Remarkable Reading #29: MICROMARKETING: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small by Greg Verdino and CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life By Nato Thompson

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.

Both MICROMARKETING: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small by Greg Verdino and CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life By Nato Thompson are influential and impactful in terms of apprehension and cognizance of the topic - content & culture.

While Greg Verdino has a more metrical and symbolic writing style, Nato Thompson is elaborate and methodical. Both authors meticulous and attentive in terms of their understanding the topics of mass media, micro-media, content and culture.

As we move full steam ahead into the twenty first century with radical and rapid advances in the Internet of Things, automation and smart devices, it is critical we continue to research and understand what the impact of social media will be on wider mass media and culture.

Two further trends include:

a) Impact of culture & arts on Mass Media and human culture (carrying on further from here)
b) Impact of micro-content on Mass Media (carrying on further from here)

From MICROMARKETING: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small by Greg Verdino here are a few further take-out's:

Page x1 - “What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, it's jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires.  What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the pre historical human fascination with telling takes”?

Page 14 - “According to Nielsen, BlogPulse, there are more than 126 million blogs and blogger publish more than 1 million new posts everyday”

Page 78 - “We’ve grown up in a mass age during which our entertainment experiences and access to information came to us largely over television and radio airwaves of course, but also in newspapers, between the covers of magazines, plastered across roadside billboards, in our curbside and electronic mailboxes, and even displayed alongside the content offered by Web 1.0 mass-reach stalwarts AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! All these forms of media thrived in an era when content, choice, and the means of distribution were relatively scarce but consumers capacity for attention was seemingly abundant”

Page 128 - “In a comment, Skype Journal blogger Phil Wolff offered a complementary definition that builds on Kirkpatrick's largely technology-centric viewpoint and adds a much-needed human core:

The real time web is a fast, fluid, torrential, and borderless.  Fast means your view of the world is always fresh

Page 155 - “Micro Marketers know that establishing, maintaining, and sustaining even a few right relationships makes brands more resonant; establishes preference, loyalty, and advocacy; and opens the door to new revenue”

Key take-out's CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life By Nato Thompson:

Intro, ix: -”One in seven people on the planet are on Facebook. By 2011, 91 percent of Children ages two to seventeen played video games.  In the United States teenagers spend nearly nine hours a day looking at screens.  And those are just the measurable aspects of culture’s exponential growth.  There are countless philosophical questions to be asked: How has the role of music in everyday life changed in the last one hundred years? How many scripted television shows can one watch? How many more creative ways are there to shape the city?

Page 23 - “What took place in the late 1980s and early 90’s wasn’t merely a war between two cultures but a broader realignment.  A number of forces were learning to utilize the power of culture to push forward their own agendas, and their successes would be grander and more pronounced than before”

Page 28 - “War often provides a major catalyst for innovations in techniques of cultural manipulation and World War 1 was no exception”

Page 36 - “If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation.  Bernays wrote” you automatically influence the group which they sway”.  The effect of third-party testimony remains so powerful that it's hard to think of an aspect of contemporary life that hasn’t to some extent been affected by the method”

Page 42 - :Like the public-relations industry, the radio emerged as a force during World War 1, and it exploded in the following years Radio gave birth to an extraordinary diversity of capitalist cultural forms to come, everything from programming, sponsorships to soap operas, not to mention major communications networks like ABC and CBS.

Page 48 - “As the economy lagged, German radio began to act as a vehicle by which one could locate enemies and salvation.  “We live in the age of the masses; the masses rightly demand that they participate in the great events of the day.  The radio is the most influential and important intermediary between a spiritual movement and the nation, between the idea and the people”. So wrote Goebbels.

Page 53  - “In the United States, the war years were marked by rationing, belt-tightening, and modesty.  It was kind of a patriotic frugality, all for the sake of victory.  The post war era marked something of a release.  Here was a new kind of consumption - grander in scale and more expansive in possibility.  The culture and advertising industries, too, grew bigger than ever: they would shape, determine, and encourage American consumption for decades to come”

Page 228 - “If culture throughout most of the twentieth century predominantly moved in a direction from power to the masses, the twenty-first century has greatly expanded the capacity for multi directional communication (the realities of this can be debated later) The distribution of photocopiers, eight-track recorders, audio cassettes, and radio-broadcasting technology made the ability for small scale producers to be their media”

Page 234 - “The introduction to social networking for most Americans consisted of early chat rooms and dating sites.  While businesses like CompuServe had provided platforms to communicate relative real time in the late 1980’s, it was American online (AOL) that introduced a far broader audience to online communication.  By 1993, AOL had surpassed CompuServe and Prodigy as the number one platform for home users to access the Internet”

You can follow Nato Thompson on Twitter here, follow Creative Time on Twitter here, and purchase a copy of CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life here.

You can purchase a copy of MICRO-MARKETING: GET BIG RESULTS BY THINKING AND ACTING SMALL here, follow Greg Verdino on Twitter here, visit his website here, and connect with Greg Verdino on LinkedIN here.

Thank you,
Praz
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