#what's that about? is it just sales? or is it related to those evangelical groups trying get books banned? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

squarebracket-trickster · 2 months

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Sorry guys, rant incoming. I considered deleting this but I put too much effort in.

"girlboss" "girl dinner" "girl math" "boy math" "gen z are making fun of us for wearing x" "here's how to dress like gen z:" "girlies" "girl's night" "boy's night" "me and the boys" "90s kid"

"I don't feel like an adult" "I'm 34 and I can tell you, I still don't feel like an adult either." "My parents seemed like real adults when they were my age." "I still feel like a teenager."

Maybe you'd feel more like an adult if you started calling yourself one. Maybe you'd feel more like an adult if you stopped trying to dress like a teenager. Maybe you should move your bed out from the wall and get a wallet. Maybe find a calendar app that works for you.

You are an adult. Even if you live with your parents. Even if you do part-time shift work at minimum wage. Even if you haven't graduated college. Even if you are single. These are adult things to do. Because you are doing them. And you are an adult. Start treating yourself like an adult. Fake it 'till you make it if you have to.

In other, writing-related, news:

That trend on TikTok of 20-40 something women authors (and writers yet to be published) promoting their books like,

"Omg! I can't believe I've sold X number of copies!! I never thought I would!" "Ahhhh imagine publishing your book and all your dreams come true and now you get to meet famous authors and work with big names in the industry!!" "Would you read a book where [proceeds to list a bunch of oversaturated tropes that tell me nothing about the actual plot]?"

It reeks of infantilization. If you didn't believe anyone would want to read your book, why should I? You made it on the NYT bestseller list! Stop acting like a mega-fan who got to meet a celebrity. You are their peer! "Would you read a book--" What if I wouldn't? Why does it matter to you what I think of your book? And for the love of god stop hiding behind tropes you know are already popular. "Here is my book: This is what it is about." Have some goddamn confidence.

It is fine to mention in passing "this idea was really far-fetched so I didn't know if it would appeal" or "I was struggling with self-esteem when I wrote this". It's fine to fan a little bit. It's fine to discuss the tropes in your book. But why are you building your brand as an author off of your inferiority complex? You are using your poor self-esteem as a marketing tactic to seem "humble" and "relatable" but it's coming across as unprofessional and desperate for reassurance. You are an adult. You are competent. The more you act like it the more you will believe it.

And of course, I haven't seen a man promote his book this way...

On another note, do any of the 20-40 something women writers who do "write with me" videos on TikTok actually enjoy writing or are they just doing it for the aesthetic?

They all have gorgeous minimalism writing spaces full of white and pink and a macbook beneath a window. Their makeup is done and they are conventionally pretty to start with. But their entire video is just them talking about how little progress they made, how many pages they deleted, how often they got distracted, how frustrated they are. And like, yeah. We all have those days. But what about the good lines you can't wait to share? The days when the words just flow? The cool stuff you learned while researching? Why don't you ever make videos about that?

Is this some other attempt to seem "relatable" by only talking about the "bad" side of writing? Because again, it's coming across as lacking confidence at best and, at worst, that you don't actually know how to write. And that is not the brand you want as an author.

Again, its always women. Why must women market their self-esteem issues in order to sell their art? Why must we be perpetually awestruck children (girlies, book girls) in over our heads?

#also why do I get the sense these women are selling a lifestyle more than they are actually promoting their own books?#I feel like someone more qualified than me could link this to modelling good christian gender roles #and cultural conformity or something #it isn't lost on me how much of this is about trying to seem humble #and how much validation is tied to protestant success and hard work ideas #is this where the indoctrination starts?#give us 'role models' as influencers #also Alex Aster of Lightlark fame is the WORST for this #her content makes me physically sick to watch #and again interesting that it is pretty widely agreed on at this point that she is an industry plant #interesting that the industry plant is leaning so heavy on the humility and infantilization of women tactics #as though appealing to protestant christians is a major concern of the industry #what's that about? is it just sales? or is it related to those evangelical groups trying get books banned?#how much influence does conservative christian america have within the trad pub industry?#maybe I am really reaching here idk #I don't have any sources #it's just speculation I am open to be proven wrong

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samwisethewitch · 3 years

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An Open Letter to Christian Witches

On this blog, I often champion the idea that witchcraft is a practice, not a religion, and that a witch can practice any religion, provided that religion does not explicitly forbid witchcraft. I still very much believe this, and the point of this post is not to tell Christians that they can’t be witches. However, as a non-Christian witch who has been deeply traumatized by Christianity, I do wish Christian witches would be a bit more mindful of how they show up in witchy spaces.

Recently, I’ve noticed a pattern of self-identifying Christian witches dominating the conversation and centering their own beliefs in spaces dedicated to witchcraft. Now, I wholeheartedly believe that this is unintentional, and most of these Christian witches seem like lovely people. But it’s still deeply frustrating and upsetting to be promised a safe space and support from other witches, only to be preached at.

Or be told that I’m doing witchcraft wrong because my ethics are not the same as someone else’s.

Or be told that I don’t understand Christianity, despite having spent the first two decades of my life fully immersed in it.

Or have my trauma invalidated because, “Not all Christians are like that!”

Or spend the majority of our time together reassuring and comforting a Christian witch who is uncomfortable with the inclusion of pagan and/or occult elements in a ritual.

These are all genuine experiences I have had with Christian witches in 2021. And in every single one of these situations, the Christian witch had a very negative reaction to any kind of constructive criticism or request that they be more mindful of the diverse beliefs and experiences in the space. Any suggestion that their actions may be causing discomfort for others was met with defensiveness, if not straight-up denial. The result is a situation where Christian witches are at the center of every discussion and demand (knowingly or not) coddling or hand-holding from teachers and facilitators, while those of us who are not Christian are left deeply uncomfortable but unable to express that discomfort without upsetting someone or being accused of creating conflict.

And I get it. I really do. Because for most of the people in the above scenarios, this was the first time they encountered a situation where their religion wasn’t the norm. But what I need Christian witches to recognize and be mindful of is that this discomfort of being surrounded by people who do not share your beliefs is something those of us who are not Christian experience every day.

In the Western world, and particularly in the United States, Christianity is a religious hegemony. (A hegemony is a group with total political, social, economic, and/or military dominance in a given area.) Everything in Western society was designed for Christians, to serve a Christian worldview, and to reinforce Christian hegemony. Everything from our government to our business practices to our media reinforces Christian values. For Christians, this creates the sense of comfort and security that comes from being part of the in-group. For non-Christians, it meas being constantly bombarded with someone else’s religion. For former Christians with church-related trauma, it means reliving that trauma constantly.

Here’s a look at an average day in my life as a formerly-Christian pagan with religious trauma. Please note that this is not an exaggeration — this is a description of what I experienced on the day I wrote this post.

I get up and, because I live with Christian family members, I walk past exactly five images of Jesus and/or the Virgin Mary on my way from my bedroom to the front door. On my commute to work, I drive past at least a dozen churches, including the one I used to attend, where my religious trauma occurred. I stop at a red light, and the car in front of me has a bumper sticker with an image of a cross and the message, “If this offends you now, just wait until you see it on judgement day!” I happen to know that these bumper stickers are for sale not at a local church, but at a privately owned, nominally secular business. When I get to work, the woman who greets me at the front gate is wearing a crucifix necklace.

I work in diversity education. When I get to the office, my boss asks me to join the local Interfaith council because I am the only person in our department who isn’t Christian. My current big project at work is trying to get a transgender speaker to visit our organization and help us lead a workshop to work towards amending a history of transphobia in our organization. My boss tells me today the she isn’t sure the speaker I arranged will be approved, because our administration might not think it is in line with our organization’s values. When she says this, I know she means evangelical Christian values. She doesn’t have to spell it out — there’s a chaplain down the hall from our office.

After my lunch break, my coworkers are talking about a church event one of them attended over the weekend. I do not contribute to this conversation. It has been several months since I attended an in-person religious event with people who shared my faith. As I’m leaving the office at the end of the day, I pass a Bible study group that has set up in our recreation area. On my drive home, I pass the funeral home where my grandfather’s memorial service was held earlier this year. The programs for that service had the Lord’s Prayer printed on them. My grandfather was an atheist.

This is my level of exposure to a religion I not only don’t believe in, but have been actively hurt by, on a daily basis. This is my normal. I’ve learned to live with it, tune it out, and self-soothe, because there is no other option.

When I’m finally able to be around other witches, many of them are coming from similar experiences. I am finally in a space where I can be vulnerable, where I can talk about what I really believe, and where I can receive support from like-minded people. But if there is even one Christian witch in the group, it’s highly likely that this space too will be dominated by Christian hegemony.

It’s a noted fact that a person exists within a hegemony, they have very little ability to tolerate challenges to this hegemony due to a lack of exposure. This is the origin of the term white fragility, which sociologist Robin DiAngelo uses to describe the discomfort and defensiveness white people feel when confronted with “racial discomfort” such as being asked to consider racism as a system they are complicit in and benefit from rather than as the actions of lone extremists. White fragility is something I have personally experienced as a white woman involved in antiracist work, and it’s something I have taken years to work through and am still actively working on. Since DiAngelo popularized this term, similar terms have been used to point to similar phenomena in other hegemonic groups, as in the cases of male fragility/fragile masculinity, cishet fragility, and yes, Christian fragility.

I’m not trying to argue that all hegemony is the same, and I am definitely not trying to say that my personal religious trauma is anywhere near the level of pain caused by the mistreatment of Black and brown people by white supremacist society. My point here is simply that being part of the dominant group breeds a very low tolerance for exposure to other groups.

Christian witches are members of a hegemonic group entering a space historically occupied by marginalized people, which creates an imbalance of power. (And yes, you can benefit from hegemony even if you are marginalized in other areas. Identity is multi-faceted. Queer Christians, disabled Christians, Christians of color, and yes, Christian witches still benefit from Christian hegemony.) The only way things are going to get better is if Christians are willing to do the work themselves of building tolerance for religious discomfort. The rest of us can host as many interfaith and secular events as we want, but if Christians aren’t able to tolerate the inclusion of other belief systems, we’ll never truly be on equal footing. Until Christians stop centering the Christian experience, it will continue to dominate interfaith spaces, including witchy spaces.

TLDR: I’m asking Christian witches to be mindful of the privilege they bring into interfaith spaces. I’m asking you to be willing to feel uncomfortable, and to recognize that your discomfort does not invalidate the work your facilitators have put into creating the space and/or program. If you truly can’t stand the discomfort, I’m asking you to politely excuse yourself instead of demanding emotional labor from other witches.

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years

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The first and third incarnations of the Klan—the cross-burning lynch mobs and the vigilantes who beat up and murdered civil rights workers in the 1960s—seem beyond the pale of today’s politics, at least for the moment. But the second Klan, the Klan of the 1920s, less violent but far more widespread, is a different story, and one that offers some chilling comparisons to the present day. It embodied the same racism at its core but served it up beneath a deceptively benign façade, in all-American patriotic colors.

In other ways as well, the Klan of the 1920s strongly echoes the world of Donald Trump. This Klan was a movement, but also a profit-making business. On economic issues, it took a few mildly populist stands. It was heavily supported by evangelicals. It was deeply hostile to science and trafficked in false assertions. And it was masterfully guided by a team of public relations advisers as skillful as any political consultants today.

Two new books give us a fresh look at this second period of the Klan. Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the KKK is the wiser and deeper; Felix Harcourt’s Ku Klux Kulture offers some useful background information but then, reflecting its origin as a Ph.D. thesis, becomes an exhaustive survey of Klansmen’s appearances, variously as heroes or villains, in the era’s novels, movies, songs, plays, musicals, and more.

The KKK’s rebirth was spurred by D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. The most expensive and widely seen motion picture that had yet been made, it featured rampaging mobs of newly freed slaves in the post–Civil War South colluding with rapacious northern carpetbaggers. To the rescue comes the Ku Klux Klan, whose armed and mounted heroes lynch a black villain, save the honor of southern womanhood, and prevent the ominous prospect of blacks at the ballot box. “It is like teaching history with lightning,” said an admiring President Woodrow Wilson, an ardent segregationist, who saw the film in the White House. Wilson’s comment underlines a point both Gordon and Harcourt make: the Klan of this era was no fringe group, for tens of millions of nonmembers agreed with its politics.

The founder of the reincarnated Klan in 1915 was an Atlanta physician named William Joseph Simmons, who five years later fell into the hands of two skilled public relations professionals, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke. They convinced him that for the Klan to gain members in other parts of the country, it had to add Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and big-city elites to its list of villains. Tyler and Clarke in effect ran the KKK for the next several years, a pair of Bannons to Simmons’s Trump.

Simmons signed a contract giving the two an amazing 80 percent of dues and other revenue gleaned from new recruits. They are believed to have reaped $850,000—worth more than $11 million today—in their first fifteen months on the job. The whole enterprise was organized on a commission basis: everyone from the recruiters, or Kleagles, up through higher officers (King Kleagles, Grand Goblins, and more) kept a percentage of the initiation fee ($10, the equivalent of $122 today) and monthly dues. The movement was a highly lucrative brand.

Tyler and Clarke polished Simmons’s speaking style and set up newspaper interviews for him, gave free Klan memberships to Protestant ministers, and assured prominent placement of their blizzard of press releases by buying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of newspaper advertising. To appear respectable, they made these purchases through two well-known ad agencies, one of which had a Jewish CEO. Simmons, however, spent much of his share of the take on horse races, prizefights, and drink. Several rivals who lusted after the KKK’s lucrative income stream maneuvered him out of office with the help of Tyler and Clarke.

A plump, diminutive Texas dentist, Hiram Evans, became the new Imperial Wizard in 1922. He, in turn, his eye on Tyler and Clarke’s 80 percent of revenues, was able to force them out because of a scandal—the two were sexually involved but each was married to someone else. Linda Gordon gives Tyler major credit for the Klan’s success: “The organization might well have grown without this driven, bold, corrupt, and precociously entrepreneurial woman, but it would likely have been smaller.” About other women in the Klan, such as one group called Ladies of the Invisible Empire, Gordon dryly notes, “Readers…must rid themselves of notions that women’s politics are always kinder, gentler, and less racist than men’s.”

