Tag: Gold Rush

Twitter and Twister

The later brought destruction to the Mid_West, but its impact is immediate, albeit regional.

The former more dangerous, simmering and long-tailed.

140 characters are more than enough to assassinate a character, his/her reputation which is built up over a life time.

Be careful.

Social malaise not social media in the wrong hands.

Not enough post, people don’t recognize your brand.

Too much, they are bored and become anesthetized.

We are living in parallel worlds: Twitter‘s and Twister‘s.

Digital and analog.

Both are real, as real as what’s floating and flowing through our heads.

With Twitter, we can edit, and control.

We leave our marks in the world.

140 characters at a time.

( I am at an internet cafe near Tan Son Nhut Airport. A baguette vendor just walked by to take order. Talking about digital and analog!).

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have become part of our digital life. The trinity came on the scene only half a decade ago.

During that time, we have had the housing crisis, and its reverberation.

Nature shed its blood, shakes its fist and shred some fat.

Survival of the fittest (MySpace, Kodak).

I must give it to Levis. During and after the Gold Rush, the unintended consequence was Levis jeans.

Winners and losers, but Levis always wins.

Now, gold diggers and gold traders are wearing them to.

We play the game of Island survival to exercise “forced choices”. Jeans always is a must-pack.

In five years, Facebook and Twitter will still be here.

Twister will come and go.

Still, be careful of both.

Its impact might be long-lasting. More than any of us is now realizing.

Just ask the scribes. They had no idea what they were doing when copying the Bible and later, print them.

A well-placed thought and well-said line becomes a saving line for someone in need and in search of truth, on or off-line. But ill-thought and ungraceful comments stay digitally and eternally.

Marketing genius

Charlie Chaplin would keep filming until he got it perfect (100:1 filming ratio to get the ladder to swing just right etc…).

In “the Kid“, the little girl would throw rocks at windows, while our handyman walks right behind to fix them.

Gillette would give away razors just to sell the blades (HP has done the same with its ink).

Levis would sell jeans during the Gold Rush, along with those who profited by selling picks and pickaxes.

Sony founder had his reps wear bigger shirt pockets to fit his “portable” radios (showmanship par excellence).

Hyundai founder tried his hands at the Pony, while Detroit was busy with its Pinto.

Pepsi had its “taste test” with blindfolded customers, while Wendy used little old lady for “where is the beef” campaign.

Barnes and Nobles followed Moses down the mountain, saying “let my people read” (beyond the tablets).

Woodstock organizers did the same when they decided to “let my people in”.

Costco built its shopping carts bigger than others (as a results, people bought more paper products) while Cisco bought up its competitors to solve innovator’s dilemma.

Apple launched its I-phone, with long lines wrapped around New York and San Francisco’s street corners. Chinese-Americans would buy them in bulk to stock up for their next suit-case entrepreneurial trip (where do they think the phones were first manufactured in?).

And the mother of them all is Facebook, where out of our own volition, we volunteer our intimate information, information we wouldn’t tell our mothers, so they can help advertisers target the right kind of demographics.

Marketing genius! They know about us more than we do ourselves.

Facebook went from on-campus to off-campus, from Tulane to Tunisia and flourished in an era of change, from Apartheid to ARPANET. The tiger is out of the cage, with its long tail. Nothing is for free. I learned that after my first 5 minutes of silent movie (wheeled around on the back seat of the peddler’s bicycle). Charlie Chaplin was timeless.

We all had our shares of being had by marketing genius, willingly especially during Super Bowl, the Davos of them all.

 

Time to read

There is a time to listen and a time to read.

That time is now. At lunch or in line.

The WSJ runs a a picture of an “early adopter” (old lady wrapped herself in a good book, digital that is).

For her, what a lifetime that was: out of the house to go to work (with sandwich bread), maybe as a telephone dispatcher, then came home to TV dinners with a Chevy in the driveway. Meanwhile, the Maytag man took care of her laundry and her husband the lawn.

Now she has retired, reading a book which is resided in the cloud, while keeping in touch with relatives on Facebook.

(I should mention the Pill).

Reading time has always been hard to come by. It’s at the top of the pyramid of chores (shopping, cooking, cleaning etc…). Now, reading is readily available as the headline news you see everywhere (when I was hooked on “the girl with a dragon tatoo”, I wished I had a comparable service so I could access my bookmark anywhere).

It’s interesting to see if readership increases as a result of better access.

Or it’s more profitable just to sell picks and pans for another Gold Rush.

One thing is for sure. Those so-called Independent Book Stores will join the fate of Independent Telephone companies of last century i.e. giving ways to an oligarchy of heavy weights. Too bad Google ebooks couldn’t be renamed with an “A”, as in Apple, Amazon and ATT.

But by its colorful logo, we already got the idea that the company is into creativity, colorful-ness and cloud-orientation. At least, it got an A as in Algorithm which suggests your next book, even before the title becomes available. It’s an age of “cognitive surplus”.

Everything is just the tip of the iceberg. 1 per cent visible, 99 percent invisible.

Time for reflection. A time to die, a time to live.