell us little or nothing.

Increasingly, our identities will be available on the web. Not our being or our essence or any of that stuff, but our identities, the avatars of our being. Maybe … or something like that …

Anyway, read the article. It’s very good.

I’ve posted about Yelp! and the branding impact reviews have now and will have more and more in the future.

I came across this piece in Ad Age Digital, which says it even better:

“Reviews are growing in importance to marketers struggling to figure out how to turn social-media conversations into insights that directly affect sales. But the good and the bad reviews are valuable….

“And while Twitter conversation and Facebook chatter [are] interesting and important, it’s not structured, and can be difficult for marketers to implement into their processes. Review data, on the other hand, address a particular product – and when a consumer is in the mode to talk about it.”

Check out Yelp, Trip Advisor and now the new gdgt to see how this is working.

I was moved by this report on last night’s Nightly News.

A cool preview from a Dirt Farmer.

Peggy Noonan’s column in The Wall Street Journal today is a wonderful defense of the positioning statement, the distinctive summary of what matters, whether we’re talking about a brand or an administration. I’m actively working on two branding projects of this type now. “What does this brand mean? How is it different from others? Why does it matter?”

She recounts a story about President Kennedy and Clare Boothe Luce, in which she told the still new President that “a great man is one sentence.” “His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about.”

Noonan says this about the Obamans: “They want the sentence even when they don’t know the sentence exists, even when they think it’s a paragraph. The Obama people want, ‘He was the president who gave all Americans health care,’ and, ‘He lessened income inequality,’ and, ‘He took over a failed company,’ and other things. They want a jumble of sentences and do a jumble of things. But an administration about everything is an administration about nothing.”

Noonan goes on to suggest that “the sentence” could be, should be this: “‘He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror.’ That’s all anybody wants. It’s all that’s needed.”

And, yes, it would be a powerful statement, not to mention a successful administration and a wonderful place in history if this group could achieve those things. But I want more. At this moment in time – in the world’s, the country’s and in my own history – I believe we need something more. We need to set things right, and, unfortunately, it’s a lot of things that need resetting.

We need to set right the economy, that’s certain. We need the upper hand in the war on terrorism and hold it around the throats of those who barbarically practice it. But what Obama seems to get is that there are all kinds of other things that contribute to the near collapse of our economy and our fight against barbarism. Health care is near 20% of our GDP … and rising. And inefficient. And yet 45% of Americans lack health insurance. The environment is being poisoned by gas guzzling autos and other dirty fuels, and oil is the primary funding source for extremism in the Middle East. GM is inextricably tied to jobs and production and output … and our economy. Financial institutions need to be strong in order to lend, and credit is the backbone of economic growth.

As one who has spent a career talking about branding and positioning and that one thing that says what you are, I agree with the concept of “one sentence.” It is at once reflective and aspirational. It is both subtle and obvious. And the one sentence for this president and this time may – by necessity – be the most ambitious since FDR, certainly, maybe forever.

In every important category of American life, law and culture, he reset the conversation, the expectations and the destinies of the American people.

Now that’s a brand I want to buy.

We (I) can laugh and joke and remember some of the weirder stuff, but there’s no mistaking the talent and imagination of Michael Jackson in his prime.

From an article in The Independent, and passed along by Jim Nugent:

“If Elvis was rock’n'roll’s George Washington, and Dylan its Abe Lincoln, then Bruce is surely its Franklin Delano Roosevelt, urging a New Deal for the downtrodden and oppressed, employing a homespun, folksy style far removed from, say, the untouchable mystique with which Dylan surrounds himself, and always stressing the need for connection to heal the rifts which, around the time of The River, he perceived were splitting his America in two: ‘In the beginning the idea was that we all live here a little bit like a family, where the strong can help the weak ones, the rich can help the poor ones,’ he said at the time. ‘I don’t think the American dream was that everybody was going to make a billion dollars, but that everybody was going to have the chance to live a life with some decency and some dignity and a chance for some self-respect.’”

Apparently not because U.S. manufacturers don’t want to bring more furniture-making stateside. Rather, according to industry analyst Jerry Epperson (as reported by Furniture/Today), “wood and metal furniture producers face a challenging regulatory process that makes it difficult to open a U.S. plant. He estimated that it would take two to three years to get the necessary approvals, permits and environmental studies to start or reopen a factory.”

Maybe so. But how about we try anyway?

Here’s a link to the F/T story.

The Times review gives us a pretty good glimpse of Reif Larsen’s first novel. But a visit to the book’s official website shows you how hard some publishers are trying to engage us enough to buy. Spend some time there and join the wonder of young Spivet’s world.

Similar thoughts in this post about Vook and this website for Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a great first novel I read last year.