Le Freak by Chic

Yesterday, I had my first, but probably not last freak out of this “week before sales meeting.”  I was trying to do something with a piece of clip art.  Seriously, it was something I’ve done before, but in my panicked haze, I couldn’t make it work.  A visit to Twitter had some people trying to talk me through the procedure, but it wasn’t until my friend Steve IMed me and held my hands through the procedure that I allowed myself to be talked off the ledge.  Thanks be to Twitter, because that did provide me with the solution.  But the freakout…no one can really help me with those.

It’s not like I haven’t been to a sales conference before.  We have 3 major ones a year, although this is the only one we travel for.   It just happens to come at the end of our fiscal year, when we have about 1,001 end of year deadlines.  So, in addition to working on powerpoints for presentions, AND coming up with agendas for sessions with channel managers, AND setting up meetings with my international counterparts, I’ve got to get performance appraisals and year end objectives done for myself and my team. 

It’s my job, so I’m not whining.  I just thought it would be helpful for anyone crossing my path to understand why my hair is standing on end, and why by Thursday I’ll be sitting at work in my comfy pants. 

That’s enough blogging.  Back to the grindstone!

 

 

The BIG BAG and a call to marketers

Wiley author Daniel Terdiman, who I met for the first time at SXSW, published a great piece revealing exactly what attendees at the conference received when they picked up their badges.  A bag.  A BIG BAG.  A BIG BAG full of stuff. 

As a SXSW newbee, I was surprised when after I got my badge I was told to go get my bag.  Cool, I thought, a fun pack o’swag.  Uh, no.  Not in the least.  A huge bag of flyers, postcards, and magazines, oh my.  CDs I’ll never listen to or use.  Guitar picks (ok, so I thought Little IT would like those).  And more stuff than I’ve ever seen from a conference.

I was horrified and a little bit ashamed to be a marketer at that moment.  Yes, we all want to promote ourselves here, but at what cost to the planet and the backs of the attendees carting this crap around.   Daniel wisely points out that the convention organizers encourage people to recycle the stuff by leaving it in the convention center if they aren’t going to use it.  But isn’t the path REDUCE reuse recycle?  Why make the crap in the first place. 

Agreed, we want to get into the minds of attendees.  Agreed, the conference needs the money that will come from these sponsorship deals.  But how can we do this better?

First, how about putting something useful in there?  A notebook or notepad, as old school as it seems, is great, because who has anything other than their laptops to take notes on.  A pen is also a good idea.  Can’t tell you how many times I’ve need a pen here to not have one.  I like O’Reilly’s minibook - they had a game book in there with old school pen and paper games.  I saved that.

Next, how about using less paper?  A postcard directing me to a web site is better than a full catalog (I’m talking about you, New Riders).  Even so, there are a LOT of pieces of paper in there.  Card stock does stand out more, but again, is more costly and harmful to the environment.  I’m not all that crunchy, but seriously. 

But there has to be a better solution.  I’ve heard other marketers suggest a small slip of paper in the bag directed to a web site, but I want to think out of the box bag.  What can we do to get our message across, deliver sponsorship money to SXSW, and still not contribute to the heapload of crap that’s about to descend on the Austin TX landfills?

Marketers, the challenge is up to you.

 

Dear Ellen

Yeah….they wanted to hear from me…

Dear Valued Guest,

Thank you for contacting Marriott Customer Care.

We will review your message and contact you within three to five business days.

Your loyalty and continuing good will are very important to us.  We look forward to serving your future lodging needs.  Thank you for choosing Marriott.

Regards,

Marriott Customer Care

 

Dear Austin Residence Inn,

Hi, it’s Ellen.  Remember me?  I just finished a stay with you.  For the most part, I tend towards Starwood properties because I have their Amex, but you were very close to the convention center, so I thought you would be a good choice. Except, you weren’t.

I wanted to write this while I was currently a guest, but your Internet wasn’t working.  ALL WEEKEND.  DURING SXSW.  Seriously, an interactive conference comes to town and you don’t have your ducks all in a row?

Anyhow, while I enjoyed your comfy bedding and thought your breakfasts and fitness center rocked, there are other problems with your hotel that need to be addressed.  Namely SECURITY.

