The worst one was a lollipop dispenser, that was ridiculous, I saw that thing and ran. That was bad, the head of marketing actually called me to apologize for that one.
Source: This Interview With the Guy Who Played Jar Jar Binks Is Tragic as Hell
Blog
Amazon Kills Shelfari
Live by the Amazon sword, die by the Amazon sword…
The worst thing about the whole “merger” is that Amazon is giving Shelfari members just two months to move all their data over to Goodreads. I actively participate in two Shelfari groups that have been operating since 2008/2009 and have thousands of discussion threads, challenges, and games. The move will likely kill one of those groups completely and severely impact the other. So two months just doesn’t cut it – it is rude and sends a message that Amazon doesn’t truly care about some of its best customers.
Source: Amazon Kills Shelfari
Meanwhile, I’m updating my LibraryThing profile (which is 40% owned by Abebooks, which is owned by … Amazon), where I’ve been since 2005.
I was close on the future of marketing, but I didn’t realize silo’d messaging was going to be the magic bean instead of open source.
From 2008:
The future of marketing is not based on latency or delayed access to timely information. RSS is wonderful and has changed my world, but its asynchronous delivery only makes me want to plant the latency bean in some fertile garden so that I can climb the vine to the ultimate marketing prize… real time tracking and delivery of information that I opt-in to.
Source: XMPP as the Marketer’s Golden Egg; Latency as Magic Beans – Sam Harrelson
Ad Tech Industry’s Impending Crash
“But when networks engage in excessive arbitrage by packaging and reselling inventory multiple times, visibility into the quality of their inventory diminishes, creating an opening for bad actors to inject invalid impressions into the ecosystem. If this sounds eerily like the relationship between collateralized residential mortgages and the 2008-2009 financial crisis, that’s because it is.”
Source: Malvertising: Three Things You Need To Know – Forbes
Throughout his career, Bowie pushed the boundaries of music from all angles: His public persona constantly evolved as he shifted genres like a time traveler’s temporal jumps. He also wasn’t afraid to grasp at the future of business: He launched an ISP called BowieNet in 1998, saying at the time, “If I was 19 again, I’d bypass music and go right to the internet.”
Source: David Bowie predicted the Apple Music future in 2003 | Cult of Mac
short blog posts
Important as the web continues to develop… don’t put all of your content into a silo. If you arrived here via Facebook, you might see why.
2. You’re probably posting your short items to Twitter and Facebook. That’s wrong. Please, before you give your ideas to a silo, give them to the open web. Of course there’s nothing wrong if you post to your blog and then re-post on Twitter and Facebook so more people see it.
Source: Re short blog posts
The Human Hope, the Cloud, and why 70% of internet traffic flows through Northern Virginia
Short but fascinating-to-ponder pilgrim’s progress piece…
And maybe my desire to submerge myself in that sediment, to weave The Cloud into the timelines of railroad robber-barons and military R&D, emerges from the same anxiety that makes me go try to find these buildings in the first place: that maybe we have mistaken The Cloud’s fiction of infinite storage capacity for history itself. It is a misunderstanding that hinges on a weird, sad, very human hope that history might actually end, or at least reach some kind of perfect equipoise in which nothing terrible could ever happen again. As though if we could only collate and collect and process and store enough data points, the world’s infinite vaporware of real-time data dashboards would align into some kind of ultimate sand mandala of total world knowledge, a proprietary data nirvana without terror or heartbreak or bankruptcy or death, heretofore only gestured towards in terrifying wall-to-wall Accenture and IBM advertisements at airports.
Source: Up to 70 Percent of Global Internet Traffic Goes Through Northern Virginia – Nextgov.com
Episode 23: Thinking Religion 62: No one gets crucified for being too nice – Thinking.FM
Thomas and Sam discuss the demise of Evernote but their renewed use, why app stores are the new platform, their love of This Is Ground products, and how Christians should and could deal with violence.
