Wow…absolutely hysterical…
Via Suzeanne Yada on Twitter…her description is better than any I could come up with:
A 1940s short film on journalism. Watch as men in fedoras call editors with visors and completely shaft women!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvBgaxUXrc[/youtube]
The New York Times Sells Its First Front Page Display Ad (NYT).
As the British marched out of Yorktown after the surrender of the troops under Lord Cornwallis, the British band played “World Turned Upside Down.” This seems like one of those moments to me…display ads on the front page of The New York Times. Just a few scant years ago the mere suggestion would have had you escorted from their newsroom by security, never to return.
Oh how the mighty have fallen…
Over the past couple weeks we’re seeing a lot of folks coming around to the view I express last year:
The thing that calls it all into question for me is the number of people who are generally ex-online marketing folks now using strange titles like “Social Media User Guru” or something equally ludicrous. It reminds me of a networking group I once attended that turned out to be a room full of sales people, each hoping to sell something, and none realizing there weren’t any real customers there.
As the astute Esteban Glas points out here, both Robert Scoble and Joel Mark Whitt decry that which Witt calls “Social Media Incest”. As I have said many times before: when the when the communication in the medium is mostly about the medium, the medium has failed.
Following Ari Herzog’s example, here are my top 10 posts of 2008.
It’s a hard choice to make, but the votes are all in and I’ve got the envelope from our friends at Price Waterhouse containing the winners:
Its mildly surprising to me that my best posts from 2007 tended to center on small business marketing, online marketing and content management. Of course, I was working with small businesses then, so that I guess makes sense.
Did I miss any important post? Quite probably, but this is a fairly solid list. Tell me, which is the best of 2008?
You’d think it wouldn’t be hard this year to come up with a list of the ten worst autos, but indeed, with so many trying so hard, the folks at TheTruthAboutCars.com have had a real struggle. Yet they once again came through with a list that’s becoming a Christmas tradition for me…
The votes are cast. The polls are closed. And there’s no question which vehicles our Best and Brightest consider the TTAC’s Ten Worst Vehicles 2008. The good news: there are only two new “winners” this year. The bad news: there are only two new “winners” this year. In fact, eight of last year’s Ten Worst are still in production. Even more depressing: half of this year’s winners have “won” TTAC’s Ten Worst three years running. How long can these turkeys hang on? Pass the cranberry sauce and read on.
Enjoy the list in all it’s snarky goodness…
(Disclosure: TTAC is one the NameMedia Inc. premium sites, and I work with them. That does not make the list any less funny…)
Paul Gillin posted on a topic that 
I’ve been mulling over for the past few days: Branded Communities. I’ve said it in the past and I will say it again here and now: why would you buy a build a branded community when you can rent one instead?
From Gillin’s post:
Pssst… is intended to bring fans of General Mills products closer to the company by inviting them into a members-only space where they can receive inside information, get coupons and samples and share their opinions about the company’s products. This is all the stuff that I preach organizations should do with branded communities. The site is produced in collaboration withGlobalPark, a company that manages online panels.
Pssst… is good in concept but bad in execution.
David Churbuck posted on the issue and asked one very pointed question:
Begs the question of who does a decent job with a branded community — aside from the usual product support forums, etc. — I can see some reasons for stumbling, but begs the question: who joins a community about bad yogurt?
The classic example would be Nike+ – where they’ve built a fairly successful brand community. However, I think a yogurt community might be a tough sell.
That said, building a branded community is a daunting task. Potential issues:
At NameMedia, I work with Niche Community Sites, and we’ve been coming up with interesting ways to put companies and their brands in touch with the customers they want to reach, and we’ve got some compelling stories about new and innovative ways in which we’re doing this. A couple brief examples:
It took Nike over 2 years to build their community. We were able to get the Brother campaign up and running over night on Craftster.org.
Okay, this isn’t meant to end up sounding like an ad. My point is that you can get real results fast working with Niche Communities and Niche Social Media. While I’d love to tell you that NameMedia has the market cornered on creative sponsorship, there are a lot of other creative folks out there.
