Author Archives: jackcameron

Movie Monday: Star Wars Machete Order

Posted on March 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Welcome to Movie Monday. Every week I’m going to be writing about a movie I recently watched. It may be a movie I’ve never seen before. Or like this week, it may be movies I’ve seen literally hundreds of times.

Over the weekend I decided to watch the Start Wars movies with my son in what is being called ‘Machete Order’. Basically you watch A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back and then watch the second and third prequels before finishing off with Return of the Jedi. You don’t watch The Phantom Menace at all. You can read the original article about this here. Since you can (and should) read the article, I’ll try not to rehash what he’s already said about it. Instead I’m going to talk about this set of movies and my reaction to watching them in this order.

I watched the Special Edition versions because those are the ones I own. I have not yet been subjected to the Blu Ray blinking Ewoks and the like.

Episode IV: A New Hope

The original Star Wars movie remains one of the best made sci-fi action movies of all time. While George Lucas took much of the plot from other sources, no one had done a movie quite like this. Watching the first twenty minutes of it, I’m still surprised by the amount of screen time we get with non-humans. It’s a gutsy move to put two robots on your screen, one of whom only beeps and whistles and expect the audience to care about them.

A New Hope succeeds because of what one of my friends calls “perpetual peril”. Each new situation leads to a new more dangerous situation for our characters. It’s a difficult thing to pull off and the Star Wars movies do it again and again. For example, when our heroes are on the Death Star, they go from rescuing the Princess in the detention area to being trapped in the detention area to being trapped in a garbage pit to being trapped in a garbage pit that’s crushing them. It’s exciting no matter how many times you watch it.

Yes, some of the Special Edition stuff sucks. Greedo shoots first and the Jabba the Hutt scene (which I refer to as ‘the gratuitous Boba Fett scene’) are significantly annoying but what they did with Mos Eisley and some of the shots in the Death Star battle make up for that in my opinion.

Episode V: Empire Strikes Back

Anyone who is making a sequel needs to look at Empire. Empire hits every sequel button just right. We have the same cast of characters. They’ve grown and changed a little since last we saw them but not too much. We’re introduced to a few new characters. And perhaps most importantly, the characters are thrown into entirely new situations. The reason Empire Strikes Back works so well is that they don’t need to take time introducing the main characters. That means they can get straight into the plot.

This also means that when they do need to introduce a character, they can take their time. The introduction of Yoda is still one of my favorite Master/Apprentice sequences from any movie. This is the movie where we see Luke grow from a whiny teenager into a hero. And yet, he doesn’t do everything right. He’s still impulsive. Even after he knows Yoda is a Jedi Master, he still doesn’t listen.

The ending of Empire is one of the all time best cliffhangers. We get the revelation of Darth Vader. Everyone’s favorite scoundrel, Han Solo is captured and frozen. And really, the Rebel Alliance got their butts kicked throughout this movie. It’s not easy to take the absolute victory from the first movie and turn it into something minor, but they manage to do exactly that.

The Special Edition stuff in Empire isn’t annoying at all really. Suddenly Cloud City actually looks like a city. Before the Special Editions I would have said that like 50 people lived on Cloud City. Also, at least in the DVD set I have, the scream that had been added to Luke’s fall is thankfully gone.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Following Empire Strikes Back with Attack of the Clones works for a number of reasons. First, it delays the resolution of the cliffhanger. Second, now that we know who Darth Vader is, we’re actually interested in how he becomes Darth Vader.

The opening crawl does a good job of letting us know what’s going on. While we initially have no reason to care about Padme and the attempts on her life, once Obi-Wan and Anakin Skywalker enter the story, it suddenly matters. Anakin comes off as a bit of a dick throughout the movie. What’s interesting is that having just watched Luke for two movies, we can see that being a whiny, selfish, impulsive guy must run in the family.

One thing that gets overlooked in the prequels is Ewan McGregor’s fantastic performance of Obi-Wan Kenobi. I totally buy that his Obi-Wan eventually turns into Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan. And having already met Obi-Wan in the first two movies, it’s nice to see him in action in his younger days.

