Archive for the ‘Irony’ tag
Corona Light Can Freshen Up Your Online Life, Too
Are you stuck in a rut? "Stan" and "Mark," the stars of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners' humorous ads for Corona Light, sure are. The beer, naturally, is pitched as the antidote—a dose of the unexpected to enliven their humdrum existences. Now, the agency has launched a follow-up in the form of a "Rut Buster!" Facebook app that lets you make and share customized video montages to encourage your friends to bust out of such monotonous routines. Recipients receive alerts on their walls and can opt to "bust their rut" by viewing the videos, then create responses or "bust out" other friends on their network. I tried it out, but quickly became overwhelmed by the broader irony of being stuck in a rut by spending too much time connected to the Internet and social media. I realized that participating in "Rut Buster!"—harmless, brand-building fun, to be sure—would just perpetuate my cyber-rut and fuel the online addiction of anyone to whom I sent videos. So, I think I'll take a walk instead. Get some sun and fresh air. Just as soon as I find my iPhone.
Is Social Media Making Us Antisocial? [INFOGRAPHIC]
Did you know that 24 percent of people surveyed in a recent poll said that they had missed witnessing important moments because they were too busy trying to write about them on their favourite social network… while they were taking place?
Ah, the irony. Of course, I’ve addressed this before: the more that you’re on Twitter talking about what you’re doing, then the less that you’re actually doing it.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Bing Is For Doing Things It Tells You Not To Do
“Bing Is For Doing” is the catchphrase being used in new ads for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But in a bit of irony, one new ad literally suggests jumping off a cliff but then warns in small print, “Do not attempt.” I first saw the ad on Sunday when watching the Mad…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
"I was just kidding"
The haute couture designer who brings out a few designs that look like they came from a truck stop.
The fancy chef who sends out a chocolate-dipped Oreo as part of dessert.
The book designer who uses Comic Sans as the type on the cover of a prize-winning novel…
In each case, they can get away with it because we know they’re capable of so much more. In each case, the irony is apparent, they’re not hacks–they’re only pretending to be hacks.
Before your digital work is shipped, you need to understand whether people will look at your blog or your lens or your ebook or your landing page and say, “hack,” or “wow.” It takes a while before you can claim your LOLcat or bizarre tweet was just a joke, not the acme of your taste.
The ironic truth about sincerity
No one cares how much you care.
That salesperson who will surely die if he doesn’t close this sale, that painter who is sweating blood to get her idea on the canvas, that student who just pulled an all-nighter…
In fact, we’re hyper alert to the appearance of caring. We want to do business with people who appear to care, who appear to bring care and passion and dedication to their work. If the work expresses caring, if you consistently and professionally deliver on that expression, we’re sold.
The truth is that it’s what we perceive that matters, not what you bring to the table. If you care but your work doesn’t show it, you’ve failed. If you care so much that you’re unable to bring quality, efficiency and discernment to your work, we’ll walk away from it.
And the irony? The best, most reliable way to appear to care when it matters–is to care.
Google AdSense Messages To Publishers: Create Google+ Page
We all know how important Google+ is to Google. Heck, we have seen the news stories recently of Googlers leaving over it.
Google is now sending messages to Google AdSense publishers as “recommendations” that they should add Google+ pages to help monetize their own web sites.
The message reads:
RecommendationsCreate a Google+ page
Creating a Google+ page brings you closer to your audience by letting you have real conversations with the right people, connecting you face to face, and making it easy for people to recommend you on Google search.
One person cited the irony in this “recommendation” saying “Worth noting that although it’s posted as a “recommendation” there’s no information or suggestion that it would impact your Adsense account in any way.”
Come on Google, relax on Google+ a bit and let the social layer socially be accepted organically. Just like how you tell webmasters to chill out on link development. Seems like these are artificial ways to boost Google+, why not make it better so people switch like you did with Google search?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Delicious Stacks Get Friendlier With Collaboration, Comments, and Privacy
Delicious has just announced 4 new features to make its stacks, or collections of links, more social. Because the only thing better than a bundle of your favorite kitten websites is bundle co-created by you and your friends. Users can now collaboratively build stacks, comment on whole stacks, respond to a stack with a stack similar to a YouTube response, and create private stacks. The features will permit new use cases like stealth cooperation and give Delicious an advantage over Pinterest which doesn’t offer private boards yet.
The collaboration feature lets you invite friends to edit your stacks. This could help teams cooperate on research, or let friends compile a set of favorite links around a topic.
Commenting on entire stacks lets you have conversations about the interconnections between links. You can also suggest links you think would enhance someone else’s stack.
Stack responses lets you battle over who can find the best content around a topic, or offer a contrasting collection. For example, if you’re worried your friends might actually buy something from their Atrocious Sweaters stack, persuade them not to ruin their image in the name of irony by responding with a stack of stylish sweaters.
