Apple is famous for not engaging in the focus-grouping that defines most business product and marketing strategy. Which is partly why Apples products and advertising are so insanely great. They have the courage of their own convictions, instead of the opinions of everyone else's whims. On the subject, Steve Jobs loves to quote Henry Ford who once said that if he had asked people what they wanted they would have said "a faster horse."

Focus groups are all about reference points. Make it more like this, less like that. Whether it's business, social business, or charity, breakthroughs are defined by the absence of reference points, and leadership is defined by the courage to leave all of the reference points behind.

...

Imagine if they focus-grouped the iPhone:
"Can't you have a physical keyboard that slides out of the back, like all of the other phones?"

Imagine if they focus-grouped Disneyland:
"Can't you make it so I can see everything in a day?"

Imagine if the focus-grouped the Apollo program:
"I think the goal should be 20 years instead of 10."

Imagine if they focus-grouped any of the things that really inspire us. Imagine if they put all of the comfortable reference points back in for us.

Take people to the places where there are no reference points, and leave the focus groups — and the competition — behind.

Conversations and buzz are giving us a huge opportunity for going a step forward this, for the 1st time we can listen people like in a bar and learn about their needs and their life... we have to re-think our marketing model:
- starting to listen and not to push
- starting in R&D and not simply in Leads and Sales
- starting to keep in touch (real) manager and people

You can manage 50 people through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep. You can touch them all in a week and make sure they’re all pointed in the right direction. By 150, it’s clear that that’s not going to scale, and you’ve got to find some way to keep everybody going in productive directions when you’re not in the room.

I agree with Mark totally, management is an old thing, in my team I'm trying to have: Autonomy, Motivation and clear Purposes...

Freemium still seems like a tough model. What do start-ups need to think about when rolling out a freemium model?

Here are three things the CEO of Evernote thinks about:

1. Make a product that a billion people will fall in love with and use for the rest of their lives.
2. Make it easy for a single-digit percentage of them to pay you a few bucks a month once in a while.
3. Make sure your variable costs are low enough that you can make a mountain of profit if you get #1 and #2 right.

If you can't see how you'll do all three things, go with another business model.

Information is hardly the same thing as a product that can only be consumed once by a single person. If you consume a news story, you might be one of millions. If you consume a beer, no one else can consume it.

So it's a false metaphor. And if you start from a false premise, you will inevitably be led to a false conclusion. Or, to put it another way, if you chug-a-lug too many of old media's metaphoric beers, you will end up staggering down the street of illogical thinking and banging into the lamp post of wrong revenue models.

A smart post by Stefano Maggi about social ties and what you have to see in real-life to achive influence and spread words faster with word of mouth...

A new step forward about the different ways to see online friendship and its effects.