Speaking of demos, this Microsoft Surface demo is truly brilliant. It is the productization of the device demonstrated in Jeff Han's TedTalk. If you can stop your laughing at the voice-over, the images are mind-blowing. How could your future customers interact with products with a large, multi-touch interface? Something to innovate about....

My friend Dan Lewis is conducting a survey on the effectiveness of product management. He writes,

The study is being conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation and is explicitly targeted for product managers working with information technology product and service offerings. The research is focused on identifying hidden organizational barriers to innovation and specifically examines the relationship between organizational trust, knowledge diversity, and new product success. The results will provide new insights into actions product managers can take to improve their overall level of effectiveness.

Take the survey and tell Dan what works (and what doesn't) in your role in product management.

I’ve been enjoying the TedTalks series of video podcasts. (You can view them online or subscribe to them via iTunes). Covering a myriad of topics, each session is fascinating in its message and its use of media (or not).

• Wade Davis uses brilliant photographs in Cultures at the far edge of the world. His photos are gorgeous and strongly support his message, that the world is filled with wonderful diversity.
  

• Jeff Han unveils the genius of a multi-touch interface design. His demonstration perhaps illustrates why typical demos aren’t very interesting… because compared to this, they just aren’t very interesting.
  

• Blaise Aguera y Arcas offers a jaw-dropping Photosynth demo hampered by techno-babble that detracts from his message. I guess some people really do talk like that!
  

• Hans Rosling conveys dense population data in a remarkably clear way, debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen. He demonstrates how rich data should be conveyed and reveals the promise of data-mining.
  

• Thomas Barnett offers the Pentagon's new map for war and peace from his book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. It’s a fascinating, amusing talk that is marred only by his truly terrible PowerPoint slides. He uses awful graphics, too many fonts, and silly sound effects.
  
• Al Gore’s presentation on 15 ways to avert a climate crisis is somewhat better although his slides are a little clumsy.
  
• My favorite speakers use no slides at all. Check out Sir Ken Robinson's Do schools kill creativity? His amusing speech is filled with stories with no slides.
  

There are hundreds of TedTalks which in the aggregate illustrate good and bad techniques for presenting information. Watch a few and see which ones resonate with you, and why. When preparing a 15-20 minute persuasive speech, having a simple message conveyed with stories and supported with images seems to work best.

Bruce McCarthy at User>Driven contrasts the roles of product management and product marketing. He writes:

The most successful organizations I've seen have a split between product management and product marketing. They have people who support sales and others who set product direction. Both talk to customers every day, but the conversations are very different. In the end they work together, of course. The work of each feeds into the other. But in the end, the mission of one is to bring the message from the market in, and the mission of the other is to get the message out.

I made the same point in Product Management Job Responsibilities: A PM listens to the market; a PMM talks to the market. It is indeed a different mindset and a different skill set.

When gathering requirements for the product, product managers and product marketers should interview customers together. One is looking for problems to be addressed for product users while the other is seeking to understand how to communicate to product buyers. As Bruce implies, there’s inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Inbound brings requirements in to the building; outbound takes the resulting products out to the market.

(However, I wish that Bruce hadn’t characterized outbound marketing as sales support. While outbound product marketing communicates to the client base through the sales channel, we should be focused on the market full of customers rather than on customers one-at-a-time. Supporting sales people is the role of sales engineering, not product marketing.)

Market requirements and positioning documents are owned by those who best know the market. Product management knows what to build; product marketing knows what to say.

"Brand” is a word with no brand. Marketers seem to flock to the idea that a swoosh or a logo or a bleed-to-the-edge will create an identity, and they call it a brand. But no one seems to agree on exactly what a brand is.

Have you seen the new logo for the 2012 Olympics? In an article on sportinglife.com, the new logo was called a logo, an emblem, and a brand. Yeesh. And it’s ugly too.

From the article: “The dramatic new logo for the 2012 Olympics was unveiled… The bold jagged emblem based on the date 2012… Organisers hope the brand will be immediately recognisable worldwide….” Well, which is it? A logo, an emblem, or a brand? And to add to the confusion, they claim it will change color and shape.

What’s a brand? My friend David says, “Branding, as an advertising and marketing term, has as its origins the visual mark burned into a cow's butt.” Indeed.

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UPDATE: On the day following the announcement, organisers say nearly 45,000 people have so far signed a petition demanding London's 2012 Olympics logo be scrapped. The committee has rebuffed criticism that the logo, which cost 400,000 pounds (US$800,000) to design, is "puerile" and "hideous," saying it is meant to be "edgy" and that people will get used to it. Sounds like the agency is thinking "everybody is stupid except us."