Just throw it away.

So I am in the market for a new point and shoot digital camera, basically to replace the one that got dropped. It seems like a pretty straight forward process, but as I am learning this is an overly complicated process, and I even know the exact camera I want.
It will be my third of the exact same camera in five years because the first iteration treated me so well and I now have back up batteries, chargers and SD cards. The problem is, what do you do with a 12 month old semi broken camera? It works most of the time, but it’s cracked, it won’t eject the battery easily and doesn’t always play nice. Some research reveals that there is a much better camera already on the market for less than the last one I bought, so a $100 repair job seems silly over a $170 new camera. Here is where it gets goofy. No one wants this camera…NO ONE! A camera shop wouldn’t take a credit for a trade in, or even take it to recycle it. “I think people just throw away old cameras” told over the phone by a camera shop employee. I was shocked.
The resolution is I found a company online that will take my old camera and donate parts or money to a charity of my choosing. Now, the shipping comes at my cost and I will get nothing out of the experience but a good feeling. What bothers me the most is that the calls to several camera shops all had the same advice…throw it away. Needless to say I found a proper home for my old camera that will benefit a charity of my choosing, but I am sad that it took this much effort to recycle.

Social Media

Don’t make me do it, please.  I really hate the idea of even bringing up the subject, but it is 2010.  Our senses are constantly BOMBARDED with information, videos, and pictures so it is unavoidable.  We are talking about the 1,000 lbs. gorilla in the (board) room that no one really knows what to do with it.  Millennials love it, Gen-Xers don’t really understand it, and baby boomers are just lost.  Here it is, social media. 

Honestly, I fought it for years.  I was fine with a well crafted email, a well placed phone call, or God forbid a 60 minute coffee date to catch up.  But now that I am sucked in both personally and professionally and  I can’t seem to get away.  My latest battle has come with trying to develop and  execute a comprehensive S.M. plan at my place of employment, while educating my boss.  On day two of the freewheeling social media plan my boss asked, ‘any updates or leads?’  I thought he was joking.  When he asked again on day five I had to sit him down and have a heart to heart.  I told him that this will be a thankless and tiresome job that might not turn into revenue for months, and even if it does we might not ever know that a job came from a facebook update or tweet.  His response was ‘what’s a tweet’?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to belittle him for his lack of knowledge or experience on social media/ online marketing.  The point is that here you have someone that is highly successful in their industry and doesn’t know a lick about social media.  And then it hit me, Facebook is the new highway billboard.  You have to post (signs) everywhere.  I can’t imagine that the tire shop off the highway has cars lining up because of a killer billboard.  I am also sure that I will never get a phone call the starts, ‘your facebook page is awesome’.  No, they will probably say, ‘I found you online’.  The lesson, put up as many billboards as you can in as many different places as you can to get your message across; facebook, twitter, youtube, linkedin, flickr, etc you never know who is looking, or where they are looking.

Why I judge every book by its cover.

First I need to start by giving an inspirational tip of the hat to Malcolm Gladwell and Blink.  His ability to break down cause and effect relationships into concise examples is astounding. 

We are all familiar with the adage ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’.  It was never merely a phrase to help with your decision making process at the library, rather a motto as to how to judge and evaluate people and your surroundings.  I can hear my mother now scolding me as I scoffed at a homeless person asking for change, explaining that just because they had dirty clothes and lived in a cardboard box didn’t mean they were a bad person.  At the time it seemed like a valuable life lesson, but now it seems like a low level attempt to seem open minded and non judgmental.  No offense mom.

Today I take the exact opposite approach, not just in books, but people and my surroundings alike.  This is an idea that Malcolm Gladwell describes as thin slicing.  He illustrates a person’s innate ability to accurately judge a person’s character within seconds of meeting or even seeing them.  This is a very complex theory that Gladwell discusses in over 200 pages in his book Blink, so I will leave that detail to the expert.

The part that I do want to discuss is actually judging books…by their covers.  In the age of fast marketing, flashy graphics and branding strategy, a books’ cover might be the only opportunity the author has to convince a potential reader to pick up their literary interpretation of Web marketing for the small business owner in a mid tier market.  We are overwhelmed by our constantly rotating choices in the stacks at your local bookstore with publications geared towards the most micro of topics.  Most authors do not have the luxury of name power to push their latest piece, so they have to rely on pictures of monkey’s flying out of a computer, or a half naked women to catch my eye.  And if I do happen to pick up your book and the cover screams low budget I will assume the work wasn’t good enough to get picked up by a big publishing house and put through the rigors of brand development.

