Explain baseball in 150 words
I decided to try Slate’s challenge below because in 5th grade, we had to do an in-class writing assignment where we explained how to play a game. We could pick any game we wanted, and most people explained something simple like Tic Tac Toe. When you were done you could leave early for recess. So guess who picked baseball and wound up with 20 pages, a cramp in his hand and sitting alone in the classroom with my teacher, who desperately wanted to get something to eat herself. “But I haven’t explained the infield fly rule!” I protested, as she told me that I probably had enough already and I should go get something to eat. This challenge by Slate was special to me because I wanted to see how my writing skills had improved in 24 years. Since brevity counts, I thought it best to skip the actual rules, which, you hardly even need to know to enjoy the game. Over the years you can unfold more and more layers of complexity as you learn the strategy and lore that make the game so great. Anyhow, below is my submission. I weighed in at one word shy of 150. Hopefully I stand a chance.
Baseball is a timeless game and the only major sport played without a clock. This, combined with teamwork and mano-a-mano matchups provides for incredible drama that parallels many aspects of American literature and culture. As American’s we’re brought up to believe that anything is possible if you try hard enough, and the same can be said for baseball, where even the third string catcher can get the hit that wins it all. In our culture we believe in second chances and redemption. In baseball we have 162 chances to turn the page and forget what happened. Baseball is about the best man for the job. It winks slyly at cheaters - it’s ok to cheat as long as you don’t get caught. Athletes excel at it, but individuals of poor physique but determination and refined skill can will themselves success. Baseball is our culture, reflected in a game.
Define Baseball in 150 Words: a Slate contest. - By John Dickerson - Slate Magazine
My 6-year-old son is playing baseball. I’m delighted. I didn’t push him into it. Honest. I’m trying hard not to be one of those fathers. I even stood out of sight at his first T-ball practice, so he wouldn’t see me and feel pressure. (It was harder to hide the film crew.) But I’d be cruel not to play with him, right? So I roll him grounders and teach him how to squash the bug.
How long before print becomes unsustainable?
- Image via Wikipedia
I’m making a bold prediction: print as a medium will be over much sooner than we think. As the economy accelerates the inevitable demise of newspapers and magazines through lack of ad dollars, the Kindle reader makes the ROI of buying books online much more appealing and more people get their information diet online, print is already in a death spiral it will be unable to pull out of?
Reader’s Digest looks like it’s on its last legs. Hachette is trying to unload several magazines. Seattle’s major newspaper is now online only with other major newspapers to follow. We all know that the NY Times has tried some desperate measures in the past years to account for its declining employment and classifieds sections, undermined by free scammy Craigslist.
But why do I see the era of print ending sooner than later? The economy of scale. Printing a magazine, newspaper or book is cheap only because there’s a huge industry to support it. Your computer is $1,000 or so retail because 10,000 people bought a computer this week. Your computer would cost millions if it was the only computer ever built. As more publications fail, more industries related to the manufacturing process will have to raise prices to stay open due to their lack of scale.
Think about all that goes into making something that’s printed:
• Paper - you need to cut down trees, mash them into pulp, make them flat, bleached in huge sheets. Paper is dirt cheap because there’s a huge manufacturing supply chain behind it. Every major publication that goes down is one more dent in that supply chain. In the short term, paper prices will fall because of reduced demand, but when all but the major players are gone, they can raise prices for those pubs still in business. You may see a paper monopoly only because that might be the only way to keep that business sustainable.
• Ink - another commodity that requires a supply chain of chemicals and specialized manufacturing to produce
• Printing presses - Is anyone going to go to school to learn how to be a pressman, let alone how to repair presses? The more people leave this business for greener pastures, the more expensive it will be to keep the few remaining presses up and running. Expect major printing press manufacturers to suffer huge losses or go under in the next couple of years.
• Digital pre-press studios - I know first hand through close friends who are in this business. Dying a slow death of a thousand cuts. People want deals, or they are just cutting them out altogether. No one has budgets for models, retouching, etc.
• Graphic Designers - Most designers are either print oriented or interactive oriented. Despite the bad economy, interactive is jumping and it’s difficult to find good people. Print designers? Some of them are designing those nice hand written chalk signs at your local Starbucks. It’s that bad. No one needs print designers anymore. So again, in the short term the price will fall. In the long term, these designers will leave design or learn interactive and it will be more expensive to lure someone into a dying field. No one will go to school for print design anymore making the few good designers left standing all the more valuable.