The only time Attack of the Clones suffers is when it starts getting into the politics of everything. In A New Hope, there was one mention of the Senate being dissolved and that was it. We don’t watch Star Wars to watch West Wing in Space. The rest of the time, it’s a reasonably fun movie.

The one problem with watching it in this order that I noticed is that when C-3PO says, “The Maker!” upon seeing Anakin, it’s a bit strange though it almost just sounds like one of 3PO’s random outbursts. It still doesn’t explain why Padme and Anakin basically steal C-3PO. Really, the existence of R2-D2 and C-3PO in the prequels is more a distraction than anything else. Their ‘comic relief’ isn’t very funny and in a universe full of droids, it’s weird that these two particular droids would stick around so much.

The final lightsaber battle is good with the exception of Yoda jumping around like Sonic the Hedgehog. Again we get Jedis getting involved in battles where they’re simply outmatched. The movie ends with the beginning of the Clone War. It’s not really a cliffhanger and it’s not nearly as good as the first two movies, but it works well in this placement.

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

I would argue that of all the Star Wars movies, I like the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith the best. It’s one of the final battles of the Clone Wars. It succeeds in throwing us right into the middle of it and then putting our characters again into perpetual peril. Once they get on board the ship it’s just one perilous situation after another. I even buy the crash landing on the runway even though, since all ships levitate, there’s no reason for a runway. It’s like the end of the car chase in To Live & Die In LA where the cars are on the wrong side of the road an you don’t even notice.

Then we get bogged down with politics again, but not for long. Anakin is having visions of his wife’s death and it’s bothering him. He feels like he’s gaining so much power and yet, he can’t save his pregnant wife though admittedly she’s only in danger in his dreams.

The turning of Anakin to the Dark Side isn’t just because of the Emperor. Yoda, who is generally very wise, gives Anakin some spectacularly bad advice. Then the Jedi Council basically marginalizes him. They’ve got good reason and part of that is manipulation by Palpatine, but still, it’s an interesting choice to make it not entirely Palpatine’s fault.

General Grievous is a strange character who seems to be around more than anything to keep Obi-Wan Kenobi busy for a while.

When we get to the epic final battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin, it’s a bit absurd. There are parts of the fight I like, but it’s almost like the perpetual peril thing done wrong. This doesn’t take away from the final scene between them where they both feel completely betrayed.

And finally we have Anakin as Darth Vader. The scene where his helmet is put on for the first time is haunting. And having watched A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, we know where this path is going to lead.

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

It begins with Darth Vader arriving on the new Death Star. I found that after watching the two prequels, I felt like Darth Vader didn’t really want to be there. I’ve probably watched Return of the Jedi more than any other movie I own. And it wasn’t until I watched them in this order that I felt that. Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi is conflicted throughout the entire movie, not just when confronted by Luke.

I had read in the Machete Article about Luke’s arrival in Jedi, but I was still surprised by it. Again, it’s a scene I’ve watched hundreds of times, but given the juxtaposition of this scene after watching Anakin go from Jedi to Sith, when Luke walks into Jabba’s Palace with his hooded robe and just chokes the guards, he’s looking more like Sith than Jedi. It’s a good moment that wouldn’t be there without watching the movies in this order.

Again, the Special Edition has enough good things that I can forgive the bad things. The song in Jabba’s Palace is terrible, but the ending sequence works much better, even with the horrible music. (I’m a fan of the Ewok Celebration Song from the original.)

Return of the Jedi isn’t just the end of Luke’s storyline. It’s the end of Darth Vader’s. Watching the movies in this order, you see this a lot clearer. Also when Luke burns Vader’s body, I was immediately reminded of Anakin on the lava shores of Mustafar.

I found you lose almost nothing by getting rid of Episode I. Or more to the point, you gain more than you lose. Without Episode I, you have no child Anakin, no strange virgin birth, no midiclorians, almost no Jar Jar Binks, and all you really sacrifice is a pod race that  goes on too long and a lightsaber battle (like there aren’t enough of those).

