Month: May 2006

(I couldn’t resist making a Dungeons and Dragons joke in the title.)

We haven’t sparred in quite some time, so her response to my response to her “Food Allergies are a Character Flaw” post feels like old times. Welcome back to the Monkey Knife Fight, Kathy!

(She needed a distraction from The Da Vinci Code, anyway.)

I’m not the only one to comment on Kathy’s entry: there’s also a response over at A Crafty Madness titled When waging war against assholes, it’s important not to become an asshole. It opens with:

Excuse my blunt language, but I am seeing a disturbing, though perhaps inevitable, trend filtering into the blogosphere (insert the usual god-I-hate-that-word disclaimer). It is this: in the various scrims brought about by the “clash of ideas” over current events, people are taking the opportunity to let their jerk flag fly.

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Alas, this exchange probably isn’t enough to land me the cover story of Internet Tough Guy Magazine…

Usually, when a stupid idea manifests itself on the blogosphere, it’s pretty harmless. At worst, following such ideas will either waste your time or leave you feeling a little embarrased. However, there’s an idea that’s been circulated that goes beyond garden-variety stupid and crosses the line into emergency-room stupid.

It started with an entry on Chris Selley’s blog, Tart Cider, on the death of 15 year-old Christina Desforges, who was initially believed to have died of a food allergy and later determined to have died of an asthma attack (coupled with second-hand cigarette smoke, first-hand marijuana smoke and hanky-panky with her boyfriend). The article uses this as a preamble to a polemic about the “allergy police”, a collective name for the groups that are campaigning against peanuts in schools and on airplanes. Kate MacMillan then linked to it in her blog, Small Dead Animals, where she talks about the rules concerning bringing animals on airplanes.

However, we don’t go into the Twilight Zone until the meme goes through the Relapsed Catholic funhouse mirror when Kathy Shaidle links Kate’s blog entry with this statement:

Food allergies are a character flaw.

As they used to say on those late-night TV ads for Ronco products: “But wait, there’s more!”:

Know what’s causing all those peanut allergies?

Bicycle helmets.

You think I’m kidding.

Ever notice how middle class white liberals are the ones with all the allergies and asthma and whatever this week’s “disease” is?

Before I continue, allow me to show you a Venn diagram to show you which space the above statements occupy:

I have a number of relatives, some of whom could not be classified as “liberal” who have some pretty serious food allergies that pre-date the campaigns for nut-free environments by decades. My mom, whom you wouldn’t classify as “liberal” based on many political litmus tests (and wouldn’t classify as “white” either), had an allergy to fish when she was younger that she grew out of. She and my sister — both doctors, by the bye — have noted these reactions in one of my nephews, who exhibits clear physical symptoms, at least according to my lying eyes. Even I, hardly the roll-over-and-die type of personality (and I eat everything; I could probably eat rocks if served with the right sauce) have in recent years developed some kind of reaction whenever I eat fresh cherries.

There is a bit of truth to Kathy’s statements, however: parents do tend to freak out and be overly cautious about their kids. A number do tend to take their kids to the emergency room for very minor ailments, but doctors have come up with all sorts of observational tricks to counter this. The waiting room full of toys at St. Joseph’s Health Centre is a good diagnostic tool; a genuinely sick kid is more likely to ignore them. A little education can fix this, and personally, I’d rather that parents obsess a little over the kids than say, the bottle or the racetrack.

Back to the matter of hand: stating that food allergies are a character flaw is as close to Lysenkoism as one can get without a career in research (or, more accurately, purported research). Lysenkoism comes from Trofim Lysenko, who is most notable for being a poseur whose theories were driven by politics rather than actual science.

While Kathy’s statement about food allergies does have the slight ring of truth to it — some people use “food allergies” as an excuse for culinary cowardice — I will remind you that “Even the Devil can quote scripture for his own purposes”. Taking it at face value may put someone you love in some pretty serious trouble. The best rule to follow is: when in doubt, see a doctor.

As for her statement about bike helmets: if you believe that line, go ahead and bike without a helmet — if you get a head injury, who’d be able to tell?

I could go on, but how ’bout we take this to the comments? Parents, doctors, cyclists: speak your mind!

Today is Victoria Day, a national holiday in Canada. The day is marked with the lighting of fireworks, drinking beer (hence its other name, “May 2-4“), the opening of cottages for the summer season and the start of white pants season. Have a good one!