This spiral will be exponential. Each major publication that goes under will tax the printing ecosystem so that it becomes more costly and less profitable to sustain. As the costs of manufacturing rise, more and more publications will fail, and that whole cycle will perpetuate itself to the point where you might see many times more failures a month in 2-3 years than you do today.
While many are saying print will die off in 10 years or more, I’m saying the timeframe is much closer than we think. Within 3-4 years this death spiral will kill off almost every publication on the planet, and the trees can finally breath a sigh of oxygen into the atmosphere.
Hachette Filipacchi Is Selling Enthusiast Titles - Advertising Age - MediaWorks
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. is looking to sell a group of its enthusiast magazines including Popular Photography, American Photo, Boating, Cycle World, Flying and Sound & Vision.
- American Magazine Conference Canceled (huffingtonpost.com)
- The Death of Printed Media (xfep.com)
- Advertising: Prominent Magazines Lose Weight, Shedding Nearly Half Their Ads (nytimes.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f4bd13f6-7a0e-4a1a-97f8-fc5a79eddb92)
From the longest commute to the shortest
I was told last week that my company was going to enjoy some substantial cost savings by reducing the amount of office space it pays for. Everyone in the company was really happy with the move because, not that we’re struggling, but anything we can do to be leaner and meaner in this economy, the better.
Of course, as I started thinking about giving up the area where I’ve made my home for the past two years, I started to do some mental math and realized “Hmm, there just doesn’t seem to be a spot for me.” Everyone realizes that as the creative director I need a semi-private space at least some of the time so I can think and maybe not be interrupted by someone who thinks something is more urgent than the urgent thing I’m working on. Other people like our CFO who must have privacy for sensitive issues also needed a few of the precious offices with doors.
So last week I started to realize that I might be asked to work from home, a growing trend in the workforce. I met this with mixed emotions, as has my employer when they approached me about the situation today. As cool as working from home is, (it would also save me a cool 5K a year in transportation costs), I did not look forward to being detached from coworkers and perhaps marginalized.
We as a company have had our difficulties with other employees in a similar situation without going into details. So I can see the apprehension from both sides. My proposal was to make sure that appropriate ground rules were laid out in advance. We had a problem where someone worked from home and did not let us know they were sick on a day they could not be reached. I said we should make sure that a “call in sick” policy should exist for telecommuters too.
I also said that either side could cancel the work from home deal at any time. If it’s not working for me, they’ll find me somewhere to sit in the office. If it’s not working from them, I’ll come back. By laying this out in advance it can be viewed more of as an experiment and less as a right or a permanent solution.
I promised I would try to average one day a week in the office and go no more than two weeks without coming in. This way i can still maintain good working relationships with my coworkers, make sure we’re on the same page on critical projects and more importantly, gives me a reason to go and have some fun in the city.
The positives are great. I’m saving over 4 hours a day that I would have been almost useless. I can work more, work on personal projects, garden, learn something new, and otherwise find infinite uses for this time. I will also be saving considerable money on not eating in the city and going out less often.
Moving to Eastern Long Island certainly improved a lot of quality of life issues that I had with living in the city, but having less time gives me not as much of an opportunity to enjoy it. It looks like if all goes well I will be able to further enjoy the best of both worlds.
The Five Best Office Pranks Of All Time | Applicant - The Advice Bank
- IBM Letting Up to 20% of Workforce Telecommute (treehugger.com)
- Arguing in Favor of Telecommuting: 5 Tips to Convince the Boss (lifehack.org)
- Work for a call center from your home office? You’re ‘homeshoring.’ (teletwenties.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b4ec4067-f588-4c9a-8313-8068faf58883)
Let’s Go Viral
A pretty incredible video that will have you wondering “is this even real.” Apparently it is.
Now, I’ve heard a few people go “Let’s create a viral video.” There’s almost no more ridiculous a statement anyone can make. I mean, excuse me while I go create my Cannes Gold Lion winning television commercial. You can’t predict how well your campaign will do, intended viral or not, no matter how greatly talented you are, or how good your ideas work. Successful campaigns fire on all cylindars and creative is just one of the ingredients. You have to reach the right people with it, and those people need to be excited about it and pass it along. That’s how things become viral.
