Hear me out... what about a Website that changes according to whatever you like to see in sites. Say one that senses whether or not you are detail oriented (and let's face is, is anyone who browses the Web?) and then changes according to those findings.
Science fiction?
SCIENCE FACT!
Okay, that was a little much, but researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management are looking to help make sites adapt automatically to each visitor, depending on that person's style of thinking.
It'd be like walking into Whole Foods and everything turned into organic 70% dark chocolate.
Well, for some.
The researchers have already built a prototype for British Telecom that, within 10 clicks, the system makes a guess at the user's cognitive style and morphs to fit.
Yes, 10 clicks is a lot, but then again you have to consider that the calculator my father was using in college took up the wing of a building.
And the slides, featured last week on slideshare.net last week, have already been viewed over 8,000 times.
Which begs the question (as Matt queried), why is it "fourteen or so years into a business world increasingly dominated by the web, people are still trying to figure out how to make the web work for them?"
I'm personally of the belief that Marketers are always looking at ROI, whether it's for Direct Mail or HTML e-mails. But then again, that may not answer the question why so many people registered.
Regardless, if you're interested in listening to the recorded call, you can still hear Lance Loveday, founder, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing and Sandra Niehaus, VP user experience, creative director of Closed Loop Marketing present the entire Webcast by clicking here and registering.
As always, free.
(Regarding the picture, "Roi" means "King" in French.)
The rumors of October's Adobe CS4 release apparently have been greatly exaggerated.
Photoshop Senior Product Manager, John Nack is saying the information of the release date, passed around by Gizmodo and TG Daily, is bogus.
"I didn't say anything about schedule...Someone pulled a date apparently out of thin air, and now everyone who can copy & paste is dutifully repeating it."
"The fish story grows with the telling, too. In addition to repeating the date, Electronista is inventing new details (e.g. 'CS3 has already had limited support for graphics processing units (GPUs) for certain filters'; sorry, no; 'An upcoming wave of video cards with special physics processing will also help, Adobe explains'; nope, didn't say that; and more). Where do people get this stuff?"
Electronista and Gizmodo both now have updates with Jack's info, though Gizmodo says to "take it for what you will."
(Either Gizmodo knows more than Adobe does, or....?) >Regardless, Beta versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth are all at the AdobeLabs site.
If you have a CS3 license you can download and use these, otherwise, if you're just browsing, you can run the apps for In the meantime, Gizmodo will be predicting the Obama vs. Clinton outcome.
Stay tuned.
If Customer Segmentation gives you goose bumps and Email Opt Out Preferences keeps you from paying close attention to Flavor of Love 3, then the DMA has just the thing for you.
Yes, a full 8 virtual seminars on everything you wanted to know about Direct Mail and Marketing in general.
No, they're not free.
But they're virtual, so you don't have to pay for parking.
By now you've heard the expression Greenwashing, right? A marketing team decides they want to join the Eco Bandwagon (which, by the way, is getting pretty full) so they play up some "green" part of their company.
Say run two-page spreads during Earth Day featuring their regular products with eco tips interspersed throughout, as Macy's did.
Or build minimal impact LEED gas stations, as BP has done.
Many times marketers, it seems, confuse the playing field for their own company's profits. Not that I mind playing up the green part of a company and telling the world about it (I did it myself when we ran an FSC certified direct mail piece), but to pretend your entire company is out to save the planet to make a buck is about as honest as selling snake oil.
Look, snake oil salesmen weren't curing tuberculosis with their bogus medicine and BP sure isn't making a dent with their gas stations considering they make most of billions in gas and oil revenues.
So what's a company to do?
Patagonia may just have the answer.
Fast Company has a terrific article on Patagonia's challenge to 10 employees to "track five products from the design studio to the raw-materials stage to Patagonia's Nevada distribution center".
The company decided to post the employees findings, good and bad, on a microsite called The Footprint Chronicles. The site covers 10 products' journey to the factory and its energy consumption, CO2 emissions, waste generated, and distance traveled.
They then ask for the consumer's feedback and post the feedback on their Cleanest Line blog.
This is no bogus marketing ploy, this is honest-to-goodness "put your ethics where your wallet is" marketing.
Congrats to Patagonia for, again, raising the bar when it comes to corporate, and marketing, honesty.
That is, until I found the final piece of my daughter's pink MALM 3-drawer chest I was assembling was nicked. And I rang customer service to find out how they wanted to go about replacing the piece. And I rang. And rang. I rang for 10 minutes. And no one answered. I rang for two days. And still...
Nor did anyone answer at the HQ IKEA number (they redirected me, after much pushing of buttons, back to my local store where it rang some more.)
There's a lot to like about IKEA, but what's not to love is their customer service. (Please see Danielle Crittenden's blog "Why I Hate IKEA" at the The Huffington Post.)
Maybe one of the execs from the Scandinavian giant will take a moment to attend the latest AMA/Aquent Webcast:
Optimizing the Profitable Link Between Employees and Customer Loyalty Behavior
Michael Lowenstein, Vice President and Senior Consultant at Harris Interactive, points out that research indicates "at least 70% of your customers’ behavior is driven by their interactions with your employees."
Which would explain why there's no rush for me to hustle on back to that big blue and yellow store to get more furniture.
But enough about my allen-wrench assembly skills, here's the delio on the Webcast.


In this free and informative Aquent/AMA webcast, Michael Lowenstein, Vice President and Senior Consultant at Harris Interactive, will present critical insights about the relationship among profitability, employee behavior, and customer loyalty, which will prove that true customer commitment is attainable only when the entire organization understands and performs its roles in providing superior customer experiences.
You will learn how to:
Effectively measure and understand customers’ perceptions
Pinpoint which employee attitudes and actions affect customer behavior
Leverage employee positivism and customer focus
Identify and eliminate employee sabotage
Develop a customer-centric culture
The AMA recommends attendees of this Webcast should include Senior Executives and Managers of:
You know there's a lot to be said for friendly competition, which is why I'm going to let you know why our resident Minister of Enlightenment and HQ Blogger, Mr. Matt Grant, has a blog well worth visiting.
For one, he gets access to incredibly interesting people in both the Marketing and Creative fields.
Two, he podcasts a lot, so you can listen on the way home or in the comfort of your own Elliptical Machine.
Three, he's incredibly smart and insightful.
Yes, it sounds as if I might marry him.
Not to worry, he's taken.
And is really, really not my type.
Really.
To prove my point this week Matt has a two-part conversation with James Intriligator, a man who received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard and now has a post in the Center for Neuroscience and Consumer Psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor.
James is currently doing quite a bit of work on how the brain perceives brands and how brands build up in brains over time.
Though it's no man rapping about sectional furniture, it's pretty compelling stuff.
How's this for Marketing snafus? (By way of Duh! Marketing Awards) The Bedder Get It Together Award
Honorably awarded toWoolworths–a chain of furniture stores in Britain - for introducing "Lolita", a bed targeted for 6-year old girls. Yikes! The retailer claimed to have never heard of the famous 1955 novel in which the narrator becomes way too involved with his 12-year old stepdaughter. Really? The lesson: Names must always be screened for negative overtones, sexual innuendo, political influences or unintended double entendres. This branding effort should have been covered up.
Wow, the retailer never heard of the movie.
In January our Marketing deparment sent out a direct mail piece, as they are wont to do, a fairly funny board game based on the current complexity of Marketing efforts, called "Complextra".
The thing that impressed me, though, was the appearance of the Forest Stewardship Council (or FSC) logo on the piece itself. FSC is a non-profit "devoted to encouraging the responsible management of the world's forests with a commitment to environmentally sound business practices." It has blessings from Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund.
Mary Anne, in our Marketing department, chose Mohawk's Chorus Art, 100# Silk Test which is 50% recycled and 15% post consumer waste for the run.
Just by this ONE choice in the production of the piece, according to Mohawk's environmental calculator:
They may be baby steps, but I think those numbers a danged compelling.
