Magazine Manager Makes Marketing Matter

It's great to hear about other businesses and to use their experiences to help get a new perspective on your own. John Griffin, president of the National Geographic Magazine Group, gave a speech early this month that is fuller with business wisdom than many books. If you change publisher to company and magazine to product or service, virtually all of the advice adapts beautifully. Here are a few points he made, relating to measuring how a company is doing, that I particularly enjoyed:

• live in a fact based world


• make numbers pass the common sense test


• too much data is as bad as too little data; act now

Just these few points could help most corporations make more sense out of the mind-numbing data analyses they do. I'd add one other: mistakes happen - it's not learning from them that is the problem.

Google Wants to Know Everything - About You

According to a piece in the Financial Times (I'm not sure how this got to be a free link, but who am I to complain?), Google wants to know everything about everybody. Literally:

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: "We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'"

There you have it - Google with the gloves off. Aside from questions of privacy, civil liberty, and propriety this naturally raises, there are some serious business issues.

To the degree that Google succeeds, it puts virtually all businesses in its debt. Depending on how it decides to analyze and answer such questions, it directs people in their choices. If your company is on the outs with Google, might there be a chance that it freezes out your chances with customers? Will you have to - eventually - pay a fee to remain in the running, if not with the current management, then with a future team? People who think that all the tumult over Google and Yahoo and Microsoft is solely about online advertising aren't looking at the bigger pictures. In a society where an increasing number of people want to be told what to do, having an ever-increasing collection of information on them as well as an ability to be a front end to the Internet means controlling business beyond what can happen even in a monopoly.