completely hilarious!
it actually made me want to buy dr. bronner’s soap! and i NEVER wanted to buy it before, cuz the packaging is so personality-less, and spouts those weird quasi-culty hippie messages.
but hey, anything punk-rock endorsed can’t possibly be as hippie as i thought, right? and their great sense of humor totally absolves them of their merchandising sins as far as i’m concerned.
they had me at: “driving while weird.”
i’m absolutely stealing that phrase from now on.
i find the synchronicity of elements that shape the development of culture as fascinating as its effects. like the random mutations of evolution that become brilliant adaptive advantages, there’s almost a kind of magic to these whimsical convergences of what retrospect makes appear like fate. a butterfly flaps its wings in the concrete jungle, and eventually the world world shifts on its axis.
i’m about a third of the way through Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. we’re circa 1979 now, when rapper’s delight gets released. the first hiphop 12-inch single ever pressed, the best-selling 12-inch single pressed–EVER.
but it’s not the bith of the hiphop industry that’s the exciting part. hiphop, the music meme of global dominating proportions, was incubated within the confines of a seven mile stretch of the bronx ghetto, and you best believe there wadn’t no tentalce of the recording industry naturally springing up in that desolate radius.
by the time rapper’s delight was recorded it was just a natural progression of the amplification of this butterfly’s roar that had already been underway. what’s really fascinating is what happened JUST before that step, what facilitated that next step, the first moves that hiphop rocked to break out of the gangland dance floor.
the fortunate cultural phenomenon that happened to have ended up at the right place at the right time, hiphop came of age parallel to the casette tape.
before that there was simply no way to record, redistribute, and replay recorded music as easily and cheaply ( waaait a second… that… sounds familiar for some reason?)
the first way that anyone outside of the bronx EVER discovered hiphop was, according to jeff chang, through:
“The live bootleg caseette tapes of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Flash, etc….. [that] were the sound of the OJ Cabs that took folks accross the city. The tapes passed hand-to-hand in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Queens and Long Island’s Black Belt. Kids in the boroughs were building sound systems and holding rap battles with the same fervor the Bronx one possessed all to itself.”
makes you wonder how many other musical and cultural styles must have come and gone, disappearing forever into the dust of disintegrating, discontinued vinyl, the momentum to expand them never able to get fulfilled, held back by the constraints of antiquated music technology, don’t it?
* * *
more reaction to can’t stop won’t stop:
HERE
starting this blog seems kinda like merging onto a freeway. one doesn’t just take a sharp left turn and blurt out some sort of doctoral thesis, rather it’s a continuous, gradual process of edging closer and closer to the main flow of traffic, with ideas expanding on ideas, expanding on ideas.
i’ve been tinkering with this draft for a while now, about what i’ve got to say on the way i see the value of social engagement marketing being discussed, which is, like, oh man, just a big monster of a topic that only seems to make the post more and more unwieldy the further i delve into it.
so, i think, rather than waiting until i’ve got the whole thing complete enough to just barrel at a 90-degree angle against oncoming traffic, i’m going to tackle a bit of the onramp–as i see it–at a time.
** curves ahead: **
please be forewarned — i am NOT an online media expert. i do NOT have any kind of technology background, and quite honestly i couldn’t do math to save my life. my perspective comes from almost a decade of producing events and experiences that bring hundreds and now thousdands of people together, and create a platform for interaction on some incredibly visceral levels. large-scale live event creation is sort of like a “control” running parallel to the online experience creation experiment, and there are a myriad ways in which each informs the other.
my perspective also comes from studying PEOPLE and SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, (there’s a reason this blog is called “social creature,” after all). if i was doing what i do in a rural village in africa, it would be called anthropology. in l.a., however, we call it marketing.
so…. with an understanding of THAT basic caveat in mind, here’s an initial attempt at getting on that bull that’s the discussion about “the value of social engagement marketing,” and seeing how long i can stay on and ride it.