And these were environmental savings reaped by the choice of just one or two key people.
See Mohawk's site (under envrionment) to see what the savings will be for any project by putting in pounds of paper used, recycled content, coated or not, and whether the product was made with windpower.
Another one from the "I just like it, 'cause it's cool" files: Y Water.
Yes it's Organic with a capital "O". And "nutrient rich" (which I'm on the fence about since it's got sugar in it.) And low calorie.. feh.
It's the bottle that's to love.
Y Water founder, Thomas Arndt, teamed with San Francisco-based design firm, fuseproject, to come up with the new product and brand concept. Each bottle can be linked with other bottles by way of YKnots, a connector attached to each Y Water bottle.
The product isn't even hitting Whole Foods shelves until mid year, but they're already making their rounds in Business Week Magazine and Eastman Innovation Lab's site (the bottle itself is made from Eastman's Eastar copolyester).
I think the hefty price tag of $1.69 each might be a bit of a deal breaker for many parents out there.
But maybe not our kids.
GenY indeed.
(Bottom image courtesy of Eastman Innovation Lab.)
I just spent the holidays back home in Nebraska with my family (and lived to tell about it) and I'd have to say that one of the unexpected pleasures was, weirdly, the Wii.
Both my brother's and sister's families both have the Nintendo Wii and it seemed like every time we got together (all 21+ of us), there were always a couple of folks playing Wii bowling, tennis, or golf.
What's amazing to me is how Nintendo invented a system that converts non-game playing adults into "gamers", thus opening up a whole new age range of consumers for them.
Not that I consider my mother a gamer, but there she was bowling on the Wii.
I think it must have something to do with the simplicity of the control and familiarity of the sports included with the Wii that really helps people make that jump.
It turns out the only problem with the Wii is holding on tight enough to the remote.
With any revolution there are bound to be casualties.
As green as some of us want to be, the hard fact is we're going to part with some cash for consumable gifts for others this holiday season.
There's good news, though. Every year the blog Treehugger runs a list of green gifts for their readers and this year they've tagged each item Light Green, Medium Green, or Heavy Green labels based on... well, they don't actually say what it's based on. But I do hope it's good science.
They've also grouped each by who you're giving to ("The Yoga Fiend", "The Jet Setter", "The Geek", "The Right Leaning NRA Member"... okay, I added that last one in.) and also included a healthy dose of charitable organizations to support.
And, like any good blog on a hot topic, it's chock full of dissenting opinions on the items listed. My favorite, as of today, "Treehugger continues to step farther into hypocricy everyday. Today's stumble: holiday consumerism, part III."
Guess who's not getting any figgy pudding?
There's a retelling of A Christmas Carol here somewhere.
Awhile ago I blogged aboutScotts Miracle-Gro, "the world's leading lawn and garden company" suing an upstart fertilizer company, TerraCycle, who makes its product out of organic worm waste (which they refer to as "worm poop") then packages it in old soda bottles.
TerraCycle turned the suit into a marketing opportunity by launching SuedbyScotts.com which parodies the difference in the companies in a very David and
Goliath fashion.
Not to be one-upped in the world of on-line marketing opportunities, one of the PR people from Scotts just contacted me with news of a settlement between their two companies. (With Scotts coming out the winner, of course. Otherwise, why would they contact me?)
Obviously, the Scotts team had scoured blogs for stories about the suit and wanted to make sure their new message was heard loud and clear.
What interested me about this story, and still does, isn't whether or not copyright infringement exists or false claims were made, but how both sides used blogs to promote their side of the story, hoping to grow their claim to the fertilizer market share.
In TerraCycle's case, it absolutely worked for me. I'd never heard of the company and, being somewhat a greenie myself, I was fascinated by their incredibly green (and socially responsible) business plan.
And in Scotts case... well, I just blogged that they won, didn't I?
Like many men, I either am overwhelmed ("Get me out of this STORE!") or underwhelmed ("I'm sorry, what did you say? I dozed off here in the Young Mister section.")
