Keeping Out the Clutter
If I have an arch nemesis, it's the fellow who wrote this book, aptly titled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. Yep, you read the title correctly: in the era of the Long Tail, there's a guy who not only believes that there's a few downsides, but that believes that it's alldownsides. I was drawn to the book because it harbors an opinion that is the polar opposite of...
Amazon Closes
That's what they do so well. Several times a day, I end up visiting Amazon.com, browsing books, just hoping that they recommend a book to me that sounds so good it gives me an excuse to buy it. If you go to Amazon looking for something very specific, you'll find it pretty quickly. Entering almost any book title or author will return very accurate results. You might be surprised, but that's actually a remarkably difficult...
You Have 10 Days
According to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, if you sign up to receive emails from a website, they have to include an "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of each email. This is so companies have to continually try and earn the right to our attention. If their emails ever become more of an annoyance than an interest, we have the right to remove ourselves from their list. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, once a customer...
Markets Value Scarcity
That goes for all markets. The stock market, the labor market, the job market, and the market for anything else you can think of. That means it's never going to be as easy as you think. There's lot of books about how to find a job, how to invest in stocks and make money, how to get a book published, and so on. All of this advice might be very prudent, but you can never...
Nationalism Is A Brand
Every history teacher I ever had was working, whether they knew it or not, as a brand manager. They spent their days shaping the perceptions that we, as students, have of this country based on what they taught. The brand has been built, tweaked, and solidified in our minds over several years, and as a result, we feel a sense of pride when we put little American flags on our cars, wear T-shirts, and bumper...
Who Am I, Anyway?
I'm sure that lots of people have been wondering what exactly possessed me to start feeding my blog into Facebook each and every day. The short answer: ego. But a more refined question might be to ask what makes me think anyone would be interested in hearing my opinions, thoughts on marketing, and business ideas. It's not as though I've ever pioneered a new invention in the marketplace or started a (success) company as an...
What's This Stadium Named?
In Detroit, the Tigers used to play baseball in Tiger Stadium, but not anymore. Now they play it in Comerica Park. There was a change in location when the team moved to a new stadium in 2000, and with it came a name change. It's called Comerica park because Comerica bank agreed to pay $66 million over 30 years for the right to name the stadium. Just about every major sports stadium in the country...
Measuring the Misses
I've never met a single person that likes getting spam. Not one. Everybody hates it. I have a couple of enterprising friends on Facebook who share the funnier subject lines about penis enlargement from their spam email folder on their statuses, and many people seem to have a good laugh, but aside from this, no one has found any merit in spam whatsoever. So why do we keep getting overwhelmed with spam emails? I still...
We're All Truman Burbank
When I was much younger, in elementary school, I used to entertain a fantasy that my life was a television show. This came from watching stuff like "The Wonder Years" or "Pete and Pete", where the show has a narrator that's explaining and analyzing the world around them. I used to sit on the swings on the playground and weave little bits of dialogue in my head that helped me make sense of the world...
Changing One Thing About Myself
Have you ever been asked this question: if you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? If you asked me that in high school, I would have given you all kinds of answers, ranging from something about my physical appearance to wanting a little bit more disposable income to spend on weekends out with friends. A couple of years ago, I finally settled on an answer that hasn't changed: I would like...