Category Archives: commentary

Fibonacci!

I just had to add this quick one. A fellow named Pierce Brown wrote me saying some nice things about this site. He sent me this cool infographic he made. I love it when rabbits and ‘rithmetic collide! Thanks Pierce!

It's got bunnies!

Also posted in creativity, friends | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Explore the Humanizing of Brands – Why Now?

Gather and Talk
Recently (Dec. 2nd) I had the opportunity to participate in a terrific event all about the humanizing of brands called BrandsConf. Jeff Pulver brought a couple of hundred people together to gather and talk about this topic that has been brewing for a long time, but has just recently come to a boil. That got me thinking: Why now? What has accelerated these ideas that have been developing around brands for several years?

I think a big part of the “why now?” is this very human idea of gathering and talking and how technology keeps making it easier for us to do just that – easier, faster, and at a larger scale. We used to gather and talk around the campfire, the dinner table, the watercooler, and now we’ve added al kinds of new places to gather and talk: chat rooms, comment threads, profile pages, Facebook walls and Twitter streams. We’ll virtually convene and debate over fanboy flamewars, activist causes, and even which thermos is really worth 24.99.

Not Gathered, but Talking
There used to be a little more clarity about when you were having a tête-à-tête, versus making a speech, or gathering a consensus. Now a conversation might be all of those things at once: one to one, one to many, and many to one all at once – and throw in many to many just for good measure. You also used to know when a conversation started and ended, but when the gathering is virtual it can also be asynchronous, or semi-synchronous, dialog and document all at once.

This isn’t just semantics (although I really like semantics), a lot of the reflexes we have formed based on the way we gather and talk in the physical world are being stress-tested by these new modes. Capacity, memory, history, context used to be things we could reliably judge in a more visceral way. There is a kinship in the gut between our skills as pattern recognizers and our effectiveness as B.S. detectors.

Gathered, but Not Talking
But I don’t think our reflexes are quite a sharp as they used to be, not as a whole. You see we spent a lot of years gathering, but not talking, first due to the radio, and later the TV. Add cable and cheaper electronics and we even began to lose the gathering – we were separating and not talking. IMHO our dialog skills got a little bit atrophied, especially when it comes to brands. We got comfortable with brands being spoon fed to us like cereal and Saturday morning cartoons. Our brand conversations were at best about brands, not with brands.

Search Me
Sorry about hopping around, but that’s just how my mind works sometimes. I’m not as random as Clifford Stoll yet, but give me time… So what was I saying? Search me…

Well that’s how we used to use that phrase: “Search me” was a handy expression to say I don’t know, or I don’t have the answer. Now “search me” is a directive, a request, a precipitate of this idea that we have a personal brand. Search me means that I have an answer and I want you to check me out so you know what you’re getting. This is where I think we as individuals can learn much from what the big brands have refined over the years, ideas like focus, consistency, aspiration and segmentation. And why is this important? Many of us come to a world with muscle-memory that was built when conversations were things that happened with a tiny scope, that faded away quickly, if not instantaneously, and we’re bringing those reflexes to a world where nothing is erased, everything is searchable, and the only way to hide a blemish is to crowd it out – make it harder to find by drowning it in a sea of positives.

I think this is why authenticity is so important to building a personal brand – every day we are offered the opportunity and consequence of operating like one-person media empires. Yet without the resources of a major brand or a billionaire media-magnate behind us it is essential that we steer our ships carefully, thoughtfully and with purpose. Our authenticity is our compass. It’s how we find our way, how we get back on track when we get buffeted around by life’s hard knocks and gleaming opportunities. It’s also the one resource that we know we won’t tap out while we’re hustling to keep up with the big shots and the big brands with their deep benches and deep pockets.

The good news is, it’s a lot easier to get big virtually than physically. The micro-brand can go global. The personal brand that embraces clarity and focus, that can bring an authentic remarkableness to market, can indeed go global. Your flavor of weird, if it’s real, might just be your win.

Talk to Me
So certainly there are heaps of brand wisdom that the little upstart can learn from big dogs like Nike, Apple, McDonald’s, Coke, Harley Davidson, etc. But can the scrappy, squishy, touchy-feely, human being at the center of a personal brand offer anything for the big brands to learn. Can you teach a big dog new tricks?

Well I think just as we as individuals have some communication reflexes that aren’t quite caught up with the new modes of semi-synchronous, always searchable, un-erasable, gathering and talking, so too are the big brands faced with outdated approaches and behavioral biases built on assumptions from other modes of communication. The command and control, TV, print, radio, megaplex paradigm depends on cascading layers of one-way filters that allowed information to flow down and out, but prevented the vast majority of the upstream communication from getting back to the top. All of that today can be subverted with a single tweet. It’s not a wolf at the door, but a human, just a few keystrokes away, and she wants to talk – not be lectured, or given the latest spin.

