My very good friend, Zach Braiker, and I just had a great conversation today about the differences between the Mastercard and Visa marketing campaigns. Mastercard has the now famous, “there are some things in life money can’t buy, but for all other things there’s Mastercard” priceless campaign emphasizing that Mastercard is perfect for all those special moments in life. Visa on the other hand takes a much broader approach with the “Life Takes Visa” campaign, emphasizing that Visa is, in fact, for everything in life, not just the special moments.
Here’s the thing though, even though they happen much more frequently, I don’t care about the generic moments in my life: I simply don’t remember them. The priceless moments are the ones I look back on to laugh, cry, or reminisce over. The Mastercard ads resonate with me because not only are they hilarious, but they emphasis the special moments in my life that I care to remember. If I were to actually think about a credit card in those moments, I’d probably think of Mastercard.
Which brings me to my next point. Who the hell thinks about credit cards? Seriously, does anyone actually care if they have a Visa or a Mastercard? I might compare banks and rates and special offers (which are bank specific), but I couldn’t care less about the logo on my card. I’ve never been to a place in the US that doesn’t accept both (Europe is different and seems to have a preference for Mastercard). Do people actually think about this, or is this a case of Visa and MS maintaining consumer mind share in the face of each other’s ads? I don’t think they’re competing with each other so much as they are maintaining market share and trying to make sure that American Express doesn’t gain any at their expense.
Ever noticed how when you send an email, you almost always sign off something like “best regards, Lorenz”?
Ever noticed how when you send a message or especially a comment on a social network you don’t? Is it because our SN identities are so closely linked to our message that it becomes redundant to sign off? Or are SN communications more conversational in nature, and hence don’t warrant a sign off any more than we need to say “over and out” after each sentence when we’re chatting on the phone?
Ok, so this is meant to be a blog about business _and_ fitness, and I have yet to write anything about the latter. Here’s my first post on personal fitness: train your brain.
Your brain works like a muscle and, like any other muscle, it’s use it or lose it. Not only will exercising your brain make you smarter, but it’ll relieve stress and help you think more clearly as well. Some of my favorite ways to stay mentally fit are to play casual games and puzzles like sudoku and chess.
If you’re willing to spend some money, the absolute best place for this is Lumosity. This is basically like a web based version of the very popular Nintendo DS game, Brain Age. A bunch of neuro PhDs got together, did some research, and actually crafted a series of games to help you increase your IQ. The games are a lot of fun, and, I shit you not, you feel noticeably sharper after playing for just 10 minutes (and no, they’re not paying me to say that!). I find it’s a great way to regain focus after staring at my screen for too long all day.
I spent last weekend working with COX Radio on their huge Birthday Bash concert. The Birthday Bash is probably one of the largest “Jawaiian” (that’s Jamaican / Hawaiian) music concerts in Hawaii with about 20,000 people showing up. We set up a 12 foot jumbotron screen to let people in the audience send their cell phone photos in and get their 5 seconds of fame live during the concert. The Blue Lava team spent over 12 hours making sure everything went without a hitch and we had a great time (the free beer probably helped).
The music itself was awesome too. I’ve never been a huge island music fan, but after seeing all the bands play, I’ve developed a new found appreciation for the stuff. I might even learn how to dance to it one day.
I was in the elevator the other day and heard a couple of foreigners laughing. Isn’t it interesting how regardless of culture, language, skin color, or upbringing, there’s one thing all humans have in common: we all laugh the same way. Countries have different approaches to sex, marriage, drug use, communication, work, socializing, but they all enjoy laughter in exactly the same way.
I had an interesting debate with a good friend recently about whether people prefer to use email or social network messaging to communicate with each other. Personally, I barely know the email address of most of my friends. They’re all on MySpace or Facebook. On Facebook, I never get spam. I get a little on MySpace, but lets face it, compared to the 30 - 50 spam emails I get each day via email, the 1 or 2 MySpace webcam porn messages are not that bad. At least they come with entertaining pictures and copy.
My friend swears people still use email (yes, obviously they do). I still use email, but mostly for business and the occasional friend who hasn’t joined a social network (probably the same friend who still doesn’t have a cell phone). But for casual communication, email is all but dead - social network email is the new black.
Not satisfied with just talking about it, I decided to actually do a little research. I came across some compelling stats. First, as you might expect, teens don’t use email. They either text or social network message. Second, I ran a couple of Facebook polls to see what I’d come up with:
If you have any other evidence to support or discredit this, let me know.
UPDATE: Here’s another great article sent to me by my friend John Bower.
My good friend Zach Braiker has recently become a huge advocate of Facebook. In fact, he’s the one who’s got me all excited about it. In browsing through the Web 2.0 Entrepreneur’s group discussion forums, I haphazardly came across one of his posts and discovered one of my all time favorite quotes, by Zach himself:
“Being creative doesn’t cost a lot of money, creative people do.”
Seeing as Zach is one of the most creative and brilliant marketing minds I know, I’m thrilled to be lucky enough to get the best friend discount on his advice.
I just went Kite Surfing for the first time yesterday and it was nothing like what I expected. Since I’m pretty athletic, I expected it to be easy. It wasn’t. It was more like “kite drowning.” At the same time, I also expected it to be hard. It wasn’t. It was all about finesse and control, not strength.
If you’re looking for an exciting way to burn _lots_ of calories and spend time on the ocean getting a tan (I know, not everyone lives in Hawaii), kite surfing is the way to go. I’ve had one lesson and I already feel like I’m picking it up. There’s nothing like the feeling of controlling a huge Kite above your head. I can’t wait to actually get on the board, ride around, and do jumps. It looks exhilarating.
I’ve been using the latest product from MySkitch. Wow. What a super simple, yet highly useful little photo editing tool they’ve built. And only on the Mac too! I feel so special.
Seriously, if you ever find yourself opening up Photoshop to make simple edits, crops, screenshots, or enhancements, or posting images from your desktop to a site like Photobucket to post elsewhere, you need Skitch. It’s seriously kick ass.
Oh, and it’s themed pink too! (If you haven’t noticed, I like pink…)
We’re doing a couple of interesting projects at Kindfish right now as we work out all the kinks in the system. One of the projects was a baby search competition we helped run for a local COX Radio station. Parents would submit photos of their baby, and the cutest baby (as voted by our users) would win a couple of free tickets to the upcoming Birthday Bash concert.
Never in a million years would I have expected what happened. The day after we rolled out the competition we have 5000 new accounts, 90% of which were not legitimate. Some of the babies had over 1000 votes _overnight_. People actually started talking shit about each other’s babies. We scrambled to make unique email validation necessary for voting, but even with that implemented we still had hundreds of new accounts being created with emails like joe01@yahoo, joe02@yahoo, joe03@yahoo, etc. Unbelievable. These people must have spent all day sitting in front of their computer creating fake profiles just to vote for their baby.
I just never realized how important baby photos were. Remarkable.
