Eight years ago United Airlines found itself in the middle of a social media kerfuffle when Canadian folk singer Dave Carroll’s guitar was broken by baggage handlers. Now they’re in the thick of it again.
A few months after his guitar was broken, and the airline refused to compensate him (he says because he didn’t make a claim with 24 hours), Carroll posted a Continue reading
I recently ran across a feature I’d never seen before on the Yahoo news site: real-time sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis can be a really valuable tool, such as when a company is evaluating social media conversation about it. Some high end programs also provide purchase and churn intent and predictive analytics about individual behavior. Those programs can start at few thousand dollars a month on up. Continue reading
A few weeks ago I wrote about how viewership of NFL games, including the Super Bowl, has been declining for two or three years. Well, the NFL isn’t going to sit back and do nothing. The league office probably knows more about marketing than it does about football. Continue reading
One of the reasons I enjoy sports is because they sometimes serve as a kind of management simulator. For example, Michael Lewis’ great book, Moneyball, is not just about how the Oakland Athletics baseball team selected players, it’s also about how any company can compute the value that an employee adds to the company – and beyond that, how rationally or emotionally we make decisions. Continue reading
Today is St. Patrick’s Day and it’s time for the wearin’ of the green! Or not.
In China “wearing a green hat” is an expression for a man being cheated on by his wife or girlfriend, because the Chinese word sounds similar to the word for cuckold. Continue reading
My wife and I have hosted an annual Super Bowl party for almost 20 years now. I remember the first one when our daughter was five. A little before the party started I told her, “So the rule for this party is that you can talk during the game but be quiet during the commercials.” And she replied, “Oh dad!”, as if I was kidding her. But when the game started she saw that that was in fact how we watched. Millions of other people do the same thing. Continue reading
Things change fast. Less than two weeks ago “no drama Obama” left the White House and now it’s 24/7 Trump. President Trump, and his administration, are producing new challenges for corporate communications and marketing.
Already a number of companies have seen their stock prices tank or jump because of a critical or embracing tweet from Trump. (Go back in your time machine 10 years and see if anyone understands that sentence.) Continue reading
The vast majority of U.S. companies are privately owned. And when owners decide to sell, they often find that their company doesn’t elicit bids as high as what they want to sell it for. One SMB M&A specialist recently told me that half or more of her clients overestimate the sale value of their company. What’s an owner to do? Continue reading
The evening after Donald Trump was elected president, Teresa Shook got some friends near her home on Maui to show her how to create an event on Facebook. Although usually not very political, she was so upset with Trump’s election that she decided that there should be a march on Washington after the inauguration to protest it. When she went to bed she already had about 40 people coming and 40 maybes. When she woke the next morning it had exploded to 10,000 coming and 10,000 maybes. Continue reading
A few days ago the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced that it is closing down. The combined circuses have been operating in one form or another for 146 years.
There was a time when they and other circuses were a big deal, showing their audiences animals and acts from exotic places that they could only dream about. They had a great PR stunt of parading into the town where they were to next perform. Continue reading