What do Milk, Gorillas and Phil Collins have in common? Well, this interesting commercial to start. Beyond that, I’m not sure I want to know.

GrandCentral, the “one phone number for life” initiative that provides permanent phone numbers and unlimited voicemail service to San Francisco’s homeless was acquired by Google last month. A phone number might not be the first thing that comes to mind when helping the homeless, but GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet see it this way:

“For homeless people and others in need, not having a stable phone number can be crippling: you need one to follow up on medical appointments, keep in touch with friends and loved ones, and hear back from prospective employers.”

GrandCentral has been operating Project CARE (”Communications and Respect for Everybody”) since April 2006, and with the help of more than 20 community outreach partners has provided more than 5,000
phone numbers and served close to 100,000 voicemail messages to homeless and needy people in the Bay Area. Someone calling a number from Project CARE will have the same experience as someone calling a standard phone number, and voicemail messages can be stored as long as they’re needed.

Food, clothing, and shelter may be the fundamental human needs, but this increasingly wired world may require that a “technology” level be added to Maslow’s hierarchy. I hope that Google continues this kind of outreach to bridge the digital devide. It’s good for the community, great publicity for GrandCentral, and one more way Google can continue their effort to “not be evil.”

Facebook.com, a social networking site with 31 million active users, recently announced efforts to develop a more sophisticated ad serving system allowing marketers to precisely target ads based on the personal data users have provided about themselves.

Facebook currently offers “flyers” and banners that can be targeted by location and school, but soon it hopes to offer relevancy based ads by predicting user interests based on information listed in profiles. This may be similar to Google AdWords Content Network that reads web pages using semantic matching. The ads will appear in a prime location; subtlety mixed throughout the “friend news feed” page that appears first upon the user login.
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So what do you do when you are the largest soft drink company and have the most recognizable brand worldwide? You must come up with creative advertising and marketing tactics in order to get consumers involved with your brand. Recently, Coca-Cola has done with its new viral campaign in which the company tries to sue itself.

That’s right, Coke Zero, the new no calorie soft drink from Coke, is suing the original Coke for “taste confusion.” In the new campaign, a fake law firm Covet & Yourminy, solicits potential plaintiffs who could be victims of the taste confusion with the usual cheesy-style lawyer ads. The campaign used cheap media buys, similar to what most local law firms would purchase, such as radio, bus shelter, and truck advertisements.

Bus Shelter Ad

Truck Ad

All ads seek to drive consumers to the microsite, designed in the same fashion. Here, people can request a Covet & Yourminy taste kit that includes coupons for a Coke and a Coke Zero. How clever. There is also a toll-free hotline that has reportedly received more than 17,000 real phone calls. Clearly, this “taste confusion” campaign was a successful and interactive way to engage more consumers with the Coke brand, while putting more Cokes and Coke Zeros into the consumer’s hands through the use of coupons.

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?

One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

By default search inputs are notoriously ugly. Just look at what they are: a plain text input. But Apple had the great idea to make a search widget for Safari that looks like this:

This is probably nothing new, it’s been around for quite a while, but the code used to create the field (input type “search” instead of “text”) does not validate and only works in Safari. So what happens when you like the search field and what to use it on other browsers?

I recently ran into this predicament and decided to put together a little javascript that creates the proper inputs.

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A good friend of mine from college is now working as a sales rep over at Kimberly-Clark, you know the folks who make they make Huggies, Kleenex and Scott Towels; so when I see their name mentioned along with a viral campaign I have to take notice. Ad Age had a great write up about how K-C used a viral video site to promote their Duckbill brand, but as I read the article I couldn’t help but feel as though they could have done so much more.
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Yoga. In most Americans’ minds, this four-letter word conjures images of sweaty gym classes with equally sweaty fitness enthusiasts smiling serenely as sweat glides down their toned muscles to their colorful mats where straining feet grasp for balance and stability.

In reality poses are called asanas which means posture. And asana is just the third limb of an eight-limbed path to enlightenment in this world. The first two limbs guide our self-conduct and interactions with others. These 10 “rules” are found in almost every major religion today.

The above pic is most yogis’ favorite pose, shavasana. Every practice ends here. It can begin here too. On restorative days you may never even stand up during your practice. But even at the office there are poses that can improve performance, attitude, and comfort. Office Yoga Ideas
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Prospecting, cold-calling, pounding-the-pavement, call it what you want but traditionally sales has been referred to as a numbers game, the more people you talk to the better your odds of making a sale. Really, so if I visit every auto dealer in the DFW area eventually I’m going find someone to purchase one of my companies commercial kitchens? Based on the numbers mentality that’s the broad assumption being made; okay, so maybe I’m being slightly facetious there but the truth of the matter is that the old-school, door-to-door mentality just doesn’t cut it in today’s information age.
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So there I was surfing the web this morning for some useless random fact, and of course I ended up finding the answer on a Wikipedia page. But was it really the answer? Should I take the Wikipedia version as “truth” or should I continue my Google search for a more reputable source? In all honesty, how accurate is Wikipedia? Easy question to ask… difficult to answer.

In summary, here is what I found… Read the rest of this entry »