Hunt WMD

Quick! I need some ad copy!

2017-11-25T12:09:00.003-08:00

I was working for a bicycle shop a while and my boss told me that I had to create new signage so we can turn over our shoes and clothing stock quicker.

Like many retail stores, we had more demand for customer service than we had people to go around so the signage needed to be punchy and informative.

I decided on a format that included the product name, who made it and I included a product review blurb I found online. I specifically looked for product reviews from well-known periodicals.

While I found a lot of great reviews I couldn’t find a review for everything we had on hand.

What to do.

What to do.

What to do.

I couldn’t just make something up so I decided to look for some quotes about bicycles.

With a little snooping around I found some great quotes about cycling from literary sources, Hemingway mostly, and from some well-known cyclists, specifically Eddy Merckx and Jacquie Phelan.

With our new signage customers that didn’t want a hands-on approach with sales were able to help themselves and the customers that we weren’t able to help immediately were able to get a crash course in our product line.

The new signage helped with sales and we were able to clear out a lot of old stock that wasn’t moving.

Ad copy, especially online copy, needs to be short, punchy and informative.

If internal sources for ad copy, such as white papers or tech manuals aren’t available don’t be afraid to look externally.

Net Neutrality and Me; What It means for Nonprofit Marketing

2017-11-24T13:19:00.001-08:00

I’ve worked both as a freelance writer and in the nonprofit world.

As a writer I’ve been given an enormous amount of freedom to write what I like to. Other than having some stories die a shelf death or having some stories being edited for brevity I’ve experienced little in the way of anything that can be remotely construed as censorship.

I also have a background in US Constitutional law so I also understand that my freedom of expression is not absolute. For instance I can’t engage in hate speech, I can’t incite violence or encourage people to commit illegal or dangerous acts, I can’t give “material support” to domestic or foreign terrorists, not all of my speech is protected if I’m a public employee, slander, liable or defamation are not protected speech, publishing confidential material, and lastly I cannot make true threats.

If the FCC has its way freedom of speech, particularly for nonprofits may be severely curtailed. This year, FCC Chair, Ajit Pai, wants to repeal net neutrality.

In a 2010 post by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Vincent Stehle wrote:

“Why should nonprofits care about any of this?

Everyone should be concerned about the free flow of information and expression as the basis of an open society and healthy democracy. But nonprofits in particular have an even higher stake in the open Internet.

First is the obvious need to cultivate an informed electorate amid a crisis in journalism, in which newsrooms are being emptied of investigative reporters and the airwaves are filling up with harsh and partisan opinionators.

But beyond this reality, nonprofits have greatly benefited from the new information ecology, in which every organization is able to publish directly to an infinite audience of prospective supporters and contributors.”

More recently Jason Schneiderman at Nonprofit Quarterly wrote:

“In 2015, the FCC under then-chair Tom Wheeler asserted that broadband high-speed Internet access qualified as a Title II utility under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as essential to modern life as phone service or electricity. That classification prohibits ISPs from engaging in blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization of specific websites, maintaining the state known as “net neutrality.” This ruling withstood a number of legal challenges, and even as the Republicans on the Commission rallied with representatives from Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to undo it, popular support for the measure remained strong, from advocacy groups like the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Fight for the Future to Internet giants like Netflix.”

Having unrestricted access to the net means you have the same ability to reach potential donors or volunteers but having to pay more for increased access means your message may not reach your target audience and will further stress cash reserves for smaller nonprofits.

The battel to maintain net neutrality isn't over, not by a long shot so roll up your sleves and get ready, it's going to be a doozy of a fight.

Fight back here.

Contact the FCC directly here.

Zaukus Guitars Marketing Material

2017-11-21T12:12:00.003-08:00

Joseph Zaukus is a tremendously talented guitar maker but needed some help with branding and social media marketing.

Zaukus Guitars focused on custom one-offs and didn’t have a product line.

By focusing on two core models, the Supernal and the Youth, Joseph was able to decrease his production time and increase his profitability.

Powerpoint file available upon requst.

It's all X k D f . X k ; t / C » . t /; and it's that easy!

2015-04-06T14:37:00.003-07:00

"Lies, damned lies and statistics", Benjamin Disraeli

Law enforcement, marketers, social scientists, all use predictive behavioral models in order to understand future behaviors for both individuals and groups.

And if you want a cure for insomnia there are plenty of papers out there that I can recommend that will surely put you to sleep.

All kidding aside Howard D. Teten was the former head of the FBI profiling division. Teten based his pioneering work on the models established by Dr. Paul Kirk, Dr. Hans Gross and Dr. James Brussel.

When Howard Teten had joined the FBI in 1962 a criminal profile division did not exist. It wasn't untl 1973 that Howard Teten and Quantico Behavioral Science Unit instructor Patrick J. Mullany were able to test their theories in the field.

When a a seven-year-old girl was kidnapped Teten and Mullany were able to use their profile model to track down the kidnapper, David Meirhofer.

Today criminal profiling is common but during one of the earliest cases of profiling, the arrest of "The Mad Bomber" George Metesky in 1957, it must have seemed like something straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel.

George Metesky went on a sixteen year bombing spree in New York City starting 1940. Metesky eluded police for almost two decades despite sending them taunting letters in the mail.

