Bloghound

Last year shipments of Macs were up a whopping 32.7 percent, according to Gartner. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an article, "Apple edges into the mainstream." So why would a company like Intuit ignore this growing market — and, worse, torture Mac users?

My firm switched over to Macs during the holidays without much of a hiccup. That is until we turned to our financials, which we run on QuickBooks.

• First bad news: there is no Web-based QuickBooks service for Mac users, as there is for Windows. Bummer, as many of us work remotely and the Web-based service allowed us all to easily plug into QB.
• More bad news: there is no Direct Connect service between financial institutions and QuickBooks Pro Mac. (But most banks’ customer service reps don’t know this, so many people get mis-information.)
• And more: trying to get Web Connect between financial institutions and QuickBooks Pro can be a nightmare. (Plus Web Connect is no where near as useful as Direct Connect.) My bank’s advice was to use Windows or Netscape vs. Safari or Firefox browser. I had to point out that Windows is for PCs and that Intuit is discontinuing its support of Netscape.

With still no luck in downloading and importing transaction data from my bank into QB after many service calls and work-arounds, I decided to join the QuickBooks Mac online community
I didn’t find answers in the community, but I did experience just how frustrated and downright angry people are with Intuit about the difficulty of making QB work for the Mac. Holy Moly! Talk about an unintentional way to ruin a brand’s reputation among a large and growing segment of consumers.

I don’t know at this point if I’ll shop around for a bank that can connect with QB for Macs,run our financials on my old PC., or install Windows on our Macs. But I do know that I’ll follow Intuit’s actions to see how closely they’re paying attention the growing Mac market trend, how seriously they’re listening to their Mac customers, and how skillfully they use their online community to turnaround angry consumers. (Or not.)

If you’re interested in social media trends, tools and advice, you might want to come to the Boston Social Media Club/PRSA event this Thursday, Jan. 1o at Bentley College at 6 p.m.: “Beyond Blogging: PR and Today’s Social Media Revolution.”

The session will be moderated by C.C. Chapman, co-founder and principal of The Advance Guard; panelists include: 

• Mike Prosceno, Vice President, Communications, SAP
• Ian Lamont, Senior Editor, New Media, Computerworld
• Lois Kelly, Partner, Foghound Communication
• Laura Fitton, Principal, Pistachio Consulting

Most viral videos that hit it big have low production values, said Stephen Voltz of Eeepy Bird, the 2-person video/live performance company that has produced the wildly successful Diet Coke- Mentos viral videos. Today at the Society of New Communications Research conference Stephen also said that low production quality makes the video feel real to the viewer, making a “more genuine connection between the persson(s) on the video and the person watching.”

More than 40 million people have viewed the Diet Coke-Mento videos. Another low production quality viral hit? AskANinja.

Every once and a while you see a TV ad that is so good you want to share it. Here’s one for Jeep Liberty that makes me smile every time I see it.

I use to go to TED in Monterey in Feb. But I’m liking the BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence in October as much — maybe more. This year’s program, moderated by Walter Mossberg of The Wall St. Journal and Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor,   will feature more approximately 30 fascinating people sharing 15 minute stories about how they catalyzed change or created innovation. Some I’m especially looking forward to:

• Mark Cuban, owner Dallas Mavericks
• Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation guru and Harvard Business School professor
• Jason Fried, 37signals founder and CEO
• Joseph F. Coughlin, MIT AgeLab director
• Juan Fernando Santos, Studiocom chief creative officer
• William Herp, Linear Air president and CEO
• Matt Mason, author, producer and former London pirate radio and club DJ
• Col Dean Esserman, chief of police, Providence
• Euan Semple, former head of Knowledge Management for the BBC 

There are only 80 tickets left for the conference, to be held Oct. 10 – 11 in Providence, one of the coolest, creative cities in the U.S. If you click here to register – or use my name when registering – the price is $800.  (I’ve been involved with the Business Innovation Factory since this non-profit launched a few years ago and will be blogging from the conference.)

On a side note the conference will be held at Trinity Rep Theater, one of the best regional theaters in the country.  (Full disclosure: I’m a theater geek and on the board of Trinity.) All The Kings Men will be playing on Oct. 10 and 11. This production is not to be missed. See it while you’re in town.  Joe Wilson, Jr., an amazingly talented young African American actor ,will be playing the role of Willie Stark.. Talk about changing the conversation.

