Archive for the ‘Anecdotes’ Category

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Bad, AMC, bad. BAD!

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Many of you know that I’m married to an attorney, but I’m going to go ahead and say this anyway:

Stupid lawyers, why must you ruin everything?

What I’m referring to is today’s discovery that the Mad Men characters that have been happily coexisting on Twitter for the past few weeks have been unceremoniously taken down as a result of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint on behalf of AMC Legal.

These profiles were not being maintained by AMC, but by (semi) anonymous individuals with a passion for the characters and the show.

These profiles were brilliant. They interacted with each other and the Twitterverse as a whole. And they did it in character so convincingly that many marketers I know were pretty convinced that this whole thing was being beautifully orchestrated by AMC and perhaps the writers for the show.

Maybe that’s why AMC had the profiles pulled. Perhaps the rogues behind the idea were doing too good a job of pulling it off, and AMC had a “why didn’t we think of that?” moment. However, I’m thinking that’s not the case.

It’s very obvious by this action that AMC has no clue what today’s age of conversational interactivity is all about and that whether companies like it or not — the user is control of brands now. @soseman said it best in a comment on the original blog post:

Rogues don’t do things the way YOU want them to, they do them the way THEY want to do them. But clearly someone with such a passion for any brand just wants to help.

This was a terrible move on behalf of AMC. What initially started as what many of us saw as the best use of Twitter yet for a commercial property has become a black eye on corporate America’s perception of social media and its ability to stifle conversation surrounding its brands at any cost.

// UPDATE: Here’s another excellent point of view on this issue.

Posted in Anecdotes, Branding, Discussions, Greatest Hits, Interweb, Ranting, Social Media, Technology, Television, Twitter | Comments

Newwww Dayyyy For YOUUUUU!

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

I am in mental agony today, and I intend to spread it in the hope of feeling better myself.

I woke up this morning with the song “New Day For You” by Basia running through my head. It has not stopped running since approximately 6:45 this morning.

I had to think about why this song (arguably one of the worst of the 80s) got stuck in my mind. As I hear Godley and Creme’s “Cry” over the lobby sound system, I’ve found a likely culprit for the source. But, I’m pretty sure I heard this musical massacre while in the power tool aisle of Lowe’s on Sunday. That in itself is a mental exercise in subliminal emasculation that has wide-reaching ramifications I’m sure.

Regardless, there’s ol’ Basia with her smooth pseudo-Latin syncopated pop, sounding all smug right between my ears:

It’s a Newwww Dayyy for Youuuuu…
Newwwww Dayyyy f’ YOUUUUUUUUU!

Can rhythm be self-important? I’ve long held the belief that it can. Smug, self-important rhythm, as in:

That paradiddle apparently thinks it’s better than me.

I think you know what kind of rhythm I’m talking about. Those odd, out-of-place beats featured in songs that are trying too hard to be cool and artsy but end up sounding like a college marching band’s ode to wire-rimmed glasses and ennui.

I’ve suffered enough today. Watch the video (and enjoy the beauty of chambray shirts) so that you can be afflicted too.


Posted in Anecdotes, Creativity, Music, Ranting, Videos | Comments

Dead in the digital ditch?

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Earlier in July I tweeted about the lack of digital footprints left behind by some people. Even for casual users of the Internet I find it simply amazing that a person can have virtually no indexable trace of themselves out there for the world to see.

As my tweet said… it makes me wonder if these people are dead. But, even then there’d most likely be some sort of obituary post from an online newspaper. So, that kind of shoots holes in that.

One of my friends works very hard at minimizing his digital footprint. He holds a high level university position and therefore doesn’t maintain any sort of social media profile or engage in any sort of traceable online activity. This I can understand.

The one that baffles me most is my friend Bruno (but not Bruno… I know where he is). Bruno and I performed as an acoustic duo named Leadmill in 1996-1997. Toward the end of 1997, he went through a “finding himself” stage, taking off to go to law school at Lewis and Clark for a year before dropping out and moving to Savannah, GA to “find his sound.”

The last I had heard from him was late 1999 when he emailed me with a Geocities site for the band he was in and made the announcement that they were off to LA to find their fortune. That was the last I heard of him or his band. There is no digital footprint for either. Vanished without a trace. Candidate for dead in a ditch somewhere? Likely.

There was one gap in the “hey, I wonder what X is up to (or is still alive)” Google search I conduct bi-anually that filled in over the weekend that came out of left field.

My ex-wife of 10 years ago made me a Facebook friend on Saturday.

Where once there was swirling, footprint-less digital sand, there is now a 24-hour convenience store of information at my disposal.

After getting over the “I don’t think I would have had the balls to do that” reaction to the befriending followed by the “holy shit, honey, you’d never guess who just added me as a Facebook friend!” exclamation I gave to Robin as she walked in the door from a shopping trip, I quickly realized it just represents another typical Facebook relation to me. It’s one profile I spent 30 minutes browsing through and then won’t have very much interaction with.

Sadly, that represents my real friendships as well. I need to work on that.

Posted in Anecdotes, Social Media | Comments

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