Marketing Category

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & Social Media Consultant For decades, professional procrastinators relied on communal hydration technologies (i.e. water coolers) to support their best practices. Unfortunately, that particular tool maxed out bladder capacities, and even the dullest middle managers quickly learned that employees chatting while holding little paper cups weren’t exactly doing “work.” Fortunately, Silicon Valley came to the rescue…Read More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & Dotcom-Bust Survivor “If you buy a share of Facebook and flip your shares in a few years, you could make millions. Oh, but wait: You can’t. Facebook isn’t a public company. The only people who can invest in it already are millionaires. The hot IPO market of the 1990s, which allowed Regular Joes to buy stock in new companies, has been replaced by a rich insider’s club that trades in pre-IPO equity sales. The middle-class folks who daytraded their wayRead More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + Incorrigible BACN Addict I have few addictions, but I confess to loving me some bacon. I’ve tempered my addiction somewhat by subbing in turkey bacon, but that’s like seeking a buzz off light beer. It’s possible but hardly as satisfying. Same thing goes for most e-newsletters. I think they’re going to be great, so I subscribe to a whole slew of them. Yet every morning the first thing I do when I check my email is delete almost every singleRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + No Fan of Captain Ahab… How does one of the hottest restaurants in town go completely out of business in just weeks? That’s what happened to The Hump, a trendy sushi joint in Santa Monica, California, that shut down after getting busted for selling (get this) whale meat. That’s right: someone there actually said, “Mmm, beautiful, intelligent, and endangered species — let’s serve it for dinner.”Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Practicing Metaphor Engineer… Looks like it’s over for us marketing strategists. Now I’m not saying there’s no more need for marketing strategy. If you look at the anemic brands of most banks, airlines, and Web 2.0 startups, you’ll see that the need for marketing is growing faster than Rush Limbaugh at a cheesecake bake-off. But the opportunity to develop a revolutionary new marketing strategy may have passed. Sure, we marketers can still develop new tactics based on new mediums and newRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Former Music Industry Advertising Guy… Funny to see all the young ones chattin’ away on the Twitter ’bout this year’s South-by-Southwest festival, aka SXSW. What used to be a good ol’ fashioned music fest in the unvarnished heart of Austin is now this slicked-up multimedia shindig known as much — or even more — for interactive media than music. Seems to me the latte-sippers now outnumber the Shiner Bock drinkers. The times they sure have a’changed…Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango & Social Entrepreneurship Instructor; photo by Alejandro Linares Garcia via Wikimedia Commons… Some people just don’t get it. I’m not talking about the willfully ignorant knuckle-draggers on the Texas State Board of Education. (They’re so beyond not getting it, they’ve gone full primordial.) I’m talking about the highly educated, wealth exuding finance execs who impersonated the Tin Man at a recent conference I attended… The four of them — a VC, a banker, an angel investor, and an asset-based lender — explainedRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + And Marketing Mix Veteran… The hardest part to believe about “Superman” isn’t that a man can fly with no physical means of propulsion. It’s that Lois Lane, a reporter, can’t tell that Superman and Clark Kent are the same guy because of a pair of glasses. (Perhaps she needed a pair of her own.) Lois’s lack of, um, vision is featured in an episode of the TV series “Lois & Clark,” wherein the time traveler Tempus gives her the low-down…Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Business Relationship Counselor… Dear John Corporation: Let me begin by saying that our times together have been good for me. I mean it! I definitely see the value in being with you… to a certain extent. So what I’m about to say might seem cold and heartless, but please don’t take it the wrong way. I think you’re great! I really do, otherwise we would never have gotten together in the first place. But the truth is — well, how canRead More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & Japanese Food Lover So you manage a small chain of sushi restaurants, and business is not exactly stellar, so you decide to run one of those coupons that winds up in people’s mailboxes en route to the recycling bin. And that’s when this happens…Read More