Kate Schackai

It’s fair to wonder about a communications tool that seems designed to refer to its users as “twits.” “Tweeple” (not “twerps”?) may be a kinder sobriquet, but how useful is the “twitterverse?” And at what point (if ever) does Twitter rise above thumb-twiddling?

You’ve likely already seen the most touted story lines — Twitter boasts more than 100 million active users, is growing at an alarming rate, and is almost absurdly well-suited to smartphones and mobile devices… So okay, we know that there’s an audience there.  But in that deliberate cacophony of 140 characters at a time, is it possible for your voice to be heard above the din?

As with any medium, the answer is “maybe.” Maybe your TV ad will resonate. Maybe your new branding concept will ring true. And maybe you will gather a powerful following of interested customers, journalists, and  ”key influencers” who will make you and your company the next hot thing. It’s been done, but isn’t there some sort of secret...

Do you serve the market? Or create it? It’s a tough question because it’s so easy to go wrong in both directions. But the explosive growth of social communications as a kind of constant focus group has tilted the scales in favor of professional servitude. And let’s just say I’m a little skeptical.

There’s a real potential genius in the idea of crowd-sourcing, exponentially expanding the pool of both ideas and feedback. And I’ll admit, when I heard the word “Wiki-brands,” I got excited about a new model for business — something cooler, less hierarchical, and more dynamic. This, of course, was followed by Eric Ries on lean startups, urging founders to stay agile and flexible, open even to a complete shift in the product or service if that’s what the market seems to demand.

Taken in context, that’s the right suggestion, but I see a lot of companies these days — even large enterprises — valuing...

I worked with a client some years back who had an impressive media budget, a growing customer base, and enviable attention from well-placed journalists — and still managed to fizzle rather than explode. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to avoid that fate.

The central problem was an insistence on departmental boundaries that defied all sense of media logic. Not only did the left hand not know what the right hand was doing, but the feet were moving in opposite directions, and one side of the mouth wasn’t on speaking terms with the other. Everyone was doing a bang-up job on their own little section, but the result was a lot more Frankenstein than Leviathan.

It certainly makes sense to have creative and logistical teams who tackle different areas of your company’s promotion — there is no guarantee, after all, that your spokesperson would make a great media buyer. But without coordination — a unifying vision, and an overarching strategy — your odds of projecting cohesion and...

We live in a communicative era, and folks like me spend a lot of time telling folks like you how important it is to talk and listen to your customers, your peers, and your market. But the tidal wave of reflections on the legacy of Steve Jobs in the past 36 hours has put forward a point that is equally important — and somewhat to the contrary:

There is nothing, nothing more important to the success of your company than having a brilliant vision, and following through on it with a top quality product. Friendliness and responsiveness can’t come close to guaranteeing success.

With the highest regard, and in fact awesome respect, Steve Jobs was a tyrant, a secrecy-obsessed control freak, who probably would have sooner torched his office than tweeted the latest in product developments or set up a focus group. In a world increasingly obsessed with relationships and feedback, Jobs was legendarily unconcerned with what consumers might think they want. “People don’t...