Significantly, the new Wizard moved the Klan’s headquarters to Washington, D.C. Membership skyrocketed, reaching an estimated four million by 1924. The revenue remained enormous: beyond dues, there were sales of Klan insurance, knives, trinkets, and garb. Those robes and pointed hoods were made to an exacting pattern, sold at a big markup, and, until his ouster, could only be purchased from a company owned by Clarke. The temptations of this fountain of money led to further rivalries and embezzlement, compounded by the conviction of several Klan leaders for various sordid offenses, most spectacularly the Indiana Grand Dragon for the rape and murder of a young woman who worked for him—a crime that left his bite marks all over her body. All of this made the Klan largely collapse by the end of the decade—but not before it had helped win an enormous legislative victory, and not before there occurred a curious episode involving the Trump family.

Before we get to that, however, there’s another odd parallel between the Klan of the 1920s and the present day, which has to do with the sheer value of getting attention in the media. Many newspapers campaigned against the KKK, and no less than five such exposés won Pulitzer Prizes. The first was for an excoriating series of stories in the New York World in 1921 that revealed secret Klan rituals and code words, gave the names of more than two hundred officials, and listed violent crimes committed by Klansmen. The heavily promoted articles ran for three weeks, were reprinted by seventeen newspapers throughout the country, and provoked a congressional investigation. But instead of crushing the organization, the exposé did the opposite; one historian estimates that the series increased Klan membership by more than a million. Some people even tried to join by filling out the blank membership application form the World had used to illustrate one story.

Being denounced by a liberal New York newspaper, it turned out, gave the Klan just the political imprimatur it needed, and spread the news of its rebirth across the nation. Imperial Wizard Evans exulted that the exposés had provided “fifty million dollars’ worth of free advertising.” People loved the idea of joining a fraternal organization with secret rites and extravagant titles that included judges, congressmen, and other prominent citizens, and that legitimized combat against the forces that seemed to be undermining traditional American life.

What were those forces? Movements heavy on ethnic hatred and imagined conspiracies flourish when rapid changes upset the social order and people feel their income or status threatened. In the heyday of European fascism, the threat came from the enormous job losses of the Great Depression, which in Germany followed the humiliating Versailles Treaty and ruinous inflation that wiped out savings. Among many of Trump’s supporters today, the threat comes from stagnating or declining wages and the rapid automation and globalization that makes people feel their jobs are ever less secure.

We don’t normally think of the heady, expanding American economy of the 1920s as a period of threat, but Gordon offers a broader cultural and feminist analysis. “The Klan supplied a way for members to confirm manliness,” she writes, in an era when many traditional male roles were disappearing. “As more men became white-collar workers, as more small businesses lost out to chains, as the political supremacy of Anglo-Saxons became contested, as more women reached for economic and political rights,” the Klan “organized the performances of masculinity and male bonding through uniforms, parades, rituals, secrecy, and hierarchical military ranks and titles.” She quotes an admonition from one Oregon chapter: “Remember when you come to lodge that this is not an old maid’s convention.” A man who by day might be an accountant or stationery salesman or have a wife who earned more than he did could, in his Klan robes, be a Kleagle or Klaliff or Exalted Cyclops by night.

Not all Klan members were men, of course, and the Klan was not the only organization that offered ceremonial dress and fancy titles: it’s telling that the first place Klan recruiters usually sought members was among Masons. But Gordon’s is a thoughtful explanation of the Klan’s appeal in the fast-urbanizing America of the 1920s, which was leaving behind an earlier nation based, in imagined memory, on self-sufficient yeoman farmers, proud blue-collar workers, and virtuous small-town businessmen, all of them going to the same white-steepled church on Sunday. It was a world in which men did traditionally manly work and women’s place was in the kitchen and bedroom. Even city-dwellers—perhaps especially city-dwellers—could feel this nostalgia. (Although, as with many idealized pasts, the reality was less ideal: many late-nineteenth-century farmers and small businessmen went bankrupt or deep into debt, casualties of a string of recessions and declining world commodity prices.)

All these feelings, of course, came on top of centuries of racism. And that hostility was surely exacerbated during the 1920s when the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South was well underway, making black faces visible to millions who had seldom or never seen them before....

Sometimes what doesn’t happen is revealing. If upheavals that threaten people’s jobs and status provide the classic fuel for movements like the KKK, then in the 1930s, when the Depression threw a quarter of the American labor force out of work and left hundreds of thousands living in shacks of scrap wood and tarpaper, why didn’t the Klan come back to life stronger than ever? One answer is that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite its shortcomings, was a far-reaching and impassioned attempt to address the nation’s economic woes and injustices head-on, with a boldness we’ve not seen since then. It gave people hope. Another answer is that although FDR made many compromises with southern Democrats to get his programs through Congress, he was no racist. The more outspoken Eleanor Roosevelt was a fervent proponent of anti-lynching laws and of full rights for black Americans. The tone set by the White House matters; it creates moral space for others to speak and act. Perhaps it’s no surprise that these were years when the Klan lay low.

#fdr was an ignoramus who was far better at PR than actual governance #but the point about having a real economic program still stands

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bluerozzawesome · 3 years

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How To Choose The Right Executive Recruiter?

Choosing the correct executive recruitment accomplice to assist you with growing your business can be challenging. The possibility of building a kickass group is exciting, yet the potential for blunders is high. In the beginning phases of an association's development, a hiring botch in a key development job can truly crash progress—an awful item supervisor can slow down the arrival of a key element, and some unacceptable agent can harsh the market against a company before it even begins.

At the point when you're gearing up to extend your group, remember the following tips as you select the recruiting accomplice that will assist you with attracting and landing the top ability that will quicken your development.

1. Gauge the requirements of the part against your internal assets

It is safe to say that you are hiring for a job that requires specific aptitudes and experience? Or then again, would you say you are looking for somebody with a typical foundation in your general vicinity? What will your cycle be for qualifying candidates and conducting interviews? Doing all the administrative work related with hiring is tedious—who will be taking that on?

Things get trickier as the profile of your optimal up-and-comer gets more difficult to find, particularly for key senior jobs. In case you're looking for a rockstar item administrator with a long history of building programming that clients love, or a sales rep who can develop both your playbook and your group from the beginning's—a decent possibility that those people aren't going to simply stagger on your LinkedIn advertisement. Besides, they may think nothing about your association or the job regardless of whether they end up hearing about the chance. On the off chance that there are just a modest bunch of individuals on the planet who have the experience you're looking for, at that point crafted by finding, attracting, and retaining them will be substantially more unpredictable.

The more uncommon the profile, the more troublesome it will be to find, draw in, and qualify the type of applicants you need. What's more, the more instrumental an effective competitor in this job will be in the general development of the association, the higher the stakes will be. For these challenging and basic hires, you'll need to invest in using a retained pursuit firm.

2. Search for trustworthy executive recruiters in your specialty

Recruiters now and then get an awful name—and truly, it's frequently for a valid justification. A few firms bargain solely in volume, firing out resumes until they exhaust their information base, and afterward disappearing when it becomes clear that they won't make a simple position. A few firms do the absolute minimum—posting position advertisements for your sake, and afterward sending you all the resumes they get without qualifying them. Working with an awful recruitment firm can be both more costly and additional tedious than essentially doing it yourself.

Nonetheless, an organization with a compelling enrollment specialist with mastery in the industry and the function being referred to can be an investment that delivers profits for quite a long time to come. Search for boutique firms that spend significant time in companies of your stage and size, just as kind of industry and job. The more specialty the firm, the more focused they will be in their effort to likely competitors—basically, don't hire a generalist to do an expert's work.

There are various advantages to working with a particular recruitment firm. They can arrive at aloof up-and-comers who are as of now achieving outstanding outcomes for their present bosses. You can use their profound understanding of the market to help you plan the job and specialty remuneration bundle. What's more, their understanding of the particular necessities of the position will mean they can adequately qualify applicants and present just the individuals who really address your issues. These organizations will frequently chip away at a retained premise, which permits them to devote assets to finding you the ideal contender for the job.

3. Find out about the recruitment association's cycle, and screen for shared fit

Whenever you've distinguished a recruitment firm in your specialty, it's savvy to invest a digit of energy getting to know the individuals that you'll be working with, and the cycle they use. An initial discussion ought to include them getting to know you and your business, learning about the job and your aspirations for the position, and a conversation about the manner in which they approach each search. Approach them for insights regarding how they will introduce the occasion to competitors, how they will pre-qualify individuals prior to sending them to you, and what kind of help you can expect all through the interview and bid for employment.

Search for indications of interest, commitment, and genuine interest in your association—they should be inquisitive and proficient about your industry. The best firms are centered around being consultative accomplices with their customers and up-and-comers, and will set aside the effort to comprehend the extraordinary necessities of every single pursuit. Should you choose to connect with their administrations, they will be liable for selling your vision and evangelizing in the interest of your company in request to draw in up-and-comers who don't yet realize they ought to think about a change—so from the get-go in the process you ought to get the feeling that they comprehend your business and your requirements, and that they have a reasonable cycle set up.

During an initial counsel, the recruitment firm is likely looking for their own arrangement of hints that the relationship will be beneficial for all gatherings involved: factors like having an unmistakable vision for the job, being willing to invest in worth (both in their expenses, and in the remuneration that you'll offer to applicants), regardless of whether you're available to criticism on the interview cycle, and their degree of admittance to the hiring chief for ongoing updates and conversations.

Specialty recruitment firms are, by definition, particular about the customers they work with. They would prefer not to take on pursuits where they know there's a remote possibility of them filling the position. Taking tasks that are fiercely outside of their hover of ability can consume assets that would be better spent on other pursuit tasks. Your prosperity is their prosperity, so search for signs that they are invested in your vision.

Choosing a compelling accomplice who can exhort and uphold you through exciting occasions of development is a significant choice for your business that ought not be messed with. We know just as anybody that the recruiting industry doesn't generally have the best standing—frequently for valid justifications. We've additionally perceived how quickly the perfect individual in the correct job can quicken development, and how damaging it very well may be to hire some unacceptable up-and-comer in a vital situation in a beginning phase company.

Much like the cycle for interviewing up-and-comers, you ought to participate in a conversation with potential Dubai recruitment agencies to guarantee that you're appropriate for one another. With some intentional screening, you will have the option to find a genuine accomplice who will work vigorously for your benefit to find the ability that will drive your business forward.

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Executive Recruitment Company, Ecommerce Recruiters

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mastectomybra-blog · 5 years

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BLOG POST #4

SECTION 1:

Through which channels do your customer segments want to be reached?

Our end-users will be patients that underwent a mastectomy and other breast oncology related procedures. Furthermore, in most cases these patients will not be the buyers do to the fact that our product will be physically fitted on the patient while still under anesthesia postoperative. So, our hospitals will be our buyers for this product and the surgeons within those hospitals will be the ones who get to choose to use our products or not on their patients. The method our team plans on using to supply the hospitals as well as market our product to hospital administrations is through medical product distribution company. These medical product distributors such as MEDLINE have the capacity to store and distribute our product as well as having a sales force to promote our product to the correct people in the correct positions.

How are they being reached now?

We will be developing and forming relationships with procurement managers from medical product distributors, such as MEDLINE.

Which channel is most cost-efficient?

The most cost-efficient channel will be we send our products to MEDLINE Medical Product Distributor. Signing contracts with a distributor will reduce the technicalities and simplify the supply chain to major customers.

How are your channels integrated with customer routines?

Our channel, distributors, are well connected with the administration of our customers, hospitals, who oversee the surgeons, who have the closest contact and best relationship with our end-users, the patients. Through distributors, we will be able to reach a greater number of customers than what we could have if it was just us going door to door. Not to mention, getting in contact with the buyer of a medical organization can be extremely difficult. It would probably take weeks, if not months before we would even get them to listen to us, whereas a distributor already has their contact information, and most importantly, their trust.

How do you create end-user demand?

We will increase our end-user’s demand by partnering up with breast cancer awareness organizations. Members of these chapters are automatically connected with the newly diagnosed patients to provide a sense of support and community. They give each other advice on the do’s and don'ts of recovery, and will advocate for our product with the new patients. We will also take advantage of our partnership with a renowned hospital such as M.D. Anderson, to promote PinkArmor in female-oriented magazines and blogs.

How is demand creation different for your different channels?

As of now, our main focus is going to be selling through distributors. The way we can create demand from them is by providing a great quality product that generates a high volume of sales, and has a huge demand. While we are working on this, we will be building a website that will allow us to sell directly to end-users. The way we create demand for that will be with good public relations, good marketing strategies and having a good effective product that proves what it claims to be.

Evangelism vs. existing need or category?

Although there have been several varying breast oncology recovery devices and products created over the years, nothing relatively close to our design has penetrated this industry’s market. Our product includes a handful full of variations from a design aspect that has been brought to attention in the past, however all of these variations were individual products. No other product exists in the market that includes all of our variations in the same idea of an “All In One” garment. All of the other products on the market are either bras with add ons for the needs of breast cancer patients, or products that is similar to a robe.

SECTION 2:

What kind of initial feedback did you receive?

Each person we have shared our product idea and rough prototype with has fallen in love with the idea and sees major potential to obtain a large segment of the market. Whether it be end user patients, surgeons, medical sales representatives, or potential distributors we have yet to see any major red flags. Initially we had confidence that our product was great, however after market validation through interviews and focus groups, we have only strengthened our beliefs of having potential to penetrate the medical recovery product industry.

What are the entry barriers?

When working in the medical field, it can be extremely tedious when attempting to reach the person in charge of purchasing products for the facility to use. This can take weeks, if not months go even get a point of contact.

Does anything change about your Value Proposition or Customers/Users?

Our value proposition and has not yet changed. Furthermore, it is important to note that we have two different value propositions. One being for the end user patient. The other being to the procurement departments of hospital administrations.

Does anything change or proposition extend or replace existing revenue for the channel?

Since we have decided to go through distributors for our sales, our profit margin will decrease slightly since distributors usually take around 20-25% of markup.

What is the “cost” if your channel, and its efficiency vs. your selling price?

A competitive price to break into the market for our product is $25 (considering that it is the current price hospital pay to competitors). The usual distributor markup is 20-25%, meaning that we would be selling our product for $18/piece wholesale. Cost of goods sold, including shipment, will average between $8-10. This leaves us with a profit of $8-10. To use distributor channels will help our product increase in demand faster through their salespeople and direct line with hospitals.

0 notes

howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 7 years

Text

Park Tae-seon – another Korean Pikareum Messiah

Elder Park Tae-seon preaching in 1956

Is anything in this story familiar concerning another Korean messiah?

