I am reading a book called Weird Ideas That Work by Robert I. Sutton. Professor Sutton from Stanford is a unique voice with an urgent message about how to generate and capitalize on new ides.  Since I count myself as an entrepreneurial person, I loved few ideas and want to share them with you. The book has 3 major parts; Why the weird ideas work, the weird ideas and putting the weird ideas to work. I did not like all of the weird ideas in this book and i am a little skeptical about some of them. But, still want to share few of my notes with you. If you are interested in management and innovation, I strongly recommend you to read this book.

Weird Ideas;

1- Hire slow learners

2- Hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike

3- Hire people you do not need

4- Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers

5- Find some happy people and get them to fight

6- Reward success and failure, punish inaction

7- Decide to do something that you will probably fail, then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain

8- Think of some ridiculous or impractical things to do, then plan to do them

9- Avoid, distract and bore customers, critics and anyone who just wants to talk about money

10- Dont try to learn anything from people who seems to have solved the problems you face

11- Forget the past, especially your company’s success

I personally did not like the weird idea 3 and 8. But these are for companies where innovation is a way of life. We can not apply these weird ideas in large and established companies. After all, the book is a breakthrough in management thinking, “weird ideas” can help organizations achieve a balance between sustaining performance and fostering new ideas. As a final message; to succeed, you need to be both conventional and weird.

I am trying to find mission and vision statements for a project that I involved in. I just realized that mission-vision statement helps managers to pass the elevator test — the ability to explain the project to someone within two minutes. A good framework from Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm can help you to position your company or product. It follows the form:

For (target customer)
Who (statement of the need or opportunity)
The (product name) is a (product category)
That (key benefit, compelling reason to buy)
Unlike (primary competitive edge)
Our product (statement of primary differentiation)

Once you fill this form out, it will be easier for you to find your vision-mission statements.

This weekend I attended a workshop at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship about Global Entrepreneurial Marketing. Workshop has been held by Rasmus Rahm, who is a Research Assistant at Stockholm School of Economics and Founder & Owner at Pop n Roll. It was a two days workshop and we have learnt lots of practical things. We watched lots of commercials from different sectors and gained vast amount of tools and methods. As a summary;

1- Customer is the boss

2- Marketing is a complex thing and should not be seen as an isolated event.

3- Big mistake that entrepreneurs do is that; positioning their product or service based on features vs. competitors. But, customers do not buy features. Instead they buy perceived benefits/values.

4- When you make your marketing, until it turns back to profit, there are different steps involved. We can show the steps in this graph and one of the most important part is Communication Effects. When it comes to that step, there are four different categories. Namely;

a- Category Need

b- Brand Awareness

c- Brand Image

d- Brand Purchase Intention

Brand awareness and brand image are somehow always in your marketing. Think about these groups, do you want to create a new category, or increase brand awareness or “encourage”, “force” your potential customers to purchase your product or service. But keep in mind that the final result or ROI will be around %12 (if you can reach this number, normally it is much less)

5.1- If your marketing is for Brand Awareness

a- Recognition Brand Awareness Strategy : Avoid radio, because target audience cant see product

b- Recall brand awareness strategy: All media are appropriate

5.2- If your marketing is for Brand Image

a- Low Involvement & Informational: All media are appropriate

b- Low Involvement & Transformational: Avoid radio because of need of visual content

c- High Involvement & Informational: Avoid broadcast media because of time needed to process message

d- High Involvement & Transformational: Avoid radio because of need of visual content

6- While preparing a marketing strategy, first define your goal, what benefits will you provide to your customers and what are the attributes of your product 7- There must be a balance in between all there points when you are marketing your product. For example, a person’s self image and behavior will create a consequence and you, as an entrepreneur, must carefully think about balance. 8- Selecting media type for your marketing is one of the most important thing. Have a look at this graph and always keep in mind the pros and cons of different methods. 9- Think about your customers motivational and involvement levels. Involvement can be economic or psychological. For some cases product can be cheap but psychologically important for the customer. So, the product will be count in high involvement group. Also think about the motivational factors such as informational or transformational. Informational means, a product to solve or avoid a problem. These problems are already exist and well known. But,  transformational means; products which are emotional for customers. Like happiness, worriers, social people. This is also means, to make your customers emotionally happy or secure and so on. 10- Lastly but not least, think about the customer loyalty. Because this is where you make money or create other customers.  It is hard to find the optimum point, for some cases your extra-active or extra-loyal customers can disturb other potential customers. But it is always nice to have reference customers, who will make your marketing for free.