Occasionally my mind does wander productively. "Who the heck would buy that?" (as in below),
"Why is that so overpackaged?", or "Man, I could go for a pretzel about now".
The review is very thorough and covers a lot of ground from the reviewer's favorite section, “The Economics of Product Design�.
"Its sprinkling of short essays reminded me of a simple truism that I sometimes overlook when thinking about design, gazing upon some item in a store or using some kind of interface and wondering how it got to be the way it is, or indeed lamenting the way it got to be how it is (who signed off on that?). That simple fact I forget is that often, an object’s design is only marginally influenced by the hand of a designer. Its design has already been preordained by market (or other) constraints. It is not merely that, as Charles Eames famously said, “design depends largely on constraints,� but something more elemental. The constraint is the design."
A bonus, too, is that the reviewer seamlessly weaves in the Billy Joel lyric "you can't dress trashy till you spend a lot of money."
Budweiser hits it well with this viral marketing piece. I've already gotten emailed this video twice today and I'm not surprised: it's too naughty for broadcast TV and is really danged funny.
Just think of the money Bud is saving not putting this spot on TV.
Not that they could, in its current state.
I remember watching BBC's Monty Python's Flying Circus series uncut on PBS when I was a kid (unbelievable for Omaha, huh?) with all its nudity and innuendo intact, and I think this ad really captures the risqué edginess you can achieve when you don't have to appeal to the wide, broadcast media audience.
PLEASE NOTE, THIS VIDEO IS PG-13 (FOR BLEEPED LANGUAGE, MEN IN TIES, AND ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION) AND MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR OFFICES WHO FROWN UPON SUCH THINGS.
In case you missed the Aquent sponsored Webcast "Successful Creative Briefs: Linking Business Objectives and Creative Strategies" with Creative Consultant, Emily Cohen (maybe you were picking up dry cleaning?), there's hope!
Some clever folks (either at the AMA or Aquent HQ) decided to turn this well-attended presentation into an on-demand Webcast.
And it's still free!!
Here's the skinny:
Emily Cohen discusses how creative briefs should best be used to link business objectives and creative strategies.
Done
right, creative briefs share valuable information, align everyone’s
expectations, and set clear objectives. In practice, this means better
business results as well as a smoother, faster creative process. And
yet, for many reasons, creative briefs are rarely used to their full
potential.
Alongside practical advice on how creative briefs
should be used to streamline your development process, Emily will
provide concrete tips, tools, and techniques to ensure that your
organization is not only creating great briefs, but also getting the
most out of them. Most importantly, she’ll help you use creative briefs
to tighten the link between goals, strategies, and tactics.
The webcast will be of value to anyone
involved in the creative development process: (1) corporate and brand
marketers (e.g. marketing communications, branding, advertising,
product design, website development, naming, etc.), and (2) in-house or
external creative services organizations (advertising agencies, design
studios, freelance writers/designers, etc.).
Leading the talk will be Emily Cohen, a Creative Consultant for over 20 years who currently serves on the board of advisors for InSource and developed and launched the Certificate of Graphic Design program from NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
Here's the skinny: Alongside practical advice on how creative briefs should be used to
streamline your development process, Emily will provide concrete tips,
tools, and techniques to ensure that your organization is not only
creating great briefs, but also getting the most out of them. Most
importantly, she’ll help you use creative briefs to tighten the link
between goals, strategies, and tactics.
The webcast will be of value to anyone involved in the
creative development process: (1) corporate and brand marketers (e.g.
marketing communications, branding, advertising, product design,
website development, naming, etc.), and (2) in-house or external
creative services organizations (advertising agencies, design studios,
freelance writers/designers, etc.).
The meeting is set for Thursday, May 17th at 10AM for those of us here on the West Coast.
If you're wondering whether your e-mail marketing strategies are knocking off your customers one-by-one by driving them to hit the delete button every time they see your company name or clicking the link to unsubscribe, you might want to look at this recent interview MarketingSherpa had with Travelocity's Director of Customer Loyalty and Marketing.
