public relations Advice and Resources for Musicians who Want Better Media Coverage My education was in music, but my career has primarily been in advertising and public relations, even though I also still play and teach. In my experience, musicians have all the skills necessary to be effective at PR and marketing but often have to learn the hard way how to
Pokemon Go Sorry, you already missed the "Pokemon Go" train It's the new sensation that's sweeping the nation, and you, intrepid marketer, are sitting there wondering (perhaps even aloud) "how can I use this to my advantage?" Well, I'm sorry to tell you, it's too late. Sure, if you own a store, you can post signs or social
performance The Trough of Awkwardness and the Fallacy of Over-Rehearsing How often have you heard someone, when preparing for a speech or presentation—or working towards some other form of public performance—state that he or she is worried about over-preparing? Most often, I hear this these days in the context of presenting a powerpoint. I've heard it at ad
Big-Boned Guy's Guide to the Apple Watch As Casey Liss pointed out, it seems like all the comments I've read about how the Apple Watch fits have included some kind of qualifying statement about having small wrists for a man. Well, I do not have small wrists. I have big ol' beefy wrists. I had my Watch
No-Knead Bread Step-by-Step I got a Le Creuset dutch oven over the holidays and since then I've used it five times; twice for no-knead bread. It's dead simple and delicious. Despite it's simplicity, there were things I didn't do quite right the first time around, so I thought I'd try to do a
Never, Always and the Oxford Comma Of the many discussions that crop up over and over again across the internet, the topic of the serial comma is perhaps my favorite. I place it just above the recurring discussion of how to pronounce GIF on my all-time list. Recently it’s cropped up again in my social
Watching the watches in Wired The October issue of Wired just landed on my desk (their third annual "design issue"), and as I started flipping through it, I noticed a couple full-page watch ads. In all, I counted seven watch ads, mostly in prime positions, including the two-page spread inside the cover and
#RVASW: We messed around and made a startup This weekend I participated in the local edition of Startup Weekend, a 54-hour-long competition where a group of mostly strangers comes together into teams to put together a product, service or business over the course of a weekend. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect going in, but it turned
Link: Apple Pay Tries to Solve a Problem That Really Isn’t a Problem That's the headline from a post on The Upshot today by Neil Irwin (@Neil_Irwin). The post starts with a humorous argumentum ad absurdum takedown of Apple's informercial-fail style spot for Apple Pay. The non-problem, as Neil puts it, is that it's too difficult to use a credit card. He
apple I'm a gadget fan, but you think I'm an Apple fanboy As far as I can recall, I've always loved gadgets. It's a passion I learned (inherited?) from my Dad, who maintained a house full of various interesting electronic devices. Like the sound-activated light switch, which, as he tells the story, lived in the hall bath until the time the light
Please don't audition for American Idol I just read that an American Idol audition bus is making a stop in town next week. As someone who came up rather short in his quest for a music career (more on that below), I thought I could perhaps provide some perspective for young hopefuls who might be interested
Anyone can play guitar, but can a video game teach you? I recently picked up a copy of Rocksmith 2014 for Xbox 360, a video game which purports to teach you guitar (in as little as 60 days at that). Unlike Guitar Hero and the like, you use an actual guitar, which plugs into the Xbox via a special 1/8th-inch
PJ Vogt's Twitter grammar question: it's "an" except when it isn't Today on On The Media's TL;DR blog, PJ Vogt asked an important question for our time: when using an indefinite article before a Twitter username, do you say "a" or "an"? When I saw the link on Daring Fireball, I thought, that's an easy one,
Some additional interesting articles Each week for work, I write a roundup of five interesting articles. Some weeks it's all I can do to come up with five articles, but this week I had a few extra I thought I'd share here. Horace Dediu on misunderstanding Innovation Mobile industry analyst Horace Dediu writes some
My top 5 bad excuses for not running The other day I ran a 10k (with about 26,000 other people). I realize for some, that's not much of an accomplishment, but I hadn't really run at all since my last high school gym class in the mid '90s. And even then, I don't think we ran more
Let me upgrade you Thats a good look Better yet a hood look Ladies that's a good look —Beyonce Let’s say you’re someone with an AT&T iPhone 5 with a contract that means you can’t upgrade for any reason for another 16 or so months, but you want to
My coworkers think I hate BuzzFeed I can see why they might think that, since I tend to grumble when presented with a link titled "23 ways you know you're a child of the 90's" (or some other such nonsense). But it's not true that I hate BuzzFeed. I'll even admit to laughing at
17 Ways to Use Your Time Now that Your Favorite Football Team Has Been Truly, Utterly and Completely Eliminated from Contention.
In defense of ideas This was done between June and November. So shut up and get back to work. pic.twitter.com/XpqeMh4RZt — Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) October 21, 2013 A little while ago, some friends of mine organized the third installment of a sort of bizzaro-TED they called "bill conference"
Why I quit WordPress and Google Analytics I started this blog as a place where I could just write for the sake of writing, so I wanted to simplify everything I could. I picked a brand new, minimal blogging platform built around Markdown formatting. The design of the site is simpler as well, both for me (as
My brief, beautiful time in an Isuzu I-Mark My first car was a maroon Isuzu I-Mark. As I recall, it looked more-or-less like this: Only not quite that nice. It was a strange little car, made up of a mash-up of Isuzu and Mopar parts (it was also sold in the U.S. as the Chevy Spectrum). I
There’s a podcast for that Lately I’ve been listening to podcasts on a regular basis for the first time since I used to listened to Revenge of the Screensavers via Odeo darn near a decade ago. It’s great that anyone can create and publish a podcast without anyone’s approval, but that results
It’s about prioritizing, not having it all. I’m going to try to tread carefully here, because the article I’m linking to wades into some issues around societal and individual norms and expectations around both working and stay at home mothers, and I really have nothing to add to that part of the discussion. But it
apple It's not about the price of your app For good or for bad, we've long-since moved to a scenario where most successful smartphone apps are free or extremely cheap. Some developers get around this by creating various in-app purchase schemes ranging from benign to devious. This week, Tweetbot 3 for iOS7 was released at the introductory price of
Welcome to my blog + one French guy’s music I play in a community band. It’s one of several in my area, actually, and I picked it more or less at random when I moved to town. I feel like I chose wisely—we play in one of the Mid-Atlantic’s largest theaters, and we draw near-capacity crowds.
