May 2010
27 May, 2010
In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote:
Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity
Marcus Aurelius, was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD. We know him because he is the wise Caesar played by Richard Harris, with Russel Crowe as Maximus, in Ridley Scott’s film, Gladiator. He is known as a philosopher king and wrote several influential works, particularly supporting the Stoics.
Time, is perhaps one of the most difficult words to define because of its very conceptual nature. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a continuous, measurable quantity in which events occur in a sequence proceeding from the past through the present to the future.
But Marcus Aurelius is much closer to the original meaning when he spoke of pinpricks of eternity. In Old English, tima, meant a limited space of time. It comes from Old German timon and is similar to the Old Norse timi. But the word has very old roots in the original language of Eurasia, the Proto-Indo-European word dimon, from the base da meaning to cut up, divide.
So, originally time meant not the continuous quantity that we now use it to mean, but bits of time. The word time is closely related to the word tide, which came from Old English tid for a point or portion of time. The tide has come to mean a portion of time defined by the rise and fall of the sea.
So when we say time and tide wait for no man - which is one of the oldest expressions in English - we risk being tautological. A thousand years ago another philosopher king, Canute, sat on the beach to prove the truth of this expression to his courtiers.
Tidings is also a derivative from the same origins. When we bring good tidings we bring good news of an event or an occurrence – a particularly pleasant moment in time.
20 May, 2010
A recent Economist story tells that Anna Wintour, the 61-year-old editor-in-chief of Vogue (widely believed to be the subject of the film The Devil Wears Prada), was not very pleased when Tavi Gevinson was given a better seat than her at a recent fashion show.
Who is Tavi Gevinson? Gevinson is the 14-year-old author of the StyleRookie blog. Gevinson started her blog at the age of 11 and has built a huge following in the blogosphere:
Guess who is going to be all fancy n stuff and talk at L2’s Generation Y conference this Friday? Me, that’s who! And I’m going to be talking about the Unpredictability of Gen Y …
And not surprisingly, as reported by the Economist, she stole the show that had been put together to focus on “tomorrow’s affluent consumer”. Representatives of luxury-goods businesses, hung on Gevinson’s every word.
The lesson for today’s businesses is that those of Generation Y (people born between 1980 and 2000) know more than us about how to make the most out of social-networking technologies.
Some of us are Baby Boomers (born after 1945 until about 1960) who didn’t own a computer until we were well into adulthood. We possibly had to program our computers to perform our calculations and may even remember having to feed paper cards into a mainframe. Computers were calculating machines.
Most of us are X Generation (born between 1961 and 1981) we experienced the growth of personal computers and witnessed the birth of the Internet. Internet 1.0 was about sharing information and we played space invaders by putting lots of coins in arcade machines.
But those of Generation Y have grown up with computers and treat them as an essential part of their everyday lives – technology is social and about entertainment. They have participated in the growth of Web 2.0 as a means of participating in online communities, for sharing gossip and for on-line collaboration. They are also known as the Net Generation!
Do you know how to use Web 2.0 to connect and engage with Generation Y? Madrigal Communications can help you put together a do-it-yourself social media marketing campaign for as little as $250! Our consultant will sit down with you and show you how you can use a combination of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and your website to connect your business with the Net Generation. Contact us to find out more!
13 May, 2010
People do business with people that they trust. When you put together your marketing material you should make sure you are building trust with your audience and your potential customers. Here are five quick strategies that I would advise you to use to build trust when marketing your business:
Be valuable
Don’t undersell your products or services. Emphasise value not price! Even if your customer is price-driven they still need to trust you to buy from you.
Be honest
Don’t say you are the best. Tell how you will provide the benefits that your customers want or need. That shows that you are the best at what they want.
Be authentic
Let your personality stand out. People don’t like superficiality. Don’t be just another business selling a product or service.
Be human
Your business is not an object – it is the quality, expertise, and experience of its people. It is what you do for your customers. It is not an “it” it is a “we”.