Park was born in a poor peasant family in 1915. After finishing his elementary education, he went to Japan and graduated from a vocational school there. Later, in Korea, he set up his Evangelism Center. At the peak of his ‘ministry’ Elder Park had over a million followers. There were whole communities of followers with factories making clothing, etc. Early on Park was ahead of Moon in the race between the different Korean messiahs. Park’s religion was also known as 'The Olive Tree Movement’. Now there are not so many of his churches remaining in Korea. There were never many followers outside Korea. Today the official name is 'Chunbukyo’ ( 천부교 ) Chun means Heaven, Bu means Father, and Kyo means Church, so it is The Church of Heavenly Father.

In 1955 Park was involved in a big revival meeting, which proved to be a turning point in his career.

In Soo Kim: “Crowds of people came from all parts of the country and there were many with different kinds of diseases seeking healing. Dr. Swanson led Bible exposition sessions in the mornings and evenings, and Park clapped and sang praise songs at dawns and in the afternoons to lead in healing and spiritual ministry. During the remaining sessions, Park collected gold rings, watches, cash and other items from the people by saying that he will build a prayer house for national salvation. Rev. Kim Seon Hwan testifies that Park Tae Seon embezzled all the money collected during the meetings. … The most crucial of the unbiblical doctrines Park taught was the so-called “blood separation” doctrine. Claiming that he “received the precious blood of Jesus, the blood became his, and he was distributing the blood to others,” he taught: “Archangel Michael, fallen as the serpent, committed adultery with Eve and because of that serpent’s blood, and all Eve’s children including Cain carried the original sin. Therefore one can sanctify one’s blood by having intercourse with Park because his body is blessed and sanctified. And the one with separated blood can sanctify others by having intercourse with them. This doctrine of orgies was used to forge mental and spiritual unity among his followers.” Moreover, he called himself “the righteous one of the east and the Olive Tree of the East” mentioned in Isaiah 41. He claimed that he was sent by God from the North (from his hometown in Youngbyon, North Pyengan Province) to save Korea.”

In March 1956 Park was dismissed as an Elder. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1956 classified his movement as a cult.

Elder Park Tae-seon’s church

From another source: “ 'the only way to enter the Heaven, believing in the God is no other than for the male and the female to be united into the one body.’ This prophecy itself contradicts the social ethics … let the married couples divorce and conducted the special services of putting hands on the faithful women. He has fulfilled what was foretold. … that the women should receive the grace of the blood exchange ceremony with the righteous man who gives the hands of the help for the salvation. … The Elder, Park Tae-seon had made the thunderbolt-like declaration in the early 1980s, that he is the only God throughout the entire realm of the Heaven, who created the whole universe and the mankind. In addition, he had precisely taught the reasons why the human being was created and why the God of omniscience and omnipotence had come down to this earth for himself incarnated and endured the prison twice and the prospect how the human will become in the future.”

(www.paikmagongja.org/english/parkteaeseon/park-001.htm)

Kirsti L. Nevalainen’s book is very helpful in shedding more light on Elder Park.

Change of Blood Lineage through Ritual Sex in the Unification Church ISBN 978-1439261538 See pages 86-88

“Rev. Moon’s immediate disciple Ms. Chong Deuk-eun with whom Rev. Moon had a yongch’e ceremony in June 1946 in Pyongyang got a revelation from God and left for South Korea at the beginning of 1947. She was told by God that she must be disconnected from Sun Myung Moon. She occasionally attended Kim Paek-moon’s meetings in Seoul. Stationed at Mt. Samgak, north of Seoul, she successfully convinced quite a few people of her religious mission. Among those who converted to her was Park Tae-seon who was then a deacon at Namdaemun Presbyterian church in Seoul. Deacon Park and his wife were especially faithful to her. In February 1949 she was invited to stay in Deacon Park’s house in Susaek near Seoul and stayed there for about a month. At this place a few young men and women were having a yongch’e or pikareum ceremonies with her. Later Park Tae-seon founded his own messianic group called the Olive Tree Movement. Park Tae-seon considered himself as the Messiah. He claimed that he “has been granted the precious blood of Jesus, which has been wholly permeated in his body which has to be distributed to others.” He practiced thus a blood exchange ritual. He identified his mission with that of Christ by insisting that he was the only one who could distribute the precious blood further. Park Tae-seon’s group had installed separate rooms in the basement of the churches in which men and women had sexual intercourse. These rites drew a large number of people to the movement.”

In Soo Kim: “Some time later, Park created self-contained villages at Sosa, Deokso and other places in Gyeonggi Province as a means to building the so-called 1000-year city. He lured many innocent Christians by preaching that 144,000 people will become a holy nation and go up to heaven according to Revelation. Those who believed him liquidated their possessions and cut off their family relations to live in the villages, only to be exploited in harsh labor for producing factory products. These products were then put on compulsory sale at the Evangelism Center for achieving commercial gains. The sect went through a series of internal conflicts and disputes. Park eventually created Cheonbugyo (Religion of Heavenly Father) and presented himself as a God. But his death brought about natural dismissal of the sect and so we see another example of cults in their typical cycle.

Park Tae-seon and his Evangelism Center movement were just like any cultic organization we can see in unstable society after a war. … Another important factor is that existing Christian leaders were unable to fully satisfy the spiritual cravings of Christians at the most crucial time.”

Park Tae-seon with a Cadillac

Following in the footsteps of Park, Moon is claiming to be God:

Rev Jin Hun Yong (He heads the UC Department for Education and Witnessing in Korea, and travels the world teaching UC members.)

Here is the content of a slide from one of Yong’s lectures:

"1. 1014 True Parents Cosmic Level Blessing (October 14, 2009).

2. Korea is God’s fatherland and hometown.

3. Jung-Joo is the hometown where God was born.

4. Jung-Joo is the hometown of the first, second and third Israel.

5. Korean is the mother language of God.”

Jung-Joo (or Jeongju) just so happens to be where Moon was born…

In 1948 Moon was excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church. (Jane Day Mook article published in 'A.D.’ New Growth on Burnt-Over Ground - May 1974 page 34, and others, state that Moon was excommunicated at around the time he was arrested and sent to Heungnam prison.)

Moon and Park both had yongch’e or pikareum sex rituals with Chong Deuk-eun. (She is also known as Chong Tuk-un.) Rev Jin Hun Yong lists her as one of Moon’s leading disciples in Pyongyang in 1946.

Sources:

Photos of Elder Park’s religion: http://www.chunbukyo.or.kr/.

The In Soo Kim PhD (2011) quotes are taken from his book, History of Christianity in Korea ISBN 978-89-6562-134-8

Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society No. 43 (1967) has a series of articles on Korean religions

(http://www.raskb.com/transactions/VOL43/Vol043.docx)

PDF file: (http://www.raskb.com/transactions/VOL43/KORS0749D_VOL43.pdf)

Spencer J. Palmer: The New Religions of Korea: Introduction. Transactions XLIII:1-10.

Lee Kang-o: Chungsan’gyo: Its History, Doctrines and Ritual Practices. Translated by Richard Rutt. Transactions XLIII:28-66.

Choi Jai-sok: A Socio-religious Study of Sindonae. Transactions XLIII:67-91.

Benjamin Weems: Ch’ŏndogyo Enters Its Second Century. Transactions XLIII: 92-100.

Choi Syn-duk: Korea’s Tong-il Movement (Unification Church). Transactions XLIII:101-113.

In the 1950s and early 1960s Tae-seon Park was a much more successful pikareum messiah than Moon, who was jealous of him.

Felix Moos: Leadership and Organization in the Olive Tree Movement. Transactions XLIII:11-27. “In September 1958, police reported that the number of residents in Elder Park’s Olive Tree Movement believers’ town was 7,467. Outside of the town, there were tens of thousands of members, economically supporting (and being supported by) the town through nationwide sales of goods that were produced in the town.”

[At the same time Moon had about 200 followers in Seoul, and a few in Pusan and Taegu, and maybe one other place.] “Heretical or not, [Elder Park’s Olive Tree] movement by 1964 had from 1,800,000 to 2,000,000 followers in some 303 congregations (Chondo Kwan), against some 97,306 Presbyterians after more than half a century of intense missionary efforts. This perhaps suggests that Park Tae-seon himself is, in his own way, a more reliable interpreter in Korea of the Protestant “ethic” than the Western Presbyterian missionaries have been.” Professor Felix Moos (Professor Emeritus, Socio-Cultural Anthropology, (Ph.D., Washington 1963) Research Areas: Applied anthropology and ethnology, culture change and development, comparative value systems, ethnic conflict; East and Southeast Asia, Pacific.)

A supposed message from Spirit World about Elder Tae-seon Park

Young-whi Kim said another Pikareum Messiah, Tae-seon Park, did “Wonderful Works”

Newsweek Article on “Many Moons” about the many Korean messiahs

Both these Korean messiahs practised pikareum:

Chong Deuk-eun Moon met her in Pyongyang in 1946, and had a pikareum ceremony with her. (They may have met in Seoul the previous year.) She and Moon worked together until February 1947 when Chong had a revelation that she should separate from him; she then she moved to near Seoul. Moon took about 17 ideas for his Divine Principle from her theology – which was dictated to a follower in 1947. Her book, The Principle of Life, was based on those notes. It was published in 1958, just after her death.

Kim Baek-moon He developed the Parallels of History, taking ideas from Paek Nam-ju. Moon studied with Kim Baek-moon for six months in 1945-1946.

#pikareum #Park Tae-seon #Other Korean Messiahs #Unification Church #Olive Tree Movement #messiah

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intjsassypants · 7 years

Text

Taking Care of Business

(phone rings, INTJ ignores it, doesn’t recognize the number)

(same number calls again, Afghanistan area code)

INTJ: Stupid telemarketers.

(same number calls again)

INTJ: I have no idea who this is but whoever you are I do not want your product or-

Terrorists: Hello Infidel, we have kidnapped your friend.

INTJ: I have friends?

“Friend”: I know your phone number.

INTJ: Excellent point, that is some Fort Knox shit there.

Terrorists: For one million dollars, you filthy American Infidel, we will return-

INTJ: You want that much? Seriously, look at what you kidnapped.

Terrorists: I think this is the wrong number.

INTJ: With the prices that you’re charging it’s no wonder that you’re not moving inventory.

“Friend”: You are aware of the fact that you are on speaker phone.

INTJ: Also, there are better ways to achieve your organizational goals. What is your organization’s goal or mission statement?

Terrorists: Uhh….

INTJ: Do you have a slogan, logo? You need good branding before you can have a good branding strategy, seriously, who am I talking to here? What makes you stand out?

Terrorists: We didn’t think about that before we became terrorists.

INTJ: I understand, most people don’t think about a lot of things before they become terrorists. But your do have one thing.

Terrorists: A valuable hostage?

INTJ: No, passion. Passion is great to have, but it doesn’t make a solution magically appear, however, it can drive you to find one.

Terrorists: I am writing that down, it is an excellent quote.

“Friend”: I would like to use one of my other lifelines.

Terrorists: No, we like this one.

INTJ: What you have is a really exciting, potentially explosive concept. You could make a big impact-

“Friend”: She knows that those are really dark puns but she’s using them anyway.

INTJ: I am negotiating with the startup, what is the name of your organization?

Terrorists: Al Shasteve.

INTJ: You need to work on the name.

Terrorists: I know.

“Friend”: Stop helping the terrorists!

INTJ: Hey, you didn’t get kidnapped by Al Qaeda or ISIS.

Terrorists: What are you implying extremely helpful infidel?

INTJ: I’m implying that you could be on that level, you could be Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or Hezbollah even, I assume that you want your organization to grow and develop, be a worldwide brand?

Terrorists: Yes, we want to be on CNN, but how?

INTJ: It’s a combination of brand connectivity and awareness, what’s your story, what makes you human, relatable to your audience?

Terrorists: We want to connect with our local audience and kill our international audience.

INTJ: On the surface those are counter intuitive, but they could work together.

“Friend”: How?

INTJ: That is an excellent question, the simple answer is, they both involve engagement, engagement would be much easier with your international audience because you’re trying to kill them.

Terrorists: They will be very scared of us.

INTJ: But your local audience, how will they connect and condone you killing your international audience?

Terrorists: We’re locally owned and operated, we share the same beliefs, have the same problems, want to solve them. By problems I mean infidels like you, and you!

“Friend”: I’m sorry, your English is excellent!

INTJ: Those are all excellent aspects of your organizations that any killer organization should possess.

“Friend”: Really?

INTJ: What you need are local brand ambassadors and evangelists, local businesses and organizations need to connect on a local level in order to succeed. I assume that you have a recruiting department.

Terrorists: We do, but, all the other terrorists join other terrorists, who aren’t us.

INTJ: That’s a completely different subject, but long story short, you need to invest in recruiting, if you have the top talent and top recruits, you will be on top. Have you considered affiliate marketing? In return, being somehow affiliated, or at least endorsed, acknowledges your organization’s worth as a quality organization. Also knowing that your competition thinks you’re competition is a real confidence boost.

Terrorists: Also…brand awareness?

INTJ: Exactly, brand awareness, free marketing! See, you have to invest in it at first, but the dividends and return. You are catching on Al Shasteve.

“Friends”: Whatever they say, don’t explain incentivization to them.

Terrorists: Why not, why not helpful infidel?

INTJ: Well, with your unique startup I’m not sure that would be a good idea, it could be disastrous for you, your competition could turn that against you. You don’t want to scare away your audience, with however, you’d convince, or forcibly earn someone’s loyalty. Also, you can’t hack growth and have genuine growth.

Terrorists: You are very wise and just saved us the trouble of taking many lives. Would you like to negotiate for your friend’s release now?

INTJ: Oh, that, sorry, we were just having such a great, valuable conversation, does she want to come back?

Terrorists: The helpful infidel wants to know if you want to come back.

“Friend”: She’s not my favorite person now and I am totally reporting her to the FBI now but yes.

INTJ: Well if it’s going to be-

Terrorists: Wait, don’t hang up, you’ve been so helpful to us, we’d feel bad if you got absolutely nothing out of this.

INTJ: You’re right, the terrorists are right, tell the nice terrorists thank you.

“Friend”: Thank you nice terrorists.

Terrorists: You are welcome, so, One million dollars.

INTJ: That’s a bit high for me, I gave you a good $999,999 in advice. Also, you need to build up your brand and associate it with such a high price tag. You should aspire to be a real luxury brand. Think about it, a purse is basically a purse, but with a certain name on it, convince your consumer that you are that good, with what you have there and being a startup and all.

“Friend”: Tell my mother I love her.

INTJ: What I’m saying is this could be a great opportunity for you, have you kidnapped anyone else for ransom money before?

Terrorists: Yes, but they died.

INTJ: Ahhh, well I have some idea what could have happened.

Terrorists: You do, we’re terrorists. Very bad terrorists.

INTJ: But do you want that mess again? This is a prime chance to develop your negotiating skills. A paid ransom for a living person is very important for your business model. It also cleans up your reputation, and saves you quiet the cleanup, she is just going to splatter everywhere. That’s not halal.

Terrorists: Caves are hard to clean.

INTJ: And she can tell the west how truly terrifying and threatening you are, right?

“Friend”: Yes, brand evangelism.

INTJ: To an international audience that you could probably not afford to reach with paid advertisement currently. She could be so very useful for once.

“Friend”: That’s right, I’ll be so…what do you mean for once?

INTJ: I think she’s only worth $10,000.

Terrorists: We need more than that.

INTJ: You see that’s the thing, when you start a business, you think money is everything, but there are valuable free, literal and metaphorical resources that matter too. Also, where would that money go? You might think that things like administrative costs and travel expenses are at the forefront now, but no, in fact, make a list, decide the minimal amount you’d need. You’re going to have to be creative, but what small business isn’t at this stage? Also, a small amount of money could get to you faster than a large amount, and cover immediate pressing expenses.

Terrorists: We could kidnap other people.

INTJ: More valuable people.

Terrorists: And be like a luxury brand?

INTJ: Yes, and then you’d have her, on CNN, you know, what you have coming together here is a real strategy for growth.

Terrorists: When you put it that way.

“Friend”: This is your nice way of saying I’m not worth that much to you but I agree with you and it’s working.

INTJ: Whatever lets everybody win, huh?

Terrorists: We do need to get rid of her, she is getting kind of annoying.

INTJ: I know right, good job incentivizing and promoting a sense of urgency.

“Friend”: Yes, I wasn’t just scared because I was kidnapped by terrorists at all.

INTJ: Personally, I think she has great sales skills, $50,000, and her and I launch a promotional campaign for the hottest new terrorist group, Al Shasteve?

Terrorists: $100,000 and the promotional campaign.

INTJ: You’ve had to put up with her for at least a week.

“Friend”: Three, did you not see that I wasn’t active on Facebook at all?

INTJ: Oh, you’re on Facebook? (pretending not to know) I’ve been, busy.

“Friend”: You manage Facebook pages and make Facebook ads, you have to have a Facebook account!

Terrorists: $90,000 you have an excellent point, you’re the one who’d really be paying.

INTJ: I know right, I saw on one of my friend’s pages that she just posts so much, it’s like, get a life, scoff, $75,000.

Terrorists: $80,000 and you have to become Facebook friends with her.

INTJ: $75,001. She asks for prayers and demands likes.

Terrorists: $75,002, we will drop the entire promotional campaign and you have to give her all the infidel likes and infidel prayers she wants.

INTJ: Only if in the event that she has kids she never mentions them on Facebook or posts pictures of the things. I’m concerned for those poor children’s privacy and safety.

Terrorists: An even $75,000 if you throw in some goats.

INTJ: I have an Applebee’s gift card.

Terrorists: What is Applebees?

INTJ: $50,000, the goats, and Fly Emirates T-shirts for all of you, no conditions attached.

Terrorists: You have to help us make the list.

INTJ: That’s a fair deal, send me your T-Shirt sizes.

Terrorists: Can the goats get Fly Emirates T-Shirts too?

INTJ: Uh, that would be hilarious, send me their sizes and I will throw in the Applebee’s gift card for free. Send me pictures of the goats in the T-shirts, inchallah.

“Friends”: How am I getting home?

INTJ: Oh, sorry, I was distracted by the idea of seeing goats in, where is the nearest airport?

Terrorists: Uhh…

INTJ: Could you drop her off outside a military base and just tell her what you want to say about your organization?

Terrorists: We could drop her off on Pakistan, what idiot would think that we didn’t have connections in Pakistan?

INTJ: I know, but in a semi-safe area, there’s a Harry Potter café, I’d love for her to bring me back some pictures and souvenirs.

“Friend”: Oh F’ you.

Terrorists: Is that how you thank your helpful infidel friend?

“Friend”: I’ll take pictures.

INTJ: Good, then find your way to a US Military base, say what they want you to say. Also, pick up and mail the the T-shirts and goats. The terrorists are the ones making you do that, not me.

“Friend”: I am not thanking you for negotiating my release at all.

INTJ: Splitsies on your ransom, and you get to punch me in the face as hard as you can when you land.

Terrorists: How selfless.

INTJ: I’ll mail the Applebees gift card?

“Friend”: You had me at punch you in the face as hard as I can when I land.

Terrorists: She’s coming home!

INTJ: I am such a good friend.

“Friend”: Reporting you to the FBI is not exactly off the table.

#intj problems #intj thoughts #intj #the negotiator #negotiation #strategies & tips #tips #helpingothers #helpingpeople #helping #freindship

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newseveryhourly · 4 years

Link

In March, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how Steve Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby and President of Museum of the Bible, plans to return 11,500 illicit Iraqi and Egyptian artifacts currently owned by the company or museum to their countries of origin. Among this vast collection of undocumented items that the museum was voluntarily returning is the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet an ancient clay tablet that, among other things, records part of history’s oldest creation story. One detail Green left out of the story? The tablet had been seized on September 24, 2019 by the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations. Now, Hobby Lobby wants the $1.6 million it spent on the tablet back.On May 19, 2020 Hobby Lobby filed a lawsuit against world renowned auction house Christie’s and a dealer identified as “John Doe” alleging that both parties deceived Hobby Lobby about the legality of the sale and seeking the return of funds spent on the item, interest since 2014, and attorney fees. They acquired the item in 2014 for $1,694,000. The story, as it can be pieced together from the government’s complaint and Hobby Lobby’s filing, begins in 2001 when a dealer and unnamed cuneiform expert identified the tablet on the floor of the apartment of London based Jordanian antiquities dealer Ghassan Rihani. At the time it was unreadable and was purchased for $50,000. The antiquities dealer brought the tablet to the U.S. where it was worked on by a then unnamed professor at Princeton. In 2007 the antiquities dealer sold the tablet to two other dealers for pretty much what he had purchased it for. When these unnamed dealers asked for provenance, the antiquities dealer used, the suit claims, a “False Provenance Letter [that] indicated that the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was purchased at a 1981 Butterfield & Butterfield auction in San Francisco as part of lot 1503.” Why does the date matter? Because if it hadn’t legally been in the U.S. for decades, then the tablet would have been illicit. Under the UNESCO convention, items of cultural and historical interest discovered after 1970 cannot be removed from their countries of origin except under special agreement. The false provenance letter suggested that the tablet had been in the U.S. for decades.In the same year as the fake letter was acquired, the tablet was published for the first time in a reputable academic journal by Professor A. R. George, a leading expert on Assyriology who teaches at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London). According to his article, George is the same scholar who viewed the tablet in 2005. He says that he published the tablet with the permission of the owner, who wished to remain anonymous. He also notes that the “tablet has since been offered for sale by a Californian bookseller, Michael Sharpe Rare and Antiquarian Books, as item 53 in his catalogue no. 1, issued on 4 September 2007.” The article does not mention the provenance of the item, although by the time the tablet went up for sale in 2007 the faked provenance was already attached. The catalog produced by Sharpe offered it for sale with an asking price of $450,000. At this point “John Doe” bought the item from the immediate owner.The falsified provenance and George’s article certainly lent legitimacy to the project. When the item was subsequently sold via private treaty by Christie’s to Hobby Lobby in 2014, they were allegedly told about the involvement of only a few relevant parties: the faked Butterfield provenance, Michael Sharpe, and John Doe. They were not, Hobby Lobby’s suit alleges, told about the American dealer who had imported the object into the country in the early 2000s, or the exchange of hands in 2007. According to Hobby Lobby’s complaint, Georgiana Aitken, the Head of Antiquities at Christie’s London office, had made inquiries about the provenance letter from the first dealer and was told “over the telephone [that the letter] could not be verified and would not withstand the scrutiny of a public auction.” Christie's, Hobby Lobby claims, organized the private sale to Hobby Lobby when “they should have known that … [the provenance] was false.”After Hobby Lobby purchased the tablet (no later than July 2014), it was “hand-carried by an Auction House representative [the Hobby Lobby suit alleges that this was Margaret Ford] to Hobby Lobby in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma so that Hobby Lobby could avoid incurring a New York sales tax.”It is worth noting that Christie’s have facilitated many such private sales to the Green Family (Hobby Lobby) and that in some cases, for example the sale of papyri, those items turned out to be illicit and also had to be returned. Now, it seems, Hobby Lobby is mad about it.As made clear by the United States Attorney General’s complaint against the item (for legal reasons the governmental complaints are brought against objects and not people), Hobby Lobby didn’t do anything wrong. They were shown faked provenance documents. In contrast to earlier seizures of Hobby Lobby acquisitions, first reported in The Daily Beast by Joel Baden and me in 2015, the Green family were clearly and overtly deceived. Certainly, their willingness to spend large sums of money on Bible-related antiquities and their history of being cavalier about provenance helped make them a target for what Steve Green has called “unscrupulous dealers.” Allegedly, that group may now include one of the world’s most famous and highly regarded auction houses. In a statement issued to The Daily Beast after publication, a Christie’s spokesperson said, “This filing is linked to new information that has come to light regarding an unidentified dealer’s admission to government authorities that he illegally imported this item then falsified documents over a decade ago, in order to perpetrate an illegal sale and exploit the legitimate market for ancient art. Now that we are informed of this activity pre-dating Christie’s involvement, we are reviewing all representations made to us by prior owners and will reserve our rights in this matter. Assertions within the filing that suggest Christie’s had knowledge of the original fraud or illegal importation do not comport with our investigation.”There are two important things to note in this story. First is that for the past year Hobby Lobby have been conducting a media campaign to reframe themselves as “victims” of “unscrupulous buyers.” They made mistakes, they claim, but things are different now. The language they use is, as Jill Hicks-Keeton, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has told me, oddly evocative of Christian narratives of repentance and rebaptism. Certainly, the crime and greater blame lies with the dealers, auction houses, and (allegedly) scholars who knowingly perpetrated these crimes. These dealers exploited the religious interests of a powerful evangelical family. At the same time, as early as the Summer of 2010, the Greens were warned about the dangers of buying illicit antiquities by Patty Gerstenblith, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject. As she told Chasing Aphrodite, they chose not to take her advice.The issue is not just that the Green Christian story of confession and rebirth has been told several times before (in 2012 when they replaced key figures in their organization, 2017 when the museum opened, and again this year) but that it doesn’t note that all of their changes have been brought about because of external pressure by scholars. For example, their widely publicized revelation that they own forged (and thus illicitly purchased) Dead Sea Scrolls this year obscured the fact that scholars like Årstein Justnes have been publicly calling them forgeries since 2016. We discussed this and other examples in our 2017 book Bible Nation, and yet Museum of the Bible would have you believe that their investigation was sui generis and, thus, demonstrates that the organization has changed. They do finally seem to be trying to set things right, but it’s also a carefully managed media campaign that ignores their own culpability. The more troubling thing is that the media is buying it. An April 5 article in The New York Times entirely omitted the recent revelation of the Museum’s possession of 13 fragments of papyri that were stolen from the Sackler Library at the University of Oxford and rightly belong to the Egypt Exploration Society. The article claims to represent the views of the Museum’s “toughest critics.” However, none of those who spearheaded academic criticism of the Museum were cited. One would expect to hear from Roberta Mazza, who sounded an early alarm about the illicit nature of the Green family’s papyri collection and has pursued the story since; Brent Nongbri, whose blog Variant Readings is the premiere source of information on the Greens' illicit papyrus collecting; Mark Chancey, who was the first to criticize attempts to introduce their Bible Curriculum to Oklahoma; Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, co-editors of The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction (Fortress, 2019); and, at risk of sounding arrogant, myself and Joel Baden, who authored the first book on the museum Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (Princeton, 2017). None of these scholars were asked for comment. (I attempted to contact the author of the article but did not hear back). Instead the article cites only those academics and experts who have collaborated with the Museum (even if they have offered some criticism of it in the past). The Museum is doing a masterful job at being allowed to control its own press and rebaptize itself in the waters of public opinion. At no point has Steve Green, who does seem genuinely contrite, offered to repay the sizeable tax deductions Hobby Lobby received for worthless forged Dead Sea Scrolls. At risk of being too Catholic about this, what is repentance without penance?The second important thing is that while individual scholars have been instrumental in bringing the problems with Hobby Lobby’s collecting practices to light, the academy also unwittingly participates in the illicit antiquities market. Prior to the publication of Andrew George’s article, the Gilgamesh tablet traded for roughly $50,000, after his publication its value rose first to $450,000 and then to over $1.6 million. The Michael Sharpe catalog mentions George’s analysis. George’s article notes that he had presented his material at seminars at several distinguished universities. Did any of the attendees of these seminars ask where the tablet had come from? George published a tablet that had forged provenance and while there’s no suggestion that he knew it was forged or that he financially benefited, that publication was instrumental in raising the value of the item in question. For Hobby Lobby, using the skills of academics to raise the value of objects was always part of the plan. Scott Carroll, former director of the Green Collection, told me that that was part of the initial business pitch that he and Johnny Shipman had offered the Greens in 2005 and 2008. Academics would jump at the opportunity to work on these texts (for almost nothing), and the Greens would reap the financial rewards. As archaeologist Neil Brodie has said before, when academics work on unprovenanced artifacts, they raise the value of illicit antiquities. As an academic myself, I can only say that we are part of the problem.Andrew George has not returned inquiries for comment.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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An old favorite article...

Falling Off the Missionary Pedestal by

Leslie Verner

on September 11, 2016

As a twenty-something single missionary home for the summer, I sat quietly judging the other girls in the room who were laughing and talking about which color Kitchen Aid Mixer they had registered for at their bridal showers. I thought about my own home—a 300 square foot cinderblock apartment in China with one sink in the kitchen that looked like it belonged to an auto mechanic and a “shoilet”—a toilet that got wet when you showered because the shower was in the same tiny space.

As I listened to those girls, rather than feeling envy, I felt smug. I was doing the Hard Thing: purposely living a life of discomfort for the sake of the gospel. I had climbed the evangelical Christian ladder right up to the top, perching on the pedestal the church reserves for missionaries. I wasn’t going to waste my life like these other girls who could guiltlessly own a $300 appliance that would collect dust on their kitchen counters.

I had this “living for Jesus” thing all figured out. Hard always equaled holy, I believed. Discomfort was always best. And poverty was external and had nothing to do with the poverty of my own soul.

But have you ever strode confidently into what you wholeheartedly believed was the direction you were meant to go when out of nowhere a giant shepherd’s rod slips around your waist and yanks you backward … hard?

That was how my five-year missionary tale ended—abruptly and with little explanation from that “still small voice.” Before I knew it, I was back in America with the Kitchen Aid Girls, drinking La Croix and chatting about recipes we found on Pinterest.

And I was miserable.

***

That was six years ago.

Since living in China, life has gone from multiple roads, all wide open with glorious possibility, to an ever-narrowing path where I can only see enough of the way ahead to put one foot in front of the other. Getting married “late,” we were on the fast track and had three kids in four years. Sometimes I wake up stunned, wondering what happened to my life.

As a missionary, I had been a superstar, both in China and back home. In China, people asked to take their picture with me and got into motorcycle accidents while gawking at the blond foreigner. In the United States, I was asked to share at churches, gather small groups and give presentations. I felt like someone special. I was doing something meaningful with my life instead of just settling for the White Picket Fence Life so many of my peers had succumbed to.

Now? I drive a minivan. I am lost in the tunnel of parenthood and live in an all-white neighborhood. But I’m finally beginning to understand some things about Kingdom Living.

So far, God’s greatest gift has been to bring me back to live the unglamorous life of the ordinary stay-at-home mom. God has shown me that I was worshipping my call, instead of my Jesus.

I relate to Danielle Mayfield as she shares a similar tumbling from her missionary pedestal in her new book, Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith. In it, she confesses:

“I didn’t start to notice this real and powerful lie, this dark animal clawing up my mind, until it almost undid me. I didn’t see how I placed myself at the top and was eager for others to do the same. I didn’t see how that meant that my neighbors and refugee friends became my stepping stones in attaining the love of God; I didn’t see how it meant that I was using everyone around me in real and devastating ways…it was becoming increasingly clear that there wasn’t even a bit of specialness to be found in me, and that God loved me anyway”(182).

It’s in recognizing my poverty that I can finally receive the love that Jesus wants to lavish on me.

I’m being given the gift of lessening.

In motherhood, you grind your knees in the dirt and do the work of washing tiny, dusty feet just like Jesus did. And then you do it again tomorrow. This does not make me feel like a superhero. Instead, I feel small, insignificant and in need of a good footwashing myself.

From this low position, I may finally look over and see the other misfits and ragamuffins wondering about this Jesus man who gathers in prostituted women, liars, double-crossers and those despised by society.

A wise Chinese friend said something once that made me pause. “Ministry is not complicated,” she said. “You just have to look around you and pray for the people right next to you—your pang bian de ren.* Then wait and see what God does.”

Right now, my right-next-to-me people are my husband, children, neighbors, and the moms I trade war-stories with at preschool pickup. They are my virtual and actual friends and family online. And they are the invisible people who Jesus sees, but I do not yet see. I’m living life in the place where the majority of people live—in the ordinary, messy and everyday.

***

I bought a used $80 Kitchen Aid Mixer at a garage sale last week. I made the first recipe with my “helpers,” my two- and almost-four-year-old. They delighted in tossing the ingredients into the humming bowl until my back was turned and they dumped flour onto the counter, sending it sailing into the air. I cleaned as we waited for the wheat rolls. Then we popped those into our mouths straight from the oven.

Life is small right now. It is not quiet, but the loud and radical station is tuned down to the simple and same, the here and now.

***

Downward mobility begins at the heart level as I confess my own poverty. I have a slow leak that needs to be plugged by Holy Spirit fingers. And it’s only when I admit my own need that I can begin to meet others in theirs.

Like Mayfield, I am learning to declare this:

“God took away my asterisk, and now I don’t know how to classify myself anymore. I’m just a sheep of his hand, and it is more lowly and lovely than I could have ever imagined.” (193)

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simplemlmsponsoring · 5 years

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New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/copywriting/the-best-checklists-tips-and-templates-for-content-marketing-in-2019/

The Best Checklists, Tips, and Templates for Content Marketing in 2019

Have you developed your foolproof plan for getting Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Home devices to speak your brand’s praises when customers come calling for advice?

Are you fighting FOMO with a killer virtual reality app that turns your shopping experience into a garden of unearthly delights for consumers to explore?

Have you budgeted for a new blockchain-based loyalty program or a celebrity-hosted influencer network promising fame and fortune to your audience in exchange for their ongoing engagement?

Don’t panic about keeping up with progressive content trends like these. Remember while it’s tempting to pour all your content team’s energies and resources into the next big thing to hit the digital marketplace, sustainable, long-term success with content marketing first requires a mastery of the fundamentals.

This updated toolkit – featuring some of CMI’s best tips, checklists, and templates – can help you build that solid foundation. Use it to check off some of the critical content marketing tasks on your to-do list more efficiently and use the newly freed brainpower to innovate wisely and purposefully.

Content marketing strategy tips and tools

Everything you do as a content marketer should flow from a deliberately constructed content marketing strategy. This includes determining how to model your content operations as well as outlining why you are creating content (your purpose), who you want it to reach (your audience), and the expected impact of your content efforts on the business (your goals).

Everything you do as a content marketer should flow from a constructed #contentmarketing strategy. @joderama Click To Tweet Choose a content business model

Think of your strategy as a road map of the content experience you intend to cultivate and how it will connect your business with your audience – and move both of you closer to achieving your goals.

Of course, anyone who has used Google Maps knows that every destination has multiple routes. And, according to CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose, the same goes for finding the best content marketing strategy for your organization. In fact, he recently identified four viable approaches that organizations can follow based on their goals, business structure, team resources, and level of content experience:

Player: Content marketing is seen as a contributor to other business communication strategies such as demand generation or product marketing.

Performer: Content functions as a center of excellence, aiming to build an addressable audience through owned media platforms.

Processor: Content is treated as a centralized service offered throughout the organization.

Platform: Content is run as a self-sufficient yet fully integrated media business.

Craft a one-page content strategy guide

You can’t achieve content marketing success unless you understand what success means to your organization. Some of the most common goals marketers pursue through their content programs include:

Brand awareness Audience engagement Lead generation Loyalty and evangelism

Sales and profitability

Of course, content marketing can help your business achieve all these aims and more; but it works best when you focus on one challenge at a time. If your content program could only help your company achieve a single goal, what would you want it to be?

To figure out which goals your organization should prioritize, try the steps in George Stenitzer’s one-page strategy guide.

Build performance-driven audience personas

When you think of your content recipients in broad terms like “audience” or “targets,” it’s easy to lose sight of their needs as unique, complex people with different needs, interests, preferences, and behaviors.

That’s where audience personas come into play. These composite sketches help characterize key segments of your audience in terms of their relevant challenges and concerns and the role they likely play in their company’s purchasing process.

Robert suggests this five-step approach to building more valuable audience personas – ones that put the customer’s needs at the center of your stories:

Define your target: Detail the total addressable audience.

Discover the “so I can”: Uncover the functional and emotional jobs the audience needs to get done.

Decide on your niche: Find your sweet spot of relevance – where your field of knowledge and your skill sets intersect with a passion point of your audience.

Differentiate your content approach: Prioritize the jobs to be done by those that you can and should solve with your unique and distinct point of view.

Design your map of success: Identify as many of the kinds of value you can provide across each step of your chosen jobs to be done.

Take the information you gathered through these steps and assemble your audience persona profile. Here’s Robert’s example:

Write a content marketing mission statement

A unique content marketing mission statement helps you document your company’s reason for creating content and the priorities and perspectives it will uphold in pursuit of that mission.

Your mission statement is a critical component for guiding decision-making throughout the life of your program. As Ann Gynn points out, there’s an art to crafting a useful one – and not everyone gets it right. To avoid providing too much (or too little) detail in your statement, follow these tips:

Be succinct but don’t oversimplify: Describe your editorial mission clearly to prevent your content team and your readers from making assumptions about the purpose of your brand’s content.

Don’t be generic: Distinguish your brand in the statement, whether it’s by geography, industry, niche, etc.

Include your content’s purpose: Explain, in as few words as possible, how it should motivate the readers or viewers, and what you want them to know, think, or do as a result of consuming it.

Pick a niche: Your content can’t be everything to everybody. Pick an area of specialization and ensure that your content efforts all adhere to it.

There’s an art to crafting a useful #contentmarketing mission statement. Not everyone gets it right. @anngynn Click To Tweet

For more comprehensive guidance on strategic considerations, follow the Road Map to Success: Content Marketing Strategy Essentials Content planning tips and tools

Repeat after me: “Content marketing works best when you plan for its success.” You need an operational plan that outlines all the insights, actions, people, and procedures necessary to take your content marketing program from a lofty strategic ideal to a fully functional and productive content marketing engine.

#Contentmarketing works best when you plan for its success, says @joderama. Click To Tweet Simplify your content inventory and audit processes

Unless your business is just launching, you probably have quite a few content pieces floating around the digital landscape. Some might be worth repurposing; others might no longer fit your goals and should be removed, revised, or replaced. Your first step for activating your strategy should be to take stock of existing content and determine whether it is still shining the best light on your brand.

Two core processes will help with this:

Content inventory – a list of all the content items you’ve created, including the title, type and format, and where each asset has been published

Content audit – an analysis of the data from your inventory that helps you evaluate the relative value of each asset

Content strategist Laura Creekmore shares a streamlined inventory and auditing process, including this template to help you focus in on the most useful data and observations.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: What Librarians Can Teach Marketers About Weeding Out ROT Distinguish your brand content

To ensure that your content reflects your brand, its purpose, and its values, enable your team to create each piece of content under a unified standard of quality – which includes maintaining a unique brand voice and consistent editorial style.

Brand voice: Erika Heald has outlined a five-step process to establish and maintain a voice that will set your content apart from its competitors while remaining true to your brand’s core ideals.

Gather a sample of your best content pieces. Include examples of all the types. Cast a critical eye on each piece, whittling the list to a small group of assets that represent what’s unique about your brand and embody the qualities that you outlined in your editorial mission.

Describe your ideal brand voice in three words. Broadly categorize all the assets on your list into distinct themes. Select the three most dominant themes and describe their core qualities based on the characteristics your audience would most likely associate with them.

Create a brand voice chart. Create a form (like the example below) to illustrate how each brand characteristic should be applied in your content.

Walk your content creators through the chart to ensure that your team members all understand how to put your brand voice in action.

Revisit and revise your chart as your business evolves.

Style guidelines: Style dictates the technical mechanics of your brand’s unique voice to help ensure that readers find your content to be consistent, trustworthy, recognizable, and relatable. Sasha Laferte shares a few tips for creating a brand style guide for your team:

Baseline guide: Start with an existing style guide (like AP Style) as a baseline, then customize to align with your brand’s unique communication style.

Formatting: Include details on how to format things like bullets, lists, hyphens, and quotes, and outline when those standards might be different – such as a content format (e.g., video, infographics) or content platforms (e.g., social media).

Colors: Detail your brand’s palette of colors, including function. Make sure to include the hex, CMYK, and RGB codes for each color, as well as Pantone numbers.

Logos: Include all versions of your logo and examples of proper usage in your most likely scenarios.

Fonts: Include all brand fonts for headings, paragraphs, etc., and instructions on their usage.

Templates: Include links to any company-branded templates (such as PowerPoint slideshows) and boilerplate information.

Staff up with the right content marketing skills

To consistently produce high-quality content on multiple channels and platforms, you need to make sure everyone on your team understands your organization’s expectations and has the required skills and know-how to fulfill them.

Use this team framework developed by Michele Linn to identify the skills, mindset, and cultural considerations to account for when running an efficient and effective content marketing program.

Read more: contentmarketinginstitute.com

#audience #best #brand #content #ndash #should #strategy #voice #your #COPYWRITING

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lucyariablog · 5 years

Text

The Best Checklists, Tips, and Templates for Content Marketing in 2019

Have you developed your foolproof plan for getting Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Home devices to speak your brand’s praises when customers come calling for advice?

Are you fighting FOMO with a killer virtual reality app that turns your shopping experience into a garden of unearthly delights for consumers to explore?

Have you budgeted for a new blockchain-based loyalty program or a celebrity-hosted influencer network promising fame and fortune to your audience in exchange for their ongoing engagement?

Content marketing strategy tips and tools

Everything you do as a content marketer should flow from a constructed #contentmarketing strategy. @joderama Click To Tweet

Choose a content business model

Player: Content marketing is seen as a contributor to other business communication strategies such as demand generation or product marketing.

Performer: Content functions as a center of excellence, aiming to build an addressable audience through owned media platforms.

Processor: Content is treated as a centralized service offered throughout the organization.

Platform: Content is run as a self-sufficient yet fully integrated media business.

Craft a one-page content strategy guide

You can’t achieve content marketing success unless you understand what success means to your organization. Some of the most common goals marketers pursue through their content programs include:

Brand awareness

Audience engagement

Lead generation

Loyalty and evangelism

Sales and profitability

To figure out which goals your organization should prioritize, try the steps in George Stenitzer’s one-page strategy guide.

Build performance-driven audience personas

Robert suggests this five-step approach to building more valuable audience personas – ones that put the customer’s needs at the center of your stories:

Define your target: Detail the total addressable audience.

Discover the “so I can”: Uncover the functional and emotional jobs the audience needs to get done.

Decide on your niche: Find your sweet spot of relevance – where your field of knowledge and your skill sets intersect with a passion point of your audience.

Differentiate your content approach: Prioritize the jobs to be done by those that you can and should solve with your unique and distinct point of view.

Design your map of success: Identify as many of the kinds of value you can provide across each step of your chosen jobs to be done.

