Lucy the Golden Retriever ate not one, but two, $400 Palm Trio cell phones (back when they cost that much). But her favorite forbidden fruit is reading glasses (dirty underpants don’t count). I drop a pair about twice a week and Lucy scoops ’em up and heads for her spot under the bed. I only pay about $8 for a pair of cheap readers online but we worry about here swallowing glass or a sharp piece of plastic. Yeah, I know… I could wear one of those little cords around my neck that are so popular with librarians. Naw.
Author Archives: Steve Mays
“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences”
The following excerpts are from an interview Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) did with Tom Asacker, a marketing and branding adviser and author (A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Customers in a Noisy World).
One of the larger challenges facing radio?
“It seems that we’ve got a catch-22 on our hands, right? We need to get out on the street and keep selling in order to keep revenue coming in, so nobody wants to slow down in order to change the way they’re doing things, to really rethink it, because that might take away from sales time. I mean we’re putting out fires, and nobody wants to step back and say, “Wait a minute. Is there a better way of doing this?”
“It’s a difficult thing with an industry that’s been around this long, with people that are well entrenched in relationships up and down the chain. It’s tough to get people to change — to just say, “Put on the brakes, and let’s rethink radio.” But I think that that’s what needs to be done: Let’s rethink radio. Just like Steve Jobs said, “Let me rethink the MP3 player.” He didn’t say, “Well, we can do the MP3 player and slap this thing on it”; he said, “Stop, and let’s rethink the MP3 player.”
That’s a tough thing to do. It takes guts.”
Yes, it does. And he offers this rather brilliant (IMO) insight on creating audiences:
“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences. You can only create larger audiences by trying to get deeper with smaller audiences.
Think about how to get deeper and make more relevant, valuable connections with individuals in a culture or a subculture.
Don’t think about audience size. Think about the depth of the relationship and how important it is and how valuable it is. The more you do that, the bigger the audience gets.”
That’s probably true of friends as well. Best way to have a lot is to be a good one. You can listen to the entire interview at Hear 2.0.
Online advertising
“The Tribune Company owns businesses (which) make money by placing ads in between (broadcast) or alongside (print) scarce content. That model, I’m afraid, is dying for two reasons. One, content isn’t scarce anymore. Two, advertisers have other, cheaper ways of reaching the people formerly known as the audience. I’m not sure there’s any form of government help that can protect traditional media from that.”
— Terry Heaton on Tribune bankruptcy
“This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move.”
— Clay Shirky
Fortune: “The genius behind Steve”
Steve Jobs gets a fair share of the credit for the cool products Apple produces. The company is also extremely efficient and well operated and much of the credit for that goes to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. For a look behind the scenes of the well-oiled machine that is Apple, check out this article in the November issue of Fortune. The following excerpt will get you started:
“Tim cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran – he’d worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years – with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.
“This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”
Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.”
You are what you ring
There are just so many ways to be an asshole with a mobile phone. You can be the jerk that lets you know he’s hot shit by barking orders to the folks back at the office. Or the dildo that can’t remember to turn off the ringer in a movie or conference, no matter how many times he’s reminded.
I’m still a mobile newbie but my plan is to excuse myself when I get a call while with others, and step away to quietly take the call or arrange to call them back.
And then there are ring tones. No way around it, your ringtone says something about you. I know this from the disdainful looks I always got when my Tracfone busted out with one of the classic tones.
The new iPhone comes with some nice ringtones but none of them are really me. (Well, maybe the quacking duck) Fortunately, I stumbled across the Zen collection from iRing Pro.
These aren’t ring “tunes.”
These aren‘t some 11-year-olds’ ringtones. You’ll find no annoying songs, or silly sound effects. The Zen Collection consists of smart, attractive, livable alerts engineered to ensure universal appeal, and provide a high tolerance for routine use and repetition.I heard you the first time.
iRingPro iPhone Ringtones are timed with moderately longer pauses between ring repeats. So there is no hurried fumbling, no urgency. You have time to see who’s calling, often before the second ring. You’re in control, not your phone.You are what you ring.
A phone’s ring broadcasts many things about its user. iRingPro iPhone Ringtones ensure that what is perceived when your phone rings is technically advanced, considerate, and envyingly fashionable. Now, more than ever, a professional presence can make the difference.
Also from their website: “You own the best phone money can buy, we believe it should sound like it.” Hell, yeah.
“Commerce Secretary” scene from Dave
Seth Godin on radio’s future
Mark Ramsey has posted audio (and partial transcript) of an interview with marketing maven Seth Godin, on the future of radio. This is an update to an earlier interview. These three nuggets sloshed out of my pan:
“So if you’re an advertiser and you have a choice between reaching a ton of people who couldn’t care less, and so you have to talk really fast, yell, and make obscene promises on the radio to get them to show up at your dealership, or reach a smaller group of people about something that they’re very interested in a very connected way, in the long run advertisers are going to come back to the smaller, more tightly knit group.”
“Everything radio has done has been about leveraging a rare piece of spectrum, and the thing we have to acknowledge is that spectrum isn’t rare anymore. So the one asset you built your whole organization on is going away really fast and instead of putting your head in the sand and complaining about that, take advantage of the momentum so that when it does finally disappear, you have something else.”
“Consider the FCC’s ruling recently about the white space spectrum. What white space spectrum is going to mean is that in five years every car sold is going to have an infinite number of radio stations on it. Not 100 or 1,000 but more radio stations than you could listen to in your lifetime, and if that’s true, tell me again why you’re going to win?”
Real Men of Genius: Cell phone holsters
“10 Survival Tools for the Digital Age”
Professor Kristin Cherry teaches a beginning Radio course at Central Methodist University in Fayette, MO, and was kind enough to invite me come talk about… radio. I didn’t know what to say about “radio” so I made a list (“10 Survival Tools for the Digital Age”) of things I was pretty sure they already knew about. They didn’t. [Just click a slide to see the next one] The photo below was taken just as my presentation peaked.
I don’t have the opportunity to spend a lot of time around young people but I’ve come to believe they are no more web savvy than the population at large. They’re great at texting and know the ends and outs of Facebook… but very few are creating media or exploring.
In my group of about 25 students, only one had uploaded a video to YouTube and that was for a class assignment. Twitter, UStream, flickr? Never heard of them.
I tried to convey the idea that these –and similar tools– will be useful no matter what they do after college. What I forgot (it was a very long time ago) was that they had very little interest in next semester, let alone The Rest of Their Lives.
The instructors (and the administration!) were incredibly gracious hosts and the campus is really pretty. As always, I got much more out of this experience than the students. More on that in a future post. [Wikipedia entry for “film strip”]
My first iPhone
It’s done. After a little agonizing and a little nagging, I bought an iPhone. Lisa, the AT&T rep couldn’t believe I didn’t have a mobile number I wanted to keep. She spoke very slowly as she asked me if I had an iTunes account and explained that Safari would be my browser.
Chuck came in while Lisa was showing me how to turn the iPhone on and off. He’s a serious road warrior who is giving up his beloved Blackberry for the iPhone. We are similarly motivated: our clients –and the world– are increasingly mobile. I need to be there and the iPhone is the state of the art.
Obviously, I’ll chronicle my mobile journey here in coming weeks and months.