Churbuck.com

So I turned to my wife around 5:30 today and said, “Let’s go for a bike ride.”

She of course, being the person who rode in the ambulance with me on Memorial Day, 2006, said “NO F$%^&(G WAY!”

So I persisted, pointing out her sad bicycle, gathering dust in the garage. I got her helmet out. Told her she would lead, I would follow. No EPO mind-blowing sprinting, no deathwish maneuvers — she would be on her fat-tired cruiser, and I would be on my Bianchi fixed gear, the Legendary SnotRocket.

I made a wistful face.

She said yes. And off we went, one mile down to the sound, then back, poking into the side streets and down to the harbor at a torrid 6 mph pace. On the last hill, when I saw she was going to dismount and walk it up, I mashed on the pedals, stood in the saddle and cranked to the top like I had last been on a bike yesterday.

The camel’s nose is under the tent. A few more of these and before I know it I’ll be riding a Cervelo Team Soloist.

Nano — purchased the day of the announcement in the spring of 2005. The black sucker that scratched. Totally abused as my primary ergometer tunes device and geek podcaster.

Dead. Not a peep. Time to reinvest in another one. Grrrr. Bad sunspots today. All Churbuckian devices are befukticated. Must be the stupid fast. Keep me away from sharp objects.

A year ago, in a fit of air rage, I blogged about how Southwest Airlines let me down a couple times in Baltimore. Typical blogger rant about bad service, no big deal, right?

Wrong. Southwest never contacted me, and I refuse to follow their caveman rules for not communicating via email, and only during business hours on the phone, or in a written letter. I don’t fly them anymore, can’t recommend them to anyone who asks, but all in all have written them off as a company I don’t really need to do business with.

Here’s where Southwest is screwing up. I lead a team of people who read the blogs and look for expressions of customer sentiment, good or bad, and then try to do something about it. See the post below? The one where I flip out because one of our own products has done me wrong? That’s the sort of post I look for every day.

Well, Southwest, if you are reading this, which I doubt you are, check out the comments on the original post.  51 comments. Some are obvious astroturfs by defensive Southwest employees (yo, Southwest, having your people in Las Vegas pick fights with angry bloggers only makes the situation worse, not better), but a lot are very angry people with lost bags, who hate your seating system, or think your customer service needs to be improved.

I am not waging a war against Southwest. They are what they are: cheap transportation and a bag of 14 peanuts. Nothing more. Nothing less. But, I blogged that post a year ago, on July 12, 2006, and it is still receiving comments from angry passengers today.

Google “Southwest Sucks” — an understandable action on the part of a frustrated customers — and it would appear I have done my job in terms of search engine optimization. My post ranks number three for the words that any marketer dreads:

I’ve considered killing the post simply because I am tired of being reminded of my negative experience everytime some other poor soul shows up here to vent their spleen. I am not hosting an anti-SW blog like the passengers did on Jet Blue after their infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at JFK. And speaking of Jet Blue, after I blogged to praise them for sending me, proactively, a certificate for something because the in-flight entertainment system failed on a flight (which I was unaware of), I know they read the blog because my server logs told me so.

Southwest, do you have anyone who reads the blogs on your behalf? If so, let’s make a deal. I kill the post if you ask me to. But you have to ask. That’s all. And please ask in email. I don’t accept letters, even if handwritten in your CEO’s blood. And I get to post that you asked. I don’t want a free ticket, lifetime platinum status, a seat in the cockpit, a pedicure. This is, pure and simple, a test of your monitoring capabilities. Give me a sign. Anything. And the original post goes away.

Collateral Damage

Constantine von Hoffman, one of the best marketing writers on the planet (CMO Magazine, RIP), a hysterical blogger — see Collateral Damage — and all around fine specimen of the genus journalista frustrata, has hung up the byline and joined Spoke.com as the blogmeister.

His indictment of the trade is sad but telling:

“Being a journalist these days is like playing baseball for the Cubs. Sure sometimes you get a hot streak but you know that no matter how well you do your job you’re playing for an organization that really doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing. I am tired of working at places that are still trying to adjust to the internet era. I’m tired of telling people that paper isn’t the primary means of exchanging information anymore. Print is still an essential and important medium — it’s just not the most important one. You’d think, given the amount of ink and electrons spilled on the topic, that this message would have gotten through. Yet this basic issue is still being debated in many, many corners of my for-now-former profession.”

Congratulations Con!

