Virtual Properties

John Moore:

In July, Clear Channel announced a plan to cut radio commercial time to no more than 15 minutes of ads per hour and no more than six ads in a row. And now we learn Clear Channel is using its formidable weight to sway advertisers to use 30-second spots and not 60-second spots. Seems Clear Channel believes bad ads are causing radio listeners to change channels.

[Hey Clear Channel … could it be BAD RADIO is driving listeners to change stations? But that’s another blog for another day.]

The Wall Street Journal reported, “… some advertisers are balking, dubbing the plan Giving you less, charging you more. In the radio industry, a 30-second spot typically costs about 80% of the price of a 60-second pitch: Advertisers usually figure they might as well spend the extra cash and get a full minute. And advertisers, it turns out, don’t like having to cram their message into half the time they’re used to."

To help advertisers make the switch from 60-second spots (where advertisers have time to tell a story) to 30-second spots (where advertisers must be disciplined to supremely focus their message), Clear Channel has created a new unit, Creative Resources Group, to help advertisers produce better and more effective 30-second radio commercials.

Marcus Graham on the disconnect between large advertising spending and automated reception systems.

Jefferson Graham writes about the fusion between Apple's "Genius" approach at its retail stores and the Ritz-Carlton's restaurant bar:

Johnson focused on customer service and thought of Ritz-Carlton hotels as a model for Apple stores. He and a team watched Ritz managers put together new hotels in New York and New Orleans, and out of those visits came the Genius Bar.

At the Ritz, "The restaurant bar is a friendly gathering place," Johnson says. "The bartender makes you feel welcome. We thought: Wouldn't it be great if going to a computer store could be as welcoming?"

Kathleen Allardyce:

The competitive environment makes branding for real estate brokers and agents a critical issue. However, there are a few common misconceptions about marketing real estate services. Among the real estate agents I speak to, these misconceptions are often expressed like this:

Ronald Alsop:

A company's sales force is its lifeblood. But you'd never know it by looking at the typical M.B.A. curriculum.

Because they're lighter on theory and research than other academic subjects, sales courses are surprisingly scarce in M.B.A. programs. "It's sad that something as important to the economy as sales shows up as a footnote in the principles of marketing course at most graduate business schools," says Andy Zoltners, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, which has long offered a sales-force management class.

But the sales function seems to be slowly gaining more respect as a few other major schools, including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina, create M.B.A.-level sales courses. Harvard Business School has taught sales management for many years, but lately it has been focusing more on the selling process itself, with lessons on making sales presentations to corporate customers, influencing people and closing the deal.

"Many people view selling as tactical and haven't taken the broader view that you will need sales skills even if you aren't managing a sales force," says David Godes, an associate professor at Harvard. "If you're going into banking or consulting, how do you get clients and how do you raise money?"

Slate:

Slate advertising critic Seth Stevenson grades the latest commercials from real estate company Century 21, which feature a nagging wife and an agent listening in to what should be a private conversation.

Nadine Brozan:

Even brokers who are at the top of their game hire coaches to try to reach higher.

Jennifer Sharpe:

People twirling signs are becoming an increasingly common sight at real estate openings and sandwich shops across the country.

Producer Jennifer Sharpe investigates this flowering of what in the business are known as "human directionals" and some of the truly eccentric people who make a living doing a very odd job.

Wal-Mart fired Julie Roehm, a fast rising advertising exec recently recruited from Chrysler last week. Roehm has become a poster child for all that is perceived to be wrong in the advertising world:

• Lewis Lazare:

  But what did Roehm accomplish in a brief 10 months on the job as Wal-Mart's senior vice president of marketing communication? Nothing less than destroying just about everything she touched in what had been a fairly well-defined and successful corporate culture, including relationships with two ad agencies -- Bernstein-Rein and GSD&M -- that worked for decades to help build Wal-Mart into the dominant brand it is today.

  In the wake of Tuesday's stunning revelation that Roehm was out the door at Wal-Mart, plenty of people, including us, wondered what qualified this woman to hold one of the most powerful marketing positions in America. And no one we've talked to who worked with her at Wal-Mart or knew of her previous career could tell us with any conviction that she had the credentials to wreak havoc on Wal-Mart's marketing department.

