“Vertigo. Ergo. Sum. (I spin. Therefore. I am.)”
Digital Manipulation
Posted on April 22, 2007 Written by 3 Comments
To be a society so poorly versed in things mathematical, we sure are obsessed with numbers. Just look at what’s happened in our sports culture. We like high scores (because scores are easy to compare to one another), and we like statistics. Football, with high scoring and punctuated violence made perfect for stats is the national pastime, no matter what the baseball purists might say. Baseball skates by on the statistical merits, even if most fans couldn’t compute a WHIP to save their fantasy teams. Even boxing – the simplest mano-a-mano science around – is now monitored with CompuPunch counters and statistics.
At the end of the day, we like to follow the numbers, even if we don’t know what they mean. Look at the swooning over the Dow by television reporters who couldn’t name more than one Dow Jones Industrial stock. (Bonus if you know how many there are.) Look at the obsession for manipulating credit scores, even if they are more arcane than anyone knows. And then cast an eye at marketing.
The big hype today is “Web 2.0,” signifying the transition to a culture of online societies and connections. And hype is what it is. (At least until my paperwork on ‘Web 3.0′ comes back from the Trademark office.) Besides, can we really know for sure when we’ve truly made it to 2.0? Doesn’t that require a historical hindsight? [Read more...]
Colbert
Posted on April 20, 2007 Written by Leave a Comment
“The Colbert Report has become the Digg of cable television.”
From Marketing Roadmaps
Truth in Advertising
Posted on April 19, 2007 Written by Leave a Comment
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...]
My Other Brother
Posted on April 18, 2007 Written by 3 Comments
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...]
Crises
Posted on April 16, 2007 Written by Leave a Comment
“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 1 Comment
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...]