Final Thoughts

If you encounter someone who hasn’t seen the Star Wars movies and wants to, I highly suggest watching them in this order. Not only will it be a better experience for them, it’ll be a new experience for you.

-          Jack Cameron

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Humiliation Is Not An Act of Love

Posted on February 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

Recently the above video has been making the rounds. The basic idea of the video is that this guy’s 15-year-old daughter complained about how her parents were treating her on Facebook. She attempted to block her parents from seeing it, but as I’ve mentioned before, nothing on the Internet is truly private. In response, her father posted this video of him going off about her behavior for everyone to see.

This is a technique called public shaming. It’s been around since the Middle Ages. Thanks to the Internet, every few months, we get a new example of some frustrated parent doing this to their child. The typical response is the digital equivalent of patting the guy on the back for standing up to his daughter’s bad behavior. Or they’re glad that he ‘gave her a taste of her own medicine’.

In America, we absolutely love vengeance and people getting what they deserve. Mel Gibson made a career by making movies about that in the 80s and 90s. So these reactions in many ways, are only natural. The problem is that public shaming is not good parenting. It’s not discipline. It’s just vengeance. And it’s vengeance on your own child.

Some will argue but that she will learn from this. However, simply because someone learns from the experience doesn’t make it a good thing. People learn not to walk through Central Park at night when they get mugged.

What the father in this video did was humiliate his child. And he did it because he was humiliated by what she wrote. What he taught his child was that her behavior was okay and that the proper thing to do when you’re humiliated is to escalate the situation. This is wrong and it isn’t the act of a loving parent.

I am a father of teenagers. I understand firsthand the frustration that comes from raising teens. I do get where the guy is coming from, but abuse is wrong no matter what. And humiliation is a form of abuse. It’s not a form of good parenting. It’s a form of weakness. Rather than humiliating your child, how about teaching your kid that respecting other people is important? You can talk to your kids all you want, but ultimately they are going to learn by your example. If you show them that humiliating people is okay, then that’s exactly what they will do.

This guy is frustrated because his daughter doesn’t have any respect for him. He probably wonders where that comes from. He should look in the mirror.

-Jack Cameron

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I’m With The Brand Part 5: The Masters of Personal Branding

Posted on February 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

Tim Ferriss, Personal Branding at its best.

We’ve talked about the concept of Personal Branding, finding your Personal Brand, developing your Personal Brand, and the things to avoid when it comes to Personal Branding. In this post, I’ll point you in the directions of Personal Branding experts. Some of these guys were working on Personal Branding before anyone had a name for it.

Dan Shawbel wrote what some consider the Bible of Personal Branding, Me 2.0. It’s a fast read full of good information. Dan has created a business around Personal Branding. His success speaks for itself.

William Arruda is another professional Personal Branding guru. His book, Career Distinction focuses on how Personal Branding can improve your career and your career prospects.

Timothy Ferriss is another master of Personal Branding. He doesn’t advertise himself as such. Instead, he’s known as a best-selling author, champion kick-boxer, fitness guru, and chef.  Yeah, he gets around. And yet, he still manages to maintain a consistent high quality Personal Brand. He does this by being a source of good information and a champion of unknown experts. Tim Ferriss spends just as much time talking up people he looks up to as he does talking about himself. His first book, The 4-Hour Work Week changed the way I look at work. His second book, The 4-Hour Body changed the way I look at fitness. His next book The 4-Hour Chef will doubtlessly change the way I look at cooking. (Notice how he brands his book with the ‘4-Hour’ thing? That’s not an accident.)  What do these have to do with Personal Branding? The information in Tim’s books aren’t specifically geared towards Personal Branding. This is true, but using many of the ideas and techniques in his book, you’ll find that you increase your Personal Brand.

As Personal Branding gets more mainstream, there will inevitably be more books and articles about it (like this one). The most important thing to remember is that you are creating your personal brand whether you’re doing it purposely or not. You’re doing it by having a Facebook page. You’re doing it with Twitter and FourSquare. You might as well take control of it.