First, my room key got switched with someone else’s in the fitness center.  When I went downstairs to see if I could get my key remade, the person at the desk said, “This isn’t for room 123 it’s for 321.”  So, she effectively told me that I had a key to someone else’s room.  Great.  Maybe she has better snacks in her fridge.  So I took the key back to the fitness center and straightened out the mess.  Of course, then my key didn’t work, so I went back down to the front desk to have it remade.  I told the woman I had no ID, but would be happy to have someone from security or the front desk follow me to my room to check my ID.  She waved that off, saying it wasn’t necessary.  I figured I didn’t want to be any later for breakfast than I already was, so I moved on. 

Truthfully, stuff like that happens to me all the time.  I get really paranoid about that, as I usually travel alone.  But oh, it gets better. 

My dad came from Houston to visit me on Saturday.  I gave him my room number and the name the room was under (sometimes I travel under aliases - Ellen Ramone for instance <g&gt so he could valet the car.  Around noon, I hadn’t heard from him so I sent him a text asking where he was.  He said he was in my room.  Yep, IN MY ROOM.  The person at the front desk gave him a key to my room.  Now, I certainly didn’t ask my dad to do that, and didn’t give him permission to do that, and I didn’t get mad at him for doing that, but that isn’t the point.  You should not give keys to people who are not registered to the room!  Period.  End of sentence.  Yes, he was my dad, but how did you know that?  He could have faked the email from me.  I found the manager over at the adjoining Courtyard and requested that he change my room to allow only me, and me with ID to get keys.  He agreed that what happened should never have. 

I certainly have other complaints:

• No one reset the time on the automated wake up calls, so the call came 1 hour late. 
• Breakfast got taken away at random times (9:37) so you never knew if you were going to miss it
• There was no microwave popcorn in the room.  A Res Inn trademark.  And the front desk had none.

All in all, I can forgive most things, but a security glitch is unforgivable.  I’m not happy, and suggest that anyone staying here, or frankly in any hotel, take steps to assure that the front desk staff doesn’t allow people to socially engineer their way into your room.

I’m leaving Austin today, and I just couldn’t be happier.  I certainly won’t find myself at your hotel again if I can help it. 

 

Oscillate Wildly*

I’ve got that dizzy feeling these days, and it’s not a good thing.  I think it’s something called benign postional vertigo.  I had it after Little IT was born, and two weeks ago on a business trip in Indy it came back.  Big time.  I was getting out of bed in the am, and the room would not stop spinning.  It got worse over the next couple of days, which I found out was due to taking Claritin-D, aka the drug that made me fuzzy and spinning.  Those are some serious meds.  I stopped taking them and the fuzziness went away.  The spinning is a little better now, affecting me only in the morning, but boy is it a head trip. Pun implied and intended.   It’s instant when I am lying down on my left side, less so on the right.  I got an ear dr. appt for the Friday before St. Patricks Day, so I think I’m taking this down to Austin with me for SXSW. 

*any excuse to expertly reference a Smiths song.  One of my favorites too because it’s Morrissey-free. 

 

It’s really enough to make my head spin

This is a rant, so be warned.

The village I live in is part of a town.  This town, called Greenburgh, is comprised of 5 other villages.  There are parts of Greenburgh that are not part of any village, and are considered to be “unincorporated” parts of the town.  Got that?  It’s taken a while for me to understand that too.

Anyhow, the village I live in is served by a lovely library.  It’s small, tiny even, but it has a great children’s library (donated by Mr. and Mrs. Tom Carvel, of ice cream fame) and has great programs for both kids and adults.  It’s been recognized as one of the best small libraries in the country by the ALA.  It’s not often that I find the specific book I want when browsing in the library, but the staff is incredibly helpful and eager to get you what you need through interlibrary loan.   IT Boy has attended wonderful music and reading programs there (for free!) and Little IT is a frequent flyer in their summer reading program.  I consider it an asset to our community to have a library like this available to village residents.   

The town has it’s own library.  It’s where I used to go before I moved into the village.  It’s bigger, and had a lot of programs going on.  It was open on Sundays, which my current library is not.  It even had a “cybermobile” that went to scheduled stops during the week and special school and town functions, bringing Internet access and books to those who cannot get to the library for whatever reason. 

Why is all that in past tense?  Because the library went into mothballs over a year ago for an expansion project.  There was a contentious vote on a new budget which passed, and then construction began.  The books were moved to storage for the most part, with some being held in two temporary locations and the cybermobile. 