Or course, we’ve got 20 million visits a month, over 30,000 conversations a day across our sites, in niches like outdoors, photography, technology, gardening, crafting, and astrology. Our list of sites.
If you’d like to hear more about the creative campaigns we’re doing, get in touch with me or leave a comment here. I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg and there are probably better folks than me to tell the story.
Newspaper insiders for the most part weren’t all that surprised to see the Tribune Company file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday. The Trib has been in trouble for some time, and it hasn’t been helped by high profile fights of the past two years by owner Sam Zell, who purchased the company in April of 2007, which saw him take the company private. Since then his fights with the leadership of the Los Angeles Times have achieved near legendary status.
The problem is that bankruptcy isn’t a complete answer for the Tribune Company. Perhaps they’d do best to do as Sam Zell suggested just a short time ago when the mortgage crisis was at the top of the news:
“…this country needs a cleansing. We need to clean out all those people who never should have been in houses in the first place.”
Perhaps indeed the newspaper industry also needs a cleansing, and all those who should never have owned newspapers should be cleaned out. For example, Sam Zell. (more…)
The idea: to run a live Tweet stream from the varied events of the Sutton, Ma Chain of Lights, a celebration that happens at many different locations thoughout the town and its villages. I used my Iphone with the Twitterlator Application that lets me post pictures direct to Twitter with pictures that I take on my phone uploaded right at that moment. The tweets all contain the hashtag #suttoncol – short for Sutton Chain of Lights which make them searchable via the Twitter search function, formerly known as Summize. You can check out the full tweet stream here.
Additionally we (my 9 year old daughter Mackenzie helped me with this) took photos at the events we attended with my Canon Power Shot A530 5 megapixel point and shoot camera.
Why Would You Bother: Sutton, like many small communities, doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the local paper, The Worcester Telegram, and substantially less from the television stations. Even if they did send someone out to cover the events, they’d have gone to a single location, took a quick couple pictures, or did a quick standup talking to some happy kids, then they’d have been off to their next assignment. Local events are naturals for crowd sourcing, and what better way to do it than live tweeting with a hashtag, posting a photo gallery, etc.
When I sat down last week to add pictures to the National Gallery and Gift Shop site to help publicize the event, I was surprised to find there were no pictures online anywhere from the Chain of Lights last year, save a few marketing shots by The Vaillancourt Folk Art Museum. (more…)
Layoffs at Random House, Simon & Schuster
Random House, etc. layoff…Yahoo is attributing it to the economy, but I wonder how much is do to people not reading in paper as much.
The economy has crashed down on an industry once believed immune from the worst — book publishing — with consolidation at Random House Inc., and layoffs at Simon & Schusterand Thomas Nelson Publishers.
At Random House, the country’s largest general trade publisher, the man who helped give the world “The Da Vinci Code” is in talks for a new position, while the publisher of Danielle Steel and other brand-name authors is leaving altogether.
“Yes, Virginia, book publishing is NOT recession proof,” said Patricia Schroeder, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers. “It’s sad day.”
David Churbuck has found that which we are losing in this digital age. It reminds me of the discussion I had with my 9 year old yesterday when she asked me if I’d read every book in my library.
I like the Kindle. Indeed I love it. But I can’t indulge my penchant for giving away books thanks to this selfish device. I can tell people to read “Moneyball” but I can’t back that up by emphasizing my desire to share that experience by giving them my copy. The Kindle, ultimately, is a selfish device that cannot be loaned. Last week, while driving my son home from college, I sang the praises of “Shadow Country,” this year’s National Book Award in fiction. But I can’t lend it to him and indeed, tragically, I don’t have a physical copy to park on my favorite shelf next to the previous three books in the Watson series.
Indeed I suspect in some ways we may end up as a “Lost Generation” having committed so much to digital formats that most likely will be arcane and unreadable 50 or a 100 years in the future. And in the here and now, the ‘community of the book’ is dying.
For now, I continue to buy my books in print. The problem is in this new economy, I have precious little time to read.
Read David’s full post…really