Guest Post: How Twitter Is Blanding Branding

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Things have been pretty quiet around here as I try to finish Teddy Roosevelt and The Lost World. So I am Pleased to present the following guest post by Kian Kaul, author of Stockholm on Branding and Marketing. Take it away, Kian:

Kian Kaul on “How Twitter is Blanding Branding”

These days every writer is their own brand, we’re constantly told in advice columns on mid-ranking marketing blogs and rushed non-fic titles (many of which are only available in the Kindle or Nook store), but what does it mean to be a brand?

A brand is a name or title which represents a product, through an experience, communicated by a primary feeling.  And that experience can change, sometimes drastically, depending on the needs of the market.

Coke is positivity, excitement and energy — but not too much energy, otherwise it would be Rockstar.  Pepsi is all those things but in a blue can and with celebrity stunt casting.  It’s also diabetes and tooth decay in excess, but that wasn’t included on the creative brief.  Ralph Lauren was originally clothing intended for upper-middle class white people until “urban” black influencers assimilated the preppy style into their own cultural positioning.  But these are the major brands, the celebrity brands.

When you’re a celebrity brand people just want to feel like they know you.  When you’re not a celebrity brand you have to offer something.  Anything.  Don’t have anything?  How about an intellectually unchallenging motivational message that may or may not have anything to do with the thing you’re selling?

If you’re a writer reading this, you’re likely not a celebrity or a major brand.  You’re the fifteenth bottle of detergent from the left and you’re actively tweeting how “fresh” and “clean” your formula will make one’s clothes, but then again, so are all the rest.  So, how do you stand out?  Do you refine your message?  Do you clearly define yourself and your approach so maybe your brand actually means something and carries some sort of significance?

Yeah, you could do all that, or just yell your marketing message more often into the greater white-noise feedback wall of Twitter, hoping that this most recent, “hay guise buy my thing thansk!” will be the one that does it.

One of the first rules of sales and advertising is to provide value.  Not actual value, naturally, but perceived value.

Coke doesn’t actually make anyone younger, or cooler, or dance spontaneously in suspiciously clean urban apartment hallways, but on the other hand it’s got caffeine and sugar and you hate Starbucks just because.  McDonald’s won’t facilitate intimacy in your immediate family or transform your turgid and disappointing Friday night out with your co-workers into a series of Kodak (remember them?) worthy-memories for your Facebook wall, but the bleached-teeth actors on the commercial (who probably gagged themselves in their honey-wagon bathroom immediately after shooting) seemed to be having a great time under their beauty lighting.

Even Pabst Blue Ribbon, long remembered only as a violent and junior college giggle-inducing punchline from the film “Blue Velvet”, has achieved a new crowd-sourced cool as the hipster beer of choice.  A sort of anti-brand, for anti-people, who wear anti-clothing and grow ironic mustaches on their anti-faces.  Suck it, Budweiser and your corporo-fascist, tasteless and not-inexpensive-enough beer.

All of the brands above have to offer, or at least pretend to offer, some sort of value beyond endless reminders that their “thing” is now on sale.

For a writer trying to build their brand on Twitter, amassing followers without understanding what your brand is yet only confounds the problem, as the people most likely to immediately follow back are up to the same tricks, not interested in meaningful interactions or providing any value, just racking numbers up with other salespeople who are also constantly posting their own anonymous ads, to each other.  Ad nauseam.

This may be how modern advertising works, but it’s not good advertising by any means.

The main character in my novel “Stockholm” (see, that’s subtle product placement, my friends) works, for a while anyway, in advertising where he finds modest success recycling ideas that aren’t his own for lack of any inspiration beyond survival.  Until, that is, he meets a model named Natasha that he’d never heard of but who completely derails his life in one fateful production day.  Suddenly he’s inspired simply to work with her, the subject matter itself not even important enough to be secondary.  His creative bankruptcy ends up distinguishing himself in the way he pulls off the same old ideas.

