Why Digital Marketing Is Like Trying To Lose 10lbs.....

Over a year ago my brother David asked me to help him with some marketing. He's been in the vintage clothing business a long time and could see that with the market changes and the high Canadian dollar he was going to have to reinvent himself. He wasn't sure what direction he wanted to take his business in but he knew that for any venture he was going to consider, be it his own clothing company, a consultant in the vintage business, that building his personal brand was going to be key.


That's when he started his blog, "The Art of Vintage Leather Jackets". The blog focuses on the historical and cultural role of vintage leather. It's a pretty interesting blog and Dave always has unique and original takes on stuff.

This morning, I wanted to find read his latest post and went to Google and typed in "vintage leather jackets". And guess what? Dave's blog is now third in the Google search results. THIRD! I mean, how amazing is that? And what's even more amazing is the fact that there are all these companies who are not Dave, that presumably have more resources in people and money than him, ADVERTISING based on the key words 'VINTAGE LEATHER JACKETS'.



This leads me to the very simple question, why the hell aren't all of those companies blogging? I mean, it's free. It's not like it's a full time job although there is some effort involved. And that's when it struck me.

Things like blogging are a discipline. You can't just sluff it off to your ad agency (not if you want it to be successful). It's not a money thing, it's a time and effort thing. It's a determination thing. It's a focus thing.

That goes for community building, engagement, connection - you name it, digital marketing is often about effort.


That's why I think it's like losing 10lbs. It should be the easiest thing in the world to do. Eat less (Nicole tells me 1500 calories a day) and exercise more. That's it. But wouldn't you rather just buy a little blue "lose 10lbs" pill?

Sure you would.

Just as you probably prefer to buy a little blue "traditional advertising" pill for community engagement.



Only one problem with the little blue pills. They never work.

Just remember this, if Dave can do it, so can you. Ok, gotta go. I've got 10lbs of post baby birth weight to lose. ;-)


Photos credit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaptainkobold/

Museum Without Walls

My colleague of mine, Andrew Kirby, launched an amazing project today, Sedai.ca.

"The SEDAI Project's mission is to gather, protect and disseminate the history, heritage and legacy of Canadians of Japanese ancestry."

The usage of the net as an cultural, social and historical archive is going to become more and more important as our entire world becomes digitized. Moments, memories, collected and aggregated to be preserved for future generations.

Sedai is a wonderful project and their team has done an incredible job. If you have some time, be sure to check it out as it's an important piece of our Canadian history.

Portalized Vs. Edited Lifestreams

Experience Planner had a posting on Tumbler and the notion of aggregating lifestreams. I had made the comment on the post that i thought our generation are 'centralists' by nature - and therefore crave a portalized version of ourselves. That we "see" lifestreams and therefore want to organize and track them.

But the generation that is coming behind us...I am not so sure. They have multiple identities, that are sometimes digitally geo-location based, un-aggregated, ebbed and flowing...Less seeing than experiencing..

My thought was that this generation may be more interested in contextual flow - meaning seeking a view of someone's lifestream in a particular context or moment in time depending upon what they were interested in.

To challenge myself on this notion, I started to follow a couple Tumbler logs (see bijansabet.com and fredwilson.vc) myself.

Truth? I think I might be with the younger generation on this one(woot!). I don't really care to see all of someone's lifestreams. I think I only care about the part of the lifestream that matters to me. With information overload becoming even more overloaded, I want to be able to edit the stream.

I am not unsubcribing just yet. Maybe I haven't seen the value because I haven't given it enough time. I know lifestreams are going to be important but how they are managed and controlled has only started to be explored.

Things that make you go ...Hum....

The Problem Of Building Your Digital House On Someone Else's Virtual Property Part Deux

From Jeff Jarvis:

"MySpace isn’t my space at all but Rupert’s Space and that that is its weakness. The Times reports today that MySpace is restricting users from using widgets they want on their own pages unless there’s a business deal in place."

Let's remember that Myspace might be free, but the owners of that site make A LOT of money off their users. No users...no money. No wonder all the kids I know are moving on to Facebook.

For Part One that links to the poor younggogetter who had his Myspace deleted click HERE

The Digital Search For Self

The old world says that our identity is about our passports. The new world via ReMarkk.com says something quite different:

"The Search for Identity.

We are in search of ourselves, and we find possible answers to our search for self through our interaction in community with others, through both our similarities and our distinctiveness. We are increasingly aware of the complex and multidimensional nature of identity in the modern world. We are much more than the roles and demographic slices that our companies, families and mass media would want to trap us in. We belong to many tribes simultaneously.

We are multi-dimensional beings engaged in the process of becoming."

The Web takes the notion of "finding yourself" to a whole new level. Don't miss reading the full article that was about open creative communities found here.

The Problem With Building Your Digital House On Someone Else’s Virtual Property Is...

That you don't own it. Check out what happened to this younggogetter whose myspace got up and went!

"My MySpace.com profile was recently deleted by “Tom”. I wasn’t spamming with shady porn embedded links, or phishing for private information… I was “social networking”.

Well, that's what he gets for using the site to, well use the site. Guess all you can really do for now is read the fine print until you find a way to own your own plot of virtual land....

Our DNA, Google & The Masterplan

A number of years back, I had read the copywrite application submitted by Canadian artist Marilyn Donahue in Harpers Magazine. She had copywrited her own DNA and has created a website to teach other people how to do it simply. In her own words:

"After discovering that the entire country of Iceland had given up their medical database (their medical privacy) to a drug company, I decided I wanted to create a work that would attempt to protect our own DNA."

Is she just paranoid? Check this short film giving one potential future scenario of how our networked world and the power of Google could affect even our DNA found via http://chimprawk.blogspot.com.

MASTERPLAN THE MOVIE