Design Matters » Blog Archive » Yipes Stripes

David Hill is VP of Design at Lenovo and the company’s first blogger. It’s been a great experience launching the Design Matters blog and getting David’s voice out into the world. Early on David requested a poll so we provided him with one. He quickly learned the best way to earn engagement from his readers was to ask them a question. Do you like wide-screen or 4:3 aspect ration LCDs? Do you use the page-forward/page-back buttons? Earlier this week he posted about an issue that came to our attention in early 2006 when customers complained about the stripes being removed from the front of the two ThinkPad mouse buttons. So David asked (John Bell at Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Mapping project might classify this as an example of customer co-creation) and the crowd replied.

I’ve been long interested in a more formal customer collaboration — something beyond a suggestion box approach — something tangible where the customer could get some true skin in the game. I have looked at Slim Devices as a great case example of how it could be done. The question is what is the right coillaboration infrastructure for getting it done? A straightforward wiki perhaps? Something more iterative, like a threaded bulletin/forum? While David shows the possibilities, I don’t think a WordPress blog with the Democracy plug-in is the solution. There must be something more robust, something used in software development perhaps, or the open source community, which would be easy and sophisticated enough for a layman or a serious human factors engineer to work within.

“Now we are reconsidering this change, perhaps we went too far in simplifying the interior. Although the utility can be argued, the familiarity is also important for a brand so strongly connected to it’s design as ThinkPad.I’d love to get your feedback on this topic. We’ve included a new poll to make this easier.

David Hill”

Go on the “Master Cleanser” lemonade fast and forsake food. This is phase one of a major weight loss program leading up to the CRASH-B sprints in February. I packed on a ton of weight following the bike-crash 14 months ago. Ordinary rowing wasn’t getting it off, and according to my guru and former cycling buddy, Marta, this cleansing fast is a good way to reset one’s approach to food.

So, ten days of lemonade made with fresh lemons, organic grade-b maple syrup, and cayenne pepper … and I am on day 2 …. feeling faint, bitchy. Ought to be a joy. And I’m doing this without a scale — being a believer in feeling fit and getting good numbers on the erg rather than starving myself to some arbitrary weight or Body Mass Index.

Americans’ Technolust Spending Is as Hot and Heavy as Ever

Wired has this excellent graphic:

Migration in progress from my old, EVDO-less X60 ThinkPad to my new X61 tablet. I couldn’t function without the wide area, so rather than invest more dave-hours in a useless migration and configuration I decided to stick with the tablet this time.

The ThinkVantage Technologies System Migration tool worked flawlessly — first time that has ever happened for me in the setup of a new PC — now I am on the IBM ISSI software installed pulling down Lotus Notes and other software essentials. What a nasty, long, drawn-out process. Sometimes I wish I could just pop the trunk and swap the drive, but that isn’t going to work with a tablet. I’d estimate at least eight hours are into this switch over so far.

The whalers had a term for a ship filled with whale oil — greasy luck — and if you think for a second about the conditions on a fully burdened whaler, a floating platform for rendering or “trying” whale blubber into oil, the smell, the slick deck planks, the lack of showers … you’d consider yourself lucky not to be aboard.
Sailors have a term for calm seas, so calm that the water appear covered with a sheen of oil that flatters the slightest ripple or catspaw — greasy calm. This morning was a greasy calm morning, grey skies, fog, and the prospects of a long tedious race to Popponesset for the annual picnic at the Lloyds, so I skipped it to blog, work through some paperwork, configure a new laptop (legally we are supposed to only refer to them as “notebooks”) and muck around in the garages. Definitely too greasy and too grey a July Saturday to get excited about sailing or the beach, but not foul enough to cocoon in front of the Tour de France individual time trial.

Yesterday’s 1/2-day-burnout-prevention cure worked wonders. It helps that the decision was made to turn off the air conditioning in our North Carolina headquarters at noon on every Friday, in the hope it would drive workaholics out to the golf courses and beaches a little earlier. Some grumble about having to work from home, but yesterday I pulled the plug, fired up the mower, trimmed the grass, and pressed my eldest into sailing the Senior Series with me as crew. There were no regrets about missed mail.
He did pretty good, beating five out of 13 boats and I realized I haven’t lost my touch as far as race starts go, able to now talk someone through the count-down like I was driving a radio controlled boat.

I am burning out. Losing my temper, knocking hats off of people’s heads, sending flame mails without pulling a Lincoln and parking them for a few days. Too many days beginning at 6:30 am and ending at 10 pm. I have an ear callous from my headset. I am dour. I am sour.

So, following my 9:30 call, some rapid decision making on some pressing issues, I am checking the heck out for the balance of the day, Blackberry will still tether me to the brawl. At 3 pm I intend to be hiking out on the deck of Number 19 with a son or daughter next to me steering around the race course on the last Friday afternoon of July.

The rest will have to wait until Monday.

Billy Budd

“The hull deliberately recovering from the periodic roll to leeward was just regaining an even keel, when the last signal, a preconcerted dumb one, was given. At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East, was shot thro’ with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.”

