Finally I have a registered business! Unfortunately Pivotal consulting was taken, even if the other owners did spell it Pivital! But I’m very happy with Pivotal Points. Have updated the website and that will be uploaded over the coming days. The domain name remains consultpivotal.com. It still makes sense. Now to continue the process of product creation. The more I look at my history of seminars and training, the more I realise I have that I can create and the hundreds of ways it can be presented. Can’t wait to build it all. Wish I could do it all right now, but unfortunately cannot do eveything at once, so it will have to be spread over the coming months. Look forward to a new teleseminar and a series of articles and tips.
Danny Sullivan blogs: Zeitgeist ’05: The Google Partner Forum is happening on Oct. 25-27, the first “customer innovation conference” Google says it has ever held. About 400 people are on the invite only list. …Speakers on the agenda range from the top three Google Guys, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmdit to IAC’s Barry Diller to MSN’s Yusuf Mehdi to Yahoo’s Terry Semel to Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble. The traditional press is well in attendance, with James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, the chairman and publisher of the New York Times Arthur Sulzberger and others. Excellent, can’t wait to hear what comes out. Wait a minute! The FAQ says:
All speeches and discussions at Zeitgeist are off the record. To ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly, no press coverage or blogging is permitted.
This will be good, to see if you can keep open discussions among 400 people, some of them bloggers, many of them press, somehow off the record.
Is this reverse psychology or reverse marketing? Or is there an old established term for this process in the industry? An interesting scenario to say the least. Not my field, marketing, but it fascinates me.
“We all accept the notion that our jobs ought to be more than just a way to sustain ourselves and acknowledge working to be our duty. But we don’t quite understand why this is the case.” Read the whole article
We take so much for granted. What a grand satemsnt! Nevertheless I was reminded of it yesterday when I read this fascinating blog post, researching for News Bytes. Taste is something I tend to take for granted and yet it plays such an important part in my life. Fascinating then, to consider just how it works.
Taste and texture
Taste is a notoriously difficult sense to study. My son Jim can’t stand baked potatoes, but I can’t get enough of them. I don’t like watermelon, but the rest of my family gobbles it up. Even more perplexingly, I do like watermelon candy. With all the individual differences in taste, how can scientists learn anything specific about how the sense works?
You can read the whole post from Cognitive Daily
I listened to audio of Tony Robbins talking about the power of one’s peers to either lift us up or to lead us to underachieve. It made a lot of sense, as Tony does. Then came Fiona Emberton’s article in Incite August 2005 about public library success. She referred to library leadership as “‘bodacious, courageous, audacious’ leadership”. That’s the type of peer group I would have – oh and Fiona as a conference speaker!!
This week I’m putting the finishing touches to a set of articles, a seminar, teleseminar and pivot box on a subject that has me excited. Looking forward to sharing it next week.
Late last week, I received my ITC Corporate trainer package. Proud to receive the recognition, but also very proud and pleased to be able to go out and speak and train on behalf of an organisation that has given me so much. But even more moving was the little package in the big parcel. It was a gift that truly highlights the international nature of ITC – a gift sent by a member in South Africa via her friend, to the international convention in Baltimore to the staff of Management Services in New Zealand who passed it on to me. Very special and heartwarming that was. Thanks Vanessa
Am I being cynical?? Am I being naïve?? Who knows, but the marketing news I receive regularly (and share on News Bytes) is hinting at a coming trend to use normal female body shapes in marketing. First there was this article from the New York Times
For Everyday Products, Ads Using the Everyday Woman
Madison Avenue is increasingly interested in using everyday women in advertising instead of just waifish supermodels. The change comes after the Dove line of personal-care products sold by Unilever introduced what it called a “campaign for real beauty,” which presents women in advertisements as they are rather than as some believe they ought to be. If the fad becomes a trend and shows legs, so to speak, it has the potential to fundamentally change decades of image-making on Madison Avenue. – article continues
And then, apparently Nike jumped on the bandwagon. Here was the article where Mediapost announced that one.
Nike Steers Advertising Toward Reality Anatomy
In the latest nod to “real” women — and the latest blow to the wafer-thin body image — Nike has introduced a campaign that celebrates women’s “big butts, thunder thighs and tomboy knees.” It comes on the heels of a Dove campaign that touched a cultural hot-button and set off a flood of media coverage culminating with models from the ads appearing on the cover of People magazine. – article continues
After decades of being blitzed with advertising that featured unattainable dreams, of living in the duality of being seduced by it and resenting its techniques, I have to believe it’s going to change ….. Believe the unbelievable ….?. Where is the “Coping with change” manual. Bring it on!!
For the last couple of months, I put ITC on the back burner while I was developing my website.Focus I thought, Don’t be distracted. And then wondered why I was feeling so discouraged, so out of sorts.
OK … the website, for better or worse, is now happening, and I gave our debate on Tuesday evening heaps of preparation. The speech went well. I was happy, and felt so much more confident and at peace. Was it coincidence that Valma’s confidence tip for the meeting was to be prepared for every presentation? Being pleased with having done my best and having modelled much more appropriate behaviour, life was good again. It extended, then, to the rest of my life. Far more confident to take on new challenges and opportunities; far more creative. Preparation – is – the basis of all good public speaking, but also of confidence.
‘In the non-stop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us
with floaties and teach us how to swim’ – Linton Weeks
Power Talk is a reasonably new tool from ITC for us, as members, to use. It is a comprehensive manual of communication, and especially public speking, covering aspects such as image, voice production, and speech preparation. We had avoided following the suggestion to concentrate on each section for six months at a time, thinking we would reach overload. So this term, I have taken on programming for Communicators Logan City, and will try a compromise of having a month for each section and then start the cycle again. I am getting quite enthusiastic about this, because the information given is so comprehensive, and we will learn much by focussing on one aspect so thoroughly. I look forward to people using the material in their evaluations, because I think everyone will have their vision of communication broadened.