Take the information you gathered through these steps and assemble your audience persona profile. Here’s Robert’s example:

Write a content marketing mission statement

A unique content marketing mission statement helps you document your company’s reason for creating content and the priorities and perspectives it will uphold in pursuit of that mission.

Be succinct but don’t oversimplify: Describe your editorial mission clearly to prevent your content team and your readers from making assumptions about the purpose of your brand’s content.

Don’t be generic: Distinguish your brand in the statement, whether it’s by geography, industry, niche, etc.

Include your content’s purpose: Explain, in as few words as possible, how it should motivate the readers or viewers, and what you want them to know, think, or do as a result of consuming it.

Pick a niche: Your content can’t be everything to everybody. Pick an area of specialization and ensure that your content efforts all adhere to it.

There’s an art to crafting a useful #contentmarketing mission statement. Not everyone gets it right. @anngynn Click To Tweet

For more comprehensive guidance on strategic considerations, follow the Road Map to Success: Content Marketing Strategy Essentials

Content planning tips and tools

#Contentmarketing works best when you plan for its success, says @joderama. Click To Tweet

Simplify your content inventory and audit processes

Two core processes will help with this:

Content inventory – a list of all the content items you’ve created, including the title, type and format, and where each asset has been published

Content audit – an analysis of the data from your inventory that helps you evaluate the relative value of each asset

Content strategist Laura Creekmore shares a streamlined inventory and auditing process, including this template to help you focus in on the most useful data and observations.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: What Librarians Can Teach Marketers About Weeding Out ROT

Distinguish your brand content

Brand voice: Erika Heald has outlined a five-step process to establish and maintain a voice that will set your content apart from its competitors while remaining true to your brand’s core ideals.

Create a brand voice chart. Create a form (like the example below) to illustrate how each brand characteristic should be applied in your content.

Walk your content creators through the chart to ensure that your team members all understand how to put your brand voice in action.

Revisit and revise your chart as your business evolves.

Baseline guide: Start with an existing style guide (like AP Style) as a baseline, then customize to align with your brand’s unique communication style.

Colors: Detail your brand’s palette of colors, including function. Make sure to include the hex, CMYK, and RGB codes for each color, as well as Pantone numbers.

Logos: Include all versions of your logo and examples of proper usage in your most likely scenarios.

Fonts: Include all brand fonts for headings, paragraphs, etc., and instructions on their usage.

Templates: Include links to any company-branded templates (such as PowerPoint slideshows) and boilerplate information.

Staff up with the right content marketing skills

Use this team framework developed by Michele Linn to identify the skills, mindset, and cultural considerations to account for when running an efficient and effective content marketing program.

Find specialized content creation talent

No matter how creative and talented your team members and agency partners are, there are times when it may make sense to outsource writing – especially when you have a high volume to be done or specialized technical or subject matter expertise is needed but falls outside your team’s comfort zone.

Finding a writer who is the right fit for your team and your tasks can take some time – and a lot of careful vetting. Chris Gillespie offers a few resources to help ease the struggle:

Writer job boards: Forums like Problogger, Writer’s Den, the Freelancer’s Union, LinkedIn Groups, or even Craigslist can be instrumental for connecting with potential writers.

Freelancing platforms: Sites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com add automation to the mix, providing a centralized place for evaluating writers’ profiles, client reviews, and past work.

Content marketing platforms: Content platforms like Contently, Skyword, and NewsCred are pricier than other alternatives but potentially worth the cost because they curate their pool of writers and can provide an editor for quality assurance.

Referrals and word of mouth: As a rule, the best writers rarely have to look for work – they’re inundated with clients starving for their unicorn-rare mixture of writing proficiency and industry expertise. The easiest way to find them is to ask around.

For more comprehensive guidance on processes and teams, follow the Road Map to Success: Turn Your Strategy Into a Stellar Editorial Plan

Content creation tips and tools

Once you’ve set your strategy and outlined your plans for executing it, it’s time to create high-quality, customer-driven stories. Though the creative process is unique to every business, plenty of tools can help with generating story ideas, organizing them into relevant content pieces, and getting them into the hands of your target audience.

Align team expectations with a creative content brief

A great creative brief provides a clear view of the project, the business challenge it is meant to address, and the value it aims to provide to your target audience. If everybody on the team understands their expectations from the get-go, it makes it easier for them to stay focused, channel their creativity, and collaborate effectively.

If everyone on the team understands expectations from the get-go, it makes it easier to collaborate. @joderama Click To Tweet

Use Duncan Milne’s creative brief template to guide your creative brief execution. Then, make sure to distribute it to everybody on your content team so they all work toward the same vision of success.

Click to enlarge

Generate content ideas designed for success

Brainstorming is a great tool for getting the creative juices flowing and generating a high volume of new content ideas. There are a wide range of ways to approach this task, including the loosely organized free-association process Jay Acunzo recommends, and the five-step improv exercise Cisco Systems’ Tim Washer developed through his experience as a comedy writer.

But, if you are looking for a more strategically guided method – one that prioritizes high-growth content projects over those that only provide incremental returns – consider experimenting with the 10x idea generation framework CoSchedule’s Garrett Moon has used to reach his marketing goals 10 times faster.

Vet your content ideas for viability

Unless you live in a world where time and budget are unlimited, you need to prioritize the creative ideas that result from your brainstorms and determine which are most worth your team’s time and energies in producing.

Michelle Park Lazette suggests asking three key questions before investing in any new content idea – a process she calls her chicken test:

Create content that delivers long-term results

Thanks to search engines, any content you publish online will be findable forever – whether it stands the test of time or not. As you build your ideas into assets, you may want to focus on more evergreen types that will continue to benefit your brand long after it’s initially published.

Mike Murray outlines the evergreen content formats he thinks offer the longest lifespans by design, as well as those that can be easily updated with fresh information as necessary.

Looking to explore additional content types? Check out our most recent content marketing playbook: How to Win at Content Marketing

Support sales and drive increased conversions

While all-purpose content is important to have, you can build your content efforts around specific or specialized business needs – like supporting your sales team’s efforts to address pressing customer challenges or bridging prospects’ critical knowledge gaps.

Follow the technique that Pam Didner has outlined for creating sales-driven (and sales-driving) content – which starts with mapping the customer journey to the sales journey.

Build lasting audience relationships

If your writers are focused on communicating key talking points instead of readable and relatable stories, you might grab the audience’s attention, but you won’t hold it for long – or earn their ongoing interest in what your brand has to say.

As readable.io’s Steve Linney explains, readable content speaks to consumers on their level, using short sentences and simple words, and avoiding unnecessary buzz terms or industry jargon that can make stories feel too complex and confusing to engage with. To strike a good tonal balance between formal and conversational speech without sacrificing your brand’s personality, use Steve’s helpful style of writing chart as a reference tool:

For more comprehensive guidance on content creation, follow the Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

Content distribution tips and tools

Simply creating and publishing content online probably won’t be enough to get it discovered by the right consumers, let alone do so at scale. As a content marketer, you need to make thoughtful decisions about how and where to distribute your content, as well as how you boost your efforts’ chances of building authority and trust.

Promote your blog posts for maximum success

As DivvyHQ’s co-creator Brody Dorland reminds us, without an effective and repeatable process for promoting your blog posts and maximizing their visibility, all the hard work creating them can go to waste. Fortunately, he shares an updated version of his future-proof checklist for promoting your blog that will help you cover all your bases.

Click to enlarge

Streamline your social media marketing

Figuring out the best places to share your content on social media can be puzzling as the rules, opportunities, audiences, and value propositions vary greatly from one channel to another – and can shift gears abruptly without a moment’s notice. But one thing that can make your decisions more straightforward is establishing a channel plan – an advanced directive for how your brand can and should distribute its content marketing efforts on rented channels like social media and what you expect to achieve.

For my post on social media marketing plans, I created a sample template (below) that can help you organize and apply the essential details. Feel free to download a copy and customize it to suit your needs – just open the Google document, go to “File > Download As >” and select the file format you prefer to work with. (Please note: While I used CMI as a reference for this example, the data included does not represent our channel plan.)

Master the basics of link-building

Another way to amplify your new content is by linking to it from your other high-performing content as well as popular and relevant third-party sites. Authoritative backlinks might be harder to earn than organic social shares; but as BuzzSumo’s Susan Moeller points out, they stay around longer than a tweet or a Facebook post, are easier to track than “dark-sharing” mechanisms like email and apps, and serve as a powerful Google ranking factor.

Amplify content by linking to it from high-performing #content as well as relevant third-party sites. @joderama Click To Tweet

If you are looking to take advantage of this technique, Susan recommends five content formats that won’t steer you wrong:

Authoritative content that answers popular questions, such as “what is?”

Strong opinion posts and political posts

Content that provides original research and insights

Content that leverages a trending topic but also provides practical insights

Authoritative news content on new products or developments

Get started with influencer marketing

Partnering with high-profile industry experts and public personalities for content distribution can help strengthen your company’s credibility and trustworthiness – a must for success. And with brands estimated to see an average ROI of $6.85 for every dollar invested in influencer marketing (Burst Media study), it may be one of the smartest bets around for successful content distribution.

Partnering w/ high-profile experts & celebs for #content distribution can strengthen credibility. @joderama Click To Tweet

Building a robust influencer marketing program can be a time-consuming and intimidating undertaking, especially for businesses new to the game. Following our eight-step process will prepare you to tackle all the tasks, but you can start with a few lower-touch entry points such as the content roundup.

As Chad Pollitt describes, the content roundup involves collecting the thoughts of several industry influencers on a given topic and compiling them into a blog post (or some other form of content). Chad also shares the checklist below, which outlines everything involved in executing the technique successfully.

For more comprehensive guidance on promotion and distribution, follow the Road Map to Success: Content Distribution Essentials That Win Eyeballs

Content measurement tips and tools

Following the above advice will give your content a strong strategic and creative foundation, but that doesn’t mean your job is done. You need to continually evaluate, strengthen, and grow your content kingdom by identifying what’s working, adjusting what isn’t, and amplifying your content’s power through strategic optimization.

Measure content performance with the right metrics

It’s not enough to create and distribute the content you think your audience will want to read. You must demonstrate that your content is making a measurable impact on the bottom line by driving readers to take action with your brand.

Tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) can help provide insight into whether your efforts are moving the needle in the right direction. KPIs can also offer clues as to what steps should be taken to get poor-performing content on track. Use this list shared by Mike Murray to identify the most informative metrics for your specific business goals:

Of course, not all of the above metrics will be meaningful when determining the ultimate measure of success for content marketing initiatives: ROI.

As Global Copywriting’s Sarah Mitchell points out, a single piece of content rarely generates a direct conversion, making data points like unique visits, page views, sentiment scores, or even time on page somewhat irrelevant to the bottom line. However, if you want to demonstrate how your overarching content strategy is contributing to your business goals in other ways, she suggests starting with these content metrics as indicators:

Open rates from email show whether your titles or subject lines resonate with your audience.

Click-through rates (CTR) from your website content and email campaigns can identify consumers’ willingness to answer calls to action and help you understand how customers move through your content.

Time spent. If time-spent figures are changing, it’s worth examining why.

Invitations to contribute at in-person events, in writing, or by making appearances on videos or podcasts are an indication of thought leadership.

Results from research and surveys about your company provide a body of information to track over time.

For more comprehensive guidance on measurement, follow the Road Map to Success: Monitoring and Measuring Your Content’s Performance

Go forth and conquer

While these tips, tools, and templates will help you tackle many of the challenges involved in successful content marketing, they’re no substitute for a thorough understanding of the principles and techniques they represent. If you have questions or would like additional insights on any of these topics, let us know by adding a comment.

Want to immerse yourself in content marketing and gather with thousands of your fellow content marketers? Register by the end of 2018 for the lowest rates for Content Marketing World 2019!

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The Best Checklists, Tips, and Templates for Content Marketing in 2019 appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/12/checklists-tips-templates-2019/

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thegloober · 6 years

Text

Chinese companies seek to buy American campuses

A Chinese company that until January went by the name Jiangsu Zhongtai Bridge Steel Structure Company plans to purchase a nonprofit American music college. What could go wrong?

Plenty, argue faculty members, donors and alumni who oppose Rider University’s plans to sell the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J., to the company now known as Beijing Kaiwen Education Technology Company.

The most recent of several suits seeking to block the sale was filed last month on behalf of members of the Westminster Foundation, a group of alumni, donors and faculty. It argues that Rider is violating the terms of the original bequest of land for the college and the intent of the donors who have sustained the institution by selling it to Kaiwen for $40 million.

They argue that Rider has chosen an inappropriate buyer in Kaiwen, a for-profit corporation that owns two K-12 schools in China but has no experience in higher education and whose controlling shareholder, according to documents filed with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, is a Chinese state-owned entity. A semiannual report filed by Kaiwen in August says that the company’s controlling shareholder is Badachu Holding Group, which is described on its website as a “large-scale state-owned holding corporate group.” The filing with the stock exchange further says that Kaiwen’s “actual controlling party” is the Haidian People’s Government State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

Bruce Afran, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit, described the planned sale as unprecedented.

“This American college will be taken over by a corporation that is owned and controlled by the government of China, which does not recognize any degree of academic freedom and which has a state policy subordinating colleges to governmental and Communist Party principles. It is diametrically contrary to the understanding of an American institution of higher education,” Afran said.

Westminster is primarily focused on music. Perhaps to counteract claims that political questions might be remote from the musical mission, the legal complaint argues that “much of the academic music world is concerned with deeply political issues, particularly as to human rights and religious concerns, many touching upon Chinese-American relations.” It discusses research done by a Westminster scholar on Falun Gong — a spiritual movement that is banned by the government of China — as an example of the kind of academic activity that could be chilled if the purchase goes through. It also says that Westminster’s choral director, Joe Miller, was informed that he had to seek Chinese government approval of the choir’s repertoire in advance of an upcoming tour in China in what the suit describes as “an unprecedented academic and cultural intrusion and interference, and this is before Westminster changes hands.” (An email to Miller seeking comment was returned instead by the dean of Westminster, Marshall Onofrio, who said it is typical of the choir to provide program copy and notes in advance of an off-campus performance, as it had in this case, and that it would perform all the work listed in its materials. He did not respond to a follow-up question asking directly if Westminster had been required to obtain the approval of a Chinese government entity or Kaiwen as a condition of going on its upcoming China tour.)