If I were going to “guarantee” that something would go viral I would pick an idea like the above LED sheep one. Here are the key ingredients:
• Leveraging a new technology or some sort of science. Even the Diet Coke/Mentos videos had a degree of geeky “gee, I never knew you could do this.”
• A setup that would be difficult or impossible to replicate - LED sheep tiled as the Mona Lisa, sheep “Pong” - two examples in one video. AKQA’s “Happy Christmas” video with microwaves beeping to play Jingle Bells (below) is another similar “impossible” or at least requiring too much tedious logistics to replicate. The Diet Coke/Mentos video where the spray of fizzing soda is set to music was the most popular version for a reason.
Happy Christmas from AKQA
If you’re a brand, using this formula for a viral is the easiest. Other forms of viral use humor (remember kids, humor is BAD for brands! 0% APR is GOOD for brands!) and humor requires expensive writers with expensive drug habits. Another popular form of viral is something completely absurdist - just so weird that you have to show someone because you probably don’t even understand what’s so appealing. I call these “traffic accident” virals. Try getting a client to successfully pull off one of those. The best they could probably do is pay someone who already created one to slap their logo on it.
Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama
Social Media Expert = The New Life Coach
I posted this concept before but it’s worth its own blog instead of being hidden away in a long rant. Matt McDonald’s post below inspired me to revisit the idea I postulated recently: So-called “Social Media Experts” are the new fangled “Life Coach.”
A history…
In 2002 I joined a little known website called Ryze.com. It was small, but probably the first social network. I made a few friends on there but then I moved to the middle of nowhere in Massachusetts, where I worked for and was promptly fired from the most clueless ad agency ever. Suddenly I was more motivated to network and found Ryze had become much more popular in my absence
Ryze was great when I started. I became friends with scientist Howard Bloom, chatted with Oscar De La Renta, and met some real actual business people. But then, the site started to go downhill. (See next post) Lower level people started joining. By lower level people I mean “business hopefuls.” These people are fine when in limited numbers, but too many of them really take down a site. Nothing like what was once a place to get legit biz leads turning into a “I don’t have a job. Do you have a job?” which is what most business sites are nowadays.
Eventually it got worse. Life coaching started to get huge. Groups started popping up for said life coaches, and “Gurus” started to come on the site to not only teach you how you could better run your life (even though none of these people had any sort of credentials at all), but they started life coaching for life coaches. For a fee, someone would tell you what to do so you would be empowered to teach other people to do.
Life coaching is the perfect sham. Most shams work on a few basic elements:
1) You’re praying on human weakness - “I just can’t stay organized!” “Oh, let me tell you what to do!”
2) Results depend on human nature - the perfect shams are always based on the fact that you would be successful doing what they say to do if you weren’t, well, such a quitter. Life coaching is in the same vein of real estate get rich quick CDs, and exercise machines sold on QVC. They do work, but for the 1% of the people who don’t give up
3) Blame the victim - When it all eventually goes to shit - the Life Coaching isn’t working, you’re not an instant Internet Millionaire, you didn’t lose 100 lbs in two weeks, it’s just cause, well, you’re such a quitter. You didn’t try hard enough. You didn’t listen. You didn’t do exactly what I said. So pay me and we’ll try all over again
4) Little to no barrier to entry. What does it take to be a real estate mogul? No money down! People just, for some reason, want to give you their real estate property. If you call enough people you will find them. Just keep calling! What do you need ot be a life coach? NOTHING! Nothing at all! Just you. Because why? Cause you’re so special. We picked you! Because a) you’re gullable and b) you have money and c) you seem desperate and have a lot of time on your hands.
By the time I decided Ryze sucked, I was assailed constantly by life coaches and their free introductory sessions. Sometimes I would take them up on it just to fluster them by grilling them on just what made them qualified to tell me what to do. But at the end of the day, I’d rather be sold a breast enlargement. If I had one of those I would probably never leave my house.
The primary prey of Life Coaches to become Life Coaches is mommies. Mommies are in a unique situation in that, while being a mom is very labor intensive, if the kids are in school there are occasional gaps in work that mean they can work on some sort of project. Most middle class people with a single income are looking for a little extra cash, so the appeal is there too: hey! I’m home all day, if I could just do something that’s flexible and I don’t need a physics degree for, why not?