It is a sad state I will admit, as I would like to think that the little guy still has hope to reach the world with an inspired piece of literature without the financial or graphical support of a publishing monster.  But in today’s over stimulated world you must be just as creative with the outside of the book as you hopefully were with the inside.

Why won’t you listen to me, I am creative I SWEAR!

I am going to steal a little from MD on this one, the three parts to success innovation: Need/Insight, Idea and Communication. I want to talk about the last part, communication, in reference not to innovation but to employment. As one of the thousands of job seekers in the U.S. right now I have found the market to be an unfriendly world to the likes of us ‘creatives’. We have found that many of our jobs have been slashed and burned and now must take our talents into other avenues attempting to adapt once wonderfully orchestrated skills into serviceable line items on an online job application. Our options are limited and our opportunity to present our unique skills are slim. In a time when a job posting for someone with 5 specific skills sets and exactly 4 years of experience is responded to by hundreds of specifically qualified people our cover letter describing ‘innovative thinking’ is quickly passed aside. Articles on job search sites and CNN give tips on how to ‘stand out’ from the masses seem like old hat to people that are used to coming up with outside that box ideas. Seems pretty hopeless. That was the glass half empty part, now the glass half full. We now have an opportunity to become extremely creative…communicators, this article is the proof. While my 11th grade English teacher would have a field day with a red pen on my grammar, she would also applaud my efforts to reach out of my comfort zone in order to have a thoughtful conversation. Since my ‘job challenged’ period began I have found a new passion of writing and reading and have engaged in blogging and correspondence that have spawned some wonder new friends, business contacts, and yes even some work. My question to you now is, when is the last time you changed the way you have spoken to the world?

Design less, get more.

I am a big fan of simplicity. Many designers associate this term with being a minimalist, but there are a few subtle differences that separate the two. Minimalists like Mies van der Rohe claim that ‘less is more’ and advocate designs that serve multiple purposes relying on light, lines, and textures to add decoration, but this is far from simple. These designs have a complex sophistication that takes careful thought and planning in order to accomplish its goal of providing a design with depth. Transversely I think a simple design combines basic design elements or design changes to alter functionality with little aesthetic depth.


The other day I found a great example of a simple design element that dramatically changes the original object’s function, the lock washer. The washer is a wonderfully simple object that is used hundreds of times a day in a variety of industries. The lock washer is just a simple variation on an already useful product to create an entirely new product. I am sure there wasn’t a brainstorming session at the washer manufacturing plant to design ‘new cooler washers for the younger generation’, but rather someone was tinkering in their shop one day and discovered that a washer with a cut and a slight bend served to keep a bolt much tighter.

The lesson to designers is to look for the simple solution first, and while it might not be exciting or revolutionary it might just be a great innovation.

Ad Sense and Nonsense

Old Spice.

I have to admit I am completely enamored with the Old Spice ad campaign over the past year or so, and especially since the Super Bowl. They have managed to take a brand that was synonymous with your father’s medicine cabinet and bring it into the main stream. I think the thing that impresses me most about the campaign is that while they are trying to appeal to a more youthful demographic, they have continued to embrace their classic Americana roots. There are no fancy spokesmen, no skateboarders jumping through the air, or naked women fondling great smelling men. Instead they decided to use a humorous over romanticized portrayal of a classic Americana, while taking a few jabs at the nonsense put out by many other companies. Well done Old Spice.

Chevy Malibu Car commercial with Asian voice over.
I was a little shocked when I heard a spot on the radio today. The ad was for the Chevy Malibu, and how a family finally made the switch from Toyota over to Chevy and they couldn’t be happier. The voice for the first part of the spot sounded like your average 45 year old white guy from nowhere, America. Then out of nowhere his wife chimes in…’I was the first person in my family to buy anything but a Toyota…” The strange part about this voice over is that the voice was coming from what sounded like an Asian women that had just arrived in the United States. Her English was horrible and she only had one line before her husband finished the last thirty seconds of the spot. I get what Chevy is trying to do here…’hey Asians, buy our cars’, but it just felt really awkward and insincere. I guess in a radio spot the best way to tell your listeners that someone is not from the U.S. is to give them some over the top accent, but do they really think that the Asian population is suddenly going to run out and buy American made cars because Peggy “the Asian that married an American man that lives in Omaha” said so?

