Best Engaging Communities

To Change Effectively, Change Just One Thing - Peter Bregman - HarvardBusiness.org [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:02:11 PDT

Internet overtakes television to become biggest advertising sector in the UK | Media | The Guardian [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:14:50 PDT

Record £1.75bn online spend makes UK first major economy to spend more on web advertising, says Internet Advertising Bureau. By Mark Sweney

How Do Innovators Think? - HBR Editors' Blog - Harvard Business Review [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:06:44 PDT

Career Couch - Dissecting Why You Were Passed Over for Promotion - Interview - NYTimes.com [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:33:04 PDT

What Your Suit Says About You - David Silverman - HarvardBusiness.org [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:48:29 PDT

Bread Board 6 Stupid Excuses for Not Getting Feedback [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:35:45 PDT

mental_floss Blog 10 Unusual Playgrounds From Around the World [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:18:35 PDT

Everything you need to feel smart again.

Segway inventor takes aim at thirst with Slingshot - CNN.com [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:03:09 PDT

If you listen to inventor Dean Kamen, the biggest health problem facing the world today is not AIDS, obesity or malnutrition. It's a shortage of water.

Great No-Cost Software [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:22:24 PDT

Paying is passé. Use these 10 free software programs instead

An Overview of the Education Market in India | Sramana Mitra on Strategy [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 04:02:34 PDT

By Guest Author Shipra Agarwal Education has long been receiving the major wallet share of the Indian middle class. The education market is generally

The Anatomy of Determination [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:46:31 PDT

Barack Obama Is Tapping Into Your Brain | The Outthinker: Mavericks that Out Innovate the Competition | Fast Company [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:20:26 PDT

The best communicators are the ones who can create and share a strong narrative story. The best novels are the ones with the most interesting plot and the best speeches are the ones that arouse an emotional response from a crowd.

IPO Dashboards — all about ipos [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:27:21 PDT

all about ipos

The 10 Stupidest Tech Company Blunders - PC World [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:23:02 PDT

'This iPod thing will never catch on'--and 9 more unbelievable (in hindsight) missed tech opportunities.

Is the TC50 DemoPit worth it? In short: Yes. Expensify Blog [del.icio.us]

mmohan — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:53:12 PDT

How much do doctors in other countries make?

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:05:00 GMT

The US doctor gets paid among the most. Even US nurses.

US Advertising spend by category and decline rates.

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:19:00 GMT

Magna Media forecasts are out for US Ad spend. 2 great graphics are:

Invention versus Innovation

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:00:00 GMT

“The gulf between invention and innovation is often a huge one that many entrepreneurs can’t cross,” said Scott D. Anthony, president of Innosight, a consulting firm.

Take the example of the 4 years it has taken GreenPrint to go from product to market. Amazing story of patience, persistence, and perseverance.

Innovation is far more about prospecting, mining, refining and adding value than it is about pure invention.

How to differentiate using a great positioning strategy and tell stories

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:21:00 GMT

Organizational storytelling is slowly but surely becoming a hot strategy for conveying important information about any business, both internally and externally.

"Charts leave listeners bemused. Prose remains unread. Dialogue is just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers or front-line staff in a large organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, storytelling is the only thing that works."

Here is an awesome example of how Costco does it.

PC shipments and the Acer brand

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:23:00 GMT

A 30% drop for Dell, 17% for HP but 7-8% drop for Acer during the last few quarters shows how Acer is taking marketshare away from DELL in the recent past. Amazingly they are only focused on one of the many markets - Notebooks and Netbooks.

Shows how transitions in product cycles can create opportunities for new entrants.

As a company, where would you go looking for new ideas? Innovation?

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:32:00 GMT

The WSJ reports:

When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look. That won’t get them anywhere.

The ideas are typically at the edge of a company’s radar screen, and sometimes a bit beyond: trends in peripheral industries, unserved needs in foreign markets, activities that aren’t part of the company’s core business. To be truly innovative, companies sometimes have to change their frames of reference, extend their search space. New ways of thinking and organization can be required as well.

InnoCentive.com is a site where people and companies look for help in solving scientific and business challenges. Posters of challenges sometimes offer cash rewards for solutions: Amounts have ranged from $5,000 to $1 million. The site began as an in-house tool for research scientists at Eli Lilly & Co. to help one another. Now it is independent, with Indianapolis-based Lilly as a founding shareholder.

Sometimes innovations arise when different departments talk to each other. But what’s the best way to start the conversation?

Many companies set up so-called communities of practice, which are typically internal Web sites where employees are encouraged to share knowledge and skills important to the company.

Teens and Media consumption

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:53:00 GMT

Nielsen released the "How teens use media" report.

Its a fascinating read overall.

1. They are more focused - they view one media type at a time.
2. They have better recall - they tend to remember ads and consider ads as content (if good)
3. They read newspapers - really? No really!
4. Television is still the most dominant form of media for teenagers.
5. The most popular genres for U.S. teens are Evening Animation, Participation/ Variety and General Drama.
6. In South Africa, teens averaged more than five hours per day of TV viewing. In Taiwan, teens averaged just two hours and 47 minutes.
7. Beyond the first (TV) and second screens (Computer/Internet) , teens are increasingly watching video on their phones.
8. Teens browse less than half as much as the typical user
9. Sixty-seven percent of teen social networkers say they update their page at least once a week
10. More than half of all U.S. teen mobile subscribers (66%) say they actually prefer text-messaging to calling. Thirty-four percent say it’s the reason they got their phone.

Real Time search = the next frontier? Or just more of the same

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:08:00 GMT

I was at the Buzz140 conference yesterday, in Chennai, organized by the effervescent Kiruba Shankar, Photon (Vasanth and others) and the knowledge conference. It was a one day Twitter conference attended by about 150 folks, many of whom were learning about twitter for the first time.

It was actually a trending topic on twitter for a brief few minutes. (Photos on Flickr) and some by tag.

There was event coverage in the local media - both the Hindu and Deccan Chronicle covered it briefly today.

There was a very interesting topic on Real time search and its implications on Twitter and Google. Many new players have emerged in the space like Topsy, almost.at and Scoopler.

Photo thanks to Keval Prabhu.

What natural and economic disasters have in common

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:50:00 GMT

From McKinsey quarterly:

Scientists, sometimes in cooperation with economists, are taking the lead in a young field that applies complexity theory to economic research, rejecting the traditional view of the economy as a fully transparent, rational system striving toward equilibrium.

Many other scientists in the field of complexity theory argue that earthquakes, forest fires, power blackouts, and the like are extremely difficult or even impossible to foresee because they are the products of many interdependent “agents” and cascades of events in inherently unstable systems that generate large variations.

See the image below for the eerie correlation between banking crisis and earthquakes in So. Cal.

These examples indicate that power law patterns, with their small, frequent outcomes mixed with rare, hard-to-predict extreme ones, exist in many aspects of the economy. This suggests that the economy, like other complex systems characterized by power law behavior, is inherently unstable and prone to occasional huge failures.

How to be a great community manager - 5 steps

mukund@thrisha.com (Mukund Mohan) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:01:00 GMT

Sarah Blue has some recommendations on the 5 steps to be a better community manager:

It not an earth shattering revelation but a tried and tested set of known best practices.