Hee-Haw Marketing

It's the Links

Behind the Scenes at TED

70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet

"While good data from social sciences experiments has been hard to come by in the past, researchers are currently swamped by it thanks to a new generation of lab experiments, web experiments and the study of massive multi-player on-line games."

Language and Tone of Voice: A look at "Oh Great"

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm

"In the last decade, a quirky legion of idea peddlers has quietly invented what might be a new discipline and is certainly an expanding niche. How and why this happened is, naturally, a subject that everyone in the field theorizes about. What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking."

Dialects in Tweets

"More interestingly, however, there is a major difference in regional slang. ‘uu’, for instance, is pretty much exclusively on the Eastern seaboard, while ‘you’ is stretched across the nation (with ‘yu’ being only slightly smaller.) ‘suttin’ for something is used only in NY, as is ’deadass’ (meaning very) and, on and even smaller scale, ‘odee’, while ‘af’ is used for very in the Southwest, and ‘hella’ is used in most of the Western states."

Pick the meal for the person behind you

"It’s a creative, if strange little set-up since you still face the problem of choice overload – you have to pick something off the full menu – and the requirement to make a choice for yourself, without the benefit of getting what you ordered."

Mini Planners

MINI PLANNERS from Moleskine ® on Vimeo.

Everything will be reinvented

"I don’t mean to come off as some starry eyed huckster but, from my vantage point, we’re living in a very exciting time. If ever there were an opportunity to think big and attack large markets with incumbent players, its now. I’m a believer that in the next 5 years we’re going to see every major industry reinvented in ways we didn’t see coming."

Things Left Unsaid

When asked his view of the value of University education, Jason Fried of 37 Signals finished with a description of the class he'd like to teach:

"It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors."

Editing is one of the last skills to hone. Hoarding and discovering are just more fun and much less painful. 

But the winnowing process as defined by Jason makes editing seem far less sacrificial. I've heard some of the best radio writers don't actually start with the ad, but write full stories, developing characters and scenes in order to understand motive and intent. So each next step in the process of editing isn't a step away from meaning, but towards clarity. Each unable to stand without the understanding generated by the one before.

Seems obvious maybe, but we probably don't give enough credit to all the things we've left unsaid.

(photo via this isn't happiness)

Understanding Customer Culture

It's shill time, peeps. If you could take a few moments to vote for our SXSW submission, Understanding Customer Culture; Caution: May Require Cajones, it would certainly be much appreciated. The panel is pretty super, I must say, including the Director of Strategy at Twist, Sean Howard, the brilliant Sam Ladner, the author of one of my favorite books of this year, Grant McCracken, and the man that pulled it all together - Huffington Post and Marketing to Culture blogger, Ujwal Arkalgud.

Vote by clicking the thumbs up here

Some other good goods you should vote for:

Community Thunderdone - Brand vs. Unbranded, You decide w/ Bud and Mike

Conquering Creativity: A Creative Method For Every Mind w/ Jason Theodor

Why PR's Future May Not Look Like PR w/ David Armano

Informationism

"The space of play and the space of thought are the two theaters of freedom."

--Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (via)

Influencing the influential
"This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence others with."

Dad is as stressed as Mom
“Men are facing the same clash of social ideals that women have faced since the 1970s — how do you be a good parent and a good worker?” said Joan C. Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California. “This is a pretty sensitive indicator of the rise of the new ideal of the good father as a nurturing father, not just a provider father.”

Eggers on Saying No
"The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it's corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I'll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the no's you've said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say."

Turning stuff into things
Russell shares something that will be increasingly important, making the intangible tangible and giving tangibles a touch of intangible.

Watch live streaming video from liftconference at livestream.com

Speaking of: Things we touch affect our decisions
"This idea is known as 'embodied cognition' and the metaphors and idioms in our languages provide hints about such associations. The link between weight and importance comes through in phrases such as “heavy matters” and the 'gravity of the situation'. We show the link between texture and harshness when we describe a 'rough day' or 'coarse language'. And the link between hardness and stability or rigidity becomes clear when we describe someone as 'hard-hearted' or 'being a rock'."

Even Later

Bridging the Gap Between our Online and Offline Networks

Interesting presentation from Google UX pro Paul Adams. We don't have one set of friends even though most of our online networks are designed in that fashion.

The Golden Age of Middle Eastern Westerns
The Persian Dubs of these 70's westerns were both commentary and a form of localization that often changed the story along the way.

