Chevy Chase Bank (now owned by Capital One) appears to have discovered free business banking. I know; I used to be their customer. In fact, I had one or more accounts with the bank for over 20 years.

While there are lots of reasons I left that bank, there’s exactly one reason I landed at PNC Bank a few years ago. They offered free banking to small businesses. They treated me as though my business is important to them. Bank staff learned my name, welcomed me in, and otherwise provided amazing customer service. Can you guess what happened next? (Yup, I moved all my accounts.)

It doesn’t take an industry changer (i.e., Apple and music distribution or Amazon and book publishing) to be disruptive. You just need to tilt the market in your direction.

What can your business do to be disruptive?

Photo by Christina (Flickr).

©2010 Independent Thinking. All Rights Reserved.

TIME Magazine has a terrific article about how Twitter is changing us. It’s well-written, and author Steven Johnson looks at Twitter not just as a fad tool for celebrities, but also as a platform that is changing how we are interconnected. A sample:

But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you’ll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we’re actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors.

What’s most interesting to me, however, is how Johnson cites Twitter, TiVo, Wikipedia, America Online, Amazon, and a few other companies and products to make a point about American innovation:

We didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products … the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

Johnson then goes on to talk about the difference between building the mousetrap and perfecting it. It’s thought-provoking stuff.

©2010 Independent Thinking. All Rights Reserved.

What do a feminist author and a soap opera star have in common?

You can do a lot of free association when you’re on cold meds. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about something related to advertising. That got me thinking about a book I once read for a class by a feminist author who premised, in part, that women’s choices were unduly influenced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. So women who “nested” were doing so because they watched 30 Something, and if we wore sexy lingerie it was because we’d seen a Christian Lacroix or Calvin Klein ad. Yeah, right. I eventually threw the book across the room and never got to the end.

Apropos of that conversation the other day, I wondered: whatever happened to Susan Faludi? So I did a Google search. But I spelled her name wrong and Google asked: Do you mean Susan Lucci? I still got that when I added in the book title. Eventually I went to Amazon, plugged in the book title, and figured it out.

I know very little about search engine optimization, which is why I try to learn from Lee Odden, Matt McGee, and other SEO pros. But I know that if your name can be mistaken for any variation of a soap opera star, you’ve got work to do on your online rankings. (Meanwhile, the irony that a feminist who posited a backlash against women was mistaken for a soap opera star wasn’t lost on me.)

How’s your online ranking? Have you ever been mistaken online for someone else? If so, what did you do to correct your online profile?

©2010 Independent Thinking. All Rights Reserved.