But for that to work for you and me there has to be some spark of desire beyond mere selling.  Something that elicits a feeling through the experience. Something other than saying, “my thing k thanx BUY”.  The chemical reaction between Anakin and Natasha becomes ‘the difference that makes the difference’ (See NLP), but if you want to know how he pulls this off… (do I even have to say it?)

Once we understand that our primary psychological motivations are social – it’s a sense of social connection and belonging that not only got us on Twitter to fling our stuff, but made us want to make the stuff we’re flinging in the first place. (Unless you’re a different sort of primate acting on the defensive.) You make a thing – you show your thing to the world (Purposefully, not like the Anthony Weiner disaster, hopefully, but imagine the PR!) – you get accepted into a social group with other people who make things.  You learn from them, take their cues and adapt in order to belong and therefore survive.  It’s an unnecessary natural selection that weakens the individual, without strengthening the collective.

Without a clear sense of self and personality, the undulating mass absorbs and gentrifies you.  You read the free marketing blog posts posted in your news feed that are also read and followed by all the other writers, who also assimilate the same ten fearful commandments into their own approach and soon everyone with something special to sell is just another indistinguishable, smiling bottle of brightly-colored stuff demanding the casual shopper to “Follow Me On Twitter!”
You can follow me on Twitter – @anakincarver
(Heh heh heh…)
For more observational and cultural satire, read “Stockholm”, my debut novel and the unlikely story of a man who becomes one of the most influential figures in media, never known.
Website
stockholmbook.com
Amazon
www.amazon.com/Stockholm-Kian-Kaul/dp/146094965X/

BIO INFO
Kian Kaul (1976-) born in Santa Barbara, California, has spent the last decade working in Los Angeles as a creative. His debut novel “Stockholm” is available now.

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Posted in Marketing | Tagged Pabst Blue Ribbon, Stockholm, Twitter | Leave a reply

Guest Post: Stephen Marshall On “Abraham”, New Novel Free on Google Books

Posted on by Lou
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I’m on reddit and this post catches my eye: A free book!

Yeah, Right I think. Another first draft, random pass aspiring teenager lloking for free promotion. But I click on it anyway. And am Pleasantly Surprised. There’s the usual appeal: I just finished, Don’t know anything, want to see if anyone likes it here try the links.  But the writer has a compelling voice. Self-effacing without being shy. And there’s no typos, misspellings or grammar errors in the post. Good Signs.

So I take the chance and click on the Google Books link. Five pages in and I’ve bought the Kindle Copy. Ten pages in and I message the author- I’d like to try to help market this book. Really. Stephen is good. Really good. I’m jealous. I’m jealous of his drive. I’m jealous of his voice and I’m jealous of his talent. Download the free copy and see if you don’t agree. Is it perfect? No.  It probably could use a close line edit. It’s obviously the work of a young writer honing his craft. And Stephen seems to have a thing against dialogue tags. Seriously, a few “saids” would’ve helped. But it’s interesting and fun.  If you like it, please retweet this special guest post and buy Abraham on Kindle or Smashwords. You really need to support this author. He’s that good.

 

Stephen was gracious enough to provide the following introduction:

Stephen Marshall on “Abraham”

After a few months of driving my fingers into a keyboard, cocooned in soft drink cans and wary of what trees might do after such a great leave of absence, I realized I had written a novel. This is actually not at all what happened (I think), but it might as well have been. I stared at the screen before me, at my beautiful abomination.

What the hell was I supposed to do now?

So I did a bit of research about getting my book, Abraham, out into the open. And surprisingly enough, I learned things. Unfortunate things. Terrible, awful, just-kidding-it’s-way-more-than-unfortunate things. Agents, as it turns out, take months to respond. Publishers are about the same. Assuming that each party ingests my book and farts pure happiness, the whole shebang would likely take over a year.

A year.

That soaked in me for about as long as the average person lets a flame soak into them. In my wonderful world of youth, a year is something just shy of an eternity. Like hell, I thought to myself while beating my chest and other choice body parts, am I going to wait a year. I have things to do. I don’t know what those things are, but by golly I’m going to have some if anyone asks. Or maybe I was lazy. I forget.