-          Jack Cameron

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I’m With The Brand Part 4: Your Boss, Your Mom, Or A Cop

Posted on January 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

I spend a lot of time online. So I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that I see people make Personal Branding mistakes every day. Many of these people would be quick to point out that they aren’t interested in Personal Branding and that they’re simply sharing their lives online with friends and relatives. That may very well be true. It doesn’t change the fact that some things shouldn’t be shared online. Ever.

A common piece of dating advice is that you not talk about your ex. There are reasons for this. Some will say that it’s because they’ll think you’re still hung up on your ex. I say it’s because they are picturing you talking about them after the relationship. No woman likes it when you call another woman a bitch. And yet, if you go to any random Facebook, you will see people trashing their exes or having actual online fights with someone they’re dating.

Another common mistake is trashing your place of employment. Sure, you might work with a bunch of people who make brain damaged monkeys look like the control room at NASA.  You might be the only one there who isn’t on drugs. Or maybe just the job itself sucks. We’ve all had the shitty job with the stupid coworkers. Some of us have had that job for years. Complaining about it online may be cathartic, but it’s not going to help you get your next job that’s not as shitty.

Yes, it’s cathartic to just go off on a rant about all of the ways you’ve been wronged both personally and professionally. It feels good to get some of that off your chest. But trashing other people is never the way to get past them in the long run.

This does not mean you shouldn’t share your bad day with the world. There are ways to do it that aren’t going to hurt your future relationships or jobs. All you have to do is use this rule of thumb: Don’t post anything online that you wouldn’t say to your boss, your mom, or a cop.

If someone is being a moron at work and making your job difficult, it’s better to say, “Managed to make some progress on the project despite challenging obstacles.”  Really, when it comes down to it, Personal Branding is just good personal public relations. What you’re trying to do is say what you want to say without causing any unintended problems.

It’s fine to have an opinion. It’s fine to be angry. Just be sure that you’re in control of that anger and use it wisely. Count to ten. Then figure out the most creative way to say what you want to say.

This is the fourth part of my Personal Branding series. If you’ve come this far, you’ll want to read tomorrow’s fifth and final post where I point you in the direction of the Personal Branding geniuses. I know quite a bit about Personal Branding but it’s all due to reading and watching these guys. See you tomorrow.

-          Jack Cameron

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I’m With The Brand Part 3: Creating Your Personal Brand

Posted on January 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Odds are that there is something you do better than most other people. Or maybe there’s just something you love to do. Whatever the case, this is what you need to center your brand around. When it comes to Personal Branding, there’s a school of thought that you should find a particular niche and become recognized as an expert at it. That’s not a bad way to do it but I don’t entirely agree with that. If you were an expert in doorknob manufacturing, I’d be willing to bet that’s not all you ever want to talk about. You probably have a favorite restaurant. You probably have an opinion on the White House, even if it’s on what doorknobs they use. My point here is that real people aren’t niches. Real people have a variety of interests and it’s okay to talk about those.

You do not need a niche. You do need a center. If you’re a musician, then it’s your music. If you’re a writer, then it’s your writing. You want your Personal Brand to not just be about you but also about what you love. From there, you can branch out to whatever it is you want to do.

The key component here is consistency. If someone comes upon a page you created online, it should be easily recognized as one of your pages. There are a number of ways to do this. One of the simplest ways to start is by having your photo be the same photo regardless of what site you’re on. This makes it so if someone stumbles upon your twitter account and they already know you on Facebook, there’s no question that yes, this is the same person.

If you’re more into graphic design than I am, you can also help establish your brand by using similar color schemes. This is more difficult on some social networking sites where their company colors tend to be on your page.

When it comes to actual content, quality is much more important than quantity. If you have nothing to say, don’t force it. And if you write something and it isn’t up to your standards, leave it as a draft. Maybe you can rewrite it later.