Show Notes:
- Lame-O | Urban Dictionary
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The New York Public Library Uploads 200,000 Images for Public Use
What the web was made for… much more beneficial to humanity than social media silos or native content ads:
The New York Public Library just uploaded nearly 200,000 images you can use for free | The Verge: “The New York Public Library just released a treasure trove of digitized public domain images, featuring epic poetry from the 11th century to photographs of used car lots in Columbus, Ohio from the 1930s. Over 180,000 manuscripts, maps, photographs, sheet music, lithographs, postcards, and other images were released online Wednesday in incredibly high resolution, and are available to download using the library’s user-friendly visualization tool. It’s a nostalgist’s dream come true.”
Episode 22: Thinking Out Loud 95: We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby – Thinking.FM
Elisabeth and Merianna talk about their New Year’s Resolutions including reading, writing and personal challenges. They also talk about how far they have come since they first started podcasting and some exciting plans for 2016!
Show Notes:
- 10 Best Workout Apps | Tom’s Guide
- RunKeeper
- Nike Plus
- G Map-Pedometer
- Map My Run
- Chuck Wendig
- Query Shark
What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?
The post Thinking Out Loud 95: We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Episode 21: Thinking Religion 61: “We took the toys out of the box and now we get to play with them a little bit.” – Thinking.FM
Thomas and Sam discuss the past year of Thinking Religion, add some new commentary, and talk about what’s next in 2016 for the podcast.
Show Notes:
You should subscribe to the show rather than listening here in the browser!
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2015 and the Return to Long Form
It annoys me beyond belief when people tell me our podcasts “should be 20 or so minutes” on Thinking.FM…
All-day podcasts and brick-sized books. Or, why 2015 was the year the long form fought back | Books | The Guardian: “There is something almost inexpressibly appealing about this, in an era when almost all other content – articles, podcasts, videos, TV shows – arrives doing jazz hands, anxiously soliciting the reader’s or listener’s or viewer’s attention by means of outrageous headlines or self-conscious gimmicks, in a determined effort to make things seem more interesting than, on inspection, they turn out to be.”
We (I think unfortunately) gave in to the loud minority on Thinking Religion, but I still very much personally enjoy the flexibility and personality of long form podcasts. And books. And blog posts. And thoughts.
Despite our newfound digital souls, we’re rekindling the notion that not everything can or should be “bite sized” to satiate our digital materialism.
14 Degrees of Visibility
Brinton charts 14 degrees of visibility all the way from black type on a yellow background (the most legible) to blue type on red (the most offensive). This research is certainly nothing new today, but gets you thinking about how the theories have been exercised. Take, for example, the classic hazard symbols, or street signs—they each use the most visible color combinations per Brinton’s chart.
via This 1939 Chart Explains How Color Affects Legibility | Fast Company
Parents Want to Know: Why Doesn’t iPad Have Multi-User Accounts Yet?
It absolutely baffles me that there is no “Parent Mode” on iPads for adding multiple logins. Amazon does it insanely well with its FreeTime offering (my kids love it) on both Kindle DX tablets as well as “regular” Kindles. Android does it well and allows for parents to easily set up multi-user accounts on one device. Even Chromebooks do it well with managed user accounts (which is what we use for the kids’ laptops in our house).
I’m guessing the “buy an iPad for your kid if you don’t want them messing with your enterprise business files!” mentality of Apple has served them well.
Once Apple does enable multi-user or managed user accounts, people will laud Apple with a technological breakthrough despite the intentional foot dragging to cause more iPad sales.
iOS 9 iPad multi-user feature coming alongside split-screen apps | BGR: “However, the feature won’t launch with iOS 9.0 this fall, but sometime after that. Apparently, multi-user support is still in development, and might not be unveiled at WWDC next week.”
Nope, not yet.
Episode 20: Thinking Out Loud 94: There Are Sharks in This Water – Thinking.FM
Elisabeth and Merianna talk about when your writing is ready to reveal to someone else. They talk about the danger of releasing it too soon when you haven’t had enough time to mold it and shape it. They also discuss that if you put your writing out there too soon, then it’s going to impact the writing itself.
Show Notes:
- Cirque Du Soleil
- Star Wars Force Awakens
- Jaws
- Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- 3 Pillars of Reading
What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?