“China has thus far tried to influence American schools by funding some programs through Confucius Institutes,” Afran said, referring to the controversial Chinese government-funded centers for Chinese language and cultural education hosted by many U.S. campuses. “Now, through Westminster, they’re trying to actually gain full control of an American college.”

Afran also described the sale as having national security implications. “Princeton itself is a very sensitive center for defense and intelligence research,” he said. “There are several institutions that are engaged in very sensitive work. It’s no accident that the Chinese government is seeking a base here, and I think the U.S. government is alerted to that.”

Larry Livingston, the interim president of the Westminster Choir College Acquisition Corporation, a registered New Jersey nonprofit established by Kaiwen to operate the choir college after the purchase is completed, dismissed such claims.

“It’s laughable to think academic freedom will be threatened,” Livingston said in a written statement provided through a public relations representative. “That claim, along with the assertion that this is a ‘national security threat,’ are just scare tactics by opponents of the plan to save Westminster. The nonprofit corporation that will run Westminster will do so in accordance with all applicable U.S. laws and regulations; that includes maintaining academic freedom.”

The Proposed Westminster Sale

The formerly independent Westminster Choir College merged with Rider University in 1992. In 2017, Rider announced plans to sell the college, saying that the board had determined it was not in Rider’s strategic interest to hold on to the Westminster Choir College campus in Princeton or to consolidate it onto its main campus about a 15-minute drive away in Lawrenceville.

Rider announced in June that it had completed a purchase sale agreement for the campus, subject to what the university described as “a series of required internal, governmental and regulatory approvals which Rider and the buyer will coordinate over the next year.” Although Rider framed the sale as being about finding a partner that will better preserve Westminster’s legacy and position it for future growth, the announcement of the sale agreement says that Kaiwen had only committed to continue “operating Westminster at the current campus for no less than 10 years” and to “substantially maintain the current academic offerings for no less than five years.”

In the proposed sale of Westminster, there are a variety of issues at play. Some deal with donor intent and questions of encumbrances on the land on which the choir college sits.

Princeton Theological Seminary has sued to block the sale, arguing that the terms of the 1935 gift of 28 acres of land make clear that the land would revert to the seminary’s control if it ceased to be used “for the purpose of training ministers of music of evangelical churches.”

The seminary’s suit argues that the provisions of the 1992 merger agreement with Rider “explicitly require Rider to continue to operate Westminster for the stated purposes” and that nothing in the agreement allows Rider to unilaterally sell the campus. (Rider said in a statement at the time the lawsuit was filed by the seminary in February that it had been focused on finding a buyer to continue operating Westminster but that it had always been its intention after achieving that goal “to return to discussions with the seminary to address its demand for a share of the net proceeds, to the extent there are any.” The university added that “Rider has supported and sustained Westminster Choir College since 1991, when the seminary declined to do so.”)

Also at issue are questions related to nonprofit law and plans to transfer Westminster’s approximately $20 million endowment as part of the sale. The lawsuit alleges that “the transaction conveys Westminster’s endowment to the use and account of a commercial entity” and that “to the extent that Kaiwen says it will use the endowment for Westminster’s purposes such claims are contrary to its stated intent to place the endowment on the books and account of Kaiwen and demonstrates that after the five year period Kaiwen will be enabled to use such endowment for its own purposes.”

According to Rider’s announcement, the purchase agreement is with three separate entities: the nonprofit entity charged with operating the campus after the sale, the Westminster Choir College Acquisition Corporation, and two Kaiwen subsidiaries. But opponents of the planned sale argue that the nonprofit is not independent of the for-profit company: the lawsuit filed last month by alumni and donors argues that Kaiwen has created a “sham non-profit” — “a captive entity fully controlled by Kaiwen.”

The lawsuit alleges that of the three trustees on the nonprofit board, all three are appointed by Kaiwen and two are current Kaiwen executives. Inside Higher Ed determined that two of the three names of trustees listed on the nonprofit’s registration filing with the state of New Jersey match the names of Kaiwen executives listed by the business news publication Reuters. The address listed for those two individuals also matches Kaiwen’s published business address.

Asked about the issue of the nonprofit’s independence, Livingston, the Westminster Choir College Acquisition Corporation interim president, said in a written reply that each of the trustees “is selected, based upon his/her passion, commitment, dedication, professional achievement, understanding of complex business and availability, and is well qualified to serve. The operation of WCCAC and the formation and functioning of its board are subject to all applicable U.S. rules and regulations.”

As for Kaiwen, Livingston said in his written statement that it is a publicly traded company with “transparent corporate governance and adequately disclosed business and financial information. The Haidian District government in Beijing has about a 16 percent indirect ownership interest in Kaiwen Education.”

“I have spent my life as a musician, much of it running major music schools, both independent and within universities,” Livingston said. “I am excited about the opportunities this new relationship will create. There is no back story here. Kaiwen Education deeply respects Westminster Choir College and is willing to help the school become even better, and more financially secure. It is in Kaiwen Education’s interest for Westminster to remain the high-quality institution that it has been throughout its vaunted history, and for it to succeed.”

Livingston also disputed that there is any threat to Westminster’s approximately $20 million endowment, which he said “will stay with the college after the transfer from Rider University. That fund must and will follow and respect the donors’ intent. The transfer of the endowment fund is subject to regulatory review and approval, and all requirements under that process will be met,” he said.

“Given the legal requirements, any suggestion that the Westminster endowment fund could or would be spent by any for-profit organization is unfounded.”

Kristine Brown, a Rider spokeswoman, said that while the university does not comment on specific points related to lawsuits, “we believe this transaction is in the best interest of preserving and enhancing Westminster Choir College. Kaiwen’s commitment is real, and we are working hard to ensure this transition to WCCAC moves forward.”

Not everyone thinks it should. The Rider chapter of the American Association of University Professors has an arbitration hearing scheduled in December to dispute the college’s plans to lay off Westminster faculty in order to proceed with the transaction. In its June announcement of the purchase and sale agreement, Rider said “key terms in the PSA intended to help achieve the goal of preserving Westminster include offering employment and comparable benefits to existing Westminster full-time faculty and priority adjuncts, as well as full and part-time Westminster staff.�� But Jeffrey Halpern, the AAUP’s contract administrator, said that the relevant portion of the purchase and sale agreement states that Westminster faculty and staff will receive employment offers for a period of just two years, effectively annulling tenure.

“We don’t see any legitimacy of the sale,” said Halpern, an associate professor in the sociology and criminology department.

“Fundamentally, nobody owns a not-for-profit. We’re not talking about selling a couple of acres of unutilized land, which schools do all the time. We’re talking about selling the fundamental core of what make a university a university — that is, its academic programs.”

Chinese Interest in U.S. Campuses

The Westminster deal is unusual in that it involves the acquisition of a functioning nonprofit college, but more broadly there appears to be substantial interest on the part of Chinese companies in purchasing U.S. campuses or other educational properties. Chinese students make up the largest group of international students in the U.S., both at the university and K-12 levels.

Douglas Halliday, the president and founder of Halliday Acquisition Group, a company that consults on mergers and acquisitions involving K-12 schools and postsecondary colleges in the U.S. and Canada, said the majority of interest he sees from buyers in mainland China or Hong Kong is in either acquiring K-12 boarding schools or career-focused colleges that focus on higher-trained, technician-type programs such as in health care or information technology.

Halliday that that some Chinese education companies are looking for a flagship institution in the U.S. that will provide another pathway for their students, “both as a revenue channel as well as for a lack of a better word, a halo factor, a prestige factor: ‘we have a U.S. school as well. You have the option of going over there to graduate.’”

“I think that there’s some caution now just because of the current political situation between the U.S. and China. Tariffs, restrictions on visas, that creates some caution — but there’s still considerable interest,” he said.

Unlike in the Westminster case, many of the transactions involving Chinese or Hong Kong-based buyers are for former campuses of U.S. institutions that had to shut their doors due to financial or accreditation problems. Companies with ties to China or Hong Kong have purchased a number of different shuttered campuses in recent years. One of these companies is the Xinhua Education Consulting Services Corporation, which last year purchased the former Daniel Webster College campus in New Hampshire. A similarly named Xinhua Education Investment Corporation purchased the former campus of Saint Paul’s College, a historically black college in Virginia.

The same lawyer with the same business address is listed on both the Virginia business license for the latter company and on court documents relating to the Daniel Webster sale. That lawyer did not respond to multiple emails and calls requesting comment. It is not clear what the plans are for the former Daniel Webster campus, which was part of the now defunct for-profit chain ITT Technical Institute.

New Hampshire’s Higher Education Commission tabled a request from the new owner in February to register the names Daniel Webster College and Daniel Webster University as trade names with the state. Minutes from a subsequent meeting in May report that the owner of the campus “has yet to decide on a name and the U.S. representatives are waiting for clear direction regarding the naming and usage of the property.” A spokesman for the Department of Education said that the department has not received any applications to operate a higher education institution at the site. The New Hampshire Union Leader reported in September that the site was unused and overgrown. The paper quoted a city official who described the purchaser of the campus as a high-net-worth individual from China who was looking to open a higher education institution in the U.S., and who had purchased other sites as well.

As for the campus of the former Saint Paul’s College, which according to local media reports was sold to Xinhua Education Investment Corporation for $2.5 million late last year, it seems the buyers may be looking to resell the campus after initially taking steps to reopen it as a college. Millard D. Stith Jr., the final president of Saint Paul’s, said he had been serving as a consultant to the buyers.

“The campus was sold to a Chinese group, and they reached out to me and asked me would I work with them to try to get the college reopened,” Stith said. “We signed the contract, and then I went to Atlanta for two days on a training session for accreditation, and then after that I went to the State Council of Higher Ed and went through their daylong session on how you get licensure from the state to operate an educational institution. The Chinese have now decided that they no longer want Saint Paul’s, so they are in the market now for selling it again.”

Stith said he doesn’t know why the buyer was potentially selling. “They have not said anything to me officially and I have not asked them. My assumption is that they bit off a lot more than they could chew on,” he said.

Another campus in Virginia that was sold to a buyer with Chinese ties is that of the former Virginia Intermont College. A spokeswoman for the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia said that the owner of the college had filed an “intent to operate” request with the state in June under the proposed name of Virginia Business College. SCHEV approved their submission in July but has not yet received an application for certification.

The “intent to operate” request, obtained via an open-records request, gives some additional insight into the buyer of the Virginia Intermont campus, identified as Zhitang Zhang, and his company the U.S. Magis International Education Center. “Mr. Zhang is an educator and entrepreneur,” the application states. “He operates Shenqui Ethnic Medical College in Guizhou Province in China and desires to expand his efforts in higher education in the United States to serve both American and foreign students.” The application says the institution plans to apply for certification from the federal government to enroll international students in its first semester, and that a partnership with Shenqui Ethnic Medical College in China will be a part of the international recruitment strategy.

Inside Higher Ed did not receive responses to letters sent to U.S. Magis International Education Center’s business addresses in New York and Virginia requesting comment for this article. The individual who is identified in the “intent to operate” request as the proposed institution’s president, Randall Blevins, declined to speak about plans for the campus, saying he cannot comment until the process of receiving approval from state authorities is complete.

Other colleges that have been purchased by Chinese-based buyers include the former Dowling College, in New York, which according to court documents was bought by the Hong Kong-based NCF Capital. Requests to speak to representatives of a NCF Capital subsidiary made through lawyers for the company were not successful, but Newsday reported in late September that the owners were still researching how best to use the property.

Just down the road from Dowling, also in Oakdale, Long Island, is a campus that was purchased in 2016 by a buyer from elsewhere in Asia, India’s Amity Education. The New York State Education Department said Amity has a pending application with the department requesting permission to offer an M.B.A. program in Oakdale. A department official clarified that this is not an application for New York State degree-granting authority but instead is an application for permission to operate a program as an out-of-state institution. Amity withdrew from plans to purchase former campuses of the for-profit Art Institutes in New York and Massachusetts after the purchases came under scrutiny from the Massachusetts attorney general.

Among other transactions involving foreign buyers, Whittier College in 2017 announced that it was closing its law school and selling the 14 acres of land on which it sits to a Chinese investment company for $35 million.

And in at least one case, a Chinese education company successfully purchased an operating U.S. college that still has its accreditation intact.

Ambow Education, a Chinese education company with a troubled corporate history, purchased Bay State College, a for-profit, regionally accredited institution in Boston in late 2017. Ambow acquired the institution as part of a strategy to offer joint degree programs with U.S. colleges in which students with three-year diplomas from Chinese institutions will spend two more years in the U.S. to complete a bachelor’s degree. Ambow plans to start by sending students to Bay State but from there will look to partner with other American colleges looking for a pipeline of international students.

“Starting next year we are doing a pilot at Bay State College,” said Jin Huang, Ambow’s CEO. “Once it is a success, starting in 2020, we are going to deploy this to other [U.S.] colleges and universities that need more international students and need more new programs.”

Source: https://bloghyped.com/chinese-companies-seek-to-buy-american-campuses/

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cryptnus-blog · 6 years

Text

Coinbase wants to be “too big to fail”, lol

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/10/coinbase-wants-to-be-too-big-to-fail-lol/

Coinbase wants to be “too big to fail”, lol

There is a piece in the latest edition of Fortune magazine with a strange and unfortunate title: “Coinbase wants to be too big to fail”. In it, we are told how the Andreesen Horowitz-backed crypto exchange has become a “21st-century Wells Fargo for a new digital gold rush”.

Much of the piece is focused on Coinbase’s 35-year-old chief executive Brian Armstrong who we are told — no sycophancy spared — has an “almost pathological” bid to better himself. (“Last year, he obtained his pilot’s license but largely lost interest upon becoming satisfied he could fly a plane.”)

In this passage, we learn how Armstrong got into crypto:

While surfing the web at his parents’ house on Christmas of 2009, he encountered a nine-page paper written by a pseudonymous author named Satoshi Nakamoto. The idea it described — a global currency beyond the reach of banks or governments — was so compelling he began to read it again, tuning out his mother’s entreaties to join the holiday festivities downstairs . . .

Like other early believers, Armstrong became enamoured of the idea of a financial system that could minimize the influence of middlemen and politicians. His fixation grew after a trip to Argentina. He recalls sitting in restaurants in Buenos Aires where prices on menus were covered with stickers that changed almost daily — symptoms of rampant inflation that had wiped out the savings of ordinary people. Bitcoin, he thought, represented a way to store or transfer wealth beyond the control of rapacious states. It was digital gold.