Finding what you want your brand to be isn’t easy. Tomorrow we’ll talk about common mistakes and what not to do when you post things online. And then, finally, we’ll bring in the experts and I’ll show you some of the gurus of Personal Branding who’ve turned it into an art form.

-          Jack Cameron

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I’m With The Brand Part 2: Identify Your Personal Brand

Posted on January 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

Before you start working on your Personal Brand, you need to find what is already out there. Googling yourself isn’t just for narcissists. Have people written about you? Are you a feature on dontdatehimgirl.com? Is someone with your name a serial rapist in five counties? What embarrassing photos, comments, or blog posts can be found and attributed to you? It’s best that you learn the answers to these questions before someone else does.

Set up a Google Alert for your name. See what comes up over the course of a couple of weeks. For those who don’t know, a Google Alert sends you an email of new search results for a specific search. If you have a common name, you might want to put your name and the city you live in into the Google Alert.

You should also do searches with Bing and Yahoo and other search engines just to see if anything different comes up, but Google is where you want to focus most of your energy because that’s what most people use.

It may be that you have a name that is too common. Or it may be that someone else with your name has already done a fine job of creating a Personal Brand. If this is the case, you need to find a way to make your name unique. For example, the name on my birth certificate isn’t ‘Jack Cameron’. It’s ‘John Cameron’. When I checked a few years ago, I was able to find six John Camerons in my hometown of Tacoma alone, including my own father. JohnCameron.com was already taken by a Canadian singer. There’s a John Cameron in Hollywood who frequently works with the Coen Brothers. From a Personal Branding perspective, John Cameron was a terrible name.

However, Jack Cameron had less clutter. Oh there are plenty of Jack Camerons out there. The Cameron Clan has had no problem breeding and we’re not all that imaginative when it comes to names. But when I started online, there was a distinct lack of Jack Camerons with a significant web presence.

Once you’ve found the name you want to use for your Personal Brand, it’s time to claim it. Purchase the domain of your name. You may even want to purchase the variations such as .net, .org and the like. However, this is a lot like Google in that if you get .com, the rest doesn’t really matter. Yourname.com is what people are going to go to first.

Go to http://namechk.com/ . Type in your Personal Brand name. How many of those are available? You don’t have to take them all, but it’s good if you can at least get Facebook, Twitter and other massively popular social networking sites. Many of these you’re going to want to log in and register simply so no one else can. You don’t necessarily have to use every one of them. You just want to attempt to avoid any branding problems in the future.

Inevitably, there will be some sites where your Personal Brand name is already taken. That’s okay. Just add one word. That word should be the one thing you want others to know about you. If you don’t know what that is yet, that’s okay. That’s what Monday’s article is all about.  Now that you’ve established what your Personal Brand is called, it’s time to work on what your Personal Brand is. This is the most important part of Personal Branding and it takes the most work. In the meantime, you can find me at:

jackcameron.com

facebook.com/jackcameron

twitter.com/jackcameron

linkedin.com/writerjackcameron

- Jack Cameron

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I’m With The Brand Part 1: What Is Personal Branding?

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment

I want to take a few days and talk about Personal Branding. I am not an expert on the subject and if you’re already fairly knowledgeable about Personal Branding, you probably won’t learn anything new. If you’re someone who doesn’t know what Personal Branding is or just someone who plays around online a lot, then this information could be incredibly useful to you.

You don’t have to be selling something to have a personal brand. If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, you have a personal brand. Your personal brand is what you tell the world about yourself online and offline. It’s you’re reputation. You’re creating it every day whether you mean to or not. Personal Branding is taking control of your personal brand and making sure that you project what you want people to know and eliminating the things you don’t.

Before we go much further, please take a look at the image below.

 

Every now and then you’ll hear people freaking out about online privacy. The simple truth is this: If it’s online, it’s not private. You can play with your privacy settings all you want. And it is good to check them from time to time.  However, if you’ve gone to the trouble of posting it online, someone has probably bothered to read it. If they can read it, they can link it or copy it and send it on to others.

