Churbuck.com

CapeCodTimes.com – Cape’s electric rates among nation’s highest

Sucks to be me. Nothing like a $400 monthly electric bill during air conditioner season to make one a believer in the wind farm.

“The average cost of electricity is higher on Cape Cod than it is in any state in the continental United States. Nationwide only Hawaiians pay more per kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy.”

Mark Babej has good thoughts on the strength of net marketing as cash strapped consumers use the interweb for price comparison and deal seeking.

Leveraging The Internet In The Recession – Forbes.com
In good times, when consumers feel cash-rich and time-poor, they can afford to be less diligent about their spending. But as economic pressures mount, sentiment changes. People feel cash-poor and are more willing to invest time and effort in getting the best deal.

What sets the current recession apart is that, for the first time, consumers have a tool that empowers them to subject everyday buying decisions to the kind of scrutiny formerly reserved for big-ticket items and large business-to-business transactions.

Marketers should anticipate this shift. They will not be able to rely on ads to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes–or on imagery to wow them.

Maybe even more important, it won’t be as easy for companies to control the expense line to make up for the loss of top-line revenues. In past downturns, cutting corners on quality has been a virtually foolproof way to cut costs and boost margins, at least in the short-run.

Not this time. Not when consumers can set the bar higher and easily find what they want at the lowest possible price. Not when any degradation of product quality or crummy service experience is subject to being instantly “outed” by the bloggers and reviewers on the myriad user-generated consumer review sites.

Cote of RedMonk twitters that Gillmor is blogging at eWeek. This is good, but interestingly, he’s chasing the Twitter thing as I have been for the past couple weeks, rethinking my initial skepticism thanks to the convenience of twhirl on the desktop.

NewsGang
Today’s brainstorm is Twitter. When it first surfaced I circled it like a bear does a baby seal – not quite looking at it, not believing it could be such an easy target, having no idea whatsoever of its apparent or eventual usefulness. But something about this stupid 140-character limit and haughty self-promotional beacon in the cybernight gave off an eery glow, the faint hint of what is coming. Twitter, when combined with such obscure hacks as TinyURL, podcasts, blogs, and most disruptively I suggest, executable code, has spawned a communications platform that will blow right past everything except platforms that allow it to dominate.

tecosystems » St Patrick’s Day 101

Always take St. Pat’s advice from someone who’s last name has an apostrophe in it. From Mister O’Grady:

What to wear when you’re eating and drinking
Something green, I think. Though apparently the answer was once blue, which I hadn’t known. To be honest, my attention to the dress aspect of St Patrick’s day is only slightly better than that I devote to dress generally. The only thing you absolutely cannot wear is orange. Particularly in Southie; just trust me on this one.

And on this fine day, thinking of our man in Beijing, Mister Mann, who found a good use for a Chinese tailor.

In acknowledgment of St. Patrick’s Day – a holiday arguably bigger than Christmas for many people in Eastern Massachusetts – I want to go back in time to the early 1980s when I was the statehouse bureau chief and political editor for the gritty Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, a mill city PM daily with a circulation of 60,000 and a reach into southern New Hampshire. I do not recall my days at the Eagle-Tribune fondly. It was an amazing underpaid stress-fest only made interesting by the lunacy of the subject matter.

Last month, on the day of the New Hampshire primary, I blogged about my days chasing the 1984 presidential campaign through the Granite State, but that was nothing compared to the St. Pat’s tradition of the political lunch at the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Lawrence. Every alderman, mayor, state representative and senator, congressman and ex-congressman, party official, attorney general, judge, even presidential candidate would cram into the AOH and roar with well-greased laughter at the patter and jokes of Billy Bulger, the leprechaunesque president of the Senate (brother to Whitey Bulger of the Winter Hill Gang, and the fugitive the Jack Nicholson character in Scorcese’s The Departed was loosely based on).

I was a minor leaguer, the home town guy in the grand scheme of things, an anomaly due to the perception by most local pols that I must be a closet Republican due to my very detestable English middle name, my prep school and Ivy league ties, and my incurable shyness and propensity to blush when made fun of, which most of my sources delighted in doing constantly and in public. But … I was the grandson of Kenneth McKiniry, who had coached a local town’s football and basketball teams to several state championships, and once I dropped that name I was given a hug, a mug of green beer, and that paragon of Bay State cuisine: the boiled dinner (corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes).

I was also bartending a few nights a week in Boston to make ends meet and attempt to pay down my college loans. Boston bartenders live in utter dread of two days every year – St. Pat’s and the Boston Marathon. St. Pat’s because every suburban amateur drunkards floods into Boston for a day of public intoxication and micturation, and Boston Marathon because bulimic mid-life crisis cases would stagger into the bar in their running shorts and Nikes wrapped in a silver mylar space blanket and celebrate their four hour ordeal from Hopkinton with a Sam Adams which would invariably lay them out on the floor.

I don’t think working for a global PC company would have crossed my mind in those days of bare knuckle reporting and bartending. The smell of cabbage, sour beer, and the sight of the Celtics logo will always bring such memories rushing back.

