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Jointblog — The Blog Site for Media Trend Watching › Tools — WordPress.

CBGB’s Closes With Tight Rock Gig Celebration

Country, BlueGrass, and Blues (& “Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers”) — Hilly Kristal made it that and a lot more at the legendary music club.

As David Bryne once said, “This must be the place.” Last night, it was…as gritty as ever.

CBGB hosted its final concert Sunday night, broadcast on Sirius, after a 33-year residence in downtown New York as the iconic, grungy bastion of punk. Although the concert biz has been trending up for the past couple of years, the small club scene has been struggling for a long time.

Talking Heads. Lou Reed. Blondie. Television. Ramones. New York Dolls. And thousands of other bands, from veteran acts to purely local artists with a strong loyal following (Lorraine Ferro!) to young let-me-muster-up-the-courage-to-try-it-once bands.

Count me as someone who’s been there many times, squeezed into the barely-300 seat club to catch some street level NYC music scene. Being tall helps.

The concert, headlined by rock poet Patti Smith, was to be the final note sounded in a drawn-out battle to preserve the legendary club, whose lease ran out after a long drawn-out battle.

But the spirit will live on. “CBGB’s is a state of mind,” Smith said at pre-show news conference. “The new kids have to have their own places.”

As Stephen Colbert commented Monday night, CBGB’s will actually move to a new location in Las Vegas sometime next year. His suggestion? Laminate the bathrooms so they can be hosed down easier for better cleanliness. And don’t be surprised if you see Celine Dion rocking the CBGB mic soon…

Read more here

The Email Signature: A great (yet often forgotten) branding opportunity

Are you optimizing your email signatures?

A few days ago, a long-lost dear friend of mine reconnected after googling me. (I know, the boys at Google don’t like their name converted into a verb…but that is exactly what happened — my friend used Google to find and email me.) Of all the great tools this new digital media world provides, “connecting” via the Internet remains the most essential asset. Connecting people with ideas, with content, with information, and perhaps most importantly, with other people.

As we all experience now and then, close friends sometimes drift apart never to get back together. Sometimes several years go by and you pick up right where you left off as if no time eclipsed at all. The Jointblog and top first-page Google ranking helped my friend find me again.

Over the past couple of days, we caught up with each other’s lives, exchanging pictures and stories, and making plans to get together in the city in the near future. Without the Internet and email, our reconnection would probably never be possible; we’ve both made several moves since being last in touch, changing phone numbers and addresses along the way.

Google made it possible…so, thanks Google!

Setting aside my personal news and the good deed from Google, there was something exceptionally worthwhile sharing for the Jointblog. It was just a little detail that caught my eye at the end of my friend’s email: the pre-saved signature message.

In addition to name and contact info (plus the micro-print corporate blurb about email confidentiality), there was a quote — which happens to be a favourite of mine. Perhaps my friend’s usage of the quote is one of the reasons we have a solid core foundation; a simple code for our relatability.

So often, we email as quickly as possible, without giving much thought to how we manage our “brand”, professionally or personally. Email is a direct form of one-on-one marketing. Yes, the most important content in each email we craft is the unique custom messages. But the signature line is an important marketing reminder to keep us connected. It’s often the last part of the received email we read right before we reply.

This little story about email signatures sets up a question you may not have asked yourself (or the company you manage): when was the last time you adjusted your signature brand message? Are your employees communicating with the ideal, up-to-date basic “form” that “frames” the content of business email?

There are so many ways today to customize emails, from quotes to graphics to corporate links and news announcements to RSS feeds.

The quote, which is only attributed to “anonymous”: “Excellence is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, skillful execution and the vision to see obstacles as opportunities.”

When it comes to email excellence — either professional or personal — brand excellence can be reinforced with a simple little thing like the right signature line.

I’m grateful my friend continues pursuing excellence.

To read an excellent article based on this quote, click here.

Digital Maverick Mark Cuban’s Thoughts On The Google/YouTube Deal

With a new media deal as huge as yesterday’s Google $1.65 billion (in stock) buy of YouTube, very few people are in a position to make comments based on similar experiences. Mark Cuban is in that position. And, boy, does he ever comment on his Blog Maverick.

No doubt, if he were watching Battlestar Galactica on his HDTV when the news was announced, Cuban would have screamed “what the frak!!!” and maybe insulted some officials, too.

He’s been on the playing field before — a decade (!) ago when he sold his Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for a billion; the rest of us Google and YouTube users are just fans in the stands (with a few us a little obnoxiously hectoring the media stars in the game).

What does Mark Cuban think of the Google/YouTube deal? In his words:

I still think Google is crazy.

