3M gets the prize from me for the boldest play. That’s a whole lot of cash to put out there in the open. Click through on the picture to see some other clever approaches.
Even the construction barricades are painstakingly built to uphold the integrity of the Apple brand. If ingenuity is one parent of Apple, brand is the other. This kind of attention to detail will always set Apple apart.
Most of us think we need to work longer and harder than our colleagues to prove our worth to our employer. That just isn’t the case any more: Thanks to technology, cheap outsourced labor, and increasing numbers of new graduates, there is always someone who will do our job faster, quicker, and cheaper.
To be invaluable, you have to work with more energy, more enthusiasm, and most important of all, more innovation. You need to glow.
Every prospective employee of Elauwit needs to read this.
The Christian Science Monitor published today a commentary by myself and Alan Bauer, general manager of Elauwit Media. You can read it by clicking here. The gist of our piece is that there’s only one side of the newspaper story being told — the doom and gloom side. The fact remains that there are solid prospects for a re-engineered business model for the newspaper industry. It’s built on giving away the news, offering total market penetration for the advertiser and creating hyper-local products. It’s what we do at Elauwit Media.
While the major media have been focusing on the big newspaper meltdowns, I believe that the success stories (and we’re just one of those stories) aren’t being addressed — or even mentioned. That was the impetus for the piece Alan and I wrote for the Monitor. When we did some research, we found that the business model has gotten some discussion in the blog space (for instance, this lengthy and thought-out post by Aaron Renn). But there hasn’t been much recognition that some folks are actually executing on a new, worthwhile model.
My issue with Renn’s analysis is that the newspaper business doesn’t need such totally inverted change in order to work. We just took a big leap in a few areas (such as mailing our newspapers for free to the entire markets they are designed to serve). It’s not unlike what Toyota did after World War II with the “kaizen” concept. It’s big change in small areas that makes a business model work. (You’ll be hearing more about kaizen and the newspaper industry from Alan and I soon.)
In sum, I think the tombstone for newspapers is being chiseled way too soon. The business will evolve — and is evolving. It isn’t going extinct.
Jay Leno "reads" The Marlton Telegram during his "headlines" segment on April 27, 2009.
It’s quite amazing to me the things that get public attention.
At Elauwit Media, we launched new Web presences for our newspapers and business publications about a month ago. We provide in-depth coverage of small-scale communities in our newspapers, and now on our Web sites. Our coverage of local budgets and recently candidates for local office is unmatched by any competitor. If it’s about one of our small towns, it’s in one of our newspapers.
Despite all of this depth in coverage about significant local issues, the comments section of our Web sites hasn’t seen much action until a few days ago when we took on Jay Leno.
To be honest, it was all tongue in cheek. Leno manipulated the facts to use one of our newspapers in his “headlines” segment. It was dishonest, but still funny. We decided to take a shot at him and ride the wave a bit when our general manager, Alan Bauer, posted a column about the whole thing.
It got widespread attention.
It was attended to by national journalism blogger Jim Romenesko, the NY Post and a newspaper editor in Florida, just to name a few. And the YouTube video of the segment that we posted garnered well over 1,000 views in just a few short days. The attention even made it’s way to Twitter and Facebook.
What was most interesting was that Alan’s column attracted about a dozen comments in short order — more than any other items we’ve posted. People have more to say about our response to Leno than they do about the critical issues we cover in their towns.
Check out the video below or check out the story Alan posted here.
My friend Jordan Hitchens found this great clip and posted it to Facebook. It shows how when Obama pledges to fight hard and cut $100 million from the federal budget, it doesn’t really amount to much. Kinda like me cutting out one grande, iced, berry chai infusion from Starbucks…. per year!