myth #1:
THE INTERNET INVENTED SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT MARKETING
nope.
guess again.
before it was about pressing Enter, it was about pressing the flesh. before web 2.0 there were tupperware parties, door to door salesmen, and patent medicine shows. all of these involved the same exact elements as what’s currently referred to in such clinical terms as “social engagement marketing,” and its potency as a selling method was never in question. before advertising, in fact, this was the only method there WAS.
but though the internet didn’t invent it, it DID upgrade it. as the tools for generating and enhancing social interaction got way fancier (and also more removed from immediately physical interaction) they seem to have also made us confused. we now look at this whole process as if it’s some alien anomaly we’ve never encountered before, when the truth is that this process has been in existence for AGES. for, in fact, as long as human beings have known how to communicate.
Strong, E.K. (1925). “Theories of Selling”. Journal of Applied Psychology 9: 75-86.
A lot of models are known in order to sell, e.g. the BOSCH-Formula, developed by Peter Hubert for the international sales training for consumer goods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA
- Be inquisitive – ask open questions
- Offer solutions – talk about the endresult benefits for the customer
- Stimulate the senses – let the customer test your product
- Cross your sales – think of all the necessary accessories
- Hit the closing point – sell when the customer is ready to buy
….ask open questions and offer solutions, stimulate the senses and think of all the necessary accessories. sounds a lot like “social engagement,” wouldn’t you say?
and all of this happening before the invention of media as we know it, let alone the application of social media.
before we go any further in this conversation (and i do hope to make this a conversation) about evaluating the “ROI of social engagement,” we must first take the follwing into account:
i believe that because the internet did not spawn either the concept or the application of “social engagement marketing” (only the terminology), nor did it eliminate all its prior forms, but rather ENHANCED them, it’s vital to recognize that any measurement of online social engagement will NOT be a measurement of its TOTAL effectiveness.
– – –
thanks to the following folks for their insight, info, and sounding boards for this in one fashion or another:
micki krimmel | jeremiah owyang | jesse shannon | thomas dillmann | sarah kalbeitzer
there’s more to come on this, for sure, but if you’ve got any thoughts on this particular part of the onramp, feel free to use your turn signal in the comments.
just yanked this bit of rad from jeremiah owyang:
my favorite part is where she goes, “you don’t know anything about me.”
and he says, “i know everything about you sweetheart!” and starts spouting off all sorts of demographic statistics. perfect case in point about the difference between knowing your demo (defined by the market), and understanding your user’s identity (defined by the user).
and speaking of identity…. i found it particularly curious that the creator of this video is european. if you know anything about the european stereotype of the “american male” (insensitive, egomaniacal, daft) it’s kind of hilarious to consider the role of the “advertiser” being based on that stereotype.
just saw a great bit by sarah dopp about the trend of an established company’s new community site campaign that involves an outdoor advertising strategy to drive traffic–case in point: reebok’s goruneasy.com that i already wrote about glowingly HERE.
what i find particularly interesting about this approach that’s being adopted not just by reebok, but starbucks as well (letsmeetatstarbucks.com), among what’s sure to be a coming slew of others, are the kind of pre-web 2.0 strategies–and their benefits–that are getting incorporated in this technique.
from sarahdopp.com:
- Billboard-to-web community-oriented marketing is being adapted with high visibility.
- By sending people to a campaign-specific website, they can monitor their campaign’s site traffic ROI without any confusion.
we’ve been employing this tactic in concert promotion for ages. the simplest way to determine the effectiveness of any ad is to isolate an offer, for example, letting radio station X promote a particular kind of discount offer that no other outlet is pushing.
it’s incredibly interesting also to consider the significance of using outdoor media to promote a web 2.0 site of a consumer goods brand. this is the multi-platform kind of “meta-strategy” that i think is going to become the standard for a new kind of campaign. one that fuses the best of the old (it don’t get much older than billboards, yo) with the new, and in the process fuses engagement WITH awareness instead of relegating the two to their own separate ghettos.