Once people actually accept this, the natural reaction is to not post anything at all. I mean when you think that every little comment you make might be read by your boss, your next potential employer, your boyfriend, your girlfriend your mom, or stalker you might get a little shy about posting anything that might tell others where you live, what you’re doing, where you like to go or any of the other fun things you’ve been posting about. While this reaction is perfectly understandable, it’s not very useful.

No matter what you do, people who might employ you or sleep with you are going to Google you. They are going to look for you on Facebook. They are going to find what they can find from the comfort of their computer and smartphone. Welcome to the 21st Century. Now rather than trying to hide or being afraid of what they might find, why not give them exactly what you want them to find? This is the digital equivalent of showering and putting on good clothes.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what Personal Branding is. Tomorrow we’ll talk about how you get started taking control of your Personal Brand.

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The Good, The Bad and The Ugly About Facebook’s Timeline and Social Networking

Posted on December 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

In the late 1990s, I was a regular on an internet chat room run by the Tom Leykis Show. (Remember when chat rooms were all the rage?) One of the most common conversations went like this:

Person 1: You seem cool. What do you look like?

Person 2: Why don’t I just send you my photo? What’s your email address?

This happened all the time. And it tended to happen to the same people. So I told everyone to send me their picture and I would put up a website with all the photos of the regular chat people. Now, when someone new came on, we could just send them to the site where they would find that they too can be on the site if they send me their picture.

This was my first encounter with social networking.  At the time, the only thing you had to choose was whether or not you wanted to share a photo and if so, which one. That site no longer exists now. Neither do the chats. I’m not even still in contact with any of the people I met on the Tom Leykis Show chat room in person or online. It was something that happened and then it was gone, like most things in life.

Then there was MySpace. It was nice and simple. Post your picture, write what’s going on. Exchange messages. The choices were fairly simple. Share your name, age, hometown and whatever was on your mind. You could post what you were thinking. You could blog. You could comment on what other people were thinking or blogging. MySpace was an interconnected blogging site for people who didn’t want to code.

In 2007, everything changed with Facebook. Initially it seemed like a MySpace clone. Then Facebook began evolving. And it never stopped evolving. MySpace quickly became something that kids were into. Facebook became the place to be online.  Suddenly you were in contact with people you knew in high school. Suddenly some ex who you forgot about is sending you a friend request. Suddenly your mom is your friend on Facebook. This year, Facebook passed half a billion users. More people you know have a Facebook page than don’t.

With something that popular, there were inevitably going to be others who wanted a piece of that pie. Twitter carved out a niche by being incredible simple and easy to use. Before everyone had smart phones, you could send a text to 40404 and tell the world what was going on. It also became the place to connect with celebrities. LinkedIn showed up saying they were the Facebook for work. And like work, they were boring, but still kind of useful. Google came out with Buzz, which faded. Then they came out with Google+. G+ would have been a contender three or four years ago back when people were getting tired of MySpace and trying out Facebook. But it’s too late now. I know some people with G+ accounts but every one of them has a Facebook account that gets updated more often.

As soon as G+ came out, people began wondering how Facebook would respond. Initially it seemed like they weren’t going to do anything major. Then they came out with Timeline.

I’ll get into the whole Timeline thing in a minute, but first I want to back up and explain something. It doesn’t really matter how cool or flashy your website is. It doesn’t matter who is involved or what company it represents. What matters first, before all of that, is content. Content is king. Your site can be easy to navigate, pleasant to look at and on the cutting edge of what any browser can display. It won’t matter if you don’t have quality content.

Most companies pay people like me to write informative and entertaining content for their websites and social networking pages. What makes a company like Facebook so ingenious is that they don’t provide the content. They let their users provide the content. It has been said that “If it is free, then you are not the customer, you are the product.” Facebook has a billion eyes looking at Facebook.  And you and I are providing the content. This is what makes Facebook so powerful.

Facebook doesn’t just encourage us to post our thoughts, pictures, links and whatever else onto our pages. By linking us with our friends, it lets us share these things with the people we care about. And the people we care about love that. Facebook makes sharing our private stuff fun. That’s the magic of it. It gives us connection even when that connection might actually only exist in our heads. I mean it’s not as if every one of our friends looks at every one of our posts, but we still imagine that they do.

