JW5150 – Page 21 – Things I've Been Working On

Great Depression 2

I’ve had a lot of random thoughts about the current financial crisis, and the role the media in shaping the public opinion. I get the feeling that the economy will bounce back when people get tired of hearing about bad news. Will consumer spending patterns really change so that Americans actually do some saving rather than live off debt?

I’m all set with every marketing campaign or event talking about how to do “x” in this economy, or in this recession, or in the downturn. From a sales/marketing perspective I haven’t heard anything from any of these sessions that wasn’t crap.

Yes, you should step up your marketing during a recession, the brands that do will never have an easier time getting attention. This is about as useful as saying “if you are in the desert you really need to drink more water”. The problem is that you have no budget and you need sales to get that budget.

Am I the only person that’s offended by these arguements? As if last all the projects I was working on last year were drowing in inefficiencies and had no concern for budget- “Yeah that free SUV campaign was a big mistake, and the junkets to the Bahamas, maybe we should try email campaigns, webinars and social media now”.

Panic and fear spread. I had a good laugh last night at the PRSA cocktail event as we came up with a list of the previous “Swine Flu” panics:

Flesh-eating bacteria
Mad Cow disease
Bird Flu
Killer Bees
and a list of 5 more that I forget thanks to our dinner at The Brandy Library

Spreading disaster makes for great news, who cares that if you add up all of those they are nothing compared to Heart Disease, or diseases that could be wiped out of developing countries. That stuff is just too boring. I’m enjoying all the great buys on Craig’s List, but the financial news is boring me. Move along people, nothing to see here.

Prognostication

Seth Godin Says Jay Moonah will be Paying Me a Year Early

Post author By themshow
Post date April 21, 2009
No Comments on Seth Godin Says Jay Moonah will be Paying Me a Year Early

Seth’s blog predicts there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US by 2012. I was really excited to see that because it’s so close to the bet that I placed back in December calling out 2/26/13 as the day that I won’t be able to get a printed newspaper or watch the 6 o’clock news.

The bigger question is – will $100 have enough buying power remaining that I’ll still care…

Daily Life

Marathon Monday!

The past month has been absolutely insane. This weekend was the first chance I had to stay at home and try and get things back together, I slept 10 hours on Saturday night. So what’s been going on? Here’s the best picture of the past month:

Carin has always talked about getting to swim with the Dolphins so I got her an early birthday present and we went to Discovery Cove, which is part of Sea World. You can click on the picture to see the rest of the Flickr set, we did the “Trainer for a Day” program and the backstage tour of the aviary, the feeding rooms and got to meet some interesting “critters” as the lovely Carin calls them.

This was the first half of our trip down south, from there we went to Alabama for a wedding of one of Carin’s cousins. The wedding was a great time but I have to say I was a little disappointed, I was hoping that I’d have some good stories about Alabama, like somebody with an accent so thick that I couldn’t understand them, or some jokes about me being a Yankee. Instead I was surprised to see south of Birmingham could have easily been mistaken for Birmingham, Michigan, or any other part of America. I was able to get the same Chick-fil-a sandwich I get in Burlington, Mass, and the Church had all the multimedia systems that you’d see anywhere in Los Angeles.

Not that this is a bad thing, in fact perhaps we are becoming more of one country, but I’m just sorry I don’t have some kind of cool story about driving around in the General Lee using dynamite arrows to blow stuff up.

In other news there’s been a lot going on at AccuRev, and Marketing Over Coffee continues its rampage. I was not able to go to SXSW and kind of regret it, so I’ll have to fix that for next year. I’ve been having fun talking with a bunch of other people doing new media projects so maybe that will motivate me to get another M Show out the door soon.

I also had today off as a “floater” and got to go downtown to watch the marathon. Surprisingly I haven’t written a post about when I ran in 2002 (pulling a Commander McBragg here, anyone else remember him?), so I need to dig up some pictures to post about that. It’s also time for the quarterly goal update – and thanks to a full year of mortgage payments in 2008 we finally got a tax break that paid for the dolphin adventure!

