What Buzzfeed does is fascinating. I’m not just talking about the lists that seem to capture viral attention, but they way the site blends editorial content (PR people often call it “earned media”) with content paid for directly by marketing dollars.

I touched on this in a previous post, but I should note that the idea is not limited to Buzzfeed. This morning Globe Columnist Scott Kirsner called out BostInno for being part of the trend:

@scottkirsner It’s by far the worst trend in media. And many are doing it.

— Curt Woodward (@curtwoodward) May 10, 2013

He’s obviously not alone in that thought.

I’m guessing that most people will respond with relative revulsion at the collapse of wall that often seemingly exists between editorial and advertising. I still wonder if the wall ever truly existed or if it was just a myth we told ourselves to keep our conscience clear.

Journalists love to look to the past as the best time for journalism (though at least one major journalist believes the best time is now), but even Edward R. Murrow had to bow to the whims of his advertisers. While journalists remember him for See it Now, the show didn’t last all that long, especially once Alcoa pulled its advertising.

I know many writers who make their money both as reporters and as paid freelance writers for companies, many of which can eventually be included in their coverage area. We don’t usually question this.

Over my career I’ve scheduled many reporter meetings with clients, especially at trade shows, that happen to include a publisher who does a sales pitch at the end. This is part of the business and always has been.

Of course, reporters tried not to be directly involved in the process, and one of my journalism professors used to give a speech at the end of the semester imploring his journalism students to not even eat the food that PR people put out at a press event for fear of impacting our reporting.

During a speech concluding Social Media Weekend, Steve Rubel talked about what he saw as the future of paid media engagements that would involve situations similar to the naming rights of baseball fields. Citibank may pay for the naming rights to the Mets’ ballpark, but they have no say in how the team handles itself. The same will be true of journalists, where an organization may pay for a journalistic series of supplement to a website or magazine, but ultimately won’t have much say in what gets written about. Though, they may choose to buy the supplement based no the topic area.

The sounds of dissent in the audience came through loud and clear. Journalists were not happy about this direct relationship with advertisers.

The core question remains difficult to answer. Will the average person care whether the story they’re reading is paid for by an advertiser? Will it change how they judge the copy? Or did they view, say, political journalism in a different light than business reporting or features?

These aren’t easy questions to answer. Does a reporter become biased by working on the advertising side? Or does advertising gain a more objective and compelling style? What limits are in place within the “paid content” world to ensure that the news consumer knows exactly what they’re getting?

It’s what makes this time in communications so incredibly exciting.

#BostonStrong

I cannot even begin to describe how last week affected our team and everyone here in Boston. While we at Fresh Ground were fortunate not to have been physically hurt by the act of terrorism, nobody escaped the emotional impact, and it will be with us forever.

I am, however, incredibly proud of how our city — and especially our first responders and law enforcement personnel — responded. And I am eternally grateful for the response we received from around the world.

I don’t think I have ever looked forward to a new week as I have to today. It could rain all day and it would still be a beautiful day here in the Boston area (fortunately, the weather is cooperating).

To everyone — friends, families, fans and complete strangers — who reached out to Boston: THANK YOU!

“Finish line Boston Marathon” by scriptingnews (Dave Winer)

I walked by where the first bomb went off a minute before it did. When we saw and heard the explosion my friend and I were on the same block and the same side of the street, about a hundred yards away. We immediately started running.

As soon as we ducked off Boylston St. on to Dartmouth and up Newbury, I opened Twitter and searched “marathon bomb” to see what was happening.  My friend texted people we knew were close by. Everyone around us was in a state of shock, most of them frantically checking their phones to make sure their friends and family were safe.

This moment served as a vivid reminder that much of technology we spend hours with every day plays an important role in society beyond its normal social and professional uses.

Technology may not be able to stop terrible acts like this from happening, but on Monday it helped civilians in Boston stay out of harm’s way, connect with loved ones and find food and shelter. From the Boston tech community’s fundraising efforts, to Google’s People Finder and Boston.com’s Google Doc, to Twitter’s donation of the trend One Boston, it’s heart warming to see the outpouring of kindness from the community we work in every day.

Are you a tech head who was snapping photos or taking video with your camera or phone anywhere near the finish line before, during or after the bombing? Email your images to the FBI now at boston@ic.fbi.gov or, if you have a lot of them, batch upload them at www.evidenceupload.org and they will be forwarded to FBI.

