Memewatch: Valleyschwag

Since I announced auctioning off 240 days of T shirt wear (see this and that), I have been relentlessly needled by my entire social network. Mostly people think I’m whacked. David Hornik mentioned the Valleyschwag deal, where you can get schwag sent to you monthly for $14.95, without having to actually go to conferences or sleep on the moldy rug at a Bar Camp in Delhi to get the T shirt.

Also, at the Valleyschwag blog I learned that schwag has additional meanings in American street culture:

[from What the urban dictionary says]

Perhaps I’m naive, but I didn’t know that schwag means “…low grade marijuana. This type of marijuana is usually brown, seedy, dry.” My favorite is the usage:

adj- Ewww this schwag ass weed tastes horrible and it didnt get me very high. noun- I hate smoking schwag, but i cant get any dank right now so i guess i’ll have to.

According to the Urban Dictionary, schwag is also “A rock & roll band based in St. Louis, Missouri,” “a fat homely chick,” “an amazing band in London, ON,” “slang for penis,” “of reject status,” “cool or awesome cool and sweet skittles with sprinkles on top!,” and “Give away promo items procured through working an event. Often used in the stagehand world when working corporate or industrial gigs.”

I don’t think that paying the $14.95 will get you any of that kind of schwag.

Memewatch: Social Media Analysis or Blog Relations?

Over at the Church of the Customer, Ben McConnell suggests that corporations are going to have to find or train people to track what’s pertinent to the business in the blogosphere:

[from Job title of the future: social media analyst]

All of this seems to point toward a new job responsibility inside companies whose growth depends on word of mouth: social media analyst.

If a social media analyst could port into Technorati’s data warehouse (or BlogPulse’s) and rely on her imagination and knowledge of company strategies to create her own, real-time dashboard of gauges, maps and charts of what’s being said online, she would probably become the company’s most foremost expert on trends, word of mouth and the democratization of culture.

Yeah, but maybe that’s too remote: all that staring at graphs and so on, like the foo-foo dust that business intelligence firms peddle. I think it is more likely that a role analogous to press relations will arise: blog relations. These folks will keep tabs on Blogpulse and Technorati, to see what is going down, but they will also maintain and active and on-going relationship with the major bloggers in their sector.

[pointer from Mike Manuel]

Memewatch: Pinkomarketing

Tara Hunt and a posse of other bright minds are throwing around the nifty term, pinkomarketing, defined in a Martin Luther style Manifesto:

[from Pinko Marketing]

The Pinko Marketing Manifesto (a very rough beginning):

1. Commie Marketing is about the end of the Marketing Manager, Director and anyone else who thinks they have control over the message, market or ‘brand’
2. The commons…the producers…will decide what makes it ‘to market’, what flourishes, what dies, what is ignored, what is celebrated…whatever.
3. No marketing budget, big or small, will change your advantage in this new world.
4. Amateurism means passion, curiosity, intrigue and growth. What the hell is a professional? You get paid for doing what I’m doing right now? Cool. How do I get that gig?
5. The ‘masses’ will decide what is ‘mass’ and what is not…whatever the hell ‘mass’ means…wait a minute? We aren’t being stuffed into a overarching classification? So, we can divorce ourselves from any notion that we are some monolithic mass of consuming beings? Cool.
6. Ask your shareholders, Board of Directors and investors to kindly sit down and relax. If they’ve invested in a dog, they’ll know soon enough.
7. Monetize this.
8. The ‘Elite’ and their ‘Wannabe’ hangers-on will also sit down and shutup. They may learn something very valuable in this next while.
9. Having a corporate blog does NOT mean that you get it. In fact, it mostly means that you don’t.
10. The voices of the community, your employees and your competitors are more valuable than anything you could ever say. Listen. No…really…listen.
11. Small is the new big. I know it sounds cliche, but beyond lipservice, let’s embrace it.
12. Shifting your attitude to Pinko Thinking today will not only put you ahead of the curve, it will mean your survival.
13. I’m not copyrighting this. It belongs to the commons. Please use it.
14. Put down the marketing plan and walk away slowly. It’ll be alright. I know. You have a tough job ahead of you. It’s called killing your inner control freak. I have the same issue.
15. Everyone is a marketer. They were right! All these years that I fought that and they were right! Everyone does it. I feel so much better…

I love it! I thought unmarketing would catch on as a term — same idea — but maybe the ‘un’ is too negative. The ‘pinko’ is cool, suggesting the iconclastic, left-leaning, and colorful side of things.