flowchart

I have a thesis that fails to explain
why my fake-white collar friends
cascade like empty water bottles

campfire

If they’re cold, there’s still a little
wine behind the leftover kerosene
handcuffs, pamphlets and torches

Music Review: Depreciation Guild, Helio Sequence, JDSY

Depreciation Guild
In Her Gentle Jaws

One part Kevin Shields, one part Mario bros., the Depreciation Guild make fuzzed-out shoegaze music that sounds like some long-lost super Nintendo soundtrack – all gauzy effects-laden guitars mashing it up with MIDI bleeps and beats. While it’s not in the same camp as the neo-gazing of M83, it’s at least in the same campground, sharing the same penchant for woozy vocals and melancholic textures. Where it differs is in the percussion, which buzzes with the energy of a hungry arcade – throbbing drum machines and pulsing keyboards kick the whole affair into a decidedly different atmosphere, making for an invigoratingly unique listen.
Highlights: Butterfly Kisses, Digital Solace, In Her Gentle Jaws

Helio Sequence
Keep Your Eyes Ahead

Who knew that losing your voice could make you a better singer? In the case of Brandon Summers of Helio Sequence, losing his voice forced him to re-learn how to sing – good thing though because it’s a boon to the already dynamic mix of effects-heavy guitar and off-kilter drums. With past albums, the instruments did the heavy lifting and Summer’s voice barely tread water. Here, vocals are as strong as the music, fleshing in new bits of melody and context – that said, some lyrics borrow a bit too much from Dylan (Shed Your Love), but it’s a minor misstep on a mostly promising release.
Highlights: Lately, Back to This, Hallelujah

JDSY
Adage of Known

Intelligent dance music isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping – so proves JDSY (Joey Sims) straight from New York with the kaleidoscope Adage of Known – a dance album that smartly left dance at the door. JDSY isn’t looking to get feet moving, he’s looking to get heads spinning with electronic songs that are actual songs, with actual verses, melodies, choruses, climaxes and denouements. It’s oddly claustrophobic and sparse at the same time – the beats are dense and closet in the vocals, but the tone and pace is warm and welcoming – it’s a fascinating tension that sculpts the unexpected into audio satisfaction.
Highlights: Staircase, Drifter, Horizon Line

Public relations: Google owns you

The day of the newspaper is almost over. So says David Meerman Scott in the New Rules of Marketing and PR. He implores PR professionals to stop spending time writing “press releases” where we hammer out a lifeless sheet that’s been vetted through a million committees, legal departments and the like – and then cross our fingers, post it to a PR wire and hope some journalist likes it enough to contact us. It’s such a convoluted process and with the democratization of information via the Internet, it’s brutally ineffective.

The truth is – traditional PR isn’t working anymore. That’s because traditional media isn’t working anymore. The latest statistics show that newspaper readership continues to decline, and the same for television. Less and less people are reading or watching traditional news. That means less and less people are going to read our stories through these channels.

The Internet is growing significantly as the news medium of choice. And it’s not just traditional sites like CNN, its user-generated sites like Digg, stumbleupon, del.ici.ous where the readers decide what’s most relevant to them. The Internet is democratizing Journalism and that means it’s also democratizing public relations.

Our landscape is changing significantly – half of what I learned in PR school no longer applies. In ten years, I’m sure most of it won’t apply at all. With that said, the guiding principles of public relations, communicating, will always be relevant. The rise of the Internet isn’t the end of PR – it’s just means re-evaluating how the cycle works.

Instead of creating “push” pieces, we need to start creating “pull” pieces. Instead of talking at our audiences with press releases, glossy newsletters, over-produced annual reports, we need to start having genuine conversations. In marketing, guru Seth Godin coined the term “permission marketing” for this approach. For us, it’s should be called “permission communication.”

We need to start creating “news releases” that any person can find on the Internet easily, read and understand. That means optimizing our releases for searching on the Internet, which means eliminating the jargon, eliminating the PR-speak, and writing plainly and simply.

It’s quite simple: Google owns you. That’s how the majority of people will look for your company, your products and your news. The “pull” approach means that you stop writing at your audience and instead let them come to you. Let them find you easily with Google, and when they do, make it easy for them to do what they want on your site, so that it’s rewarding and meaningful for them.

Once you show that you’re genuine about delivering the best and most useful content and information to the people that want to read about you. They will trust you and they will keep coming back.

Video Games: Guess what, Wii Fit sucks

Wii Virus

A while back, the President of Epic games compared the Nintendo Wii to a virus. Basically, he explained that the Wii was the perfect PR hype machine. It’s the kind of product everyone talks about, but once they own, they stop playing it. As an early adopter of the Wii, unfortunately, I’d have to agree. Essentially, the Wii’s endless hype, and subsequent retail dominance can be traced to two factors: first experience and word-of-mouth.

First experience basically means that the Wii is built to be awesome when you first try it. Who can’t remember trying out Wii sports tennis for the first time and being blown away by how much fun it was to swing the remote? The problem is, this experience doesn’t become more rewarding the more you play the game – if anything it stays the same or drops as familiarity leads to tedium. The reason for this is that Wii sports is a casual game, and by nature, it’s game play is shallow. There’s no real progress and there’s no real depth to continually playing. It’s the same exact game each time you turn it on.

However, because the first experience is totally awesome, it leads to a lot of positive word-of-mouth. Here’s the typical scenario: Your friends try Wii at a friend’s house, and the next you thing you know, they’re telling everyone how great it was. It’s not reflective of actually owning the Wii, but that hardly matters. The word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire, increasing demand, decreasing supply, which just reinforces the cycle.

Wii aren’t Fit

Now, here comes the Wii fit to replicate the experience of Wii Sports. It’s the same exact situation. There’s uncontrollable hype for the game because it is a lot of fun to play for the first 10-15 minutes. Add in promises of getting fit and you have another game that’s being driven by word of mouth. The reality however, is that Wii fit is just as shallow as Wii Sports and owning it, isn’t nearly as fun as just trying it. The evidence can be seen in growing dissatisfied Amazon posts or the huge number of gamers who are already giving up on Wii Fit’s fitness programs.

Couple this with the fact that the Wii is still struggling to sell third-party games and my earlier prediction still holds strong. I feel strongly that the Wii’s innovation, while unique and needed in the video game market, simply isn’t enough.

The Wii’s technical limitations mean that it’s not appealing for most developers who are concentrating on next-generation titles. Add that to the fact that the Wii’s glut of cheap imitation games makes it different for its consumers to choose quality games – resulting in people only buying name brand games (Nintendo games) means that third-party developers will be less willing to design games that just won’t sell.