I read an interesting study the other day on Word-of-Mouth Marketing, or hyper One-to-One Marketing.  The Keller Fay Group, a Word-of-Mouth Marketing and Consultancy has published the study and can be found here.  According to their study, the brands that have the most “buzz” based on their sample are the following:

1. Toyota
2. Wal-Mart
3. Honda
4. Apple/iPod
5. Chevrolet
6. Target
7. Sony
8. Home Depot
9. BMW
10. Verizon

I don’t know the details of their study criteria or the sample by which they produced their results.  I know that it’s a continuous marketing research study, perhaps based on some rotating panel.  I am fascinated by Word-of-Mouth Marketing.

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The book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki explains how the aggregation of information in groups can result in outcomes better than if the decision was made by any single person in the group. He argues that there are 3 types of Crowd Wisdom:

• Cognition: Market judgment, which he argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts, or expert committees.

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We recently finished landscaping our yard — front, side, and back. We’re really happy with how things turned out. Before landscaping, we had HUGE wheat-looking weeds all over the place, which hid the basketball-sized rocks beneath. Now, we have grass, trees, curbing, and a nice cement pad to BBQ and entertain. I’ll explain the whole landscaping process later — a lot of lessons learned. Today, however, I just want to share about the 14 trees we bought.

We bought the following trees:

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Rumor has it that Shutterfly may be headed for an liquidation liquidity event soon, either an IPO or an acquisition valued at ~$500MM. Shutterfly has been profitable for 3 years, with profit estimates of around $20MM.

Shutterfly’s model is a fascinating one. Unlike 99% of their competitors, Shutterfly has its own manufacturing facility, where it houses inventory as well as several HP Indigo printers, and other machinery to make their own photo books. Shutterfly’s manufacturing facility is in Hayward, California. Their competitors outsource that process.

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Remember when eyeballs were the de facto business model of the web?  Eyeballs are back.  Yesterday’s New York Times article entitled “As Online Ads Grow, Eyeballs Are Valuable Again on the Web” is good and discusses the dynamics of Eyeballs.

Coincidentally, AdAge published their annual Largest National Advertisers report yesterday.  It’s an interesting read and shows marketing spend by category, company, and other interesting crosssections.  This is a must-read if you have an advertising business model.

Growth in the advertising space could continue for some time.  I’m curious to know when or if Eyeballs will be uncool again.

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During dinner last night, our phone rang and on the other line was a cigarette-smoking man. He wanted a few minutes of my time to explain that he works for Arbitron, a marketing research firm. He pitched his story that all I’d have to do is carry a diary with me and write down which radio stations I listen to, the duration, for one week. In exchange I’d get paid. The rest of our conversation went like this:

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IBM released DB2 9 last week, previously codenamed “Viper.” It took the IBM team 5 years to develop, 750 engineers, and 68 patent filings. DB2 9 is radially different than the current database models available, which are primarily based on relational data, pioneered by Boyce-Codd (i.e., Boyce-Codd Normal Form, or BCNF). DB2 9 was built to handle both relational data and unstructured data in the form of XML.

In their own words, IBM promises the following with the release of DB2 9:

• Unlocks the latent potential of XML with performance and development time/cost savings from pureXML®

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The Pareto Principle was named after an Italian economist who discovered that 80% of the wealth in Europe was concentrated in 20% of the population. This discovery is also known as the 80/20 rule or the Law of the Vital Few. The Pareto Principle is a phenomenon that finds application in many places, such as software engineering, quality, manufacturing, word-of-mouth marketing, human resources, and government; the 80/20 rule was also popularized by the book “The Mckinsey Way” as a principle by which Mckinsey consultants follow to solve client problems.

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