“Found on a 37Signals blog, and accompanying comments. Apple’s Steve Jobs describing what he thinks is wrong with Microsoft’s upcoming Zune music player…”

“Nikon did what every major brand should be doing…it got out of its own way and let the real people that counted do the talking: their own consumers. Here’s the frame-by-frame: Nikon sent a bunch of their D80 cameras to a group of Flickr users and let them snap to their heart’s content. They took a bunch of submissions and used them as part of a 3-page spread, which ran in places like BusinessWeek…”

“This week I’m at the ThinkEquity Partners Growth Conference in San Francisco with a number of start-ups and established giants that are touting their companies. What’s truly remarkable is the collection of god-awful names on display. That’s one craze the Internet era could not kill. A bad name just puts the wrong foot forward. Conversely, a good name can help launch a company.”

“Seth Godin is author of six books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, entrepreneurship, and work. He is also a renowned speaker and a helluva nice guy. I cornered him and got him to answer ten (really eleven) questions about his latest book, Small is the New Big, and ‘life.’”

“Market yourself effectively in 15 seconds…”

“Over at MediaPost, Max Kalehoff writes about the need for R&D within advertising agencies, hitting on some things I’ve been thinking about lately. The entry comes out of a question Max asked at the Innovative Marketing Conference: ‘Why the heck are advertising and marketing agencies so often so late to invest in or experiment with new technologies and emerging media, while the marketers and clients demonstrate increasing interest and tendency to pursue them directly?’”

“I generally don’t do the cartoons for money, but prefer to distribute them freely via the internet, or whatever means I have at my disposal. If people want to use my cartoons for their own stuff, or help support the cause, the best thing they can do in exchange is consider buying a bottle of Stormhoek, if and when they come across it.”

“A couple of weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg’s business cards broke. The Wordpress blog platform creator’s business card simply reads, ‘1. Go to Google. 2. Type ‘Matt.’ 3. Click ‘I feel lucky.'’ But when Matt’s Google score tanked, his card was useless for a few days. Thankfully, in the tough world of schmoozing, the Google trick is just one of the… Five ways to make business cards that people keep.”

“In my travels, the group that wants to know the most about marketing, and seems to know the most about marketing (except, of course, for marketers) is engineers. Software engineers and programmers, to be specific. Why? I think it’s because online marketing is particularly interesting and often allied with programming techniques. That and the fact that programmers toil long and hard and get bitter pretty quickly when some marketing dork screws up their efforts.”

“How search engines index and value content is also changing quickly. It is imperative that you understand The New Rules of Marketing. Failing to embrace The New Rules could negatively impact your online sales, lead generation, demand generation, online visibility, search engine rankings and brand perception.”

“Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational style of marketing. Whether you’re looking to sell something or to build traffic by earning links from others, you’ll need to tell compelling stories that grab attention and connect with people. This tutorial is designed to get you up and running with the basics of copywriting in ten easy lessons…”

“Let me use our company as a case-study here. I own a presentation firm, our clients are big corporate companies, in theory they just come to us for presentations i.e. we’re not a ‘creative’ company as such. However when they come, we have a rule, and every employee knows it: When someone visits our office we have to make such an impression that people talk about us at home later, not just at their office.”

Another one of my favorite sessions at SXSW Interactive 2006 was Zero-Advertising Brands, where we got to watch Maggie Mason talk to the guys from skinnyCorp, the makers of Threadless among other creative commerce/community hybrids. One of my favorite things about talking to folks that really get the user-generated web, is that when they tell you their secret recipies, it all sounds so easy. Here’s George from Flickr in the Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps talk: ‘We listen to what our users say, and then iterate the design.’ See? Easy.” Also, here’s a good quote from Ben Brown over at Evhead.

“Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. Godin’s books have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. Permission Marketing was an Amazon.com Top 100 bestseller for a year, a Fortune Best Business Book and it spent four months on the Business Week bestseller list. It also appeared on the New York Times business book bestseller list.”

Do you design your communications or do they just kind of happen? When your communication is important — that is, when you want it to be remembered — you need to think carefully and design it to resonate with your intended audience… You can improve your communication by thinking about seven ‘C’s’ of communication design: The seven C’s lay out a simple sequence which can help you start broadly and work your way down to specifics”