On the afternoon of July 13, Revolution Strategy accepted a softball challenge from the HMCS Brunswicker. The competition was tough and reputations were on the line.
Revolution, sporting some fierce eye black and chewing on nature’s best flavoured sunflower seeds, fought to the bitter end losing by a measly 1 run which is pretty great considering our team of 10 consisted of a couple of “never played before”, a handful of “haven’t played since junior high school”, and 3 professional “play-ball-four-times-a-week” players.
(I might add that the HMCS Brunswicker plays some variation of a sport weekly and have had the opportunity to play softball this season a few times so they should have buried us…and in case you missed in my opening paragraph, they won by a MEASILY 1 run.)
Highlights of the game – Kay breaking out her superior pitching skills (aw yeah!), Laura not only making bat-to-ball contact, and not only making it on base, but scoring a crucial run, not to mention Kylie’s bases empty grand slam WOO HOO! All supported by Kayte’s amazing catching skills - surely some of the best from that day.
Good times were had by all! Never fear, the famed Revolution softball team will be making a stop to softball fields near you to sign “hot off the press” softball cards.
In marketing, we talk a lot about understanding the product or service we’re selling, and also understand who it is we are selling it to.
But it occurs to me in terms of marketing on the web, we don’t talk enough about understanding the existing business processes and how web and social media might integrate with those processes. People go to the web to DO things — connect, be entertained, accomplish some task. On the web, people go to the properties and channels that let them do the things they need to do the fastest, easiest, and most intuitive way.
“The question was how can broke economies lend money to other broke economies who haven’t got any money because they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent to the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent it to them in the first place because the broke economy can’t pay it back.”
Twitter finally started selling something today. It’s called ‘Promoted Tweets’, and what the first phase means is that some Tweets will be paid to appear at the top of some search results pages. This would be similar to paying Google to appear the top of search results.
It’s launching initially with just Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony, and Starbucks, but I expect a self serve option like Google Ads or Facebook ads will follow not far behind.
The Museum of Modern Art’s department of Architecture and Design has acquired the @ symbol - a 1971 work by Ray Tomlinson. This article offers an interesting discussion on the symbol’s origins, meanings and relevance in today’s world.
Seth Godin had a great piece today on companies that don’t react fast enough to a changing marketplace. Really what he’s discussing in his examples, at least, is a changing platform for delivery of either applications or content.
In terms of the clients that I advise on being online every day, mostly Atlantic Canadian businesses, the biggest platform change happening right now is the shift to mobile, or more accurately what I call the pervasive web–ways to interact with web based technologies on an array of ever present devices and screen sizes. I’d argue that companies with websites and an online presence who aren’t seriously considering what they can be delivering to clients on mobile platforms are falling behind.
The pervasive web isn’t something we need to worry about for the next 6 months or a year. It’s here now. Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are seeing more users from mobile devices than from the traditional desktop based web right now.
