File This Under “Stupid.”

Upon a recent visit to Apple’s website, I saw this:

“Thousand of apps, thousands of reasons to love your iPhone.”

And I agree…mostly. (Hello Shazam. I do love you.)

But there are two things that truly bug me about the iPhone. (Well, three if I bring up the touch screen keypad, but that’s inherent in this device, so I’ll just suck it up and continue to be thankful for predictive text…)

• No copy and paste
• No multimedia messaging

If multimedia messaging isn’t currently an option, just admit it. Don’t pretend you have the feature by doing what AT&T currently does, which is to send a text from the person attempting to send a multimedia message saying:

I sent you a multimedia message. You can view my message w/in the next 5 days via the web at www.viewmymessage.com/1 using MSG ID a8ejetzt, Password cast2cake.

How stupid.

Sans a copy and paste feature, this text leaves me with few choices, neither of which I love: find a pen and paper and write down the message ID and the password or test my brain and remember two nine alpha/numeric combinations.

I’m more likely to reply to the person who sent the text and ask them to email me the image instead.

Come on Apple.  Add these very simple features and allow me to love my iPhone unconditionally.

So Much For Getting Work Done on Sunday

Someone refuses to remove his head from my keyboard. It doesn’t help that the fan in on that side blowing warm air at him…

Heads Up Asses? Me Thinks So.

This just out in a report from Epsilon:

Marketing Execs Aren’t Sold on Social Nets.

The story is here and pasted below.

Not only are social networking site users less than thrilled about seeing ads,  it turns out that  corporate chief marketing officers share that lack of interest, judging from the results of a survey released yesterday.

Conducted late last month for Epsilon by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media, the online poll quizzed CMOs of consumer and business-to-business brands with revenues ranging from $250 million to $10 billion. More than half of the 180 respondents said they’re “not too interested” (22 percent) or “not interested at all” (33 percent) in using Facebook and MySpace as part of their marketing strategy.

“Internet forums (52 percent), webcasts and podcasts (47 percent), e-mail (47 percent), blogs (37 percent) and webinars (52 percent) outscored Facebook and MySpace (35 percent) in terms of being social media elements that marketing executives said they are very interested or somewhat interested in using,” according to Epsilon’s summary of the findings.

The same survey found 70 percent of the marketing executives expecting to decrease their ad expenditures in 2009. Among those expecting reductions in their budgets, e-mail marketing is the area in which they’re least likely to make cuts.

Part of me says “good” to that. Go ahead and ignore social media and let the rest of us who get it gain the foothold these clowns are about to pass it up.

Social media isn’t just about spending money on advertising in a new channel. It’s about embracing the tools and using them to help build brands. If these CMOs are passing up the opportunity to examine and test all aspects of marketing in a new channel, they’re just asleep at the wheel.

I wonder if this is the same pack of CMOs who questioned the value of spending time and money building a website back in the late 90s and believed that no one would ever pay for connection speeds faster than dial-up.

Overused

When I lived in NY and read NY Magazine religiously, one of my favorite sections of each issue was “overheard.”  You know, random things you hear, completely out of context, that are funny. Now I read the Overheard in New York blog, where I pulled some of these:

“Just because she has a tattoo doesn’t mean she’s an alcoholic!”

“Hey, what month is eleven?”

“I don’t need more drinks to choose from. I’m not that interested in beverages. I like my Diet Coke, I like my vodka, and that’s all I need.”

“Sex with Steven is more boring than church.”

“This is the B train. B like in Bitch.”

For me, the opposite of Overheard is “Overused.” Random words or phrases that become too popular. They start off innocently enough. You only hear or read them occasionally.  Then some kind of social inertia kicks in, and these words seem to be everywhere: spoken in meetings, seen on web pages, blog posts, print ads, even radio spots. Might I dare say they’ve reach a tipping point?  (Hmmm. Tipping Point. Might have to put that on the list, too…)

It’s around this point that I just stop paying attention.