Kudos to Youtube for getting them to say yes. My advice to you is to always protect your downside. Ignore all the scammers who want your money, and don’t listen to all the tax scammers who want to save you money on taxes. Writing that check is painful, but its the right thing to do. That aside…

It will be interesting to see what happens next and what happens in the copyright world. I still think Google Lawyers will be a busy, busy bunch. I don’t think you can sue Google into oblivion, but as others have mentioned, if Google gets nailed one single time for copyright violation, there are going to be more shareholder lawsuits than doans (sic) has pills to go with the pile on copyright suits that follow. Think maybe how Google discloses what they perceive the copyright risk to be in the SEC filings might be an interesting read?

I think there will be supoenas to get the names of Youtube and Google Video users. Lots of them as those copyright owners not part of the gravy train go after both Google and their users for infringement…”

There’s LOTS more to read — how it impacts DRM rules, the deals with music labels, how video content will be re-centralized (possibly making bandwidth much cheaper), how it reconciles selling Sony videos from Google Video when it is free on YouTube, AND how he thinks its “effingreat.com” if no one decides to sue deep-pocketed Google over copyright infringements and what he plans to do if it truly is a whole new world.

Yes, he’s surprised by the deal, even though there are great similarities to his own deal with Yahoo! that made him a very wealthy man. He asks, “Does it open up a whole new world if they go liability free? You have no idea.”

From another Cuban post a couple of days ago, “Would Google be crazy to buy Youtube? No doubt about it. Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime.”

Read more of his candid thoughts here.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep media trend watching.

Wired but weary of MySpace; Xanga now the cool place to be online

According to Hitwise.com, Xanga is hotter than MySpace as THE most searched personal or social web destination. By a 50% margin in the month of September (chart below provided by ClickZ.com from Hitwise data).

Xanga is a 6-year-old overnight success.

It was unthinkable a year ago, but that’s how fast things change in the worlds of older teens and 20somethings: according to Forbes.com, MySpace has become passe for many. In fact, as teens and 20-somethings leave, MySpace is becoming, more and more, a social community for 35 year olds and older.

As of August, Xanga had signed up 27 million blog users…and it is still growing rapidly.

Viacom…are you noticing?

As a recent comScore survey shows, MySpace’s member base of 12-to-24-year-olds has plummeted 44.3 percent over the last year, as a share of its total, to just 30 percent. “I think we’re at the very beginning of them reaching a saturation point,” Iowa State journalism professor Michael Bugeja says.

As the Jointblog write in March 2006, MySpace may be on its way to becoming a junkyard.

Of course, Xanga did have a problem with the FTC over marketing and security concerns for users 13 and under, forcing Xanga to pay a $1 million fine in early September. The good news: it did force Xanga to add more security measures.

In the Forbes article, one 26-year-old graduate student just canceled his MySpace account after realizing he had wasted time accumulating a bunch of acquaintances he knew little about. No kidding!

Perhaps kids of the tech generation are now rediscovering the value of face time, which would be a bad thing for News Corp. and MySpace.

It’s that “face time” that is helping Xanga, too…as they recently added extensive free services and templates for “audioblogs” and “videoblogs”, with massive amounts of free web storage space for members to use. On Xanga, these blogs allow more than just text and picture posts; you can post audio and video messages.

Call it Social Networking 2.0…a media trend to watch.

Low-tech Media Idea: Personalized Top 5 T-shirts

From chart tracking the weekly Top 40 songs to Top 100 podcasts to the Top 5 movies at the box office to David Letterman’s nightly Top 10 on his Late Show, everybody loves a great list. It helps us relate and compare to others, to better understand how our own tastes may differ and match “everyone else’s” tastes. Often, the lists we create and consume defines which social community represents us.

Sometimes lists make us laugh. Or they might encourage to make a purchase. Or even get us to tell a friend about it (“did you hear the so-and-so is the #1 fill-in-the-blank this week?”).

The problem is: someone else created the list, not you. Why not you? Why not be your own Top 5 list creator?

Why not wear it on your own t-shirt?

Low-tech fashion…how retro…

Not all new ideas require high-tech answers. Low-tech can be a great counter-brand position. As the frenzy of new tech gadgets and multimedia platforms continue to excite us geeks while causing decision stress and choice overload for many other typical consumers, low-tech options can sometimes create “fresh” and lucrative options.

Take this idea from a Canadian company: personalized Top 5 list T-shirts by t-lists.com, selling top 5 list t-shirts that let customers fill in the blanks.