“The Walls of Jericho Fall Down,” Gustave Doré [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

“Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!”

Okay, maybe not “Ghostbusters” bad. But the nice clean dividing line between paid and earned media was blurred long ago, thanks to the rise of owned media, and now the lines between all three of these media types have all but disappeared. The ramifications are being felt on both the agency and the client side.

Clients are Integrating

PR Week recently reported that FedEx has integrated marketing and communications into one team under newly minted SVP Patrick Fitzgerald. He was quoted in the article saying, “There is no better opportunity in marketing and communications: leading the full integration of communications, brand, advertising, and sponsorships for one of the world’s most admired companies and brands.”

There is also no faster churning executive position than chief marketer, though the outlook is improving. The fact of the matter is that putting PR, advertising, IR, product marketing and other communications functions under the same roof looks great on paper, but out in the real world can lead to conflicts that rival the best of the old “sales vs. marketing” clashes.

Agencies are Responding

Agencies have responded to this integration trend in various ways. The smart ones are ramping up their integrated marketing efforts. We did our first marketing automation engagement in early 2012 and learned much that we’ve been apply to all of our clients. Lately we’ve turned our Fresh Ground Intel offering inward, helping identify opportunities to engage with customers on social media from data we pull from marketing automation databases. Other agencies are responding too. In December, SHIFT Communications hired Christopher S. Penn to head up their marketing technology offerings (a smart idea). And in January, Richard Edelman announced “a change of heart” when it comes to paid media (a terrifying idea to many). He wrote:

“Those of us in PR have to change the game. Let’s recognize that the digital platform for mainstream and hybrid media is an unmatched opportunity to offer hundreds of visual images, a different mentality about contributing comments, a high propensity to share quality material and a short-form mode for absorption of information. Why not take on the chance to make content the basis of advertising? Ads are inherently more effective when you have something to say. And we are better than any other marketing services sector at knowing what is newsworthy at any moment in time.”

When the leader of one of the world’s largest independent PR agencies says our industry needs to embrace advertising, I listen. So far, this has been limited to sponsored content (like tweets and Facebook posts), but I am curious how this will evolve.

The Future of Marketing

“Hercules slaying the Hydra,” Hans Sebald Beham [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I think John J. Wall put it best in this past week’s Marketing Over Coffee podcast when he referred to this dangerous, CMO-killing, multi-headed beast of integrated marketing as the Hydra.

Except it’s not something we should kill. It’s something we need to understand and work for us. It’s something we need to tame.

For years I’ve been speaking about the need for communications (especially PR) to have a seat at the management table. It’s essential if companies are to avoid the kind of bad business and communications decisions that turn business mistakes into genuine crises. And it’s going to be even more essential if companies are going to succeed in this new marketing environment. Richard is right: PR is best equipped to know which message will resonate at any given time. But PR is also best equipped to understand the longer-term impact of marketing efforts.

As we embrace the new opportunities presented to us by the blurring of lines and technology advances brought about by marketing integration (not to mention all the new ways to calculate the ROI of our efforts) we should not lose sight of the traditional value the PR has always offered: a better understanding of a company’s publics.

In the spirit of effective pitching, I’m going to keep this post short and sweet.

Communication is expressed in different forms. I get that. So why try the same communication approach across channels? Specifically, why do some pitches reaching journalists’ inboxes start something like, “Hi, XYZ. I hope your day is going well. I wanted to talk with you about …”

“I hope your day is going well.” – Let me tell you why that’s wrong.

The potential ROI of leaving that line in does not surpass the risk you take leaving it out.

Every word in a pitch is real estate, from the subject head to a signature. The value of that real estate is dependent on the order the journalist would read the pitch. Meaning, your email subject is the most important. It’s the first impression and what will get that person to delete or open.

The second most important copy is the first two sentences of your pitch. This is where the journalist decides whether they delete or keep reading. Chances are if you’ve got them to read that far, you might actually have a shot at closing the deal or at the least a response.

So why waste this valuable real estate on an insincere-looking greeting? Do you “really” care how this reporter’s day is going or do you care if this person will cover your client?

