Just Break ‘Em: Not So Cool Rules in Marketing and Media

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

For all our talk of freedom, we Americans LOVE rules…

• Our favorite sport, football, has the most rules of any sport on the planet.

• Poker players make up new rules with every hand (“threes and hearts are wild except for the Queen, which you can pass to the right if someone sneezes during play”).

• Our institutionalized belief systems — whether Rastafarianism, environmentalism, or even Libertarianism — bristle with rules of what can and can’t be done.

• The August issue of Wired features an entire section on rules, “How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans,” which includes a few illuminating ones by Brad Pitt (“Don’t take a picture of your wife’s butt. That’s silly. Take pictures of other people’s wives’ butts.”).

• And, of course, as its name indicates, this here blog occasionally lays out rules for marketing and media as laid down by a higher authority (me).

Want more proof that most of us are rule-snorting junkies? Take this here Internet, where many users routinely cry “net neutrality!” and “information is free!” and “hands off, Feds!” — YET first-comers to any new website, network or medium are quick to impose rules that newbies must follow or die.

Black and White and Dead All Over: Can Journalism Survive Free Riders?

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

Yeah, try re-bottling that. (illustration by Stuart MacKay-Smith)

It’s tough watching an old friend slowly die. Even tougher knowing that you’re helping to knock him off.

Before you go calling 911, the old friend I’m referring to is my daily newspaper. For decades, I’ve started every day with my morning paper. I score my sports and business fix while downing pure Colombian full-caf. Over the years, the two addictions have chemically intertwined to enhance their combined effects. Consequently, whenever I miss my morning coffee-n-paper jumpstart, I find myself fluttering from activity to activity the rest of the day like a fat pigeon in a hurricane.

And now, to my horror and profound sadness, newspapers are dying, losing readers and advertisers to the Web. As a blogger, I contribute to this lethal migration, not so much by stealing readers from newspapers (if only I had such drawing power), but by validating the Web as the place to go for scoop. I myself drink deeply from this vast sea of instant info. After all, why read papers for business alerts or sports scores when they’re updated every second online?

Expressing My Inner TURFgeek: How I Became a Professional Sportswriter for a Day

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

No, not me on the cover. Really.

Somebody my size with my athletic ability doesn’t play for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Picture an over-caffeinated chicken on a greased trampoline. It’s just not in my genetic cards.

So I did the next best thing: I wrote a bad-ass essay about the team. Actually a few essays…

Untweetable: Why Twitter Fever Isn’t For Everyone

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

It was all about that sharpener...

When I was a kid, the object of all crayon lust was the Crayola 64 box with the built-in sharpener, because a dull crayon was almost as bad as soggy Cocoa Pebbles. And yet, that Crayola 64 contained some bizarre colors like Maize, Burnt Sienna and the fun-to-say-but-rarely-used Raw Umber.* While Black was quickly worn to a stub — one could never have enough Black — Maize lasted longer than the Shredded Wheat that mom tried to get us to eat in place of Cocoa Pebbles. (Sorry, mom, miniature bales of hay are for miniature horses.)

The point of this contrived metaphor? Just because a color exists doesn’t mean you have to use it. The same holds true for new media like Twitter…

Cool Rules Pronto’s Greatest Hits (So Far)

Ever laugh at career retrospectives by people who are still getting started — or who never really got off the ground? I mean, really, how can the band The Goo Goo Dolls be upon their second volume of greatest hits already? I didn’t even know they ever had more than one hit.

Well, I’m about to do something that should have you ROFLYAO. I just launched this blog in December of ‘007, and now I’m going to perpetrate a greatest posts retrospective. Yes, call it premature exaltation. Or just a lark…

“Your Skin Color is not a Stain!”: L.A. Teen Takes on Unilever’s Bigotry

Delia Rose is mad as hell. In her usually lighthearted and witty blog, Impeach the Muffins, the L.A. teenager is calling for a boycott of Unilever. The reason? The skin-whiteners that the corporate behemoth distributes and promotes in Malaysia and other Eastern countries…

Uh Oh: Death By Blogging

According to the New York Times, three prominent bloggers suffered serious heart attacks in the past five months — Russell Shaw, Marc Orchant, and Om Malik — with Shaw and Orchant going to that big blogosphere in the sky. (May you have infinite comments and pingbacks for all eternity.)

That Great Big Sexy Mistake: 5 Reasons Not To Use Flash

A Flash-based website is like a supermodel date: awesome to look at, but after a while, you’ll just want someone who can carry on a conversation…*

Name Dropping Rules: A Blogging Tip

I love checking my blog stats, not just the raw numbers of views, but also such info as where my traffic is coming from. That’s how I discovered that my article on Wal-Mart had been cited by the Wall Street Journal. Woohoo — I’ve got Street cred!

I’m most intrigued by the search-engine terms that lead to Cool Rules Pronto. Who Googled “Freddy Nager blog”? And why is somebody researching “Spicoli origin”?

Here’s the key factoid I learned from looking at these search-engine terms: name dropping works….