Tag Archives: ROI

Happy Anniversary World

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Volume 4, Issue 20

Today is our 12th wedding anniversary. On the satellite radio Matt Monro sings Tony Newley’s song, On a Wonderful Day like Today, “May I take this occasion to say that the whole human race should go down on its knees, show that we’re grateful for mornings like these…”

Zohreh the cat steps on my bare feet and curls her tail around my calf, affectionate gestures to show how grateful and eager she is to receive her breakfast. Four identical little birds catch my eye with their geometric formation to remind me to hang their feeder.

Last night as an anniversary present to each other we attended Stan Satlin’s and Joel Martin’s musical tribute to Nelson Mandela on what would have been Mandela’s 96th birthday at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. Powerful African drums reverberated in my chest as we entered the great sanctuary. Reverend Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr. recounted a visit to the church in which Dr. Martin Luther King, with great respect, introduced Nelson Mandela shortly after his release from 27 years in jail. Mandela’s peace-inspired writings had created an unstoppable tide for the end of apartheid which caused his release and then Presidency of post-apartheid South Africa. The touching event featuring Stan’s and Joel’s music, the voices of a horde of talented singers and musicians, and many moving personal remembrances, brought tears of joy and triumph for me and many others. The meaning of the event, entitled  “Footsteps of Mandela”, is that we are each to hear the inner voice from above the way he did and carry out our own Missions in the same unifying spirit.

I had heard Stan’s song “Keeper of the Song” before but never expressed the way it was last night, as a sacred hymn, by a chorus of amazing singers. I prevailed on Stan and Joel to rush me a copy of last night’s performance of that song. And alas it is not here in time for this post. As soon as it is available I will share it. In the meantime here is another recording of Keeper of the Song.
Keeper of the Song

Thirteen years ago Lalita awoke one morning at the ashram where she serves with a voice within her telling her that today she would meet the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life, and bade her to go to New Paltz for that meeting. Driving through a mounting snowstorm she arrived at the location specified by the voice and met me.

Hubble's Colliding Galaxies
courtesy of Hubble

At the time I had no idea she had dedicated her life to a spiritual Mission and that her ashram is located at the former site of the hotel where I spent every summer of the first 16 years of my life. As we parted from an initial meeting, I had snapshot flashes of the two futures that emanated from the moment, one in which we would be together. To me it was just a moment but apparently to Lalita it was longer and she later reported that it appeared I had lapsed into a narcoleptic trance.

In Mind Magic I wrote “When two individuals fall in love it is as if two fragments of the universal consciousness have remembered that they are one.”

To the extent of their love,
they will cease to seek individual goals,
and will begin to seek mutual goals.
Two consciousnesses seeking mutual goals

are in the process of gradually
becoming aware of themself
as one consciousness.

Once the goals are merged,
the perceptions and memories
are in a position to follow.

Know that the purpose of love
is to reunite the universal consciousness.

Our wedding ceremony was presided over by the late Rabbi Chaim Gelberman and combined Jewish and Vedic elements, leading me to classify it to friends as an Oy Vedic ceremony. The Rabbi reminded us that the Temple in Jerusalem was built not just for Jews but for all religions since Abraham’s Covenant was with the One God of all.

I’m now reading Harvey Kraft’s brilliant book The Buddha from Babylon in which he reveals a little-known connection between Judaism and the spiritual teachings of India. Abraham was a shaman and religious leader of the Yadu (“root for Yahudi, i.e. Jewish”), one of the five Indo-Aryan tribes mentioned in the Rig Veda, before migrating west following the Epic Drought. His name may be the source of the words Brahma (the Creator God) and Brahmin (man of God).

Abraham is estimated to have been in Babylonia after the Drought around 1800 BCE and the Rig Veda dates back no earlier than 1750 BCE according to Wikipedia and other Internet sources so on the face of it Harvey Kraft could be right.

I’m having an amazing day and I hope you are too.

My best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.

The Spirit of Friendship

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Volume 4, Issue 19

And the Future of Facebook

It started as a way for male college students to see the faces of the coeds so as to choose which ones to ask out on dates. Today it is as big as television in the lives of many people.

In my newsletter of things to come, when I was making my wild-eyed media predictions a long time ago (which all came true in one way or another), I thought Facebook would come through webcams first, and of course I never used the term Facebook. I saw it as “each person having their own television station” and cross-device promotion expert Richard Fusco despite his fondness for radio saw it that way too. That was the closest my mind could get to a picture of the interactivity and democratization I knew would be coming. Of course, my mind was constrained by the things I knew best, such as television.

