Crazy Friday Night
I’m still pretty snowed in by brand tags. More than anything else, it’s just keeping on top of emails with new brands to add. I can’t complain, but it’s definitely kept me from reading/thinking as much as I might like. But, I haven’t been totally dormant, so here’s some random things I’ve read/seen/thought about over the past week or so.
- 1) let me get some brand tags business out of the way: 1. I reached 1 million tags. 2) I launched a brand tags blog (which will include announcements and hopefully observations by me and others). 3) I launched uk brandtags and hispanic brand tags. 4) This is a bit old, but brand tags was on NPR and they made this cool video segment.
- I’m off to San Francisco and LA next week. If you’re around and want to meet up, drop me a line.
- Faris and I wrote an article for this month’s Contagious Magazine all about the importance of data visualization. For me, at least, it was in part inspired by a quote from Ed Cotton: “in a data driven world, infographics are the new art.” Anyhow, Faris has a little writeup of the article and a link to the full thing in PDF form.
- I know I’m a little late to the game on this, but: Thing Younger Then McCain. Some of my favorites include automatic transmissions, LP records and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
- This poster is awesome.
- I keep saying this to people, but I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here … I think the best way to understand what any business does is to listen to what it says it’s not. If you feel like you need to defend yourself preemptively by saying you’re not something than that’s probably exactly what you are.
- After one week of hard core training new Zappos employees are offered $1000 to quit. The idea is that if you’re willing to take the cash then you weren’t right for the job anyway. I think that’s awesome.
That’s all for now. Thanks to everyone again for all the brand tags support and sorry for ignoring the blog for a few weeks.
Hi, I'm 
Really like that comment about being defined by what we say we are not.
I’m in no way trying to be friendly about this ;)
Nice bunch of info there. I’ve been dropping ‘zappoisms’ at work for a few months esp since I started following their ceo and some others on twitter. The response at my work is true to cliche – disdain and revulsion from my snobbish colleagues when they hear the source. Pity. I like what you say about listening to what businesses say they are not. In luxo sales I’ve used what I sometimes call the mirror test with colleagues, products and sometimes policies or campaigns. When things are murky or the politics aren’t totally clear, by articulating the opposite of what the thing or experience claims to be (or is) helps me figure out how it can be dealt with or how it can fit in with everything else, even how it can be sold. A few yrs back all I had to do to discover the opposite was leave an old copy of adbusters on the table before a touchy meeting between brand managers and their marketing teams. I did not claim responsibility. I don’t recall the cover, but the threat of a free thinker deflated the hubris pretty quickly. For a moment anyway.
Hey Noah!
I´m from Chile and I´m totally crazy about BrandTags. Congrats!
I am aware of the release of spanish brandtags as a platform.
I was wondering if you´re releasing some kind of API that we can use to apply this principle to ther brands (chilean celebs, politicians, local brands, etc).
And if you´re not, is there any chance that we could colaborate somehow.
Thanks a lot…this is a very striking proyect!
cheers!
:::v:::
Just testing comments …