R. Michael Brown 🎯

Your Story, Your Channel: Brown Tells Highlands County Cultural Groups “You Are the Media Now” Highlands County’s museums and historical societies have plenty of stories to tell. The hard part is getting people to see them. That was the message from author and media strategist R. Michael Brown at the Heartland Cultural Alliance (HCA) meeting on Thursday, Oct. 29, at the Military Sea Services Museum in Sebring. Brown presented “You Are the Media Now: An 8-Step Content Marketing System to Increase Awareness, Engagement, and Support,” based on his 2025 book of the same name. The audience included representatives of local historical societies and museums, a church, and a radio station. “The gatekeepers are gone,” Brown said. “We used to need a reporter or a TV crew to tell our story. Now every museum, cultural group, nonprofit, and for-profit organization has a digital press and a TV station in its pocket.” See More [R. Michael Brown] rmichaelbrown.com/2026/10/31… #marketing #contentmarketing #branding #digitalmarketing #sales – at Lake Placid, FL

I can't believe it's November... | Michael McIntyre youtu.be/-2yekhjzhlw?si=O8Px… via @YouTube

Treat #2. Tricky restaurant drinks. #HappyHalloween

Why didn’t the @RaysBaseball change their pitcher during the 5th inning @Brewers rally? #WorldSeries

Imagine dumping 425 million gallons of sewage a day off our beaches in south Florida. And they did it for decades. Swimming risk warnings at South Florida beaches. Six pipes off Southeast Florida have carried treated sewage to sea: off Delray Beach, Boca Raton, Pompano Beach, Hollywood, Haulover/Sunny Isles and Virginia Key, one to nearly four miles out. The six systems together discharged about 425 million gallons a day in 2005. Studies link discharges to nutrient pollution that feeds algae on coral reefs and to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Routine use was banned after 2025, but backup discharges remain legal during wet weather. Swim warnings happen almost every time there is big windchop waves in the area. The dangerous bacteria is stirred up by big surf.

Winter beginning? Maybe just Fall. Looking forward to this week in Lake Placid, Florida. – at Lake Placid, FL

Swipe, Cliffhanger, Buy: Why Brands are Betting on Micro-Dramas Ads used to interrupt the story. Now they are the story. Micro-dramas are vertical, soap-style series with one- to two-minute episodes built on betrayal, secret billionaires and cliffhangers. See More [R. Michael Brown Marketing Consulting, Writing, Producing] rmichaelbrown.com/2026/10/16… #MarketingStrategy #MicroDrama #BrandStorytelling #MarketingTips #ShortReels – at Lake Placid, FL

I record all the interviews for my articles and use AI to transcribe the audio. They are mostly accurate. I still have to make updates to be sure the transcripts are correct. Because of this, AI detectors say the recordings are AI. So using quotes from the transcripts flag the article as AI. Good grief. Don’t trust any of the #AIdetectors. – at Lake Placid, FL

How Audiobooks Affect Your Brain Reading wins. theepochtimes.com/health/how…

New Published Feature Story by R. Michael Brown - A Land Remembered Comes Home For a Hardee County rancher’s son, playing Zech MacIvey in an upcoming TV series, is not make-believe. It is family memory, Florida history and the open country still worth saving. By R. Michael Brown Photography courtesy of Corey Castellano, Jaime Green, Tamarind Free Jones and Carlton Ward Jr. The surprise about Colby Harrison is that, when the cameras stop rolling, his job playing the part of a Florida cow hunter doesn’t. He goes back to feed the cattle on his family’s ranch. Before our interview, the 12-year-old actor had already finished his morning ranch work and started his school day. A rodeo competitor and student of roping, he now plays Zechariah “Zech” MacIvey in the upcoming television adaptation of Patrick D. Smith's "A Land Remembered," the sweeping Florida novel that spans three generations from 1858 to 1968. That made the casting feel different in Polk, Hardee, Highlands, Okeechobee, DeSoto, Glades and Hendry counties, where the early part of the novel takes place. Colby did not have to learn the heat, the mosquitoes, the horses or the rhythm of a cattle operation for the camera. He grew up with them. “I’ve been rodeoing since I was three or four,” Colby said. “I started competitively roping when I was maybe like seven.” He competes in tie-down roping, breakaway, ribbon roping and goat tying. His family runs a cow-calf beef operation in Fort Green, and Colby is sixth generation. “On both sides of my family, we’re orange grove farmers and cattle ranchers,” he said. A friend at church gave him Smith’s novel. Colby read it, finished it and immediately searched online for a film version. “It said, ‘No, there is not a Land Remembered movie,’” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Well, dang, there has to be something like this.’” Then came the casting call. Read the full article [Heartland Living Magazine] issuu.com/heartlandlivingmag… #ALandRemembered #ranching #Florida #CrackerCowboys #HistoricalFiction – at Lake Placid, FL

