Electrolicious

From a comment to my recent post: Don’t [marketing] events like this kill off some small part of your soul? Does every part of our lives need to be sliced up and laid on a platter as a feast for marketers?

I stick my finger into marketing — it smells of nothing.
(with apologies to Kierkegaard)

This is totally a hot topic for me, and I really appreciate the question. To understand my thoughts on marketing, you first need to understand how I got into the industry.

Ten years ago, I started writing for a free rave magazine. I was idealistic and enthusiastic and completely committed to the community I was serving. A year and a half later, I was promoted to Editor in Chief. It was my job to write/edit all sorts of awesome content all about the culture and lifestyle of raving, which I was beyond enthusiastic about. I made very, VERY little money (sound familiar, fellow magazine folks?) but was deeply committed to my work.

Since Lotus was free, it was supported entirely by its advertisers. Most of these advertisers were electronic music and event-related — lots of record labels, production companies, etc. As soon as I became editor, I started getting huge amounts of pressure from the publisher about editorial content. We needed more music coverage! More album reviews! More event listings!

Why did the publisher care? Because that’s what the advertisers wanted to see. Maybe they weren’t going to demand a review of the exact product they were advertising, but they at least wanted to know that readers turned to the magazine for information about that product, and therefore would be receptive to a related advertisement.
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I’m at the Web Community Forum for work for the next couple days, immersed in Facebook geekery. Of the list of marketing buzz phrases below, one of them is made up. The rest were used (legitimately, or at least as legitimately as buzz phrases can be used) during the course of presentations and panels:

Gravity marketing
Existential marketing
Robin Hood marketing
Fan-sumer
Astroturfing
Viral loop
Micromedia
Grages (group+pages)

Also, if anyone’s interested in my random notes from today, read on. They’re disorganized, misspelled and ugly, but have at it.
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