There Was Magic in the Night at Fenway Park

16 Aug

What do you say about a Bruce Springsteen show that starts with “Thunder Road,” the previous evening’s high point, performed simply and in classic style, with just piano and harmonica by Springsteen and “Professor” Roy Bittan?

What do you say about a Springsteen show that includes diverse but amazing audience requests like “Thundercrack,” “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?,” “Frankie,” “Quarter to Three,” and “Prove It All Night” (with the 1978 intro), and where a cover of Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” (a song the band has only performed once before — in 1976) is considered by Springsteen to be the weirdest one of them all?

What do you say about a Springsteen show that also includes an excellent, powerful “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” an awe inspiring “Land of Hope and Dreams,” and a transcendent “Backstreets?”

What do you say about a Springsteen show where he sings “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” and ironically, that’s when it starts raining? Then he does an acoustic “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” and it starts raining even harder?

What do you say about a Springsteen show where he asks for a hot dog and beer so many times that someone actually gives him one — at the start of “Working on the Highway” — and he chugs that entire beer in one sip … while still playing the intro to the song!

What do you say about a Springsteen show where even the usually stoic and serious Max Weinberg smiled a few times?

What do you say about a 31-song Springsteen show where only 12 of those numbers were repeated from the night before, one of which (the aforementioned “Thunder Road“) performed so differently that it kinda doesn’t even count as having been repeated?

What do you say about a Springsteen show that ends — with Ken Casey of the Dropkick Murphys joining the band for “American Land” — and then treats the audience to a fireworks show off the Green Monster as they’re leaving the stadium?

What do you say about a Springsteen show that’s even better than the one the night before?

Really, what can you say other than that you’re lucky to have been there. Damned lucky. Continue reading →

Greetings from Fenway Park, MA

15 Aug

Bruce Springsteen wrote the song “Wrecking Ball” in 2009 to commemorate the tearing down of the Meadowlands in New Jersey.

It wasn’t too long ago that Fenway Park was threatened with a similar fate.

But here we are celebrating the 100th birthday of America’s Most Beloved Ballpark, with a wrecking ball nowhere in sight, and Springsteen is back to play his third and fourth shows at the stadium in less than a decade.

These are glory days, indeed. (Someone must not have told the Red Sox, but we’ll leave that to another blog post.)

Continue reading →

Is Your Brand in on the Joke? Or Is the Joke on You?

13 Aug

One of the best ways to show your brand’s social media accounts are managed by an actual person is to show a sense of humor.

That doesn’t mean posting a lot of jokes.

It means lightening up and having a laugh — sometimes at your own expense. Continue reading →

Let’s Win This Thing for America

10 Aug

Election years are always great times for comedy, so much so that the reality is often funnier than any scripted bits that Hollywood can produce.

But what fun would it be if we left all our political humor to the politicians?

That’s right, none.

So let’s give thanks for the new movie The Campaign, which stars Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as two doofus political candidates battling it out in a small North Carolina town for a Congressional seat.

If that premise doesn’t tell you enough about what kind of movie this is, then know this: The film begins with a quote from one-time Presidential candidate Ross Perot.  Continue reading →

Number 5 Is Still Alive

9 Aug

Hollywood likes to play by its own rules.

For example, if the star and director of a successful franchise chose not to make another film in a series, most of us might call it quits and start at the beginning with a new star, director, and character.

But in Hollywood, the solution to that “problem” is to find another actor and director, and extend the brand anyway, even if it confuses things.

And so we have The Bourne Legacy, with Jeremy Renner taking over for Matt Damon in the lead, and playing not Jason Bourne, but Aaron Cross, another field agent who is determined to take down the people responsible for tweaking his body and mind. Continue reading →

They’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling

8 Aug

This week, my parents celebrated their 40th anniversary.

Theirs is an unusual story (for non-celebrities, anyway), in that they met and were married within the space of just eight months. Today, a relationship like that may have resulted in a marriage that only lasted 72 days. So yeah, 40 years of marriage is an impressive achievement.

