Pop Culture

When Facebook Launched: Marketing In 2004

Facebook celebrates its 10th birthday this week, which made me wonder: What did marketing in 2004 look like? I was there, of course. Maybe you were, too. But time has a funny way of recasting memories. (Which explains how my siblings and I sometimes have annoyingly different takes on our childhood.) In marketing and perhaps in life, it’s easy to notice how much things have changed. In February of 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm room, it entered what seemed at the time like a crowded social media world. Friendster, Classmates.com, Habbo, and MySpace all preceded Facebook. And remember FullCircle? Me, neither. It seems cute and provincial to think of that time before Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vine, Slideshare, and the rest as “crowded,” doesn’t it? This was before content marketing was a thing; before Big Data was our big daddy; before his first infographic was […]

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Joint Effort: Why Ben & Jerry’s Won Social Media Last Week

Last week, Colorado legalized recreational marijuana. And Ben & Jerry‘s brilliantly tweeted this on Thursday, January 2: BREAKING NEWS: We're hearing reports of stores selling out of Ben & Jerry's in Colorado. What's up with that? pic.twitter.com/zBs8nyxZWn — Ben & Jerry's (@benandjerrys) January 2, 2014 The tweet has been retweeted 9,584 times and favorited 5,750 times, to date. There are either a lot of stoners on Twitter, or it’s a great example of how to be engaging on social platforms. Or maybe both. “We didn’t plan to jump on Colorado’s news, but the idea came up during a meeting and we thought it was very funny,” says Mike Hayes, who handles social media for Ben & Jerry’s, based in Burlington, Vermont. “Because of the team we’ve developed here at Ben & Jerry’s over the last year, we were able to execute it within a few hours.” It’s not just that

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The Best Worst Words of 2013

The school that comes on my radar exactly once a year, Lake Superior State University, today released its 39th annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness. Or, as I’ve renamed it, the Best Worst Words of 2013. LSSU releases on New Year’s Eve a list of words compiled from a list of nominations submitted mostly through its website and Facebook page. The list is closing in on its 1,000th word banishment. “Banishment” is, of course, merely suggested. Language is a fluid thing, and also personal and ephemeral. Why does one word culturally ignite while another does not? For example, “selfie” is the number-one worst word, according to the LSSU list. Yet my inability to make “us-ie” happen—to describe a group selfie—is one of my biggest disappointments of 2013. Here’s the LSSU list with its explanations (in quotes), some of them

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Justine Sacco: When Bad Gets Ugly

So now the news of Justine Sacco’s moronic tweet heard round the world is well-documented: The top PR person for InterActive Corp. (but otherwise unknown) Sacco stupidly tweets an offensive update (now deleted): “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white! —Justine Sacco (@JustineSacco) December 20, 2013” Her employer, IAC—a New York media company that owns the Daily Beast, Vimeo, CollegeHumor, About.com, Match.com and Ask.com, among others—issues a preemptive statement distancing themselves from her: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC,” the company said. “This is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action.” Sacco was on a long, apparently Wi-Fi-free British Airways flight from London to South Africa. And in the 11 hours it took for her to arrive, a kind of Twitter mob formed—mocking her, condemning her, threatening violence, and looting her other

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Tell True Stories Well: Hire an Artist

The best content isn’t storytelling. The best content is telling a true story well. It’s a subtle difference. But the creators of the best content of 2013 contemplated not just what story was worth telling, but how to tell it. And one way to do that is to hire an artist. I’m tempted to insert something here about how stories have a remarkable capacity to stir our souls, to connect us, to shape a kind of shared experience. But since you are human, you know that already, right? Increasingly, the best marketing groks that, too, and so this year we’ve seen an incredible abundance of inspired brand storytelling. But we’ve also seen some terrible efforts. Because coming up with your bigger story is (relatively) easy, yet telling a true story in an interesting way “turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat,” says the writer

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Ann Handley is not impressed. (The back story.)

Dani Hagen had the idea late last week to create a MarketingProfs version of the Olympic-inspired meme, “McKayla is not impressed.” Because I live under a rock, apparently, I had only a vague notion of what Dani was referring to. It turns out that she was referring to US gymnist McKayla Maroney’s sour expression after settling for a silver medal in the women’s vault final, which promptly birthed the Tumblr that transported the 16-year-old’s hilariously sour face to places far away from London. Like the Sistine Chapel. Into an Andy Warhol painting. And what not.

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Toy Story 3: ‘Contains Mild Thematic Elements Not Appropriate for Older Viewers’

Dear Motion Picture Association of America: I’m freshly back from the theater after seeing Toy Story 3. One question: A G-rating? What were you thinking? I haven’t been this disturbed since the Turkish prison scenes in Midnight Express. The first two Toy Story movies centered on the happy relationship between a young boy named Andy and his toys. In Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3, Andy is packing for college, and the story leaves the toys to fend for themselves in a world where there’s no one to care for them. It’s not that the movie was mis-rated. No sex. No violence. It is a kid’s movie. Orrrrr…. is it? Because here’s what happens: Abandoned by a grown-up Andy, the desperate, panicked toys have to not only find a new home, but also a way to recapture their raison d’etre… The simple joy and richness of being loved best by a child.

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Today’s Guessing Game: What Is It?

Remember AOL disks? If you owned a mailbox in the late 1990s or early-2000s, you know what I mean, because America Online‘s aggressive direct mail strategy probably distributed CD-ROMs and diskettes into it with irritating frequency. More than a billion disks were mailed between the late 1990s and 2006, when AOL stopped the mass mailing. Or mass irritation. However you look at it. In fact, the end of that era likely came without you being aware that is was, in fact, the end of an era. But that’s how evolution is, right? One day you have to bungee-wrap your trash cans against the bands of wild animals foraging outside your cave. And the next thing you know you can’t remember the last time you saw a mastodon happen by. Things change. Technology evolves. And suddenly you’re dealing with a whole different set of problems. When was the last time you

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Scavenged

We set off on foot, the six of us, under an azure sky as big as the ocean. The breeze off the water smelled of salt and September, and the dune grasses bent toward each other, whispering the news that fall was coming. It was a picture-perfect, precious August day, the kind of day that a talented someone with a camera might photograph and print onto a postcard, which someone else might then buy to send to a friend, to show how big the Maine sky can look over an endless sea; and how the line from the midday crowd snakes lazily out of the soda fountain, through a squeaky screen door propped open all day, in turn, by the backside of whoever happens to be waiting for service next; and the way the wild beach roses that grow straight out of sand (impossibly) cascade over a split-rail fence, tumbling

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