Two months passed while I did, ahem, “stuff”. Youthful things occurred. I put Abraham up on Google Books and Amazon, but I hadn’t done anything substantial with it save anxious glances here and there to make sure it didn’t read like a sixth-grader’s report on hurricanes. I made one post on the Amazon forums during this time and realized that I was pouring a single bottle of possibly-okay water into an ocean of piss. Outside of telling friends and family, I had essentially told no-one. It was out there. People could read it. I was busy with school (i.e. doing almost nothing) at the time, so I thought, eh. I’ll deal with it later.

Later, like the deathward knell, has arrived.

So I’ve been throwing Abraham around now. Working on getting seen, maybe getting some sales, maybe (maybe) getting the eye of a publisher. I made a post on Reddit which was well-received and generously upvoted to prominence for a few ego-inflating days. People bought it, and I received quite a few compliments. Criticisms too. They’re interesting, actually. People who should be doing important things, like sleeping, or going to rehab, or not typing, are ever-so-eager to offer advice on the whole book after reading only a single chapter. I suppose I appreciate the effort: you really wanted me to know about how the first chapter basically “reads funny, and not like ha-ha”. That sort of determination is endearing, in a Forrest Gump kind of way.

Self-publishing has been fun, if initially depressing (the slag-hordes of Amazon must be seen to be believed). I enjoy it. And seriously, I appreciate any feedback. If it’s good, really good, I may make an edit or two. If you’ve made it this far, thanks! You can read Abraham for free on Google Books, because I want you to like what you purchase! Now buy the goddamn book.

Bio: Stephen Marshall is a student from Kansas who fancies himself a writer. His stubborn and generally terrible personality has led to people calling him “charming”, among other things. When Stephen is not writing, Stephen is busy playing video games or masturbating. He reads too, apparently. Stephen is also perturbed by the standard use of third person in Bios, or when people take him too seriously, which happens frequently. Stephen now feels uncomfortable.

Links:

Amazon Kindle: www.amazon.com/dp/B004OR1QZ8

Google Books: books.google.com/books?id=UA_gH6agil0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/books/view/57408

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Posted in Books, Kindle Excerpts | Tagged Abraham, Amazon Kindle, E-book, Forrest Gump, Google, Google Books, Guest Post, Kansas, Reddit | Leave a reply

Lost Treasure Found

Posted on by Lou
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Eighteen years ago, my wife, our one-year-old dughter and I moved from Columbus Ohio to Youngstown to finish school. We had met in Columbus as college dropouts, got married, had Jamie ( Not necessarily in that order) and were going home to get our degrees.

On the way out of town, we stopped at a local independent bookstore and sold a box of books for gas money. Among the treasures was “Call of Cthulhu: 2nd Edition,” the one with all the full color plates and the “Lair of Great Cthulhu” song in the back.

Last fall, Jamie entered CCAD as a freshman. She’s a lot more driven than we ever were, and a lot more disciplined. She’s been doing great, but only leaves campus for the Short North.

We decided to show her some of our old stomping grounds in Grandview: Nong’s restaurant is still there. The Big Bear is now a Giant Eagle. The Grandview Theater still exists. Where Nickleby’s used to be is an Aladdin’s, which was started right here in Boardman.

And the Acorn Bookstore on Fifth Ave. is still there. “Hmm,” I said. “I’ve got to sTop by and see if they still have my books.”

So last weekend, we did. And no, they didn’t have the CoC. But I did find a couple “Weird Tales” that were mine (1989 edition) and this small press magazine from the same time:

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I asked the owners about CoC, and told them My crazy story, which they heard out. But they said they donated the RPG books to the library years ago. So I’m still looking for my old copy.

So, If you go to the Grandview Library, Let me know if my old book is still there. And stop by the Bookstore and let them know I appreciate their great stewardship of my small magazines.

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Posted in Random Blogginess | Tagged Books, Call of Cthulhu, Columbus Ohio, Cthulhu Mythos, Shopping | 1 Reply

Guest Post: Bryce Beattie of StoryHack

Posted on by Lou
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Today I’m very pleased to turn Byzantine Roads