Private stacks make Delicious more than just a broadcast channel for your taste. You can stealthily collect links and curate them before publishing to the world, or keep them to yourself forever. Now the links you collect on Delicious don’t all have to be things you’d want your boss or mom to see.
5 new rules for a knock-out pitch
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the agency pitch is here to stay. It starts with the RFP, moves into the RFP Response and hopefully ends with the opportunity to pitch in person. It’s an antiquated process that has seen little change in the past few decades. You bust your butt, spending good time and money, putting together a proposal in the hopes of making finals and having the chance to pitch your services and ideas to key decision makers. It’s like applying to college — you put yourself out there and someone else decides if you are worthy. The irony is that the clients dislike the process as much as the agencies, yet no one is willing to change it; at least for now.
So, before you make your next pitch take into account these three assumptions:
1. Before you even walk into the room, the client has most likely has made up their mind
2. If there are 10 people on the client side, eight do not want to be there
3. For the client, a pitch is just another meeting, and we all know how we feel about meetings
So, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you stand out from the competition and win? Here are five new rules to make sure your pitch is not just a formulaic, run of the mill boring meeting, but a performance that leaves them begging for more!
How to Develop a Distinct Writing Style as Blogger
Everyone around has a blog these days. So, quite expectedly, competition has stiffened a lot in the past few years and newbie bloggers now have to work really hard to shine as a successful blogger.
But churning out the same old articles in different formats and style is not going to work anymore, since the same policy has been adopted by scores of other bloggers.
So, with this tactic you are highly unlikely to cut any creative ice with your audience. The only option available is to develop a distinct writing style that acts as a signature quality for your blog. But this is easier said than done. To make your task easier, here we are going to share some tips that may help you develop a unique writing style:
Use Metaphors and Similes:
Use of metaphors and similes are a great way to make people engaged to your content. By using them, a complex subject can be explained in a relatively layman’s term. It is like helping people come to term with a new concept by casting the new concept in a concept that they are already familiar with. But use of metaphors demands a certain level of authority on language and if you feel that you have the authority, you can easily develop a unique writing style which is unlikely to be copied by a new entrant.
Add Fun:
By adding some fun elements in to your writing, you will be able to develop a completely new writing style. However, you do not need to stick to fun only, you can add some elements of pun, satire, irony etc and each of them has their distinct flavor, which will help you further enrich your writing style. However, an over dose of humor and other similar elements might turn out to be disaster. People like to come across funny elements while reading a blog post, but there is no need to spoil the broth by overdoing things.
Be Succinct:
People do not have much time go through a long and boring article. So, rather than scaring people with a 5000 words article, you should try to sum things up in 350 words short articles without rubbing on a particular point unnecessarily. Try to keep points short, simple and do not elaborate things unless it is necessarily. If you can manage to follow these simple suggestions, you will be able to develop a unique writing style for sure.
Read, read and Read:
Try to read as many novels, magazines and journals as possible. Follow their writing style and slowly, you will be able to develop a completely new style. Reading others article will have an overpowering effect on your writing style without yours being aware of it. So, keep reading and a new writing style will be in the making that will definitely have a positive impact on your blogging career.
Proofread:
Yes, this is something you are habituated with. You must proofread not to find out errors but to find out whether a particular sentence looks ordinary or needs to be spruced up or pruned a little bit. With these kinds of minor tweaks, you will be able to develop a truly unique writing style.
How to Develop a Distinct Writing Style as Blogger is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2011. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.
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Shadow Profiles
Amen to this piece written by Bobbie Johnson on GigaOm concerning how certain sites scrape publicly available data from Facebook and Twitter to create ‘profiles’ of people without their permission. The focus of the article is on the site AllThis which allows people to bid for other people’s time. Their creation of so-called ‘shadow profiles’ without permission or notification has annoyed a number of people (including the founder of Instapaper). But it also mentions another notable perpetrator: Klout.
A while back, Rohn pointed out that Klout had created a profile of me. Look, here it is. Thing is, I’ve never signed up to the service and have little interest in doing so. So I e-mailed them to ask them to take it down. They responded that as I hadn’t registered on the site, I had to go to a link deep down on their privacy page where I would need to “provide credentials that allow us to verify you as the rightful owner of the profile in question”. That turned out to be by using my Twitter or Facebook account. As the profile is not of my making, I didn’t see why I should do this.
I wasn’t intending to write about this, but it’s an example of the wider privacy creep that seems to be taking place right now. It’s a rather cavalier three-steps-forward-and-one-step-back-approach to personal data and it’s an example of the worst kind of marketing. As the piece on GigaOm points out, the irony is that this uniquely anti-social practice is being conducted by companies that all claim to be ‘social’.
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