This Friday (February 3rd) will be the fourth anniversary of smays.com and I’m going to mark the occasion by attempting to drink four cold beers. I invite any bloggers and/or readers to join me at Chili’s right after work (five-ish). If I succeed in drinking four beers, I probably shouldn’t drive so please bring this phone number (Checker Cab) with you: 636-7101. It’s possible you’ll be the only one that shows up and I don’t want to throw up in your car.
Time Machine
A few years ago, a sale rep for our company asked to have a commercial written and producted in a ridiculously short period of time. My advice was something along the lines of:
Go down to the basement where we keep the Time Machine. Set it for two weeks ago. When you get back there, submit this work order and it’ll be ready by tomorrow.
Since then it’s become something of a running joke for a few of us at the office. Yesterday it occurred to me how much fun it would be to have a Time Machine in the basement. It would be the highlight of every tour. I don’t have the skills to build such a device but I have some ideas on what it should include:
- Computer and monitor
- Headphones
- Analog date display (more fun than the monitor)
- Flashing lights
- Siren and/or horn
- Levers (lots of them)
- Switches (lots of them)
- Seat belt (shoulder harness would be better)
- Helmet (women probably won’t wear this or headphones)
And I sort of see this on a platform sitting on some huge coil springs, so there would be the slightest movement as you climbed into the seat. Which should be either an old dentist chair, or one of the old metal tractor seats with the holes in it.
What started as a gag could be a great marketing tool. A fun way to review significant moments in the company’s history. But we could also look into the future. This would be huge. I predict we’d have so much word-of-mouth on this, customers would be calling us, asking if they could visit and take a ride in the Learfield Time Machine.
So who could build such a thing? I have no dought some artist or sculptor has already created exactly what I’m looking for. But it’s in a museum or art gallary and damned expensive. My childhood friend RP could have built this in his prime. Not sure about today. He has the imagination and technical skills.
Joe Browning could design it but I’m not sure he could build it. He’s an architect in Santa Fe so he probably knows someone that could make this real. If you know of someone that could pull this off, put me in touch. Hell, I might even be able to get the Grownups at our company to come up with some dough. If not, we’ll have a series of car washes or ham and bean dinners and raise the money.
Naked Conversations
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:
- Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
- Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
- “First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
- Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
- If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
- If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)
If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.
I’ll update this post as I move through the book.
Death Row Blogger
“Vernon Lee Evans Jr. — amateur advice columnist and convicted murderer — is scheduled to die next month by lethal injection. He is one of the very few death row inmates to have a blog and, activists say, perhaps the only condemned man worldwide to use a blog to take questions from readers.”
— washingtonpost.com:
More Squirt Cheese in History
“It was against this backdrop that Marco Polo floated into Japan in a hot air balloon, carrying with him the most luxurious goods from his homeland: extra virgin olive oil, Venetian blinds, and his 5 remaining bottles of squeezable parmesan cheese. The Japanese people, after years of gustatory oppression, gobbled Polo’s golden ribbons of delight with gusto. They rose up against their oppressors, won their freedom, and never looked back.
Is there a lesson for the modern reader in Japan’s tragic romance with its scrumptious first love? Perhaps it is this: we fight the good fight for that which we hold dear, but ultimately, to win or lose is a mere footnote to our having tasted our bacon-flavored life to the fullest.”
Wouldn’t you love to know and hang out with someone that can write like this? I am so pleased to know David Brazeal and so sad we don’t get to hang out.
Living Healthy (14) – The DASH Diet
Rock and Roll Fantasy
So you have great singer/song writers like Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, Don Henley and Glen Frey who –as far as I know– aren’t making hit records any more. They’re rich, the royalties are coming in, they worked long and hard…so maybe they’re just taking it easy. Why should they bust their asses writing songs. Because they love writing songs. It was once their passion and I want to believe it still is. So where are the songs?
Let’s suppose in the hip-hop musical world of 2006, nobody wants to hear a song by these old farts. But that doesn’t sound right. I’m betting they’re still writing songs…and there are millions of fans who would love to buy/hear them.
Okay, here’s the fantasy part. Let’s say you’re one of these musical legends and you still noodle around in your home studio, writing and recording songs. Not necessarily ‘hit’ songs, just songs. Stuff you like. Why not put it up on a website, give your fans a little taste, and let us buy them?
I think Janis Ian (if you don’t know, it doesn’t matter) does something like this. And why not. If your music is no longer “commercially viable,” but you still love making it… put it up there. Let us buy it direct. Like I said, it’s a fantasy.
Speaking of music… I would love to hear Sheryl Crow do Me and Bobby McGee. Not the Joplin screamer. More of a ballad treatment maybe. Has she ever performed that song?
Still speaking of music… I kinda like the song Table for One by Liz Phair.
But reaching back it occurs to me
There will always be some kind of crisis for me
Not a good drinking song, but haunting.
If somebody has Doug Howard’s email address, he can probably answer the question above. Play the Kennett card.
End of music research?
Mark Ramsey asks: What’s the point of music research when every listener personalizes his or her music to his or her own tastes? And where’s your NON-music content, Mr. Broadcaster?
He also wants to drop the term “streaming” in favor of “Internet radio.” My only problem with that is where that leaves us verb-wise. Now I typically write/say: We’ll stream the governor’s speech at 7:00 p.m. If what we’re doing here is “Internet radio,” do I say we’ll “broadcast” the speech? It certainly is not a broadcast.
I’m becoming a fan of Mark’s blog. He seems to really know the radio business and has a firm grasp of new media.
You = Your iTunes
Tom Peters says his #1 belief about management is: You = Your Calendar.
“All we have is our time. The way we distribute it is our ‘strategic plan,’ our ‘vision,’ our ‘values.’ Period. So how’d you spend your precious time today? Tell me, and I’ll tell you what you actually care about — it’s simple and unerring.”
Maybe. But I don’t want to be my calendar. Nobody has to guess what bloggers care about. It’s all right here. But if I weren’t a blogger, you could look at my iPod and get a sense of who I am. In fact, here’s what you can do in lieu of a memorial service for smays: Plug my nano into a good sound system…put it on shuffle… and let it play until the battery runs down. Friends can stop by for a few minutes and listen.
Living Healthy (13) – Back Pain
Recorded January 21, 2006