uncategorized & miscellaneous – Page 20

Come On In, The Senility Is Fine

Dancin’ Steve reminded me of the HRC’s Poetry on the Plaza so we sat and listened, during the lunch hour, to four UT dean’s read some of their favorite poems. The Communications Dean introduced this one hilariously saying, I’d like to open with that great French existential poet…Ogden Nash.

Come On In, The Senility Is Fine
by Ogden Nash

People live forever in Jacksonville and St. Petersburg and Tampa,
But you don’t have to live forever to become a grampa.
The entrance requirements for grampahood are comparatively mild,
You only have to live until your child has a child.
From that point on you start looking both ways over your shoulder,
Because sometimes you feel thirty years younger and sometimes thirty years older.
Now you begin to realize who it was that reached the height of imbecility,
It was whoever said that grandparents have all the fun and none of the responsibility.
This is the most enticing spiderwebs of a tarradiddle ever spun,
Because everybody would love to have a baby around who was no responsibility and lots of fun,
But I can think of no one but a mooncalf or a gaby
Who would trust their own child to raise a baby.
So you have to personally superintend your grandchild from diapers to pants and from bottle to spoon,
Because you know that your own child hasn’t sense enough to come in out of a typhoon.
You don’t have to live forever to become a grampa, but if you do want to live forever,
Don’t try to be clever;
If you wish to reach the end of the trail with an uncut throat,
Don’t go around saying Quote I don’t mind being a grampa but I
hate being married to a gramma Unquote.

Media Rules

Maile gave me a great book for digesting and balancing all the innovations in communications technologies called “Media Rules: Mastering Today’s Technology To Connect With And Keep Your Audience,” by Dan Solomon and Brian Reich. She saw Brian speak and told me all about how he was talking about the same stuff she always hears from me. And though I’ve just started the book, I definitely feel as though Brian’s passions and talents are similar to my distractions and ambitions.

I’m working on blogging and social networking at McCombs right now, so I thought I’d pull out a few of the best quotes.

Technology Facilitates the Transfer of Experience
Everyone uses technology in a slightly different way, and understanding how people use technology must dictate how we, as organizations and individuals, operate and manage. How people create, consume, and share information should dictate how you prepare and distribute content, both in terms of format–written, audio, video, three-dimensional, and beyond–and what that technology should be.

Below the quote I wrote in my book: It’s because there are so many media options and habits that goals must be articulated before avenues of connections can be chosen, used.

There Are All Types Of Blogs
Blogging has taken online communication out of the hands of IT experts of the world and placed it in the hands of anyone with and Internet connection. You should not launch a blog, however, simply t make you content more available or to prove that you can. Like any other communication opportunity, you should look at blogging as an opportunity to add something interesting, or relevant, or timely tothe discussion with your audience. And if you can’t, then there are plenty of other ways to add you voice that may be more appropriate.

Everything is Social
You might not think of it this way, but Amazon.com is one of the most influential social networks in the world. They figured out long before anyones else that customers were more likely to buy a book that everyones said was good over a book that everyone said is terrible…And that same comcept has been applied to everything from stocks to shopping to medical choices to the delivery of individual grants to school teachers. All this is driven by social interaction, networking, and the power of people communicating with each other–facilitated by technology and the Web. All of it is reputation driven.

Brand Obama

I just read Fast Company’s cover story this month: The Brand Called Obama. It’s wonderful to hear someone else realize how many things he’s done right, Web-wise. I’m trying to help McCombs figure out social networking right now, and I found myself underlining many passages for possible inclusion in my upcoming presentation to the marketing council.

“Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand,” says Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide. “New, different, and attractive. That’s as good as it gets.” Obama has his greatest strength among the young, roughly 18 to 29 years old, that advertisers covet, the cohort known as millennials — who will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010. They are black, white, yellow, and various shades of brown, but what they share — new media, online social networks, a distaste for top-down sales pitches — connects them more than traditional barriers, such as ethnicity, divide them.

The question is how. Social networking poses challenges for marketers, no matter what — or whom — they’re selling. Traditional top-down messages don’t often work in an ecosystem where the masses are in charge. Marketers must cede a certain degree of control over their brands. And that can be terrifying. (Remember that “I got a crush on … Obama” lip-synched YouTube tribute?)

Yet giving up control online, in the right way, unleashes its own power.

What’s true in politics is no less true in business. “There is a new, authoritative consumer empowered by the Web,” says Karen Scholl, a creative director at the digital-advertising agency Resource Interactive. “And they can smell a fake.” The agency has coined the term “OPEN brand,” an acronym for on-demand, personal, engaging, and networks; it is a framework for companies to think about distributing brand messages in new ways. With Obama, “not only do people feel they know who he is, they feel trusted to share their views,” Scholl says. “And they get constant feedback from the campaign and from each other.”

Being an OPEN brand can be daunting when something as simple as starting a company blog can entail interdepartmental reviews and legal vetting. But, Scholl points out, “you don’t have to cede all control, just some.”