Top 5 (or Top 10, 20, 40, etc.) countdown lists have been popular on radio and TV as well as newspapers and magazines for generations. Usually, “somebody else” makes the list, not you, eventhough we all have our favorite things and tastes. In this age of the blogosphere, 40,000 friends on MySpace pages, Amazon Top 5 additional purchase suggestions and iTunes/Revver/LastFM song recomendations, why not go low-tech and print your own “Top 5″ t-shirts. Or, better yet, make it an ordering option on your company’s website for whatever that relates to your media product and customer interests.

“Top 5 Overrated Bands”

“Top 5 Stupid American Idols“

“Top 5 Sci-Fi Captains”

“Top 5 Sirius (or XM) channels”

“Top 5 Howard Stern Stripper Guests”

“Top 5 O&A Cringe Moments” (good for CBS Radio management to wear on Casual Fridays)

“Top 5 Katie Couric Leg Moments” (Last night, the night before, the night before that…)

Oh, sorry…got distracted there.

Google Gadgets available to customize your site

Since Google is an essential starting point for web users to find stuff they want, installing mini Google tools to customize your browser has been a popular choice for the past year.

Now you can add a whole new slew of various Google Gadgets directly to your own website to make the Internet user experience even better for site’s visitors.

It’s one more way for Google to literally be everywhere online. Apple popularized this mini-script/application concept through dashboard “widgets”, which later became available for PCs, too. Yahoo! also made a move for widget downloads. But none have been so highly focused on specific Google usage, with so many different choices.

While Google Gadgets have been available on Google.com for some time, Web page owners can easily add these gadgets/widgets right on their sites as quick-use buttons. BIG helpful improvement. The Jointblog applauds this move.

There are more than 1,200 free gadgets from which to choose what you want, including the HTML code to embedd miniature lookups for things like Google Maps or Google Calendar; also, appiications providing financial information, sports results, communication tools, jokes, horoscopes, even PacMan and Tetris.

Best move by Google in months…will it gain user popularity? That deal with MySpace made over the summer should help make Google Gagdets quickly popular. Hey, if it makes the user experience better AND easier, it’s all good.

Look for some of these Google Gadget widgets to be added to the Jointblog site in the weeks ahead.

Read more here

Google Gadgets page here

The Ten Biggest Themes of ‘What Teens Want’

Did you know 15% of Virgin Mobile teen cell users admitted to breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend via text message? (What, are Post It Note breakups passe?) Or that 44% of teens have different friends offline than online? Welcome to the new media lifestyle of teens.

So what do teen want anyway? They notoriously change their tastes in music, fashion, gadgets, websites…. WHATEVER…every 9 months (or even less). Just enough to cover a school year. School’s in, season is changing, now what?

In July — less than 3 months ago (which means you still have another 5 or 6 months before teens next seismic taste change) — the “What Teens Want” conference in NYC gave word on youth marketing knowledge and insight. How well you are satisfying current trends? Wondering now what’s hot for the next trend wave?

Monitoring teen media choices is already difficult enough.

Parents of teens may (should) realize some of these “Teens Wants”:

>> To create an identity
>> To connect with others
>> To create
>> To change the world
>> To be older than they are
>> To have fun
>> and as a driving force, they want to do this now.

As Angela Leaney from The N put it, “don’t call them fickle”. They are smart and savvy, multi-tasking media users, time/schedule/overload-stressed and if what you’re doing isn’t good, they won’t like it.

yPulse is an excellent resources for what’s going on in youth marketing. They posted the following thoughts about “What Teens Want” from the various presentations at the conference. You might want to double check your knowledge and your teen media strategies. See how well you’re hitting the mark of these points and make your updates now:

Basic Teen Facts:
* 33.8 million teens in the U.S. (up more than 200,000 from 2005)
* Teens “spend” $209 billion per year
* Multi-ethnic: 36% are non-white
(From Alloy Media + Marketing)

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* Teens look up to their parents. Seventy-one percent see their parents as their chief role model, miles above the next contender, teachers (40%). On top of that, 59% say their parent is their best friend. They are the first generation to share music taste with their parents
* Dream jobs: Entrepreneur (13%), Musician (11%), Doctor (8%). Worth noting is that service jobs like being a firefighter or carpenter are very low on the desire pole
* Decreasing interest in being famous, or “being someone else.” Points to the trend of authenticity
* Very interestingly: If inherited $20 k, would spend it on a college education (by a large margin)
* Want to contribute to society through their consumer choices
* Most important item is always a “cool car.” Of all items, the cell phone is the last item they would give up if forced. When money is cutback, the items and activities they’d cut back, in order include: movies, going out, clothes, and shopping
(research from Virgin Mobile)

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Media consumption and the reduction of TV viewing was rightly a huge theme. 87% of teens are online and 35% of teen media consumption is online (Tagged.com)

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When “passion points” were discussed, music came up time and time again as the most important. Going to a concert by their favorite band is the number one event choice. With movies, teens seem to gravitate towards either films that are wishful or films that are full of dread (Screen Gems).