Melville is my favorite tragic author (from a personal basis) — Billy Budd — arguably his most accessible work, wasn’t published until well after his death when it was discovered in some papers and brought to the public in the mid-1920s. As a stylist, he could turn a beautiful phrase, and I am especially hit with the force of repetition in emphasizing the tragic execution of the hero with “Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.”
Verbal pearls like this put me in awe of great writers.

1. Tour de France becomes the Tour de Petri Dish
2. Barry Bonds is the human asterix
3. NBA ref bets on games. Games he officiates
4. Dog fighting NFL player
5. Mechanics cheating in NASCAR
6. Lawsuits in the America’s Cup
7. Steroids in golf

What ever happened to the ideal of non-commercial, amateur athletics? Parent-free children’s sports? Nationalism free Olympics?

Feh.

Imagethief : Did the “Genocide Olympics” influence China?

There is a reason I read William Moss — aka The ImageThief — as closely as I do, and that is his honest appraisal of the way things are in China for marketers and communications professionals. As I am deeply involved in my company’s Olympic plans, and have tactic responsibility for our online brand and reputation, I take this seriously:

“… remember that the modern Olympics exists specifically as a propaganda vehicle (and here I include marketing as a kind of propaganda). The IOC may call it a “movement”, evoking images of grass roots participation and noble sporting ideals, but that is propaganda itself, designed to draw a graceful fig leaf over the reality that the Olympics is a vast business venture –reportedly US$4 billion in revenue over its previous quadrennial cycle– driven by sponsorships and advertising. Sponsors take the messaging opportunity seriously, as well they should considering what they invest.”China, hungry to be seen anew as a great power, had its own agenda in mind with the Olympics. Unfortunately for China, all the debate and controversy that swirls around its human rights, environmental and geopolitical issues is being dragged along in the Olympic slipstream. People have China axes to grind, and that beautiful Olympic fulcrum is too enticing to pass up. The 2008 Olympics was politicized from the moment it was awarded to Beijing, and will be more contentious than any games in modern memory. That’s a big deal considering the Olympics’ propaganda-splattered pedigree. In the PR industry we refer to the 2008 Olympics as “issues rich”, which is a polite way of saying, “watch this space for crisis”.”

xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe

I don’t make these up, I only point to them ….. tip of the hat to Esteban

Proof that I am masochist, a wearer of hair shirts, a Yankee cold-shower taker, a Spartan and ascetic …. is my fondness for Moxie.

This is the official soft drink of the State of Maine, the original mass produced American carbonated beverage, invented by a Maniac (resident of the state of Maine) and brewed in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, where it was first sold in 1876 as Moxie Nerve Food, a patent medicine that prevented “softening of the brain” and “loss of manhood.” It gave a man “spunk.”

It tastes like crap — with a bitter aftertaste that only Calvin Coolidge could enjoy. E.B. White (adopted Maniac, Charlotte’s Web) nailed the magic ingredient on the nose — it’s the same medieval alchemist herb that makes Fernet Branca the shooter of choice for funny guys at the bar — gentian, the same thing that makes Jagermeister taste as strangely moss-like as it does.

Photo from the Wikipedia

Kids hate it, which means there is always an adequate supply for me (I consider Moxie to be the beverage equivalent of an anchovy pizza: an acquired taste, no one else wants any, the culinary equivalent of spitting on your food). It mixes well with alcohol, apparently giving rise to the Southern Maine phenomenon, The Welfare Mother. You can only get it in New England — but once upon a time Moxie was bigger nationally than Coca-Cola.

I love the stuff. So did Gloucester, MA newspaper publisher Phil Weld, who sailed a trimaran across the Atlantic in a singlehanded race in 1980, and eschewing commercial sponsors, decided to sponsor a softdrink, naming his winning boat, what else: the Moxie.

And finally, that emblem of Boston, flyfisherman, fighter pilot, and batter extraordinare — Ted Williams …. Moxie drinker.

When I was a cub reporter at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, high tech consisted of a Hastech editing system (competitor to Atex), a bunch of Kaypro CPM machines used in the bureaus, and a fire/police scanner in the newsroom which I never developed a knack for listening to with my subconscious. This was 1983, the IBM PC had just been introduced, and answering machines — tape based things that sat between one’s phone and the phone line — were becoming all the rage.

The newspaper, in an effort to open its pages to its readers, set up an answering machine. Readers were invited to dial the general number and ask the operator to transfer them to the “Soundoff” machine (today, that would be the SoundOff Machine). There they could leave a rant about some issue that was bothering them. The next day the editor-in -chief’s assistant transcribed the tape and the best rants were edited down and printed on the op-ed page.

