Headline from the WSJ: GM pulls advertising budget from Facebook! Days before the IPO, that’s just plain mean spirited. If I was banking on a $100bn valuation, I might be a tad concerned about this development. With a budget of over $3bn to spend on ads, GM is the third largest spender in the US (P&G is #1). Perhaps they were miffed that they only have a $33bn market cap after all these years, and quite a few motor cars sold. Either way, the implication is that targeting Facebook members …

Day four of my mobile phone fiasco. Four hours, four days, seven phone calls, and now the wait for the replacement phone. And today, I have a replacement phone. Beautiful packaging. Explicit, step by step instructions on how to return defective device. Big RED Stop Sign: IMPORTANT telling me how to avoid punishing processing fees, and by returning I agree to extend the Warranty for the maximum time allowed by law. Basically: the company and the telecom provider have bent over backwards to make sure that they get their material …

Consider this Sturm und Drang: less Goethe’s Prometheus than an understanding of why we are so fascinated by King Sisyphus’ ultimate punishment. I am in our terrific Fort Myers, FL location this week, working with the Gartner SMB Sales team. Over 100 bright, ambitious, hopeful sales folks, eager to learn what it is that analysts do, exactly. The day before coming down here my mobile device suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The battery drained completely on Friday, and due to a software glitch associated with the device, the machine could not …

The only way your company will differentiate based on customer experience is if the culture of your organization aligns closely with the brand promise to customers. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh puts it in his blog post entitled “Your Culture Is Your Brand“: “Advertising can only get your brand so far . . . So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into building the brand you want? In a word: culture. At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of …

The only way your company will differentiate based on customer experience is if the culture of your organization aligns closely with the brand promise to customers. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh puts it in his blog post entitled Your Culture Is Your Brand: “Advertising can only get your brand so far… So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into building the brand you want? In a word: culture. At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff …