Tag Archives: cultural change

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Relative Technology

TWO MENFor two years in the early 1990’s, I lived in Bingi, a small village about 10 miles off the main dirt road that ran from Rutshuru to Butembo through the Kivu region of the Congo.  As any Peace Corps Volunteer can tell you, the term, ‘surreal’ becomes an everyday word.  What planet is this?   Only wispy shortwave broadcasts remind you of Earth.  Even the most well-to-do people seem impoverished by our standards, and since the natural and man-made disasters in this region are well documented, I can assure you that nothing has improved in the eastern Congo.

You won’t find a single bar of cell coverage.  There is no electricity.  Friends are still dying from Malaria and AIDS.  If they had social media, they would’ve added Fear-of-Death-by-Roving-Militias as a Life Event to their Facebook Page.  Generally, there has been very little added comfort through advancing technology in the Third World.MAMMA WORKING

Yet, these people still plant, grow, and harvest all of their own food.  If there is any excess, they barter for something they need.  They re-purpose tin cans as cups and rags as soccer balls.  In other words, they use sustainable, green-like technologies.

For most of us, no electricity would soon mean… no food.  But what does no electricity mean for the third world?  Well… pretty much business as usual…  no phones, no lights, and no hash-tag anything.  They would still laugh, cry, get married, have kids and grand-kids, CATand then die.  How important is this electricity you speak of?

The night sky in Bingi was amazing.  No light pollution meant that you could see or imagine every star in the universe.  The Milky Way ran from horizon to horizon.

The stars are visible because there’s no technology.  But you’re reading about them… because there is.

Surreal should be an everyday word.

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Digital Media Strategy. Do You Have One?

Web Site, Facebook Page, Blog, Twitter Account, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest…yadda yadda… Check, Check, and Check.  By now, most companies have decided to which social media platforms they will be committed.  They’ve  decided how analytics might be the measurement of success, and have staffed the marketing team with someone who focuses solely on social media, right?  Right?  Let’s play a game…

STRATEGOAt some point, your next VP of Marketing will probably have been a Director of Social Media someplace.  End of story.  The biggest measurable change in a company’s inside marketing operation over the next few years, will have come from social site management.   Most CEO’s have held the VP of Marketing title at one time.  Do the math.  Sooner or later your boss will most likely have been “That college kid who played around on Facebook for two years.”

Here are four things you might consider when implementing a Digital Media Strategy for your organization.

  1. Platform.  Sites used to distribute information and link potential clients/supporters.
  2. Content.  The information being presented at these sites.
  3. Frequency.  How often the message is posted.
  4. Organizational Guidelines.  Who has the responsibility for creating content?  Who has approval and accountability?  When interaction is encourgaed with people outside the organization, who determines appropriate dialog?

Mud-Hut Studios can help you with all of the above.  However, eventually the biggest concerns we hear from clients are regarding content.  What stories should we tell?  What format should we use to tell these stories?  How do we visualize the content? (see Developing a Marketing Script)

We have much experience with content production, and we believe that consistent, branded messages are the key to your marketing plan.  What do your clients need to hear?  What do your potential clients want to hear?  What do you want to say?

Let’s talk about how our inexpensive Impact Media might help you.

 

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Ripping the Phone Book in Half

PHONE BOOKSo many changes in just a few years!  I have to shake my head in wonder at some of this.  I know businesses that were paying over $1000 a month for yellow page ads.  Now let’s be clear, people traditionally USED yellow page ads and this expenditure was probably justified.  Ironically, some of the last consistent advertisers were pizza shops… many people still used the phone book to order pizza… now we can basically text and pay for orders from our phone.  So, how does a company reach people that no longer use phone books?  Is there a way to spend money on marketing that has a chance on reaching an audience?  What does $12k buy you these days?

