On this day in 1737 Thomas Paine was born. Happy 273rd Tommy! I hope it is a good one for you. Paine is arguably one of the most influential thinkers of the last 300 years, having played key roles in both the French and American Revolutions. More importantly for this…
I just grabbed Seth Godin‘s All Marketers are Liars. True to form, it’s bomb ass. The book details how marketing is really about telling stories – a premise you’ve definitely heard if you’ve been near a business in the last 5 to 5000 years. So, if telling a story is…
Tintin, the popular French speaking comic book character, speaks a slang known as “joual” (at least in books sold in Quebec). Profs, columnists and others in salons in the Plateau Montreal and Outremont are outraged reports the National Post. The above piece singled out two reactions from members of the Quebec intelligentsia that…
Length matters. I say this partly because, in the last few days, I’ve come across several items on the amount of words needed to convey news. Two in particular spurred on some thoughts: This post, that touched on whether the 140 character world might eventually kill traditional news media. A…
Justin Kownacki, who tends to deliver the goods, had an interesting post about inspiration (and why it is bullshit) the other day. I disagreed with elements of what he wrote, but looking back we were pissing around over semantics. In effect, we were talking about different meanings of the same word….
I am about 50 pages into Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food with about 15o to go so this ain’t a book review. However, already, I’d recommend you read it even if you have limited interest in food production (if you don’t care about what you eat then you…
Do you remember “show and tell” in kindergarten and grade school? Members of the class would get up, showoff some object and tell the teacher and their peers about it. It is a great exercise and, for most of us, one of the first real experiences with formalized presentation. During…
Brian Solis has a great post today on how businesses are using social media tools. Brian highlights a report by econsultancy.com. The report says that micro- blogging (i.e. Twitter) is now the most widely adopted social media tactic, used by 78% of company respondents. This I find surprising. There’s waaaay more…
I read this short piece from The Economist on PR this morning. The whole article is worth a read but the tag was definitely my favourite, it read “Other firms suffering has bolstered the public relations business.” Sounds like a parasite party is on. The gist of the piece is…
PR is a business in crisis. There are a variety of reasons for this but the Three S’s are largely responsible. These are spin, spamming and story pitches with no news value. As Brian Solis has eloquently stated, “PR does not stand for press release”. I agree with his contention…