Here are few of my personal “favorite” words and phrases that are overused, approaching overused status or just plain annoying:

• Ecosystem
• Outside my comfort zone
• Join the conversation (Come on. Even Anderson Cooper is using this now.)
• Reach out
• Meet up
• We’re committed to…(insert any company initiative here)
• Paradigm shift
• Across the pond
• Let’s discuss that offline
• Synergy and/or synergistic
• Workflow

What words or phrases drive you nuts?

Testing New Polling Funtionality in WordPress

[polldaddy poll=1043879]]

Vote No for Yes…Yes for No…Huh?

Having a conversation today with a co-worker about a question  we ask around here often:

Should we do direct mail for this campaign or not?

We both are thinking no. It’s expensive. It doesn’t work as well as it used to, and really, who reads their office mail anymore?

He suggested starting a campaign he’d call Propostion 1, with the message:

Vote No on Direct Mail.

But I told him, if it were a true proposition, you’d have to make it a YES vote for no direct mail, and a NO vote for direct mail, so it’s written in true political backwards speak.

He’d have to get the postal service and various state groups to support a NO vote in an attempt thoroughly confuse people.  Then he’d need various other state groups, two or three random guys and the Pulp Paper Commission to support a YES vote. And, of course, he’d have to run incomprehensibly stupid ads on radio and TV that support both sides but do nothing more than make people want to avoid voting at all.

So remember, this November, vote YES if you don’t want direct mail, NO if you do.

Who couldn’t see this ridiculousness as a real proposition on the ballot?

Confessions of a Shoe Whore

Calling myself a shoe whore may be too kind. I might just be sick.

Here’s why:

I have a slight obsession with a particular pair of black leather boots by Donald Pliner. I bought them about 2 years ago retail and paid $225. At the time I was horrified to be spending so much.

But money be damned, I loved them. I wore them all the time. I had to buy another pair as a “back up” because, you know, I might ruin them should I get stuck in snow storm (where I live in the very snowy San Francisco) or a rainstorm (as I drive to work everyday in my car from one enclosed garage to another…)

Then, about a year ago, I saw them in fabric at the popular Norstrom’s Annual Sale. Woohoo. My size. But there was only one. Not one pair. One boot. The sample on the rack. The sales person couldn’t find the match. She took my number. Said she would look for it and call me.

A day passed. No call.

Another day passed. No call.

Finally I called her. She wasn’t working that day. OHMYGOD! What if someone else already found the match and sold it to another customer??

But sales person #2 found me the match and I drove there as fast as I could before they closed for the night. They were both waiting for me. One beautiful pair of boots and the sales person. Yes, thank you for holding them for me, here’s my credit card, goodnight.

I thought my obsession was fully fed. Until last weekend I was poking around ebay looking for who knows what. I searched Donald Pliner. I found my boots. A brand new pair, my size, never worn. Opening bid $25.00.

I starting watching the auction. Hello sickness?

It was ending at 5:15 tonight. I made a appointment in Outlook to remind me at 5:00 that I should watch the auction, “just in case.”

“Just in case” happened — right about the time I thought someone was going to get “my” boots for $59.00 plus $12.00 shipping. So after a few rounds of very fast, last minute bidding, I was finally the highest bidder with just 4 seconds to spare. $75 bucks, plus shipping, those boot were mine!

I don’t even need them. The economy is crumbling around me. Layoffs are rising. Yet I just spent $87 bucks on a pair of back up boots for the pair of back up boots already in my closet.

There’s a marketing message here somewhere. The power of brands? Clearly. The excitement of bidding on an ebay auction? Without a doubt. The way that ebay connected someone who has an obsession (me) to someone across the country (the seller) who wanted to offload what they thought was a bad purchase? I’d call that some form of social media in action.

Whatever the message, I am now am the proud (?) owner of a new my fourth pair of Donald Pliner boots. Um. Let’s just keep that between us.

I’ve Twitter Graded Myself

That sounds dirty.

