snark

10 Steps to Writing a Popular Blog Post in no Time Flat

Friday, February 19th, 2010

In a recent email, someone accused me of not being snarky enough lately. HA! You asked for it:

Here they are, 10 steps to writing a popular blog post in no time flat:

  1. Spend 2 minutes on Twitter and find a popular blog post on a hot-button issue.
  2. Open your blogging platform and start ranting in response. Logic here: rant = passion and passion = popular.
  3. If possible, make some audacious claim about Gen Y, or Gen X, or whatever generation you happen to be from. The more it inspires warm fuzzies or outright anger, the better.
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We’re transparent, authentic, and on Twitter…now what?

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
We're on Twitter...now what?

photo credit: Troy Newell

I think we’ve reached the point at which if you aren’t transparent, authentic, and/or human you’ll be treated like a dirt sucking, crap-eating spammer.  I think we have to start talking more about what’s next.

I realize that I’ve regurgitated some of the hackneyed language of social media in Tweets and posts. But now is the time to move beyond those second order concepts like “relationships.” We don’t need any more lists of tips to help us get more followers. We need a strategic understanding of what the real-time web will look like so that we can write our business plans and outline our strategies for community engagement.

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CMOs: “Social Media is Better In-House”…DUH

Monday, October 26th, 2009
Some things are just painfully obvious.

Some things are just painfully obvious.

When a group of CMOs were asked which group was best equipped to help them with social media, a recent post on Business Week reported the following:

65.6% In House
15.6% Interactive Agency
9.4% PR Firm
9.4% Social Media Agency
0% Creative/Ad Agenc

I may anger some of my friends in the agency world (I know, I was there once too), but I firmly believe social media MUST come from inside an organization in order to be credible. I think this is best illustrated in a quote from one respondent:

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Against pronouncing email, blogs “dead”

Friday, October 23rd, 2009
Are email and blogs really dead?

Social Media Killed the Blog Star?

To get straight to the point, I believe email and blogs are not dead, and I’m tired of the countless articles that say they are.

Oh sure, it’s easy to jump on the email/blogging-is-dead bandwagon, but declaring these modes of communication as dead doesn’t accomplish much. Those who are ready to pronounce the death of email and blogging often justify their arguments in one of two ways: (1) with anecdotal speculation, or with (2) a bogus game of semantics.

Both of these arguments aren’t particularly helpful, and here’s why:

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META Tagony (Guest Post)

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Background: I’ve been secretly hoping that Neal Rohrbach (@nrohrbach) would do a snarky post for quite a while. Neal is the co-founder of ideaAnglers.com, a collaboration start-up that was recently featured on Business Week as a online business tool with the likes of Twitter, Skype, and Google Apps. Neal is a multi-talented professional whose portfolio is outshined only by his ability to generate new and fresh ideas. So needless to say, I’m excited…

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5 Biz Lessons from Jackson’s “Thriller” Video

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

mj

I may have jumped on the MJ bandwagon, but here are 5 lessons I think we can take from Jackson’s Thriller video (if you haven’t seen it, please read the post first—the link is at the bottom):

1. Do something unordinary

Thriller is much longer than the standard 3.5-minute, band-playing-in-a-warehouse video.  Part of the reason it’s memorable is that it doesn’t conform.

We claim to “think outside the box,” but how often do we end up buying ad space in the same places or sending the same email newsletter month after month? How often do we take the time to do something really different—maybe something that at first seems counter-intuitive (e.g. a computer company like Apple starting to sell MP3 players…)?

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