Political Ads: NY Times Picks the Best & Worst

Posted by Richard Earle
Regis Affiliate

If you’re like me, with less than a week to go before the election, you’re sick of the negative political ads stacked knee deep in every possible TV commercial break, you may find yourself shouting at the screen, “I’m not voting for any of you turkeys!”

But if you’re like me, you will also ultimately vote for one in each category.

Of course, this is a blog devoted to positive posts only, so I’d like to offer a tip of the hat to the New York Times, for posting a very amusing video made up of clips from actual New York area political ads, with awards for “Best Splash” and “Best Run-on Sentence” thrown in for comic effect. View this short video and see if you don’t say “Thanks, I needed that!” with election day fast approaching.

The Ultimate Backpack: Solar Panels to Charge your Cell and Laptop

Posted by Richard Earle
Regis Affiliate

We turn again to the blog site of our friends at SmartPower for an amazing innovation being added to that accessory that everyone age 30 and under seems to be toting about these days.  Safe to say that none of those backpacks are not without a cell phone or a laptop tucked into them.

So leave it to an innovative entrepreneur like Voltaic in New York City to find a way to keep those devices charged up and ready to assist us in living our complicated lives. And it's totally green!

To read more, visit the SmartPower Blog.

What URL really stands for, and other computer terms you should know

Posted by Richard Earle,
Regis Group  Affiliate

There’s a wonderful story in the first paragraph of an article in a recent AOL newsletter about the fellow who didn’t really understand computers, and once complained “I wish they were as easy to use as my telephone.” Well, he got his wish. He no longer knows how to use his telephone.

The rest of the article contains some terms that anyone who uses a computer regularly should be familiar with, and defines them completely. For example, did you know that URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and http before a site address means hyper-text transfer protocol? These and many other basic terms are explored in this article.

“Buzz,” the New Marketing B-Word

posted by Richard Earle
Regis Affiliate


For the last few years, the key word among Marketing professionals has been Branding.  But now, with the explosive growth of Social Media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, a new “B-word” has roared to prominence in marketing circles: “Buzz.”

Buzz is an invaluable Marketing tool these days. The only problem is, nobody is quite sure how to create it. It’s discussed very thoroughly in a fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer on the Wall Street Journal web page. I heard about it in a LinkedIn Post from a colleague.

Jonah quotes Northwestern University Sociologist Brian Uzzi, who, although I disagree with some of his conclusions, does own a fascinating research tool. He also has some fascinating examples in two films, “The Sixth Sense” and ‘Toy Story 3” considered difficult to market that became mega hits thanks to a huge Buzz, and cites Apple as the leading product Buzz-creator.  To read article, please visit the page on LinkedIn.

A tip of the Hat to Google for a $5 Billion investment in Clean Energy

Posted by Richard Earle
Regis Group Affiliate

SmartPower, who was my client for several years has a very newsy blog dealing with issues related to clean energy at http://www.smartpower.org/blog/. Google, who has been my search engine and calendar of choice for many years, was unknown to me as a clean energy promoter, although that’s a field I’ve done a lot of work in. Apparently they are heavily invested in wind power, both financially and in other ways, so they certainly deserve a tip of our hat!

It makes some sense if you consider their mission as an “information superhighway.”  Here are excerpts from the SmartPower blog posting by Brandon Rose:


Google is partnering with the renewable energy financial firm Good Energies and many other investors to create a major wind farm. The project is called the Atlantic Wind Connection and it has the attention of a lot of investors. A big portion of this project will be laying down a 350-mile underwater spine, which would remove many critical obstacles to wind power development.

This underwater cable, or “superhighway for clean energy,” in Google’s words, is designed to link multiple offshore wind farms to the U.S. power grid. “By putting strong, secure transmission in place, the project removes a major barrier to scaling up offshore wind, an industry that despite its potential, only had its first federal lease signed last week and still has no operating projects in the U.S.,” Google said in a statement.

