Jennifer (Kohanim) Pittleman

I'm a social media strategist and PR professional working in Boston. I have the fortune of loving what I do and am energized by the way in which social media is transforming our world. This blog is a chance for me to scribble my thoughts on social media and marketing, while chatting about some of my other interests -- such as music, the music business, technology and pop culture. Connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected]. Note: Everything posted on this blog is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer or its clients.

[jennko]

I finally got the chance to watch the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Reunion and I have so many feelings. I loved this show so much as a kid that I directed a play based on the show in 5th grade - literally writing the script, collecting my friends to play the various parts, rehearsing endlessly and then finally performing it in front of our classmates. 

But the part I missed as a kid that I now see clearly as an adult was how ahead of its time the show was in depicting the Black experience for a broader American audience. There are so many examples and the reunion episode featured a few, including the time when Will and Carlton were pulled over by the police.

The more I think about it, the more upset I am. How were we not incensed by the injustice when we watched that episode then? I also remember the subject being covered by Family Matters, another hit TV series.

I know I was just a kid and these storylines didn’t fully register in my young mind, but how is it that this narrative was being told on national TV and we were just OK with it and are only now reckoning with this issue?

I already know the answer to the question - a lot had to happen from then until now for these issues to boil to the top, the pandemic played a part, social changes take time, etc. - but it’s still so infuriating. I wonder if the medium of TV (where there’s always a resolution of some sort, where the moment is fleeting and it’s over once the episode is over) makes it less effective to really have an impact on its audience. I think about music that has been more powerful for me in delivering the message of pain, injustice and ugliness of African American history (thinking specifically about when I was exposed to songs like Living for the City by Stevie Wonder or Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday).

At the same time, I was just watching this video -- How Far Have We Come? Black Teens vs. Grandparents by the amazing folks at Jubilee. The conversation between the two generations is fascinating and they get to some very real stuff at 18:17 when the question of trauma comes up. One of the participants talks about PTSD as being “present” traumatic stress and how its reoccurring trauma experiencing today’s headlines around police brutality: “I feel like I’m in a domestic violence relationship with law enforcement.” The conversation then moves onto generational trauma from slavery. One participants says, “My mother beat me because her mother beat her. And her mother beat her because her mother beat her because they did not want the masters on the plantation to beat their children, so they said pleaded with them and said ‘no no I’mma teach them’ so they beat their children so someone else wouldn’t beat them.”

These are my stream of conscious thoughts on the last day of Black History Month. May we continue to talk openly about the roots of America’s racial discriminatory systems until we make significant change.

[jennko]

Great interview nugget between Trevor Noah and Howard Stern, where Trevor describes a conversation he had with Dave Chappelle, where Chappelle explains why he chose Trevor Noah to open for him instead of other comedians. The way Trevor interprets this conversation is fascinating and so applicable for all public speakers and leaders. Watch here or see quote below.

“You’re not here because you’re funny. You’re here because you’re interesting. Anyone can be funny, but not everyone can be interesting. Not everyone can make an audience listen to what they’re saying. Not everyone has a wealth of life experience that makes people want to know what they have in their minds. So that changed my perspective on silence - and so now, if I can hear that the audience is listening, I am engaged.”

[jennko]

It's strange how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.

Clemantine Wamariya from The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (an excellent and eye opening memoir from a young girl who survived the Rwandan genocide)

[jennko]

So proud of the work I did on this Heart Health Month campaign for (client) AT&T at this exact time last year. In the process of doing this work, I heard so many heartbreaking stories about people losing a loved one to a heart attack. We also met this amazing business woman - Dr. Marie Johnson - who created a digital device (connected by AT&T) that can scan blood flow and assess cardiovascular health. Such incredible and important stories.

[jennko]

Working on this holiday video campaign for client Norwegian Seafood Council was one of the highlights of my year at work. 

We asked three cooks to show us the seafood dishes they make for the holidays and learned all about Brazilian, Norwegian and Italian food traditions along the way. 

