Ever since the first poor cow got her skin burned by a paranoid cowboy worried about rustlers, branding has been an exciting, controversial and occasionally painful field.
Tom Asacker has something interesting to say on the topic: Amazon.com: Books: A Clear Eye for Branding. His blog is a good read too. (acleareye.com)
Joi Ito points us to Dan Gilmor’s A Minute with Dan: Bad Behavior | Bayosphere. It really is a minute. A minute of audio, the idea being to tap into the emotional power of the human voice without adding a lot of time or technology constraints.
A quick definitional thought: podcast ≠ online audio. Online audio has been around a long time. What makes a podcast a podcast is that you subscribe to it. I’ve been the online subscription guy since 1991, so that’s a great thing. But earning a subscriber is difficult, and keeping one is harder still. Things like Dan’s minute are an interesting way around that.
Don’t bet against selfishness.
I’m spending the weekend feeding the cat across the street while my neighbors go hither and yon. If you don’t already believe that All marketers are liars take a look at this promo copy for Fancy Feast Cat Food:
Fancy Feast Gourmet cat food is finely ground and smooth, like paté
offering a taste and texture to please every cat’s discriminating
palate. Choose your cat’s favorite flavor from our 11 different
flavors, for complete and 100% balanced nutrition every day.
Did you know that cats had discriminating palates? When was the last time a house cat starved to death? Remember, these are animals that capture, torture and then eat small rats.
Do the cats know that there’s gravy in the chicken? Do the care about the pate-like texture?
It’s pretty obvious who expensive cat food is for, and it sure isn’t cats.
And baby food isn’t for babies, and life insurance doesn’t work until you’re dead and ….
"…If merely four people of out of a hundred can make gridlock go away by choosing not to use their car, imagine the other changes that can be wrought just by four of us out of a hundred. Take a hundred musicians in a depressed port city in Northern England, choose John, Paul, George and Ringo and you have "Hey Jude."
Take a hundred computer geeks in Redmond, Wash., send 96 of them home and the remainder is called Microsoft. Take the Power of Four and apply it to any and every area of your concern. Politics: Four votes wrung from one hundred into another hundred is the difference between gaining control and losing clout…"
Tom Hanks, speaking at Vassar
Walter Johnson sends us this graphic essay from the brilliant Scott McCloud: I Can’t Stop Thinking! #6.
I’m not sold on the mechanics of his solution, but I completely believe this: We get the content that we (our society) pays for. Maybe we pay for it with ads, or patrons, or souvenirs or directly, but the quality and quantity goes up when there’s some sort of compensation.
Read any good poetry lately?
This is the PULL THE DOOR sign from the local Pain Quotidien organic bakery and cafe.
Even though an illiterate person has at least a fifty fifty chance of getting through this door on the first try, the sign on the door serves a valuable purpose. It tells a story about the attitude of management, a story that fits the worldview of many that would choose to come.
Some podcast stats for you, from Feedburner:
— FeedBurner points to nearly 6,000 podcasts now, up from about 500 in
November.
— The average number of subscribers to FeedBurner-managed shows is up
to 33 from 15 last year.
— The top 20 most popular shows have "thousands of subscribers and our
couple of top podcasts have tens of thousands."
Barnako.com: Podcasts growing 50% a month.
Addendum: if you have 5,000 subscribers, I figure that equals 500 listeners to a whole show if it’s really good, or 50 if it’s not. That’s based on my audiobook experience (as a writer, reader and listener).
Jack and Meg of the White Stripes were on Fresh Air with Terri Gross today. You can find the link on their site: WhiteStripes.com.
What I loved about the interview was how aware Jack is of the stories he’s telling and how, more important, his audience is telling themselves a lie. He says he’s opposed to the preconceptions and the buzz and everything that has nothing to do with the music, and then spends hours and dollars creating preconceptions (is Meg his sister, his wife, both?), focusing on colors (there are only three, because three is a perfect number) and on and on.
Lots of artists are poseurs, acting out the lie to tell the story. And we love it. But Jack (Meg is basically mute, at least in public) was clearly enjoying his simultaneous roles of debunker and bunker.
Not one, but two emails today asking about Apple’s switch to Intel. Both writers were sure that Apple had blown it (one works at Intel!) and wanted my take on how this changes Apple’s story. The thinking is that after years of telling people that they are better because they don’t use Intel, how can they change their story?
The problem with this analysis is that only geeks and journalists are listening to Apple’s story with that sort of clinical attention to detail. Ask ten typical Mac users and perhaps one can tell you which company made the old chip. Mac users don’t like Macs because of the chip. Far from it.
If the Mac looks the same and the mouse moves the same, they don’t care.
If Jobs is smart, he’ll use the increased heat efficiency and scale of the Intel chips to put more money into drop dead sexy cases for superlight laptops. That’s the story Mac users want to hear.