The Moral Life of Babies
"The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature."

The Social Rationality of Footballers
A study of penalty kicks that indicated that footballers often choose a less effective strategy in order to lose more honorably.

Moo-ing in different languages

Summize and Fixing Twitter
Probably an approach we should be taking more often when solving our own problems...
"I remember asking Greg during the Summize due diligence what his plan was for stabilizing Twitter. He answered that there was no magic bullet. He said they weren't going to do one big thing, they were going to do lots of small things. The first thing they did was instrument the hell out of the system, they started measuring everything and finding the bottlenecks, and then they started knocking them down one by one."

The Latest

Moo'd Cards

Awesome idea for a discovery device using Moo cards. Free download.

SleeveFace Photography

 

2 Quotes

“Cock your hat - angles are attitudes.” Frank Sinatra
"It's a lot easier to be repeatedly useful than it is to be repeatedly funny or sexy" Rory Sutherland

People who photograph their food

"In 1825, the French philosopher and gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Today, people are showing the world what they eat by photographing every meal, revealing themselves perhaps more vividly than they might by merely reciting the names of appetizers and entrees."

The Original Cadbury Gorilla finally makes it back to YouTube

After many moons of only having access to the remixes, the original reappears. Good for another giggle.

Making Ford a Model for the Future

"There are many reasons Ford has achieved such an extraordinary turnaround since Alan Mulally took over as CEO in 2006. After observing him in action, talking with him and spending time with his senior team, I'm convinced Mulally is taking an old-school industrial company and turning it into a model of how a modern company ought to be run."

Monkeys choose variety for variety's sake

"Pretty basic, apparently. The behavior of the capuchins, which are native to South America, "suggest that there's some inherent basic strategy for variety," Ariely said. In the wild, variety seeking may help ensure a nutritionally varied diet. It is also possible, the authors suggest, that variety-seeking contributed to the rise of bartering and then abstract money in human society."

Subscription models are awesome

Panties By Post and Manpacks. Very smart.

Links of Stuff

The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory
Pioneer in behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman on the differences between how we experience moments to how (or if) we remember them afterwards. Brilliant stuff.

The New Rules for Reviewing Media
"Newspaper and magazine reviewers pretty much ignore this stuff. There's little mention of whether a book would be good to read on a Kindle, if you should buy the audiobook version instead of the hardcover because John Hodgman has a delightful voice, if a magazine is good for reading on the toilet, if a movie is watchable on an iPhone or if you need to see it in 1080p on a big TV, if a hardcover is too heavy to read in the bath, whether the trailer is an accurate depiction of what the movie is about, or if the hardcover price is too expensive and you should get the Kindle version or wait for the paperback...That citizen reviewers have keyed into this more quickly than traditional media reviewers is not a surprise."

Be Extraordinary: Tom Peters describes a meeting with Burger King chief Barry Gibbons

sfgirlbybay has some great taste
If you're looking for some killer shots for your next presentation - treat her taste as your own. You'll look good.

 What Burger Chain Reigns Supreme?

 

Corporate Headshots

 

Cool Stuff from the Internet

A box that continually sells itself on ebay.

Money for young scientists is shrinking.
"Scientific revolutions are often led by the youngest scientists. Isaac Newton was 23 when he began inventing calculus; Albert Einstein published several of his most important papers at the tender age of 26; Werner Heisenberg pioneered quantum mechanics in his mid-20s. At the time, these men were all inexperienced and immature, and yet they managed to transform their fields."

Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet?
"I got off the ChatRoulette wheel determined never to get back on. I hadn’t felt this socially trampled since I was an overweight 12-year-old struggling to get through recess without having my shoes mocked. It was total e-visceration. If this was the future of the Internet, then the future of the Internet obviously didn’t include me."

A letter from Thomas Edison
"The worst is to come, for it takes about seven years to convert the average man to the acceptance of a solved problem."

Can You Trust a Facebook Profile?
Yes.

Red Bull and the Secret Half-Pipe
"For those of you who haven’t heard of this, Red Bull custom built a half pipe for White at a secret location in the middle of nowhere. They fly him out to the location via helicopter whenever he wants to practice. This allows him to invent new tricks away from the prying eyes of the press and his competitors. Both the pristine condition of the halfpipe and its secret location have allowed White to pioneer new tricks that he will debut tonight for the first time in Olympic competition."

Douglas Adams on technology
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."