“If you name the band after yourself, you can never get fired.” That bit of rock-‘n’-roll wisdom prompted me to call my company “Matthew Rothenberg LLC” back when I limited my liability and procured my EIN in 2008.
But lately, I’m beginning to think that what was good for the Jimi Hendrix Experience may not be so hot for my corporate profile. In fact, I’m inclined to decouple the name of the company from the name of its founder.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
Brown paper branding
Wigberto Serpa. Tanya Cheeks. Ty-Shonn Evans. These are all names stamped on the bottom of brown paper bags I get at restaurants and retail shops. It's become a habit of mine to look under my bag and find the name of the person who made it, so I can wonder about what else they do or find a match for a name I already know.
I don't know what the manufacturer had in mind, but the personal moniker is a cool touch of humanity that reminds me real people are making this stuff. I've Googled the bag makers and learned a little about them. (If you look up "Wigberto Serpa," you'll see I'm not the only person who's interested in his name.)
I don't know what the manufacturer had in mind, but the personal moniker is a cool touch of humanity that reminds me real people are making this stuff. I've Googled the bag makers and learned a little about them. (If you look up "Wigberto Serpa," you'll see I'm not the only person who's interested in his name.)
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
The Integrity of Commercial Content
(My buddies over at Contently included an essay of mine in the latest version of their Content Strategist magazine. I've been doing a lot of content strategy work for different clients ... and I'm watching the term turn into a catch-all for anything from editorial to marketing to body copy to UX. Here's a stab at sorting out the mess.)
“Nowadays, ’content strategist’ is another phrase for ‘unemployed editor,’ “ my colleague laughed.
Ouch! There’s a sting of truth in those words. Granted, the title is better defined in some sectors — such as digital agencies, where it’s closely aligned with user experience. In other spheres, it’s quickly been devalued as a catch-all phrase for any activity that generates blocks of words.
That’s especially true for companies outside traditional publishing, where words haven’t been a source of revenue. These enterprises are accustomed to content marketing, and they’ve heard that content strategy is important. Nevertheless, they may not see a role for customer communications beyond “brand enhancement” or “thought leadership.”
The result? Many job descriptions for “content strategists” that aren’t strategic at all, and lots of corporate microsites half-full of articles that live in isolation from the actual business of the company.
Think about it: A manufacturer of cleaning products launches a WordPress blog and hires someone to populate it with articles about housekeeping. Is this strategic content, or is it simply commoditized copy that is (a) disconnected from the business of driving glass-cleaner sales and (b) just another small voice in a Web already teeming with household tips?
There’s a better way for companies to approach content — one that’s truly strategic. To me, the key to genuine content strategy is integrity, both in aligning with the company’s brand and its business goals.
Read the rest on Contently!
“Nowadays, ’content strategist’ is another phrase for ‘unemployed editor,’ “ my colleague laughed.
Ouch! There’s a sting of truth in those words. Granted, the title is better defined in some sectors — such as digital agencies, where it’s closely aligned with user experience. In other spheres, it’s quickly been devalued as a catch-all phrase for any activity that generates blocks of words.
That’s especially true for companies outside traditional publishing, where words haven’t been a source of revenue. These enterprises are accustomed to content marketing, and they’ve heard that content strategy is important. Nevertheless, they may not see a role for customer communications beyond “brand enhancement” or “thought leadership.”
The result? Many job descriptions for “content strategists” that aren’t strategic at all, and lots of corporate microsites half-full of articles that live in isolation from the actual business of the company.
Think about it: A manufacturer of cleaning products launches a WordPress blog and hires someone to populate it with articles about housekeeping. Is this strategic content, or is it simply commoditized copy that is (a) disconnected from the business of driving glass-cleaner sales and (b) just another small voice in a Web already teeming with household tips?
There’s a better way for companies to approach content — one that’s truly strategic. To me, the key to genuine content strategy is integrity, both in aligning with the company’s brand and its business goals.
Read the rest on Contently!
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Exodus from Blogger
Next step toward getting real with this blog: transferring it to a more flexible platform that will let me turn matthewrothenberg.com into a lean, mean self-promotion machine.