Teens want to connect with their friends, carve out an identity, and be creative. Brands are increasingly a means for them to do so. And then there are mobile and online communities where teens can talk about these things really really fast – exponentially fast. It’s the new reality of word of mouth; the driving force of youth marketing.

There’s the importance of friends and communities. “Friends” are central to trend creation, as groups of friends are the source of comfort, support, advice, and the top way they “find out about things.”

For more on teen word of mouth, “seeding social leaders”, the Internet, User-generated-content (such as an online “Video Mixer” which lets fans of the network easily mashup clips from a range of shows with pre-made sound beds), teen mobile/text message/ringtone lifestyles, Social networking, media/marketing engagement, customization, Social activism through consumption, and Trend creation.

Finally, some important lessons from The N’s top teen marketer (if you don’t watch The N, you aren’t plugged in to teens)

1. Institutionalize experimentation
2. Don’t try too hard
3. Encourage participation
4. Allow your audience to inspire you
5. Better ingredients, tastier results
6. Make it easy to be an ambassador
7. Yield control
8. Being a true engagement marketer, she insisted that the audience send an email to one of her staff for the final rule.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Keith Olbermann Puts The Biscuit In The Basket Supporting Bill Clinton Fox News Interview (update: video posted)

Talking heads are usually just talking heads…they stopped making sense a long time ago. Last night, though, one took an unusually strong and correct stand. It got my attention. For 10 minutes, a talking head actually made sense.

To many, the last real President for the United States was President Clinton. Listening to MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” Monday night, it was good to be reminded of that.

He devoted the last 10 minutes of his show to a commentary in support of Bill Clinton standing up for the truth during a Fox News interview Sunday night.

All month long, Olbermann (on the newly-refocused MSNBC) has been ranting, blasting and verbally spanking the senior administration of George Bush’s White House (here’s his video clips on Rummy, Bush, Cheney et al, as posted on YouTube), even insisting for an direct apology to the people from George Bush.

And then we get reminded Bill Clinton is no longer officially the president. Instead, we have “Dubya”.

The compare and contrast of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush has never been clearer than this past week; Bush gets called “the devil” by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez at the U.N. while Clinton raise $7.3 billion for the Clinton Global Initiative fighting poverty, global warming and supporting other social causes.

Meanwhile, Bush’s speech at the U.N. got hardly a mention…because he said nothing new about his “war on terror” except talk about more terror.

However, it was Clinton’s Fox News interview that was the real news of the week, not only for what he said but also for how the media reacted to it.

There has been a tremendous amount of media coverage to the interview; the video links are clickable below. This post is mainly about Monday night’s (9/25) Olbermann post-Clinton/FoxNews commentary. To use a favorite expression from his ESPN “SportsCenter” days — put the “biscuit in the basket”.

Bravo, Keith, well said.

The Jointblog is not a political blog so this post is not for political purposes. Rather, my P.O.V. is media trend watching. For reasons unknown to date, the media and the nation as a whole has mainly given George W. Bush a pass despite tremendous troubles, all with very little public or media protest. 9/11, Afganistan, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, Enron/corporate fat cats, Katrina, “Plumegate”, “weapons of mass distruction”; anthrax; questionable voting/election tactics and advertising…the list goes on.

Maybe we are still all shocked with post-9/11-tramatic stress disorder.

Mainstream media may finally be clearing out its collective head, based on this past week’s events. And President Bill Clinton (still acting presidential) may be the tipping point force for that change.

Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore started waking up the public and the media this spring and summer with his “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Then last week’s Clinton Global Initiative (how many ex-presidents have ever done that?)

Finally, Sunday night, Bill Clinton went on his truthful and worthy tear against his critics (and specifically the right-wing agenda of Fox News) during a “heated discussion“. Clinton made a huge move correcting history and putting debate back into politics, media coverage and the news.

Monday night, concluding MSNBC’s “Countdown”, Olbermann delivered his 10-minute commentary about the Clinton interview and how media covered the story. How the real story wasn’t Clinton’s verbal “explosion”; it was about Clinton setting the record straight. And doing it on the network filled with his strongest critics.

As Clinton said — among his many bang-on statements: “Say the truth, come on now, say the truth.”

