BACK ON FRIDAY AND MONDAY, we discussed whether I should “reinvent” myself and my written/published/posted work, according to the principles of Seth Godin’s business book Unleashing the Ideavirus.
That book claims the key to success in business today is to have a strong, easy-to-understand, and easily-spread idea.
Other business guides, including Tom Peters’s The Brand Called You and Rick Haskins’s “Branding Yourself” courses, insist that individuals have to start thinking about themselves as if they were products, and devise brand images and marketing strategies thusly.
My problem with that is my “product,” comprising the words you read here, is difficult to define in a sound bite or a Hollywood “pitch line.” The points of view expressed within these words are also hard to succinctly summarize.
So: How to accomplish this “self-branding” thang? (And doesn’t that sound too much like a scarification fetish?)
1. I’ve got a slogan already. “Popular Culture in Seattle and Beyond.” But that’s deliberately broad and vague.
2. The Seattle side of the premise is comparatively easy to explain. We’re chronicling the ongoing evolution (and, in some aspects, devolution) of one of North America’s great cities–particularly as these changes affect the arts-‘n’-entertainment scenes and assorted “youth” and “alternative” cultures.
3. The national pop-cult topics discussed here are more nebulous, but potentially could become more popular than the local parts (due to this ‘Net thang being so borderless and all). The MISCmedia title accurately implies a melange of many culture-and-media related topics.
But a little bit of all sorts of things is precisely what these “branding” experts warn their readers against. The well-branded enterprise or individual has to be about one really simple thing.
4. But much of the cultural philosophy expressed in these cyber-pages involves rants against too-simple thinking.
5. This insistence upon the value of complexity might actually be the most apt “simple idea” with which to describe this ongoing work. As the back cover blurb of The Big Book of MISC. says,
“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture?
Good.
Get used to it.
Learn to love the chaos.”
Maybe my next book oughta be a manifesto specifically about the transition to a more “Misc.” world, and why that’s nothing to fear. (Unfortunately, the phrase “Chaos Culture” has already been in use, by commentators specifically discussing rave-party culture or trends in conceptual art. But other, equally-appropriate slogans are surely out there.)
TOMORROW: The greatest Northwest reference book ever written.
IN OTHER NEWS: The great Josie and the Pussycats creator’s-rights lawsuit.
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