Category: Mass Persuasion

LA.com’s Mystery Owners Launching Premium Email Address

LA.com’s New Owners Ready “Portal” For Los Angeles News and Events, Plus a Pricey email address for only $99.

by Domain Buddha

How does [email protected] Sound? It has a certain ring to it!

After years of just sitting in the ownership bin of the Tribune-Tronc crew, LA.com has been sold and is ready to launch under new ownership.  The purchase price was not revealed, but it was listed for sale for 5 million.   I said at the time that was a fair price, although the head Tronc had paid one million for it a few years before.  He was intending to link it to the Los Angeles Times, but things went wild for the Troncs, and they sold the Times and the San Diego Tribune to another rich guy in the Medical business.  Only they didn’t mention LA.com, or he didn’t want it.  Big mistake.

So now LA.com has a new owner.  Who is it?  Not announced yet.  Elon Musk?  Probably not, he’s chasing the little bluebird.  I would have guessed Eli Broad, who had at least a passing interest in owning the Los Angeles Times at one point.  He passed away last year, so we can rule him out, unless he’s running it from the spirit world.  Any clues? Not much.  The logo for the new email service looks kind of like a sports patch,  like a baseball patch for the St. Louis Cardinals.  Hmm, a whole new dimension could be around the corner.  Could the new owner be a rich retired sports guy?

The new site is billed as a “Portal”, with a focus on local news and events.  That sounds like PR talk for a site that will flood out corporate news releases and put an event calendar full of happy-talk wine and cheese meet-ups and lectures on metaphysics and woke-ism.

The main push right now is for all of Los Angeles elitists and Hollywood high-lifers to pop for the exclusive $99 per year for your new, very “in”, very cool, email address:  like “[email protected]” for example.  If you act now, you can get it for half price.  (Even Hollywood folks like a bargain once in a while).

But who cares that much about email?  Everyone is now on their phones, messaging or using signal.  Email is fading.  Everybody has an address, but so does the post office.  Who writes and mails a letter anymore?  Not many folks compared to how many are using their iphones for messages.  I’m not saying email is dead yet, but it is not what it was.  The phone is the thing.  Is this a grand old time to launch an elitist email service?  G-mail, Outlook, and many others are free.  Is it an “ad-free” service?  No details were posted on LA.com.  With the economy turning down and raging inflation, is the bottom 99% going to blow about a hundred bucks a year for an email address?  How does the new owner expect to make back his 5 million purchase price by selling an expensive email service?  And then there was the big London email and phone scandal a few years ago, but I digress.  The important thing about email is privacy and security, meaning no snooping by anyone.

The big picture is that LA.com could become the go-to site for big news, scandals, Hollywood, entertainment, etc.  A big city tabloid on your phone (or ipad or computer).  The trend is that the new powerful phones are what folks are using.  Even laptop use is somewhat fading.

Stay tuned for more information on LA.com.  Hope it’s not going to be a cross between the old L.A. Weakly during it’s last 5 days and Friday’s Calendar section from the El Segundo Woke News.  We don’t need that great name to be wasted on a Portal to Ho-Hum land.

Is Twitter on the Way Out?

Is a Trojan Horse Radical Cadre Violating Basic Business Attitude Regarding Customer Relations? Or is it just stupid management?

It’s hard to find out what is going on inside the deep caverns of Twitter.  Employees are secretive, bound by legal chains to keep quiet about what is going on.  So, the Twitter watchers can only guess based on what is observed that the social media giant is up to.

One observation is that many social media companies are attacking their own customers.  The so-called “censors” have de-platformed millions of their own users.  Maybe the censors are all Catholics, and want to excommunicate Twitter users who are drifting to some kind of free speech heresy.   Or maybe  they are radicals, a cadre of woke ultra-leftists and neo-Marxists who have infiltrated Twitter and are now exercising power by kicking out hundreds of thousands of users who violate some mysterious “rules”, like discussing the covid vaccines and so called “mandates”.  Unlikely, their employment apps probably don’t probe political beliefs.  So that leaves management as the guilty party.  A stunning situation.

One thing is clear, whoever they are, they are destroying Twitter.  Think about this, for the last fifty years,  one of the most important rules of business is to focus on customer satisfaction.  Corporations and businesses have spent millions of dollars training their employees to deal with customer complaints, and try to satisfy the customers and keep them loyal to their brand.   Amazon is probably the best example of this, their mantra is “the customer is always right.”  Anyone who has dealt with amazon.com knows this.  The vendors sure know it, because almost every dispute is settled in favor of a customer.  Amazon is wildly successful because of this, among other reasons.

But not Twitter, not Facebook, and not youtube.  These three giants have gone the other way.  A couple of years ago they declared war on their own customers.  Twitter even kicked off a sitting President.  Youtube has pulled possibly millions of videos that violate their secret policies.  And Facebook, the same belligerent attitude.  So, how is that working out for them?  Ex-communicating their own customers, the users who have, until recently, no way to fight back.

The bad news for Twitter, the tube, and the facebookers is that everyone on the planet knows about it.  Everyone talks about it.  People are pissed.  I would say millions are pissed.  They don’t like the arbitrary censorship, the nasty authoritarian attitude that the faceless facebookers, and possibly super-woke morons inside the other FANGS have behaved.  The customers on those platforms are never right.  They are preyed upon by the FANGS, de-platformed, suspended, humiliated, shadow-banned.  If social media is a new religion, as Zuckerberg would have you believe (Meta), then the censors are the new high priests and are reveling in their power to excommunicate their own flock.  Tubers, tweeters, and f-bookers are cast out and damned in a thousand ways.  The FANGSTERS may actually now be running Cults.

