For whatever reason, the art of writing seems more fully expressed when published via a typewriter or your own hand. Words seem especially poignant. Like when Mick Jagger tells Andy Warhol, “He will probably look nervous and say ‘Hurry up’ but take little notice.”
Ever since Carol Bartz became CEO of Yahoo, I’ve been watching her closely. I love that she’s a woman leading a tech company, I love that she’s outspoken, and despite all her detractors, I think she’s going to do amazing things for Yahoo. Every interview she does is awesome, and I particularly liked these quotes from a recent piece in the New York Times:
When people come to me and say, “I can’t work for so-and-so anymore,” I say, “Well, what have you learned from so-and-so?” People want to take a bad situation and say, “Oh, it’s bad.” No, no. You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something.
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I grew up in the Midwest. My mom died when I was 8, so my grandmother raised my brother and me. She had a great sense of humor, and she never really let things get to her. My favorite story is when we were on a farm in Wisconsin; I would have probably been 13. There was a snake up in the rafter of the machine shed. And we ran and said, “Grandma, there’s a snake.” And she came out and she knocked it down with a shovel, chopped its head off and said, “You could have done that.” And, you know, that’s the tone she set. Just get it done. Just do it. Pick yourself up. Move on. Laugh.
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Via the New York Times.
This print is by far one of my favorites right now and in fact, I bought it and it now hangs above my laptop at home. Artist Valero Doval is based in London and has a devastatingly interesting portfolio. I’m loving some of his newer work too – see Drawers, IncorporealEnergy and HiddenCompositions – and would buy them in an instant if only they were on sale.
Japanese Poster 1 via inPRNT, $40.
Normally I don’t go for things that are ridden with deeper, darker associations, but set designer Gary Card’s Burning T was just too powerful to pass up. Created for New York Time’s Tmagazine, Card describes his work as “a burning effigy in a dramatic countryside setting” which “sounded like too much fun not to do.” Other inspirations came from The Wicker Man, a 1973 English cult horror film that features pagan ritual and is a film I will probably never, ever see.
“We lit it with a blowtorch,” Card continues, “and then ran for our lives.”
The result is one of the best sculptural pieces I’ve seen.
Via The Moment.
In some more research related to my post on feeling pressure to marry early, Pew Demographics reveals some fascinating statistics in their infographic on marriage and divorce. For starters, the numbers back up my assertion that Midwest women marry earlier; a Wisconsin’s woman median age of first marriage at 26 is a full two years earlier than a New York’s woman median age of first marriage at 28.
And in another intriguing twist, it seems that the rate of divorce seems to increase in States where couples marry sooner and is lower in States where couples hold off a couple years, with some interesting exceptions.
Pew Infographic via GOOD.
Just imagine these wool shorts with tights for winter. The designer “eschews the flashy and fleeting in favor of re-worked timeless basics, and old-fashioned tailoring.”
Steven Alan Pip Wool Short via Frances May, $178.
This was a bestseller in France originally and is now a bestseller here as well. It’s not the type of book that you sit on the edge of your seat with, but rather that you pick up and savor slowly.
Renee is a cultured concierge who mulls over great philosophers and acts like she doesn’t, while Paloma is a bourgeois teenager who has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. The two characters are living in the same building, but never interact until mid-way through the book when an event pulls them together. And when that happens, of course, you do start to sit on the edge of your seat, ever so slightly.
Just because something’s cheap, does that mean you should buy it? If it’s free, should you use it? The recession means a proliferation of cheap and free, but that often means sacrifice. The social network Facebook is free, but at the sacrifice of quality customer service (not that I don’t love Facebook).
My belief is that everything and everyone is connected, so cheapest is not good enough. It’s why I don’t shop at WalMart, I try to buy organic food, I pay more for a hybrid, and make other conscious buying decisions. If it’s cheap at the same time, that’s all the better. But it’s almost impossible to take the full lifecyle of a product or service into consideration every time you shop.
So tell me, is cheap good enough? How about free? Does it matter if you’re foregoing quality or sacrificing the well-being of another or the environment? Where do you draw the line? And how do your values line up with what your actual purchase decisions?
I like when the light in a photograph helps your other senses experience the scene. Like the light here makes me think of an evening towards the end of summer, with a light breeze, and the smell in the air that only comes about when the seasons are on the cusp.
And the woman in the yellow dress is just fun.
By Joseph Holmes via 20×200, $20.
Trust is easily bamboozled.
Like in social media, all you have to do is start a blog and write a lot of content– it doesn’t even have to be original or even good. Next, find partners and create alliances where you tweet, digg and stumble each other’s content. Abuse whuffie to make crowd-sourcing work for you. Mass follow everyone on Twitter, import them into FriendFeed to inflate your subscriber numbers, and then unfollow everyone but twenty on your list. Spam people. Promote under the guise of community. Push. Pull. Publish.
Give your efforts a few months in the oven, and then… voila! You’re an influencer.
Congrats! And don’t worry. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually putting out interesting, new or relevant ideas into the world. Pure hustle, as Gary Vaynerchuk so aptly explains, will do the trick.
These are the mostly unspoken rules of social media. And in a medium that is supposed to be revolutionary, it’s disappointing that not much has changed from the status quo, despite claims that PR and traditional marketing is dead.
“The old way was to create safe, ordinary products and combine them with mass marketing,” Alex Bogusky and John Winsor explain in the little spark of a book, Baked In. We’re repeating the same inefficiencies in social media, however, where the focus on accumulating mass numbers is doing a great disservice to the possibilities.
Indeed, in my own outreach efforts with Alice, I’ve found that individuals with smaller numbers – whether it be traffic or subscribers – often have just as much influence, if not more than those with large badges on display. Bogusky and Winsor agree, reporting on a study that found “news travels as readily through ordinary people as influential ones. Interpersonal networks are democratic.”
We’ve supposedly learned from the likes of traditional advertising that worshiped a spray and pray approach, and yet we still pay credence to only the large influencers. Such an approach could be even more flawed than mass marketing, because social media numbers mean nothing. They’re often so inflated and distorted, that in trying to boost our influencer status, we’ve leapt back into the untargeted and interruptive advertising pool where relevancy and effectiveness drops drastically.
While the smaller scale of social media hides such issues right now – for most Fortune 500 companies, the medium is still emerging – it will soon come out that while the tool is different, the habits are the same.
What we need then, is not an improvement upon or even a replacement of the traditional PR and advertising model, but a complete market shift. “The new way,” Bogusky and Winsor explain, is to “create truly innovative products and build the marketing right into them.”
That, in a nutshell, is why my job at Alice is so enjoyable. We better connect manufacturers and consumers in the giant consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. And in disrupting the traditional retail market, Alice has made it possible to buy all your household essentials online with competitive prices and get it delivered to your door with free shipping. Toilet paper is all of a sudden revolutionary.
And in the few short months since our launch, the service has spread. While that doesn’t surprise me, the ease with which it has done so and continues to (knock on wood) does. Good spreads. Something I didn’t fully believe in until this job.
When good spreads you don’t need all the superfluous advertising and marketing campaigns. You don’t need traditional posturing, marketing gloss, fluff and trickery. Good has the promotion baked in. Creating products that market themselves means tearing down the walls between the company and consumer. No longer do you have to spray over the ledge, but you’re able to join them on the other side.
“In the same amount of time it takes to create an advertising campaign – it’s possible to take all that consumer insight and actually bake it right into a new product. A product designed with a mission. A product with a story to tell. A product with the ability to sell itself,” argue Bogusky and Winsor.
A product with integrity. That is the future of marketing.
What do you think? Does good spread or do you need to give it a promotional push?
, $9.