I haven’t kept up the pace of posts here compared to previous years. Part of this is because it’s been an exciting, busy year. But the other cause is my writing time is fractured between this Decker Marketing blog, our company blog (Bazaarblog) and writing other articles / columns. So, I thought I’d point you to articles I wrote elsewhere over the past year or so that you might find interesting… Some of my columns on iMedia Connection: The Big Idea Behind Social Commerce How

At last week’s Forrester Consumer Forum, Richard Edelman suggested today’s PR has to be ‘masters of reality’ rather than focus on spin and hype. This was underscored by his tagline, "Be it. Don’t Buy it." I think that’s a great mission for marketers in general. In a world of higher transparency the best products and companies will succeed. The true reflection of their quality and character will be amplified. As masters of reality we will realize that products need to be great

I was at the Forrrester Consumer Forum last week. The topic of the conference was social technologies. At a place like that you meet people that have blogs. I try to check out blogs of people I meet, I scan them, and see if something pops out. I met Deborah Schultz, a consultant in the Social Media / Interactive Design, and this post popped out to me where she outlined 10 things she tries to live by. In a busy, transparent world these rules are relevant for a consultant or c

At the WOMMA conference in Las Vegas (Nov. 14, 15) one of the primary topics on the table is the debate and implications to the marketer focusing on the influencer or the network. The influencer model suggests you should focus on the few (say 15%) who are disporportionately influential. Malcom Gladwell called these the Connectors and Mavens. The netowrk model suggests that the importance is having many connections is more important. I’m not fully versed on both of these equal

At this year’s Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit (WOMMA) on November 14/15 in Las Vegas, one of the topics will be “who owns word of mouth?” Is it one person in PR or advertising? Product development? Someone on the web team? In some companies it’s someone in PR, who is responsible for blogger relations. But in my opinion, that’s a tiny fraction of word of mouth on a typical fortune 500 brand. In some companies, as it was at Dell, the word of mouth ‘owner’ was someon

Last week was the first event of this year for Texchange (my first as President). The speaker was John Moore, author of Tribal Knowledge and top marketing blog, Brand Autopsy. The title of John’s presentation was "Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks". John was a senior marketing guy at Starbucks and Whole Foods. I told him Texchange was an audience of (mostly) B2B entrepreneurs and executives, yet his seemingly B2C message didn’t disappoint. The lessons learn

It’s been a month in a half since my last post. Yikes. I’m hoping you (haven’t) noticed. 🙂 I’m back. One of the reasons for the absence has been a lot of traveling, including a trip to London. See my picture here in downtown York. U.S. history is nothing compared to a place like this! I also spent one day in the UK with David Rance, CEO of Round. I worked with David to bring a customer centricity framework into Dell several years ago. There are two powerful parts of the Rou

Last week my family and I spent a three day mini-vacation at a “Dude” ranch. Don’t think City Slickers. My kids are 6 and 9, so this was more “dude” than ranch. We bought the kids cowboy hats so they felt authentic on the back of our senior citizen horses walking along a muddy trail. They met kids from other states, playing with cap guns and bullwhips. My 6 year old son hooked up with adults as my wife pulled me into line dancing. Surrounded by drinking strangers, to whom I t

McDonald’s spends $820M+/yr in marketing on $21.5B revenue…4% of revenue. Chipotle spends $4.5M on $882M revenue…less than 1% of revenue. I did the math… if you assume the average meal is $8 (with drink, maybe chips), then Chipotle is serving over 110 million burritos (or burrito bowls, as I prefer) per year. If they decided to spend as much as their McDonald’s parent and competitors (4% of revenue), they could spend an additional $29M in marketing. That’s an extra $.26/burri

I’m speaking at WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Basic Training, April 17, 18 in New Orleans. My topic will be aquiring, amplifying and measuring online word of mouth. Cost for the conference is $795, but that’s a bargain compared to most conferences that are closer to $2,000. I’ve been to a few of these now and they are great events. The association has exploded and you will learn a lot and meet some great people who are focused on how to drive word of mouth to drive business results.

