Rule #1: They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. (Attributed to many sources including Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr.)
Rule #2:
It’s not about what you say; it’s about what they hear.
Rule #3:
Fast. Short. Meaningful.
Rule #4:
An incomplete solution now is better than a complete solution later.
Rule #5:
Instead of giving a lecture, tell a story.
Rule #6:
You can’t educate ‘em if you don’t entertain ‘em first.
Rule #7:
You can keep your audience busy with quotes and retweets. But to build an audience, you need to be original.
Rule #8: Of course you’re there to sell. But your audience isn’t necessarily there to buy. Remember it and respect it.
Rule #9: One sales pitch for every 20 pieces of non-selling content. Maximum. And that’s if your content is really good.
Those irritating vuvuzela horns that South Africans (and now everyone else, it seems) like to blow from the first minute to the last of a soccer match seem to have taken much of the world by surprise.
Vuvuzela or stadium horn?
But they are, and always have been, readily available in the United States. They’re sold as school-spirit items (School spirit stadium horn), novelty items (Windy City Novelties), stadium contraband (May be banned in a stadium near you!), and curiously even as magic accessories – with a collapsible option, perhaps for sneaking them into stadiums under your game-day jersey (Madhatter Magic Shop). Nobody seems to wholesale them for much more than $2.35 apiece.
Wikipedia’s history of the vuvuzela traces them from Mexico to Brazil and, only in the last decade, to South Africa. Not mentioned in that history is their longstanding use, as I heard on a radio call-in show yesterday, in stadiums of the Canadian Football League.
And am I the only person in the United States who remembers being able to buy them at baseball and football games in the United States in the 1970s and, perhaps, early ’80s? At some point, they were regulated out of existence here – apparently for the same reason that many 2010 World Cup spectators want them banned: They’re really loud and really annoying. But I clearly remember my dad buying me a stadium horn one time; I think he shelled out $3.50 for it in the days before the blessedly quiet and equally ridiculous giant foam finger became the must-have for loyal fans in Anywhere USA.
The zazu
The manufacturer of the “authentic” vuvuzela (www.vuvuzela.com) offers them in their original form, or sheathed in a removable fabric sock of your favorite World Cup team’s colors (the sockzela). You can get them with a beaded sheath, in a miniature size (for an easy getaway when you blow it in the ear of the wrong football hooligan), or in a curved antelope-horn shape, called the zazu and looking suspeiciously like a shofar.
The shofar
Vuvuzelas reportedly sell at World Cup venues for about $3, which seems about the right price for creating a worldwide phenomenon capable of driving television sound technicians to an early grave. But if your only exposure to the vuvuzela is what you see and hear during this short blast of World Cup coverage, then you’re missing a little bit of a treat. Perhaps as a gesture of international goodwill, the folks who run the official vuvuzela website have provided us with this intriguing video of a zaza choir.
It’s got that Paul Simon/Rhythm of the Saints feel you expect from South Africa, and it’s good enough to make you take those giant foam fingers out of your ears – if only for a couple minutes.
The zaza as you’ll never hear it at a soccer match
For a fee, Frontier Airlines is now allowing people to bring their caged pets into the passenger cabin to fly along. In doing so it joins United and Southwest in liberating dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters and small birds from the dark chill of the hold.
It’s all part of a larger strategy. Between narrower seats, reduced legroom, baggage stuffed in every cranny, elimination of in-flight meals and every other nicety, the airlines are getting closer to their end-game.
For yet another additional fee you’ll soon be able to buy a seat and meal service for your beloved pet, and forgo the noise and discomfort of the main cabin with your own spot in the cargo bay.
“… In a world with many media choices, consumers are actively selecting what content is meaningful to them and circulating it consciously to people they think may be interested. They are deploying media content as gifts for their personal networks, as resources for ongoing conversations. Until marketers understand [this], they are doomed to insult and alienate the very people they are hoping to attract.”
Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley made the following presentation at a recent meeting of technology wizards and gurus. (Notably she got the name of the event wrong; it’s the CN Summit.)