Here’s a little gedankenexperiment I’d like to try out on you, Gentle Reader:

I propose that it be called “Republican Marketing” instead of “Pinko Marketing”.

“Okay, Accordion Guy, now you’ve really lost it,” you might reply. I ask that you bear with me for a moment as I introduce you to Chuck DeFeo.

I met Chuck and saw him speak at the 2004 Internet + Society conference (whose subtitle was “Votes, Bits and Bites”) at Harvard, which Wendy coordinated. He participated in a panel in which the 2004 elections — which had taken place only the month prior — were the topic of discussion. At the time, Chuck held the position of eCampaign manager of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and he now works at Salem Communications, a media group of talk radio stations and online media such as sites like the Townhall.com, a favourite in the conservative blogosphere.

Now let me toss you a mind bomb: Chuck is a master of so-called “Pinko Marketing”. He understood it better than Zack Exley, his counterpart at the Democratic Party.

The Republican Online Campaign: “Pinko Marketing” Well Before the Term Was Coined

Chuck’s strategy was simple: get people talking to each other and get volunteers for the Republican campaign to recruit other volunteers. The idea was to have the message delivered by the campaign’s biggest fans rather than campaign headquarters. He organized events like “Walk the Vote”, “Neighbour to Neighbour” and “Parties for the President”, which gathered people who lived in the same neighbourhood but didn’t necessarily know each other that well. These events were held more often in homes rather than public places, as Meetup events are.

He said that these gatherings proved to be more powerful than a TV or print ad. He said that there was nothing so convincing as someone in your neighbourhood promoting by saying “I live near you, our kids go to the same school, I share your values.”. He also said that these events had an additional benefit: “You know your neighbour now.”

The Democratic Online Campaign: “A Disaster”

The Democratic online campaign was, by Zack Exley’s own admission, “a disaster”. There was no plan, and there were no trained volunteers. “It was as if they did not see an election coming”, he said.

The closest they came to engaging the constituents was to solicit stories from people about how the Bush government affected them. 100,000 submissions were received, and they were stored in a database and made available online. In the end, although they were using testimonials from the people, their campaign was still a top-down one, with all the messages coming from Democratic campaign headquarters.

At the panel, Zack said that the Right is beating Left at what used to be the Left’s game: grassroots campaigning. The Left thinks that grassroots politics is “doing neat stuff”, but in fact, it’s still talking to people. It fundamentally comes down to a cultural problem: the Left don’t have trust in ordinary people. “We don’t know how to talk to ordinary Americans,” he said, adding “I agree with Chuck — our best campaigners aren’t paid staff people, but real people!”

Republican Marketing: Trusting the People

At one point in the panel discussion, an audience member asked about what role fear played in the 2004 presidential campaign, remarking that President Bush said the country would be in great danger if he were not re-elected.

Chuck’s response was “The American electorate is incredibly samrt and know how to form their opinions.” He said that voters are able to decide for themselves from the different sources of information, capping it with “I think we are the better choice”.

Zack then responded in a surprising way. “What Chuck said was very important,” he said. “When was the last time you heard a Democrat say that the electorate was smart? Did they, the last time we won, say ‘this country’s dumb, I’m moving to Canada?'”

My Conclusion

DeFeo’s online campaign, was — even by the admission of his opponents — a far superior campaign. It is a textbook example of “Pinko Marketing”, having embraced its five principles (see this entry for the principles) and could be used as a prime example of a Pinko success story. As such, it is more directly applicable to marketing than Marx and Engels (whose marketing typically boils down to either tanks or scruffy social maladroits selling the Socialist Worker on street corners).

Hence my modest proposal: Let’s call it “Republican Marketing”! (Or hey, maybe “Bush Marketing!”)

(I’ve donned my flame-proof suit. Fire away in the comments!)

The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants: A Stupid Name

For a comic that was smarter than most at the time, The X-Men comics featured a team of supervillains with a painfully stoooopid name: “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”. Worse still, they had two incarnations of this badly-named gang: one led by Magneto and the other led by Mystique, both of whom you’ve seen if you watched any of the X-Men movies.

