Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

I don’t know about you all, but I have yet to come up with a good way to queue up stuff to read for later / blog about later. To date, the best approach for me has been to create a draft blog post in Live Writer, but I’m finding that even that isn’t efficient enough for me. Saving to MyWeb kind of works, but it’s not integrated enough into my daily habits that I go and check a specific tag on a regular basis… Anyhow, tips are definitely appreciated, if you have any. In the meanwhile, here are some tabs I’ve been keeping open in Firefox that I can now close and get my computer to stop whining (why the hell is FF such a resource hog!?!?!):

Brody Jenner is either the biggest tool ever or a genius.. : I stopped watching “The Hills”. I just couldn’t take the idiocy of the two “stars”, Lauren and Heidi. But reading this back story on the two toolbag boyfriends, Spencer and Brody, almost makes me want to put it back on my Tivo, just so I can follow them a bit more. I haven’t even processed what this says for us as a society..

P&G understands “conversation marketing”: A very short piece in Ad Age, but an important one. Jim Stengel of P&G understands that there is no ability to control someone else and that a company can actually build relationships with its consumers. “This business is personal” – great line from the video. This stuff gets me so excited about the future that I scare myself sometimes.

Google’s advertising product development reaches out: Maybe this is about trying to determine the priority of its ad product development, but my gut says this is something a bit more savvy. I think this “survey” is actually intelligently positioned marketing. I think Google’s trying to get big, slow, old advertisers to understand that they don’t have much in the way of metrics from the majority of their buys.

A reminder that not all great companies are public: This quick blurb on REI from the Motley Fool reminded me that I really need to get my series on Seattle companies going. I heart REI.

The Starbucks memo from Howard Schultz: Speaking of Seattle companies that I love, here’s a link to a memo from Howard Schultz that illustrates just how different of a company it is. “Let’s get back to the core” he says. By the way, the fact that there’s a “Starbucks Gossip” blog that is obviously frequented by baristas is not only unsurprising, I actually thought to myself “holy crap, I’m an idiot for not finding this before” when I came across it.

Social shopping is alive!: I might get more into this later, in its own post, but it looks like some folks are making real progress on social shopping (something I first brought up here) in a variety of ways. Sounds like the National Retail Federation is getting after this with some big tech partners. Awesome.

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