Timeline is everything that Facebook was and more. We’re no longer contained by the fact that Facebook didn’t exist before 2007. We can now post pictures, thoughts, ‘life events’ and everything else at any point in our lives beginning with the day we were born. If you really wanted to, you could use Timeline to tell your entire life story in a way that no journal has ever really been able to capture and share it on a global scale.

The potential here is extraordinary. It used to be that if you met someone new, you could look that person up on Facebook and find out what they looked like, what their relationship status was, what their interests were and how many Facebook friends they had. Now, with Timeline, it’d be possible to learn everything you might learn on a date just by going to their Facebook page. Facebook encourages you to post where you worked, who you were married to, how long you were married and what day you had a kid. In fact, Timeline has made it remarkably easy to fill in your entire life with words and pictures. Your autobiography could be a click away.

Remember what I said about content being king? This is the Holy Grail of content. Sure, you might not decide to share everything with Facebook, but the more you share, the more you feel connected. The less you share, the more people will think you’re hiding things. The one bright side of this is that at least it is letting you write your own autobiography. It’s not cross checking this with employment statistics and public records.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Timeline. I think the one thing that people might not be noticing is the fact that Facebook essentially owns everything you post there. For most people this doesn’t mean much. There’s not a lot of call for autobiographies of random people. However, let’s say you’re not random. Let’s say that you become someone who is in the public spotlight. Let’s say you become massively famous. And then let’s say that spotlight of fame burns you and you flame out like Charlie Sheen. And you do it publicly. On Facebook. What is to stop Facebook from taking your entire profile, publishing it and not giving you a dime?

Okay, that’s a worst case scenario. It’s unlikely to happen because you’re probably not going to be famous and Facebook would encounter a mass exodus if they started publishing ‘Facebook Biographies’ without the consent of the main characters. A more likely possibility is that with publishing becoming cheaper and cheaper, you decide to publish your own autobiography and you decide to use a bunch of your Facebook posts. For whatever reason, your autobiography takes off and is a best seller. Facebook could potentially sue for their share of your riches despite the fact that you wrote every word. Again, it’s probably not going to happen, but it could.

The most likely scenario in a world where you decided to share your entire life on Facebook goes something like this. You spend years creating your Facebook page with daily posts of random things that interest you. You comment on things. You share pictures. You share your life online. From time to time you might add things that happened before you joined Facebook into your Timeline. You create a snapshot of what your life was like day by day. And then you die. Two hundred years pass. And somewhere in the Internet archives, your Facebook page exists. More permanent than any hardcopy book that can be lost or destroyed. More accessible than an old relative that knows your family history. Your Facebook page becomes the Testament of You.

Strangely in this last scenario, Facebook owning the content actually helps you. Because jackcameron.com only exists as long as I or someone else pays for it. I’m betting my great grandkids won’t give a shit about keeping Great Grandpa Jack’s website up. But I don’t have to worry about my Facebook. It’s owned by a multibillion dollar corporation that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon and even if it does, it’ll likely just be sold to another company that will keep it going. Sure, there’s the possibility that Facebook will one day charge, but it’s unlikely. There’s no reason to. We aren’t the customer. We’re the product. And I’m okay with that.

- Jack Cameron

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Posted in Marketing, Social Networking

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Best Buy’s Worst Commercial?

Posted on December 14, 2011 | 3 Comments

Christmas is retail’s last chance to increase their profits for the year. So they tend to pull out all the stops. This is the season when you’ll get the craziest commercials advertising the ‘best bargains’. From a marketing perspective, it’s the time to bring your ‘A’ game. The only other time retailers are trying this hard, they have a Super Bowl spot.

The goal of a good Christmas commercial is to show that your company  has great gifts for good prices and encourage a behavior of giving. You want the customer to feel good about what their purchasing.