The post Thinking Out Loud 94: There Are Sharks in This Water appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Episode 19: Thinking Religion 60: The When, Where, and Why of the Nativity – Thinking.FM
This week, Thomas Whitley and Sam Harrelson examine the
Show Notes:
Thinking Religion is 22 minutes long.
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Homer Simpson Saves His Business with YouTube Ads
“YouTube isn’t just a place for brands with primetime budgets, it has become a powerful tool for small and medium businesses too. If it works for Homer Simpson, it can work for you. YouTube video ads help your small business succeed on the web, just like Mr. Plow.”
Well played, Google.
But they are right… I’ve been seeing great results with client YouTube ads (it takes a little more know-how and technique than typing with 8 total fingers, but the results are out there).
Lower Salary Potential
I’ll take my Religion major any day…
USC considers charging different tuition for some majors | The State: “‘Look at what it costs to deliver an engineering degree than it does to deliver a philosophy degree,’ USC President Harris Pastides told trustees Tuesday. ‘Yet these two students pay the same amount of tuition.’
After the board meeting, Pastides said he could see lowering the price tag on humanities majors, such as history, which have lowers salary potential.”
Our university system is a broken diploma / tuition factory that is breaking the backs of our young people who think they have to have a degree in order to have a “good job.”
Our democracy will suffer.
Customer Service via Facebook Messenger
Interesting to see the first company utilize Facebook Messenger for customer service, but it’s not the first instance of companies using messaging platforms such as WeChat to do so…
Rogers offering customer service via Facebook Messenger | Marketing Magazine: “Rogers claimed to be the first telecom company in the world to offer customer care via Messenger. Representatives from the two companies first met earlier this year, said Deepak Khandelwal, chief customer officer with Rogers.”
As I keep saying, messengers (Messenger, WeChat, iMessage, Hangouts, Line, Snapchat etc) are the future of social interaction on the web, so this is a big first step in North America (already happening in Asia just as texting, emoji etc developed there first).
Twitter needs to get its Direct Messaging app and product out there. Quickly.
Authenticity, Social Media, and Presidential Candidates’ Digital Strategy
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I think we have two different definitions of “authenticity,” especially as it relates to marketing…
Marketing Strategy – Ranking GOP Presidential Candidates According to Digital Strategy : MarketingProfs Article: “Donald Trump takeaways: Use social media to be controversial and troll the media—it’s the most cost-effective way to get mainstream media mentions. Obviously, you want to protect your brand with integrity—a line that Trump has crossed a few times—but don’t be afraid to side with unpopular beliefs or call out someone. People are starving for more authenticity.”
From marketing or digital strategy standpoints, there are certainly anecdotal insights businesses and groups can glean from the current crop of GOP candidates for the 2016 election.
This conclusion about Trump’s campaign raises a much needed question about the nature of social media marketing as it relates to authenticity, however. It’s a question I frequently get from clients, especially in the beginning stages of a campaign.
My take is that “authenticity” as a social media tactic involves more than just one way trolling towards something like the media. It means more than being controversial, glib, or quick-to-the-point (especially as a business). Instead, the authenticity that the author says people are starving for has more to do with communicating an experience that is possible.
That is most frequently accomplished by incorporating visual imagery with precise text. So, if you’re looking for authenticity to drive part of your marketing campaign, look to Instagram.
A few examples of product-oriented companies that do a good job of using authenticity on Instagram as part of their marketing are ThisIsGround and Bexar Goods. You can see the types of “lifestyle products” I enjoy viewing and interacting with on Instagram… but I’ve made quite a few purchases from both companies as a result of their marketing there. Or take Newspring Church here in South Carolina… they do a great job with their design, sites, social media campaigns, and Instagram by telling their story and giving glimpses of what it’s like to participate there.
If you’ve been in the public eye for thirty years, have billions in the bank, and once appeared on a network reality show… troll the media in search of authenticity.
If you’re looking to build a successful business or expand your organization or group, then think long and hard about the concept and how you might be able to use social media to showcase glimpses of the experiences that you offer.