As I stated in my article, Digital Dog Years, the world is split into two categories; things you can do on your handheld device and then… everything else.  Are there things that your firm can put online that could provide consistent information to your potential clients/partners?  After all, normal business hours don’t apply if we’re all connected to each other all the time.  Website FAQ’s, Articles, and YouTube videos can answer most of the same questions your staff normally answers during the day.  We might even argue that it can be more effective.  People are used to media telling them why they should buy from the advertiser.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s on TV or YouTube.  It takes pressure off your sales rep too.

And, by the way, $12k buys you alot of media production these days.  I have clients who’ve committed to putting their entire product line in short Impact Media clips on YouTube.  Not only will they save money this year, they won’t have to update the media for some time.  AND instead of a marketing expense, these clips become company assets.

RIP!

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Can You Afford Paper?

LITTLE KIDThere was a time in our history when paper was too expensive for the average writer.  Paints and canvas were an indulgance for the rich; materials were simply too costly.  It’s crazy to think that these items were for the elite, not the everyday artist.

Prior to the 1990’s, the equipment used in recording studios was so expensive that musicians were paying more than $100/hour to get the use of a facility that owned some of it.  In fact, time was so expensive in the early days that only well capitalized record companies could afford to rent the studios for the musicians.  The rate included the studio engineer who, by the way, most likely had a college degree in electrical engineering.

Video equipment followed the same plot line.  Before the early 2000’s, Only TV stations and high-end independents with rates to match could afford the equipment necessary to produce professional looking videos.

Today, with a credit card and stops at a big box electronics retailer and a music store, you can take home enough equipment to do both jobs.  Hey, pick up some paint and paper and you can be a writer and an artist too!  I’m being facetious.  The point is this; if you think that media communication is important enough to do it regularly, than you need to consider doing it yourself.

Ian Kanski from IMR Digital and I have discussed this many times.  He believes that once technology can be placed directly into the hands of creative people, everything changes.  The story teller, the artist, and the musician need no go-between.  Once they understand the tools, they can begin presenting their vision.

Sometimes technology learning curves require patience and practice.  Just because we can go buy a Fender Stratocaster at any music store doesn’t mean we’ll be Jimi Hendrix.  So before we set up media production in that empty bedroom/cubicle by HR, there are a few questions that I usually ask my clients;

  1. Do you have a creative person on your staff that would be interested in this type of role part time?  Maybe they have media experience.  Maybe they think it would be fun.
  2. Do you have a digital media strategy that includes the need for professional final products?  Hey, smart phones do a great job of taking pictures and capturing video.  Audio is another story, but if short, regular FB posts are your objective, then good audio may not be necessary.
  3.  Is there a way that Mud-Hut Studios can help you set up your studio cube, train personnel, or even provide on-site production/examples for you?  I am happy to work myself out of a job… I’m used to it!
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Little House on the Scary. A Brief History.

FIREPLACE FINALHow far back in time would we have to travel to find our families gathered around a fire?  It would have been a near daily occurrence. fire had warmth, light and was basically the stove.  As education became more common, male family members may have taken turns reading from the bible or borrowed novels by fire light.  Eventually even the girls were allowed to go to school, and they participated.  It’s not too hard to visualize this picture.  If we haven’t been camping, we’ve certainly seen examples of early living in movies.  Versions of this family gathering played for centuries around the globe and it certainly still exists today in much of the third world.

Urban homes began installing electricity in the early decades of the 20th century.  The first radio broadcast was in 1920 and by 1922 there were 600 radio stations.  While probably in the same room as the fire place (central heating didn’t become a common goal until the RADIO1930’s), the radio caused the family to lean in together to hear the static, words, and music.  The radio had replaced the fire as the central gathering point.

In the 1950’s the television replaced the hulking radios in the family room.  We moved as a group from the dinner table to watch Gunsmoke.  Whether we really liked the programming or not was irrelevent.  The TV was the new fire and like the vacuum tube radio technology before it, you could even say it glowed…

Whether the family gatherings were mandatory or not could be argued, but it was probably punishment to be banished from them.