This is a current Best Buy commercial:

It succeeds in advertising gift ideas for good prices. But then instead of encouraging a behavior of giving or making people feel good about themselves, it appeals the competitive nature of people. Worse, it appeals to competing against someone who is basically universally liked. It’s like having an arm wrestling competition against a baby. We don’t really want to be the customer in the commercial. And if we don’t want to be the customer, then why would we buy the product?

A better way to use this same concept in a commercial is to take the focus off of Santa. We like Santa. We don’t want to beat him. We want to help him. So instead of ‘Game On, Santa.’, why not focus on Santa’s helpers? I mean if you’re hellbent on appealing to humanity’s competitive nature for a Christmas ad (which I don’t think is a very good idea), the way to do it is to show Santa asking his elves what they’ve made for gifts for a family. They show little wooden toys they’ve cobbled together. Then have Mom there with the Kindle Fire and various other gadgets from Best Buy. Now Mom has helped Santa by shopping at Best Buy.

Marketing is fairly simple. Too often marketers try to get too clever with it and fail. Answer these questions in as quick and entertaining a manner as you can:

Why does the customer need the product?

Where can the customer get the product?

Why is yours the better product?

Necessity, availability, quality and value. That’s what it comes down to. These Best Buy commercials fail right out of the gate by not giving you that necessity. You don’t need to beat Santa. You need to BE Santa.

- Jack Cameron

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Posted in Marketing, TV

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Book Review: The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living By Mark Boyle

Posted on November 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

What would you do if you had no money? The obvious answer is ‘get money’. But what if you couldn’t get money or more specifically didn’t want to get money. Welcome to the world of Mark Boyle. In The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, Mark Boyle puts his mouth where his money used to be.

It’s easy to think of life without enough money. For most of us, that life IS our life. But trying to think of life without money at all is actually somewhat difficult. If you need food, you can go to the store or you can go to McDonalds. If you need food but you have no money and refuse to take charity in the form of money or friends giving you stuff, this simple need becomes a bit of an adventure. What do you do? You can grow some of your own food if there is a community garden they’ll let you use. You can go dumpster diving or ask local businesses if they’re throwing anything out. You can forage in the forest. The thing that this book illustrates time and again is that there are options without money.

It begins with a fantastic and simple description of finances, banking and debt. He explains clearly how he’s not against the concept of money exactly. He’s against debt. He’s against what world currencies have created. He’s against financial institutions that only exist to make rich people richer. Some protest these people who seem to have rigged the system. Mark Boyle makes an interesting choice by walking away from the game entirely.

It would be easy to pick this book apart if I wanted to. I could point out how much stuff he got simply because he was lucky. (Not everyone who reads the book is going to be able to put a donated trailer on a community garden and live rent free.) Or I could say that he violates his own rules again and again. I mean he goes on about how he doesn’t like to eat animals and doesn’t want to use cars because of big oil companies and whatnot, but he still has a cell phone and a laptop. However, none of that really matters. This isn’t a book about living like a monk. It’s about what’s possible even without money.

This isn’t new thinking. In fact it’s very old thinking. The idea of trading and bartering for goods and services is as old as humanity. I think that’s why it’s so appealing.

For me, the problem is that I am really nothing like Mark Boyle. Towards the end he says, “We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, while simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water, and a stable climate.” I disagree with this. I think that science and technology are the problem and the solution. I think that technology can make things easier and better. The problem isn’t so much the technology and science as it is the profit.

There was an interview with a record executive that I can’t find now. In it, the executive talked about how it used to be that you’d find a band. You’d help them create a voice. You’d help them create an album and a sound. You’d help them tour. And you’d help them work on their next album. You’d let their career be your career. Now though, most record executives don’t care. They find someone they can make one number one hit with, they push that as hard as they can and make a million damn dollars and they’re done. It’s fine for business to be about money. It should be. But it should be about more than just money. It’s the WalMart-ization of the world. Price and profit over quality and innovation. This is where our real problem lies.

- Jack Cameron

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Posted in Book Review, Corporate Greed, Ruin Your Lifestyle

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