The social innovations of today’s Internet have brought back the talk to the gather and talk and large companies will be wise to recognize that we are not just demographics, not just a count of households in a statistical strata, but humans at every turn and in every nook and cranny – we’re squishy and we want to talk.

Hear Me
With all this talking and gathering another very human need is revealed – the need to be heard. The personal brand bold enough to build a narrative on a foundation of authenticity wants desperately to be accepted and acknowledge for that very thing. The person who tweets a complaint about a bad bit of customer service, or a disappointing product experience also wants to be acknowledged, engaged and will react to the brand that does so in much the same way as they would react to a human acknowledgement.

So, Now…
The social technology has positioned us as individuals to realize the potential and responsibility of being a great brand, while also reminding big brands that they are surrounded by and suffused with humans. Their potential and responsibility will be revealed in how they choose to engage in a world of trackable, semi-synchronous, and squishy human-to-human communication.

That’s why now.

If you want to get a little more of the flavor of BrandsConf search for the hashtag #brandsconf on Twitter and check out my doodle-notes made during the event.

Also posted in branding, Branding Thoughts, networking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Doodling in the dark at TEDx Peachtree

Pamela Meyer doodle from TEDx Peachtree

Take permission to play

Today I went to the second annual TEDx Peachtree event. TEDx are locally-organized events in the spirit of the TED Conference. I thought I would try something new today and do a few doodles while actually at the event – normally I do all my doodles at home, in the doodletorium. It was fun to feed off the energy of some inspiring speakers – and a bit of a challenge since I only had a handful of markers with me and it was dark in the auditorium. I hope you enjoy, and I hope I’ll see you at a TEDx in the future!

See my 7 TEDx Peachtree doodles here.

Also posted in art, Live event | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Welcome! So glad you’re here!

C'mon in!

Welcome! Or maybe I should say Welcome Back! As some of you know I used to write my blog over at davidscohen.wordpress.com. Well, no longer. This is the first blog post that I’m composing here on my brand-spanking new site. Hosting the blog with WordPress.com was great for a while – in fact it is wonderfully easy to do – if you’re new to blogging I highly recommend it. I just needed to add some fancy plugins and things that they don’t let you do over there, plus I wanted a tighter integration with the rest of my stuff.

So what’s the stuff?

Well if you’re here you’ve certainly noticed that this is a major rebranding/rebuild of my website. It was a butt-kicker getting here, but I’m very excited about it and I’ve got lots of plans for more content, business tools, doodles and fun down the road. Yes, it’s ok to say “business tools” and “fun” in the same sentence, in fact that’s part of the point of the redesign.

If you were a fan of the old blog don’t worry, all the old posts and drawings have been moved here along with a whole lot more. I’ve put up more galleries for doodles of Space Bunnies and such, a better page for keeping track of my podcast, The Be a Beacon Show – Personal Branding with David Cohen, and something new, an ecard service, which I’m calling doodlegrams.

I hope you’ll continue to visit the blog and explore this website, it’s new home, and if you do please drop me a note to let me know what you think.

Thank you so much!

David

Also posted in blogging, branding, Branding Thoughts | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Harry told me, Work is Personal

In the bookstore

Have you ever been in a bookstore and just felt drawn to a book like a magnet? Yesterday, I had just finished a meeting in a bookstore coffee shop, so before heading back to the car I thought I would do a little title scanning – one of my favorite hobbies. As I patrolled the aisles I came upon the clearance shelf and there, staring back at me, with an inviting, “come hither”, $4.98 markdown price tag on the cover was Harry Beckwith’s “The Invisible Touch – The Four Keys to Modern Marketing.” I figured that’s a buck for each key and 98 cents for the experience: How could I resist?

Like I said, this was yesterday, so I’ve really only just cracked the cover, but I’ve already stumbled on this little gem: “Work is personal.” That’s it, three words, but when I read that I just thought “wow!” which I think mirrored the author’s reaction when he first encountered those words as a slogan on the back of a Fast Company baseball cap.

“Work is personal” – it’s kind of juicy, but I’m not going to try to outdo Harry breaking this idea down, because he just nailed it, I just felt compelled to share his words though:

“Work is not about business; it’s about us. The human dimension of business — the messy, emotional, utterly human dimension — is not merely important; it is all encompassing. As a result we must plunge into the world of feelings — truly frightening territory.”

I just love that! I think it nails a lot about why I do what I do, and I think it is so important that as a business author he acknowledges that this is not an easy nor comfortable place for the business-minded to dwell. Every day it seems the amount of evidence and literature mounts up supporting the idea that success in business is not so separate from our human qualities – just read a few Dans like Dan Pink, Dan Roam, Dan Ariely or Dan Goleman and you’ll get a taste of a rising tide of interest in the inescapably human aspects of business. We may wrap ourselves in corporate veils, but beneath that cloak we are people: frail, humble, shy, bold, altruistic, greedy, brilliant, bullheaded, savvy and irrational people. We want meaning, we want fulfillment, we want marvelous experiences – I believe that a business can provide all of those and I think you can build one of those businesses if you keep the human experience in mind for your customers, employees, vendors, and yes, for you too.