The latest issue of @HeartlandLiving Magazine is out. I got the cover story. Can’t wait to see the whole magazine…

Is the "AI is going to kil| us all!" hysteria just another Y2K bug? Don't know what Y2K was? Look it up. – at Lake Placid, FL

The Little Town That Built Big Baseball Dreams Inside Avon Park’s extraordinary baseball legacy - from Babe Ruth to Hal McRae By R. Michael Brown Long before spring training became synonymous with Florida’s coastline, before televised games and million-dollar contracts, baseball found a home in a little town along the railroad tracks in Highlands County. The legends came here: #BabeRuth, #LouGehrig, #DizzyDean, #FrankieFrisch. Generations later, another young man would grow up only a few blocks away, dreaming of following them. His name was #HalMcRae. Today, visitors can stand where all of them once stood. The newly opened Baseball Museum wing at the Avon Park Historical Society’s Museum and Depot, doesn’t simply display baseball memorabilia. It tells the remarkable story of how one small Florida town became one of the state’s most unlikely baseball capitals, and how that passion continues nearly a century later. Article starts on page 20: issuu.com/heartlandlivingmag… #baseball #baseballlife #baseballhistory #florida #FloridaHistory – at Lake Placid, FL

I've proven #critics wrong over and over again throughout my #career. You can too. Show up before anyone else, leave after everyone is gone. Out produce everyone. #ThinkBIG! Put #systems in place that you can follow everyday and #CrushGoals with your #discipline. Don't complain. Ever. Give #credit to everyone that helps. Even a little bit. #Share the #wealth and #rewards with everyone on your team. Beat the #job #competitors and impress #employers – at Lake Placid, FL

Jobs are shifting. Caveman Issues Dire Warning That The Wheel Is Going To Eliminate Countless Jobs babylonbee.com/news/caveman-… via @TheBabylonBee

The Dunning–Kruger effect. One of its central ideas is that people with less knowledge in a particular area often overestimate their own ability or understanding in that area because they don’t yet know enough to recognize the gaps in their understanding.

Warren Buffett Said He Could End the Deficit in 5 Minutes With 1 Rule. His Plan Would Cost Lawmakers Their Jobs. “I could end the deficit in five minutes,” he said. “You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.” Buffett said a law like that would have an immediate impact. “Now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right?” he said. “If you guys can’t get it done, we’ll get some other guys to get it done.” inc.com/kevin-haynes/warren-…

The Most Famous Company You've Never Heard Of I've spent three years asking college students one question about @IBM. More than 95% give the same answer, and it should worry the company. By R. Michael Brown, Brand Consultant and Former IBMer Picture one of my college students buying a sandwich. The cashier scans a barcode, the card reader beeps, and the receipt prints. In about 10 seconds she has touched technology that #IBM invented. If you told her that, she'd probably ask you who is IBM? I don’t have to guess about that last part. I teach college students about communication, typically over 100 per semester, and for the last three years I’ve asked my classes the same question: “Have you heard of IBM?” More than 95% say no. It isn’t a scientific survey. It’s a show of hands in a classroom. But it’s been remarkably consistent, class after class and year after year. As someone who once worked at IBM, I find it startling every time. The barcode she just scanned is the Universal Product Code, developed by IBM engineer George Laurer and introduced in 1973. The hard drive, the great-grandparent of the storage in her laptop, goes back to IBM's RAMAC in 1956. The Lenovo ThinkPad laptop she uses was invented and branded in 1992 as an IBM ThinkPad before IBM sold the Personal Computer Division to Lenovo in 2005. And the first time a machine beat the best humans at their own game on prime-time TV was IBM's Watson on Jeopardy! in February 2011. My students were in elementary school. So, here's the question I keep coming back to: how do you turn a brand around when the next generation doesn't know it exists? See More [RMichaelBrown.com] rmichaelbrown.com/2026/09/25… – at Lake Placid, FL

I asked my young doctor yesterday if she's ever heard of @IBM. I ask all my college students I teach too. She said no, just like all my college students say. #IBM has lost its brand among consumers and young folks. Most under 30 years old have never heard of it or don't remember who it is if they have heard of it. – at Lake Placid, FL

Employees are becoming bot bosses — without boss pay By @RaniMolla @BusinessInsider You entered your profession because you wanted to teach, code, write, create, or design. But thanks to AI — and the immense pressure to use it — you now spend less time practicing your craft and more time managing the technology that's doing the work you wanted to do. For many professionals, that means supervising agents: tools designed to perform tasks autonomously but that, in practice, require workers to set expectations, delegate assignments, evaluate performance, demand revisions, and intervene when things go wrong. Others manage a steady pipeline of AI-generated work, reviewing the output and taking responsibility for what ultimately ships. See More [Business Insider] businessinsider.com/workers-… – at Lake Placid, FL