There’s a breadth of information here, ranging from adoption of mobile technologies to the potential for mobile advertising to the investment outlook for companies in the business.
The big takeaway for me is how it underscores the increasingly reasonable-sounding claims that mobile computing will change how we think about computing; and, no less, how important it is for media companies of all sizes to recapture their audiences on the small screen.
Marketing guru and all-around deep thinker offers his vision for magazine publishing: the Micro Magazine.
The ideal distribution and monetization method for such a product? Apps of course.
This effort to scare me into giving up the goods got caught in the spam filter this week. Except for removal of the phishing link, it’s published here exactly as it appeared:
Hello Visa Card Client ,
Your Bank Card is suspended, becaus we have noted a problem on your Card.
We have determine that someone has maybe using your card without your permission. For your protection, we have suspended your credit card. To exercise this suspention, Click Here follow the procedure, and specify for Update your Credit Card.
Note: If this isn’t complete 15 May 2010, we will be forced to suspend your indfiniment card, because it can be used for fraudulent
For those – and there are many – who say the iPad won’t save publishing, here is evidence that the Little Tablet that Could might be more powerful than they expected.
Ordinarily slower than honey from the fridge, the audit bureau’s speed to provide meaningful data across the fast-emerging new-media platforms speaks to the urgency of its customers. The data means media will be able to sell advertising for new online formats almost as fast as they develop. That alone will hasten the already hurried development of unique offerings for smart phones, mobile websites and the iPad (as well as the fleet of act-alike products that others will inevitably produce).
It’s important because it’s a stay of execution for the advertising-based business model on which virtually all media rely but which has so far resisted the digital transition.
Why give the iPad credit for this? Since its introduction just a month ago, the conversation about mobile media has changed dramatically – as have reader habits. Powered by the app, consumers are suddenly willing to buy subscriptions for online content, Google has been declared a declining power in big media’s pursuit of traffic, and at least one of the major audit bureaus has been shaken to innovate. All because iPad provides a different user experience than any previous device.
I’m not ready to declare that the iPad is going to save publishing-as-we-know-it. But I’m pretty sure it will be right in the middle of publishing-as-it-comes-to-be.
According to B2B magazine, ABM, the trade association for the business-to-business trade press, held a series of panel discussions recently in which participants declared that print isn’t dead.
Wouldn’t we expect them to say that? Of the four pro-print souls mentioned in the article, three of them still make their living by running, editing or selling for print magazines.
I’m not arguing their point either; I believe print is a vitally important communications vehicle and somehow will remain so in the future.
What’s notable in this discussion is the reasoning offered by the fourth panelist, Bob Drake, who runs Drake Creative agency. He said that a recent ad campaign that included a print component succeeded. He’s quoted by B2B as saying, “It goes against everything we’re hearing, but we can engage people for a long period of time (in print) and they stay engaged.”
I don’t know Bob Drake, and I don’t mean to pick on him. But if he’s hearing that print doesn’t work, then he’s talking to other marketers and not to marketees.
Marketers are abandoning print because it’s harder to measure as a marketing vehicle than Internet-based technologies. This is undeniably true. But at some point, that legitimate objection got simplified to the assumption that print is broken, which has been simplified even further to the notion that print is dead.
But if you ask readers, that’s not even close to the truth. The same article cited a poll by Roads & Bridges magazine (conducted by Internet, ironically enough) that indicated a strong preference among its audience for getting information via print. This is consistent with every bit of research and opinion I’ve ever seen. People prefer reading words on paper – especially glossy paper with charts and pictures.
The point? Like everyone else, marketers are susceptible to the echo-chamber effect. Print isn’t in trouble because it doesn’t work; it’s in trouble because shorthand communications of marketers obscure the nuance that is the truth.
For a fee, Frontier Airlines is now allowing people to 
For those – and there are many – who say the iPad won’t save publishing, here is evidence that the Little Tablet that Could might be more powerful than they expected.
Worse than the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the post office or the car rental counter in a tropical location…