• Peter DeLorenzo:

  I'm talking about people who were so far out of their leagues and so far removed from what a proper marketing/advertising person should act like, that more often than not their behavior, combined with their utter lack of professional relevance, bordered on the criminal. And they proceeded to do deep damage to their brands - and to the heretofore unsullied reputations of the people who actually did conduct themselves with the utmost in professionalism and creativity.

  The most blatant example of this kind of marketing malpractice (before the Roehm episode at least) was the devastatingly dismal period in GM history not long ago when that esteemed Proctor & Gamble refugee John Smale unleashed a phalanx of so-called marketing "experts" on the corporation who were going to finally "fix" GM with the etched-in-stone tenets of marketing success as espoused by P&G's vaunted "brand management" philosophy. Smale appointed Ron Zarrella as his brand management guru and chief proponent of Smale's "Profit through Marketing" doctrine - which was based on the fundamentally flawed premise that GM could market their way to prosperity - while relegating the importance of the product itself to a subservient, if not outright inconsequential, role.

• Michael Barbaro & Stuart Elliott:

Aaron Swartz:

Google's famed secrecy doesn't really do a very good job of keeping information from competitors. Those who are truly curious can pick up enough leaks and read enough articles to figure out how mostly everything works. But what it does do is create an aura of impossibility around the place. People read the airbrushed versions of Google technologies in talks and academic papers and think that Google has some amazingly large computer lab with amazingly powerful technology. But hang around a Googler long enough and you'll hear them complain about the unreliability of GFS and how they don't really have enough computers to keep up with the load.

"It's always frightening when you see how the sausage actually gets made," explains a product manager. And that's exactly what the secrecy is supposed to prevent. The rest of the world sees Google as this impenetrable edifice with all the mysteries of the world inside ("I hear once you've worked there for 256 days they teach you the secret levitation," explains xkcd) while the select few inside the walls know the truth -- there is no there there -- and are bound together by this burden.

Brand Autopsy:

Best Book Title
** THE HUMMER and the MINI ** (Robyn Waters)
This is a book on trends where the author, Robyn Waters (former trendmeister at Target), contends consumer trends emerge from discovering trend/countertrend paradoxes such as … luxurious commodities, less is more, and healthy indulgences. Smart stuff. Smart title.

Golden Raspberry Award for Over-Promising and Under-Delivering
** OUTSIDE INNOVATION ** (Patricia Seybold)

Co-creation is a hot marketing topic these days and OUTSIDE INNOVATION promises to show us how to harness customer innovation to design better products and programs from the outside in. Unfortunately, the book under-delivered on its promise. I struggled to read through this chunky 400-page book and when I did finish it, I was left uninspired and uninformed on how to exactly weave customer innovation into the company creation process.

Carl Bialik:

In a column last month, I wrote about the methods behind a U.K. marketing firm's ranking of the 10 most popular online videos. The firm, Viral Factory, was forced to improvise in arriving at some of its estimates for videos that debuted before the YouTube era, when email, not the Web, was the preferred tool for sharing.

Yet even today's videos, generally watched on sites that count each view and publish the numbers, can be hard to track -- just another reminder that on the Internet, supposedly the most quantifiable medium, users remain hard to count.

To understand the video-numbers predicament, consider the site vidmeter.com, which launched this week. Its software crawls 10 major video sites, including YouTube, and grabs the stats they display. Vidmeter's editors sift through the top videos and tally total views, taking into consideration that the same video is often posted on multiple sites. (Sometimes, the same video is posted many times on a single site -- there were 18 different versions of a popular "Saturday Night Live" clip on YouTube on a recent check, according to vidmeter). Vidmeter does its crawl each day, and ranks videos on views over the most recent 24 hours. There's more detail here, and the rankings are listed here (though be aware that the site doesn't filter results -- some videos contain adult content.)

