It Is A New NYAMA

Every once in a while I interrupt this blog with invitations to events or to drop names.  This is one of those times.  So I’ll temporarily drop my role as CEO of Verse Group and switch into my role as the President of the NYAMA.  I’m doing that here because, well….I don’t have a blog yet at the nyama.org…

But when I DO, I’ll write the following:

The old way of marketing doesn’t make sense in a changed world.  And at the New York American Marketing Association we realized that our old way of communicating with our members and the greater marketing community doesn’t make sense in a changed world.  We’ve taken the several important steps forward.

In addition to our Linked-in and Twitter presence, we’ve (finally) upgraded the website, making it easier to see the NYAMA events that our programming committee has developed for the coming weeks, next month, next few months.  In fact, we have events planned from now through June of 2012, thanks to Sarah Linden, Lee Hornick and everyone else on the programming team.

In addition to the NYAMA events, you can also find an aggregation of marketing events across the New York City area.  This is something rather special.

In a world of silos, where each organization becomes more and more specialized, the NYAMA is going in the opposite direction.  We are opening up the world of marketing, opening up the opportunities to learn from more people in more areas.

Marketing extends across design, social media, consumer research, public relations, mobile media, media research, advertising, reputation management, organizational design, employee culture, product innovation, managing outside agencies, measuring ROI.  That is why the NYAMA is opening up all of these areas for everyone to discover, to explore, to understand and to see if they make sense for you.

That is why the NYAMA is organizing events across more areas than anyone else.

That is why we having a monthly “meet the author series” with people as varied as Tony Hseih, Jack Trout, David Rogers and, at the pre-dawn hour of 8 am on November 16th you can have an intimate breakfast with Steven Rosenbaum to discuss his new book “Curation Nation”

Have breakfast with the author Steven Rosenbaum at the nyama

That is why we are bringing to you a window into the full richness of marketing in the marketing capital of the world.  Sign-up at the new site to learn about the events, to meet people, to expand your horizons.  And, yes, you can have fun, too!  nyama.org

Questions, improvements, ideas are always welcome.  You can reach me at randall.ringer@nyama.org

Think Police?

For years people have been saying “content is king”.  In branding, context is king.

There are times when the context tells a different story than what was intended.

IBM Think Police?

Irony aside, it was wonderful to see these screens lit up at night while walking past Lincoln Center or early in the morning.  That wouldn’t have been possible without the NYPD.

Cloudy Outlook For Word Clouds?

Finally, an authoritative source on the un-usefulness of word clouds.  This from the NY Times’ expert software architect, Jacob Harris:

For starters, word clouds support only the crudest sorts of textual analysis, much like figuring out a protein by getting a count only of its amino acids. This can be wildly misleading; I created a word cloud of Tea Party feelings about Obama, and the two largest words were implausibly “like” and “policy,” mainly because the importuned word “don’t” was automatically excluded. (Fair enough: Such stopwords would otherwise dominate the word clouds.) A phrase or thematic analysis would reach more accurate conclusions.

How do I compare the relative frequency of lesser-used words? Also, doesn’t focusing on the occurrence of specific words instead of concepts or themes miss the facts….

And what about the readers? Word clouds leave them to figure out the context of the data by themselves…Most interesting data requires some form of translation or explanation to bring the reader quickly up to speed, word clouds provide nothing in that regard.

At least I now know that I’m not the only one who gets gloomy under threatening word clouds.  They remind of George Trow’s phrase, “Within The Context Of No Context”.