Winning The Battle of The Charles Cox (es)

If you've ever set goals for yourself - and seriously, who hasn't; "I'll get up at 9:00 AM tomorrow, I swear" counts as a goal - you'll know what I mean when I say goals change.

Sometimes you've never quite sure when they turn the corner, but your goals, once so orderly and proper, start getting away from you and picking up little tricks of their own. Seriously, they do. They evolve with the times.

They learn a little street slang here, pick up a few phone numbers there, do a little rearranging, a little shuffling, and pretty soon your saintly goals are picked up on the corner of Madison, doing 75k a year speedhustling tourists on Three-Card Monte, with the little toothpick in their mouth and everything.

That toothpick thing is about where I caught my last goal before it got away with me. I don't know what this blog was really meant to be, but sooner or later I made it my goal to become something notable, something quantifiable, even if it was a small thing.

Maybe it was spurred on by my fight with my doppelganger in the Spa Shop, maybe after hearing about Naymz and deciding to give it a go I started thinking differently, but over the past three months or so, a goal emerged; and as trite as it was, it was still a goal:

I was going to become the #1 Charles Cox on Google.

This was big stuff, I thought, as I realized my goal was solidifying. I was talking about a brand. The Charles Cox brand. Defining Charles Cox to the world in a way that got people's attention. I had to finally get out there.

But, I realized one day, that meant competing with all the other Charles Coxes.

My competition was tough: a noted real estate agent, an Oklahoma State educator, a microbiology professor at the University of Iowa, a settler from 1741, Vice President of the Global Government Industry for EDS, the Mayor of Camden County in the mid 1800's, and an Assistant Professor of Molecular & Integrative Physiology, Pharmacology, Biophysics and Neuroscience.

All of them were named Charles Cox.

But I played the hands I knew how to play. I linked my blog to other blogs. I got an account with Technorati. I started using Pingoat. I submitted my blog to over a dozen blog aggregators. I placed my name everywhere, including in my blog header and RSS feeds. I bought (cheap) google ad space for my name using Naymz. As the weeks dragged on, I even added "charles cox" Technorati tags to the ends of my posts.

I wasn't sure what quantifiable benefit these actions had, if any. In the beginning, I was way back in the back row of Google, beyond the third page. You couldn't see me if I was ten feet tall and wearing a Carmen Miranda fruit hat. But I had faith in the system and was willing to see these actions out, confident that the system would do what it was designed to do, and that my brand, the Charles Cox brand, would begin slowly to float to the top.

Why do it? Because I could. Because I wanted to. Because I wanted to see how the system would handle me, whether I could make it happen. Could I be the number one Charles Cox on Google?

Well, turns out I am.

Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, the overwhelming advertising and marketing pressure I fed into the system blew the stack. If you search for "Charles Cox" or even Charles Cox (without the quotes) on Google, I'm now at the top of the list.

I was teetering at #2 for the past several weeks. Finally, the scale has tipped. I did it. For reasons I can't explain too clearly (due to lack of sleep, probably), this is beyond cool. This is a mixture of advertising, information warfare, brand strategy, and social networking all rolled up into one great big Dr. Honeydew-and-Beaker experiment. And it worked.

If I had something to sell, I'd sell it. Right now. But I don't. So, I guess I'll just keep blogging. Thanks for hanging out and listening to my stories and reports from the field, everyone. You're making this whole Internet thing work out alright.

Related Tags: charles cox, branding, google, advertising, name search, naymz, marketing

Newspaper Fortresses - Print Still Suffers

I come back from a restful vacation on Mars and see this: N.Y. Times to reduce page size, slash jobs

You know, two things come to mind here. One - unless held at gunpoint, I haven't willfully picked up a newspaper in six months. Two - last I saw, the New York Times' webpage, NYTimes.com, was still harping on the "premium content" bandwagon, still trying to squeeze out otherwise free information, now while simultaneously slashing jobs.

Does this scream out the ever-popular-in-this-digital-age warning, "fortress maneuver"? Major publishers, Rupert Murdoch aside, don't get it, and they're not trying to get it. They're still trying to squeeze juice out of this juiced and re-juiced turd.

Even though just the other day I said certain jobs in the future would be dependent on reducing choice sets, right now that ain't paying the bills (in the case of the New York Times, it ain't payin' to the tune of at least $42 million annually), and it won't be while people can get better stuff for free, and the tools are good enough to get it.

It's amazing. With mobile digital technology, I can read linked, contextual news fed from blog aggregators I choose, on practically a minute-by-minute basis, with Bloglines. I don't pay for that. I can get a high-level picture of what the world gestalt is by looking at the popular Technorati tags. I don't pay for that. I can get detailed information on anything under the sun by jogging my browser over to Wikipedia. I don't pay for that.

Compare it to the New York Times, please. They pick the format (smaller now, note), they pick the content, and we're paying for their synthesis of this information down based on interpretation of assumed demand. It's not contextual beyond the Editor-In-Chief's read of his press bureaus and bird entrails the night before. Right? And what is he reading these days while browsing his web for porn waiting for the video teleconference machine to heat up? I'll bet it's a goddamned blog, nine times out of ten.

And what's this? "Turn to Page A4"? Are you kidding me? We pay for this? If I wanted to go on a wild goose chase for copy I'd flush a couple Hallmark cards down my toilet.

The point is, and always has been make me smarter. I don't want something that doesn't fulfill that request. And when I ask, I'm asking contextual questions. The newspaper, a dead tree flattened and smeared with oil, cannot answer them, except by dumb luck or the occasional reprint of Ziggy. And yet, the newspaper conglomerates still think there's cash value in their "carefully researched" and "editorially scrutinized" Pulitzer-winning journalistic juggernaut. It's just not holding cachet with the upcoming generation, I can tell you that.