Richard Edelman:

delman and Boston Consulting Group co-sponsored a dinner on Wednesday to explore media convergence and new ways to communicate with the consumer. Attendees included important marketers (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, GE, Citigroup, Delta Airlines, Dannon), communications firms (Y&R, BBDO, Razorfish) and media companies (AOL, Yahoo, Dow Jones, VH1, Conde Nast, Walt Disney). Here are a few of the key findings from the event:

1. Ideas are paramount. Too much time is spent on where to communicate, not enough on what to talk about. Ideas can be gathered by listening to stakeholders and consumers online.
2. The new sweet spot for video content is a 3-4 minute segment, between long form (movie) and short form (30 second spot). This is the average length of segments on YouTube.
3. The web has scalability issues for major marketers. TV is still perceived as necessary to reach a mass audience for brand building, while the web is fine for a small advertiser focused on product choice/sales. TV is also seen as offering predictable sales results, key to a food business with a need to forecast production precisely. Of course there was a loud dissent from Wenda Harris Millard of Yahoo who described TV ads as “spray and pray.”
4. There is further proof of Linda Stone’s adage, "The World of Continuous Partial Attention". Thirty eight percent of those watching the Oscars on TV were also on-line. People may be watching TV but are watching TV differently.

Harvard Business Review:

1. The Accidental Influentials *

Duncan J. Watts

In his best seller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals. The idea seems intuitively right—we think we see it happening all the time. Nevertheless, this isn’t actually how ideas spread. It’s better to focus on getting enough plain, ordinary people to sign on.

John Hagel:

Fifteen years ago, he wrote a seminal book on “Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition.” That book argued that “structural holes” defined by gaps in connections among complementary resources in the competitive arena provide significant opportunities for entrepreneurial initiative. As he succinctly put it, “competitive advantage is a matter of access to holes.”

Structural holes still form the centerpiece of Burt’s analysis but, in his new book, he focuses on two sets of activities required to generate value from structural holes – brokerage and closure.

• Brokerage is the function performed by people whose relationships bridge across structural holes in social networks – they help to connect non-redundant flows of information.
• Closure on the other hand helps to build alignment among diverse individuals by creating rich connections with third parties that establish powerful reputation mechanisms.

As Burt makes clear, closure is typically not the direct result of efforts by individuals but instead is a by-product of interactions that naturally arise when dense networks of relationships form.
Burt’s book explores the complex relationship between these two activities, especially the paradox of tension and interdependence. On the one hand, brokerage is about reaching out and embracing new flows of knowledge while closure is about focusing inward and enforcing conformity, rejecting that which does not fit. At this level, brokerage and closure are deeply at odds. On the other hand, brokerage cannot function effectively without the trust that closure creates.

Carol Lloyd:

Now that sales volume has also declined, agents are looking for ways to distinguish themselves from their Lexus-driving peers.

Not surprisingly, a growing industry of marketing wizards, Web site designers and personal coaches has sprung up to help them.

Suzee Miller, "author, broker, speaker" and founder of Feng Shui Paradigms, teaches agents to "feng shui" their listings and sell the unsellable. Coach Mike Ferry offers a "One-on-One Coaching Program" to agents eager to scale new real estate heights.

These programs don't come cheap -- to join Ferry's (which includes "40 high-intensity Coaching Calls," "Superstar Retreats," access to the Ferry library of media products, business tracking tools and daily e-mails from Mike, among other services -- but not actual private coaching with Ferry himself) the cost is $12,000 a year.

Locally, San Francisco agent Alexander Clark offers an electronic newsletter, with concise listings of all new properties on the market and all properties sold in the past week, to other agents so they can use the assembled data to "add value" to their client communications. And umpteen Web sites charge agents high fees and/or commissions in return for "hot leads" from random Internet surfers who fill out a form saying they are looking for an agent.

Matthew Boyle and Jim Collins:

If you were to offer advice to a beginning entrepreneur, what would it be? --Francisco Romero, Albuquerque

First, don't obsess on finding the "great idea." In fact, our research shows a somewhat negative correlation between pioneering a great idea and building a great company. Many of the greatest started with either no great idea or even failed ideas.

Sony (Charts) started with a failed rice cooker. Marriott (Charts) started as a single root beer stand. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's great idea was simply to work together - two best friends who trusted each other - while their first four products failed to get the company out of the garage.

They followed the "first who" approach to entrepreneurship: First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn't the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.

Starting a company is like scaling an unclimbed face - you don't know what the mountain will throw at you, so you must pick the right partners, who share your values, on whom you can depend, and who can adapt.

GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz spoke with bloggers at the Chicago Auto show. He mentioned that they are doing "more in the way of unconventional media, unconventional consumer influence than most corporations our size".

Seth Godin:

Marketing, I think, can be divided into two eras.

The first, the biggest, the baddest and the most impressive was the era in which marketers were able to reach the unreachable. Ads could be used to interrupt people who weren't intending to hear from you. PR could be used to get a story to show up on Oprah or in the paper, reaching people who weren't seeking you out.

Sure, there were exceptions to this model (the Yellow Pages and the classifieds, for example), but generally speaking, the biggest wins for a marketer happened in this arena.

We're watching it die.

Terry Heaton:

CNN announced a deal this week with Internet Broadcasting that comes down to a massive information swap. CNN is investing in Internet Broadcasting, and will publish stories from the 70 locals affiliated with the web publisher. Internet Broadcasting's stations can, in turn, publish CNN stories on their sites.
From the Wall Street Journal:
"CNN... hopes that the content-swap arrangement will drive up user traffic both on CNN.com and the local sites, allowing all parties involved to charge higher advertising rates. That would theoretically pave the way for Internet Broadcasting affiliates to expand their national ad sales."

But if you have a finite amount of information and you spread it across two sites, how does that increase the traffic at both? The trouble with the deal is that it still thinks in terms of pageviews. You've read Terry and me on this topic before: trying to aggregate giant numbers of pageviews is a 1.0 approach and a dying tactic. It's a hard sell, too.

I don't go to CNN.com for local news. And I don't go to local news sites for international news. The marvelous thing about getting information from the web is how I gather it from hundreds of sources. My "homepage" is my RSS reader. I'm not likely to subscribe to WXXX's RSS feed of CNN's national news.

David Maister:

What We Hate About Those People, the 15th episode in my live video and podcast series, deals with the interpersonal relations between professionals and their clients. Often the professional, being the expert, overlooks the emotional needs of their clients. We will demonstrate a simple exercise that will help you better understand and fulfill your clients’ wants and needs.

An interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management:

Question: What do companies do stupid things?
Answer: First, they ignore feedback effects. There has recently been a lot of interest, and apparent surprise, that programmers in India now cost a lot and their wages have been rising rapidly. Did people forget supply and demand? If everyone moves work to India, what did companies think would happen? Or, to take another example, when companies cut their retirement benefits, and people can not afford to retire, guess what, they won’t.

Second, companies often ignore the interdependence or connections between actions in one part and those in another. So, even as some departments are trying to cut the costs of benefits, others are worried about recruiting and retaining enough qualified people. Maybe the parts should work together.

Third, many companies presume that incentives are the answer to everything, and have a very mechanistic model of human behavior. That is also incorrect.

Tom Patterson: 230K PDF Based on a national survey of 1800 randomly sampled teens, young adults, and older adults, this report examines the amount of daily news consumed by young people. The evidence shows that young Americans are estranged from the daily newspaper and rely more heavily on television than on the Internet for their news. A few decades ago, there were not large differences in the news habits and daily information levels of younger and older Americans. Today, unlike most older Americans, many young people find a bit of news here and there and do not make it a routine part of their day.

The results were especially grim for newspapers. Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.

Terry Heaton:

At the LATimes, second quarter revenue was down 10% and cash flow down 27%. In his call for front page ads, Publisher David Hiller noted it was one of the worst “ever experienced” by the paper.

Richard A. Smith knows something anyone considering buying a newspaper company needs to know. He's taking his advertising dollars somewhere else.

Smith, president of Realogy Corp., the largest residential real estate broker in the U.S., said the portion of his Coldwell Banker and Century 21 branding budget devoted to newspapers will shrink by as much as two-thirds next year from 2006 as spending moves online. Newspapers will receive 70 percent of Realogy's home-sale advertising by 2010, down from 84 percent this year.

The shift, echoed by executives at Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s HomeServices of America Inc., the second-largest broker, is a sign that real estate advertising won't recover fully from its slump when the housing market rebounds. Newspaper officials such as McClatchy Co.'s Gary Pruitt are mistaken in predicting a comeback, Smith said.

