Over the weekend, my fiance had one of her bridesmaids in town for her wedding shower, and with two days to kill, she wanted to do something purely New England. Granted she is originally from up here, but there was one thing that she had never done, neither had we, a whale watch. As anyone from the area can tell you, fall has come in quite cold and it probably was not the best idea to head into the ocean.
Cold aside, the day was beautiful, seas calm – until we were half way through Boston harbor. That was when we experienced five to 10 foot seas, needless to say half of the boat was not feeling to well. I had the benefit of a jug of Cape Codders to keep me sane. When we entered the ocean, the seas were calm and we saw a whole bunch of whales. Below is the video that I grabbed of the whales coming close to the boat to say hi.
As I am putting together this post, a lot has happened. For starters, my fiancé is debating putting out a restraining order on Omaha Steaks who calls her more times in a week than I do (roughly 3-4 times a day). I also saw this hilarious photo montage of hilarious protest signs (do check it out) that would have made the list if it had more words, and found out that one of the places we considered for a wedding site went bankrupt and we would have been SOL if we had chosen them. So without further adieu, here is this week’s installment of Five for Friday.
Flack in Training – Vol. 3 – This article is from my friend Jess Greco (@jessisjuicy) from the PR Breakfast Club, a first year PR pro who is blogging about her first year as a full-time staffer. In this post, this Juicy connoisseur dives into the mindset of many companies who hire outside agencies or hire newbies to handle their social media in lieu of training existing staff who have a feel of the corporate culture. It’s a good read for all of us who probably face that dilemma right now.
A Redskin feels the heat of a Tweet – Who is Robert Henson, if you look at the ‘Skins stat sheets from the first two weeks of the season, you wouldn’t know who he is aside from being one of the five inactives. However if you Google his name, you’ll turn up countless reasons why the NFL has instated the no-social media, in particular Tweeting during games. On his account, the reserve LB tweeted: “dim-wits” who “work 9 to 5 at McDonalds,” about fans in response to their favorite teams’ recent ugly win.
What’s your Twitter ROI? – It’s not often that I read ComputerWorld, not because it’s not a good publication, but rather the subject matter doesn’t interest me too much, however this article was popping up on my Twitterstream and I decided to check it out. Perhaps the most interesting takeaway to this piece is the different variations of ROI that are mentioned – that and the dancing otter video.
Launching brands in public – While this post may come off as a simple commercial for Seth Godin (it’s his blog so it is), I think it is actually a brilliant idea that he hatched up. By using the public information swirling about companies on the Web, he almost forces brands to pay his company to have control and to be able to have their say.
Microsoft debuts social media monitoring product – All I can say to this one is interesting. The article reads like Microsoft is launching something ground breaking, but is already being offered by other companies. Since they have launched Bing, I would be interested to see what kind of real-time metrics they come up with. My guess though is that this may wind up like many of their other products, full of bugs and glitches.
Is there ever an original thought anymore? It’s tough to find in the world of music with all of the samples and it doesn’t
Image Comedy Central
seem like there’s a flick that hits the theaters that wasn’t made 30-some-odd years ago or was on the smaller screen on Saturday mornings (here and here). Even the world of literature which screams originality, tends to borrow from stories past. As does our government, one would only need to look at Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to hear the words of Change 1.0.
I found myself wondering the same thing about the business marketing industry as my boss and I pondered ideas for a contest after reading the story about Netflix awarding a cold million to the winners of their three-year old contest to improve their movie prediction tool. The contest seemed original to us for all of an hour or so when Mashable posted this nugget about PayPal. It was kind of disheartening throwing contest ideas off one another only to say Didn’t so-and-so do that contest, heck even the contest that we are currently running, has been done before.
It almost felt like we were stuck in that episode of South Park where the shows creators mocked their own originality in an episode called Simpsons Did It. Every creative thought was met with a sarcastic Simpsons did it, in an homage of sorts for the classic Fox series.
With the overall lack of original ideas out there, I wonder if it is the idea that matters or if it is in the delivery. I am a firm believer in the proof being in the pudding, so the success hinges on how well the campaign is executed that ultimately will determine a company’s success. Afterall with human life being thousands of years old, there is a good chance that whatever you are thinking, it has been done before. If not, by a person, I am sure that the Simpsons did it first.
Welcome to the second installment of Five for Friday, hopefully you enjoy these stories that you may have missed.
Image - www.stuartlow.me.uk
Relief for Twitter headaches – Interesting piece from the Journal on Monday. As the wave of social media continues to grow, especially with Twitter it makes it increasingly difficult to manage and there is a need for better tools to help streamline the process. Co-Tweet is a service that I’ve been using for a while now and am glad to see that they are getting some good ink on their great product.
A social media strategy checklist – This one comes via @prsarahevans Commentz. The article asks the question that no company seems to want to ask (or understand) why are we jumping into social media & how should we be doing it? My favorite line is: spending money on social media going to provide better ROI (define) than other forms of advertising you could be spending money on?
Make social media a business tool, not a distraction – From Wednesday’s Miami Herald, an interesting read on how some of their staffers incorporate and balance social media into their lives. This seems to be a hot button issue right now and it’s interesting to see main-stream papers jumping onto the bandwagon.
Top 10 Kanye West Parodies – Our friends at Mashable definitely don’t disappoint with this photo montage of the week’s most over-publicized happening. But do you think Shaq would sit there and let him talk smack?
daughter only to have her drop it to the ground, you must be dead or at least without TV or the Internet. It may seem like a missed chance on a great souvenir, but the little gal gained her and her dad some notoriety across the Web in viral gold, but also were invited back to a game, shown on TV and given great swag. On top of all those things, the whole family gained an experience of a lifetime.
A few years back, Bud Light captivated the masses with their Real Men of genius commercials. Well, never one to shy away from one-upmanship, they may have taken the title of most inappropriate commercial of all time with In the Can.
Enjoy…
