Dmitry Linkov

The Messaging Times blog

March 28th, 2006. Published under General. No Comments.

With a little delay I recommend you to take a look at Messaging Times blog by Tom O’Leary.

Good luck Tom!

Remarkable baldness

March 27th, 2006. Published under General. 4 Comments.

First were funky guys. They invented the image of “cool” business professors. Than Seth made baldness remarkable (who else could do it so good?!).

So after Seth – baldness is also an attribute of a successful businessman. The fact that “He insists that he is naturally bald” is absolutely awesome. But I found out that this image starts to be quite popular. First was AlfaBank – Russian bank that started to use the image of bald business guy. After that I found a Russia business author that also used a bald image:

So what’s next? Will “baldness” be a required point in your CV?

upd.: Seth’s points that he was the first).

How we choose

March 23rd, 2006. Published under General. No Comments.

It’s been a long time I was thinking about how we choose to buy something or not.

My fathers got a certain principle “we are not so rich to buy bad things”. It worked. But not the last years. It all started from digital camera. We bought Sony DSC V-1 with “5 megapixels, Carl Zeiss optics, manual regime of work etc”. And we bought it basing only on recommendation of a good friend of ours, professional photographer.

What we get is a camera with expensive memory stick cards, with a battery that lasted very little time and with a great time between clicking on the button and making a photo. And all this cost us 700$ when the average price was something about 400$! We received good professional characteristics but lack of users characteristics. And that taught me to think off what I really need from anything before buying it. But that’s a hard thing to understand! For me these user characteristics were things that have to be ok by default!!!

The users that never were familiar with any electronics will have such problems. Thinking make a Squidoo lens on this topic.

Question to you – what are business (and “way of communication” in particular) opportunities in all this stuff?

Janelle Barlow in Moscow

March 19th, 2006. Published under General. No Comments.

On Wednesday I visited a conference with Janelle Barlow – Branded Customer Service.

The amount of people was something like 120-130. The conference was good, Janelle is a great speaker – she can work with people a lead them. Anyway Russian mentality was here once again and it was pretty hard to “make move” the biggest part of the audience.

The idea of the whole concept is pretty simple – you brand is made by your personnel and if there are problems on the finish line to the customer, all you efforts in establishing your brand were in vain.

It was interesting to hear that the problem of bad personnel education is relevant not only for Russia. In Russia there is a re-branding tendency – a lot of companies begin to think about brands and realise that they have only trademarks. So the first step they do is they go to design/branding agencies that develop a good corporate identity for them. But they do nothing with personnel. This is the easiest and maybe most expressive way – but is leaves the internal part of branding aside. There is no certain answer on the question “what do we need to do?” Change the way people think is hard. And it takes efforts and time.

Once again, Listen!

March 9th, 2006. Published under General. No Comments.

How many times you heard “Listen to the people” phrase? Millions? More? But there are so many people who still didn’t heard about it at all.

 My personal experience is, when you boss don’t listen to you it makes a terrible effect. Something evokes inside you and the relationship to the boss becomes bad immediately.  It’s good if you understand this and can explain it to yourself. Otherwise it can bring a conflict.