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Filed under: community, marketing | Tags: Bowling Alone, Chief Awesome Officer, communities, marketing, Robert Putnam, Seth Godin, tribes, Triiibes
As you can see on the sidebar, I have been reading Seth Godin’s Tribes. I vacillate between promoting books like this—books that do a good job of inciting but are more shallow on hard data—and discouraging their propagation in light of more deeply founded arguments. This moving to action that like books offer is most helpful when trying to organize a group around a core idea. And when we compare Godin to Putnam (as in the Bowling Alone author), the former is going to do a much better job of furthering the ideas in the latter’s book.
That said, Putnam’s book gives a strong foundation for understanding the cultural forces in such phenomena as a tribe, thus giving the reader and insights into steps that move beyond what is discernible in the case studies and metaphors that Godin breaks out. Tribes is the spoon full of sugar, Bowling Alone is the necessary medicine that the true marketers, managers, and strategists ought to have their organizations swallow.
It is worth reading both, but you will have much more success in passing Godin’s book to others (as I have started to do—we’ll see what our CAO thinks about it).
With that, Godin has also produced (with Triiibes) a Tribes casebook in a free ebook format. Included in this book is a case study that I wrote and I have featured here already, so there is a bit of self-promotion with my referencing this publication. If you do download it, please read the very first case study. It is remarkable.
Filed under: online media | Tags: Berlin, Chief Awesome Officer, greek calculator, greek computer, Klingner, Mars, Montauk Monster, Nadym, Nenets, olympics, over the hedge, raccoon, Russia, Seth Godin, solar eclipse, Tang, the photo scrooge, Triiibes, water
Let’s try just a simple stream of consciousness.
Welcome to August 1. On this day some 72 years ago, the Olympic Games opened in Berlin. Speaking of those games, The Photo Scrooge posted this winner of a demonstrator about two months ago:
Look it up if you aren’t already shaking your head.
Of course, this is also the week that it was reported that researchers discovered that the cool ancient Greek calculator also told when the Olympics should be scheduled.
Two more discoveries this week. First, the Montauk Monster, which doesn’t get a picture because it’s gross. Go look if you want to see it. If you haven’t read, some dead, monster-like (as in odd appearance, not in it’s monstrous, meter-long size) animal appeared on a shore in New York, and then it disappeared, and now it may be in a box in a backyard [...] and it may be a raccoon (thanks to Over the Hedge for the picture), not a monster. How unfortunate.
The Monster
The second discovery was water on Mars. This is a big deal. One that that we can all look forward now is on the astronauts trips to Mars, they can bring their Tang and have the water to add to it. The Martians have expressed great happiness with this new discovery (picture from Klingner; you should ask the Chief Awesome Officer about him).
And moving on with celestial occurrences, there was an amazing solar eclipse today. It was said to be most complete near Nadym, Russia. Nadym acts as a modern gas deposits location, but was originally part of the area frequented by the tribal Nenets people.
And on that tribal subject, Seth Godin launched his new Triiibes service. I haven’t learned yet about the triple i, and I am still having some trouble with my profile picture. After and while I overcome these deficiencies, I am going to enjoy checking out this new medium for exchange. Everyone involved seems to be very excited thus far.
Phew—that’s it.
*pictures from cited sources unless noted.
Filed under: marketing | Tags: Boing Boing, Chief Awesome Officer, Compliance Girl, disc golf, Rice, Seth Godin, Steven Sharp, The Curious Savage, Twitter
Against a panoramic backdrop of mountains and cityscape, I was inches away from moving to the championship. It was my first “real” disc golf experience, and I was paired in the semifinals against the Chief Awesome Officer’s omnific and barmy younger brother. Granted, Steven Sharp, the host, sponsor, and golf disc “advanced master” (yes, that Steven Sharp) of the tournament was in our way. Regardless, great heaps of pride were at stake with this pairing. Unfortunately, those inches were unkind to me, as my disc crashed against the basket and on to the conference room’s carpeted floor. The missed throw gave the Bohemian bachelor new life as he moved to defeat me, adding one more boast against his married counterparts.
The disc putting tournament was a free gift from Mr. Sharp to the top floor inhabitants of the Zions building downtown. I have always been intrigued by Steven’s disc golf stories, but now I really have a desire to participate.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may remember my ambiguous reference to The Curious Savage, a play that I had the pleasure to watch as a result of some free tickets from a neighbor in our building. While there, I noticed our neighborly Canadian couple were also enjoying the performance. During intermission, they sought out my wife and me to share with us their exuberance, during which they jocularly remarked that they thought the tickets they had also received were a “marketing trick”, because now they would have to come to another play. That got me thinking:
Hmmm, a marketing trick. Place that in the memory bank; I am always on the lookout for more sneaky tactics.