I think the worst part is after all this time, I still have to put up with Doonesbury, every time I open a paper. I haven't seen those trademark canoe-phallic noses and hyper-liberal mash-up talk for six months, but they still haunt me, crawling out of every paper in every dentist's office, just waiting for their chance to strike. And they wonder why I don't sign up for the Sunday edition.

Related Tags: newspaper, new york times, media, news corporation, print media, charles cox, mobile media, mobile blog

iPods and Endless Choice: An American Dilemma

Let me tell you another story.

I used to own an iPod Nano. I was proud of it. I felt that little music-spouting digital wafer fit me. That pencil-thin Calvin Klein anorexic-silicon acrylic with its Deutsche-angst silver backing screamed from all angles “You Shouldn’t Be Playing U2 On This” and that, I said to myself while drooling on the package in the Apple Store, was fine. Me and my ‘pod had an agreement, even before I flicked my card at the snotty cashier and pretended I knew more Ani DiFranco lyrics than he did.

See, I had a whole system in place around how I was going to use the hell out of those two gigabytes. I didn’t worry about not having video. I didn’t worry that when it said it could “display photos”, it really meant photo-stamps, sort of the same way you could expect an Intellivision to “play video games”. It’s passable, but not really fooling anyone.

No, photos, videos – not for me. Not yet, anyway, until I got on “the scene” with my Dad’s 8MM and made the killer Indie-video so I could be the next to tell the raving fans at Sundance that they were too bourgeois to understand my artistry, and then there’s a book deal that drops more cash on my front lawn than the Marshall Plan and Johnny Depp plays me in the movie version.

Sorry, I was dreaming again. Where were we?

So I’ve got playlists, see – I slap together some playlists around different emotions, sort of like movie scenes. I’ve got “A Million Dollars, Cash”, “End Credits”, “Zero Out”, and others. Now, of course, I’ve got a 30-gigabyte library at home. I do the work to find my favorite songs, stuff ‘em in the lists, and consolidate my entire emotion-music-connection stock from 30 gigs into 2 gigs.

And it works. My God, does it work. Crappy day? Bust out “Call Out The Fleet” and I’ve got a million Teflon-coated bullets of The Crystal Method tearing up every car on the road until they’re chicken wire with wheels. Want to relax? Dial up “Zero Out” and I get Brian Eno injected straight into my eyelids like Bohemian Botox. It was all working fine.

Until I lose the iPod.

Stick it in a bag one day with a Charleston Chew, go out sailing, and it’s gone. I didn’t even get to pretend I wasn’t going to miss it, then turn around when it left and look all wistful – it just upped and left and took all those playlists with it. I’m talking to a lawyer about those lists but it’s really beyond the reach of the courts, he says.

I did what any self-respecting human would do at this point. I held my head up, walked right back into the Apple Store, and upgraded. That’s right. I bought a 30-gigabyte iPod, with video.

And that’s when it goes wrong.

I plug the new ‘pod in, download my entire list, yank it off the cradle, stick it in my car to take a long, beautiful drive full of amazing music and as soon as the screen comes on, I realize it.

Jesus Christ on a Compaq – I can’t think of anything to play.

It’s not possible. I’m twenty-four and I’ve got the technology equivalent of erectile dysfunction. I can’t get a song up. I can’t think of a single song that’s pushing my buttons enough to roll that clickwheel over its little title bar and click. I can’t. I roll back and forth. Nothing is natural. I feel my eyes getting gritty. Am I hallucinating? Is that really “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago in my head?

I don’t have playlists, because I didn’t think I needed them. But I do. God, do I need playlists right now. There are 5000 songs on that iPod, all waiting for me to pick them. And can I? Of course not. It is an orgy of choice, complete with the lambskin rugs and free booze and that one naked chick on the trampoline, but I’m feeling sick just looking at the buffet line.

And I know I’m not alone. Al Jareau? Spandau Ballet? The Very Best of Starship? What’s a guy going to choose? Have you been there before? Have you seen the horror of infinite choice? Now, I’ve heard it said that when you’re singing the Blues, it ain’t about infinite choice. Maybe, but if you’re talking about a circle of hell no man should ever face, it ain’t exactly “my baby said she’d give me sugar, she gave me gasoline” – it’s this: nobody can pick from five-thousand options.

We have never been this swamped with choice in our country – in our world. Never. Not even when we had our pick of land to settle on in the early days of American colonization, did we get this much choice at once. Digital music is just the most visible watershed, of course, but it’s everywhere. Books, movies, games, pantyhose – whatever – there’s too much choice and too little criteria. But while others might see impending doom (because they always do), I see a business opportunity.

In the next several years, businesses in America will be built around reducing available options. I’m not kidding here. Critics have been doing this for a while, but even more efficient – even automatic – means will emerge. And I guarantee you that the first few people to drastically reduce our choice sets here in America in each medium are going to be the new Carnegies, the new Rockefellers, the new Morgans. Think it isn’t happening? Think endless choice isn’t the enemy I think it is? Go ask Pandora why they’re successful.

Like me, I think they took one look at their iPod, saw it - in that firm, jewel-glow black and white with the famous Apple font - that Styx had as much choice of being picked as The Beatles, and with that firmly in mind, vowed: “This shall not be.”

Domo Arigato.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to make some playlists.

Related Tags: ipod, digital music, music,choices, playlists, pandora, charles cox