James Crawford

When a company that “produces nothing” spends $1 billion to acquire a company that makes no money, should money managers fear the next bubble? As Facebook advances from Instagram splurge to IPO this week, some on Wall Street have already reached a verdict: Let the public and media furor over Facebook’s IPO reach frenzy pitch — professional and large institutional investors are staying home.

What might the “smart money” know that the rest of the world could be overlooking? Perhaps it’s that when the unwashed masses go gaga over stocks, it’s time to start socking money in your mattress. The common wisdom among investment’s in-crowd is that the little guys are always last in. The arrival of “retail” investors signals the Big Boys that it’s time to leave.

On the other hand, The Wise Men sometimes miss...

This week in Barcelona the world’s leaders in cellular communications, IT, apps, and even automobile manufacturing – Ford’s chairman keynoted – convened for Mobile World Congress, one of mobility’s foremost annual conclaves. As usual, the hype on our “connected world” was hot and heavy, the air thick with forecasts about the never-ending growth of mobile data, smart devices and eager users.

Perhaps fed up with being outdone by smart phones, smart apps and smart grids, every manner of vendor launched a “smart” product of some kind, or predicted its imminent arrival. One heard talk of smart refrigerators that take mobile commands to thaw out the chicken, smart sinks that wash it, and smart ovens that turn themselves on and bake the bird to crusty perfection. I kept track of these and other equally impressive goings-on at Mobile World Congress as often as possible, meaning whenever I had Internet access.

Way back in the 1960s, longshoreman, author and philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”

We see this phenomenon every day in the business world, where companies compete by copying products — adding some minor feature or performance boost in the name of differentiation.

The same holds true in public relations, where one agency’s services — even in specialized areas such as telecom PR or tech PR –  sound much the same as all the rest.

Companies that fall into this trap aren’t competing at all. They’re collapsing into each other and becoming more alike, making it all the harder for customers to make a buying decision based on distinct value.

Decades later, in her best-selling Different, Harvard luminary Dr. Youngme Moon describes the trend of me-tooing as “the artful packaging of meaningless distinctions as true...

Curation — it’s huge, it’s hot. It has its tens of thousands of followers here in the U.S. and worldwide. But is it legit? We’ll soon know. If the Online Privacy Act (S. 968, The PROTECT IP Act of 2011) becomes law, curation and news aggregation may find themselves lumped with rogue sites that steal copyrighted content. They could be cordoned off and banned — collateral damage of public policy that views information repackaging in any form as piracy.

In case you just tuned in, curation is a technique for gathering relevant information to serve and attract the interests of a specific niche market. Think of curation as a funnel or sieve for weeding out all extraneous information and providing a finite audience with its own exclusive and tailored content. The marketing premise: By establishing you as an “expert,” it attracts followers and new business.