Marketing | Environment | Culture
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In early February, BombBomb, the video email marketing software company I’m helping build, was honored with an award at the Celebrate Technology event. The Colorado Springs Business Journal, Peak Venture Group, Colorado Springs Technology Incubator, Regional Business Alliance, and several other organizations helped produce a great evening at Pinery on the Hill on the west side of Colorado Springs.
Featured guest: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, The Woz
“(Peter Drucker) reduced the purpose of a business to the logically elegant phrase: to create a customer. In doing so, he elevated marketing, which is all about creating and connecting with customers, to ‘a central dimension of the entire business.’ Drucker thus set the stage for Regis McKenna’s ‘marketing is everything and everyone is a marketer’ argument.” (“The Four Pillars of Profit-Driven Marketing” by Moeller, Landry, & Kinni of Booz & Company, p44)
The same weekend I read these words, I listened to a wonderful conversation between Seth Godin and On Being‘s Krista Tippett. Because her show is about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas, the conversation brought out Godin’s theses in a slightly different way.
25 minutes in, Godin suggests “Whether or not you choose to be a marketer, you are one.” It connected immediately, as did many moments throughout the edited hour.
What a fine bit of marketing genius by a company I respect and patronize!
Amazon stole headlines all last weekend, on the eve of Cyber Monday 2013 (biggest online shopping day ever), with a primetime television feature on 60 Minutes and the release of the Amazon Prime Air video.
So what do we have here? We have the suggestion that delivery drone copters will bring Amazon packages to you within 30 minutes.
This suggestion drew predictably mixed reactions – from “Absolute nonsense! It simply can’t be done.” to “OMFG, this is the new sliced bread! Now pick me up off the floor so I can pass out again from the proper blend of befuddlement and elation that every member of the flock of consuming sheeple should be experiencing right now.”
Naturally, the extremes have little relationship with reality, so let’s take a few minutes to get real about the Amazon Prime Air video.
Prideful. Purist. Fashionable. Bandwagonesque. No matter the nature of the underlying motivation, all kinds of people are tweeting their photos with the hashtag #nofilter.
A photo is shot with a smartphone. It’s shared to Twitter with Instagram. In that process, a filter or effect may be applied. It’s given a description. The description may include one or more hashtags.
Two primary purposes of a Twitter hashtag are to provide context and to increase findability. Hashtags provide definition, tend to be related to subject matter or geography, are often humorous, increase community and conversation, and can be clicked to produce an entire stream of tweets with the same tag. Though they have no function beyond context on Facebook, hashtags are also seen there, especially on photos shared through Instagram.
The purpose of #nofilter in particular is to say “I didn’t use an Instagram filter or effect; this photo is less processed and more pure than many other Instagram pics.”
At one level, the folly of this tag is immediately apparent and reflects several of the cliches for which both Twitter and Instagram are known and mocked. As in: you shot and shared a nearly in focus smartphone pic of your lunch that somehow makes a delicious meal look unappetizing … congratulations on refusing to filter it! Way to hold the high ground.
Here’s a sampling of photos shared to Twitter through Instagram with the #nofilter hashtag this morning:
It’s one of Amy Poehler’s top 10 favorite moments from Parks and Recreation. It’s from the Sister Cities episode (Season 2, Episode 5), in which Fred Armisen leads a Venezuelan delegation visiting its sister city in Pawnee, Indiana.
In this extremely funny scene, Armisen’s character reacts to the relatively outrageous behavior of local townsfolk in a public meeting in a school gym.
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It’s a commonly accepted and often repeated concept.
It’s illustrated by powerful examples from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg to Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller to James Cameron and Tom Hanks (every one of them is a college dropout).
It’s the sub-headline and positioning of a recent “Billionaire University” story in the Forbes 30 Under 30 issue: “Some of the Forbes 400 have Ph.D.s; far more never finished college.” Continue reading
NYT: Media Decoder© 2024 ethanbeute
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