Well, it’s later, and the library is showing no signs of being finished.  People are fighting, name-calling, and finger pointing left and right about why it’s still under construction.  I’m not saying the library has always been right - there seem to be a number of things that they have been fighting for which seemed to me at least to be petty and a waste of taxpayer money.  But recently, they lost any of my support when out of the blue they reacted to an audit of their finances by stopping the cybermobile service and cutting Sunday hours.  Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.  They’re griping about how they need to keep their new year budget for new materials the same, while they are currently occupying about 10% of their current space.   They’ve budgeted for programs that they don’t have the space to provide.  But because the town, who provides but does not oversee their funding, has started to question things, they’ve come up with this brilliant solution to hurt those who use and support the library.  This may not be my library, but my grandmother who is not mobile was a frequent partron of the cybermobile, like many seniors.  Losing this service hurts her.  Sunday may not have been the most popular day to be at the library, but when I would go I saw many teens doing homework and reading.  Take that away from them and where do they go?  And what’s most disturbing is reading the comments on the Town Supervisor’s blogabout how libraries aren’t needed at all, with Google and the Internet.  These great unwashed, who in most cases are posting anonymously, don’t use the library, so therefore no one must have a need for it and it can be eliminated.  These are the same folks who gripe about how bad the schools are and how it’s bringing down their property values.  There’s a correlation here, people.  And while I cannot say I fully support the Greenburgh Library’s attempts to reinvent themselves, as a former patron I can say they provided invaluable services to me and my family.  I’m being served by another library now, which I am so grateful for, as it is “drama free.”  I wish the bickering at the town level would stop, as it’s only hurting those in the town who most need the support. 

Thank you for your viewership.  Soapbox dismounted. 

 

Dear Cablevision,

You suck.

How in the world can you have an outage exactly one minute into the Pats-Chargers pre-game show, leaving Mr. IT a twitchy mess?  Sure, sure, things like that happen, but when he called, all sweaty and bothered, it really wasn’t wise of you to say, “These things happen” and “Be patient.”  Because a cable company shouldn’t suck so much that “Be patient” is the best that you can do.  I think you’ve come to grips with how much you suck and have determined that suckiness is par for your course.  The bar has been set…at sucky.

Because of his rashiness surrounding the signal outage, I had to make the trip myself to pick up the buffalo wings, accompanied by the two kids.  Yes, IT Boy looked adorable in his Bruschi jersey, but that’s not the point.  Additionally, the pot rack never got installed in the kitchen, because of the time spent checking sets and making calls.  So I still have the pots cluttering up the stove and the cabinet that really wasn’t designed for my pots.  I was so close to pot rackdom I could almost taste it. 

We’re seriously thinking about switching to Verizon for cable.  Sure, there are fewer HD channels and you have to pay extra for them, but you get BBC America, and I can think of few things better than that (Calling “Dr Who”!).  Except for being able to see the game on the big screen.  Mr. IT looks so sad and pathetic watching the game on the 20″ set in the playroom.  I hope you know how much you have ruined my Sunday. 

I hate you. 

Ellen

 

When I was a kid, Pluto was a planet

Two things happened recently that sent me on a wave of nostagia.   

Yesterday, Mr. IT was kind enough to watch the kids so I could go to a movie with a friend.  The choice was an all-out popcorn pick - National Treasure Book of Secrets.  Yes, it was a poor man’s Da Vinci Code, but it was a heck of a lot more entertaining as a movie.  Anyhow, before the movie we were subjected to the increasingly standard assortment of commercials and PSAs before we saw one preview for the new Narnia movie.  We thought the movie was starting, but instead they showed an animation short.  Yes, a short, just like mom used to see in the movies when she was a little girl.  They usually come before Pixar films, but this was the first Disney movie in a long time that had a cartoon short as an accompaniment.   It was Goofy’s guide to setting up a home theatre, and at this time of year, it drew lots of chuckles from the audience. 

My friend, who was with me, was not totally pleased.  First, there was only one preview, and we both admitted to loving previews.  Second, she didn’t understand the short (she’s under 30).  Not the content of the short, but the concept of a short before a feature film.  I tried to explain that movies always used to have these, and back a long time ago, they were an art form.  Back in the day, not my day but one I’ve heard of, there were cliffhangers and newsreels and cartoon shorts before the feature film.  My friend really could not wrap her mind around this concept.  I explained that before TV, theatres are where people came for visual entertainment, and they served that purpose well.

