Saturday, March 14, 2015

Expanding to tweeting news in French, Spanish, Italian

You may have noticed tweets of  French, Spanish, and Italian news pop up under our Twitter account and wondered if there was a reason.

Of course, there is.

It makes us look so much smarter, said the K-Landnews TheEditor, throw in tweets of really famous quotes by long dead people for added effect.

Don't you love TheEditor and its** grumpy style.

Ultimately, we decided to go ahead and add news sites from France, Spain, and Italy to our reading list once or twice a week. This adds a little bit of flavor to the Anglo-German brand of the K-Landnews and dilutes the brand at the same time.

Diluting the brand puts the K-Landnews on a collision course with marketing people everywhere. Build a brand, and stick to it, the experts say. Then they invariably point to the latest internet "newsy" sites like the Gawkers, the Buzz Saw Feed, or whatever the latest fav is right now and applaud the brand.

This makes it so that a couple of years down the internet, they can come back and lament the loss of vision and dilution of the brand, said TheEditor. If they had any clue, they'd know that branding hurts like fuck, ask any Texas longhorn or any gelding. Yeah, I know, for geldings it hurts twice, don't distract me.

So the K-Landnews decided to go counterbrand, as in counterculture.

Which involves deep insights like today's tweet from Spanish daily El Pais telling us that the number Pi is not 3.14.

To be honest, what good is there to having a strong brand when you compulsively write about the great upcoming whiskey shortage like every other web rag on the planet?

Regarding our daring brand collision course, we regret there won't be any tweets in Eastern European or Asian languages any time soon.

That's because TheEditor was not home when the Japanese teacher called and said you have been doing so well, please continue the class. And Russian is mentally tied to the traumatic scene of a kid waltzing into a western military post with rolled up LitGaz under the arm - before the kid had enough money for a briefcase to hide the LitGaz.

Enjoy the counterbrand, and don't worry, once everybody else is doing it, we'll build a cool brand...

** TheEditor insists on a gender neutral form of address and jovially told us "get used to it".

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