ethanbeute

  It’s a commonly accepted and often repeated concept. It’s illustrated by powerful examples from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg to Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller to James Cameron and Tom Hanks  (every one of them is a college dropout). It’s the sub-headline and positioning of a recent “Billionaire University” story in [...]

  The start of the NBA season on Christmas day, as well as loads of new advertising campaigns, somehow spurred my curiosity about the Facebook fanbase and Twitter followers of the professional sports leagues.  So, I went and tracked down some counts. To be clear on my philosophy, more is not inherently better – it’s [...]

Note off the top: this post is one of only two that ties together the themes of this blog – marketing, environment, and culture (only other one was about Lisa Gansky’s The Mesh).  Now, on to the post … Dow Chemical Company.  Do you associate the name with nature, harmony, connectedness, or humanity? No?  Then [...]

When the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau removed the new logos and video from VisitCOS.com and disabled public viewing on YouTube, it broke (slightly) my previous post about the Live It Up campaign. Wishing I’d used KeepVid a week ago, I searched for it elsewhere online. I didn’t find the Live It Up video, [...]

  In Colorado Springs, a place I’ve called home for more than 5 years now, community leaders recently gathered and consultants were hired to create a branding campaign for the city.  The targets: “residents, tourists, and the business community.”   I love a good internal branding effort – one that gathers stakeholders, is facilitated by [...]

I’ve been doing marketing and promotion inside local television stations for more than a decade.  Nearly everything we do is highly perishable, especially in the linear broadcast.  It must affect my mindset, because two instances today – neither especially profound – open-hand slapped me in the face with the idea of permanence. These instances immediately [...]

Earlier, in my brief examination of social whoring, I included a mention of “who” being more important than “how many.”  The basic idea: 10 Twitter followers truly locked in to you – your persona, your concept, your product, your service or your brand – are more valuable than 1,000 followers who are just hanging on [...]

Though it’s great for ESPN and pretty good for the BCS, the $500M contract that pairs college football’s biggest games with the best brand in sports is another blow to broadcast TV.

I’ve been observing and thinking about a phenomenon I’m calling “social whoring,” which favors “how many” over “who.” A recent Twitter experience set me to write this post. A couple examples from Facebook are a bit more confounding. What should I make of social whoring?

Most of us buy things we don’t really need, but instead simply want. I’m good with that. Buying socks for your chairs, though, crosses the line into ridiculous consumption.