Marc Sirkin's Mindnumbing Thoughts

I'm doing a panel this Friday in NYC - my first as an official Microsoft employee. It should be interesting. Learn more about the event here and the speakers here . Following the great success of NYU Stern’s Florence 2007: Global Alumni Conference, we are pleased to present our first campus-based conference, New York 2008: Alumni Business Conference – A Look to the Future. Join fellow alumni and guests to hear from industry leaders and scholars on current market issues on financial risk, investing, entrepreneurship, marketing, digital media, and social networking. Dean Thomas F. Cooley and Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance, will provide keynote remarks, while Ed Altman, Max L. Heine Professor of Finance, and Mark Tercek, Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern and Director of Goldman Sachs' Environmental Markets Initiative, among others, offer their expertise in the breakout sessions.

Groundswell Originally uploaded by msirkin I'm reading a great new book called "Groundswell" that is really helping me frame out what's next for the CIO Network I'm trying to build out. This chart clearly shows that if we lean on "creators," those that create unique content within the site we're going to have issues. Instead, we're focusing on how to drive spectators up the ladder, perhaps with polls, and other "frictionless" ways to rate content and participate on the site. It's interesting to play with their profile tool and map out different ages and locations to see how different strategic approaches might work (or not work).

Great marketing can seem so simple at times. Turning mistakes into big wins seems to me to be the easiest way to impress customers these days (not that you want to make mistakes in the first place). I got Guitar Hero for the Wii a few months ago - and found out that the disc needed to be replaced because the original didn't have the proper sound capabilities. I filled out a web form and received a self-mailer that had shipping already paid. The note from Activision said a disc replacement would come in 4-6 weeks. Just before we went on vacation, I dropped the disc into the mail and hoped that it wouldn't disappear forever. About 3 weeks later, I got an automated e-mail telling me that they had received the disc and were processing it. 2 days later, I got a note that it had shipped. Exactly 5 weeks from the day I dropped the disc in the mail, I had a replacement disc, as promised. A week later, while I was away on a business trip my wife called and told me I had a box from ...