This isn’t the first time Google has gotten involved with energy, though. Google has already offered research in home energy use monitors and advocated for U.S. smart grid technology. The Atlantic Wind Connection is the largest energy project Google has been a part of so far.

Compassion Fatigue by PowerPact's Melissa Radin

Posted by Richard Earle
Regis Affiliate


I found this post through the daughter of an old friend on the Blog of the web site of the cause marketing  company she works for, PowerPact at http://powerpact.com. I’ve posted a slightly edited version.

Pink. Online or in-store any day in October you’ll see pink ribbons, pink logos and pink symbols, all supporting the worthy breast cancer cause. This celebration of pink at first seems like a winning equation for both brands and nonprofits: but is too much of a good thing too much? Take a walk down any street in America and notice how many people just aren’t wearing yellow bracelets any more. Instead you’ll see red, the new love color of the day, thanks to Bono’s creation of Project Red. What’s the deal? Is pink and yellow out and red in? Probably, but red won’t be in for long if we don’t change the way we market causes.

So many causes supported by so many brands looks to consumers that everyone is doing the same thing. People simply can’t connect which brand goes with which cause. They don’t know who supports what. So they support nothing.

This support nothing-attitude is called compassion fatigue. The consumer is desensitized and exhausted. This makes them actually less likely to buy your product or shop in your store because it’s tied to a cause.

Involvement in cause marketing is intended to build consumer loyalty.  Is it possible your cause programs may actually be undermining your company’s success with consumers over the long term? You bet. But there are ways to combat compassion fatigue. The key is to recognize it exists and go beyond the norm by finding ways to be more meaningful to your consumers.

Consumers are in the driver’s seat, so hand them the keys and give them the tools to take control. Create programs with them in mind, use the cause to connect the brand to them. American Express (AMEX) did this with the “Members Project” and it worked. Instead of telling their card members what cause program they were going to participate in they invited consumers to pick the cause/issue AMEX should support.  AMEX received over 9,000 ideas, and had 1.6 MM unique visits to their web site.

Crate & Barrel did this with their DonorsChoose.org gift certificates program. Instead of asking consumers to buy before donating funds they simply thanked customers by sending 3.6 million gift cards. The gift cards thanked customers for shopping at Crate & Barrel and invited them to make a predetermined donation to DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit group that funds projects for needy schoolteachers nationwide. This shift in the paradigm paid back, as stores sales increased 15% in the six months following the promotion.

Social Media Glossary II

By Richard Earle
Regis Affiliate

I’ve been getting some positive feedback from my post last week containing some terms created by Pete Blackshaw, Nielson online digital guru, and published in two columns in Ad Age, one last January, and one this September, since he claimed the January terms were all obsolete (I don’t agree). Since I only had room to post a short Glossary, I thought it might be fun to look at some more.

Here are some more terms pertinent to the social media and mobile age:

SPURNED MEDIA: Just like it sounds, earned media that goes horribly negative, invades otherwise pristine search results or bleeds into traditional media. Bad customer service is a top driver of "spurned media."

MOBILENECKING: The alarming tendency to have our necks titled down or shifted sideways -- ever glued to our mobile device. This anywhere, anyplace epidemic is increasingly common in cars, airplanes and crosswalks. Closely related to term "Eyevoidance," where no one looks at anyone anymore.

JACK RIPPER: The device warriors who hog outlets anywhere they can find them -- in the airport, via the USB port of a colleague's computer, even a restaurant reservation desk. They get a charge from a charge.

FAUX POST: When you are talking to someone on the phone and they notice an unrelated tweet or Facebook status update from you showing up in real-time. Bad form -- don't do it. (Trust me!)

APPFUSION: An inevitable outcome of app overload. Very common among iPhone users who download so many apps they can't find their address book. Appfusion can lead to as many problems as the apps solve.

