Hey, guess what? It's Friday again! Just like last week, we dug up some really great little bits to bookend with quotation marks these past few days. Here you go:

"The major industrial country that gets the greenest the fastest, with the smartest technologies - that's the country that will lead the 21st century. We've got the innovators; we've got the venture capitalists. If only we had the government that would create the right market conditions and then get out of the way."

- Thomas L. Friedman in yesterday's NY Times Via John Winsor.

"When mobile phones first appeared in China in 1987, sales were predicted to reach 800,000 by the year 2000. By the time the millennium turned, sales had actually surpassed 87 million. Today there are 490 million mobile phones in China; during this year’s Spring Festival, these phones delivered over 15 billion SMS text messages."

- Hai Wen, Vice President of Peking University.

“In China, CEO’s are smiling. In Europe, they are not.”

- Sir Martin Sorrell.

"It is not easy to present the same image and personality to consumers over time, in the face of a rapidly changing society and fierce local competition. To accomplish this, marketers must really understand their consumers and tap into the fundamental drivers of the category and brand. Michael Tatelman, corporate vice-president and general manager of mobile devices for Motorola in North Asia, stressed the need for integrated marketing, citing the launch of the pink V3 mobile phone, which featured TV, PR, point-of purchase materials, and even new uniforms for sales promoters, all linked to a common theme."

- Nigel Hollis again, via John Winsor.

"Starbucks has been successful because it made the coffee experience uncommonly better. So uncommonly better that we gladly pay a premium for it. Using that mindset, the Starbucks CD-burning stations have been unsuccessful because they failed to make the music download experience uncommonly better. It’s far easier for us to download music using our own computers than it is using the Starbucks CD-burning kiosk."

- John Moore

"As we seek to give brands newly robust and dynamic meanings, I think we will be obliged to resort to new meaning management strategies that are not at first true to marketing orthodoxy."

- Grant McCracken

"And from a business and innovation angle, we’d like to argue that the CUSTOMER-MADE trend, co-creating with your customers, is the most important one to watch. Not because everything has to or will be co-created in the future, but because tapping into the collective experiences, skills and ingenuity of hundreds of millions of consumers around the world is a complete departure from the inward looking, producer-versus-consumer innovation model so common to corporations around the world."

- trendwatching.com, via 37 Signals, via (yes, you guessed it,) John Winsor.

"There’s a good goal for every brand owner: Since you can’t always be there to enforce your organization’s brand, make it your priority to empower your team to live the brand from the inside, out."

- Mike Wagner

"The fundamental question is to understand what stage of the buying cycle the buyer is in when searching for information online or when looking for recommendations offline. If he or she is in the early stages of the buying cycle while surfing for information online - trying to narrow down the list of potential choices to two or three - then online negative word of mouth would have a dramatic impact on that buying decision, no matter how much offline WOM is happening about a given product. Of course, given the recent Yahoo!/OMD study "the role of online research on offline purchases" results, the answer to that question is not that easy if indeed the shape of the traditional purchase "funnel" changes into a "tumbler!"'

- Francois Gossieaux

That ought to do it for now. Have a great Friday, everyone. (And to our US readers, in case you don't drop by here again until Tuesday, have a great Memorial Day!)

The Estonian Example:

Foghound's Lois Kelly just got back from Estonia's annual Parnu Marketing Conference and had this to say about this not-so-well-known country:

"Last week I had the pleasure of participating in the annual Parnu Marketing Conference where 550 of Estonia’s marketing professionals get together to learn and talk about new marketing ideas. The theme of the conference: “Marketing Without Advertising.”'

My first reaction was "Wow! Estonia? Of all places? Really?" But then I read on and it all started making sense:

"During a word of mouth marketing workshop 50 people came up with more than 300 ideas in 45 minutes about how to talk about Estonia to attract tourists and businesses to this Baltic country. A great testament to what can happen when you bring smart people together and remove all the traditional “branding” rules. Some of the ideas:

For tourism:

Estonia is like a fantasy land – beautiful old medieval architecture, Hansel & Gretel-like countryside, pristine beaches and forests with bears, wolves, wild mushrooms; and it’s safe, inexpensive, and almost everyone speaks English.

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is the largest and best preserved medieval capital in Europe. More beautiful than Prague.

The White Night winters in Estonia are magical, where you can really chill: pure silence amid the snow and ice; walking from island to island on the ice; barrel saunas.

And for the high testosterone crowd, Estonia is a great hunting spot – wolves, bears, wild boar; or you can tour former top-secret Soviet Union military bases.

For economic development:

Estonia is the Silicon Valley of the Baltic – totally E, and far less expensive than other European cities.

Estonia is the safe, friendly gateway for companies that want to do business with Russia, --- but be based in Europe and not Russia.

Estonia offers all the benefits of Scandinavia for businesses – educated population, high quality of life, great technology infrastructure -- with a MUCH lower flat tax rate.

Having spent two days as a tourist in Estonia, I can tell you that it is a gem of a country. Despite Soviet occupation until 1991, the country has preserved its national identity and the beauty of its environment and rich architectural history."

(I'm looking for flights.)

It's pretty wild to think that most States and cities in the US - which are still stuck on looking for catchy tag lines and not-so-fresh "identities" to attract tourists and industry just got trumped by little old Estonia. (Las Vegas being the most notable exception.)

The New Media Press Release Template:

PR: The Social Media PressRelease is here! Check it out here (thanks to Mike Manuel and Shel Holtz for the heads-up). At first, I thought that the template was going to be a joke of some kind, but it's 100% real... and actually pretty good.

No, it's better than good. It's a pretty impressive tool. Read Shel's take on it here.

Be sure to browse the other network posts. Have a great Wednesday, everyone. :)