Five posts for your weekend reading consideration:
- The best of #heweb13. Judging from all the Twitter talk earlier this week, the #heweb13 conference in Buffalo was a great success. (Kudos to Mark Greenfield and company for putting together such a stellar event.) For those of us who weren’t able to be there, we had the benefit of excellent coverage by the devoted crew of bloggers at LINK. Now another devoted blogger, Karine Joly, shares her 13 top LINK blog posts from the conference. (And she even gave up the chance to eat maple bacon ice cream to sift through all the LINK posts. Talk about dedication.)
- The Show Me State (of the art). I must admit, as a Missourian, I was hooked by Seth Godin’s headline. But the text below the headline should give all marketers pause. We spend so much time showing, revealing, offering samples, giving stuff away, just to draw in customers. Maybe in doing so, we’re hurting our causes. Maybe we should show a little less.
- 5 successful rebranding efforts. Every brand needs a little freshening up now and then. What do you think of these five efforts? Were they as successful as the author suggests?
- Here’s what the marketing organization of the future should look like. In this post, Forbes’ Jennifer Rooney reports on what a panel of top chief marketing officers (collectively called the Marketing2020 project) think their organizations should look like in 2020. The structures are more hub-and-spoke models of collaboration rather than hierarchical, and the “non-negotiable characteristics of the 2020 marketing organization” will include “a goal of business growth; a clear purpose; complete internal alignment of functional areas; clearly defined roles and responsibilities of each individual; research centers and data-informed efforts; an amalgam of agency partners as well as an in-house agency-like team; cross-platform social-media engagement; a strong CMO-CEO connection.” (Hat tip to @DebHammacher for sharing.)
- 10 rules for creative projects from painter Richard Diebenkorn, by Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings.
Andy writes! 
“10 rules for creative projects” sounds like it’d be my favorite. I have no creativity.
Mark. That is not true. All humans are creative. The photos you post on your blog are terrific!
I think there’s a misunderstanding in general about what it means to be “creative.” I see it all the time in my line of work. Many of our clients defer to our staff to do the “creative” stuff — which in their minds usually means, “Take my mushy idea of what I want to do and make it pretty, make it work, make people want to open the envelope/apply for school/send a check/etc.”
But creativity isn’t limited to the arts, or design, or video, or writing. Check out this post:
5 reasons why everyone is creative
I’d be interested in your thoughts on what he has to say.