Here’s our Italian cook sharing his family’s recipe, featuring Norwegian bacalao (salted cod), onions, tomato sauce and raisins.

[hotelhalsey]

Halsey delivered a powerful poem at the Glamour 2018 Women of the Year Summit with a message to women: be inconvenient.

[jennko]

Bezos wisdom

Below are some of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos’ 2018 shareholder letter (too good to not write up, even if I’m a month late)...I’m particularly struck by Amazon’s memo approach, which makes it sound like projects are deliberated for longer periods of time before acted upon. I’m probably not understanding their process entirely, but initially it feels counter-intuitive to the whole notion of innovating fast to keep up with consumer expectation. I would love to read further on this and hear about other companies that take unique planning approaches. 

On consumer expectation:

“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up...People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before.”

On high standards:

“I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious.” "I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process...Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble. You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots.” “To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be.”

On longer deliberations:

“The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.”

[jennko]

“Artists have a unique perspective, they get the opportunity to bring people together...we can help facilitate through art and music and bring people to a common ground.” - Janelle Monae, when asked about whether she’d want to go into politics / discussing the benefits of only being an artist

[jennko]

Spotify is hemorrhaging money and it needs to become Netflix to stop the bleeding | Markets Insider

Spotify's public filings revealed the company is spending most of its money on fees for licensed content and music royalties.

What's easier - creating a breakthrough TV show or breaking a new artist?

I'm not saying that either is easy of course, but the question came to mind as I was reading this article which suggests that Spotify should follow the Netflix model of original content to increase revenue, in light of its recent direct public offering.

It's a great idea in theory - churn out original artists and grab a larger cut - BUT breaking a musical artist is nothing like developing a breakthrough TV show. The odds for success are even slimmer, even with a huge platform like Spotify. With a TV show, you can take recognizable actors, work off a familiar story (let's say British history for something like The Crown) and have a closer shot at success. I don't think the same formula is nearly possible in the music business.

Agree / disagree?

[jennko]

Tales of a B2C turned B2B marketer - and catching myself from getting stuck

I started my marketing career promoting some of the coolest brands in the music, fashion and travel industries. It was the kind of work that wowed acquaintances at dinner parties and came paired with perks like free concert tickets, backstage access to NY Fashion Week and more.

About three years ago, I was asked to roll onto an enterprise account while a colleague went on maternity leave and have since found myself in the B2B space. Let me tell you, the learning curve was significant and I spent those first months reading as much as I could and asking countless questions to ensure I understood the enterprise IT ecosystem.

Through it all, I stuck to this idea that marketing to businesses still ultimately meant talking to humans and that any social media content needed to mirror that basic understanding. I was determined to use my years of consumer marketing experience to drive my B2B social approach - and I did. I continually argued that B2B and B2C were essentially one in the same and on various occasions, I was even successful in persuading my clients to take a more consumer-oriented approach in implementing social media programs for the enterprise market.

Fast forward a couple of years and I was sitting in a team meeting where a colleague brought up the topic of whether we should consider creating a new Facebook channel for our enterprise brand. My immediate reaction was to push back - who would want to be interrupted with enterprise content while they were decompressing or catching up on their friends’ lives and daily observations? I thought about my mindset when clicking on my Facebook app vs. Twitter and LinkedIn apps - when clicking on the latter, I was in a professional mode, wanting to catch up on the news and occurrences of my professional network, instead of seeing what my friends were up to.

Then again, 2017 was indeed the year of status-quo for Twitter and it was clear that their user base was not growing, even if current users were active on the platform. I personally love so much about Twitter, but truthfully, what would its future look like if its audience base was not growing? How could an enterprise brand only focus on Twitter and LinkedIn, when Facebook was the dominant social media brand?