If you were to ask my parents, I suspect Ward and June (no, those aren’t their actual names) would tell you they are just as in love today as they were all those years ago.

Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones), the couple at the center of the new film Hope Springs, would probably not say the same thing about their own relationship. Continue reading →

5 Reasons Why I Still Use Foursquare

6 Aug

When it first hit the scene in 2009, Foursquare was the next big thing in social media.

Instead of telling people you did something or went somewhere, now you could say where you were at that very moment, and if your friends were close by, they could meet you there. If you went to a place often enough, you could be its Mayor, or you could earn other badges or perks.

It was Location: The Game, and it was meant to be fun for users and beneficial for businesses too, because the more people used Foursquare and shared their location, the more they’d promote businesses, and that word of mouth would drive more customers.

But location-based gaming apps in general never really and truly caught on like they were supposed to. There was a major competitor — Gowalla — but it was purchased by Facebook in December 2011 and promptly killed. Facebook itself tried to get into the game with Places, but then had second thoughts and folded the ability to check-in and tag yourself at a place into the rest of the site. And SCVNGR barely even made it out of the gate (it has since moved into mobile payments with its LevelUp service).

There have even been other kinds of check-in apps — like GetGlue, which lets you check in to TV shows, movies, and music — but they haven’t had much traction either.

That’s basically left Foursquare as the only location-based check-in game in town. And yet, despite the perceived limited appeal of such apps, and lots of people who don’t feel safe revealing their whereabouts, three years later Foursquare still claims more than 20 million users, who have checked in more than 2 billion times (and counting).

That’s not too shabby.

So who are these people who still use Foursquare and check in all over the place? Well, I’m one of them — and have been for more than two years, as the app recently reminded me.

Friends often make fun of me for checking in so often, and ask me why I do. So I thought I’d answer them with this blog post, and share those reasons with you too.

Here are the 5 reasons I’m still using Foursquare: Continue reading →

Calvin and the Real Girl

5 Aug

In the new film Ruby Sparks, the main character, Calvin (Paul Dano), does what so many lonely, nerdy writers wish we — I mean they could do: He creates a character who becomes real.

But not just any character … A real, live girlfriend.

A dream girl who is perfect in every way.

That’s the fanciful Stranger than Fiction meets Adaptation meets Bride of Frankenstein meets Annie Hall premise of the latest big-screen creation from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the directors of Little Miss Sunshine. Continue reading →

5 Things Small Businesses Can Learn from the 2012 Summer Olympics

1 Aug

Though I tried awfully hard to resist, over the past couple weeks I’ve come down with a pretty bad case of Olympics Fever. (Damn you, NBC, and your endless hype!)

Thankfully, it’s been an exciting few days and there have been plenty of highlights — a great Opening Ceremony and Ryan Lochte beating Michael Phelps among them.

Even if you don’t have much interest in swimming, diving, basketball, gymnastics, tennis, cycling, weightlifting, track and field, or any of the other events taking place, there’s still good reason to tune in to these Games — particularly if you’re a small business. That’s right, the Summer Olympics may seem like a giant corporate blowout, but they can also teach small businesses a thing or two if you look at them the right way.

So in the spirit of my earlier post about marketing lessons you can learn from baseball, and because there are five Olympic rings, here are five things that small businesses can learn from the 2012 Summer Olympics. Continue reading →

Email Is Not Dead. Now Shut Up.

30 Jul

Here we go again.

On Friday, the latest in a long line of “email is dead” blog posts was published, this time by a guy named Ted Landphair, and as if right on cue, folks I know in the email world got all riled up about it, going back and forth about how stupid and misguided the blog post was.

Every now and then this happens — too often, really — and it’s always the same routine: A provocative article gets published declaring the end of email. Industry folks and others all link back to the article, thus driving up the writer’s traffic. Email folks go on defense, arguing that email is still an effective marketing channel. Email folks claim moral victory. Nobody cares, and nothing changes. Continue reading →

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