The end is the beginning is the end

I'll be out of town tomorrow, so I wanted to leave everyone with some stories/posts that caught my eye...


Toby has a great recap of HP's blogging initiative, and also talks to Eric Kintz, who has already been kind enough to comment here. Susan was kind enough to tell us about HP's live-blogging of the Sundance Film Festival back in January. Good to see companies like HP taking the lead in embracing the blogosphere.


After taking a few weeks to settle into his new Regional Marketing Manager position with Canada's Boston Pizza, Ryan is back in the saddle at Ashton Media. Add AM to your bloglines feeds and you'll thank me for it later.


Love this story of what happened when the city of Austin embraced its musical community. The city works with local venues and musicians to make the live music scene as vibrant as possible. The results of the city working with their community of musicians has resulted in the music scene pumping over $600 million a year into Austin's economy, and feeding the city another $11 million in taxes. Here's another more detailed account of what the city does to cater to the musical community. Amazing things happen when you market WITH your community, not TO them. Makes you wonder why other companies/people/cities can't figure this out.


The always interesting Andrea writes about the 'Online Disinhibition Effect'. I think she's onto something here.


Chris, as usual, has way too much cool stuff to comment on. But I did want to point out his post on how the director of the movie Stick It turned to MySpace to build buzz for the movie, mainly because Disney was giving her little traditional marketing support. This was a perfect way to appeal to the movie's core target community of teenage girls.

UPDATE: I posted too soon, just came across Clyde's recap of several examples of marketing successes with MySpace on his blog ProHipHop - Hip Hop Marketing. Clyde also mentions MC Lars, who I blogged about as part of the Nettwerk/RIAA file-sharing flap on BMA last month.