Paul Briggs has been Director at the company for 4 1/2 years and is a huge fan of e-mail marketing segmentation. His program has gone from 2 to 3 million generic e-mails messages to a broad audience into targeted mailings to highly-segmented lists which could be as small as 50,000 names.
He's finding that a better targeted audience initiative "consistently converted
sales anywhere from eight to 12 times higher than less-relevant offers."
The article, found here, is open access for today, but may require sign in if you're reading this in, say, 2025.
(If you are reading this in the future, would you look me up and see how I'm doing? I'm very interested to find out.)
While you're reading the article, you might as well sign up for their free newsletter, which comes highly recommended from our Marketing Director, James Gardner.
Even though Easter seems to roll around the calendar every year like those other lunar-based holidays (Chinese New Year, Rosh Hashana, Burning Man), I can always count on our own Debra to show up at my desk every February with the Girl Scout Cookie order form.
But what if you don't have a Debra in your office to bug you with the form? How are you going to get your Thin Mints and Samoas?
Fortunately, the Girl Scouts have launched their new Website just for you.
Just enter your zip-code, find your local council, and get your cookies. (Seems on-line ordering would defeat the concept.)
In a clever bit of marketing they also created a MySpace page with some vintage cookie commercials with some out-of-control low budgets.
It's nice that they're introducing those girls to Sales AND Marketing, don't you think?
I imagine someone might be able to explain how the actual company names showed up as the top search results on both Google and Yahoo!, but it seems odd to me.
You know it's coming up. And you know what you have to do.
Yes, I'm speaking about Valentine's Day. And it's in a short 9 days.
I was looking through Craigslist for used iMacs the other day when I came across this strange item:
Authentic Tiffany Ring Case, Box, Ribbon with Bag for Valentine's - $45
"You will receive:
1 Tiffany Velvet Ring Case
1 Tiffany Blue Box
1 Tiffany White Ribbon
1 Tiffany Blue Bag (small size)
They are all in mint condition and authentic."
So... I'm supposed to buy my Very Special Someone (VSS) a ring from, say, the 99 Cents or Less store, then put it in this box to fool her into thinking I bought it from Tiffany & Co?
Sounds like an honest beginning to a relationship to me!
Natalie in our office said that she'd seen them on eBay, and sure enough, there are 4 or so being auctioned off while I type.
Is there something going on with Valentine's Day that I didn't know about or is this weird to everyone?
Last night they came back, the traveling magazine sellers. A couple of guys had come to our door last week, looking to sell us a few magazines to help earn college scholarships. We see these guys a couple times a year during the winter, but for some reason over the last two weeks they keep coming to my door.
A couple weeks ago my wife was smart enough to tell the first guy she wasn't interested and, if he wanted to talk to someone, that I'd be home tonight. Having done (some) sales, I'm not against talking to these guys. But unless they're raising money for a school or church down the street, they're probably not getting my money.
The next guy showed up at 8pm (which seems to be the magic hour for telemarketers and door-to-door salespeople.) He was young, 19 or so. I let him do his pitch. He told me he wasn't from here. Okay. He was from Oakland and had been shot at and living on the streets. That this was his his first job and an introduction to working with people. If he succeeded, the company would let him counsel others like him, you know, help them off the streets, too. But first he had to prove he could speak to people door-to-door without using slang.
I told him it sounded good to me, but what, exactly, was he selling? He was selling something, right? He didn't just need me to sign the sheet on the clipboard he was holding to tell the company that he's done a great job of talking to me, right?
Turned out he was selling magazines.
"And if you're not interested in buying magazines for yourself, you can do what your neighbor down the street Sue did: she donated the magazines to a school who needs them for their library."
I thought this was incredibly clever, because he'd anticipated my saying that I didn't need any magazines. Who could turn down a school needing some more reading materials? (Kids these days love Cosmo, don't they?)