How diet fads could help shape a sustainable revolution

Starting in 1994 the FDA required all food products to have the updated nutrition label, a decision at the time that might not have seemed like a big deal. In the years following this move we began to see a flurry of diets and fad diets that caused consumers across this country to judge products based on what they found on the back panel as much as they did on the name on the front. Who knows how much correlation actually exists between the two events, but it is interesting watching people in a grocery store attempting to evaluate products based on their current diet. “I am really watching my calories from fat”, “I need to have more good cholesterol”, or “I am not eating carbs, white flour or refined sugar”. And while this movement hasn’t vaulted the American public into a suddenly healthy nation, it has caused food producers to reevaluate their products and menus. Whether it is the Subway diet, Applebee’s advertising 500 calorie meals, or Taco Bell offer ‘fresco’ items, the principal is the same. Nutrition facts transparency is opening people’s eyes to just how bad the food is they are consuming. Many companies are not too happy about it as they are forced to tell their most loyal customers ‘hey the Big Mac value meal is really bad for you’. See the 2009 federal court decision requiring New York fast food chains to display nutrition facts on their menus; the New York State Restaurant Association was not happy.
So how can we use this to our advantage in our drive to make America more sustainable? How about a ‘nutrition facts’ label on products displaying information on the product’s and company’s environmental grade? Even if the information doesn’t pressure consumers into buying ‘healthier’ products, the transparency might force companies to reevaluate their environmental practices. It might not make the average consumer ‘greener’, and they might see their options and still eat the Big Mac, but in the process it might make a lot of companies see exactly what they are doing to the environment. Companies would hate it, they would pay lawyers millions of dollars to try and keep their environmental skeletons in the closet, but for the average consumer at Walgreens the information is power. Suddenly we all have the power to balance price and effectiveness vs. it’s ‘ECOValue’.

Who Cares if Organic Food is Good for You?

I would like to take a minute to discuss (with absolutely no scientific support) the merits of producing and eating organic food. Lately I have been finding a bounty of articles that want to debate the nutritional merits of eating organic food. Some have come to the aid of the organic food industry, but some continue to question the health benefits vs cost of organics. (Almost the exact same arguments about vitamins and supplements are battled in health and research publications) The truth is we may never know the full benefits of eating organic foods. Every human varies biologically and is exposed to different environmental factors, which makes a long term scientific test (over the span of ten plus years) virtually impossible. Add to the fact that two pieces of produce grown on the same farm could have drastically different nutrition levels, let alone an orange from Florida vs one from South America, and we just have way too many variables to produce a viable experiment.




After all of this debating, I think we have missed out on one of the biggest known benefits of producing organic food. It is good for the environment. When I reach for the organic apple in the store my first thought is definitely ‘this will taste better and will have no pesticides’, maybe if for no other reason to justify the extra cost. I do consider the fact that this might be a complete farce, but what I do know is this apple is better for the environment, and that is enough for me to spend the extra few cents.


I guess my point is, why are we wasting all of this energy debating the health benefits of organic food (even though it seems like a no brainer to me that pesticide free food will be better for me) when the simple fact is organic gardening is just good practice? You want to start taking some serious steps to making this country more environmentally friendly?


I was thinking of some crazy ideas of how to level the economic playing field for organic farmers, again with no solid economic data to support any of these ideas. What if a grocery store offered to ‘match the difference’ between organic and non organic produce certain days of the week? So instead of paying $0.20 more for the organic apple, you pay $0.10 and the store matches the other $0.10.


What are some other ways we can support organic farming?

Productive...Sounds Great.

All day I have been thinking about the lady that works at the cleaners by my house. Every time I go in there she is so happy, so excited to see you and run around like a crazy lady working so hard. As I left there this morning I thought ‘why is this lady so happy? She works six days a week, 10 hours a day and probably makes 40k a year. I would be miserable.’ It finally hit me hours later when I heard someone on the news giving a eulogy saying…’lived a happy and productive life’. Productive? It doesn’t seem like great word to describe someone’s life. It sounds more like a description of an auto assembly plant. That word stuck in my mind for the next few hours.




I went and had lunch and saw a busboy and thought, ‘wow he looks really productive’. But that didn’t help because he looked really happy too. Needless to say I was very confused. These tasks seemed so meaningless to me (even though I had been a busboy boy and understood its importance within the restaurant). How can these people be so happy, so productive with something that seems so little? I mean I work in a clothing store for crying out loud, how is that important?


Then on the train it finally hit me, everyone has a different idea of what being productive means. To some folks productive is a big fancy job with international influence, having a house full of kids, or saving baby whales. But to some it is much simpler; productive is being a part of something no matter how large or small. For the lady at the cleaners it is working hard and putting food on the table for her family. The busboy wants to work hard to send money home to his family in Mexico so they can live a better life. So maybe at the end of the day productive is a great way to complement someone’s life, it means they accomplished what they wanted. They put a stamp on something that was important to them. Maybe that’s all we are really looking for in life, some way large or small to be a part of something. For me, right now, this blog was my way of being productive, and that feels good.

We are all in Marketing.

I bet you didn’t know you were in marketing, so is your five year old son, your 88 year old mother, and yes, even your dog. I mean this as no disrespect to those classically trained and working in the professional field of marketing, but everyone is out for your job. The moral of the story is everyone is selling something. Your son wants pizza for dinner, your mom wants you to come by on Sunday for lunch, and your dog would love the bone from that steak.
So what are you selling? You want a new job, or your wife to agree to buy the new TV? How about a weekend with the guys next month? Marketing isn’t just about trendy logos, flashy commercials, celebrity endorsements or a cool website. And it isn’t just the Bud Light, Coke and Nikes of the world that need great marketing to compete. Everyday companies of all sizes and people from all different backgrounds, enter into the cut throat world of marketing. From the minute you wake up in the morning you have goals of what you want to accomplish during your day and figuring out what you have to do to get there. Your son knows that an extra hug might soften you up a little, your mom makes you feel guilty with a well timed phone call, and Sparky gives you those sad puppy dog eyes. No doubt you have brought flowers home on a random night, or sent that I love you text out of the blue before you ask your wife for a big favor.


The point is marketing doesn’t have to be a sky writing airplane over the beach during spring break. Successful marketing is the well timed touch, the right phone call, or even a look from across the room. Remember, everything you do is part of your marketing campaign. From the haircut you have to the shoes you are wearing, they are all pitching you, and your goals.


So what are you selling today?

Evolution is Sustainable

We are not talking about some prehistoric bacteria crawling out of some swamp and becoming humans here, but rather evolution as the term for forward moving change. Businesses, products, societies and nature all change, or adapt to improve their position in their environment. The evolution process does not just apply to how a dolphin grew fins, or a tiger developed strips, but how entire systems are in a constant state of change.




The best example of this process is the life of a successional forest. The principle is simple; rocky non vegetated areas slowly become populated by weeds, those weeds are eventually overcome by annual grasses, then perennial grasses. After years of growth and topsoil development species such as pine begin to establish growth, followed several years later by poplars and maples. After years of growth, slowly hickories and oaks begin to move into the area eventually becoming established hardwood forests. During this process changes to micro climates, wildlife population and hydrologic cycles are in constant motion. Then one day a lighting storm strikes, burns the forest to the ground and we are right back to a rocky non vegetated patch of land.


What does this process have to do with the economic environment? Would you consider any of the habitats during the succession to be unsuccessful? Did a prairie become a pine forest because no wildlife lives on prairies, or grasslands just are ‘cool’ among bison anymore? No. These environments evolved in response to competition, available resources, and species demand. In the same way businesses must be able to evolve to provide products and services that best benefit their consumers. AT&T still sells land line services, but they have changed their business model over the years to focus on cellular services. That doesn’t mean that they never should have sold land line services, or should drop that service to their existing customers, but be prepared to change with market demands and develop new technologies. But the trick is they must also be prepared to go back to selling land lines (emerging markets, developing countries, etc) if the opportunities arise.


What is the lesson here? Don’t be afraid to change and grow, but also don’t be afraid to narrow your market or scope. Big is good and so is small. And you can start from nothing, make it to the top and then suddenly find yourself back at the bottom.




What companies do you think have evolved well to remain viable?