When Facebook came out as a stock for public investment, the results were disappointing because despite enormous audience usage there was no credible revenue model. The early Internet pioneers were mostly anti-advertising and/or had ridiculously high estimates of what advertisers would pay. Google was determined never to allow advertising. They were all smart enough to pivot and learn the advertising ground rules fast once the handwriting was on the wall.

Back in the post-IPO early days I suggested to a friend highly placed at Facebook that Facebook advertising should not be advertising at all, but branded content. Brands would insert content that fit within Facebook’s mood, not selling their product but sponsoring entertainment and/or informative/useful content that users would like and be grateful for, translating to sales and loyalty for the brand. I showed my friend the 28 studies I had done proving this point. He said it was interesting but they already had a full plate of ideas they were testing.

Stan Silverman, one of the most effective direct marketers today, pointed out around the same time that regular ads would not be as effective in Facebook, since when people used Facebook it was not for shopping or thinking about products, but instead feeling good in the warmth of communicating with friends or just seeing what they were up to lately. Nonetheless “regular ads” is what transpired in Facebook.

Something else is happening to Facebook today. The way content is organized is changing. Facebook must by now realize that users are not at all happy about this. Posts from friends they were particularly following no longer appeared on their main page (Home or News Feed) but had to be found on a new page that had to be stumbled upon. This content feed (called Pages Feed) appears to be where the algorithms put content that has some soft-sell advertising-like purpose but is not paying Facebook anything for ads. One can imagine the meeting at Facebook in which it was decided to dis-incentivize these “freeloaders” and force them into paying for ads by shoving them in the back of the Facebook so to speak.

At that meeting someone might have warned that users don’t like changes unless they themselves have asked for them. Jonathan Steuer, whose renaissance mind springs instantly to the bottom line, reminds us that Microsoft has made much-despised changes at the pleasure of its software developers without considering the inconvenience to users of such changes. Jonathan has been loyal to Apple since the beginning and across all devices the Apple interface has been steady as a rock.

It remains to be seen whether Facebook will make a success of its current ad policy or evolve a new one. If it can show ROI of course the game is won Business-to-Business (BTB), although fans might not like the ad-driven changes. A true win/win would be to maintain the mood and spirit of the original Facebook, return quickly to the beloved format before too much time passes, show the world that this is a company whose leaders can admit mistakes because they are real people like the rest of us. That’s the spirit of the place. It’s a great spirit — the spirit of friendship. It could be a wonderful — even the premier — environment for brands bonding with consumers.

And it could lead the way into a future where advertising is more a matter of friendly brand content than the bombarding remnants of operant conditioning theory. I hope this prediction comes true.

Best to all,

Bill 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.

Come Out and Play

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Volume 4, Issue 18

Being and Becoming

After all the rains, nature is happy that the sun has come up brightly. The talkative birds fill the ears as one awakens. Sunlight glinting off the river helps keep the eyes closed. The birds, squirrels and chipmunks gather outside waiting for Lalita to come out of the side deck door with food. Then when all humans are safely locked back in the house they waste no time in racing each other for the pans of seed. The first to get to the hanging birdfeeder is a large woodpecker who has learned how to arrange his body so that he can get the seed inside the tiny holes designed for much smaller birds.

Soon a squirrel is at a pan, darting occasionally at the five swirling jumping chipmunks intoxicated with the morning and trying to get a bite in edgewise. Finally one of the chipmunks steps out of character and, perhaps accidentally, bounds onto the squirrel and away again. The squirrel seems to need to think about this and retreats for his tree home to contemplate the unusual event.

All this fun stuff going on yet I realize I have woken up fixated once again on all the things I have to get done. The thing about knowing one’s Mission is that it’s great but it soon becomes an attachment like anything else. This is true even if the Mission is well-intended and unselfish. If looked at as an enormous challenge slope that one will not be happy leaving unfinished at the end of one’s life, it is obviously as much of an addiction as heroin.

Priorities. Our first priority in being here as the Universe looking through yet another unique peephole perspective, is to enjoy it. Let’s call that BEING.

Hourglass Nebula
Hourglass Nebula courtesy of www.NASA.gov

Second priority is to learn and evolve to higher levels of consciousness and states of being by watching the Universe’s clues. Let’s call that BECOMING.

Where in that construct does Mission fit? The Mission is to do one’s passion work, which is the chariot you ride in the BECOMING part of existence.