The Economist takes an interesting look at American culture vis a vis British retailer Tesco's analysis of American consumers. Tesco plans to open "Fresh & Easy" stores in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Southern California:

The company has spent years gathering detailed information on every aspect of American life. Most retailers would think they had done their homework after the usual focus groups and surveys, but Tesco went much further. Researchers, including a small cohort of top executives, spent two weeks living with 60 American families. They poked around in their kitchen cupboards, watched them cook and followed them as they shopped. “They'd been studying the city for about a year before they came to us,” says Scott Motley, who works for the city of Phoenix, which with the Greater Phoenix Economic Council helped Tesco find places to put stores.

Even the stores seem part of a grander plan to keep gathering data. Take the patchwork of districts where Tesco plans to build some of the first. In central Phoenix it has chosen some of the poorest parts of town. Families living within a mile of one store have a median annual income of just $37,500 (against about $44,000 for America as a whole). In nearby Chandler, a middle-class area, it will be building its stores within reach of the city's richest inhabitants. There, median incomes run to about $93,000. This torrent of comparative data is central to the plan: Tesco is setting out to change the way Americans shop and eat.

Dori Molitor:

It’s been ten years since Tom Peters declared women’s economic clout, but most marketers are still in the dark.

Scott Karp:

Two reports out today illustrate how the traditional media industry is working hard to prop up their declining business. First, as evidence of the decline, IBM released a study that says that the Internet is about to overtake TV as the principal medium in most households (via MediaPost):

TIME SPENT ON THE INTERNET is set to surpass time spent watching TV in the average American household, according to the results of an IBM survey released Wednesday.

Overall, 19% of respondents said they spend six or more hours a day on the Internet, versus 9% for TV. More telling, 60% reported that they spend one to four hours using the Internet, versus 66% who spend the time watching TV.

Of course, the time spent on the Internet includes growing consumption of online video, according to the global survey of about 2,000 respondents (including 885 Americans) conducted in April-June of this year. Globally, 67% of consumers say they watch video on the Internet, or would like to do so.

Andrew Schrock:

A new study suggests that marketers shouldn't fixate on the number of people who click on ads. According to the research, just seeing an ad on a Web page can impact memory. The findings could have a significant impact on the way online advertising is made and metered.

Typically, to be considered effective, an online advertisement has to elicit a response--usually a click of the mouse--from a potential customer. But Chan Yun Yoo, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky's School of Journalism and Telecommunications, found that when people view Web advertisements, they store information in two different types of memory: explicit and implicit.

Explicit memory involves facts learned through conscious interaction, while implicit memory involves unconscious retention. Explicitly remembered information includes ad slogans, product benefits, and website addresses. In contrast, implicit memory might only come into play when external stimuli trigger concepts. For instance, a consumer might only recall a brand of toothpaste from a television ad when he or she discovers it while browsing in a store. Or the consumer might develop an unconscious affinity for a certain brand despite not knowing specific facts about it.

Subjects who paid attention to a banner advertisement were more likely than those who didn't to recall whole words and facts from the ad--facts stored in explicit memory. All ads had the same level of impact in the unconscious explicit memory, however, whether or not they'd been clicked. Yoo's findings are relevant because they challenge the assumption that online advertising is only effective when it gets a direct response from the viewer. His study was published in the spring 2007 edition of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.

Bob Sutton:

Here is the list. I've found this on many places on the web. This version comes the HP website, here. It does caution that is is for internal use, but as these have been published so many places and they are such wonderful standards, and I found it on a public website, I can't imagine that putting here can do any harm -- only good

Foreignerd:

If it were not for Rand McNally, I wouldn’t know I was in Europe, separated by an ocean from my family and friends. As far as I’m concerned, the urban culture of Berlin is closer to the culture of New York City than it is to, say, the German hinterland, to say nothing of the American hinterland. It is only through a certain way of looking at the world — from the privileged view of the orbiting satellite, in this case — that it appears the way it does. Our traditional maps, from the rough sketches of the Middle Ages to the latest map/satellite hybrids of Google, place geographic proximity above all other considerations in terms of importance.

But what about cultural proximity? Lifestyle proximity? “Energetic” proximity? What about the fact that I can take a direct flight (more or less) to any world capital, but to get to a mid-sized city in the States, I have to take two or three? It costs more money and takes more time to get from Denver to Upstate New York than it does from Denver to Amsterdam, Paris, or Milan — wouldn’t that make Denver CLOSER to the European capitals than it is to small cities in its own nation? That is my contention.

Jeff Jarvis:

For decades, I've watched newspaper industry thinktanks - the too few that exist - try to invent the next medium for news. This usually takes the mythical form of e-paper, thin as a sheet and just as portable, able to display newspapers like newspapers, very Harry Potter. I have also seen too many newspapers and magazines attempting to use painful PDF technology to display their publications on screens exactly as they appear on paper. Why? Ego, I think, and comfort and fear of change. The New York Times recently did a deal with Microsoft to use its new reader, which looks as attractive, if grey, as the Times itself and enables familiar activities like turning pages, but which loses some of the rich linking and interactivity of the web.

I think that's all driving the wrong way: backwards. These are attempts to mould technology to old media. What we should be doing instead, of course, is moulding media to new technology. We should be asking what new we can do on this new iPhone.

Marcelle Fischler:

ON the way to Annona, a stylish restaurant on the second floor of the Manhattan Motorcars Hamptons dealership here, George and Mary Ann Mathys of Quogue spotted a 2001 Rolls-Royce Corniche the color of merlot in the showroom.

“It really caught our eye,” said Mr. Mathys, 70, who works in real estate management. Over a dinner of braised short ribs and sea bass, the car was a topic of conversation among the Mathyses and another couple.

“I ended up buying it,” said Mr. Mathys, a car connoisseur who also owns a 1957 Chevy convertible, a 1936 Auburn and a 1953 Buick.

The two-year-old dealership is one of a number of high-end showrooms offering customers more than wheels.

Alex Frankel:

You can only learn so much about frontline employees as a customer, or even as a reporter. I knew that to find out how the best companies train and indoctrinate employees, I'd have to become one myself. In what wound up as a two-year undercover project, I took a series of entry-level retail jobs, becoming that critical employee who represents the company's face. I did it to better understand the world of commerce and the corporate cultures that drive it. In the process, I learned that Apple Stores, with their aura of cool, were in fact living up to their mission to "reinvent retail" and setting a high bar for other companies in the retail world.

I knew I'd have competition when I applied at the Apple Store, but I also knew store managers hire from the ranks of the brand's fans. Apple is surely a rare bird--few companies have such a broad and committed following, let alone frontline employees who revere its CEO. (When I worked at Gap, then-CEO Paul Pressler showed up in the store and coworkers knew he was a bigwig but didn't realize he was the boss.)

But even companies that have devotees don't always look as hard for passion as they should. On its hiring application, Starbucks asked briefly about my interest in coffee ("What do you like about coffee?") but left it at that.

In my journey, only the Container Store did as good a job as Apple Stores at finding people passionate about what they're selling. When I went in for my Container Store group interview, I choked during a show-and-tell exercise that's an impromptu sales demonstration-slash-passion display that rapidly separates wannabes (like me) from the real deal. Learning from that experience, in my Apple Store interview, I talked about all the Apple products in my life: from iPods to iMacs, AppleCare to Safari.

Seth Godin:

Most industries innovate from both ends:

• The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
• The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
• It's the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.

The mediocre record companies, mediocre A&R guys and the mediocre acts are struggling to stay in place. They're nervous that it all might fall apart. So they wait. They wait for 'proof' that this new idea is going to work, or at least won't prove fatal. (It's the impulse to wait that made them mediocre in the first place, of course).

So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they're persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.

The irony, of course, is that by jumping in last, they're condemning themselves to more mediocrity.

David Brooks:

Van Zandt fell for the Beatles and discovered the blues and early rock music that inspired them. He played in a series of bands on the Jersey shore, and when a friend wanted to draw on his encyclopedic blues knowledge for a song called “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” Van Zandt wound up as a guitarist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

The 1970s were a great moment for musical integration. Artists like the Rolling Stones and Springsteen drew on a range of musical influences and produced songs that might be country-influenced, soul-influenced, blues-influenced or a combination of all three. These mega-groups attracted gigantic followings and can still fill huge arenas.

But cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock. There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.

People have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades. Back in the Feb. 18, 1982, issue of Time, Jay Cocks wrote that American music was in splinters. But year after year, the segmentation builds.

