Making me hate your brand
Making me hate your brand
I got my copy of the Boston Business Journal yesterday, which is a paper I normally enjoy reading, as it’s got decent coverage of the Boston business scene. Yesterday’s issue came with something new:
The paper, looking to maximize advertising revenues I suppose, has now permitted an advertiser to slap an ad over its content. Not with it, not alongside it, but over it, obscuring the usefulness of the content with an unhelpful ad. I figured okay, annoying, I’ll just remove it and throw it away, maybe write a blog post about how interruption advertising smells more desperate lately.
Unfortunately for both the paper and the advertiser, their ad destroyed the medium it was on, tearing off chunks of the paper and rendering its useless. Now instead of an ad being an annoying interruption, it’s actively destroying the reason I bought the paper in the first place.
For advertisers: before you make a media buy, ask about how your brand will be used, and please try to put some common sense thinking into your campaigns. An ad that annoys and irritates only harms your brand and decreases the likelihood that someone will buy your product or service.
For media producers, old and new media alike: Yes, I know times are tough. Yes, I know every dollar counts, and squeezing the most value out of your media efforts is important. I work at a college student marketing company. I know how tough the market is. However, if you’re not actively serving your audience – especially if said audience is paying the bills – you’re going to be out of business, period. Use some common sense when determining ad inventory.
What would I have done differently? At the very least, put the sticker over the logo of the paper instead of over the content. However, if I wanted to be more creative, I would have instead had pre-printed band-aids on the paper, perhaps on the logo or even still enclosed in their sterile paper wrappers, with copy like, our health care plan is so generous, we can give you this for free.
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Twitter: sometimes brevity means all meat
We banter a lot in discussions about social media and the various applications of it. Twitter, for good or ill, has come to dominate a lot of people’s thinking about what social media is, despite it being only a small piece of the puzzle. That said, Twitter does a great job of encouraging brevity with a 140 character restriction per message. Sometimes this creates inscrutability or long streams of drivel broken into bite size chunks, but sometimes…
… just sometimes …
… it distills the essence of what you want. It becomes all meat, no fat, trimmed to perfection. It’s rare, but it happens. Here’s an example of just how good Twitter can be if people distill the essence of what they want out of the service.
This is knowledge distilled. You’ll get so much out of this one post (and corresponding links to more resources) than you’ll get from 99% of the search engine blogs out there or the endless blathering of self-proclaimed “social media gurus”. I picked up and learned things from Danny’s session summary that I didn’t know, and I consider myself reasonably well versed in SEO.
The lesson reinforced: be an expert in something, and use social media to deliver the goods (as opposed to being a “social media expert”). In this case, Twitter forced both questioners and Danny as the expert to go for the all-meat distillation of knowledge, and the end product is concentrated brain food.
This to me is the essence of great Twitter usage and I’d love to see much more of this.
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It's All About The Numbers: Social Media Jungle Presentation
Many thanks to Jeff Glasson and Perkett PR for recording and publishing the video, and to Jeff Pulver for hosting the event.
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4 Steps to a DIY Lightbox
I was messing around with my D90 today and was thinking about lightboxes. If you’re not familiar with a lightbox, it’s a controlled photo environment, like a pint-sized studio, that lets you take close up shots of items for sites like eBay or Craigslist. Most of the systems out there for amateurs rage from $25 – $100 – which for what a lightbox does, seems awfully pricey. I decided to see what I could do at home with a small amount of materials on the cheap.
I started with my phone in normal daylight, no flash. This was shot with a Nikon D90, aperture priority, 65mm f/5.3, no flash, on a tripod.
Not phenomenal, but good enough for a basic auction site. Next, I added two sheets of white paper beneath it.
So far, still not breaking the budget. The white background does help isolate the phone from its surroundings, but it’s still not quite what I want. I got a dirt cheap acrylic photo frame – the kind you can buy in the office supplies section of Walmart for 3 for $1 – all clear plastic, L shaped – and taped a piece of paper to it. I put this behind the phone to filter some of the daylight.
All that screen glare and reflection has now gone away.
With a bit of judicious cropping and a quick auto adjust in iPhoto, my phone looks far better than it really is:
The actual cost of this project? Literally pennies for the paper and call it 50 cents for the acrylic frame as a light filter. Now, is this as good as professional lightbox system? No, not at all. Is it good enough for what most people need to put up an item on an auction site? You bet. Do this and you’re ahead of 99% of the crowd that takes a picture with a handheld and a way-too-close flash. You can add more lighting and photo frames as needed – you’ll probably end up buying the pack of 3 anyway.
Disclosure: any Amazon links in this post go to my employer, the Student Loan Network, and earn a nominal commission.
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Becoming a ninja
Becoming a ninja
My teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, asked us to write a bit about how we got involved in the martial arts and why we’re still here.