Actually, I’ve been thinking about how effective the Curious Savage and disc golf free trials were for different reasons. You see, the part about free giveaways doesn’t have the best application to my work, since we primarily sell fixed income securities by way of a free service (Zions Direct Auctions). What is insightful is the simple idea to attract the right people, at the right time, and then give them a reason to listen (maybe with a freebie, maybe with something else). And when they listen: then tell them something noteworthy so that they want to learn more and share it with others (if they are part of the 1% that are the sharing type of people).
Now that you’re listening, here’s the problem. I don’t have anything particularly noteworthy to say. Sorry. But I will give you some reasons to listen until the time is right and I do have something. But, in the meantime, you can view this old rice ad I came across yesterday. The pout is priceless. Compliance Girl ordered the booklet, so we’ll see if we get it.
Disclosure:
You may see that I like Zions Direct Auctions. I also work in marketing on that product, which means I may be a bit biased (but it also means I do something that I believe in).
Filed under: innovation, politics | Tags: Chief Awesome Officer, Doom, Ender's Game, Gary Larson, Halo, innovation, Pinger, Raytheon, Slate.com, Sly Dial, Super Mario World, thagomizer, The Far Side, Universal Control System, video game
When they haven’t annoyed me with some inane, narrow-visioned opinion, I have been known to enjoy reading Slate. Today they brought together Ender’s Game and The Far Side, which is more concerning than enjoyable—but nevertheless intriguing. The article relates:
The guy in the knit shirt leans back in his leather chair, his hand wrapped around the joystick. On the console display, two plane-shaped icons show the available ammo. As the target vehicle crosses his screen, he squeezes the red button. The car vanishes in a fireball.
[...]
But this is no game. This is the real thing. It’s called the Universal Control System. It directs aerial military drones. Raytheon, a high-tech defense contractor, exhibited the system last week at an air show in Britain. It looks and feels like a video game. But it kills real people.
[...]
If you’ve seen combat in the flesh, you know what the fireball on the screen means to the people in the car. But to a teenager raised on Doom and Halo, it looks like just another score. He can’t feel or smell the explosion. He isn’t even there. The eeriest thing in the demo video is the total silence that accompanies the car’s destruction. The only sound that follows is the pilot’s triumphant verdict: “Excellent job.” It’s like something you’d read on the screen after getting a high score at an arcade.
If you can’t see the connection with Ender’s Game, then either you haven’t read it (so I don’t want to ruin it for you), or you have read it and you just don’t get it (then you should read it again or get a friend to condescendingly explain it to you).
The Far Side connection was with a comic I once saw that featured a geeky teenage boy (I guess that would be a normal Far Side kid) that was on the ground playing Super Mario World. During his play, his parents gleefully daydreamed about his lustrous future as a video gamer. I was trying to find an example of the comic strip, when I ran across the following Gary Larson request:
So, in a nutshell (probably an unfortunate choice of words for me), I only ask that this respect be returned, and the way for anyone to do that is to please, please refrain from putting The Far Side out on the Internet. These cartoons are my “children,” of sorts, and like a parent, I’m concerned about where they go at night without telling me. And, seeing them at someone’s web site is like getting the call at 2:00 a.m. that goes, “Uh, Dad, you’re not going to like this much, but guess where I am.
So, instead I will give you a lovely picture of a thagomizer.
To very different worlds colliding in a sobering look into the future of warfare. While it may be quite disturbing to think of wars being fought in a dehumanized, video game environment, it lends to the increasingly prevalent feeling that more and more “the future” is happening right now.
The second thought, not related to the first except that I also read about it this morning, is about Sly Dial. Here is the concept in summary. You want to call someone, but you only want to leave a voicemail. So you call this number in Pennsylvania, 267-SLY DIAL, they have you either pay or listen to an ad, and then you are in the voicemail of the person you called. As the recorded voice explains on the service, “pretty sly, huh.”
What was cool to me was the ad; it wasn’t just some random ad that added no value to the advertiser—it had targeted appeal and a real direct response component, which says to me that there is some staying power to this service. Second, I like the attitude/personality that the brand emotes. In addition to the “pretty sly” comment, when I tried to dial my number as my test run. She (the sassy recorded voice) quickly replied, “don’t you have any friends” and then chided me for dialing my own number. I laughed for a second, which soon ended when I realized that I really don’t have any friends.
Update: Our self-proclaimed Chief Awesome Officer just texted me with a poorly structured statement of dislike for Sly Dial in comparison to Pinger. You probably are wise enough to realize that Pinger and Sly Dial aren’t very similar, but then again, you missed the Ender’s Game comparison. Irrespective of that thought, check Pinger out as well; it looks pretty neat.
