So after going back and forth with two not so “Internetie” friends for months now on the impact and influence of the Internet I finally have a bet we have agreed to and settled on. The Internet is really it’s own society and for 2009 I want to be a good citzien by contributing as much as I consume of the Internet for 2009. So with all that being said I have been given 10 tasks that must be met for me to win this bet.
The bet has a fair play doctrine as well, since the bet is about me being a good citizen I cannot just go accomplish these tasks on December 30th and declare victory. So each month I will blog a report of my progress and hopefully I can crush most of these “requirements” of the contest.
So I got into this huge conversation at a friends place about business cards and how they are a true extension of your brand but does yours send the right message? After talking on end about this topic and the person realized I have never seen American Psycho they thought I was nuts for caring so much about business cards. I find that most business cards are almost there but make simple mistakes. I went through every card I ever received and found many that would lack a website address, explain what they did, lack a physical address, or just something real general and silly. Some even lacked e-mail, come on!? These are in no particular rank but they are the five best cards I ever scored.
Andy Williamson - C-16 Magazine
This card is super old from my collection and Andy actually owns the company of another card I have featured in this blog post. This is the few things I feel that make this card perfect. It’s see through and die cut but it’s still average business card size so it fits in my Rolodex sleeves. I do have another clear card but it’s annoying and bigger than a normal card. As cool as you think this is, don’t do it. It gets annoying and your card ends up getting tossed at least out of my book if it won’t fit in my Rolodex. Some failed marketing/branding at that point if it’s in the trash. The second thing that won this card for me aside from it’s uniqueness is that it tells you what C-16 Magazine is in case you didn’t know. “Car Culture Style and Design” is a great piece to throw in, especially something this simple since magazine is in the big title. So this way you can figure out that Andy Williamson works at a magazine about car culture. Then they nailed every topic you could need. Physical address, telephone, cell, fax, e-mail, web address. You need all this stuff!
Scott McNearney - SXSW Sponsorship Manager
This card is very simple but it sends a great message out. SXSW for those who don’t know is a music/film/interactive festival in Austin, Texas every March. The three men doing the topics with a bubble that goes up to SXSW is perfect and simple branding on a business card! One glance and I know what this company is all about in case I had forgot. The few negatives on this card are they don’t list a physical address. This denies FedEx/UPS deliveries I could make to Scott. With people I meet now I try to send a package to them overnight afterwards with some basic gifts and a hand written note, I cannot do this to a PO Box. The other flaw is if people do business with you they will forever be hitting you up for the physical address to send stuff since they will never remember it. At least invest $200/year in a UPS store box and have a pretend physical address. At least you can get packages and the UPS store will sign for stuff in your name, it’s quite marvelous. The only other strike on this card is nothing is on the back. At least print a little SXSW logo on it somewhere.
Dennis Trilles - Babe Blvd.
This card almost didn’t make the cut but I couldn’t find anything much better. Babe Blvd. is an automotive industry model website. The back of the card clearly has some good branding on it and even some space to jot notes about the meeting with this person. I should of done that because I don’t ever remembering meeting this guy. The card on the other side is nice and green but matches the sites overall branding and message. It has a phone number listed but doesn’t tell you if this is a cell/fax/office which is a small oversight. No physical or fake address listed either. A cool tid bit is that he did list his AIM name which is a cool creative reach out for contact on a card.
Haley is an old buddy of mine from college and I almost passed up her card until the back sold me on hers big time. Girl Talk is a 501 (c)(3) non profit based out of Atlanta, Georgia. Her charity basically creates chapters in middle schools that are pier to pier support groups for girls in this age bracket. If you know any middle school girls then clearly you know this is important and needed. The simplicity and colors won me over on this selection. The light pink back with the website was an excellent touch and it really communicated the good feeling and female esque look without even visiting the website. This means the card is a great branding plug, you already know what your in store for. the front side lists all of her proper information including a website along with a logo that you can find and identity with on the website. Physical address is nailed along with e-mail and proper phone listings.
