Tag: guesswhatelsesoundsvapid

Update on critical talking points

All:

First I want to thank the entire team for the hard work and dedication you’ve shown this year. As we approach the holidays, the Management Team wishes to express thankfulness and emphasize that the entire org chart is vital to our success.

It’s time once again to review our key focus matrix and hone in on the heart. The points we’re about to list are non-negotiable and I can’t estimate their importance. Let’s hammer in with a laser-like focus on these.

  • The threat of refinancing: how lower rates drag us all down.
  • The hidden links between skateboarding and Hepatitis C: do we know enough?
  • Zoning reforms necessary to encourage urban fish farming.
  • End ethnic set-asides in the mortuary industry.
  • Phrenology in the public schools: is Medicare responsible?
  • Hogs for Heroes: soldiers need to know we have a pig for them.
  • An America Without Simony: If not now, when?
  • An end to subsidized quahog farming is the beginning of free trade in bivalves.

All of us need to drill down into the meat with a laser-like focus here. Let’s stay on message and be forceful. The Management Team knows we can exceed our own expectations, and we expect that.

If you have any questions or comments, speak right up! My door is always open.

The Mgmt

GONE VIRAL IN THE WILD FRONTIER OF YOUTH ORIENTED ONLINE MARKETING

Here is a paragraph from TechCrunch today:

Sprout Commerce, the company behind MyPickList, has launched a new product today, called FavoriteThingz. A widget for social networking sites like MySpace, FavoriteThingz lets users identify their favorite bands, movies and other branded products and display those brands in a nice looking slideshow. Their readers can click through to purchase the same goods and affiliate revenue is split between FavoriteThingz and widget publishers.

You can’t say that paragraph without your soul leaving your body, so I don’t recommend reading it aloud. I’m sure glad that I will be allowed to display my favorite branded products and split the revenue with someone for displaying my favorite branded products on branded websites with co-branding.

Here is the second paragraph of that article:

After identifying a product category, users select between hundreds of bands, for example, with press photos to display and affiliate revenue percentage listed next to each. Widgets can be customized a bit, which is liable to be appealing. Press photos can also be replaced by any image you chose – which seems like a branding disaster waiting to happen.

Oh it sure does. Wait until the Somethingawful Goons get hold of that. Goatse always wins, and half the Internet is going to end up joining the Lemon Party. I am glad, though, that I’ll be able to choose from musical artists by affiliate revenue percentage just like the big record companies do, instead of just doing something stupid and Web 1.0 like listening to music I like.

I’m going to skip a paragraph here and go right to the end:

Will this type of service take off? Sprout Commerce and many other people think that social commerce is set to be big in the future, not because of the affiliate revenue it generates for users but because of the existential opportunity to associate ourselves with brands. Sounds pretty vapid to me, but if brand association is an important part of being a teenager then FavoriteThingz could be a winner at monetizing it.

This service is easy to use and the widget can look quite nice. Its success will probably come down to marketing. Who can guess what will go viral in the wild frontier of youth oriented online social networking?

I already have a lot of existential opportunities. I can, for example, die. Also I can reinvent myself consciously in every moment in a world without a priori meaning, without God, without others. But in the end, as Kierkegaard and Camus both said, it comes down to marketing.

The last sentence of the article is also, of course, the last sentence in Beckett’s Happy End. Or at least it should be.