Tag Archives: marketing

Mobile Mania, Which New Cell Phone To Buy?

There’s a lot going on in the mobile world these days.  Big names want our attention, and they’re hard pressed to keep it for more than the two seconds it takes for the next best mobile thing to arrive.  Well, not quite that quick, but you get the idea.  The latest addition to the group is the much talked about, supposedly highly anticipated,  Android from Google.  Which technically isn’t a cell phone but the software used by the cell phone.  A minor detail.

Research In Motion continues to dominate the enterprise world with its Blackberrys; Apple’s hanging with the cool kids on the corner sporting iPhones; and I think there are a couple others, but their names elude me.  Which is to say, who cares about Nokia and Microsoft?  Although, Nokia does offer a worthy alternative with its N95.  Still, no one is talking about Nokia.

There’s more to it than just a bunch of big hitters stepping up to the plate with new gadgets, we also have to consider what’s tied to these phones when it comes time to get one.  The iPhone is stuck to AT&T at the moment, but has an awesome Apps Store.  Google is stuck to T-Mobile and HTC (for now, at least), but is offering an open platform for cell phones which includes Chrome.  RIM isn’t stuck to any of the carriers, but they’re losing hype and recently decided to partner with Microsoft.  (Microsoft’s way of staying relevant in the mobile world, by offering its services via RIM’s Blackberry.)  All these groups see web use moving to your hand held device and they want in on the action. You definitely see it in the geek world with more and more web services offering mobile apps or SMS connectivity, but so far only the geeks are really using mobile services like Twitter or BrightKite.

Whether or not there’s a real demand for this much competition in the smart phone world remains to be seen, but for those of us fascinated with new tech toys, we’re enjoying the show and anxious to see where all this is going.  What will be the ultimate deciding factor, and is there one?  Applications?  Network speed?  Device performance?  Or really slick design?  If I had to guess, for most people, it’s being able to make a call.

Leave your number after the hash.

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Be Clear Be Obvious

The downside to not being on the ball and taking immediate action when it hits you is that someone else is probably going to beat you to the punch.  Maybe they’ll do a better or worse job, maybe they’ll do exactly the same job.  But they’re doing the job, and you’re left to kick yourself in a crowded parking lot at two in the morning on a Tuesday night inevitably asking yourself, "How the fuck did I let this happen?"  I don’t know.

Shortly after finishing a nine-month-long leadership course in 2007 I quit my then current job and started working with Thompology in a tiny attempt to find personal freedom.  This got me to start thinking about marketing which lead me to thinking about branding.  Sadly, I didn’t fully understand either until it was too late.  However, I did eventually coin the term "Be Clear.  Be Obvious." for my personal slogan, and I never shared it with anyone, at least not until early August 2008 when I shouted it out while jay walking across a street in Portland, Oregon at two in the afternoon.  (Why then?  I don’t know.)  So there it was.  My mantra.

Not even a full week after returning from Portland, Mr. Calacanis was at it again with his newsletter and emails a four thousand plus word writeup about PR and sums up his branding philosophy in six little words, "be amazing, be everywhere, be real."  Talk about very strange timing.  The only proof I have that I said mine first is the couple of witnesses jay walking with me, and I won’t incriminate them.

Essentially, it took Jason six words to say what I said in four.  Except I forgot the most important piece — "be amazing."  Very crucial and probably the part I take most for granted, which is likely why I completely glossed over it.

Calacanis has been at this quite a bit longer than I have, but that’s not a good excuse.  So take what you can from what either of us said, and learn your lesson.  Be Clear Be Obvious and to drive home what JCal said, be totally fucking amazing.  The rest will follow.

Blog Cards by Street Cards

It’s time to start marketing the blog out in the real world, and I figure what better way to do that than with business cards.  Small, easy to pass out, people are familiar with it and its purpose, and you can put whatever you want on it.  I decided to go through Street Cards because they offer a line of cards with cartoon art from Gaping Void blog author, Hugh Macleod.  There are some 90+ different cartoons to choose from, but I finally settled on this one after some brief discussion with thompology and that other guy.

Business Card

The back of the card shows the web address for this blog.  We’ll see how things go.  Should be a decent way to get traffic I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Commercials as Social Objects

It almost never fails that someone, at some point in a conversation with me, if we talk long enough, will ask, “Have you seen that one commercial?” No.  I haven’t. I don’t watch commercials. I don’t understand why anyone wants to talk about advertising if they don’t work in the world of marketing.  Boggles my mind, and I have to make a real effort not to chastise someone when a commercial is brought up in conversation.

Okay, wait, I get that commercials can be short and entertaining, sometimes showing with a bit of humor, but none of that creates a want in me to purposefully watch one, and I truly do not want to talk about them while out in public because, ultimately, all commercials are really just trying to get me to buy something I already know I don’t want and I don’t want to push that sale on someone else.  But that’s not what bothers me most about the situation when I find myself in it.  What bothers me most is that these people find commercials interesting enough to talk about with strangers.

Hugh MacLeod has this thing he calls the Social Object. “The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else.” It drives me crazy that I appear to others as someone who views the commercial as a Social Object, the thing I would want to talk about with you rather than someone else.  It’s a pretty safe bet that, if you’re talking about television commercials, I don’t want to talk with you at all.  A Social Object can be anything we know about that would be easy to understand and interesting to talk about that is not seen on TV, like a park down the street where I play Frisbee from time to time. Maybe it’s been seen it in a commercial somewhere.

I’m usually not too picky when it comes to strangers talking about whatever, and I’m almost always willing to listen except when the topic turns to commercials on TV.  Let’s, the next time we bump into each other, talk about the weather.