It is October 31st, 2010.
Halloween.
In the grand scheme of things, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. It is, however, also a holiday that often makes me feel very awkward when it comes to actually participating in the traditional method of celebrating it.
I have costume anxiety.
EASPORTS really has cranked up the PR machine in anticipation of the November 16th release of EASPORTS Active 2. In the last few months they have announced that David Beckham and Venus Williams will be celebrity spokespeople for the product, and they have also been releasing a steady stream of promotional videos to drive player interest. The latest video, released last night on Facebook, reveals an impressive array of interesting and, perhaps more importantly, challenging looking exercises.
So.
It is almost 6:00 AM on a Saturday morning. I should be sleeping. I wanted to be sleeping. Instead, I had a nightmare that got me out of bed about 30 minutes ago. One of those nightmares you don’t even want to tell the details of because they are horrible and embarrassing. I’m awake now, and sitting here doing that I’m almost always doing at this time on a weekday. Drinking coffee, eating my breakfast of two frozen waffles with peanut butter in between them, and drinking coffee.
If I didn’t have an insanely long (and mostly self-imposed) to-do list for the weekend I’d be even more upset about that.
I am writing this post on October 20th, 2010. The date is important because today has been declared Spirit Day by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. For those of you who have not heard of this, Spirit Day (in the words of the promoters) “honors the teenagers who had taken their own lives in recent weeks. But just as importantly, it’s also a way to show the hundreds of thousands of LGBT youth who face the same pressures and bullying, that there is a vast community of people who support them.”
I want to state right off the bat that I am just as horrified and outraged about the suicides that sparked this event as any other sane human being would be. It is also not my intent to offend anyone who may have been bullied or teased because they were a member of the LGBT community.
The above statement is what is known as a disclaimer.
I follow a lot of folks on Twitter who, like myself, are very active in the social media community. These people, again like me, are very passionate about the importance of social media in the business world and about how valuable of a tool it can be to promote your business. Unfortunately, many of them seem to fall flat on their face when it comes to coming up with a valid justification as to why a business needs to be involved in social media. In fact, they very frequently tend to take offense at the very nature of the question. Which is, of course, a sure fire way to guarantee that the business you’re trying to convince to get into social media never well.
Return On Investment, kids. It’s not a dirty word. Get over it. The whole nature of taking offense at the idea of justifying why a business should spend money on your idea without being able to quantify where it will turn into profits for them is absurd. It is tantamount to an artist claiming that people “just don’t get” their work. It’s a cop out. Sure, it’s all fine and dandy that you might be doing something unique and awesome in your mind, but if you can’t prove to someone that giving you money for doing so is worth their time you have no business trying.