Marketing Cleveland from the Bottom Up

Ed Morrison, weighing in on a discussion on Brewed Fresh Daily of efforts to market the city of Cleveland, offers this:

Efforts at sloganeering (mainline or guerrilla) waste time and money. In this age of transparency, authenticity is the only approach that works. So build a buzz about being an older industrial city willing to re-imagine itself by actually doing it.

Damn skippy!

Brewed Fresh Daily, and the blogs of so many in the BFD circle, have long been a part of an authentic, transparent, and passionate grassroots effort that continues to build buzz about Cleveland -- from the bottom up. The street-level events coverage, restaurant tips and reviews, and overall level of discourse -- political, cultural, and otherwise -- says a hell of a lot more about what's good and cool and truly interesting about Cleveland than any of the formalized, formulaic marketing campaigns I've witnessed in my 53 years in this town.

Does that mean there shouldn't also be mainstream campaigns? Of course not. But the real Cleveland emerges only in the aggregate of all of the various perspectives. No slogan will ever capture or communicate that emerging image.

The End of Software -- as We Know It

In Calling all disruptors: the perfect storm of SOA, SaaS, and open source beckons, ZDNet's Joe McKendrick addresses the disruptive impact of the death of the monolithic application:

...[T]he combined SOA, Software as a Service, and open source movements will drive the software and application industry to highly modular, building-block, assemble-to-order approach -- similar to the disruption Dell incurred on the computer hardware business. Monolithic applications will go away, and replaced
with modular, loosely coupled components.



Will there be application "Dells" that will begin to eat the lunch of the SAPs and Oracles of the world? Stay tuned. The SOA/SaaS/open-source combination is a highly potent disruption force, and we ain’t seen nothing yet. As Winston Damarillo put it: "There are opportunities for commercial vendors -- as Dell did with hardware -- that create an assembly of components into a stack, manage the versions, and deliver it to the customer."

Recognition of this (dare I say it?) paradigm shift is important across the board -- and the boardroom. The transformation to highly modular IT solutions (and highly modular everything else) represents an opportunity for businesses -- regardless of size -- to adapt to an ever-changing global marketplace that will continue to be reshaped and redefined by the Long Tail, the Flat World, and the Wisdom of Crowds.