A similar memory came up last week when we went to see the Radio City Christmas show.  I remember being a kid and going to Radio City to see a movie, when the Rockettes would perform before the movie as a regular thing, and how the Rockettes used to perform at times other than just the Christmas holidays.  It’s not like that anymore, and it made me sad that I could not share a memory like that with my children.   

I got to thinking how the concept of entertainment has changed.  The Internet and our 999 cable channels certainly provide the content we used to get, but the simple thrill of entertainment, whether experienced live, can’t be replicated.  I miss movie theatres that housed one theatre, and not 10.  I used to joke with friends in high school about the concept of the googleplex, long before a company with a similar name sprung up.  That was when all our single theatres were being sliced in half, and half again.  What would be next, an unlimited zone of thousands of theatres where you sat and stared at a tiny screen in a tiny room, we thought.  Aren’t we living that reality now, in front of our computers and in our home theatres?  As accessible as entertainment has become for us, it seems more and more that the thrill we used to achieve regularly is disappearing. 

As a side note, I kept pointing out to my friend little in-jokes in the Goofy short, such as the framed photo of Disney animation head Jon Lassiter, and the box that the computer came in having the SKU code that looked suspiciously like the name MICKEY MOUSE.  These were “blink and you miss them” moments, but she did catch Goofy wearing a Mickey Mouse watch.  Even in public, I’m destined to be a geek. 

 

Netiquette or just plain common sense?

Here’s a hint - if you’ve recently set up an email group list, it MIGHT be a good idea to email the people on your list and ask them to verify that they are getting your messages.  You MIGHT have misspelled their email address, or be using an old one.  This would mean that your recipients might miss important emails you are sending.  Because when you do send an email months after NOT verifying the list saying “if I don’t hear from you I will assume you will not be participating” I can’t very well reply if I HAVEN’T GOTTEN THE FRIGGIN MESSAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE NOW CAN I???

This isn’t rocket science.  It’s common sense, a trait that seems to be lacking these days.

 End rant…begin coffee.

 

A Rush & A Push & The Land Is Ours

In a virtual land grab in the e-content arena, Amazon’s finally launched their long-awaited eBook reader today.  It’s called Kindle and it retails for $399.  The page on Amazon is richly detailed and should give you a lot of information on the reader.   If you want a demo of it, Stephen Levy does one on Newsweek.com.  In the video, it appears in parts that he’s viewing Kindle through the famous Steve Jobs RDF, but admittedly, it does look like a great product.  It’s such a big deal, Jeff Bezos is even gracing the front page of Newsweek’s print edition.

Now, let’s say I am overcome with gadget lust and decide to go on Amazon click the buy button to get a Kindle into my hot little hand.  I have a reader coming!  But I need something to read.  I need CONTENT.  Scroll down the page on Amazon to see what’s available, I see that I can buy most books for $9.99.  Sheesh, that seems a little steep, but I will suck it up and take one for the team, for the good of the entire publishing industry.  What’s next?  Look there, it says you can get access to newspapers, magazines and even blogs on this thing!  And they cost how much?  It’s a case of nickel and diming you, and then you start to do the math and tally this all up.  Thankfully, I don’t have to as ZDNet did…

As I scrolled down through the product page I couldn’t help but start adding up how high the monthly fees for this thing could possibly be. There are monthly subscriptions for newspapers from US$9.99 to US$14.99, magazines at US$1.99 and US$2.99, blogs (yes free blogs) for US$0.99 each per month, and Word document and photo email attachment support for US$0.10 each. I think the device hardware is a bit steep to start with, but you could easily be paying a monthly subscription cost that dwarfs the hardware cost over a rather short period of time.

Yikes!  That’s what kills the acquisition of these gadgets for me.  The whole monthly subscription model dooms me every time when I try to make the case to Mr. IT that we should be early adopters.  Same reason why I still don’t have TiVo (I know I know).  Mr IT can’t handle the idea of yet another subscription that you have to pay for.  He gladly bought the iPod for me because for about 99% of what’s there, it’s stuff I had already, no monthly fee charged.  I’m not keen to pay $400 to have nothing on there, so I’d have to pony up for some content, and that just won’t be pretty. 

From the looks of the device, it’s a beauty and it hopefully will change our reading habits.  I’d love to say I’m jumping right on board.  But not for me, not yet, and not at that price.  Who knows if someone like an Audible might come on and bundle the readers with an all you can eat subscription kind of model?  That would work for me, and I probably would pay $400 for that kind of feature.