Way, way back, as far as 4th or 5th grade in school, I was the short, unathletic kid who ended up getting bullied a fair amount. (the inside of a locker is surprisingly spacious if you’re not claustrophobic) Once I got to high school and found myself in a much larger population including some folks who took bullying rather seriously, I decided in 1989 to try out martial arts and asked my parents to take me to the local YMCA. There I met a teacher of Isshin Ryu karate and spent the next 3 years or so progressing through the grades and material in his school.
Learned some really interesting things from him, too, since he was by occupation a prison guard – things like, if you’re going to beat someone, do it with a garden hose since it doesn’t leave permanent marks for a judge to admit as evidence but still hurts like hell. Stuff like that was what kept me looking for something more in the martial arts than just how to administer a beating to someone else – but whatever it was that was missing from my training, I certainly wasn’t going to get it at the karate school.
All during this time, the ninja boom of the 80s was reaching its peak. I remember hanging out more than a few times in the martial arts section of the local bookstore, looking to see what other interesting things there were out there. One set of books always captivated me – a series of large format ninja books by some guy named Stephen K. Hayes, who was billed as the Western world’s foremost authority on ninjutsu. The ninja warriors seemed like they had it all – superior fighting skills, Jedi-like powers, and the ability to change the world to suit their needs.
Where do I sign up?
Well, it turns out, you really couldn’t sign up. Back then, there were very, very few legitimate ninja schools in existence (and to be truthful, there still are very few that are worth anything) and getting accepted into one of them meant having to rearrange your whole life, so I filed that all away as a wishful teenage boy’s fantasy and kept on training.
My martial arts career, such as it was, took a radical left turn when I went to college. Before going to college, I’d been prepping to take my black belt test in Isshin Ryu, feeling great about the progress I was making in the martial arts, thinking I was all that and a sandwich to boot.
On the first day of the martial arts club meeting, I met a sophomore from Boston named Peter Steeves and learned that he was a junior student at a school called the New England Ninpo Society – one of the very few legitimate ninja schools in the country in Stephen K. Hayes‘ lineage. (today, that’s the Boston Martial Arts Center) I decided to see if this guy Peter was legitimate and at the first workout, unleashed my tournament-winning spinning roundhouse kick.
He politely stepped to the side of it and punched me in the face. After laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling for a while, I asked him what he did. He said, “Well, you kinda missed…” and right then and there I asked him to show me what he’d learned in his training.
We spent the better part of four years working on whatever he was looking at in his training. Peter would head home during breaks and study with his teachers, Mark Davis and Ken Savage, then bring back whatever he’d learned and we’d try it out to the best of our abilities. Starting in my junior year, during holiday breaks like spring breaks, I’d go to Boston and spend the week taking every class I could at the Boston dojo. Nothing says spring break like traveling to one of the least warm, sunny places in America in early March!
As with all things, life changes. I graduated from college and decided I wanted to train more regularly, so I uprooted my life, quit my job, got accepted to graduate school, and moved to Boston, renting an apartment literally about a 3 minute walk away from the Boston dojo. That was 1998, and I’ve been there ever since.
What’s interesting throughout this entire journey is what kept me in the martial arts. To be blunt, I started in the martial arts because I was tired of being on the receiving end of some bullying and wanted to give back better than I got. One of the starkest lessons I’ve ever learned was that first workout in college – no matter how fast, tough, or powerful you think you are, there’s almost certainly someone else who is going to eat your lunch.
These days, being tough, being some super warrior is fairly far down on the list of motivating things to me. There are so very few things in life that are worth fighting for – family, loved ones, the safety and health of friends – and so many ways in which others can harm you without ever laying a finger on you. Ask anyone who’s ever been unemployed or desperate for money just how vicious life can be, and you quickly realize that being a tough fighter by itself isn’t much help there. Ultimately, a successful martial practitioner has to be able to win no matter what the situation is – and 99% of the battles we fight every day don’t involve bare knuckles or swords.
The reason I still train and go to the dojo twice a week is because so much of the ninjutsu training is about mastering yourself and learning powerful strategies for dealing with the threats to your happiness and the happiness of the people you care about. That’s what keeps me coming back – learning more, refining what I know, and learning some more on top of that.
It’s not just martial arts, either – the meditation and mind sciences in our tradition help me to improve myself from the inside out – everything ranging from understanding why I react in certain ways to how to lose my temper less.
Some of the strategies and ideas I’ve learned in my training I now share, both as an apprentice instructor at the Boston Martial Arts Center, but also in my work in new media and social media. For example, the old ninja battlefield strategy of joei no jutsu finds new life in a case study of using new media to locate a missing child successfully.
I’ll wrap up by saying that everything here is subject to change as I get older and more experienced. I may look back on this post in another decade and laugh my ass off at how ludicrous it seems from the perspective of a mid-40s, 30 year practitioner of the ninja martial arts. I look forward to that day, because it will mean that I’ve grown past what I understand to be true now – and I hope we’ll share the laugh over a beer when I do.
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