I find that my marketing and communications friends are voracious readers. So here’s a list of some  non-business books that I had the pleasure of reading on vacation.  Great stories, wonderful characters, and fascinating insights into parts of the world we Westerners tend to know little about. (And, yes, there’s plenty to talk about after reading them!)

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  A remarkably frank and insightful look into Islam in Somalia and Holland, particularly its implications on women.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Set in Eastern Nigeria during  during crippling three-year civil war  in effort to  form the independent nation of Biafra.

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh.  Set in Sundarbans, a vast archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, this page turner is rich in history, culture, marine science and rich characters.

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje.  Such a beautifully written novel that I am lost for words to how to even big to describe this riveting story, set in Northern California and Southern France.  (A line from the book that I keep thinking about:  "We have art," Nietzsche says, "so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth."   His previous novel, Anil’s Ghost, set in Sri Lanka during tits civil war in 19080s and 90s, is also an amazing read.

Eat. Pray. Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. Eating her way through Italy, praying on an ashram in India, and finding love in Indonesia.  My kind of woman! The writing is hilarious, reflective, honest and irrisistable. The line I can’t get our of my head, "I realized that praying is talking to God, and meditating is listening to God."

How to measure marketing communications  (beyond lead gen) or PR (beyond "hits") seems like a question that’s never really answered in a way that executives or marketing and PR professionals feel good about. I’d like to propose an alternative.

Empirical evidence shows that two questions on teacher evaluations correlate with independent measures of student learning, according to Ken Bain, author of "What the Best College Teachers Do."  

1. Did the professor help you learn?
2. Did the professor stimulate your interest in the subject?

Now apply this to marketing or corporate communications:

1. Did the PR/marketing professional (or conference/speech/Web site/podcast/article) help you learn more about the company?
2. Did the PR/marketing professional (or tactic) stimulate your interest in the company/category/product/issue?

Understanding and interest have to be in place  before people make a decision to act, whether that action is calling to set up a meeting with a sales rep or buying the product.

These seem like more informative measures than web hits, clips, white paper downloads…and much less expensive than some of the  complex  measurement approaches that companies often put in place to measure marcom and PR.

Too simple? Maybe.  But when I think of my favorite professors and my best experiences buying from B2B and B2C companies, they would all score off the chart on those two questions.

  Don Murray, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalism professor at my alma mater, University of New Hampshire, recently died but left so many of us with a lasting message: “There’s no magic in writing. It’s a discipline and a process.”

The hardest part of that discipline for me — and many others in marketing — is saying less, stripping out the adjectives, not over-explaining. Using fewer useless words makes for better stories. The other upside to being brief, according to Creative Think’s Roger Van Oech, is that limitations can “be powerful creative stimuIants.”

In the spirit of brevity and creativity, Robert Hruzek of Middle Zone Musings has created a contest challenging people to tell a story in just six words. similar to Wired’s November 2006 feature, “Very Short Stories”

My six word story contributions:

• Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella. Same charming prince?
• She struggled and then just laughed.
• The answer came from weird questions.
• Keeping lids on passion screwed them.
• Addicted to love, seduced by cotton.
• Housework kept her life uncomfortably tidy.
• Would you look at that? Uneffingbelievable.

I've been tagged by Francois Gossieaux in the new blog tag game and am suppose to reveal five things about me that you don't know yet.

1. I was in a famous production of the Metropolitan Opera's Madame Butterfly; my role was the illegitimate child. ( No singing involved.)
2. My favorite writer is Ian MacEwan.
3. I'm convinced that more women than men will be leading countries and major universities within two decades, largely because women are  better at listening and making people feel heard.
4. My first job, at age 14, was writing obituaries and weddings for the Arlington (MA) Advocate.
5. I believe that better communication can change the world.

Now I get to tag five others:

Thomas Clifford

Walter Carl

Tom Asacker

Patricia Seybold

Renee Hopkins Callahan

As interest in social media heats up, check out what J. Bruce Martin at Sales Driven Marketing calls the top 2006 social media sites:

• MySpace (biggest user base by far)
• YouTube (owned by Google)
• Flickr - photo sharing site (owned by Yahoo)
• Xbox - video gaming community (owned by Microsoft)
• Mashable - blogging community
• Sneakerplay - footwear community (owned by Nike)
• CarnivalConnections - branded company community (owned by cruise line)
• Communispace — private invite only online community space