I strongly suggest to entrepreneurs and start-ups to go to Istanbul/Turkey between 7–12 October 2008 to join CeBIT Information Affair. Uniquely positioned to address the region’s flourishing ICT market, CeBIT Bilisim Eurasia is the ideal platform from which to launch new products and services.The 2008 show will boast a total exhibition area of 27,000 square meters divided up into four main sections: Business World, Digital Life, Telecommunications and Home Electronics.

Are you looking for a guaranteed way to boost your business into new dimensions? Then now is the time to set your compass for Turkey, a nation which is well on its way to becoming the number 1 digital business platform of Eurasia.

CeBIT Bilisim Eurasia attracts a highly global audience year after year, generating unrivalled opportunities for everyone interested in expanding their business base and tapping into new markets.

Indispensable for the Business World, the thematic sections will continue to present innovations and solutions that will shape the future.

CeBIT Bilişim Eurasia, where the “application, product and information” triad comes together in a unique environment, will be the most effective promotional platform to share your own business solutions with the rest of the world.

For more information click here

Most of the people believe that writing a business plan is just a one way of wasting time. Instead of writing a business plan, we should focus on development,marketing and sales. I do not agree with them. Because if we do not plan some core topics, strategies of our company we will not be able to react the emerging markets or new opportunities in a correct way or timing.

We had a guest lecturer last weeks, who is one of the founder of eviware, Niclas. I really like his example, he said; “In soccer before you go to stadium all the team comes together and talk about the tactics. If you do not do that, while you are in the field there will not be enough time to think about every thing. Your opponents will start to attack you from the left, right and they will develop new tactics and so on. So; before going to pitch you should develop a core tactic, of course you can change it while you are in action. But still there must be a well defined tactic before you start”. In addition, while writing a business plan we should follow this circle; Discuss, Write, Read, Discuss, Rest, Read, Discuss, Write and Finish

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While online video creates new ways in which to acquire and disseminate information, it does not appear to be replacing traditional media outlets. Eighty percent of consumers say that online video usage does not cut into their TV time.

However, differences by gender and streaming usage are apparent. For men, online video usage cuts into TV time significantly more than for women (29 percent and 16 percent,respectively). While 29 percent of heavy users of online content (those who view content more than once a week) claim that video usage cuts into their TV time; only 12 percent of those who view content once a month make that claim. Of the 51 percent of respondents who indicated that they would watch a television episode online after missing it on TV, heavy users are the most likely to do so – comprising 62 percent of that population.
Consumers like watching TV online for the convenience factor, but connectivity and small screen size are still a barrier. Consumer comments include: “It’s just as enjoyable as watching on television, plus you can watch when it’s convenient for you;” “I like that it is available at my convenience to watch the show. I dislike that even with DSL the quality isn’t as good as watching it on cable;” and “It usually takes some time to download it, and my screen is smaller than the TV screen.”

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References: http://www.advertising.com

This morning Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship hold a breakfast seminar about “Social Media and Internet Marketing” and it was really a good seminar.

I am very familiar to the concepts and i like blogging, podcasting, video advertising and so on. But some small advices and clues can be listed as this:

-RSS becoming really important
-Females like creating content but Males like uploading videos
-youtube, flickr, facebook, myspace are important to make a social impact
-blogs, microblogs and tumblelog are important. They make your brand or company more reachable for the customers and you let them see, read what is happening in the company, which makes them feel good and trust your brand
-and also search engine optimizations are very important

I’m also collecting material for a new whitepaper on the impact of social media.

- How did your blog/podcast/video help you connect better with customers?
- What new ideas, insights and impulses did you get from blogging, podcasting
or sharing videos on YouTube?
- What impact did the use of social media have in your particular job?
- How much more revenue were you able… okok, that was a joke .

If you have any story about how social media made a difference for you in our job or in making customers happy or in any other sense, please let me now and tell me about it.

I’m trying to get a better understanding on the impact of social media on everyday business life and on our ability to work. Many people believe that blogging, podcasting and other social media can be huge differentiator for a company like Sun and I’m one of them. I’d like to add the data to the belief, extract the mechanisms that make it work and provide the numbers and logic to show that the belief is a proven reality.

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I am working on word of mouth marketing techniques and i want to share a very good presentation with all of you. I used the documents from “Napa Consulting Group” and i would like to thanks them.