One of my favorite crime fiction writers is Elmore Leonard. You may know Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight, among many of his classic novels. And one of my favorite literary devices Elmore uses is… suspense. He is the master of the fake out. Characters motives are always murky, and readers get hooked trying to guess […]
My house was ground zero for the recent tornado that passed through North Georgia. The twister was totally unexpected, but thanks to technology (and good friends), we had a 15-minute warning to take shelter. The tornado alert started blaring on my iPhone. Friends were texting, telling me they were watching the news and Sandy Springs was in the […]
A recent story entitled Five Lessons on Compelling Content from Australian Football from the Content Marketing Institute caught my attention. With an intriguing title like that I couldn’t resist. One of the lessons discussed was about the power of storytelling to attract and retain loyal fans. As the article points out: “Storytelling is at the […]
Ever since I learned my ABC’s, I have been aware of the beauty, power and symmetry of “the number three” in communications. Many things in life resolve to three. Think of popular culture. Three Little Pigs, Three Blind Mice, Three Stooges, etc. According to Pythagoras and the Pythagorean school, the number three, which they called […]
So I went to the dentist the other day and learned something interesting about my mental state. During the routine dental check-up, my hygienist asked me if there was something different in my life. “You seem to be less stressed, I can tell by looking at your mouth,” she said. I was quite impressed as I […]
Are job seekers really keen on using mobile devices to search for jobs? My initial assumption was the desire is there, but the market is not quite optimized to support them. Desktops PCs and laptops are dinosaurs, the cloud is enveloping everything, and everyone is going mobile right? Pardon brief 70’s diversion. Of course our […]
They’re back! (Not sons and daughters of baby boomers living with their parents). At MATRIX we have witnessed a different trend, of former employees returning to the fold. Is this a good thing for us, and for them? Conventional wisdom holds that hiring former employees is a bad idea. Some firms even have a hard […]
In July my 15-year old son and I went on a Northern Tier Boy Scout wilderness canoeing trip in Atikokan, Ontario. Our crew consisted of five boys and three adult leaders. It was a great time, very challenging, with many adventures along the way. For the first time since I can remember we were also […]
Recently we in marketing were trying to come up with a trivia question for our new consultant newsletter. Seemed simple enough. Create a difficult, but not impossible question for our brainy IT consultants, let the recipients sweat over it a bit, and ultimately give away a $100 prize to the winner. Well it took us […]
History lesson. The word “brand” originally meant anything hot or burning, and was associated with marking livestock with a unique symbol, so that the owner could identify and claim the animals later if they got lost or stolen. Good for the rancher, not so good for the cattle. Applied to marketing, British brewery Bass & […]
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