Phil Luis - Theory Communication and Design
This card is the company that I referenced earlier that Andy Williamson owns. This puppy is a homerun. The wood is unique and cool but the card is proper standard size. I haven’t gotten a splinter from the thing yet either or it would be off the list….injuring people you want to call you is never good or productive. This card has a front/back print that establishes the brand very well. He nailed all of the contact information again like in the C-16 card but I feel it lacks one major key element. I understand they are Communication and Design but I would like a little listing telling me about more of their core perhaps? Like automotive specialist or just a quick line in however they want to niche themselves. 365 days of PR or something kinda neat that if this card sat in a pile with a ton of other cards it could communicate to the potential client we are what you need before they even hit your website.
That is all, hopefully I can take this into consideration when we make our next round of cards for PM Lifestyle. I have been doing quite a bit of brand studying over the past few weeks *hint hint* and it looks like next week is an Atlanta to Los Angeles roadtrip with Bertha so stay tuned for news on that.
The LA Auto show rolled out some great products like the Infiniti G37 convertible. This is the same exact color/wheel package I am running on my hard top and I must say that it has a nice look to it. Seeing the car in person and looking at these pics instead of the horrible sky blue render they released earlier. The new vert comes with powerful a 3.7-liter V6, good for 325 HP. In S trim the G37 will also get the same sport tuned steering and larger brakes. Both models have the choice of either a six-speed manual transmission or a paddle-controlled 7-speed gearbox. I think I am going to stick with my hard top but it is going on me.
So I have so much I need to talk about. SEMA 2008, the death spiral of General Motors, LA Auto Show, new content, and new features across Wrecked Magazine. We even have tons of new and excited stuff going on at Wrecked’s parent PM Lifestyle right now as well. So I haven’t forgotten about you blogites, great stories are coming soon. Right now I have to tackle some P/L charts, clean up the palace, and pay our 31-60 day late utility bill that was buried on my desk under some Fuze bottles and misc. credit card offers. And yes, that is me laying dead on Thursday at SEMA and Evan from Exedy sitting on top of me. I have no idea what is going on, who took this picture and why it’s on my blog. Ok this post is done.
Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch made this amazing post about how Voicemail is dead. Stop using it and welcome to 2008. Here is his post as he posed on Techcrunch.com.
Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.
When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems - which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.
But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.
Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.
How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”
Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message - “Just left you a VM, it’s important” - just so you know it’s there.
There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.
The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).
More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).
For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.
In a time when I thought NBC couldn’t do anything correct (Knight Rider) they have managed to do something very cool with the only show on NBC I claim to be a fan of. Tina Fey carries this show and my super crush on her helps me not miss an episode. Who cannot watch this show after Alec Baldwin publically claimed NBC was giving his show the shaft and not promoting it right. If your a 30 Rock fan you need to watch this online and not wait for it on television. Strike this up as a win for Internet TV.
This video is a great reason why I am going to stick to watching TV on the Internet. Hulu is good enough for me! I have never watched the Spike Feresten show but this skit is great. In 2009 all televisions will convert to digital, ABOUT time. I cannot wait for all the people who will be calling Comcast to inform them that they are no longer receiving television.
Forget about real television already! Tune into Hulu or you can catch most new prime time shows at the respective sites like CW, ABC, NBC and etc…..
If you will be at Formula D Irwindale this weekend then please tag your twitter posts with #formulad (without a space). If you use this tag it will be picked up by our live feed and you can contribute to all the action we will be going over for the people who cannot make it around the world. If you cannot make it to Irwindale, you can watch the live updates from the Wrecked Magazine staff and fans by hitting the chat page.
Well I survived Monday of the Search Marketing Expo in New York City and I reviewed the three big sessions I attended. Later on the PM Lifestyle site I will be reviewing some great non session things I have been doing after the conference. The two big things of day one were what is new in video search marketing and what is new and big in social media marketing. I put together three reviews that you should check out over my first day. I also have a Flickr account going for my whole NYC trip that will be updated everyday.
Luckily it’s not 1973 but in Atlanta we are going on a third week of a fuel shortage with no hope it seems in sight. Luckily through Twitter people all around Atlanta have been coming together to help identify in real time where gasoline is available. So if your a twitter fan or you wish to locate gas just simply head to http://search.twitter.com and type in #atlgas and it will pull up people who are referencing gas locations in Atlanta. If your going to do all that make sure you just end up following me at www.twitter.com/joeyredmond as well.
