Daniel Johnson, Jr.

What does jazz have anything to do with social media, digital marketing, and helping stories get told, you ask?

Improvisation.

Improvisation (or The time of a note...) (Photo credit: ePi.Longo)

Consider these quotations I borrowed from Lukasz Langa‘s DailyImprov.net:

In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: “In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.” His answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds. – Frederic Rzewski

Even if you’re improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure. — John Cale

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that’s what we face when we’re dealing with improvisation. — Jan Garbarek

Story

A couple weeks’ ago I’m on a project helping with sound and media for a church function. I’d heard that there was a video the team would want played. Not a problem, I’m thinking. What typically happens is that we get the video burned onto a DVD or some other media. It’s easy to bring it right into the MediaSHOUT software we use. (more…)

I recently shared about my approach in using Eventbrite to manage New Media Cincinnati events I’ve organized. My approach has changed over time, and I suppose it will continue to be tweaked. This post is not about my approach, though. (more…)

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Earlier this month I asked a question to the Microsoft CRM community and my LinkedIn network about e-mails with large attachments set regarding an item forwarded through the CRM organization (By the way, LinkedIn tagline and position are really helpful in identifying who in LinkedIn you can ask a question to – subject of another blog post entirely.). I wanted a definitive answer I could tell our clients who ask these kinds of questions (they have). (more…)

No one ever gets admitted to the hospital because everything is going alright with them.  Similarly, most people don’t call technical support when the computer system is behaving superbly. Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely have some interesting insights into how we can provide better service. (more…)

I’ve been checking out the numbers for How I Got My Job episodes, and I thought it might be instructive to share what I’ve uncovered so far. This discussion will get a bit technical.

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