I Think I understand the Hipster Trend

So, today I was on a walk around Toronto and as usual, saw a lot of hipsters along my journey. While looking at a semi-cute hipster girl I had an epiphany; I finally understood this hipster trend thing.

A little while ago the hot trend was to look like you just came out of a pop video. Girls dressed like pop princesses and guys looked like they wanted to be in N'Sync. The problem with this was you actually had to be a semi-good looking person to really pull off the look. Girls could buy the clothes, cut and dye their hair the right way, wear a lot of make up, but if you weren't a good looking person anyways it wouldn't help.

Hipster style is different though. It's kind of about looking frumpy and like you're not trying even though you are. I think it's caught on though because it's leveled the playing field. Hot girls can wear the style and still be hot. But, on the flip side the not-as-attractive people can also wear the style and the "I'm not trying to look good" look helps bump them up a bit. Like I see girls who are only semi-cute but the look they have going sometimes helps to bump them up a bit.

However, for the record, I still don't support the hipster movement.

Now, here's some hipster music I can stand:

40deuce

Building My Personal Brand

In my last post I mentioned that I was starting a new book called "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success", and I'd like to explain why.

As you may have deduced with your superior intellect, my real name isn't "40deuce", although it's a possibility for my child (kidding). I came up with the name a long time ago. It comes from my lucky number 42 (and yes, it was my lucky number before I read "The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" although that was a fantastic stroke of fate), and I just though changing the 2 to "deuce" made it sound cooler.

At first, I was just going to use it as a business name. I was going to have a 40deuce empire! 40deuce Media, 40deuce Records, 40deuce Films, 40deuce Clothing, 40deuce whatever, etc. A little while after that I decided to use it in an email address just because I couldn't think of anything else and didn't want to go with just my real name (how boring). Later it just became a screen name for me so I could log into all kinds of websites and not really worry about forgetting what name I came up with for this site.

At first I never really considered anything about using the alias, but then people on Twitter (where of course it's my handle) started addressing me with lines like "hey deuce" as if it was my real name. I thought it was a little strange, but I understood why they were doing it. It didn't quite click in my head yet that I had started building a personal brand.

A little while after that I decided to get some business cards made up for networking purposes. I put all the usual title, contact and website info on one side, but had to think of something to put on the other side. I decided that I should just put a big 40deuce on the back side. That way I could also tell people that they can find me on Twitter with that name, but I also figured it worked since I plan on calling any business I start 40deuce.

While at a networking party for young business minded people here in Toronto known as #GenYTO, I was mingling around and introducing myself to the people there with my real name. We would chat for a while and eventually the person I was talking with and me would exchange business cards. It was at this point when a few people throughout the night would look at my card and say, "Oh! You're 40deuce?? I've seen/follow you on Twitter." This is when I started to realize that I was becoming this 40deuce brand.

The next week in school one of my classmates asked to see my business card. When I showed it to her she asked, "What's with the 40deuce?" I didn't even think about my response and somehow the words "I'm building a personal brand" came out of my mouth.

That was the first time I even thought about it in those terms. I didn't mean to say that, it's just what came out. It did howevr make me realize that it's true. 40deuce is now my brand. My personal brand, and I think that I've started to establish it enough that it's now time to build that brand and really make it known.

And that my friends is what lead me to pick up this new book. I'll let you know how it goes when I finish reading it.

40deuce

Learning "The New Rules"

I know, I know. I've fallen off the posting wagon again. In my defense, my last month of school was hectic, but I'M DONE NOW!!!

During my last couple months of school though, I managed to read this great book in little 45min increments on my public transit commutes.

The book is David Meerman Scott's "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" and is a fantastic read. I highly recommend this book to not just anyone in marketing or public relations, but to anyone that does any kind of business now or wants to in the future.

This book takes a look at how the world of business has shifted thanks to the internet and how people are staying connected to their consumers through it. The best part about it is how Meerman writes the book like he does his blog. It's very easy to read and simple to understand. As well, there are tons of real life examples (or case studies) that make all the material he writes about easy to understand through actual stories.

The book is broken up into three distinct sections. The first talks about why the internet has changed how marketing and PR is done. The second section then talks about different tactics that are currently being implemented on the web and gives a nice overview of each. The final section then helps readers to make an action plan to harness all these new techniques and use them for their benefit.

The section I got the most out of (possibly because I was supposed to, as he reiterated it throughout the book) was about creating buyer personas. The chapter talks about how every business has to know their audience, and sometimes that could be more than one audience at a time, and make sure that you think like those people when creating your content. For example, words are very important. You need to make sure that the content on your website or blog is written in words that your target demographics would use in their everyday speech. It also talks about moving past just the basic demographics like age, sex, location, etc., and breaking it down even further into micro categories like "males in northern Canada from 14-30 years old that ride bikes, are heavy into music, love chocolate ice cream and walk their dogs without leashes" (that example isn't actually from the book).

This book was a great extension to "The Cluetrain Manifesto" which I blogged about earlier in the year.

Again, if you do business of any sort now or plan on it in the future, I highly recommend you read this book.

Next on my reading list: "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success" by Dan Schwable and I'll explain why I chose this one in my next blog post which I'll hopefully have up in the next couple days.

Till then, enjoy this tune:

40deuce

The Glitz, The Glamour & The Grind

On Monday April 6th, as part of a school class, I had to hold an event. All of my class was split up into groups and each group had to put on a seminar type of event with a theme. My group decided to focus our seminar on entertainment PR.