Today, If your family consistently  eats together around a table, I congratulate you.  If you move en masse to a family room, I envy you.  If by chance you then regularly carry on meaningful conversations, I gape at you.

Everyone has their own TV; we can access the world from any room in our home via wireless link; and if you’re reading this, I guarantee that you have used electronics to communicate with another member of your household who was somewhere in the same living space.

Here’s the undeniable irony;  We are more connected now than ever before.  Despite the weirdness of texting someone in the same house, it doesn’t matter whether they’re even in the same state.  It feels the same… like they’re under your roof.  This is why anybody can do business with anybody.  We’re all just settin’ ’round a bigger fire.

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Digital Dog Years

The processor in the IPhone 4s is 100 times more powerful than the Intel 8088 CPU in the original IBM PC.

Yawn…  Well of course it is.  We’re old farm hands at technology change and that farm’s been bringin’ in a personal computing crop for 30 years.  I get it.

The reason we should stop right where we stand in the middle of the field during harvest time is this:  When was the last time you burst through the front door with a new piece of technology and exclaimed, “It’s twice as fast as my old machine, and only cost half as much!”  Has it been two years?  Five years?  More?  We don’t BEAUTIFUL NESSIE FINALtalk about hardware technology advancement any more.  We talk about applications.  We’re concerned about what we DO with our new toys.  This represents a MAJOR shift in focus.  Think about what first time users (aren’t many around any more) say when they show you their new smart phone…  “I can do email, Facebook, Twitter, text, watch video, TAKE video, scan bar codes, get recipes, Skype, and… I can even make phone calls.”

We don’t mention “the Internet” anymore.  We can do ANYTHING we want to with music.  Well… you get the picture (and don’t forget to take that picture and share it with your phone).  Our lives are now broken down into to two categories…Things that CAN be done on our smart phone, and things that CANNOT be done on our smart phone.

Here’s the thing.  The introduction of the original IPhone (which arguably ushered in this era) was a minute ago in 2007.  What makes this so important is that it’s more than good ol’ advancing technology; we are witnessing CULTURAL change.  The way in which we consume information has changed.  Has your business kept pace?

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Media, Meteor, Meatiest

GROMMES PRECISION WEBMud-Hut will be 20 years old in October of 2012.  I recently finished my fourth major studio upgrade, and it gave me a reason to think about the amazing experiences I’ve had.  Five different computers and operating systems (starting with DOS), a music industry that imploded on itself, and cell phones that record with better quality than the equipment I started with, seems incredible.  The hundreds and hundreds of releases on cassettes, vinyl, CD’s, DVD’s, and USB drives, are impressive, but what really excites me are the thousands of awesome clients I’ve met.  I’m humbled by the number of talented and hilarious people I’ve worked with.
Sure, I could recall the tale about the all-nighter spent flashing the ROM on my first CD burner from my Window’s 95 platform, or that this is my fifth major web design, but it doesn’t compare to the incredible people I’ve met.  From drug dealers and their posse’s to Baptist ministers and their bibles, “I’ve had a most righteous journey, braw!”
One time, I had a band that got so drunk that the bass player started crying during the mix down.  “I’m sorry!” he sobbed.  “I just played so bad today…I let you guys down”.
A. There was nothing wrong with his playing.  B. If there was, nobody else in the group would have been able to catch it.  They finished three cases of beer and had purchased more.  I put a cap on alcohol consumption simply by recounting this story to subsequent clients.
Then there was the burned out bass player who sat on the couch in the studio studying an apparent age-appropriate book from my coffee table, “Where’s Waldo?”.  He proudly announced to us that he had just found Waldo “Three times in a row!”.  When we realized that he had done this while staying on the same page, we became absolutely incapacitated with laughter.  There were literally guys laying on the floor.
As I said, the best part is the people!