I haven’t had the chance to post much lately as we are on the final turn towards the Beta launch of NextUp Careers (hopefully for Monday), so its been a little crazy. That’s too bad, because there has been some great potential topics for the blog out on the information super highway this past week. Here are a couple of my favorites.
Newsweek is reporting in its article “All that’s Fit to Buy” that legendary entertainment impressario David Geffen is interested in buying the New York Times and converting it to a non-profit. It could be an interesting approach, and as the article notes there is some precedent as the St. Petersburg Times is operated as a non-profit and is quite successful. I’ve had a lot of interest in how the newspaper industry would be fixed as I wrote a post – “How to Save the Republican and Your Local Paper” a while back. My recommendations were more tactical solutions for retaining a for-profit model, but the non-profit model, at first blush looks pretty interesting. I’m not sure how that would apply to local papers, but it should be interesting to watch.
Over at the Keyhole, there is a brief post about Playboy Magazine. Like many in the publishing industry, Playboy has fallen upon hard times and the post – “Not Your Dad’s Playboy” highlights some of Playboy’s strategies for solving its crisis. It appears Playboy is going to focus on two routes – increase prices and cut the number of issues. I can’t decide whether or not this is a good strategy, but I’m inclined to think it is not. Price increases in reductions are okay if you are going to do something to provide greater value, but without added value, my sense it all Playboy will accomplish in the long-term is to drive customers to cheaper alternatives and further compound their problems.
Over at Venture Beat, there was a great post yesterday by guest contributor David Shen (formerly of Yahoo). The post “Solving the problems of early stage me-too product start ups” provides some great insight into how to launch a product/service in a competitive marketplace. This has got some really great ideas and I think I will probably revist this as a full post or White Paper at a later date. Until that time, if your thinking about a start-up, give the post a read.
Lastly, check out this post on “Social Strategies for Exciting (and Boring) Brands” over at Groundswell. The insights on boring brands is quite interesting, because let’s face it – most of us have boring brands. The key to making boring brands work – get people to talk about their problems and leverage it. The post has some thoughts on how to do it that I won’t get into.
That’s it for today’s post. Hopefully, we’ll get the initial NextUp Careers launch behind us and it will be back to a normal post schedule next week. Oh, and if your a reliabiity engineering or predictive maintenance professional and reading this post, don’t forget to check out the site!
