Online Media Cultist

Call me crazy (and people do!) but there’s something that happens when you hang out at a Starbucks. Not so much when you just run in to grab a mountain of caffeination before work or a roadie, but I’m talking about those times when you happen to on an outing with friends, drinking coffee (I go for the old fashioned coffee-and-milk, nothing fancy for me, thanks), doing work, and so on.

The music sounds good, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s the caffeine – which I swear Starbucks doles out in crack-like addictive quantities – but I personally start to get down with stuff I would never listen to ordinarily. Sometimes I need to shake myself out of it with a shudder… Dave Matthews, no!

And I’ve had conversations with friends about whether or not purchasing music at a Starbucks (we’ve all seen those little displays at the register) constitutes some form of “selling out,” whatever that means.

This is all to say that Starbucks does a fantastic job of piping a secondary offering (music) to its in-store customers.

Further, I think it’s a pretty great idea that Starbucks has teamed with iTunes to give away 1.5 million “Song of the Day” cards that are redeemable at the iTunes store. This all ties into a third thing that people like to do in Starbucks: hop on the WiFi and play with the Interwebs.

If you’re on a computer in a Starbucks with a coupon for a free download of a song you’re digging at that very moment that’s playing on the overhead speakers, you’re in a prime position to be motivated to redeem it. And then it’s all too easy (read = addictive, I’ve been there!) to take the next step to start clicking the “purchase” button and start jamming down $.99 downloads over the high-speed pipes.

I’d be surprised if this program isn’t highly successful, and I think that we’re going to see much more of this kind of online-offline interaction in the future.

I must be the Ebenezer Scrooge of April Fool’s Day (bah hum bug! Let me count my web visitors in miserly and cantankerous fashion, I say!), but I’m just not that into everyone trying to become The Onion in an effort to trick the masses on April 1 each year. I’ll go with yet another Office Space reference here: it’s a little bit like when boss man Lumbergh decrees that everyone can cut loose by (going ahead and) wearing a Hawaiian shirt on Hawaiian shirt day.

And it would be one thing if the hilarity could be contained within a 24-hour timeframe, but it seems that this year things had to start early. Chief jokester Mike Arrington kicked things off on March 31st with the announcement that TechCrunch had acquired F**kedCompany.com (the joke being that a media property that covers start-ups had bought one that covers failures, get it? It’s all just too delicious to breathe).

At this rate, I can smell a wave of jokes and misdirection and boldfaced lying in the Interweb airs. It may make sense to actually leave the house on a sunny California Sunday, in fact, rather than be subjected to the neurosis-inspired madness of not knowing where the lies end and the elusive truth begins.

In any event, I was (mock) surprised by an enormous Starbucks logo overlaying Twittervision this evening, still not-April Fool’s on the west coast. The joke being, I guess, that they had sold out early and huge to the coffee-dishing colossus. Twittervision is super fun, by the way, particularly if you’re a Twitter fan: check out Twitter “tweets” popping up all over a Google maps mashup.

Update: The Starbucks logo has been removed, guess it was a short term gag!