I asked my Twitter friends to chime in on this today and had some thoughtful feedback from a few journalists. Mitch Wagner, editor in chief of Internet Evolution, said “It’s a courtesy. It’s fine.” He followed up to clarify, “Pitches are entirely impersonal. I assume they’re generated by bulk email software. And I’m fine with that.”

While conceding that the greeting is a waste of real estate, Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin, followed up with “…the ‘hope you’re well’ doesn’t really bother me so much. There are tons of worse things.”

So the basic point here: While it’s not always considered a rookie mistake to include a warm greeting in your pitch, you’re wasting valuable real estate and potentially lowering the value of your pitch.

“Funny Internet Spam for eMail and Websites is Spicy” by epSos.de

After killing Google Reader (and joking about killing YouTube, which would have been funnier had it not come so close on the heels of their announcement of Reader’s demise), every blogger in the known universe jumped on the “subscribe to our email newsletter” bandwagon in an attempt to keep people’s attention and continue to be able to effectively hawk their wares or smarts.

I felt like I was the lone voice saying “oh great, more crap to sift through in my email inbox.” After reading Michael Farrell’s piece in the Boston Globe a week ago, I realized my mistake: apparently I care too much about my email inbox. Oh, and apparently, marketers all over the world are wrong about email too.

Now anybody who has waited for a reply from me or actually seen my inbox — which is more “inbox 10,000″ than “inbox zero” — might assume that I don’t care about my email at all. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I perhaps place too much import on email. I complain endlessly of our misuse of the technology as it’s morphed from a replacement for the office memo and formal correspondence to a news aggregation platform and instant messaging alternative. (Please don’t send me emails asking if I’m there from around the corner.)

And I’m not the only person who cares about email. It’s still one of the most effective marketing tools out there, and according to a January survey by BtoB Magazine (right), more email marketing budgets are growing than social media budgets. (Of course, that same survey shows mobile budget growth in last place, which makes me question the survey data just a little.)

I’m sorry to break this to you, but just because teens aren’t using email doesn’t mean they’re not going to use it when they get to college, or when they get to the workforce.

Now I agree with Dmitri Gunn, Anna Rosenman and anyone else who says that email is broken. It’s been horribly misappropriated. But it’s far from dead, and marketers and users alike are responding to the limitations and challenges posed by our modern email-centric business world.

According to a recent Pardot survey, “70% of B2B marketers do not consider email marketing to be a primary lead generation tactic.” Instead, they’re using it for lead nurturing, targeted messaging and message testing. According to the same survey, “58% of respondents test to see what type of content results in the best click-through-rates; 57% test for a correlation between subject lines and open rates; and 46% test to see how open rates are affected by time of day.” Highly targeted digital marketing is so much easier to do via email than any social channel.

Marketers have heeded the advice of many and widely adopted permission marketing. With this change and the improvements in spam filtering, my inbox is almost manageable these days. On most days at least. Still, if anyone’s written an autoresponder that fires off an email letting people know how behind I am on email, though, let me know, okay? Oh, wait, that’s just one more email…

I’ll close with one more Monty Python reference (you did know of course that spam is a Monty Python reference?):

“UH Cheerleaders Cheering” by D Services

I hate the phrase “compelling content.”

I know that content marketers love it; they use it as shorthand for “hire me because I know how to turn your written junk into SEO gold!” But frankly, the phrase doesn’t say much. It just states the obvious: Write stuff that people want to read.

Oh great, thanks. It’s kind of like saying “if you want to be rich then make a lot of money.”

Such helpful advice.

The real problem isn’t that people don’t want to write compelling content, nor that they don’t know what compelling is, they do. It’s that their perspective keeps them from creating something that others want to read.

In short I believe there are three core perspectives to this:

• Marketers: Most inbound marketing sites are run by marketers. Marketers, by training, have things they want to tell you, actions they want you to take and goals you can help them meet. Their opening question: “What do I need to tell my audience.”  During a presentation at PRNews Digital PR conference, Amy Africa provided some insight into how humans naturally utilize base reactions in ways that almost always supersede our conscious minds. Marketers live and die on these things. But it also means that for them, “compelling” means “elicits an action.” 
• Journalists: This dying breed understands the concept of “compelling content” like no other, not because they tell better stories, but because they start with the question “what does my audience want to know?” It seems so basic, and it is, but while marketers are thinking “what do I want to tell you,” journalists ask themselves the opposite. They often run into problems when asked to serve a different master and convey a concept or idea that may need to be forced upon their audience. They take their credibility seriously, and they should. So while it makes them great content creators, it can make them lousy marketers. 
• Public Relations Writers: Of course I’m biased on this since we produce a lot of content for our clients, and I like to believe it can be pretty compelling. Our goal is to straddle the roles of journalist and marketer. We balance the questions “what does our audience want to know” with “what does our client need to say?” It’s not easy, sometimes we can lean too far one way or another, but it’s what makes good PR people worth the time and investment. 