Eventually Dr. James Brussel was called into the NY police department to help. Dr. Brussel studied "The Mad Bomber" letters and accurately predicted the suspect would be in his late forties or early fifties, was a non-native English speaker due to his lack of use of slang in the letters, was a practicing Catholic, probably from eastern Europe, and lived with an older unmarried woman that was either his sister or mother.

Dr. Brussel would work with the NYPD from 1957 to 1972 and Howard Teten would work with the FBI until 1986.

Even though compiling statistical data can be daunting, sorting through reams of information is laborious, and making sense of material is agonizing in the end it is a powerful tool.

Without accurate, reliable information you cannot make accurate decisions.

For more interesting article on the subject check out:

1. "Towards an environment-sociologic model for prediction of environmental behaviors and investigation of strategic policy alternative" by Kurosh Rezaei Moghaddam and Mahsa Fatemi

2. Interview of Former Special Agent of the FBI Howard D. Teten (1962-1986) by Stanley Pimentel

3. International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction official website.

Remember the Pet Rock and Disco?

2015-04-03T12:19:00.003-07:00

I was rich and famous once too

I’ve been toe deep in the social media pond for a little while now and the currents of tributaries change faster than a river during a flash flood. In reality what you thought was safe and a sure thing one day is quickly swept aside the next.

I was watching my incoming streams this morning and I ran across two interesting articles. The first was from Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer both writing for The Atlantic. Their piece was called “A Eulogy for Twitter; The beloved social publishing platform enters its twilight”.

Even though the article was dated from April of last year LaFrance and Meyer both spell out several trend that are clipping the wings of Twitter’s mascot “Larry’s” wings:

•Twitter users are less active than they once were.

•Twitter is following a similar trajectory as chatrooms had. They used to be the Wild West of the internet but now they have become more closely monitored making the content boring and predictable.

•Twitter has also attracted a larger amount of commercial users hocking goods and services.

•The average Twitter user is also spending less time on Twitter too so that can’t be good for ol’ “Larry” either.

There are a couple of more things going in too but like any good party it doesn’t last forever. I tell you one thing the hangover is going to be a bitch.

The second article was written by Jim Boulton for Digital Archaeology called “The Imaginary App” and is an interview with "DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid".

Paul D’Shonne “DJ Spooky” Miller lives the life of a modern day Renaissance man and is a Professor of Music Mediated Art at the European Graduate School and is the Executive Editor of Origin Magazine. Not to mention a slew of albums, mixed media work, film restoration projects and Antarctic research projects.

(Miller makes me realize I’ve also done nothing with my life).

When asked question : Why don’t app developers identify as workers and collaborate rather than compete?

Miller said;

“The market for Apps is volatile and there is extremely high compensation if you play your cards right. Of course they’re not going to identify as humble factory workers! They’re going to look at Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos etc And that too, is kind of OK. But we need new models for thinking about this kind of aspirational aesthetics. The Imaginary App was thought of as an irreverent collage of different approaches to how Apps have changed the way we look at modernity. From mathematicians like Stephan Wolfram on over to map inventors like Noel Gordon (one of the principal inventors of Google Maps) on over to art Apps like what Scott Snibbe designed for Bjork’s Biophilia App, we’re presented with a dynamically engaged portrait of App’s as they appear both in current culture, and what will be going on in the near future. You can think of The Imaginary App as the past, present, and potential of Apps.

I wanted to inject more politics into the idea that data is not neutral, there are many underlying ideologies about the way devices are put into our society. Apps are a tenuous link between platforms and portals, between ideologies and networks. Apps are just like portals – you have to be thoughtful about what path they take you on. The map is not the territory. The territory is not an App. Press play, loop, re-edit. Repeat.

The final section is about Remediations. From Digital to Tentacular, or From iPods to Cephalopods: Apps, traps and entrées without exit by Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biwas Mellamphy likens the network of smartphones to the tentacles of a massive cybernetic octopus. However simple and benign they might appear, apps are hyper-camouflaged bait in a predatory framework that aims to appropriate our identities. Apps, they suggest is short for appetizers.”

To quote Admiral Ackbar from the film “Return of the Jedi”, “It’s a trap!” Not a physical trap but an intellectual and creative one.

Personally I see a point when people are going to get tired of the online services that over promise and under deliver and will eventually find something else to do with their time.

Remember the Pet Rock and disco? Probably not. But they were big at one time too.

Design Project

2010-05-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

Occasionally a really cool design project will fall into my lap.

This one just came out of nowhere and it's still a work in progress.

Since everything is still up in the air the name of the other person who is involved with the project is purposely being left out but it'll be cool to see if the final project if completed.

Gibson USA has spent a great amount of time and money trying to drum up interest in their product line and while there has been some successes such as their artist inspired by lines other have been just stomach churning abominations that never should have seen the light of day.

I'm just waiting for either Ted McCarty or Les Paul to rise from their respective graves and give Gibson's current design teams a collective wedgie.

I mean, c'mon... is this the best you can come up with?

I just want the folks at Gibson to know that I've got plenty of time on my hands and I'm not afraid to use them.

Newspaper Collages

2010-04-30T18:26:00.000-07:00

Unused Band Graphics

2010-04-30T18:21:00.000-07:00

Unused Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld Images

2010-04-30T18:14:00.000-07:00