So what has happened to rectify this bad behavior of the woke FANGSTERS?   A lot.   Look at the Start-ups.  The customers, millions of them, the “deplorables”, the “Army of Apes”, the shadow-banned, the suspended ones, they still have the ultimate power, and they know it.  They are leaving the Cults.  They are heading to Gettr, Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, Brighteon, NewTube, Telegram, Parler, Clubhouse, Frankspeech, and many others.  They are flocking to new platforms by the millions, hoping to find a home where they can express themselves with something called “Freedom of Speech.”

I recommend that Twitter and the others get rid of their censors and ugly authoritarianism.   Join Free Speech. You might yet save your companies.  A big storm is brewing.  Soon a new platform is going to launch, it’s called Truth Social.  I’m not a Trumper, but I’d say to the little blue bird that it’s past time to change your bad behavior because your customers were right and you were wrong.  And there’s some ex-communicated folks out there who want to clip your wings.

Trump’s Tweet Storms: Madness or Genius?

Are His Tweets A Stroke of Genius Or Will They Lead To Disaster?

President Donald Trump is the first U.S. President to rule and rile using social media.  His tweet storms are legendary.  His personal attacks on friend and foe alike are maddening.  Half the country laughs while the other half foams at the mouth.  The next day the half split may reverse itself, the foamers laughing and the laughing screeching.  Is the President mad? Some psychiatrists have gone on CNN to say the guy has syndromes galore.  Others think Trump is actually a genius, using tweets to rule, to ridicule his enemies, to taunt foreign leaders (as well as his own cabinet), and shock everyone else by his technique of twitter voodoo that causes any who reads it without laughing into coming down with a disease called Trump Derangement Syndrome.

One thing is absolutely certain.  Day after day, and usually late into the night-time talk shows, all the attention is on HIM.   The Orange Eminence rules the roost, he is the head rooster, and all the chickens are constantly clucking about him.  The amount of nasty remarks piles up every day.  “Listen to all these LIES he has told, Just This Morning”, blasts out Morning Joe, his stone face actually showing some twisted emotion.  And then there’s nightingale Rachel who blathers on for seemingly hours detailing everything wrong that the Orange Man managed to do during the day, starting at 4am tweet time and continuing non-stop until he disappears into his man cave. “And did you hear that he actually wants to buy GREENLAND?  *sputter sputter*

Years ago, when I worked at a national public relations firm, there was a mantra that was something like “Say anything you want about me, just spell my name right.”  This was sort of a smart alack  response to attacks on political figures.  But there is actually some truth to it.   The repetition of a name 1000 times a day on TV and Radio, does grind into the minds of the masses.  What the context was, all the other words, can be forgotten because there’s a huge confusing amount of chatter and accusations that nobody can begin to recall a week later.  What sticks are the words “Donald Trump”.

What is going to be crucial to the next election cycle is what the impact of Trump’s constant turning of the spotlight on himself.  Will the masses of voters, bombarded every minute of every day with Trump News, even remember 10 percent of the bad stuff?  Will they just vote for him because of name recognition?  Travel around on a bus and listen to the conversations.  Amazingly, most have nothing to do with politics.  Many individuals just tune out the political chatter, “it’s just politics.”  They tire easily of the constant bickering, and it’s easy to say that the Dems are saying bad things about Trump because they are Dems.  And the Elephants are chopping the Donkeys because they have Big Trunks with Tusks and that’s what they do.  It all reminds me that my boss at the PR firm, the great Hal Evry, said clearly and often, that we need to appeal to the Average American who has the mind of an eleven year old, and that’s max eleven.

Trump seems to know this, and to top it off he has a blast furnace rudeness that has great mass appeal.  Archie Bunker has finally made it to the White House.  A certain percent love that off-the-wall, insult everyone mentality.  And many folks love the fact that Trumps speech writers, if there are any, all seem to have worked at Mad Magazine in the 1960s.

And then, there’s the really personal touch:

  1.  He seems to never tire of giving someone on his hit list a derogatory nick name.  “Cooked Hillary” is one that comes to mind. And if he is too busy to formulate a nickname then he sticks a moniker on someone, like his Attorney General, Sessions, “He was a weak man, very weak.”
  2.   At his rallies, he invites audience participation by inventing clever slogans that his followers can chant when he triggers it.  They can’t seem to wait, they squirm in their seats until their moment in the spotlight when they can yell out “Build That Wall”, or “Lock Her Up”.  Back in the day, the rule of thumb was that a political speech should be no longer than 10 minutes, because after that the audience just zones out.  Trump has knocked that rule upside down.  His rallies, his speeches go on for hours.  The crowd sticks around for the fun, watching the few protesters being humiliated and thrown out. “Get him out of here”, says Trump.  “Out, Out, Out” chants the crowd.  The working class crowd has a great time.  It’s better than sitting at home watching TV, in fact, you get to be on TV, chanting, whooping and yelling!  It’s a blast.  It’s MAD TV.

So the answer to the question will be revealed at the next Presidential election.  Will the voters remember all the lies, all the bad things?  Or will they just remember that name, brainwashed into their eleven year old minds.  It may be hard for them to vote against someone who is Larger Than Life!  He must be almost a king, the chosen one, because everyone talks about him day and night.

Maybe some folks should remember that silence can be golden.  If nobody ever mentions your name, do  you exist?