Happy 60th Anniversary Israel

Poor little Israel, surrounded by enemies that wish to totally annihilate the nation and the Jewish race.

Reminds me of China's totalitarian delusions about little Tibet.

Fight on, little nations, even if the massively corrupt USA government fails to support and defend you, know this: there are plenty of individuals who care and do what they can to help. For myself, I engage in internet activism.

My wife and I bought two Israeli flags at a fair held at a local synagogue. I keep one in my multimedia studio, and it ends up in lot of my music videos and films. My small way of promoting the sovereignty and dignity of Israel, and my love for the Jewish people.

My aunt Reba was a Mormon, and her husband, my uncle, was an orthodox Jew. I loved them both very much, but they're no longer with us. (I myself am neither Mormon, nor Jewish).

I don't support every single thing Israel does, but I do respect their right to exist in the land God gave them.

Happy 60th Anniversary, Israel, land of revolutionary communal farms (kibbutz) within a free market system, democracy, and monotheism.

Art Forum Magazine VIDEO

Value = digital surrealism / action filming.

Str8 Sounds "Art Forum Magazine" (6:49)

http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=BfoDka3orPU

hype vs marketing

Is marketing just hype? Or is marketing, in the best sense, something other than bullying, exaggeration, and fluff?

What is hype? What is marketing? What separates them as opposing concepts?

Hype is any form of pushy sales, where the company wants to overpower, overwhelm, and overcome your resistance to purchasing their product right now.

You, as a potential customer, are not important or interesting: it's your wallet they're after. They don't have time to understand your specific problems and needs, they just assume you could use their product, so they try to clobber you with thought clubs. Beat you into submission. Trick you, seduce you, lure you. Force you or dazzle you into buying their product.

Hype, being product-centric, rather than user-centric, uses "we", "us", "our" instead of "you" and "your".

Hype is akin to frenzy, hysteria. It's fluff in higher gear.

Hype is arrogant, egotistical, neurotic. Hype is grasping, craving, obsessing over converting you into a paying customer, then moving on to the next "conquest". As in romance, the conquest is not treated kindly by the pursuer: customer loyalty and repeat purchases are lost by hype.

Hype is hyperbolic, i.e., exaggeration, partial truth, pregnant with undisclosed downsides. It paints an over-excited picture of the miraculous product, and the extreme proclamations and claims are clownishly coy and patently absurd.

Educated, sober, mature customers don't fall for it. Hype offends the right-thinking person. Hype only works like hucksterism, snake oil salesmen, and cult leaders: they prey on the weak and feeble minded, the young and the senile, the paranoid and approval addicts.

Marketing is sober communication of how a product can solve a problem, or enhance the life, or meet some need, for a customer.

Marketing helps the customer decide which model, color, size, style, etc. is right for him or her.

Marketing helps the customer understand his or her own problem better, which is due to a truthful positioning of the company as a leading expert.

No exaggeration. No inflated claims. No sex appeal. No reaching out to baser instincts. No bedazzling with showy gimmicks. No rush to make the sale and move on to the next victim.

Car commercials are idiotic hype, for example, almost without a single exception. Driving at illegal speeds, with no other traffic, and no pedestrians, or cops, around for miles. Or balloons and hot dogs and popcorn, it's a circus, not a car dealership. You get the idea.

Music band promotions are 98% hype. Exaggerated claims of virtuosos, new directions, unheard-of sounds, giant leaps in imagination, trend-setting stylistics, astonishing lyrical gifts, beautiful crooning...and it all sounds mediocre, exactly like, or less than, what came before.


This topic of Hype vs. Marketing was inspired by a Twitter message ("tweet") from @markdavidson:

http://twitter.com/markdavidson/
statuses/808184725


[QUOTE]

My own PR person just told me my passion might be coming across too much like an infomercial. (This is why I retain a PR professional.)