Hubspot has a site to “rate your Twitter mojo.”  My mojo is 61 out of 100. Given how not a Twitter celebrity I am, I’ll take it. But that doesn’t mean my competitive side won’t try to raise it…

There’s also a tool for ranking for press releases and websites, using a various set of criteria. It’s not that similar tools aren’t already available on the web, but I found these interesting and somewhat entertaining with a bonus nice interface. (I especially liked the dancing logo while waiting for the website review to arrive. What can I say? I’m into cute icons…)

I plopped a recent press release about our new Cloud Summit Executive event into the text box and scored a 90 out of 100. Not bad. The report tells us we should be doing more with SEO and our releases, so we’ll take the advice.

I then ran www.cloudsummit.com in the website grader but on this one, we didn’t fare so well. Just a 62 out of 100. To be fair, we put the site up in about 8 business days, and while we got high ratings in many areas, there are some standard SEO things that need to be fixed.

In a perfect world, we’d have budgets for a fancy SEO agency to help up get our rating up. But since we don’t, tools like these are nice to have so we don’t get lazy and sit around eating bonbons in the afternoon.

But as soon as I’m done with that bonbon, I’m going to work on my Twitter ranking!

To Be Or Not To Be…An Asshole

I’ll confess. I work for a company that sends lots of email. It’s not like we sell crack to crack whores — we sell conferences and one of our tactics is to use email. We’re CAN-SPAM compliant. (As if those laws have actually helped cut the number of real SPAM anyone gets…)  But as we’ve watched email ROI eclipse direct mail over the last 18 months or so, we’re fans of email. And while we know some people hate email, for us it’s a necessary evil.

We’re not perfect in our email sends, yet we constantly look at how many emails one person can get over a certain period of time and how to make our opt out process easier for our recipients. But my inbox was an interesting study in the world of human behavior this morning.

First there was this:

“Goddammit!

I don’t appreciate you assholes spamming the fuck out of me!

I wouldn’t go to one of your conferences now if you paid for the whole thing. And I’ll damn sure recommend against attending your conferences to all of my colleagues.

What a piss-poor marketing strategy.

I’ve been putting up with this shit for months, and I’m sick and tired of it. Get my e-mail address out of your databases immediately!

cc: Attorney General, State of California, Attorney General, State of Illinois, Attorney General, State of New York, Attorney General, State of Nevada.”
(my note: ooooh. scary.)

Then there was this:

“I’d be grateful if you could help me with a bit of a problem I have.

Somehow, your company got ahold of my email address, and has been sending me invitations to things I have no interest in.

I would be grateful if you would ensure that I never again receive email from any of your business units. I think it’s better to do it this way than to forward this to our email team to request that your domains be blocked.”

Both names will immediately be removed from our global list — but I have to admit, I am tempted to provide the first guy’s email to as many “sign me up” boxes I find across the web. Call me evil…

Nebraska Loves You. And Your Kids.

Have you heard the news out of Nebraska? They’re the last state in the U.S. to pass the “safe-haven” law. A law that allows parents to abandon unwanted children without question within a variable (by state) amount of time, usually 72 hours from birth.

Only instead of giving parents 72 hours, Nebraska’s law gives the parents 19 years!

Imagine the ad campaign for this law:

Kid sucks? Drop ‘em off.

Your child a druggie? Let us deal.

Tired of cleaning up after your little slob? We’ll take on the task.

Give us your disrespectful, ungrateful, selfish, self-centered monsters. No questions asked.

What’s even crazier about this law, is that anyone can give the kid up. If you take a vacation and leave your child with a babysitter, and they decide the Friday rave is better than caring for your little beasts — poof! They can be given up!

When I was a kid, my mother’s big threat was: “Wait till your father gets home!” Today it would be something like “Wait till I pack you up and drop you off at the fire department!”

Nuts.

Update (November 26, 2008): Since September, 34 kids were dropped off at Omaha hospitals and none of them were infants (the olders was 17). The law has been rewritten to only permit children as old as 30 days to be dropped off. Finally, some with a brain was taking action.