Best use of Instagram by a brand

The most easiest thing to do is to start and manage a brand presence on a particular social platform. The most meaningful thing to do activities around a social platform in order to customize experiences for consumers. Nike has constantly got it right. They revolve their products around social media rather than putting their products on social media. (Think of Nike+ Fuelband). For them social is just a means to achieve consumer satisfaction rather than a mode to address complaints or initiate consumer engagement.

According to me, this is probably the best use of instagram by a brand.

http://photoid.nike.com/

I lost a friend

On April 19th, around 8.30pm, I lost a friend.

I lost him. Only to death. But not to life.

For he still lives. With his deeds and thoughts.

His love & compassion to fellow human beings are worth remembering. Every day.

His pursuit of excellence, that rare capability of practical thinking, zest for living to the fullest – are worth pondering. Every day.

A true disciple. Pushing the limits of my thinking.

I can go on and on. And to do justice to a man of short words, I’d just like to put down these five words.

Achen, you will be missed.

(I’d like to dedicate the following poem to Achen. It’s written by Rumi. Translated from the persian by Coleman Barks. We know as much about the beginning and the end, about the infinite complexity of the word, as does an embryo locked in its mother’s womb. These words, making use of that metaphor, calls for our opening up to that whole dimension of existence which escapes our words. While Rumi orders our imagination to think of life before birth, I’d like to interpret it in this particular context as life after death. I’ll listen to that answer. With Achen.)

 

Little by little, wean yourself.

This is the gist of what I have to say.

 

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,

move to an infant drinking milk,

to a child on solid food,

to a searcher after wisdom,

to a hunter of more invisible game.

 

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo,

You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.

There are wheatfields and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight

the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”

 

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up

in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

3 things you didn’t know about Redbull’s approach to content marketing

Thanks to twitter, we all are familiar with the above visual. That defining moment when Felix Baumgartner jumped off from space.

If you are a marketing professional who is fascinated with what Redbull did, here are 3 things I bet you didn’t know about Redbull’s approach to content marketing:

Firstly – Redbull shot the entire event on film and distributed it across 80 television outlets in five countries along with a live strem on YouTube that was 16 times greater than the views for the summer Olympics that took place a few months before Stratos.

Secondly – Redbull considers itself as a full fledged “media production company” with thousands of hours of original copyrighted footage on extreme / adventure sports. Its vision is to make the company’s content sales equal to that of its energy drinks! A full-length snowboarding feature film “The Art of Flight,” was the No. 1 movie download on iTunes (at $5.99) during its first week of release in September 2011; ‘The Red Bulletin,’ its monthly magazine, has an international circulation of 2.7 million

Thirdly – Redbull was planning this stunt for seven years.

Now, how does that change the way we look at content marketing? Fascinating.

12:21am

The words of the blind prophet rang in my ears

“You will find a fortune but not the fortune you seek.”

Little did I know that your grandpa was also sailing

In the same sister ship that would take a different route through the same creek.

For a moment I felt like he kidnapped you, my fortune, away from me

I’m dying here to hear your voice in this dark night so bleak.

Canvas of self expressions – Twenty Two

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.”

(He had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he was fed through a tube for years) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.)

I was slowdancing

Before chimps formed clans and fought over water holes,

When God was still gas and his spirit over the earth blew,

Before the algae wanted to mate and reproduce,

When nothing but dark matter, beings and space were far and few;

I was slowdancing.

With you.

Happy Easter?

Lent. Maundy Thursday. Good Friday. Easter.

I came across this fascinating quote from Zizek this lenten period. He says, “God’s suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle, the struggle in which the absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s deep insight that, after shoah, ‘only a suffering God can help us now.’”

While these words were playing on my mind today, I was told that “resurrection can also be a celebration of wounds”.

A suffering God. A celebration of wounds.

C.S.Lewis once said, “Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it”.

That suffering Christ is resurrected today. And if resurrection can be a celebration of wounds, where are my wounds?

Where are my wounds?

Happy Easter? Not really. A struggling Easter.