Be accountable
You are the most important thing in your business. Don’t be anonymous. If something goes wrong your customer knows who to talk to. Make sure you have a relationship with your customers.
Need help?
If your business needs ideas to build trust with its marketing give me a call, Tim Entwisle, at Madrigal Communications, valuable, honest, authentic, human and not anonymous.
6 May, 2010
As we sit down for dinner in Australia the polls are opening in Great Britain. Will Gordon Brown lose badly and end Labour’s run of power? Or will David Cameron resurrect the fortunes of the Conservative Party? The outsider, the Liberal Democrats are making a run on the outside with their leader, Nick Clegg. Will the British voters flock to the polls to vote away their expense-scamming politicians or stay away as they have been tending to do for the last couple of elections?
Some pundits are predicting a hung parliament; others a strong Conservative win; and there is an expected high voter turnout. I found a wonderful, 1989 quote from David S. Broder, currently the White House correspondent for the Washington Post:
The science of interpreting elections has a fancy name: psephology. A shorter, simpler and more accurate title for much election analysis is: fiction.
Psephology is the branch of sociology that studies elections and its practitioners are psephologists. It comes from the Greek word psephos for pebbles. Psephism is the process of voting.
Although the word is a recent concoction, it reminds us that democracy is very old and that votes were once cast by Greeks dropping pebbles in the urns of their chosen candidates. A ballot is the Roman or Italian version – a ballot comes from pallotte, for the small balls that were similarly used as counters.
In a less positive voting system, ostracism, comes to us from ostraka, the Greek for potsherds or pottery tokens that were used when Athenians voted to exile one of their citizens for ten years.
But in a British election with their first past the post system, there will be questions about whether the party that gets the most pebbles gets the most seats.
1 May, 2010
Beserk was a great warrior from Norse mythology, renowned for his bravery and for his fury in battle. He didn’t fight in armor but in his bera serkr, literally bear shirt or bearskin in Old Norse. He gave his name to the berserks, the wild, frenzied shock troops of the marauding Vikings.
The Icelandic poet, Snorri Sturluson, wrote the Ynglinga legendary saga in about 1225 and in it he gave a description of the berserks:
His [Odin's] men rushed forwards without armour, were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or wild bulls, and killed people at a blow, but neither fire nor iron told upon them. This was called Berserk-gang.
How the berserks, induced the frenzied state, called berserk-gang, is unknown. Various suggestions include a form of psychosis or induced madness, but it seems most likely that it was a secret ritual using a drug to bring on the frenzy.
The berkserk-gang might have resulted from ingestion of bog myrtle (Myrica gale), a plant used throughout Europe and Scandinavia as part of the gruit used to flavour and make beer bitter, which is known to have hallucinogenic properties.
The mushroom Amanita muscaria can produce temporary psychoses and is another candidate for causing berserk behaviour. It is also known as fly agaric or in Scandinavia, flugswamp. The mushrooms association with flies in both its common name, fly agaric, and in its scientific name, musca being the Latin for fly, stems from it having been known to kill flies that drank water steeped with it.
Berserks when not engaged in battle were a bit of a social nuisance so the practice gradually became outlawed throughout the viking kingdoms. By the 13th century there were no more of these rampaging Scandinavians to terrorise Europe and their own brethren.
Berserk, forgotten for centuries, found its way into English in 1822 when Sir Walter Scott’s wrote of them in his novel, The Pirate:
… the Berserkars were champions … who used to run like madmen on swords, and spears, and harpoons, and muskets, and snap them all into pieces, as a finner [a whale] would go through a herring-net…
Scott’s use of berserkar rather than berserk was probably a confusion and substitution of an -er agent suffix (i.e. as in builder for someone who builds, killer for someone who kills) for the old Norse use of -r to denote a masculine singular noun.
Thus beserk became used in recent times to denote not the agent but the activity, as in going berserk, and berserker became used for someone who fights recklessly and with disregard for his own life.
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