[END QUOTE]


An infomercial is advertising that pretends to be providing information about a skill, industry, need, or how-to topic, but is using the information to trick people into receiving product sales promotions.


Here are my Twitter replies to him:



hype vs. marketing 1

http://twitter.com/vaspersthegrate/
statuses/808185617


@markdavison - Your PR person may be right. Try to be more enthusiastic about your niche or field, not about yourself or your products.





hype vs. marketing 2

http://twitter.com/vaspersthegrate/
statuses/808185108


@markdavidson - For me, it's all about being passionate about ideas, and not about my own products, music, or marketing expertise.



Marketing begins with the customer's needs, problems, or desires. Not with the company, product, or sales pitch.

You start with the actual situation and human reality of the customer. You build a gestalt, a complete vision of what the customer wants to accomplish, then present the product in terms of how it helps the customer in a reliable, economical, efficient, satisfying manner.

Or, as in music and food especially, the instant consumables, you give free samples. Let the product sell itself to those with the required tastes, interests, and needs. Talking about music is boring. Let's hear it and have it. Let your fans hear and have your music, for free, abundantly, and they may do you the favor of distributing it to others, and causing a groundswell of craving for more, at any price. The collector mentality.

If you want to annoy people, use idiotic, self-centered hype.

If you want to help people, use smart, altruistic marketing.

Twitter as social bookmarking

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging, status update, link archiving, and asynchronous chat communication tool.

It's also, like many Web 2.0 sites, a lively social community. Users share everything from what they had for lunch, or what airport they're stuck in...to profound declarations of revolutionary activism and links to emerging tech tools that are now open to beta testers.

Unlike FarceBook, I mean Facebook, it's remained simple, streamlined, and sleek.

Let's look briefly at using Twitter as a way to keep all your favorite or important links in one convenient location, while enabling others to visit those. Saving a URL to your Favorites or Bookmarks file is private bookmarking. Sharing links with others, in addition to archiving the links for personal use, is called "social bookmarking".

del.icio.us is a popular social bookmarking site. Jason Calacanis once said, on Twitter, that he was going to "blog over at del.icio.us" for a while, exclusively, as an experiment. You can blog on del.icio.us because you can attach comments to the links you post.

But if Twitter is your primary communication channel, why not use it as your social bookmarking application?

You have a Twitter account.

You tweet (send a Twitter message) to your Followers, and if they happen to be on Twitter's rushing river of brevities at that moment, they'll see it "live", in real time. If not, they won't ever read it, unless they consider your tweets so valuable, they click on your Profile and view your past messages.

So, there you are, communicating in 140 character bursts to your Followers. Pithy writing, condensing a complex or frivolous thought to essential wording, this is a marketable skill. Business writing is not easy, and brevity, being concise and short in your communication, is a valuable art. So as you tweet, you're increasingly gain skill in fast, brief communication.

But let's say you're not on Twitter, you're just surfing the web, researching a topic, or looking for something entertaining, a blog post or video or music. When you find something that is so cool or helpful, you wish others could know about it, Twitter the link.

When you share the link with your Twitter community, you must turn a long web address into a short one. You can use TinyURL to accomplish this task. Use your cursor or keyboard command to highlight the URL, go to Edit in your browser chrome and click on Copy, or use Ctrl + C on your keyboard.

http://tinyurl.com/

You have now saved the URL to your browser memory, and can convert it to a shorter web address. Paste that long URL into the text entry box on the TinyURL interface. Once you've shortened the URL, it's ready for your tweet.

To speed up the conversion process, install a TinyURL toolbar button on your browser, so every time you need to convert a URL to short form, you just click on the button. TinyURL then converts the URL of the web page to a shorter code.

SAMPLE Twitter message, in social bookmarking mode:


Free legal mp3s of A Silver Mt. Zion, avant-garde classical art music, at http://tinyurl.com/3t2ch9

That's about 90 characters, well under the 140 limit. But it conveys what the link is, what kind of music, and name of band, with a URL that your Followers can click on to visit the site.

