by Mark O'Brien | Mar 19, 2015
On LinkedIn alone there are so many apparent obituaries being written for the CMO, I pulled my black suit out of mothballs for the funeral. But when it occurred to me that none of the pieces I’d been reading had given a cause of death, I decided to do a little...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 9, 2015
The Dumbing of America preceded television programs like Jerry Springer, Oprah, The View, Real Housewives, and every other broadcast and popular-culture offering that indicates the decline of Western Civilization and reduces the public discourse to the level of...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 5, 2015
Floyd and Boyd are not real people. But they play them on TV. They recently engaged in this discussion during an episode of Unreal People on UPC (the Unreal People Channel). Floyd: Why don’t companies market to vendors? Boyd: What? Floyd: If companies need the...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 2, 2015
As of this writing, there are 12 groups on LinkedIn dedicated to social media in insurance. Those groups have 41,837 members. Yet a client who sells software to insurance companies told me she wasn’t devoting resources to a Facebook page because it wasn’t worth...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 26, 2015
According to dictionary.com, hype is a derivation of hyperbole: Origin: 1925–30, Americanism; in sense “to trick, swindle,” of uncertain origin; subsequent senses perhaps by reanalysis as a shortening of hyperbole That’s easy enough to imagine. A hyperbolic pitch...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 25, 2015
In a beautiful little book called, The Zen Path Through Depression, Philip Martin offers advice for easing the pain of depression that could just as easily apply to the practice of marketing: When we are lost, frightened, or facing something new or unknown, our first...