I can’t say that all of journalism truly understands the impact of “compelling content.” According to the Pew Research “The State of the News Media 2013” report, 40 percent of local TV news is now devoted to weather, sports and traffic. That’s what local TV news believes its audience wants and as a former TV newscast producer I can tell you, this is nothing new. Traditionally ratings always rose with the storm warnings.

But viewership has dropped, especially by those under 30, and while 2012 showed inflated ad numbers thanks to election-year spending, most ad spending is down by more than a third. Worse, the report points out, weather, traffic and sports are easily replaced by other sources. Show of hands, how many of you get your weather on your iPhone? Yeah, thought so.

So you can expect many more TV journalists to find themselves without jobs over the next few years. They’ll join the thousands already laid off, cuts that Pew Research notes has created a death-spiral of sorts for traditional media. Researchers found that most people stop reading a news outlet not because they suddenly found their iPhone, but because the publication no longer gives them the information they expected.

Nearly one-third—31%—of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to, according to the survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults in early 2013. And those most likely to have walked away are better educated, wealthier and older than those who did not—in other words, they are people who tend to be most prone to consume and pay for news.

So where do all these unemployed journalists go? PR of course!

In a piece on PandoDaily, Marco Greenberg pointed out how many journalists jump to the PR world but then flame out when asked to promote something that may not be up to snuff. Their critical nature makes the unsuited for the “rah-rah” culture of the PR firm. In writing about Dan Lyons, who recently jumped from the ashes of Newsweek to the reborn ReadWrite, only to jump again to HubSpot, Greenberg asked “What happens the first time Dan Lyons has to bite his tongue when a client wants him to promote a genuinely silly idea?”

Frankly, I often fall victim to the same problem, looking for holes in stories that clients tell so that we can find and fix them before others do.

This is a Liger, a lion and tiger. A hybrid that’s not a Toyota, but sponsored by them. Fun Fact: the Newton high school aged robotics team is the Ligerbots, for the Lions of Newton South and Tigers of Newton North.

This is also why PR plays such an important role in this world of owned, earned and paid media. Companies like BuzzFeed create branded content that blends “advertising” and “advertorial” with “sharable” content. Its paid media is meant to be shared just as its independent content is meant to be shared. At Social Media Weekend, Jonathan Perelman, editor at Buzzfeed, showed a great example of this with an article called “20 Coolest Hybrid Animals” sponsored by Toyota. It’s content Buzzfeed probably could have written regardless, but Toyota paid and got branding for its hybrid vehicles.

It’s high-level stuff, not the kind of action-oriented and lead-generation concepts that marketers often crave, but it works.

It’s just a matter of coming at the problem with the right perspective.

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe bomb.” by oztenphoto, a tribute to Boston’s overreaction to a too-clever marketing campaign

Well, it’s that time again: time to sift through your inbox and tweet stream, figure out what’s real and what’s not, and maybe laugh a little in the process. Yep: it’s April Fools Day, the national holiday of marketing professionals (even for us no-frills Bostonians).

To prepare for today, I’ve spent the last couple of days reading up on hoaxes, hacks and hilarity. I also re-read my copy of Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, the bible of all modern prospective media hoaxters.

Holiday earned quite the reputation after coming clean with some of his bigger, more underhanded media campaigns. This 25-year-old marketing pro reminds every would-be viral marketer that competition in today’s market for attention comes from every possible corner. Or, put more concisely by Holiday in an interview with Chase Jarvis, “porn is a click away at any given moment.”

Making a headline-grabbing April Fools campaign is a lot like becoming the center of attention at a large, noisy social gathering: you have to use everything at your disposal. The two most important assets at a cocktail party are looks and voice. Let’s explore each.