Voila! You've just shared a link. You've also archived it, for your own future personal reference. You may want to print out your tweets, so you have an offline copy of your messages and shared links, for when Twitter is down, or if Twitter ever vanishes.

SIDE NOTE: A blogger once said that TinyURL could be the next Digg or YouTube, perhaps even bigger. TinyURL database contains URLs of web pages that people have gone to the trouble of converting to shorter addresses, so these web pages must be significant. The data mining possibilities are clearly there.

+!+

Sources Quoting Steven Streight

Steven E. Streight aka Vaspers, web usability analyst, web content creator, and social media specialist, has been quoted in the following books, publications, and blogs:



Naked Conversations:
How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (John Wiley & Sons, 2006)

http://tinyurl.com/32hf29





US News & World Report

50 Ways to Improve Your Life:
“Start Your Own Blog”

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/
health/articles/061217/25blog.mind.htm



BusinessWeek Blogspotting “The Importance of Taglines”

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/
blogspotting/archives/2005/05/
the_importance.html


“The blogosphere is not credible?”

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/
blogspotting/archives/2006/07/
the_blogosphere_1.html




Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright (McGraw-Hill, 2005)

http://tinyurl.com/35gxny




Society for Technical Communication
Usability Interface Newsletter Online

“User Observation Testing: Forms & Procedures”

http://www.stcsig.org/usability/
newsletter/0408-user-observation.html




Jason Calacanis
Entrepreneur in Action at Sequoia Capital, co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., and GM of Netscape.

"Feedback on My Linkbaiting Rules"

http://www.calacanis.com/2007/04/
27/feedback-on-my-link-baiting-rules/


"#2: Vaspers the Grate--a blog I read all the time--also has some really interesting thoughts on linkbaiting." - Jason Calacanis



CEO Blog – Time Leadership
Jim Estill, CEO, Synnex Canada ($3 billion company)

“CEO Blogs and CEO Blogging”

http://www.jimestill.com/2006/
08/ceo-blogs-and-ceo-blogging.html




Doc Searls Weblog (pioneer tech blogger)

“Where 0.1”

http://doc.weblogs.com/
2007/01/20#where01


“All the news that’s fit to annotate”

http://doc.weblogs.com/2005/05/
30#allTheNewsThatsFitToAnnotate




John C. Dvorak

(PC Magazine, CBS MarketWatch, Dvorak Uncensored)

“Wall Street Journal Still in the Dark About Blogs”

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1775




Consumer Reports WebWatch

Websites that are pledged to uphold credibility guidelines.

Listed as Streight Site Systems.

http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/
praise-worthy.cfm#s



Evan Williams (EvHead, Blogger, Odeo, Twitter)

"Measuring Blog Impact”

http://evhead.com/2005/
05/measuring-blog-impact.asp




Darren Rowse (Pro Blogger)

”Writing Effective Post Titles”

http://www.problogger.net/archives/
2005/05/25/writing-effective-blog-post-titles





Katherine Stone (Decent Marketing)

"Don’t Worry, Be Crappy?"

http://decentmarketing.typepad.com/
weblog/2005/02/dont_worry_be_c.html





Dave Taylor (Intuitive Life Business Blog)

”What makes a successful blog?”

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/
what_makes_a_successful_blog.html





Satish Talim

(Appliblog: Applied Software & Technology)

”8 ways to decide what to blog about next”

http://personalwebsiteblog.blogspot.com/
2005/05/8-ways-to-decide-what-
to-blog-about.html





Jennifer Rice (What's Your Brand Mantra)

”Not Worthy”

http://brand.blogs.com/mantra/
2005/03/not_worthy.html




Debbie Weil (BlogWrite for CEOs)

”What makes a successful blog?”

http://blogwrite.blogs.com/blogwrite/
2005/02/what_makes_a_su.html