So mommies get sucked into it, and then training other Life Coaches to the point where you have lots of people who are not qualified trying to coach you.
“Social Media Expert” has a lot of the same elements and you see these people, many of them stay at home moms, popping up on Twitter all the time.
• Pray on human weakness: “My business needs social media but I just don’t know where it is or how to start.” The idea that “you’re missing out” is a card that’s played often
• Results depend on human nature: Note that most “social media experts” just guide you to do what you’re supposed to. But many people realistically still struggle with email, let alone wrapping their heads around the vagaries of social networking. So again, most people will, upon failure, simply blame themselves. Which just opens up the expert for more…expertise.
• Blame the victim - Your campaign didn’t go viral? I guess you’re just not that cool. Can you try to be cooler and maybe people will start to pay attention to you?
• Zero barrier to entry: All you need is a Twitter account and a dream!!
Social Media Experts are all over Twitter. I would venture to say that there’s a giant Ponzi scheme of Social Media University about to bubble up over this “revolution.” I estimate that about 1/5 of the people who add the @adholes account claim to be a social media expert of some kind.
In a future post I will examine how Social Media Expert = the New SEO Expert because of the similarities in a field where the rules and tactics change daily so you can never have a real measure of success, or at least completely bogus ones like “You now rank 7th for ‘Oranic Tea Tree Oil From Bolivia’” - as if anyone ever searches for that term.
Too Many Chiefs…
Published
by
Matt
on Jan 22, 2009
in social media
. Tags: commentary, experts, social media.So Twitter is catching on more and more (something I have mixed, albeit mostly positive thoughts on, but that’s another post all together), and I’ve been noticing something recently:
I’m not sure I’m the only one who feels this way, but does it seem to you like every. single. person. on twitter is a “social media expert” or “web 2.0 guru” or something to that effect. I swear there should be one of those random title generators for this stuff. According to this.. I’m a… New Web Wizard! or The 2.0 Aficionado!
Eventually everything turns into spam
This article forwarded to me by my coworker supports a lot of what I’ve been saying in my “I’m bored with Social Media” rants these past weeks. It’s talking about the devolution of blogging from what was once an authentic, trusted medium to being untrusted. The new car smell of Twitter is about to wear off too. People are adding me just so I peek at their link. Fine when it was relevant, not cool when it’s spammy stuff. I can get that on Myspace, thank you!
At the end of the day, brands will be authentic or not in whatever medium they choose. Look at what Nike was able to do with some well written television spots in the 90’s before they became a more experiential brand. People love brands for a number of reasons - the ability to have an authentic conversation between them and a person is just one of them.
And reality? There are really very few ad creatives, business leaders and marketers who know how to come from that authentic place. It takes a special mindset and instinct to properly approach the right idea, just like very few creatives could come up with breakthrough traditional creative back in the day. Right now, social media is a blind wasteland where the one eyed person is king. Once it all gets sorted we can start to cut through the clutter and identify the real players.
Conversational Media Marketing: Social media is a tool and a mindset
Social media is a tool and a mindsetA recent post by my good friend *John Jantsch asserts that “social media is a tool, it’s not a religion, there are no real rules and we are experimenting every day.”
While I tend to be zealous about the use of social media for marketing purposes and very evangelistic its promotion, I do agree with John that social media is a toolset. Where I do find myself at variance with his assertion is when he says these are “just” tools.
Just a short post
To lament on what a giant pain upgrading Wordpress was. I’m glad to have a new layout and all but I had a heart attack when the new installation read “Sorry, nothing to see here.” I thought I lost two years of posts. Luckily it was more like two hours of my time. I should pay myself $150/hr for all the high end tech work I just did for myself. Hey, if banks can create money out of thin air, why can’t I?
An interesting take on business travel
My friends at Labov and Beyond visited me the other day and I was pretty stunned to find out they traveled from Indianapolis to NYC via their own jet. I thought they were kidding even. But now that it’s all laid out for me it makes a lot of sense. And, to their point, the auto industry is giving the concept a bad name. They produced some neat house ads explaining it. Check them out
I’m Bored With Social Media Part II
In my last post I lamented the new hangers-on in a medium that’s been around for many year now: social media. It’s been called different things. But if you think about it, it’s basic form has been around for aeons.