Looks

Humans evolved to respond to visuals. If it moves, we tune it in. Once we’ve tuned it in, if it’s visually pleasing, we stay tuned in. Magicians take advantage of it to amaze us. Marketers have known this since the dawn of advertising. Our fascination with visuals is what makes YouTube the number two search engine in the world. It’s what leads Facebook’s “EdgeRank” algorithm to favor images over links and text when deciding what to show in you news feed.

The more popular of today’s hoaxes will have a visual element. A few of my favorites from recent years included clever visuals, including these two from Starbucks and Google:

Google, by the way, isn’t slacking off this year. Fresh off of the furor around killing Google Reader, it has announced it’s killing YouTube next…

However important sight is, we’re easily distracted by shiny objects. If you want to keep our attention, you have to use your voice.

Voice

The next most important thing in a cocktail party is your voice. Loud voices carry, but humans are damn good at tuning people out. In fact, there is an entire area of study in science devoted to studying this so-called Cocktail Party Effect. Volume might help at first, just like sight does, but if what we hear doesn’t interest us, we’ll move on quickly.

Finding your right voice takes a lot of time, but focusing on stories — and more specifically on the “why” — is an important step toward figuring that out.

When it comes to April Fools, you must ask yourself whether your corporate voice has room for playful or dark humor. And you must have a very clear sense of the risk tolerance of your organization and industry.

Lighten Up, But Keep It Real

My advice for anyone considering jumping on this bandwagon next year? If you want to get seen, find the right imagery. If you want to be remembered, find your voice. And if you want to be remembered for the right things, lighten up and keep it real.

Lighten up by allowing some use of humor. It grabs us. And it helps us remember you. Try it out today. See how it feels. If it fits, use it again next year. If it was effective, think about ways in which you can deploy humor throughout the year. But be careful!

Keep it real. Everybody knows not to trust news releases on April 1st. But when April 2nd rolls around and you’re still in a laughing mood, make sure that you’re laughing with your community, not at them. Humor comes at the expense of someone, and that someone should be yourself. Laughter makes us human, and companies that can laugh — especially at themselves — feel real.

Smell you later!

With baseball’s opening day upon us, I thought it time to take a look at how my favorite sports teams handle social media.

Due to several flukes of childhood, I’m a fan of New York’s major losing franchises: the Jets and the Mets. I know the Red Sox fans like to think of themselves as long-suffering, but you people have nothing on the hapless franchise that is the New York Jets.

How bad are my teams? Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal devoted a front-page story to the Mets’ long-time head of PR Jay Horowitz calling him the King of the Butt Dial. In the first paragraph Brian Costa managed to insult both of my teams at once:

During their disappointing 2012 season, the Jets became known for the butt fumble, caused by quarterback Mark Sanchez‘s unfortunate collision with teammate Brandon Moore’s rear end. Across town, the Mets are countering with a derrière distinction of their own: the butt dialer.

Sure, the teams have their on-the-field problems, and as Todd rightly points out, no amount of “PR” can fix their core “business problems.” Nevertheless, the Jets can certainly do better with the social media efforts. In fact, the Jets could take a lesson from the Mets.

OK, so Jay isn’t the greatest with technology. Costa notes how a few of Jay’s Tweets are rather… um… odd:

…just before the start of spring training, he tweeted a photo of himself shirtless in a swimming pool, buoyed by a tube and a pair of floaties, with goggles over his eyes and a snorkel lodged in his mouth. Other tweets have included such updates as “Hy” and “Congrats to $.” On March 2, he simply tweeted the letter O.

But frankly, Jay’s Twitter feed is awesome. He brings you behind the scenes of the Mets world with quick snippits and pictures that you’re not going to find in the mainstream media. Like, now I know that Al Leiter drinks a TON of Starbucks Coffee.

Al Leiter is here with @mlbnetwork Shown drinking his 10,000th cup of @starbucks this spring. twitter.com/Jay_HorwitzPR/…

— Jay Horwitz (@Jay_HorwitzPR) March 26, 2013

The Jets, meanwhile, put out a Tweet on the week before free agency began saying ”Free agency begins tomorrow. The Jets priority should be _________.” (sic)

Free agency begins tomorrow. The Jets priority should be _________.