That means porting the blog over from its old digs on Blogger to a hosted WordPress environment I can skin like a bunny. I'll also try to apply plug-ins to maintain whatever modest links this pig has collected over the years.
I'm looking forward to a technical assist from my pal, former Amazons bassist and Sceneroller partner Jason Brownell, who'll be visiting from San Francisco tomorrow. We're going to be talking about next moves for our software ... and setting me up in a better position to publicize it won't hurt!
Stay tuned for this blog to start looking a little more legit in the next few days. (Isn't this meta?)
That means porting the blog over from its old digs on Blogger to a hosted WordPress environment I can skin like a bunny. I'll also try to apply plug-ins to maintain whatever modest links this pig has collected over the years.
I'm looking forward to a technical assist from my pal, former Amazons bassist and Sceneroller partner Jason Brownell, who'll be visiting from San Francisco tomorrow. We're going to be talking about next moves for our software ... and setting me up in a better position to publicize it won't hurt!
Stay tuned for this blog to start looking a little more legit in the next few days. (Isn't this meta?)
Friday, April 19, 2013
My dad, the brand
There is at least one Rothenberg who's taking real advantage of blogging as a tool for personal branding: my 81-year-old father Jerome Rothenberg, a lion of experimental poetry with more than 80 books to his credit.
My parents' participation in the "little magazine" movement during the 1960s and '70s inspired my own excitement about the DIY power of early desktop publishing in the 1980s. (I remember blue-lining literary magazines from about age seven.)
My folks have not slowed down, and my father hasn't lost his interest in new ways to spread the word. He started his own blog, "Poems and Poetics," in 2007, and he has built a substantial following based on his own reputation and his steady attention to adding new content that combines poetry with personal insight and autobiographical detail.
Jerome Rothenberg recently added a Facebook account to his arsenal, quickly picking up a set of fans along the way, and has been using it to great effect to promote the work on his blog. Next stop, Twitter?
My parents' participation in the "little magazine" movement during the 1960s and '70s inspired my own excitement about the DIY power of early desktop publishing in the 1980s. (I remember blue-lining literary magazines from about age seven.)
My folks have not slowed down, and my father hasn't lost his interest in new ways to spread the word. He started his own blog, "Poems and Poetics," in 2007, and he has built a substantial following based on his own reputation and his steady attention to adding new content that combines poetry with personal insight and autobiographical detail.
Jerome Rothenberg recently added a Facebook account to his arsenal, quickly picking up a set of fans along the way, and has been using it to great effect to promote the work on his blog. Next stop, Twitter?
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Great balls of WordPress!
I sent Sunday's confessional around to a few friends with social-media smarts — it's a way of ensuring I keep momentum and get this thing up to snuff.
The first response I received: "It takes balls to confess to using Blogger!" Not only is that motivation for me to make the migration to WordPress, it also has the makings of a dandy T-shirt slogan!
The first response I received: "It takes balls to confess to using Blogger!" Not only is that motivation for me to make the migration to WordPress, it also has the makings of a dandy T-shirt slogan!
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Confessions of a half-ass blogger
Like Geraldo Rivera prying open "Al Capone's vaults," I broke a few electronic locks on this blog and slid into the dusty darkness. And like Geraldo, the results are pretty underwhelming — a few bottles here, some mummified rats in the corner, and not a lot of content.
For a blog titled "matthewrothenberg.com" — a blog that bears the domain of someone with decades in the business of communicating, mostly via the written word — this place really sucks.
To start cleaning up this mess, I might as well consider how it got so musty and flyblown in the first place.
Confession #1: I only set up this blog as a container for my resume. Back in October 2006, my friend and then-Hachette colleague Chris Herring pointed out that while I'd been happily participating in social media for years (including curating the user-generated content for ZDNet News), I'd never gotten around to taking this simple step toward self-promotion. D'oh!
Confession #2: This blog is on Blogger with the default appearance because I was too lazy and cheap to think about alternatives. I've since created other, superior blogs with WordPress and Drupal ... but I never bothered to fix up the blog bearing my name. (Maybe Blogger is adequate, but I've never thought about it.) D'oh!!