I told him I appreciated everything he told me (which was true), could he give me a card or something? "We don't have business cards," was his reply. "Okay," I told him. "I realize you're doing a good thing here and a very hard thing, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. The problem is, there are a lot of companies who run magazine scams, duping customers into buying subscriptions for magazines that never appear. He told me his company was legit, why would he be working with them for so long if they weren't legit? Now I'm supposed to believe this complete stranger about whether his company was legit or not. Nope. (I didn't really buy the fact that Enron was innocent, either, but I didn't point that out.)
"I'll tell you what, give me your company's Web site and I'll check it out. If it's something I'm interested in, I'll order some magazines, use your name, and you can get a commission," I told him. He told me it didn't work that way, he wouldn't get the commission if I ordered by phone. Really? I let him know I'd worked in sales before and that concept seemed pretty odd. I mean, what if a car dealer wasn't allowed to give you his business card and whoever the customer saw next got the sale. Not really a good sales plan. I told him I'd check it out and he could come back again the next day or so.
And he never showed up again. (Apparently, he didn't tell the next guy, who showed up last night, not to come.)
The unsurprising turn in this story is that his company Trinity Magazines does not have a Web site. In fact, the Attorney General in North Carolina charged them with selling fake subscriptions. The only mention of their company I could find on the Internet, besides the lawsuit, was a report on traveling sales crews by the Dedicated Memorial Parents Group. I might add the report is not, by any means, glowing.
You probably don't want to read any of those stories at that site, unless you like hearing about such depressing things as missing children, abuse, murder, etc. There's also an in depth article at The New York Review of Magazines describing how the traveling magazine sales world actually works.
So what do you tell these kids who show up at your door? Tell them, "Get away as fast as possible, you're being scammed"? Not sure that would work. I found a site for crew members who want to get back home, MagCrew.com and a NY number for stranded kids (212) 666-4221. I figure I can at least print a few of these up and keep them close by the front door to give out. Who knows if it works, but at least I'm trying, right?
Okay, now that I've brought everyone down, I should let you know that I emailed our local Neighborhood Watch Captain in hopes of getting a message out to the neighbors.
Turns out his wife already bought $60 worth of magazines.
And so are the tattoos and high kicking sheep, but every time I click to articles from the New York Times to the Sacramento Bee, there they are, incredibly excited because mortgage rates have dropped to an all time low.
I'm speaking about the LowerMyBills ads, just in case you're not getting the reference.
Ducks waddle. Babies wear diapers emblazoned with state's abbreviations. Silhouettes dance on pumpkins while a knife cuts out "Calculate New Payment" with alarming proximity (which brought back a lot of memories of a dance club in Silverlake for me).
A NY Times article yesterday explored the phenomena that are the LowerMyBills' on-line ads. Even though people complain that they're intrusive, distracting, and many times tacky, the company insists they work. LowerMyBills is a lead generation company, when people click the ads and fill out the application, the company makes money selling those applications to companies like Citibank.
The Designer of the ads said each one usually earns $4 in lender referral fees for each dollar spent (the national average, according to the Times, is less than $2 per dollar spent).
Who says you have to be beautiful or make sense to be successful? (At this point I am going to refrain from using Courtney Love's name.)
Aquent's own Director of Marketing for MIT, James Gardner, who also runs the on-line ad archive Adverlicio.us, has a funny quote in the article as well as a link to his collection of LowerMyBills ads.
BTW, if you work at all in the world of on-line ads, James' site is a great resource. They collect and categorize them so people can talk about what does and doesn't work.
There are some hunters, if you don't know, who will shoot at anything. They just "pray and spray" as the expression goes. They know if they shoot enough, they'll eventually hit something.
Their research team ran live tests on 3 HTML emails and people clicked the links all right, but they also clicked on non-clickable items: photos, logos, and crudely drawn portraits of bank tellers (okay, I added that last one, but you get the point).
Since the point of sending an email from your company is getting people to click the links, this is probably important, right?
They give a few suggestions to bone up your next email campaign, mainly make all photos and images clickable and add more right-side and top-of-e-mail hotlinks. Not such a bad thing to share with your design team.
