Without question the best dot com meeting of all time was the meeting we had in 2000 with Michael Jackson-yes that Michael Jackson-introducing him to the venture investors in our Internet start up Beliefnet. Jackson was looking to raise money for a theme park venture on his Neverland Ranch. One of our columnists was the Rabbi Schmuley Boteach who was a friend of Michael's and had facilitated Michael writing a column for us. Schmuley called us one day and asked if we would invite our venture investors to a meeting with Jackson and his people to discuss potential investments in his theme park venture.

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This is an extraordinary time in technology marketing. The turbulent economy combined with the continued Internet media revolution has created an unprecedented time of change and transformation in marketing. In discussions over the last several months with our customers; business technology decision makers and technology marketers, several common themes have emerged that provide a sense of technology marketing today. Last week in the bay area we gathered together 25 senior technology marketing executives to share thoughts on the state of technology marketing today and it was clear that these themes resonated with them as well:

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Updated on Friday, May 1, 2009 by Tony Uphoff

I recently posted "So I'm getting requests on Linkedin to professionally recommend people I haven't worked with or talked to in 15 years. Ahh is it just me or does this lack a bit of authenticity?". Almost immediately after posting this to Facebook and Twitter, I received a ton of responses, via posts to the thread on Facebook, replies on Twitter and private posts to my email accounts. 

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Have always found it fascinating when people use the expression, " This isn't personal. This is only business". Business is highly personal. It is a means of self expression and self discovery. This isn't to say that you don't have to balance the needs of "the business" with the needs of "the individual" and as a result make difficult decisions that affect people. To suggest however that business doesn't have a personal foundation is simply untrue. This is why the rapidly evolving nature of social software platforms and applications in business is so fascinating. Like the famous line; we are still struggling to define what we mean by "social" when we describe the use of these new platforms, applications and services in business. Is it the use of Facebook, Twitter and other social graph/micro messaging platforms applied to a business? Is it the private use of powerful wiki based platforms that can fuel increased communication and engagement amongst groups inside your company or organization?

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Content is king but distribution is the power behind the throne. Newspapers don't have a content problem. They have a massive and insurmountable distribution problem. Time to acknowledge this and accelerate the evolution from analog to digital. Magazines have a far longer print shelf life and will likely be the ones that really benefit from the new generation of digital readers; Kindle, iPhone, Sony, etc. It's difficult to watch once proud and powerful daily newspaper brands like The New York Times and The LA Times struggle as they cut costs in an attempt to right size their print businesses. At the same time this continued pruning is taking precious focus away from the inevitable future of regional news, which is online. 

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Advertising has been a non starter on social networks. The financial results of Facebook, Linkedin and even MySpace reflect the promise of social networks as advertising platforms may go unfulfilled. I'll go so far as to suggest that advertising simply doesn't work on social networks. How can this be? 100's of millions of people and it's not an ad play? No. Because social networks are not media. They're a service.

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Updated on Friday, February 6, 2009 by Tony Uphoff

"Creative Destruction" is the term Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined to define the business darwinism that drives capitalism. The basic theory being that new ideas, technologies, ways of working, organizational approaches and other creative discontinuities spark competition ultimately driving the economy. Through economic cycles of all sorts, across every industry and size of company, creative destruction has played a seminal role in driving growth, productivity and ultimately the economy itself. When the innovations, new ideas and new approaches in an industry become out of balance however, the natural process of creative destruction ceases to work. This imbalance is playing out in the media industry today.

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