Attack of the 50-Foot Woman star died at 82 completely alone: Mummified body of former Playboy playmate Yvette Vickers found in her Benedict Canyon home:
With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.
A great book about the breakdown of American community is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. The author provides an interesting analysis about U.S. society during the last century and last 50 years. Of course this has implications for marketing. Putnam examines the causes and effects of the fact that in the 1950s, bowling leagues, PTAs, church groups, and general neighborly interaction was very popular, while nowadays we spend a fraction of the time we used to spend socializing (and voting or participating in community).
Vickers is not the first elderly person to pass away unnoticed.
But a less dramatic form of loneliness pervades people of all ages; it is disguised as complete connectedness.
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? New research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.
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Expand your customer base to form lifelong brand loyalists, increasing average selling price and frequency by decreasing price sensitivity while garnering evangelists to promote your brand through word of mouth. That’s the goal of marketing.
Gamification
I started playing My Coke Rewards in December 2007. I usually enter codes for 2 liter bottles of pop (worth 3 points) or 12 pack cans (9 points). After almost five years, I have about 1,050 points. I don’t cheat or buy codes online. (Yes, there is a black market for Coke Rewards codes. Much like property swapping during the McDonald’s Monopoly game.)
I’ve amassed my points organically. I keep playing because I’m a consumer who has been gamed, because I expect a great prize when I reach a high point level, and because Coke accomplished their goal: I am more engaged in the brand and spend more time on their site.
... read more Post a comment (0)It was a jumbled Nappy mess. In 2002, the music industry was fumbling as online piracy and the loss of control over releases, quality, and theft threatened their bottom line. The major music companies couldn’t get their hardware and software silos to work together. In software, Sony and Universal had PressPlay and AOL Time Warner/Bertelsmann/EMI’s creation with RealNetworks was MusicNet. These were two of the primary subscription services. You didn’t own the music; you rented it. And most mp3 players were clunky, overly complex, and poorly integrated with software.
Apple had released the first generation iPod in 2001. But the 2003 release of the iTunes Music Store, introduced a new, consumer-centered concept for distributing music digitally. While artists frequently maintain that the proper experience of their music is to listen to an entire album in order, we all know that record labels typically release just a few good songs on an album. (Except for Florence + the Machine’s Ceremonials, on which every single song is good (as far as the last five years are concerned).) Steve Jobs and his team at Apple asked why it had to be that way.
Many Instagramers have a burning question:
If I like then unlike a photo, will the user who posted the photo know?
This is a follow-up to my Instagram Privacy Tips and FAQ post, which received many excellent questions. The answer to this like/unlike mystery is worthy of its own post because it deals with the concepts of push (notification outside of the app) versus pull (user activity/refreshes within the app).
Can the other user tell I liked their photo if I unlike it afterward?
Scenarios:
- Recipient has push notifications on (regardless of IG app running or not): like notification received
- Recipient has push notifications off and IG app actively in use: like notification received
- Recipient has push notifications off and IG app open but not actively in use: like notification not received
- Recipient has push notifications off and IG app not open: like notification not received
Garry Kasparov said,
The stock market and the gridiron and the battlefield aren’t as tidy as the chessboard, but in all of them, a single, simple rule holds true: make good decisions and you’ll succeed; make bad ones and you’ll fail.
It is that simple. Stop your immediate human reaction of searching for qualifiers to reject this statement. That is your ego.
Sometimes a decision seems good at the time and turns out to be bad. So define decisions as good or bad based on ultimate outcome, not on present circumstances. This leaves less room for excuses. But Kasparov’s logic is not about ego, it’s formulaic. We only read into it from an ego perspective when we have failed.
You have to operationally define good and bad for yourself. If you don’t consider it failure to make decisions that seem good at the time but are bad in the end, you will be forgiving of yourself and others forever. It is the sting of a really bad decision that incites true investment in making the next right decision at the moment with what information is available. It makes you look harder for the answer. Otherwise, you never fail; you are a victim of circumstance. Nothing is risked. Material may be gained, but the outcome of the game cannot be interpreted as anything but a loss, strictly speaking.
I reveal the mysteries of Instagram‘s inner workings. Some nuances to privacy settings are unclear on Instagram Help, so let’s shed some light. Skip to ii. Privacy below if you know enough about account management and third party Instagram websites.
i. Instagram FAQ
1. Can I have multiple usernames?
Yes. Each must be associated with a different email address.
2. Can I toggle between my usernames on the iPhone app?
No, you have to log out and log in to switch your profile. Here are tips on using Dropbox and Fotogramme to make toggling less painful.
3. Can I see Instagram pictures online?
Yes. Some are directly uploaded to Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous etc. But if a user simply tweets a link to the IG picture, you can see it by clicking the link (or in twitter.com’s native display). However, you won’t be able to login and Like or comment. To do this:
4. Can I Like and comment Instagram pictures online while being logged into and able to manage my IG account?
Yes. For this, I like statigr.am best. There are several other third party Instagram services. This post covers the top 10, however I’ll leave out the cat-related and meaningless competition-based ones in my list.These are the other two sites with functionality closest to the Instagram iPhone app:
A. Ink361 (formerly Inkstagram) Login to this web-based version of Instagram. You can do everything you can on the iPhone app except add new pictures.
B. Insta-great Login to see Instagram photos, follow/unfollow users, or to like photos. Filter photos by dates, users, or tags. You can only view one picture in full size at a time.
To see IG photos in a stream or grid, try the web gallery Instagrid.
ii. Privacy Tips
You can block a user. This means that even if they are following you, they will not see your photos in their Instagram feed, nor will your actions (commenting, liking) show up in their News – Following feed. However, they can still see your photos in other ways: If you tweet or post a link to another social network when you share an IG photo, they can click it and see the photo.
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Impress Your Audience
Last week, I had to create a presentation about digital marketing. The thought of slaving over yet another PowerPoint made me cringe. I had heard of Prezi.com, an online zooming presentation creation tool. Although it would take a few hours to really learn Prezi, I decided the investment would pay off when I presented a PowerPoint on steroids.
Prezi
It took me about three hours to learn the ropes of the zoom tools, the frames, the objects, and the paths. I was able to select a theme with colors and fonts, then modify the CSS to use my company’s color codes. The biggest hurdle was breaking out of my longstanding .ppt slide paradigm. I’ll never go back.
Prezi is all Flash and you can import Powerpoint or Keynote slides. On your canvas, a massive grid, add objects and organize them in any array or direction, add visible and hidden frames, and don’t worry about matching sizes of images and fonts. After adding objects, you create a path (progression) by clicking on each unit of text, image, video, or a frame. Click on an object to zoom to it or click the outside of the frame around the object to zoom to the center of the frame.
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