I realized that I was sacrificing the BEING part to the BECOMING part by my attitude of “no time for fun, better get down to work”.

Realizing all this did not automatically set me right again. What did was a sudden tiny delighted voice I heard that sounded like a woodland fairy spirit might, saying “Come and play with me!”

That brought my mood around. Then my eye was suddenly drawn to the little black wrought iron café table and chairs on the upper side deck, sparkling in a spotlight of sunlight through the trees. I went up with my laptop to sit in that pool of light and write this post.

As I went up the stairs, laptop in hand, I was in the mood to play. Writing this, I’m just enjoying myself. I hope you are too.

Best to all,

Bill 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

P.S. My wife Lalita and I will be attending "Footsteps of Mandela," an original musical production celebrating world peace, freedom and human dignity. We will be accompanied by our good friend Stan Satlin, the songwriter of several inspiring songs about the spirit of America that will be performed there. Footsteps of Mandela will be performed at Riverside Church in New York City on July 18 at 7 PM to benefit the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Footsteps of Mandela

What the World Needs Now

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Volume 4, Issue 17

Happy Independence Day!

The answer is always the same — “Love, sweet love.” Hal David’s lyrics to the Burt Bachrach score. Reverberating in John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” a couple years later.

Yet at almost all times in memory there have been huge groups of people so angry at each other that the differences indeed appear irreconcilable. If they are truly irreconcilable differences, God help our great grandchildren, as Weapons of Mass Destruction (biological and chemical as well as radiological) become more and more refined and more and more available to anyone.

Shiites and Sunnis are once more at each other’s throats in Iraq — all we did was postpone it with the gallant soldiers who threw themselves bravely into the turmoil. Kurds are taking advantage of the distraction by consolidating their terrain. In our own country, there’s Fox News and the Outraged Democrats. Anywhere in the world you look somebody hates somebody, righteously holding onto their grudges and refusing to forgive. Even True Christians who know the sacredness of Forgiveness are allowing themselves this exception to the rule — they are allowed to hate at least one bad guy like “the Devil” and in real life other folks too with whom one has a long-running melodrama. And in the current Acceleritis™-degraded environment, each of us flips into demonizing another person or group at least briefly. This tendency has become so ingrained — maybe it’s just somebody driving too slowly in front of you when you can’t pass. Old brain circuits don’t die easily.

While we can all agree that this is pretty much the real scenario, most of us seem to feel nothing can be done about it. It’s the way the world is, and the world especially today has become so complex and so full of powerful rich people that control everything, what can any of us regular folks do to change anything so big and so pervasive?

We not only can do plenty, we are already doing it. As far as I can tell so far, it was not a huge conspiracy theory that brought about digital media, aimed at the democratization of power. It “just happened”. Possibly the plot was written from on high. In any case the inmates are now running the asylum to a more massive degree than ever before. Why not channel at least a tiny fraction of this digital free-for-all into content that evokes our capacity to love and forgive?

Sounds like boring screen fare? Not necessarily. Picture the MTV series “True Life” and then imagine amateur videographers all over the world starting to generate YouTube ongoing cinema verité series about friendships between a Sunni and a Shiite in Iraq, a Brit and a Catholic Irishman in Northern Ireland, a Liberal and a Conservative in the U.S., and other pairings of individuals from groups assumed to always hate each other. Maybe in some cases the friendships are between musicians or entertainers, perhaps from diverse cultures and global locations. Such as Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and other projects.

It might not be spectacular or grotesque enough to go viral, but as a constant drip-drip-drip in areas of the world where the hatred seethes to the boiling point today, it could begin to make a difference. The world’s establishment media can find cases of this already and simply bring the phenomena to everyone’s attention globally via mass media as well as social media. With very little effort it is possible to inject a little bit more love into the screens that now dominate our lives. 

Just a little bit more love could be enough — imagine Archimedes’ lever slightly turning the angle of our world-line just one baby notch, with a little more oxytocin and a little less amygdala — as we endeavor to create a better future for our children’s children’s children. 

Love,

Bill

P.S. My wife Lalita and I will be attending "Footsteps of Mandela," an original musical production celebrating world peace, freedom and human dignity. We will be accompanied by our good friend Stan Satlin, the songwriter of several inspiring songs about the spirit of America that will be performed there. Footsteps of Mandela will be performed at Riverside Church in New York City on July 18 at 7 PM to benefit the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Footsteps of Mandela

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.