Quite simply, it’s called “Making Friends.”
Without a whole convoluted post about defining what friendship exactly is, let’s just say that it’s is something that benefits both parties and involves some degree of giving and taking and sharing of common ideas and experiences.
We’ve understood the concept of friendship since pre-school. I give you a cookie. You let me play with your toy. That boy hit you, I will hit him for you. You like Obama. So do I.
Friendships grow and evolve, get stronger or fade over time. Sometimes good friends disappoint us. And we either forgive them or not. Sometimes former friends can become enemies. This is sad, but part of life.
According to the documentary “The Corporation” - the corporate structure forms an entity, that when examined from a psychological view is in fact a sociopath. Which is why perfectly decent people will smile and go “oh well, it’s for our best interests” when they let go their colleagues - their friends - in a merger, or a business cycle bloodletting.
Of course, “Our best interests” used to include these very friends as part of the “our.” But those are just details.
The point is, (finally, I know!) that after milleniums, sociopathic corporations are waking up from their self-absorbed slumber and (gasp!) learning how to make friends (let alone like, totally ruin our planet for habitation altogether.)
And it’s all because of social media. Or at least, social media is the tool that allows them to make and maintain friendships.
Before social media, there was no good way of connecting with a company. No channel to keep tabs on them, other than their very carefully one-to-many communications via mass market advertising. If you had a problem, you had to talk to a low level drone who just got hired last week because the other guy who was there couldn’t stand answering your incessant questions.
With the invention of confusing touch tone options, and black hole email accounts, the standard corporate practice was to well, blow you off. They figured “if they’re really mad, they’ll hold for 2 hours. Otherwise, it must not be important.” You need to be angry on a stalker-level to even want to try and discuss a problem with a company in the old model.
Because of social media
• Customers have a voice. Five years ago I could say “Hey, I run a really popular blog and you’d better take care of me or else.” But few others could. Now anyone with a Facebook or a Twitter account is dangerous. Because even untrue stories spread like wildfire from friends to friends and more.
• Brands who react quickly to said fires will be the ones seens as using social media the smartest. I had a problem with Zip Car. I wrote a tweet about it. Within an hour, Zip Car apologized and gave me a credit.
• Because consumers have a pent up desire to have a conversation with brands, companies can use social media to “make friends” with people and use their enthusiasm to help them
• For example, Adobe can leverage its users as a knowledge base to solve each other’s problems before their techs even need to get involved. A fast food giant can reach out to fans on a local level and have them spread discounts to their friends and see a return in almost real time. “Friends and Family” discounts spread repeatedly through my inbox.
But, back to the original premise of my multi-part blog. So what. Big Deal. Who cares?
Just like social media = the centuries old tradition of “making friends;” the idea of brands using new-fangled websites to communicate with us is the same thing as, well, answering the phone, having knowledgeable customer service reps, writing people back and not blowing people off.
If you had a friend who blew you off like companies do, you wouldn’t be friends with them anymore. I had one friend like this. She was the new business director of an ad agency who used to frequent my website. We became friends, but it was always very one sided. I went to her functions, she would reply “maybe” to mine and never show. I’d ask for help via email, she’d ignore me. She’d ask for help via email and I wrote give her an answer, but she’d never write back.
One day I got sick of it all. She also had a penchent for being a Martha Stewart type and after seeing status updates about apricot scone scents wafting through the air, I dropped her from my Facebook.
And I know she never noticed.
You know what? Neither do the companies who are still using the same one-to-many form of communications when you quietly stop patronizing them. For every 1 person who gets through to them there’s 1,000 who never said a word.
And in my experience in trying to sell social media apps and services to clients, the vast majority of them are terrified of the fact that the consumer has a voice and there’s nothing they can do about it. That’s why (yawn) social media as we know it today is just not cutting it. Because there are too many poseurs trying to sell too many bad ideas to too many clients who don’t get it.
There needs to be a true evolution of social media before mainstream clients do more than stick their toes in. What’s next? People need a way to really become friends with each other. And companies. And I’ll show you what I mean in Part III of this series.
My Guest Post on Akron B2B Blog
I was asked by my friend Alma Gray to write a guest post for the business conference she runs in Akron. Without knowing too much about the businesse involved I did my best to give some advice for those about to weather a severe storm.