Some Follow - Up

and further notes on the topic "How Do Croatians Communicate" 

Not long back Crown Croatia published my little paper on the topic - How do Croatians Communicate?  I brought at least fifty years of experience in communications to the effort.  My first career in Forest Products sales and marketing was a hundred percent communication.  My second career as an ordained Lutheran Pastor was two hundred percent communication.  My third career as a YouTube video producer is at least nine hundred percent communication when you consider that the task is to interpret the performers words and music into images which faithfully reflect his message in a manner which appeals first to the Croatian audience whether at Home in Croatia or in the diaspora and "sells" the musician, the music, the musician's message, and the culture to everybody else on the planet.  

Our task also includes doing all that in a way which hopefully will result in at least a modicum of income for the musician and his backers.   Along the way we have to skate the sometimes paper thin ice covered pond of copyrights and so forth.   That means that if somehow we fail to please just about everybody in the chain of musicians, writers, composers, producers, record companies, "rights management societies", etc., no matter how "good" we think we are, we are dust.   It is sometimes quite an adventure for a group of people who do what we do mostly for the love of all these performers and for the love of our Homeland.  Lots of communication is necessary.

Communication is clearly at the heart of everything that everyone connected to the entertainment industry in any way does.   A few days ago,  reports came in showing that Al Jazeera America, with a staff of nearly nine-hundred and seventy bureaus worldwide were receiving thirteen thousand views per day.   I was ecstatic at that news because on more than one occasion recently my own little operation conducted from a pair of computers in my bedroom with a staff consisting mostly of little old me (with some delightful assistance now and then) and almost no investment,  has out done a comparatively monster operation backed by the government of a small oil rich country.  I'm not even one of the important guys in the Croatian niche.  Take us all together and we are a growing cultural force, for better or for worse, to be reckoned with worldwide.  Wow!!  [~~ pats himself and all his fellow Croatian communicators on the back]

On the 20th November, Linda Draškić Perak , herself a young person, wrote an article for Večerni List entitled "Nakon ovoga pazit ćete što pišete na društvenim mrežama."  The article has a few observations about the way some Croatian young people are communicating.  While it is obviously a commercial placement leading into an article about the guys who turned down FaceBook's offer of billions for their "app," there are things about the article itself which are revealing and important.

There has been recent information suggesting that young people are leaving Facebook perhaps for other more anonymous networks. Data on Croatian young people was a bit amorphous and difficult to analyze but ... what I had suggested was that Croatian young people do not tick quite the same way as the group the American marketeers are abuzz about. First, the number of comments, likes, and shares, shows that a significant number of Croatian young people read this article on Facebook - meaning of course they continue to use Facebook. 

Second, the responses show me a marked unconcern and certainly a lack of fear about "privacy" issues which matches closely information gathered in an Austrian marketing survey from last year. The attitude I see is that social communication is for communications so lets communicate - what's your problem? A major Chinese company with one of the new toys which some people are going to agrees with me concerning Balkan people and concerning even a huge section of "American" youth. I'm smiling really big today because all this seems to confirm a major point in my research - that "Croatians communicate vigorously." 

By the way, our Chinese Wechat friends point out that their app, and the whole genre of similar apps don't necessarily compete with FaceBook and YouTube, etc.  We could always, and some of us did,  communicate  via FaceBook private message all around the world to people whose FaceBook accounts were connected to their cellphones.   This new generation of "apps" adds new dimensions to texting in that they all have some visual and video aspects heretofore lacking.  Rather than choosing one over the other, its more likely we'll choose the mode which suits our purpose at the moment. 

What does this mean to Croatian musicians and other communicators to this group of people? Just what Lisa Irby  has been telling us all along. Do good top of the line stuff and put it out here where people can see it. Don't BS anybody about anything, keep it all clean and first class and keep it out here in front of our people with all the tools at our disposal.  Our kids are bright and our women recognize class, you'll do just fine ... 

do sljedeći put, blagoslov - until next time, blessings,

Canovals a.k.a. Slavonac

21. studeni 2013