On February 28th at 4:00PM CST, Linda Ford of Ford Business Consulting is interviewing me in a teleseminar titled "How to Use Customer Oxygen to Breathe New Life into Your Business!" This is a a topic I feel very passionate about, and have written about in my blog and DM News. I’ll share principles and learnings from my experiences in four startups and 7 years at Dell leading change initiatives and customer-centricity strategy. Topics include: Why "customer feedback" isn’t e

Measurement and accountability crystallizes movement towards a goal, individual performance, and helps identify employees worthy of merit. Measurement is the language of any organization. The more measures we can hold employees accountable for the better, right? Hold on. There’s a cautionary tale to running a company with an extreme and unbalanced reliance on internal measures. Most corporate measures and employee goals are internally focused, financially-oriented, and functi

My esteemed colleagues at Bazaarvoice found a fun little site that allows you to make up your own Google search interpretation. It’s called GooogIe search, and here’s what they came up with as a search phrase for me and their "corrected" interpretation of that search: Isn’t that nice? 🙂 Actually, internally I am known as the world’s cheapest marketer, and I don’t reject that title. Read my "Marketing Bullseye" series on the right — the whole idea of bullseye markeitng is how

I may have attended 20 events and conferences this year. I’ve been to conferences all my career, but it was especially concentrated this year as an exhibitor, speaker and attendee. So, I’ve seen conferences, events and symposiums from multiple perspectives at events such as Internet Retail, eTail, Shop.org, SuperNova, WOMMA, iCitizen Symposium, adTech, SES, eMetrics, Creative Good, Forrester Consumer Forum, eComXpo (virtual conference), and others. iPods are great becaus

I’m in D.C. presenting at the Word of Mouth Summit. I wanted to share my notes from today’s keynote by Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of AOL(and owner of several Washington sports teams). Mr. Leonsis shared tremendous insight and perspective on how marketing has changed, and he presented it with disarming humility and sincerity. It was great to hear someone at his level ‘get’ what has happened to the market and marketing with such clarity, presented with simplicity. Here are some

1to1 Magazine published Zappos’ 10 rules for creating a customer-centric culture, via Jane Judd, senior manager of customer loyalty who spoke at the North American Conference on Customer Management (NACCM). (I only got it in email, so maybe they’ll link it from their site soon.). Make customer service a priority for the whole company. Make "wow" a part of your company’ vocabulary. Don’t measure call times, and don’t force agents to upsell. Empower your customer service team.

Notice: This is an ad. I am getting paid to write a review of ReviewMe, a new service that pays bloggers to write reviews. Although I am getting paid, I’m not writing this for the money. I want to know what it feels like to share my opinion and be compensated. I want to know how you feel about it (write comments). Though I’m writing this in full disclosure, I wonder if this review loses the essence of a review? As for ReviewMe and the service, I’m impressed with the way it wo

A couple weeks ago I spoke on a Word of Mouth panel at Forrester’s annual Consumer Forum in Chicago. Attendees were senior marketers, online/ecommerce executives, and CMOs. The theme was "Humanizing the Digital Experience". The tracks were: Experience-based Differentiation Devices Everwhere Next Generation Branding Social Computing I don’t really like "Social Computing"…but you can pretty much pick the term you like: Long Tail Folksonomy Word of Mouth Crowdsourcing Prosumeris

Today the Washington Post posted an article on MySpace being so “Last Year”. As said by journalist Yuki Noguchi, Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle. Within several months’ time, a site can garner tens of millions of users who, just as quickly, might flock to the next place, making it hard for corporate America to make lasting investments in whatever’s hot now. There are 122 million profiles on MySpace and 400,000 created each day. I don’t p

Think about a bad customer experience you’ve had. It could be a customer service issue, or defective product, or rude interaction with an in-store or phone representative. What was the conclusion? I’m guessing there are three possibilities: A. No response or recognition by the company. You left disappointed, if not irate, never to return. B. They dispatched a standard resolution to your dissatisfaction…in your mind, a compromise. C. They acted quickly, apologized and delighte