— New York Jets (@nyjets) March 11, 2013

No, seriously, they said that. Never mind the grammatical issues, but it gave everyone–fans and non-fans alike–the chance to just beat on the Jets. Buzzfeed went so far as to collect the 25 best responses. One of my favorites? Caitlin Kelly of the New Yorker answered “A new social media coordinator.”

Now, if the Jets had done this in a self-deprecating manner, sure, it could work. This isn’t the first time the social media team has pulled this kind of move. Toward the end of the season, after the “butt fumble” and while the team was going down in flames, the Jets Facebook page continued to be populated with standard-issue rah-rah team images asking fans to “caption this!”

Um… yeah guys… not what you want to do at that moment.

One of the greatest examples of a site that “gets it” is The 7 Line, a site by fans and for fans of the Mets. They get the love/ hate aspect of rooting for a losing team. I love the Born to Believe shirts. They also had a baby shirt a few years ago saying “I was born into this mess.”

So, how can the Jets improve things a bit? Well, besides getting rid of their social media coordinator, maybe they can take a different attitude.

• Show us life behind the scenes — How about using Instagram or just a cell phone camera to introduce us to the support staff? What about the coaches most of us never see? I’d also like to know about the players. Well, maybe not as much of Brett Favre, but what is everyone else doing? 
• Bring us to the game — TV is great at showing the field, but the game is more about the people around me. It’s about the tailgating parties, it’s about the parking lot. Whenever I walked up to Giants Stadium there was a line of buses and vans that people use almost exclusively for games. Show me some of that.
• Acknowledge the failings — Nothing is perfect, certainly not the Jets. Acknowledge that, and not just in official quotes from the the press conference. Show us that you’re upset too. That no, the team isn’t performing the way it should, that you’re frustrated by interceptions, commiserate with me! Be a FAN!

The fact is this: you’re not going to sell more tickets through social media, the best you can do is keep fans engaged while the business puts a sub-par product on the field. You’re not going to sell more items with the product logo, you’re not going to sell out more games, you’re not going to improve the TV ratings.

But maybe, just maybe, you can sell a few self-deprecating t-shirts. Or a bobble head similar to the one CBS Sports proposed that the Mets make for Bobby Bonilla.

If you missed Sigur Ros on tour this month, boy did you miss out! In the last week this internationally famous rock band from Iceland headlined at Madison Square Garden and the Agganis Area, wowing crowds with their spectacular soundscapes; perfectly choreographed with energetic light shows and videos.

Last night I had the privilege of seeing them, and started thinking about the many lessons tech companies could take from this band about effectively communicating with customers, reporters and any other influencers.

Never let go of your audience

Sigur Ros and many other world famous bands do as much between songs as during them to keep their audiences engaged. While doing a quick tune up or instrument change, Sigur Ros always had a video or light show playing in the background. This kept the audience on the edge of their seats for every minute of their show.

Lulls between songs at a concert remind me of company lulls between product launches. Tech companies must put in place strategies to keep prospective customers and journalists engaged between news announcements.

Wow your audience with lots of great content

Bands don’t just go on stage with instruments anymore. A light show and professionally made video accompanied each song Sigur Ros played. Even if the music wasn’t your taste, the show was a spectacular sight to see. (For a quick example, check out this Vine of how they projected video onto a silk screen surrounding the stage!)

Similarly with tech public relations, putting out a press release is rarely enough to capture an audience these days. Images, videos, infographics and any other content that helps convey news must accompany each press release. Prospective customers and journalists alike are most impressed when this content comes together in a way that tells a clear, unified story.

Don’t be afraid to engage

I never know how bands have the nerve to stop in the middle of a song, expecting their audience to sing along with them. This is particularly interesting with Sigur Ros, as most of their lyrics are in Icelandic. But still, when they stop singing, the crowd is still excited to stumble through a few words.

Tech companies should take a note from Sigur Ros’ book and make sure they give their customers lots of opportunities to engage. Whether it’s running a competition or asking for feedback on a design through Facebook, companies must make sure they give people a chance to engage.

Embrace your voice

Sigur Ros’ front man has a huge singing range and can hit wildly high pitched notes. Still, it’s this voice that gives the band a distinct sound and is likely a major contributor to the band’s success.

Sometimes people in the tech community worry about being edgy or different. The bottom line is that finding a unique way of expressing yourself can help you stand out.