I should add, though, the emails tested did not include the clickable-link hand icon you'd normally see when you roll over a link. The test group was just prompted to click on anything they thought was a link, so this may weaken the study somewhat. Regardless, it's an interesting study, and, heck, a few more links never hurt anyone!
Or "Junk Mail" as the New York Times would have it.
According to the Times and the U.S. Postal Service the number of direct mail pieces sent last year was up 15% from 5 years ago (they do include catalogs in that figure).
The surprising find in the article? Many consumers prefer direct mail to spam and phone solicitations and find "old-fashioned mailed ads work, particularly in combination with online
offerings and Internet purchases".
All this may be good news for the Postal Service. Remember when they were worried that the one-two punch of the Internet and FedEx would put them out of business?
Instead it looks like they may be laughing all the way to the Mint.
Seems like it was only yesterday I was listening to Tom Davenport describing Marketing Analytics on an Aquent/AMA Webinar. But it wasn't yesterday, it was last week.
I've simply got to get a 2006 calendar.
And now tomorrow Aquent's President of Aquent Consulting, Nina Eigerman, is giving an AMA Webinar on "How to Maximize Marketing Spend by Increasing the Role of Internal Creative Services." (The title sounds more fun when sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island.)
If you're interested in creating an internal creative department that can compete with the agencies, you should tune in.
Ah, Staff Meetings: fun, games, exercises, food, and (yes) numbers.
You can't escape the numbers, but you can try to make it a little more fun, right? And not forced fun (right, Susie?)
Since we're in Q4, this quarter's Staff Meeting was all about Holidays.
The new folks thought we were joking when we said to Dress Up as Your Favorite Holiday.
Yeah, we always joke about stuff like that.
Free prizes to identifying the holidays pictured below! (Just e-mail me your answers.)
Oh, yes, and Boston Market did a fine job of bringing in Turkey and Gravy,MashedPotatoes,Stuffing,CranberrySauce,Corn Recently On the Cob, and Biscuits.
Sadly, it's also Ozzy's last day and we're losing him to our Portland office.
Question: If a blog comment falls in the woods and no one's around to respond to it, does it matter?
If you ask any blogger, whether they blog for themselves or for a company, what's the hardest part of posting (aside from coming up with daily entries), they'll probably answer, "Getting people to comment."
It's just a fact that a lot of people like to read blogs, but may not feel comfortable putting their words out there for everyone to see (and possibly shoot down). Turns out the upside of the Internet, anonymity, is also the downside.
It's a sad fact, really, as most bloggers tend to be nice people who are interested in a subject and in communicating that interest with like-minded folks. Bloggers take care of the folks who honestly put up their questions or opinions. The only exception I ever see is when someone starts getting nasty. And those folks, just like the bad guys in kid flicks, always get it in the end.
So this strong need for commentary on a blog makes it all the more confusing that a company would set up a corporate blog and leave no one to mind the shop.
I posted a comment on their Sept. 12th post and I'm still waiting for someone, anyone to check in.
Maybe they took a long lunch.
Doesn't seem much of anyone over there really is paying attention to any of the posts.
To me this is marketing at its worst. It says someone in their marketing department decided, "Hey, let's have a blog. They're cool and cutting edge," decided to feature it prominently at their main site for one of their product lines (in this case the site for Simple Green Toe shoes), but never made it anyone's job to run the dang thing. Smart, huh?
Though this may be their version of a company newsletter, it is not a blog.
Hey, if Heather over at Microsoft can do her busy job and still have time to address every single comment to her very busy blog, the folks over atimple can, too.
How about the guy in the stock room? He's probably got some stories.
And if you're one of those folks who loves reading blogs but has been afraid to comment, go right ahead, we'll take care of you!
Well, not on the aforementioned Simple blog, but you got that, right?
It's weird, sometimes you go into a store and you get surprised by the things they sell.
Case in point, the car wash on Santa Monica Blvd. that I pass every day. While getting my car washed and checking out their sunshades, iPod holders, etc., I couldn't help but notice these nice (and very realistic) BB handguns and shotguns:
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