I started scouring the Internet for articles about this Facebook for B2B question and many made the argument that the lines between our personal and professional lives were blurring, that research showed that social users were utilizing Facebook for professional reasons and ultimately that Facebook was the preferred social platform for this user base. If we knew our target audience was spending so much time on Facebook, why wouldn’t we want to have a conversation with them on that platform?

There’s a lot more detail in developing a Facebook strategy for B2B, but what hit me the most during this reckoning is that the approach I prided myself in at the start of my B2B journey - treating B2B and B2C social marketing as one in the same - had somehow lost its luster. I was starting to show the signs of being in the B2B heads-down mindset.

Luckily, I caught myself, but what this teaches me is that we have to keep our heads above water. We cannot get sucked into our day-to-day work, without reading and listening to a diversity of voices in our industry. We must keep our pulse on work happening outside of our team, company and industry to stay relevant and inspired. And we must welcome learning from all sorts of disciplines.

Have you had similar experiences before? How do you make sure you don’t get stuck in a particular discipline and keep an open mind / always learning mindset? Feel free to share below.

[Note: originally shared on LinkedIn]

[jennko]

What a treat to see The Lemon Twigs in concert last week. They've crafted some amazing anthems - including "I Wanna Prove to You,” featured here. I'm truly impressed with how they've drawn on classic styles (the 1960s for the overall sound and Queen in terms of vocals), but still manage to make it their own. Excited to see this young band grow. --

[jennko]

I worked on Cortana four and a half years ago. At the time we all were like, 'Amazon, yeah, that technology is so far behind.' But one thing I learned is that in this race to AI, it's actually more about having the right application scenarios and the right ecosystems. Google and Microsoft, technologically, were ahead of Amazon by a wide margin. But look at the AI race today. The Amazon Alexa ecosystem is far ahead of anybody else in the United States. It's because they got the scenario right. They got the device right. Essentially, Alexa is an AI-first device...the phone, in my view, is going to be, for the foreseeable future, a finger-first, mobile-first device. You need an AI-first device to solidify an emerging base of ecosystems...what AI-first really means [is that] you interact with the technology differently from the start. It has to be voice or image recognition, facial recognition, in the first interactions. You can use a screen or touch, but that’s secondary.

Baidu chief operating officer Qi Lu, speaking to Jessi Hempel of Wired’s Backchannel

[jennko]

Talk about beautiful vocals and a silky smooth groove. I’ve been listening to this song on repeat from Mac Ayres, a young new R&B artist whose career I’m really looking forward to following.  

[jennko]

Big questions

It happened twice this week. 

I was asked big-picture questions and I froze. 

The first question was part of a work brainstorm, where we were asked the following: who is someone out there in the world whose vision inspires you?

Vision? Just anyone? Are we talking about something business related or something broader? I had no idea how to answer this tough question.

Other colleagues in the room had no problem answering the question, throwing out books they had read recently that inspired them etc.

The brainstorm went on, but afterwards, I had this nagging feeling wondering why I couldn't come up with an answer. Was life so busy that I never got a moment to think about these kind of big questions? Was my life structured in a way that didn't allow for inspiration? Or perhaps I wasn't journaling enough (journaling is synonymous with real thinking for me). 

Later in the week, today actually, my friend posted the following prompt on Facebook: 

“In the spirt of international Women's day, which lady (challenge here is NON Relative) inspired/influenced you? ( disclaimer: I'm asking for curiosity and to be fun, please no negative or dramatic responses)”

Again, I was dumbfounded. I hadn't thought about this in years. 

When I was a teenager, I would think and write about my inspirations - musicians, dancers, writers, you name it - all the time. And somehow as I've gotten older, I just haven't been thinking in that fashion. 

So I forced myself to think of just a couple of female figures that have inspired me and after a couple of minutes I did. I shared the list with my friend on Facebook and then she inquired why, saying she'd love to hear more. So this is how I responded...

