Ingredients:
1. A CD with music by Eleni Karaindrou.
2. A photo album, the kind you find in the lounge usually with scenery or black and white pictures.
 
Instructions:
1. Play the music.
2. Flick through the photos.   Really slowly.  1-5 minutes on each usually is OK.
3. You can (slowly!) move your gaze across the page occasionally.
4. Think or don’t think of anything you [...]

Before the web there were just plain marketing gurus.  They were the closest we had to the to soundbite Twitter sized slogan makers we are used to today.   Before Google searches, they were the ones discovering interesting stories about products, companies and brands.   And they packaged them neatly for us with branded big fonts and style.
A well known [...]

“The European flag consists of 12 golden stars in a circle on a blue background. The stars symbolise the ideals of unity, solidarity and harmony among the peoples of Europe.
The number of stars has nothing to do with the number of member countries, though the circle is a symbol of unity.”
That is all you get when trying to discover what [...]

I once famously wrote an article about the Business Software Alliance and how it’s methodology is similar to the Holy Inquisition.  The Middle Ages are to me a truly inspiring historical period, a time when many of our modern concepts were created.   Except they were in their more raw, essential form.  For example there were quite a few “tests [...]

I think everyone in branding envies Steve Jobs.   Some turn it into adulation, others into hate.  He was the ultimate spin doctor.  From “we burn Pentiums to the ground” to “we love Intel” in the space of a few months.  Or “we will never use Adobe Flash” to “OK, we will implement it in everything again”; most politicians would do [...]

For most business people, social media appears to be something exotic, even alien.   Partly due to the way it is presented in the media and largely because their “older media” companies are still not sure how to sell it.   There is a big temptation to see it as a completely new paradigm.   Of course it isn’t.   [...]

We tend to think of social media as quite an individualistic activity.   Very self centred.   Sure, it’s “social” but we often imply that the “circles” or “groups” are smaller and more fragmented to a degree which trivialised “old school” categorization.
Enter the nation state.
A country is of course quite an artificial creation, but still a mighty powerful one.   [...]

Email going around with the following disinformation:  (In italics my responses.)
“These figures reveal the huge black hole that our time disappears into when we visit Facebook, Twitter or YouTube or other social media sites.

One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook ( This number is calculated by dividing the planets 6.94 billion people by Facebook’s 750 million users)   No [...]

While most of the media tries to convince business people that they should all run to use social media asap, I beg to differ.   The step is simply too big, especially for market leaders.   You make a business page for your company, brand or product?   I will use it against you!   What you have effectively done [...]

Few people realize how important the Google Plus “Real names”policy really is.   Maybe it’s just me having spent so much energy taking advantage of Facebook’s completely chaotic structure over the past years.  Sure, it ran contrary to most Facebook official policies but any business person would be an idiot not too.  What?   You can see all the ‘friends’ [...]