My favorite was one reader who said of a local politician: “His mother dresses him funny.” But I digress.

Let’s just say that “Soundoff” was pretty tedious and over time became dominated by a single issue: would the garbage collectors in the city of Lawrence continue to “roll-out” the citizen’s trash barrels or would the citizens have to lug their bins to the curb. Many an aldermanic and mayoral election hinged on this burning issue.

Now, nearly 25 years later, and newspapers are on the ropes seeking relevance. One way is to rebuild as networks of local blogs, or, as is the case with my local daily, The Cape Cod Times [disclosure, I interned there over the summer of 1980] to append reader comments to the bottom of stories. The Times redesigned and introduced reader comments this spring and I’ve been reading them ever since.

Let’s just say the tenor of the discussion isn’t up to Pulitzer levels. Yet. A surefire piece of flame bait seems to be dog bites. Seriously — the old “man-bites-dog” cliche is alive and well at the local level in reader comments.

If I were to write a novel about the seedy side of Cape Cod, it would have to be titled, “No Place to be a Dog” From the man who’s wife accused him of having relations with the dog (or was it the dog having relations with him?), to the two ladies who ran a mail order pit bull breeding operation and allegedly decapitated the head of a customer’s dog for nonpayment, to the lady who lived next door to the elementary school and who’s dogs got out (“who let the dogs” out was a true issue, it turned out to be a clueless roommate) and attacked third-graders, to the post office refusing to deliver mail to a neighborhood because of the presence of a scary pitbull, to the police shooting a pit bull during a drug raid — if you want to see classic flame fights, check out the comments on a Cape Cod Times dog bite story.

My point? Citizen journalism is even more proof of Tip O’Neil’s classic observation that “all politics are local” — in this case, citizen journalism is not giving silent would-be Thomas Paines their own printing press — it’s about people called “ThongRider” abusing the public pulpit anonymously to snark and slag dog owners, drunk drivers, and the underclass. Being a big fan of flamefests, I have to say — like talk radio and professional wrestling — the best part of the show is the audience.

[amendment: instead of quoting Tip O'Neil I probably should have been erudite and quoted Mencken or Bierce to the effect that we're devolving into a true idiocracy where the real tragedy of the commons is two anonymous frigtards duking it out over the local leash laws]

Monday – Wednesday: Cotuit

Thursday: NYC

Friday-Monday: Cotuit

Peter Kim, he of the impeccable taste to designate your humble narrator a top ten client-side marketing blogger, he of Forrester, has a must-read whitepaper which is now a year old but which is as valid and important now as it was last July. Entitled, “Reinventing the Marketing Organization,” Kim posits the thesis that most marketing organizations, still tied to the old discipline of the Fabled Four P’s (product, placement, price, and promotion), need to get with the program and reorganize away from a product line or channel alignment to what he calls a Customer Centric Marketing Organization (CCMO).

The quote which I love and serves my agenda as the interactive/social marketing person, is this:

“Shift dollars away from media … and towards the experience infrastructure. Forrester recommends investment in new media engagement platforms, such as rich media, advergaming, and social computing, as well as the marketing backbone technologies such as customer analytics, offer/contact optimization, and marketing resource management. Emerging interactive channels offer opportunities for customers to immerse themselves in brand experience.”

This is a pretty rich document and all the more remarkable in its acknowledgment of some serious issues facing marketing organizations. Net Promoter Scores, the decline of the traditional agency relationship, an emphasis on quantitative analysis over creative gifts(I’m doomed). While not a call for complete revolution, Kim presents a well-reasoned organizational redesign aligned to customer segments. Bad news, you need $300 to get the PDF.

Silicon Alley Insider

The rag of the New York 1990s interactive scene relaunches in beta with Henry Blodget at the top of the masthead (yes, that Henry Blodget) and ex-Forbes.commer Peter Kafka. First impression, Blodget wins my heart by trashing Second Life for marketing, but that’s like picking a fight with a dead person. The best thing about the blog is it bloggishness and the niche it fills as a voice for the Alley, which really hasn’t had one. Paidcontent sort of had it for a while but outgrew the gossip as it scaled bigger. Into the reader it goes.

I went into Raleigh last night for one of the better North Carolina meals I’ve had at a place called Joe’s. Really simple — pulled pork, fries, snap beans. I reached for the hot sauce but needed none.

Here is the Imagethief — Will Moss in Shanghai on the American tradition of BBQ in China:

Imagethief : BBQ-less 4th of July and the naughty waiter of Hongqiao

“To make a barbecue all you really need is three things:

* Mastery of fire
* A dead animal, the larger the better
* Sauce

And arguably the sauce is optional.”