{{myquote|The Colbert Report has become the Digg of cable television.}}
From Marketing Roadmaps
Archives for April 2007
Colbert
Posted on April 20, 2007 Written by
Truth in Advertising
Posted on April 19, 2007 Written by
Sometimes, the words we choose communicate things we didn’t mean – and sometimes they end up being more honest than we wished.
Here’s an example, from Clearspring, which develops products for developers who develop widgets:
We are building services to make cross-platform widget development, distribution, and tracking as easy as ‘pi.’
Now I love a good pun as much as anyone else. In fact, I cracked the following joke on a hapless telemarketer: [Read more…]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
My Other Brother
Posted on April 18, 2007 Written by
Didn’t know I had yet another one out there. And no, this is not an indictment of my parents for “not telling me something.”
I’ve recently started swapping e-mails and conversations with a fellow communicators – a nice guy named Michael Sommermeyer. He works for the courts in Las Vegas, and it turns out we have a heck of a lot more in common than either of us knew.
I don’t write about “Social Media” and “Social Networking” and “Web 2.0” stuff for a host of reasons. There’s already a lot of it out there, and it’s not in my ordinary bailiwick. Also, what it out there is typically narcissistic, navel-gazing, and highly speculative. Besides, if you can communicate clearly, it doesn’t matter what tool you use. But, if it weren’t for playing around experimenting with these tools, I wouldn’t have met Sommermeyer. [Read more…]
Proof of Concept
Posted on April 17, 2007 Written by
Have you ever had one of those ideas that you thought were really cool, and inspired — and you were certain would never work? Maybe it’s the complexity, such that execution is never perfect. Maybe it’s the sheer number of things that could go wrong, or the consequences if they do. Or maybe it’s just that the idea is so simple, you worry there’s no way it could work. Oh – there’s also the fear of failure… that gets in the way too.
Sunday afternoon, my four-year-old daughter wanted to go outside and do some Kung Fu. Not the Spongebob Squarepants “kah-rah-TAY!” variety, but actually some of the Kung Fu she sees daddy teaching out the window on Tuesday nights. She is obviously too young to learn much of value, and I’ve already slipped in a couple of concepts that might help protect her. Still, I was waiting for her to get a little older before asking so determinedly, and has such had to rely on an old answer: logic.
When I used to do presentations for Junior High and elementary kids, I’d invariably get asked about my hobbies, or what I did for fun. In one case, I knew the teacher, who took it upon herself to let the class know that they needed to behave because I knew “Kung Fu.” The natural response for a middle-school student is “Show us some Kung Fu!” — which would lead to the whiteboard for a lesson in logic. [Read more…]
Crises
Posted on April 16, 2007 Written by
{{myquote|There are only two things worse than managing a crisis; not managing a crisis, and being forced to manage a non-crisis as though it was something truly important.}}
Lesson Learned
Posted on April 16, 2007 Written by
Time for another brief lesson in communications from ORACLE: The message that worked yesterday might not work today.
Case in point: trying to get my kids to pick up their toys, on the pretense that I might remember the color of the living room carpet if I could see it. (The current color… no one remembers what it looked like originally, unless there is a furniture shuffling going on.) Sometimes they respond to rewards, but when it’s already past bedtime there’s not a lot of wiggle room for bribing them. So we move to delayed/denied privileges. [Read more…]
Rarity of Maturity
Posted on April 13, 2007 Written by
{{myquote|Ninety percent of the world never leaves high school – they just leave adult supervision.}}