Confession #3: I've done much better. In February 2008, I launched the Che Underground blog, which was dedicated to rediscovering a group of bands I played with 25 years earlier. We launched it on WordPress and hosted it on PowWeb; my friend and former Che Underground veteran Dave Ellison skinned it to look cool and rock-'n'-roll; and other confederates like Kristin Martin, Jeremiah Cornelius and Jason Brownell helped keep the software up to date. (While this blog has gotten about 6,000 visitors in its lifetime, Che Underground peaked at around 16,000 uniques per month.)
Another example: Jason and I are the principals of a music startup called Sceneroller, and he set up a nice blog within the Drupal environment that I've made use of to talk about music scenes and how folks have documented them.
Meanwhile, I've also taken advantage of Twitter; LinkedIn; and most notably Facebook, where I provoke a lot of participation with tortured puns and a bit of topical provocation. People who meet me often start by telling me how much they enjoy my Facebook posts ... No one has ever complimented anything I put up here. D'oh!!!
Which brings me to my final confession ...
Confession #4: The content on this blog is lame. I never decided what I wanted it to be, so it's never turned into anything worth reading. I've alternated between Purell-sanitized reports about my family and weak efforts at self-promotion about my current jobs. Without any kind of center or real voice, this thing has languished like Al Capone's vault.
This is not a content strategy, friends ... And for someone who bases his practice on examining clients' strongest intellectual assets and giving them a distinct voice, it's actually an embarrassment!
A bonus confession: I'm not yet sure where I'm going to steer this content bus, so I'm not going to start promoting it through other social media. But it's coming out of its rut starting now.
Furthur!
For a blog titled "matthewrothenberg.com" — a blog that bears the domain of someone with decades in the business of communicating, mostly via the written word — this place really sucks.
To start cleaning up this mess, I might as well consider how it got so musty and flyblown in the first place.
Confession #1: I only set up this blog as a container for my resume. Back in October 2006, my friend and then-Hachette colleague Chris Herring pointed out that while I'd been happily participating in social media for years (including curating the user-generated content for ZDNet News), I'd never gotten around to taking this simple step toward self-promotion. D'oh!
Confession #2: This blog is on Blogger with the default appearance because I was too lazy and cheap to think about alternatives. I've since created other, superior blogs with WordPress and Drupal ... but I never bothered to fix up the blog bearing my name. (Maybe Blogger is adequate, but I've never thought about it.) D'oh!!
Confession #3: I've done much better. In February 2008, I launched the Che Underground blog, which was dedicated to rediscovering a group of bands I played with 25 years earlier. We launched it on WordPress and hosted it on PowWeb; my friend and former Che Underground veteran Dave Ellison skinned it to look cool and rock-'n'-roll; and other confederates like Kristin Martin, Jeremiah Cornelius and Jason Brownell helped keep the software up to date. (While this blog has gotten about 6,000 visitors in its lifetime, Che Underground peaked at around 16,000 uniques per month.)
Another example: Jason and I are the principals of a music startup called Sceneroller, and he set up a nice blog within the Drupal environment that I've made use of to talk about music scenes and how folks have documented them.
Meanwhile, I've also taken advantage of Twitter; LinkedIn; and most notably Facebook, where I provoke a lot of participation with tortured puns and a bit of topical provocation. People who meet me often start by telling me how much they enjoy my Facebook posts ... No one has ever complimented anything I put up here. D'oh!!!
Which brings me to my final confession ...
Confession #4: The content on this blog is lame. I never decided what I wanted it to be, so it's never turned into anything worth reading. I've alternated between Purell-sanitized reports about my family and weak efforts at self-promotion about my current jobs. Without any kind of center or real voice, this thing has languished like Al Capone's vault.
This is not a content strategy, friends ... And for someone who bases his practice on examining clients' strongest intellectual assets and giving them a distinct voice, it's actually an embarrassment!
A bonus confession: I'm not yet sure where I'm going to steer this content bus, so I'm not going to start promoting it through other social media. But it's coming out of its rut starting now.
Furthur!
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