Last month, for example, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an essay in The New Yorker noting that indie rock is now almost completely white, lacking even the motifs of African-American popular music. Carl Wilson countered in Slate that indie rock’s real wall is social; it’s the genre for the liberal-arts-college upper-middle class.

Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices.

Jay Deragon:

We were recently meeting with one of the top executives of a Fortune 500 company and discussing the power and dynamics of social networks.
The issue being discussed was whether creating a “social network for customer feedback” was a good or bad thing for the organization. One of the executives commented “I’d hate to empower our customers to complain because there is a lot of things we do wrong that they could complain about and opening that dialog up to the public could be dangerous, risky to say the least”.

Hmm….so ignoring the issues and hoping customers don’t talk to other customers is a better strategy? Do you think maybe your customers could actually help you solve the very problems that create the complains? Do you think your employees agree with your customers but don’t dare speak up?

Business bureaucracy has brainwashed many people into thinking “nothing can change so hide the truth”, don’t put things out in the open because it is dangerous to admit shortcomings publicly. The social web is dangerous to the bureaucracy of business because it enables customers and employees to “openly discuss and share the very issues that ingrained bureaucracy has caused.”

Jay Deragon:

We were recently meeting with one of the top executives of a Fortune 500 company and discussing the power and dynamics of social networks.
The issue being discussed was whether creating a “social network for customer feedback” was a good or bad thing for the organization. One of the executives commented “I’d hate to empower our customers to complain because there is a lot of things we do wrong that they could complain about and opening that dialog up to the public could be dangerous, risky to say the least”.

Hmm….so ignoring the issues and hoping customers don’t talk to other customers is a better strategy? Do you think maybe your customers could actually help you solve the very problems that create the complains? Do you think your employees agree with your customers but don’t dare speak up?

Business bureaucracy has brainwashed many people into thinking “nothing can change so hide the truth”, don’t put things out in the open because it is dangerous to admit shortcomings publicly. The social web is dangerous to the bureaucracy of business because it enables customers and employees to “openly discuss and share the very issues that ingrained bureaucracy has caused.”

J.W. Elphinstone:

Frustrated as her house languished on the market for three straight summers, J.J. Rodgers is trying a new sales tactic: giving the two-story home away in an essay contest.

Already, she's received more than 500 entries - each essay requires a $100 entry fee - for her four-bedroom home in Red Feather Lakes, Colo. She's hoping for a minimum of 2,000 entries, or $200,000 in fees, by the May 25 deadline to pay off the mortgage, cover closing costs and have a little left over. Rodgers last listed the property at $169,000 after cutting the price three times.

"We don't have anything to lose," said Rodgers, 45. "If we're unsuccessful, at least we did something different from what we've already tried."

Rodgers isn't alone in turning to unconventional sales incentives to unload her house. Aside from cash, home sellers across the country are giving away luxury cars, homeowner warranty plans and furniture to entice buyers.

Julie Freese:

You may not be able to beat the house in Sin City, but you just might be able to beat the housing market. At least that's how two real estate agents, Barbara and Marshall Zucker, are placing their bets.

As they watched the Las Vegas foreclosure rate skyrocket 169% from 2006 to 2007 - making Nevada the most afflicted state in the nation - they also noticed that 40% of all home sales were foreclosed properties. So in February the couple bought a 24-seat Ford (F, Fortune 500) bus for $40,000, named it the Vegas Foreclosure Express, and began offering locals and out-of-staters thrice-weekly tours of repossessed homes.

"As with any business, you have to change and adapt based on the market to succeed and survive," says Barbara, 48.

Orey Lorinsky:

s "Facebook Fatigue" real or imagined? We've been hearing about a supposed backlash against the social network for months, but haven't seen enough data to convince us. But here's another piece of anecdotal evidence in favor of the "played-out" argument: An interesting word association game, which indicates that people have much more affection for old Web geezers like Amazon and Google than Mark Zuckerberg's upstart.

The experiment, via a site called brandtags.net, is anything but scientific. But it is simple: The site shows a brand's logo and simply asks you to type the first word that pops into your head.

Here are the top 25 words or phrases on Brand Tags currently associated with Facebook (descriptive words are bolded):