Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

It was August of last year when my lovely introduced me to Pinterest. People who are new to it keep saying they get ‘lost’ easily in Pinterest. Ms. M described it exactly so when she told me about it.

I’ve started using it to collect infographics, and searching for phrases like “beauty” and “light.” It’s a wonderful new way to mine the collective consciousness while feeding the right side of the brain. And I’ve really enjoyed seeing more people adopt it recently.

As a result of all the new users, I’ve also been fascinated by the torrent of recent press about it. Turns out 80% Pinterest users are women. And on the other hand, 80% of Google+ users are men. (More about Google+ soon.)

This Atlantic Wire article stopped me in my tracks though. The Army as a poster Pinterest user? At the bottom of the page is a Slideshare presentation on how the US Army describes Pinterest to their communications teams.

As a big bonus, they describe very succinctly how it works.

In an article yesterday, AdAge talked about the struggle of marrying social media and Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems. There’s no doubt the technology is there, and social media feeds can easily be linked to individualrecords in CRM systems (like Salesforce.com). The marketer’s struggle is pretty much a visualization exercise, in my book. Plus, few marketers “speak IT.” But more and more, IT teams and marketers have a common language - largely linked through well-implemented CRM systems.

So, to visualize just a little:

My life was pretty much transformed when I met the Mac. I discovered technology I could relate to the year the Mac was born, when the two halves of my brain were finally united in a Macintosh 128K.

Yesterday, I learned of Steve Jobs’ death while sitting at my generations improved Mac, watching a Twitter feed. The irony was not lost on me that I learned of his death on a device he inspired. So many of us were likely to have experienced just that.

I knew his death was inevitable, but I was surprised at how hard it was to take. I stopped working at 4:43 Pacific Time on October 5, when I realized that first Tweet I saw was true.

• Friends said they cried - for the first time - at the passing of a CEO. I know!
• News and blog coverage has been consistent in personal remembrances. I’ve been moved to blog for the first time in a month!
• His impact, while it will continue to be felt for years, is already feeling too small. What would even ten more years have offered him? Us?

In true Apple fashion, their home page tribute to him is actually something I captured for posterity:

Apple's tribute to Steve Jobs

And Google and Amazon have honored him as well, today, each in their own ways.

Inspirational. Creative. A champion of simplicity.

Thank you for your extreme leadership. Rest in peace.

I read the most fascinating book this summer, by Nicholas Carr, called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. It’s up for a Pulitzer prize this year.

Here’s the deal. Most of us (especially “information workers”) have the attention spans of gnats, as adults. And our attention is being pulled in all sorts of directions by virtue of the tools we use. Mr. Carr exposes why, and how that has happened.

An exerpt (published on NPR):

“Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an education researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that literacy, as we’ve traditionally understood it, “is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry — clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society.” The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the “linear, hierarchical” world of the book and enter the Web’s “world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity” — a world in which “the greatest skill” involves “discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux.”

Upon finishing the book (which I DID finish!) I have made a deal with myself: I read every day, for about an hour, while I’m on the elliptical machine. And I read books. Sometimes involved books, sometimes easy books. But I make myself have deep thought for at least that time - exercising my lungs, heart, legs and brain!

What do you think? Is it time to abandon the “linear, hierarchcal world” of the book? Or are we (virtually) doomed because of the tools we use?

Talk about mining the best of the world’s collective spirit! My lovely has been enchanted by Pinterest for some time. She has been devouring collections of all sorts of things people have collected there.

This delightful little community is simply “a virtual pinboard. collect the things you love.”

Well.

Talk about enchantment.

In an “Animal Kingdom” pinboard, I found this: