Community Archives | Page 22 of 26

Starbucks, I Done You Wrong! #smwin

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:May 15, 2009
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:6 Comments

Starbucks is more socially responsible than I thought.

One of the great things about “social media” is the ability to engage in conversations with a variety of people, anywhere in the world, on pretty much any topic of interest, no matter how obscure or inane. Thanks to forums, blogs and Facebook, I’ve connected with poets, writers, comic book fans and creators, and re-connected with friends and family, past and present, most of whom I don’t get to see nearly as often as I used to. My.BarackObama.com pulled me deeper into a political campaign than I’d ever been.

On Twitter, the shiny objet du jour, I’ve connected with insightful marketing and publishing professionals with whom I’ve had many interesting conversations and from whom I’ve learned a lot.

From a marketing perspective, new social media tools offer an incredible opportunity for companies to engage with customers (and potential customers) on a level that old-school interruption advertising and media relations simply can’t come close to. While some choose to avoid them completely or approach them tactically for preemptive damage control, I prefer to see them enabling proactive engagement, joining the community and participating in the conversation, no matter which direction it goes… and sometimes it can go in unfortunate directions, as Amazon found out a few weeks ago.

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What New Media Can Learn From Slam Poetry

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:May 11, 2009
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:6 Comments

"I have just read the immortal poems of the ages and come away dull. I don't know who's at fault; maybe it's the weather, but I sense a lot of pretense and poesy footwork: I am writing a poem, they seem to say, look at me! Poetry must be forgotten; we must get down to raw paint, splatter." Charles Bukowski Confession: I loathe most formal poetry. Sestinas, sonnets, terza rimas, oh my! While I appreciate the exercise of writing in a particular form, the end result is usually a self-indulgent bit of forgettable wordplay rarely worth reading, never mind hearing…

6Qs: Maria Schneider, Editor Unleashed

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:May 6, 2009
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:3 Comments

“I don’t know if there’s any light at the end of the tunnel for publishers, but I think the future for writers is bright.”

–Maria Schneider, Editor Unleashed

I had the pleasure of working with the Editor Unleashed herself, Maria Schneider, for about 18 months, back when we were both with Writer’s Digest — as Editor (her) and Ad Director (me) — and am happy to still call her a friend despite no longer being corporate colleagues and with more than 600 miles separating us.

Maria is a smart, savvy writer AND editor, who understands the difference between the two, and who fully grasps the integrated world publishing has become, able to speak fluently in print and digital. Her ability to brainstorm new ideas that work from multiple angles without ever compromising her editorial integrity made my job much easier, and her outspoken, engaging personality has always been refreshing.

Her openness to new ideas and engaging personality allowed her to hit the ground running when she left Writer’s Digest last year, immediately launching her own website on October 8, 2008 with a post entitled, “So here’s how I got here…“, adding a forum two weeks later, and never looking back. Since then, she’s been offering near-daily content, featuring inspiring writing prompts and invaluable resources; interviews with successful agents, editors, and authors; and sharing her own hard-won insights with an appreciative and steadily growing community of aspiring and professional writers.

I’m delighted to have her as the first in a new series of interviews with insightful publishing and marketing professionals — 6Qs: Maria Schneider, Editor Unleashed.

It’s been just over six months since you were “unleashed” and went freelance. What’s surprised you, in a positive way, and what hasn’t quite gone according to plan?
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Stop Interrupting; Listen, Engage, Earn Attention

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:April 29, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:3 Comments

Youre not listening anyway. by MadRussianPhotography — You're not listening anyway. by MadRussianPhotography

You know the stereotype of the guy on the first date who can’t stop talking about himself, only to wonder why he doesn’t get a kiss at the end of the night, never mind a second date?

That guy is like advertising.

In the latest flare-up of the “print is dead” debate, Michael Josefowicz’ provocative article for MediaShift entitled “The Fallacy of the ‘Print Is Dead’ Meme” has generated some interesting feedback, partly for daring to counter the meme, and partly for clinging to the ad-supported model that has pushed many newspapers and magazines onto the endangered list:

[T]o extrapolate from personal experience to a statement about what is going to happen in the world doesn’t work. But that’s exactly what many of the people foretelling the death of print are doing.

That’s because most of the public discourse tends to be dominated by information junkies and there is little doubt that if you’re an information junkie, the web is the way to go. But the reality is that info-junkies are only a small tribe. They consume the news at a prodigious rate and the web is the fastest way to satisfy their appetite. Thus, they’re also the most vocal tribe — so it’s easy to get the impression that theirs is the most widely held conclusion. But if you listen to some of the discourse, it soon becomes apparent that it’s only one way to look at it…

Because every business understands the value of print advertising, the trick is only to make the buy for a print/web ad combo easy and affordable.

Responding to MediaBistro’s highlighting of the article, I noted: “I agree with Josefowicz that print isn’t dead, but he’s wrong about advertising; that ship has sailed. Interruption IS dead.”

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Attack of the Social Media Gurus

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:April 10, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:9 Comments

Scream Duck at it again. by digicolleen (permission granted)

Have you heard, yet? EVERYBODY is on Twitter!

It’s grown 1,382,000% since last year!

Even William Shatner is using it!

This may come as a surprise but I don’t have a degree in acting. http://tinyurl.com/ct6sut Please subscribe to my YouTube channel

1:54 PM Mar 21st from web

Also, Google is dead; Facebook is broken; and those dreadlocked guys with the funny dance moves are lip-synching!

Okay, fine, Rob and Fab really couldn’t sing, but if any of the 8 million people who bought their album back in 1989 did so because of their videos and dancing, they deserved to be duped. The rest is hyperbolic BS that’s been floating around the Twitterverse lately, mostly promoted by self-proclaimed social media gurus trying to make a quick buck, and websites like Mashable, which recently changed its tagline to “The Social Media Guide”, looking to capitalize on a trend and boost their ad impressions.

Seriously, can we get a little perspective here?

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Advertising is Failure

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:April 3, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:0 Comments

Digital guru Steve Rubel interviews Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?“, who makes an interesting point that I suspect many marketers are going to have in the back of their minds when the economy ultimately turns around and they reassess their marketing strategies and measure the results of their responses to the meltdown.

Mr. Rubel: Are customer service and peer-to-peer advocacy the new advertising? And if so, how does that change the ad industry?

Mr. Jarvis: Advertising is failure.

If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don’t need to advertise.

OK, that’s going too far. There is still a need to advertise — because customers don’t know about your product or a change in it or because, in the case of Apple, you want to add a gloss to the product and its customers. But in the book, I suggest that marketers should imagine stopping all advertising and then ask where they would spend their first dollar.

In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service. If you’re Zappos, you spend the next dollar on customer service and call that marketing. If the next dollar goes to advertising, there has to be a reason — and if the product is good enough, that reason may fade away.

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Hitting the Reset Button on emedia

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:March 30, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:0 Comments

Ultimately, publishers' primary focus should be to curate great content that people are willing to pay for, and to organize and nuture a community around that content and the authors who create it. That community will exist in multiple places and spaces, physical and virtual, and it will flow into whatever container suits it best.