Thinkin’ about…

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Here’s your latest kicked sandcastles:
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The100: Group cohesion scores, gatekeepers and MM/DD/YY formats
Fancy a day of truth hacking? I’m running an in-person event in London on May the 4th (yes, may the force be with you too). It’s all about liars, lying and uncovering truths. Some may even posit that that’s quite important in our line of work 🙂 Plus it’s incredibly good value, working out at …
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The100: Presentation structure, innovation constraints and arm swinging
Recidivism in a Recession As the whiff of recession continues to float through economies, Mark Ritson’s 9 steps marketers should take to avoid the dark times ahead are, in modern parlance, pretty flipping useful. “The companies that maintained ad spend, or even increased it, during a recession saw little advantage during the hard months of …
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The100: Cynicism, Value and Häagen-Daz
Tips from Uncle Les This 30 min talk from Les Binet about how to tweak your marketing plans in these uncertain times is a must watch. Not only does it provide a magnificent summary of where we find ourselves today, it also examines multiple factors that everyone should be aware of: The stoical cynic Martin …
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Haul videos
You may or may not have heard of haul videos. Haul videos are essentially people (consumers) uploading videos on what they have bought from the shops – talking about what they bought and why they like it (the benefit of these for the marketer is that they are rarely negative – why would you buy …
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Strategic planning
Couldn’t have put it better myself. Here at watchmethink we’re all about making things simpler, about getting things done, not just talking about them, about making it easier to understand your customer, easier to get at insight about your customer, easier to digest this insight, making it fun to digest this insight. Accessible, simple, insight. …
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Great people
Small people. Not interested Average people. What things? We definitely want to talk to you. Great people. You will want to be with us. Because if you’ll talk about them, we’ll listen to them, and make sure the right people are listening too.
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What consumers want
The title of a piece by the team at Made by Many. So many think things to quote from this one. Firstly, ‘what I do know is that in agency-land ‘customer focus’ is too often merely rhetoric. Sometimes it’s not even known who the real customers are (!).’ If this is true, and we believe …
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The importance of global
We’ve heard that before. But it’s going to be even more important in the next decade, according to Niklas Zennstrom (co-founder Skype, recently sold for $3.1bn), in the most recent edition of Wired magazine. Zennstrom (who invests in almost 30 other start ups through his London based Atomico fund (which by the way recently raised …
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Cultivate relationships, not transactions
Over at the complete innovator, a fantastic site where they consistently come up with high quality editorial, they recently published a piece on secrets to corporate authenticity. It gives a real insight into how companies should operate. For a business in its infancy (as watchmethink is) this is a ‘must read’ piece. For us here …
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Brand communities
Over at we are social, Nathan McDonald has been allowed to reproduce a piece he wrote on Brand Communities for Contagious Magazine. He says that ideas from these brand communities ‘can contribute to the evolution and innovation of products or simply be a way to test new features, flavours or functionality’. It’s an interesting area …
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Crowdsourcing Brian
Brian Blessed. Legend. Brian Blessed. Loud. Brian Blessed. Now a voice on TomTom thanks to the power of the crowd (or Facebook depending on how you look at it). 25,000 members was the target which was achieved (albeit after 3 years of effort) and then TomTom true to their word delivered on their promise. Now …
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The web is dead, long live the web
Reading what has to be one of the best sites ever, flowingdata.com, we saw a great graphic pushing the point that the web is dead. Whilst that is probably a huge overstatement and not taking into account certain factors – like bandwidth – it’s important (or just good for us) to note the increase in …
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One new actionable idea every day
Seth talked recently about making sure that you find inspiration instead of it finding you. He proposes a simple idea ‘start a blog and post once a day on how your favorite company can improve its products or its service. Do it every day for a month, one new, actionable idea each and every day. …