Marketing says unity is possible

Posted by on Jun 22, 2009 in Advertising, Awakening, Marketing | 7 comments

We spend a lot of time focused on differences because we’re programmed to. That’s a crude survival mechanism. As Mitch, Hugh, and CC pointed out on the most recent episode of Media Hacks, the one silver lining in the current Iranian… situation?… is that our prejudices about what Iran and its people are like are rapidly shattering. Once you look past the subjects of the riots, you realize that the streets in Tehran don’t look all that different.

Here’s an even broader look, the marketing in Tehran, courtesy of a bunch of Flickr photos.

Are we so different? Our marketing says we’re remarkably similar. Any American in Tehran could easily figure out, not speaking a word of Persian, exactly what’s going on in most of those ads. I’d bet you 10,000 rials that if I went to any suburban Iranian family’s home, I could tell you exactly what each junk mail ad was advertising without reading a lick of Farsi.

This could be any street in America, Tehran, Jerusalem, or Tokyo:

In the end, we are so much more alike than we are different.

Our marketing departments agree.

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I was on a boat called PAB09

Posted by on Jun 22, 2009 in Conferences, Economy, Marketing, Money, New media, Podcasting, Rant, Video | 23 comments

Podcasters Across Borders 2009 has wrapped up and the team of Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche threw yet another impressive event. This year’s PAB theme was ostensibly bringing outside knowledge into the podcasting world, but the general subject of many of the presentations was on story more than anything – ways to more effectively communicate your story from Six String Nation to a Hollywood career. There were some spectacular new tools and techniques debuted which I look forward to integrating into my shows, the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee, ideas that I think will, if they work well, bring things up a notch. Also picked up some great new photography techniques I’ll be trying out soon.

Along the way, I presented an 18 minute talk on monetization and why it’s vital to new media. Longtime readers of this blog will find many of the themes to be as familiar as old friends.

I also did my usual Sunday morning semi-improv presentation, My Top 20 Social Media Tools. Unlike the other presentation, I’m not publishing this presentation in any context, and here’s why: you had to be there and ready.

The Sunday morning presentation is always a tough one for people to make. It’s at 8 AM, which, after a night of partying, only the hardcore attendees can usually make. Delivering a super-tight, all-meat presentation that many have expressed a desire to see is my way of thanking them for making that extra effort to show up.

It’s also part of a martial arts lesson my teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, is constantly reinforcing with us. Very often in the black belt class, he’ll show a technique only once as a way of helping us train our minds to capture and catch as much information as possible, to be vigilant about paying attention.

Social media in some ways makes us reliant on the crowd, reliant on the tools, reliant on waiting for someone to retweet or blog or podcast an important event. That laziness – and it is mental laziness – softens our ability to capture vitally important things that happen which may never happen again. Think about your own life. Have you ever had the experience of missing a child’s first important event, missing a news story break on the street right in front of you, missing a key piece of information at a conference? I know I’ve missed information, especially in the dojo, because of a lack of focus. I know I’ve missed some terrific photos due to inattentiveness.

Thus, that presentation will never happen again, at least not like that. The slides won’t be posted, the video won’t be uploaded, the information never shown again. If you were there – fully and wholly there, meaning you were paying attention and not twittering, blogging, chatting, etc. – then you got some information I hope you find useful. If you weren’t there, then please make the effort to actually show up at events like Podcasters Across Borders or PodCamp rather than hoping someone will live stream/live tweet/live be there for you. You’ll find that there are many more gems from the weekend which will probably not be published from other presenters and attendees as well.

Also, big shout outs to all of the longtime friends and fabulous conversations from the weekend, from Marko Kulik’s photo advice to intense debates about the future of media with Whitney Hoffman, Tod Maffin, and Julien Smith, to the many other great conversations over the weekend.

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Geeking Out: Twitter from the command line

Posted by on Jun 18, 2009 in Technology, Twitter | 3 comments

I enjoy communicating with Twitter, talking to all of the friends I’ve made over the past few years at conferences, events, etc. I enjoy many of the Twitter clients out there like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Nambu, and others. The one thing I don’t enjoy? Every Twitter client seems to have a large memory footprint. Leave any of them running and you’ll be sacrificing up to a gigabyte of RAM for them to manage your Twitter experience when you follow and are followed by over 10,000 people.

That’s why, despite all the cool new features in all of the clients being rolled out, I really wanted a command line client. Old school black and green terminal command line, minimal memory footprint, zero graphic footprint, no need for Java or Adobe AIR or even a web browser.

Enter TTYtter, a Twitter client written in Perl (using cUrl and a few other libraries) that should run out of the box on any recent Mac. It follows the timeline, sets apart @replies and DMs, lets me pull profile information, and pretty much everything that every other Twitter app supports.

Popular hashtag? I can set up a one-shot search or keep track of it. Replies in the public timeline? No problem.

It’s a thing of beauty to have a super-lightweight Twitter client, especially if I’m on an EVDO or other mobile connection where connection is spotty and data economy is at a premium.

You can try it out for yourself by downloading TTYtter from here. I will warn you that it is not for the technologically faint of heart. If you’ve never run something from the command line, this might be a little outside your comfort zone…

… but then, isn’t that part of the fun of new media?

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How do you reconcile openness and secrecy?

Posted by on Jun 17, 2009 in Economy, Money, Social networks | 11 comments

Here’s another serious topic for discussion: how do you, in social media, reconcile openness and secrecy?

Let me give you an example from World of Warcraft. One of the side parts of the game (a very big side part for me) is the in-game economy. You make gold by creating stuff, by killing stuff, or by trading with other players for their stuff. In the game, there are “secrets” – great spots for earning gold through killing things or great tactics to use in the Auction House (an in-game eBay of sorts).

These secrets are powerful, capable of generating hundreds or thousands of gold a day, compared to the average player who earns perhaps a few dozen gold a day. The catch is this: their value decreases in direct proportion to the number of people who know and use the secrets, because the server’s economy is a zero sum game – if I know the secret and you learn it, at best our earning potential is halved, unless you’re truly incompetent.

There are lots of similar examples in real life – in the world of search engine optimization, Google Juice is more or less a fixed sum game. If I learn a powerful SEO tactic, the more people who know it, the less value it has.

Contrast this with the social media world of sharing everything (from the mundane to the powerful), openness, and transparency. If you share something of value, your social currency increases among those you share it with.

Here’s the questions I have for you: how do you value a secret vs. the social currency earned for sharing the secret? Which is more valuable to you, and in what context?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments. Yesterday’s discussion was especially good to read, so I look forward to hearing less from me and more from you.

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How exactly is this making a difference?

Posted by on Jun 16, 2009 in New media, Politics, Social networks, Twitter | 37 comments

I have a serious question for everyone who’s not in the country of Iran but is participating in the various Iran memes floating around the social media world, such as changing your location or making your avatar green. I want to hear your thoughts and debate on this.

How does something like changing your avatar or other forms of “showing your support” make any tangible difference to the citizens of Iran?

Bonus: if you’re Iranian, I’d like to hear what tangible impact the memes and movements online have had on you and your fellow citizens.

Please leave your comments, thoughts, and opinions below. Keep it civil.

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