Tag Archives: Andrew Sullivan

5 Good Posts for Friday April 22

Blogs and blogging, Weblogs, , , , , , , , ,

It is now fixed so I haven’t lost my last two weeks of blogging, and all of your comments, from yesterday’s Amazon Cloud server failure. In the meantime, life goes on. These are some posts I’ve collected this week, posts I want to recommend:

  1. Little Bets Can Make a Big Difference: Dan Schawbel’s review of Peter Sims’ new book Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. I’ve been meaning to review this book myself, because I like it a lot. Dan beats me to it with an interview style coupled by some specific helpful lists. Here’s a good summary in one quote from Peter:

    I’ve heard thousands of entrepreneurial stories, some extremely successful, many mediocre, or not successful. That combined with the extensive research my team and I did for this book leaves it clear to me that instantaneous ideas are extremely rare, in business, art, science, or you name it. Mozart was an exception. He was a prodigy. But for the rest of us mortals, it takes lots of small steps and constant iteration to identify big opportunities and problems.

  2. Anita Campbell posted Are You Too Old to be Innovative on the Amex OPEN.  One of the highlights is that being holder helps to spotlight trends. I hope so.
  3. And on Anita’s Small Business Trends blog, Lisa Barone posted The 7 Types of People to Avoid in Social Media. Do you recognize yourself there? Scary question.
  4. My thanks to John Jantsch for pointing me to 5 Tips for Better Business Storytelling, by Jeanne Hopkins, on Hubspot. Very practical tips. I think story telling is extremely important, and not just for blogging.
  5. Andrew Sullivan’s Look At Me When I’m Talking To You. Very disturbing. I’m guilty of this. Read it.  By the way, has anybody else noticed how prolific he is? Like 10 blog posts a day?

Unsend That Letter Award: the Pork People

Business Mistakes, Business Stories, True Stories, , , , ,

Oh dear. Have you seen the pork industry’s “other white meat” advertising campaign? Last April 1 the blog at ThinkGeek.com offered canned unicorn meat as “the new white meat.” Earlier this week they got a cease and desist letter from the pork association. You get the joke, right? The pork association lawyers didn’t. How embarrassing that has to be.

And how funny. ThinkGeek is having a ball with it. They posted Officially Our Best-Ever Cease and Desist on their blog yesterday, obviously enjoying every last detail. There’s an image of the actual letter, as serious as it can be, talking about infringement and dilution of trademark rights. It cites other sites that picked up the joke and ran it with headlines like “the other other white meat.”

ThinkGeek apologizes with all the seriousness of a 13-year-old boy whose wisecrack has the whole class laughing uproariously and the teacher mad. Holding it’s breath, trying to keep from giggling:

We’d like to publicly apologize to the NPB for the confusion over unicorn and pork–and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn’t actually exist.

I got it from Andrew Sullivan’s The Other Other White Meat on his Daily Dish blog on the Atlantic site. Which reminds me, if they give out awards for a prolific stream of day-in-day-out interesting blogging, Andrew Sullivan has to get one. He’s been churning out multiple good posts a day, every day, for several years. He jumps over a lot of topics, and I suppose he offends a fair number of people with his opinions, but I’m just in awe of how much good writing he produces.

And I really feel bad for the pork people who didn’t get the joke. We’re all too busy, so easily distracted. And protecting the brand is so important. Still, this is a reminder to us all. I feel like revising my “Stop. Breathe. Think.” holiday post to add “Chuckle” to it. My wife reminds me why angels fly: “because they take themselves lightly.”