When the X-Men comic first came out in the 1960’s, it was a standard comic book convention for supervillians or suppervillain groups to have some word along the lines of “evil” in their name, leading to antagonists with lame-o monikers such as “Doctor Doom”, “Count Nefaria” and villian teams with the terribly unoriginal names such as the Alliance of Evil, the Masters of Evil and the aforementioned Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. By the time the 1980’s rolled around, superhero comic books had become a little more “realistic” (at least for comic books), with better writing and grittier characters becoming more popular (witness Wolverine as the “poster boy for mutant cool”). Comic book writers did a lot of “retconning” — a portmanteau of “retroactive” and “continuity” — to either simply excise historical goofiness from old issues (“it never happened!”) or to provide a more “modern” spin on old goofiness. The X-Men writers took the latter approach with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants: they often flipped between these two explanations:

• That the “Evil” in the name was chosen to be ironic. If humans said that all people born with mutant powers were evil, then evil they would be.
• That the “Evil” in their name was to force Charles Xavier (a.k.a. “Professor X”) into an awkward moral position, as both he and the Brotherhood were both advocates of mutants. The primary difference was that Xavier’s dream was peaceful coexistence with humans, with the Brotherhood were all about mutant superiority.

Both were lame-o ways to explain away the lame-o name of a group of villians. The writers of both the X-Men comics and movies still have a group called the Brotherhood, but they;ve since dropped the “Evil” from the name.

Pinko Marketing: Also a Stupid Name

To my ear, “Pinko Marketing” has the same feel that “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants” has. Just as the later editions of the X-Men comics claimed that the use of “Evil” in the Brotherhood’s name was ironic, the “Pinko” in “Pinko Marketing” is also ironic in its appropriation of a Cold War slang term and Soviet socialist graphic design.

I have a message to all you people promoting Pinko Marketing:

The name sucks. Commies aren’t cool.

Don’t get me wrong, the general principles of so-called Pinko Marketing are cool. For those not familiar with the concept, it’s a “power to the people” approach to marketing. At the Mesh Conference, Tara Hunt outlined these principles:

1. Rely more on inbound, rather than outbound messages. Listen to your customers and give them reasons and ways to promote you. (For excellent writing on how to do this, I recommend Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users.
2. Rather than being the voice of the company to the community, be the voice of the community to the company.
3. Be authentic. I have some reservations “authenticity” — I think a lot of people think it means “unpolished” or “amateurish” rather than “genuine” or “”truthful”. I agree with AKMA when he says “The short expression of why ‘authenticity’ vexes me comes down to, “There’s no there there.”
4. Serve niche markets. See this entry in Creating Passionate Users for a great explanation behind this principle.
5. Follow the principles of open source software — share information, be as transparent as possible.

“Pinko Marketing” views people as customers, as opposed to conventional marketing, which views people as consumers. This may be a fine distinction, but it’s an important one. A customer is a living, breathing person with whom have a relationship as a vendor; a consumer is merely an entity whose role is, as Jerry Michalski put it, “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash”. That part, I can get behind.

What I can’t get behind is this embrace of socialist/communist imagery to symbolize personal empowerment. What is it that’s so attractive about red propaganda, anyway? Is it the long lines for sub-par cabbage and gritty toilet paper, the surveillance society and criminalization of dissent, the gulags, the shoddy workmanship or a kleptomaniacal government? Aren’t many of these symptoms of the current U.S. administration, which we rightfully criticize?

Want a sound bite? Here’s one: Using socialist/communist imagery to promote better relations with your customer is as tasteless as using Nazi imagery to promote punctuality and good information management.

In fact, the bottom-up, power-of-the-individual, customer-is-always-right ethos of so-called “Pinko Marketing” is more American than anything else. The problem is that the use of “America” imagery is pretty much the domain of the ironic (think Colbert Report) and the irony-blind (think Fox News). Isn’t there some concept that captures the spirit of Pinko marketing minus the silly name?

I’ll close by noting that during her presentation on Pinko Marketing, Tara asked the audience to “Please, please, please stop using the term ‘Viral Marketing’! It’s so tired.” In the same spirit, I am now asking you to take the Pinko Marketing pledge: Please, please, please stop using the term “Pinko Marketing” — it’s so “Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”.

(For more on the silly use of communist imagery in high-tech circles, see this entry in the Nielsen Hayden’s blog Making Light, where they take BoingBoing and the copyfighters to task for using Soviet imagery in their campaigns, and rightfully so.)