Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:
Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
“First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)
If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.
I’ve been reading Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book (Get Back In theBox: Innovation from the Inside Out) and was delighted to come across an interview with Rushkoff at Radio Marketing Nexus. Mark Ramsey talked with Rushkoff about “how to make radio relevant again.” Ruskoff misses the same things about radio that I do. AUDIO
“Because of my book tours I’ve been in a lot of radio stations, and even from 1995 to 2005 the amount of change I’ve seen has been shocking. There used to be this kind of quality to an FM radio station – I hate to be stereotypical, but there was a certain kind of chick who would be the receptionist at an FM radio station. There was a certain kind of guy that worked in the album room organizing the albums. There was a certain kind of geek figuring out the emphasis rack.
But FM stations are not really like that anymore. They feel much more like almost any other office, and if you didn’t see the control room you wouldn’t know you were in a radio station at all. They don’t ooze their culture anymore.
There was a smell and a quality and a texture to everything radio that I think was the fun of the industry. There was something so real about it. In the early days when I was a kid, you had Ron Lundy and Cousin Brucie – you just somehow knew those guys were there even though they were playing top 40 stuff. You knew it was a world of guys with records and personalities. And there’s so little of that on the radio today.
There’s almost nothing in mainstream radio that has that sense of this as a club of people in a cool place having a great time sharing some of their ecstasy with those of us driving to work or sitting in our bedrooms who wanted to have a taste of what it’s like to be an adult who understands music, who reads “Rolling Stone,” who understands why we’re fighting the Gulf War, or whatever it is. And I want to piece of that.
When I turn on the radio now I don’t feel that these folks have a piece of anything that I can’t get a piece of by going into Allstate to work in the morning. It’s just another working stiff with some computer telling them what to play and when to play it and when to read the ads.
I don’t trust the voice behind the music anymore because I don’t know that he’s really an expert or that he really cares. He’s not part of a living, breathing, fertile culture whereas if I go online and look at these Podcasts I know these people have done it not for the money but for the love of it. And radio is going to have to go a long way now to convince me that there’s somebody there who cares about what they’re doing for some reason other than the cash.
Finally, I would say the purpose of radio is to keep people company. And in order to keep people company there’s got to be a human being on the other side of it. The more truly human your radio station is the better it is at keeping people company. And the more computerized and business-like it is the farther outside the box you’ll find yourself.”
So there you have it. The pure, distilled essence of what’s wrong with radio today. And it seems like it would be very easy to fix. To get back in the box. But I fear we don’t even remember where we put the box.
Between XM, Tivo, HBO, the nano, and the web…I don’t see or hear that many 30-second commercials anymore. So I don’t know why it should be difficult for me to imagine Life After the 30-Second Spot, the title and premise of Joseph Jaffe’s latest book. But it is. Maybe it’s because our company sells a LOT of 30-second spots.
The forward, written by Don E. Schultz, Professor Emeritus-in-Service at Northwestern University, sets the tone of the book:
Media advertising, as we have known, practiced, and worshipped it for the past 60 or so years, is in trouble. Big trouble. And it’s not going to get well. Ever.
I’m about half-way through the book and highlighting something on every other page. Jaffe might be full of shit, but just in case he’s only half-full, anyone remotely connected to advertising supported media should read this book.
From the folks at Despair, Inc., a business book that’s “So Dangerous We Had to Put a Lock on It.”
“Ironically, managers attempting to motivate employees by increasing their self-esteem only compound the very problem they seek to solve. Reinforcing employee delusions of grandeur only increases their irrational sense of entitlement to the wealth, stature and privilege that justice dictates be reserved for the truly accomplished and inarguably worthy: namely, Executives.”
These are the same funny kids that produce the motivational calendars and posters.
Quality: The Race for Quality Has No Finish Line – so Technically it’s More Like a Death March.
On page 253 of John D. MacDonald’s Nightmare in Pink, Travis McGee shares his measurements: Jacket: 44 extra-long; Pants: 35 waist, 35 inseam; Shoes: 13C; Shirt: 17-35. I always pictured him as a larger man.
