Friday Five: 5 on 5

We’re having a Friday Five special today. Each Friday Five item includes five tips, giving you 25 takeaways in all today. Yes, we’re over-delivering this morning. But fear not. We’ll make up for it once we get to the office.

  1. The 5 big myths of social media, from Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Marketing Blog, dispels the idea that social media is all about going viral, that you need a community manager, and so on. Good read. Thanks to Andrew Swenson for sharing via Twitter (@wordpost).
  2. Social marketing for celebrities: five lessons from Neil Young. Here’s another one by way of @wordpost (he’s been retweeting some good stuff lately). This piece from Huffington Post contributor Andrew Cherwenka extracts sound advice from Young’s successful and prolific musical career and applies it to the social media sphere. Noting that the folk rock legend is not the most web-savvy of celebrities — Young “has no official Facebook fan page, and his website is a Flash disaster stuck in the ’90s” — Cherwenka points out that “Canada’s legendary mutton-chopped musician was leveraging 5 key principles of social marketing decades before the Internet came to be.” Hey hey, my my, this is good info for anyone wanting to engage in social media marketing.
  3. 5 apps to tap into the Internet’s infinite playlist. While we’re on the subject of music, these five apps will help you tune in to Neil Young or any other musician whose work is floating around in the Internet cloud.
  4. 5 brands tapping into your brain. This FastCompany piece also gives a nice overview of the concept of neuromarketing.
  5. Your future in five easy steps: Wired guide to personal scenario planning. Worried about the future? Worry no more, my friend. Just follow these five steps to envision “a clearer view of what the future may hold and of the most advantageous route through it.”

Have a good weekend. Stay strong.

My Kanye moment

Move over, Taylor Swift. I’ve now had my own encounter with Kanye West.

It began innocently enough. I clicked over to Ron Bronson’s website to see what my blogging buddy was up to. When I read the headline of his latest post — The Beatles just weren’t that good — I was intrigued, so I read on.

Ron’s post wasn’t so much a dis of the Fab Four as it was a poke at the “people [who] shake their fists at me for my deliberate avoidance of most music made before I was born.” Still, I couldn’t pass up a chance to school the young man about why the Beatles matter, so I posted the following comment:

<em>My comment about the Beatles on Ron Bronson's blog</em>
My comment about the Beatles on Ron Bronson's blog

Turns out I was the one who got schooled. By someone named Kanye, no less:

<em>The response to my comment from "Kanye"</em>
The response to my comment from Kanye

Yeah, I know the Kanye jokes are getting old. But this one made me laugh. I can only imagine who the prankster was. Anyone care to come clean?