- Sheryl Sandberg for putting her all into teaching working women to lean in, for working her way to the top of a competitive and male - dominated tech industry and for grappling with her huge personal tragedy with honesty and grace - Oprah for being the ultimate tastemaker and influencer, for pulling out the human story in every guest she had on the show, for making people feel and change their lives - all while running a media empire. - Angelique Kidjo for truly believing in the power of bringing people together through music, for focusing on the idea of peace and love trumping hate in her joyous and spiritual way...all through music! - Ella Fitzgerald for her perfect voice that rocked my world when I first heard it as a teenager. There's nothing more beautiful. - Nora Ephron for telling such truthful and lovable stories throughout her career and for doing so in a male - dominated industry...it never seemed to shake her. - Mary Tyler Moore for depicting a strong woman on TV in the 60s and 70, for not being the conventional TV housewife and then for breaking standards by portraying a happy 30 year old career woman on national TV. - Beyonce for giving the world a young black female heroine, for always evolving creatively and for blessing us with the best girl-power anthems we've ever heard. Happy International Women’s Day! Who are some female figures that have inspired you? And when was the last time you asked yourself a big-picture question? 

[jennko]

When I first became CEO, people asked how I wanted to define Autodesk and I often answered somewhat cryptically, 'great, good and important.' In my mind, great companies are defined, first and foremost, by their financial performance. Good companies are defined by their values and culture and how they treat their employees, their customers and the communities in which they do business. And important companies make a real difference in the world.

Carl Bass (former CEO of Autodesk) (more on his exit blog post as well as his TechCrunch interview)

[jennko]

Imagine if you could tell Google Maps, 'I'd like to go to the airport, but I need to stop off on the way to buy a present for my nephew.' A more generally intelligent version of that service - a ubiquitous assistant would know all sorts of things that, say, a close friend or an earnest intern might know: your nephew's age, and how much you ordinarily like to spend on gifts for children, and where to find an open store. But a truly intelligent Maps could also conceivably know all sorts of things a close friend wouldn't, like what has only recently come into fashion among preschoolers in your nephew's school -- or more important, what its users actually want. If an intelligent machine were able to discern some intricate if murky regularity in data about what we have done in the past, it might be able to extrapolate about our subsequent desires, even if we don't entirely know them ourselves.

The Great A.I. Awakening, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

[jennko]

Ideas typically do not just come to you...they happen because you've been thinking about something and talking to a lot of people about it for a long period of time.

Mark Zuckerberg

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Over the weekend, I was reading Fortune’s interview of Mark Zuckerberg on behalf of its Businessperson of the Year award. The article focused on his management style -- pointing out that he’s retained his upper management team (many since the start of the company) -- and his unique ability to look into the future. It is within this context that this quote was shared. Zuckerberg explained the importance of surrounding yourself with smart people to bounce ideas off of. Essentially, innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum, in isolation, it occurs through conversation. 

In the same sitting, I read through an interview with Frank Ocean, where he talked quite a bit about his creative process and how he just “knew” when a song was ready, saying the following: “They’re just chords, just melodies. I don’t know what combination of those objects is going to make me feel how I need to feel. But I know precisely the feeling that needs to happen.” 

I think any of us that work in creative fields know exactly that moment he’s describing. It’s that moment of clarity when you feel you have uncovered and revealed a truth. It’s an idea that resonates, that makes you feel and one that feels big.

Interestingly though, Ocean admits he “had writer’s block for almost a year” and that he would go to the studio and “stare at the monitors and come up with nothing, or nothing that I liked.” 

It was actually a conversation that broke his writers block - interestingly, going back to Zuckerberg’s point. Ocean said he reconnected with a childhood friend from New Orleans who was going through difficult times and that conversation “made me feel as though I should talk about the way I grew up more.” 

It’s simple, but I think there’s a real lesson here. In our businesses, do we set up a space for conversations to happen and for big ideas to spark? Do we marketers have time set aside to discuss our theories about brands, media and storytelling? Do we discuss our long-view visions for the future of business? This surely is one step to creating something that has even a semblance of innovation.