And Olbermann agreed the truth was finally said in the media. By Bill Clinton on Fox News, of all places.

As a media trend watcher, I applaud Olbermann’s support. At a time when mainstream news media coverage has radically changed its hosts (Couric, Gibson, Williams et al) and “all the news that fit to print” is getting reset at the New York Times, the medium remains the message. If only Olbermann words (and Clinton’s and Couric’s and the rest…) can rejoin mainstream media’s new thinking. I hope it does, as we certainly need more of it back in the political debate.

It’s a time for essential change in both tone and content for media.

Click here for a transcript as posted by crooksandliars.com. Once the official K.O. transcript and video about Bill Clinton and the media scrum are made available from his Bloggermann, I will post them here.

Google video posting of Fox News interview with Bill Clinton here and here.

4pm Update: Olbermann’s “Special Comments” Google video posting here or view below by clicking:

For all the bluster of I’m right/they’re wrong TV talk programs — including the fake news programs, which I most love — what struck me about Olbermann’s “special comments” about Bill Clinton last night was its quality and substance. It wasn’t angled. It wasn’t hyperbole. It wasn’t chest-beating. It wasn’t even political. It seemed (to me, at least) better than that. And I love a good snark as much as the next person. This country needs a whole new running dialogue; I hope this marks a new media trend.

Note: Look for a special “Countdown” Tuesday night at 8pm eastern focused on this topic.

No Kids Zone: Baby Boomers are forming a MySpace just for them

Baby boomers don’t like it when other people (formerly known as their older authority and power figures e.g. “The Man”) have something they don’t…so they usually figure out ways to get it, too. Looks like they may be at their old tricks…only this time, they’re inspired by what’s cool with their own kids: MySpace.

After all, kids are always the arbiter of cool. If kids can have a MySpace, why can’t us Baby Boomers have our own site cool to us that’s uncool to our kids?

By now, most Baby Boomers are well-aware of the online social network phenomenon…places where people gather, share, gossip, “meet” and become “friends” online. They know of places like MySpace and Friendster mainly because they read magazines like Fortune or Forbes or, on the flip side, they read news reports in USA Today or watch on Oprah getting them concerned over potential threats to their children or grandchildren due to rare incidents that shows adults taking advantage and/or preying on unsuspecting teens.

They certainly don’t know MySpace from their own usage because it is too messy, noisy, confusing and too much trouble to navigate…which is exactly why it is so successful among teens and Gen X/Y/New millenniums. That grownup usage barrier means the “kids” get more freedom to express themselves without a concern of a parent or other authority figure ever discovering their “odd” or potentially embarrassing proclivities.

Well, at least the chance is very small for now. Businesses are only now setting up ways to better locate online profiles and personal webpages, aimed to investigate their employees or potential employee candidates and even college admission departments investigating college recruits. Of course, once the deal with Google is fully integrated within MySpace and its spyderbots have fully index-mapped the tens of millions of MySpace accounts, “being discovered” will become easier — a good thing for emerging artists, a not so good thing for those preferring to stay underground.

All this talk about MySpace these last two years has created a ripple effect of demand for Baby Boomers…a group with a long deep history of saying “Me, too”…”If they can have it, so can I”.

Wal-Mart has set up The Hub while Linked In has become an important recruiting network tool for upcoming executives the last several years. Now there is a MySpace-like place for Boomers popping up online, too.

For example, some 300,000 Boomers in recent weeks have logged on to a new website, Eons.com. The site is banking on a digital awakening among recreation-minded boomers and matures, a growing and increasingly active demographic online and everywhere else. Registered users can trade text, images, and audio in total anonymity or with starkly candid, photo-accompanied attribution.

In fact, social networking sites is the #1 reason why the 35-64 year old demographic is quickly becoming the largest user of the Internet, covering everything from dating sites to industry forums to self-expression websites to proudly place their photos of family events.

Even those embarrassing pics of their kids growing up.

Jupiter Research estimates that 62.4 million over-50 adults will be online by 2010. And they just might seek one another out. “The fastest growing group for Internet dating is older people,” Gloria Steinem told The New York Times earlier this month.

Hey, if the kids can do it, so can the parents. Teens always think their parents embarrass them, even when teens do enough to embarrass themselves on their own. Now parents have the Internet to promote more “aw, aren’t they cute?” moments for rich teen embarrassment.

“What’s that…another failing mark in school?” “What, you broke curfew again?” It parental payback, kids. Grounding may not cut it anymore, just wait till parents begin posting the family news on their webpage in their own social network.

Those baby boomers, conniving sometimes, aren’t they?

To read more, click here