If you’ve spent any time on Twitter lately, you’ve no doubt seen the hashtag #meerkat. This new iOS app debuted at SXSW, even though Gary Vaynerchuk started using it before the annual party in Austin. And if Gary uses it, you know that his legion of fans are going to use it. And boy have they. I can’t pop into Twitter anymore without seeing |LIVE NOW| links to streaming videos by marketing gurus who all want to be THE subject matter expert…
Gary Vaynerchuk is a successful businessman. And he has over a million Twitter followers to prove it. When Gary gives advice, people listen. I am not a successful businessman. That is, not in terms of how most Americans define business success. I have something like 2,000 Twitter followers, so my advice is sketchy at best. But I’m going to share it anyway. We’re small. We live on a rock orbiting a star flying through the infinite universe at a million miles an hour…
When I was a young man, I loved Super Bowl commercials. They inspired me to become a copywriter. Some time later, after working in the ad industry a while, I realized that I’ll never create a SB commercial. Instead, I was assigned projects by brands that didn’t have Super Bowl budgets, and that simply wanted to generate awareness for their products/services. I wrote good things. Award-winning things. Things that solved the problems of the clients I worked for. The ads I wrote shifted…
Sometimes I’m amazed at what people share and retweet. Namely, when some self-help guru offers some basic advice about how to live, and people fawn over it. You want some advice on how to live? Stop listening to self-help gurus. Everything you need to live your life to the fullest is currently within you. It’s called a conscience. A conscience is the little voice inside of you that tells you right from wrong. And it’s in you as much as it’s…
The following snippet is from a chapter titled Angels and Devils in my upcoming book Minor King. In it, the protagonist Jim Christianson is having a conversation with his 10-year-old daughter, Abigail. You can order Minor King by clicking here. *** “Daddy?” she said. “Yes, sweetie?” “Is the devil scary-looking?” she asked. “No,” I said without hesitation. I’d given this a lot of thought over the years. Early on in sobriety, the only way I could understand what was going on inside of…
Since the day I decided to write Minor King, marketing it has been the elephant in the room. But something that I knew had to happen. How to set up the website so I could let people know when and where to access the story? How to make the art compelling enough for people to want to look closer? How to establish a presence in all the right distribution channels? How to mobilize friends to help spread the word? Etc., etc. It’s…