Thank you Harry for reminding us that Work is Personal – and if that’s the kind of insight that’s in the intro, I can’t wait to read the rest of your book. I’ve already gotten great returns on my $4.98 investment.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately? Got a “Wow!” to share?

Also posted in branding, Other Interests | Tagged , , | Comments closed

When the wiring goes wrong – a cat’s tale.

Ally
She’s intense, willful, dangerously stealthy, surprisingly clumsy, endearing, ponderous, and difficult to ignore. She’s Ally the cat – one of two that share our home. Ally is sweet and cuddly and a contender for most annoying cat of the year. But it is only because she’s nuts. Something’s wrong in her wiring. Some primordial instinct in that little feline brain gets mixed up causing her to attack her own tail. It’s probably some play-as-hunting-practice algorithm that’s gotten a bug in it. She sits, gets bored, starts swishing, then thumping her tail and then it’s swat, thump, swat, thump, swat, growl, swat, swat, bite! And then she squeals gets up and runs away from her attacker. The whole thing would be comical if it wasn’t so darn frequent – or frequently happening so darn close to my bare feet. My bare feet have this funny allergy you see to needle-sharp teeth and all manner of slashing, swiping claws. As an aside I hope that the thought of me, bare-of-foot doesn’t put you off this blog post, frankly I do some of my best writing without shoes, but my hobbit-like writing practices are not the point here. The point here isn’t even that my cat is nuts, which she is. The point is she’s stuck in a bad pattern that may have been good, useful or productive once, but isn’t anymore. Ally is saddled with these weird, stress-inducing behaviors that certainly were important survival skills for her innumerable cat ancestors. But the thing is she doesn’t know that, she’s not intending to make me scream when she misses her tail and tags my big toe instead – she’s just doing what she’s wired to do.

I don’t think cats are the only ones who do this. A company will sometimes try to operate with patterns and processes that may have been successful in the past, but haven’t adapted to changing market conditions or new technologies. “Yell and Sell” marketing tactics end up doing more to turn off buyers when once they stood as the pillars of brand awareness. A person who hasn’t job hunted in 15 years is laid-off and suddenly thrust into a world that has been forever changed by Monster, Career Builder and LinkedIn. Over-dependence on old habits of looking in the paper for listings and sending unsolicited resumes to large companies have distracted that job seeker from building new skills and a vibrant network through social media just when they need every advantage. These people and companies aren’t intending to flounder, but they may have gotten stuck in old patterns that used to be the right answers. It’s a tough trap because they feel like they are doing the right things, but they are no longer getting the old results and they often find it hard to see the problem themselves.

A cat’s gotta eat, but lightning fast reflexes and hair-trigger aggression don’t make a bit of difference when your prey is a tin of Sophist-a-Cat Supreme. The felines of the Cohen kitchen, our domestic savannah, have to rely on a whole new set of emotional and psychological skills (primarily based on cuteness) to get the big human with the fancy thumbs to open their cans for them. Believe me, if cats could work the pop-tops we’d live in a very different society. So here’s the question: Are you trying to hunt for your supper when you could be going to a supermarket? What habits are you hanging onto that are no longer getting you results? What processes and approaches should you change to acknowledge today’s market realities?

Or the question I ask Ally: Have you got a tiger by the tail or has the tiger gotten you?

Also posted in Branding Thoughts, mad scribblings, social media | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed
  • Doodle Delivery – Subscribe!

    Subscribe to occasionally brighten your inbox with a bundle of doodles wrapped in a few thoughtful thoughts on being a beacon in this crazy-wonderful world.
  • Search

  • Left Brain + Right Brain = My Blog

    This blog is chock full of joyful drawings and a few musings on personal branding, startups, creativity and being a beacon.

    Featured Posts


     
  • The Be A Beacon Show

  • Send a Free eCard

    If the drawings on this website give you a smile why not share one? I added a free ecard system so you can send "doodlegrams" to anyone you'd like. Go ahead, send a smile! Just click on the words eCard (free) below any doodle on the blog .
     
  • Categories

  •  

  • Archives

  •  

    Caitlín Mowbray"I adore your doodles... I swear looking at those bunnies lowers my blood pressure, calms my mind and makes me smarter. Who needs meditation when there are bunnies?"
    ~Caitlín Mowbray - Meditation Teacher, Astrologer and Soul Provocateur

    Find David on Bloggers.com

  • October 2025
    M T W T F S S
     12345
    6789101112
    13141516171819
    20212223242526
    2728293031