BLOG DODGER: Someone who has abandoned his or her blog for Twitter or some other lower-hassle social-media substitute. This was big in 2009, and we'll likely see much more of it in 2010.

QUAD STALKERS: Folks from your past who "friend" you (e.g., folks you marginally knew from the high-school quad) and who seem to comment on everything you post on Facebook. Mostly benign, but a tad curious.

TWEET SIFTING: Delaying or mixing Twitter posts so axe murderers don't know you're miles from home. Increasingly common as a spousal and family covenant among folks who travel with high frequency.

Web 3.0 is coming! More personal and easy-to use

Posted by Richard Earle
Regis Affiliate

I was browsing through the aol e-mail newsletter recently and an article by Tara Taghizadeh caught my eye. It announced the immanent arrival of Web 3.0. Since I had been totally unaware that there had been a Web 1.0 or 2.0,  I  looked with great interest to see how she had defined them. Some excerpts from her article follow:

In the beginning…
Web 1.0 was all about basics. Back then, websites provided information with little opportunity for user interaction and feedback -- a one-way process dubbed “read-only.”  The most interactive user activities involved chat and instant messaging.



Then Web 2.0 came along and introduced the world to blogs, social-networking sites, and a host of self-publishing tools. Articles are now accompanied with “comments” tools, and any hack with a computer can create a blog. Content exploded on the web, and a considerable portion of it is created by average users 

Web 3.0 is coming! What industry analysts foresee for the next version is a more personalized and easy-to- use web, eliminating several steps from your online searches to make them quicker. Hence, your computer is 'smarter’ and can better understand what you are searching for. According to PC Magazine, “the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we're looking for.”

For example, if you are planning a weekend getaway to a mountain lodge and you want to make sure that there are convenience stores nearby, you wouldn’t have to conduct separate searches for lodges and stores. The web would simply deliver search results for both and categorize it in such a way that you would know which places are more convenient.

A Tip of the Hat to aol for thus headsup!

A glossary for the Social Media Age

By Richard Earle

Regis Affiliate

I was browsing the Ad Age web site the other day and was directed to two columns by a guy who is intimately involved with social media on a daily basis, as exec. VP of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services. His name is Pete Blackshaw,  and he has a wicked sense of humor.  The premise for both columns is that in the current world of social media, “we're downsizing to small screens, friending the world, thinking in 140 characters and downloading -- dare I say -- "billions and billions" of apps designed to make everything we do simpler, faster and more convenient (well, we think).

We have affixed labels and buzzwords to our curious stampede to the social media and mobile future.

Here are a few choice selections from his January column:

WIKI WART: A bad piece of news or an embarrassing brand episode (e.g., an activist protest or a social- media campaign that backfired) that just won't go away in a brand's Wikipedia description. PR pros often give false hope to brands of removing the warts, but relentless Wikipedia editors put them right back.

OEDIPOST COMPLEX: The curious neurosis that compels folks to sleep with their Blackberry or iPhone. The afflicted can't stop checking -- even in late hours -- for responses to tweets or blog and Facebook posts.

APPFUSION: An inevitable outcome of app overload. Very common among iPhone users who download so many apps they can't find their address book. Appfusion can lead to as many problems as the apps solve.

This month, declaring that due to the fast-moving nature of Social Media his glossary “is already obsolete”  (I don’t agree) he added twenty more. Here are a few examples:

App rat: A relentless app collector who is known to download apps and then leave them to gather cobwebs. Related to Appotato, a compulsive app addict.

Textgression: The curious migration of adults into youth behavior, habits and practices, especially when it comes to texting. Here our language quickly digresses into comedic short-form. R U w/me?

Like meister: That person on Facebook who "likes" everything. Borders on compulsive. Even the goofiest photos get likes.

 Wiki whipped: When you just can't change your wiki entry, under any circumstance. Often activist groups, detractors or others will completely own your entry.

Who knows? These could become the “BIZSPEAKS” of the future!