Daily Life SalesForce.com

DonorsChoose.org

As a presenter at the SalesForce.com annual conference (DreamForce ’09) I was given a $100 gift card for DonorsChoose.org , an organization that uses the web to match donors with projects in schools that require funding. From the project that I chose:

“Help me teach the language to my preschoolers! I teach public preschool in an inner city. I have 30 students ranging in age from 3 to 5 years old, 33% are special education students. Eighty percent of my students are Non-English speaking and come from low income families.”

“In order for my students to enjoy and discover a variety of music and literature, it is important to have a listening center. The listening center will allow a group of children to put on head phones and hear the phonetics of the language while at the same time listen to wonderful stories. Audio books provide students an alternative way to acquire knowledge and allow interactive learning to take place.”

You can read the rest of the info on this project here.

I thought this project was a good fit considering that I make my living in communications. A few weeks later I got a full size 8.5 x 11 envelope came in the mail. It had been a long day and I grumbled about being asked for more money (as I tend to get 2 or 3 DM solicitations a week – thanks for all the return addresses guys, I’ll never use them all), but when I opened the envelope it was a wonderful surprise – a thank you letter from the teacher, letters from the students and some photographs of the kids using the listening station.

I was really impressed with the service and the program, if you are looking for a place to make a charitable donation, DonorsChoose is worth checking out. I have to thank Brian from Salesforce and the guys at Manticore for their help with DreamForce.

Here’s one of the thank you letters from the kids:

Brain Buster

QR Campaigns

I was in a discussion about QR (Quick Response – which are two dimensional barcodes), and was told about baseball cards using this data to generate 3D images. You hold the card up to your webcam, and on the screen you get an image.

Some stats here, and links to campaigns by Ford and Pepsi and more info, as usual, at wikipedia

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAjEGqGnpFI#t=00m30s[/youtube]

I had seen the same thing with Mini Cooper a few months back, I think there will be a lot of interesting stuff on this front:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTYeuo6pIjY[/youtube]

Tags 3D Imaging, QR, Quick Response

Brain Buster Prognostication

Social Media Lies – Like Trackbacks are Good

Post author By themshow
Post date March 15, 2009
No Comments on Social Media Lies – Like Trackbacks are Good

Clay Shirky has written a great post about newspapers and the future of journalism.

The other thing that struck me about this post was the number of worthless trackbacks. I’ve started to look at blogs along a spectrum where the degree of interactivity is inversely related to the popularity of the author/blog owner (which, for the larger ones may be corporations or the former dead tree vendors Mr. Shirky is talking about).

The blog starts with everything open, although by default now you have to have some spam protection on. If you reach critical mass you start to have comments that deride you personally, are generally crude, or caricatures of humanity, usually submitted anonymously, and so the comments get shut off in favor of trackbacks.

The acceleration continues and then the trackbacks get too spammy so they have to go too.

The underlying issue is that it doesn’t scale as well when you hit explosive growth. Something I need to think about some more…

Fanboy Geek Stuff

Playing with the Kindle

I was messing around last night trying to see what a Kindle graphic novel might look like:

This really didn’t work, I had the PDF from a DVD that Marvel used to sell, but the two page spread is too much for the small screen to take. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to get a bigger, color screen, but I do worry about what it means for guys like this.

Geek Stuff Prognostication

TiVo using Bonjour

This will only be of interest to the most hardcore video geeks (perhaps only half of the readers here). I just upgraded to the latest version of TivoToGo – the program that gets TV shows off my TiVo and on to my PC, and then converts them to a format that I can watch on my PSP (or iPod, but I don’t do that anymore) and it’s all legal. Or at least, I’m using a tool I bought from TiVo not downloaded from some weird server in some Eastern Bloc country.

The interesting thing is that version 2.7 uses Bonjour, some software that is also used in iTunes to detect what media players are out on your network.

Apple and TiVo seems like a really nice fit, don’t you think?

SEO and Paid Search