We put together an event that we cleverly titled The Glitz, The Glamour & The Grind: The Skinny on Entertainment PR. We held the seminar down at Toronto's Second City Theatre. The whole thing was a great success.

We had three speakers come to talk to the students that attended. Anna Von Frances of Pink Mafia, a full service PR firm in Toronto that specializes in entertainment events. Daniel Shehori who does PR for The Second City on top of other live comedy shows, and Nick Poireir who is a recent graduate of my program and currently is doing communications for LuminaTO: Toronto's Festival of Arts and Creativity. The speakers spoke about their experiences in entertainment PR, gave the students advice on what to do, what not to do, trends in the business and then answered questions from the audience.

On top of that, to add some entertainment value to tie in with our entertainment theme, The Second City kindly donated us some of their cast to do some improv for us. They went over as a hit, and we got to make an ass of our teacher on stage.

Overall, I think the whole thing was a success.

Here's some pics from the day:

Lot's of pics today so no music video.

I'm out.

40deuce

Irony At Its Finest

Last night was opening night for the Blue Jays 2009 season. I was lucky enough to be one of the 48,000 people in attendance. The game was amazing with the Jays blowing Detroit out of the water 12-5, but something was wrong.

I couldn't get any service for my cell phone during the game. No phone calls. No text messages. No internet for surfing, emails or twitter. That didn't just happen with my phone. Everyone around me seemed to be having the same no service issues.

Does anyone else find it kind of ironic that I was in the ROGERS center and my ROGERS cell phone wouldn't get service??

Just a thought.

That is all.

40deuce

THE NUMBERS DON'T MEAN JACK (NOT A LOST POST)

For the past couple of weeks (aside from not writing any blog posts here) I have been lucky enough been taking part in the beta trial of an online app that has a connection to Twitter. Now, I'm not at liberty to speak the name of said app, but that's not the important part.

What I want to talk about is a certain feature this app I'm beta testing has. Technically, I am not giving anything away about this specific app because this function is not native to just this application.

A lot of websites are popping up these days to help people build up their Twitter communities. Some of these allow you to look for people who may be tweeting about things you're interested in. These sites usually allow users to categorize themselves and then be sought out. Some sites I use for this for this are We Follow and Just Tweet It.

On the other side are sites or apps that do what my beta test app does; they will automatically do a mass follow of people for you. All you have to do is click a button and and the program will grab hundreds of of random people and add them to your Twitter follow list.

Here's my beef; I just can't figure out why anyone would want to do this????

Sure some people out there may be playing the numbers game in Twitter, but to me that defeats the whole point. Sure, I'm not the most popular person in the Twitterverse, but I'm ok with that, because most of the people I follow I followed for a reason. I follow people who I'm interested in. People who I think I can have a good conversation with. People who I won't ever talk to, but still like to hear what they have to say. I follow a few different news aggregating accounts on different subjects. Sometimes even a celeb or two because they can be cool or funny (I highly recommend checking out Kenny Powers from Eastbound and Down. F'n hilarious!). But, I never follow someone just in hopes that they will follow me back.

I'm not interested in becoming the guy with the most followers on Twitter (although I probably wouldn't be upset about it if it happened). I'd rather connect with people and have meaningful conversations and start friendships.

Social media should be about actually being social, not looking the coolest. And that's all I have to say about that.

40deuce

Is Twitter the Next Great Search Engine??

I'm going to start this post off with a little story.

Today I was doing some research for ideas for an Online PR class that I'm helping my course director put together. While looking for some informative links to show him I came across a problem. I was looking for SMRs (Social Media Releases) to show my prof how different they are from old skool regular news releases. When I googled (do you capitalize that if it's being used as a verb?) "social media release" the top four hits were blogs and articles of peoples advice on how they think a social media release should look. Semi-helpful, but not what I was looking for.

I decided to try a different approach. Since I know that a lot of my Twitter friends work in and around marketing and PR, I decided to throw my query out to them. Within five minutes of me posting my question on Twitter I recieved six responses. Four of them were people on my list of friends with links and/or recommendations of people to talk to. The other two responses were from professionals who deal specifically with SMRs. One from Canadian News Wire (CNW) and the other from Marketwire, who each directed me to examples on their sites.

I don't know about you, but I find stuff like that incredible.

It also made me start thinking, is Twitter the next great search engine? Let's think about it for a minute...

- I was looking for useful information, and people I actually know were able to make recommendations on where to find this info. If you can't trust your friends, who can you trust?

- Professionals from all kinds of companies monitor sites like Twitter to see when people mention them. I'm sure that both the representatives from Marketwire and CNW had real time searches going for key words like "SMR" or "news release" so they could respond quickly. Other companies do the same thing. They search for mentions of their companies or products and respond to the people talking about them. I remember one time a friend had a problem with UPS, tweeted about it, and a few minutes later a UPS representative asked her via twitter how he could help make the problem right. Meaning, you can get any kind of info directly from companies themselves.

- You can see what everyone around the world has to say about a topic. There is now a plethora (I like that word) of Twitter search engines such as Twitter Search, TweetGrid, Twitscoop, and many more. On these search engines you can type in a key word or phrase and see what anyone in the "twitterverse" is saying or linking to about that topic. This is great for finding reviews and what people are saying about products and services, or even things like movies.

These are just a few reasons off the top of my head as to why Twitter is sometimes more useful than Google for finding things.

I'd love to hear what you all think about this, but I just added a new theme to my blog and the comments section doesn't seem to be working properly. I'm trying to fix that so please be patient. You can always tweet me your thoughts at @40deuce.

*UPDATE* comments seem to be working again, so please leave one.

40deuce