But it seems like there was a more compelling idea than even the one of this new global currency. In the rest of the Fortune article, we are told how Armstrong, wanting to minimise the influence of middlemen and politicians, set out to become the biggest middleman in crypto (largely by wooing other middlemen and politicians).

Leaving aside the tone-deafness of the piece’s title, published just after the 10th anniversary of the start of the global financial crisis, the article also exposes the inherent contradictions that lie at the heart of the crypto world.

A key selling point of bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) is supposedly that they operate outside of banks and government. And yet in order for anyone to actually be able to use them, they require businesses that resemble banks to spring up, but with none of the checks and balances in place that protect customers. And, in order to be able to operate within the legal system, they require government to be on side.

There also seems to be a large gulf between the buzz-phrases crypto companies use to sell themselves and what they are actually doing. Coinbase’s mission, it tells us, is “to create an open financial system for the world”, and yet it also appears to be aiming at global hegemony (emphasis ours):

Presiding over all this is an introverted founder who sees the cryptomania of 2017 as just one chapter in a longer story. Armstrong belongs to a generation of evangelists who view digital currencies, and the blockchain technology on which they’re based, as tools that will make investing, borrowing, and saving money faster, cheaper, and more egalitarian. And he wants Coinbase to become the banking empire that brings those tools to the masses.

It’s not ever explained how Coinbase will make this new system more egalitarian. The company makes money every single time a transaction is done on its exchange. And it’s not small amounts, either. According to Fortune, Coinbase charges up to a 1.99 per cent commission per trade. The company reportedly made $1bn in revenues in 2017, and Recode reported on Tuesday that Coinbase is finalising a $500m deal with New York hedge fund Tiger Global that would value the company at about $8bn.

Maybe Coinbase really does want to make money free and they don’t really mind who does that, as long as someone does it? Not so much, according to the piece (again, emphasis ours):

Over the past year, fintech companies Robinhood and Square and European brokerage eToro have wooed crypto investors with low- or no-cost trading. That ominous drumbeat adds urgency to one of Armstrong’s biggest missions: converting Coinbase into a diversified blockchain-banking giant that isn’t solely dependent on trading revenue.

So many missions! So many contradictions! So little time.

There is an accompanying video with the article, in which we hear Armstrong telling us that Satoshi’s white paper was the most important thing he’d read in five years. We also hear from Emilie Choi, a VP at the company in corporate and business development. She tells us:

There are different motivations for people who play in crypto. Some of it may be technical breakthrough, some of it may be motivated by privacy concerns, some of it may be philosophical, some of it may be political.

Kind of feels like you left out quite an important motivating factor there, Emilie. She continues:

What’s cool about it is that when we’re working together towards this goal of creating an open financial system for the world, it doesn’t necessarily matter what is motivating you, it’s that you’re driving towards this decentralised future.

Erm, OK. So what we are being told is whatever is motivating Coinbase — which must surely be one of the four lofty factors Choi lists — it doesn’t actually matter, because it has come up with a buzz-phrase about creating an open financial system that makes it all OK.

The irony of a company simultaneously boasting that it has over 20 million users while also telling us that it is motivated by creating a “decentralised future” seems to have escaped Choi. But the fact Coinbase is working on “creating an open financial system for the world” is intrinsically contradictory. If you want to have an open, decentralised financial system, surely there shouldn’t be one huge company “building” that.

Coinbase seems pretty keen to co-operate with government and regulators.

The company said in a public filing in July that it had set up a Political Action Committee, or a PAC, to spend on upcoming elections. (PACs are organisations in the US that collect donations of at least $1,000 specifically to influence the outcome of elections or to campaign for other initiatives or legislation.) And it also recently became a founding member of the Blockchain Association, a DC-based lobby group that is pushing for the “adoption of policies that will unlock the potential of our ecosystem”.

But the company doesn’t always seem to have been quite so committed to compliance. In an investor presentation in 2015 seen by the Washington Free Beacon, Coinbase boasted that one of bitcoin’s biggest advantages was that it could be used to flout international sanctions. (See page 2 of the presentation here, where we are told bitcoin is “immune to country specific sanctions (eg. Russia-Visa)”.)

The then chief compliance officer, Martine Niejadlik, resigned after the leaked slide deck came under criticism. (Coinbase said at the time this was so she could spend more time with her family.)

Tim Swanson, who runs fintech advisory firm Post Oak Labs, told us:

They present themself as a white knight but that’s only after the fact . . . At the start, non-compliance was the innovation. They went from being crypto anarchist folks to being: we’re the white knights now . . . It’s OK to change visions, but what is the point of trying to be a new financial order when you’re exactly the same as the old one but with less accountability?

We put this criticism to the company, who told us that “compliance has been core to Coinbase’s mission from the start”. They also shared a blog post from January last year written after Coinbase acquired a New York “Bitlicense” that allows the exchange to operate in the state, highlighting this paragraph for us specifically:

The Bitlicense, which authorizes Coinbase’s continuing virtual currency business operations in the state of New York, is an important validation of our highest priority: to operate the most secure and compliant digital currency exchange in the world.

It’s funny because we thought their highest priority was to create an open financial system for the world. Simultaneously having one that involves complying with regulation designed to keep the old, closed system in check seems tricky.

According to Fortune, Coinbase is now “on the cusp of regulatory approval for a broker dealer license”. But Armstrong is still a revolutionary guys! He has a new product!

As for the broader cryptocurrency revolution, Armstrong hasn’t lost sight of the ideal of a global payment system independent of banks and governments. To this end, Coinbase is building software called Coinbase Wallet to help ordinary investors navigate the world of tokens. And Armstrong remains even more ambitious than his investors. “I really want to see crypto be used by a billion people in the next five years,” he says.

Related links: Crypto & government: from anarchy to amity in the USA — FT Alphaville Bitcoin exchange in banking tie-up with Barclays — FT

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foursproutwealth-blog · 6 years

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Human Evolution Favors Safe Thinking. As an Entrepreneur, You Need to Be Unsafe.

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/human-evolution-favors-safe-thinking-as-an-entrepreneur-you-need-to-be-unsafe/

Human Evolution Favors Safe Thinking. As an Entrepreneur, You Need to Be Unsafe.

Learn to step out of your comfort zone and your business will thrive.

April 23, 2018 8 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Excerpted from Unsafe Thinking: How to be Nimble and Bold When You Need It Most by Jonah Sachs. Copyright 2018. Available from Da Capo Lifelong Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

For more than five years, researchers have been able to demonstrate that women-led tech businesses, though rare in the industry, tend to outperform their male-led competitors. Yet Silicon Valley investors, paid millions for their Midas touch, still give male-led startups about 34 times the venture funds. Most have seen the evidence. Few have done anything about it.

Related: 7 Proven Ways to Reprogram Your Thoughts

Despite watching CVS vastly increase its market share after cutting its $2-billion tobacco business, every other major pharmacy chain continues to insist there’s no way it can stop selling cigarettes.

Having briefly learned a very hard lesson about the perils of over-zealous lending, big banks are once again spinning out subprime mortgages at a furious pace.

Old habits, it seems, die very hard.

It’s easy to see these as moral failures, but they are more likely simply very human ones. In the face of threats that come from rapid change, we’re programmed by evolution to seek what seems like safety — fall back on what’s worked in the past, choose the most obvious paths forward, hunker down and dig in — even when it’s obvious that such behaviors are incredibly dangerous. This is not just a problem for big businesses. Medical surveys show that when doctors recommend critical lifestyle changes, up to 70 percent of us choose to stick to our comfortable, unhealthy ways. Gallup reports that more than two-thirds of Americans are disengaged at work. They have settled for the safety of a job that doesn’t excite them — and they’re sometimes miserable in — rather than risk pursuing a passion.

Related: The Importance of Dreaming Big and Envisioning Success

We are, it seems, a species of safety-seekers. And then there are people like Jason Klein the young branding executive who, when hired to rename the Hartford minor league baseball team, chose the bizarre, seemingly ridiculous, and ultimately ingenious name, Yard Goats.

The Hedgehogs had been a close runner up.

At first, reaction to the Yard Goats was swift and merciless. “Worst thing I ever heard of,” snarled an 87-year-old man who had been a dedicated fan of the team, formerly known as the Rock Cats. He vowed never to watch another game. Twitter lit up with derision. “Yard Goats?” the fans demanded. “That’s the best you could do ?”

The anger and rejection that greet Klein’s creations never feel good exactly, but by now he knows this type of response signals that he’s struck a nerve. The people of El Paso, Texas had been angered when he named their team the Chihuahuas. The people of Lehigh, Penn., and Richmond, Va., had received the Iron Pigs and the Flying Squirrels with the same ire. Under pressure from fans, Klein’s clients had often considered abandoning the brands he created for them and ending their relationship with his firm. But, within a year, in all these cities and dozens more where his firm’s touch had been felt, sales of team merchandise had shot off the charts, setting minor-league sales records. People bought hats adorned with a slab of bacon, not just in Lehigh but across the country. They ate nachos out of dog bowls at the Chihuahua’s games and then proudly displayed the empties on their mantels at home. These franchises generated buzz, and profits, that teams with respectable names, like the San Jose Giants, simply couldn’t keep up with.

Related: How to Reprogram Yourself for Greater Success

“If you’re feeling nervous, that’s a good spot to be in,” Klein told me. “Stuff people expect gets forgotten quickly. On their mental computers they drag it right to the ‘I’ve seen it before folder.’ And then it’s game over.”

Of course, there’s a method to Klein’s seeming-madness. For many minor-league franchises, game over was becoming a real possibility. With the proliferation of competing entertainment options available in smaller towns and a decline in baseball interest, owners had been looking instinctively to the still-thriving major leagues to figure out how to compete. But, Klein and his firm Brandiose turned that obvious approach on its head. Minor-league teams, he reasoned, provide local family entertainment. The minors, he evangelized, can either be second-rate sport or first-rate spectacle. This assertion may offend die-hard fans, but Klein’s work has had enormous influence in the industry.

Klein could have made the citizens of Hartford and his client momentarily happy with a safer team name like the Huckleberries, the choice of Hartford Courant readers, in honor of Mark Twain’s history in the city. He would have gotten the high fives and the approval we’re all after. And his firm would almost certainly be struggling in a sea of sameness now. Instead, he has found a way to overcome his natural bias to seek safety and approval. In doing so he’s sparked a revolution of growth in what was becoming a stagnant industry.

Related: Those on Track to Achieve Success Share This Mindset

Klein is an unsafe thinker. He’s chose not to freeze in the face of the rapid changes tearing minor-league baseball apart. Rather, he saw the turmoil as an opportunity. He approached the problem with a spirit of courage and playfulness that he knew industry experts wouldn’t accept and would thus put his reputation at risk. And in doing so, he discovered a kind of genius in the bizarre and counterintuitive form of Iron Pigs, Flying Squirrels and Yard Goats.

So, why do a small number of individuals and organizations consistently thrive in conditions of rapid change while so many more attain a certain level of success only to get stuck in a rut? Why do so few of us take a flexible, nimble approach to unfamiliar challenges while the rest of us hold on to outdated or incremental solutions?

This tendency to retreat to the familiar when challenging times call on us to change is not the only unhelpful mental habit we have to contend with. It’s just one of dozens of quirks of the human psyche, implanted through evolution, that make us favor safe thinking. We’re also pushed in that direction by a bias toward projecting authority and surety instead of admitting we need to ask more questions, an involuntary drift toward conformity when working in groups, and a knack for internalizing conventional wisdom until it appears to be our own gut instinct.

While science tells us we face an uphill battle in changing ourselves and our institutions, it also offers plenty of reasons for hope. Our understanding of the nature of creativity has undergone a revolution in the past few decades. Where once creative ability was assumed to be a fixed trait that we can’t influence, more recent research tells us we have far more control when it comes to being far more creative.

Related: Are Entrepreneurs Born — or Made? Research Says ‘Born.’ But There’s a Catch.

Over the past three years, I’ve found dozens of individuals who have intentionally worked to expand their thinking patterns and broken with old habits and old ways. I spent time with economists who have upended conventional wisdom and even conventional morality by simply giving away money, no questions asked, to the world’s poorest, $1,000 at a time. I’ve seen how an executive vastly increased her company’s valuation by throwing away a $2-billion line of business she knew was undermining her company’s brand. I learned the secrets of a two-time championship NBA coach who’s taken the pressure out of the game for his players so they can be freed to take risks and I learned about where to find the courage to bounce back and reinvent yourself from the former CEO of the internet’s most famous flop who has since rebuilt her reputation and a thriving business.

I found that the breakthroughs of these unsafe thinkers often come not from a single trick or practice but from using all the mental tools available to them. Rationality and creativity, intuition and analysis, intrinsic and extrinsic drive, expert and beginner’s mindsets, these are all essential aspects of human thinking. The most adaptive of us rely on those tools that come most naturally and intentionally work to hone those they are less naturally inclined to use.

This whole-brain way of operating is not automatic or instantly achieved. But, it is urgently needed in an era when automatic and simple solutions, appealing as they may be, are unsuited to the challenges we face. We are confronting social, technological and ecological problems unimaginable to our ancestors. We also have, for the first time, opportunities to finally eradicate poverty and most diseases while designing far more just communities. It will take unsafe thinkers who move beyond a reliance on standard approaches, to help us overcome these challenges and seize these opportunities.

#Wealth

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foursprout-blog · 6 years

Text

Human Evolution Favors Safe Thinking. As an Entrepreneur, You Need to Be Unsafe.

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/human-evolution-favors-safe-thinking-as-an-entrepreneur-you-need-to-be-unsafe/

Human Evolution Favors Safe Thinking. As an Entrepreneur, You Need to Be Unsafe.

Learn to step out of your comfort zone and your business will thrive.

April 23, 2018 8 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Related: 7 Proven Ways to Reprogram Your Thoughts

Having briefly learned a very hard lesson about the perils of over-zealous lending, big banks are once again spinning out subprime mortgages at a furious pace.

Old habits, it seems, die very hard.

Related: The Importance of Dreaming Big and Envisioning Success

The Hedgehogs had been a close runner up.

Related: How to Reprogram Yourself for Greater Success

Related: Those on Track to Achieve Success Share This Mindset

Related: Are Entrepreneurs Born — or Made? Research Says ‘Born.’ But There’s a Catch.

#Wealth

0 notes