 

3.17 – Monday, Evacuation Day: Cotuit

3.18- Tuesday, Cotuit to RTP

3.19 – Wednesday RTP

3.20 – Thursday RTP to Cotuit

3.21 – Good Friday — likely will take off in Cotuit

3.22-3.23 – Easter weekend Cotuit

Following week of the 24th is medical week — checkups, physicals etc. so Cotuit is where I’ll be.

Ten days until opening day for the Red Sox and I thought I’d confess my return to the Sox after regaining the zeal like a classic rainy day fan in 2004 when they broke the curse.

I was an old school Sox freak, back in the mid-60s, when the 1967 Sox lost the World Series to St. Louis and started a forty year tradition of disappointing me and a few million other people each and every fall.

The final straw was 1986, when that retard John McNamara left Bill Buckner in the sixth game against the Mets so Bill could be on the field to celebrate when the Sox won the series.

Hah.

For the next 18 years I literally would avert my eyes, change the channel, turn the page, or excuse myself if the words “Red Sox” came anywhere in my vicinity. I gave up. The rage attack I displayed when Buckner dropped the ball was so profoundly primal that I had to stop watching for my own health.

It took a freak-a-zoid son who is an ultra fan to drag me back into the game,
So, with ten days to go, and on the eve of that other classic Massachusetts Milestone — Evacuation Day (the Suffolk County holiday commemorating the day the British abandoned Boston under the threat of George Washington’s guns on Dorchester Heights, and which coincidently falls on St. Patrick’s Day, a nice benefit for all those city woikers who need their green beer) I present to you three good Sox Blogs:

1.  Wicked Clevah: From Stephen O’Grady at Redmonk, is this side-blog with a high obsessive compulsive humor factor.

2. Joy of Sox: very, very funny.  The Nickname Guide is essential reading.

3. Surviving Grady: courtesy of O’Grady, this is by far one of the funniest things I’ve read.

A few weekends ago my son and his NYU buddy came to the Cape for some R&R and Guitar Hero. Beset with cabin fever they went looking for the household digital video camera, a tape-based Sony, but I suggested they use a FlipCam — the $150 device that has a USB jack and is drop dead simple. They scoffed, but four hours later, using Microsoft Movie Maker — they came up with this.

Any thing that scores Eno’s Music for Airports is okay in my book. No seagulls were harmed in the making — that’s actually a pretty recent kill — there’s lots of dead seabirds in the highwater line in February, probably the toughest month of the year to be a seagull. That, and characters talking in hillbilly accents shooting arrows and riding in a 5-series BMW …..

Got on the water this morning — it was too smooth to ignore and the temps are positively spring-like. Being inspired by the crocus and grape hyacinth, I donned ye olde spandex and lugged the Empacher down the hill to the hahbah.

Being a fat f%$k, this not one of my finer rows. Here are the numbers:

8054 meters in 55 minutes, 30 seconds (I do this course in 38 minutes when I am fit) with 1167 strokes. I stopped a lot due to … of all things …. shin splints!

Went by some clammers — commercial guys — and shot the breeze for a while. A quahogger off of Bay Lane in Osterville agreed that you can’t buy a spring day on the water like we had today.

So, if you were here at Churbuck Central this morning, you’d be giving me grief for being a geek with not one of those mark-of-a-loser wireless headsets stuck in one ear … but two — stereo headsets, one in the left and one in the right.

The one in the left talks to the BlackBerry phone. It is a BlueAnt Z9 and I like it because it goes in my ear, not over it, like the Motorola H700 on my right ear which talks to my X61 Tablet and Skype and rests on top of my ear.

The BlueAnt is great for noisy situations. The Motorola … I’ve had it for sometime.

So why two? Well, I can’t figure out how to easily divide one head set between two apps — cell phone and Skype. Any suggestions?

Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy London put it best, in all of the Spitzer scandal, there was some element of the population, myself included, who were first struck and outraged by the lack of an apostrophe in the word “Emperors Club.”

Shocking. All the copyeditors and proofreaders of the world were aghast.

Apparently the New York Times feels the same way, for as of this morning they are referring to the high-priced escort service as the “Emperor’s Club.”

One could argue it was a club for Emperors (of whom there are few), or, as many of us word geeks inferred, it was the club belonging to the Emperor, and therefore needed an apostrophe to designate its possessive condition.

As for Client 9, I think of Patrick McGoohan — “Number Six” — running for his life in The Prisoner, chased by the evil beach ball.

“I am not a number — I am a free man!”

In NYC today for the Ogilvy Verge conference — a one-day digital discussion for Ogilvy’s partners and clients.

Highlight was a late afternoon panel of John Battelle from Federated Media, John Bell from Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Project, Nick Denton of Gawker and Owen Van Natta of Facebook. No bon mots spring to mind, but the key insight was delivered by Battelle and confirmed by Denton — essentially, the current digital model of impression based media is not going to survive, that some new media model is required and has been lacking for over a decade, and that in the end the mostly likely place it will be found is in Social Media.

Battelle recounted a Dell campaign run in Facebook — seemed semi-interesting, but not earth shattering. Bell called out the move from 101 SMM to 201 and AP level discourse on the finer points. Indeed, moderator Polly LaBarre basically told the crowd of mostly clients that if they haven’t gotten the “transparent, authentic, marketing-is-a-conversation memo” then they were essentially under a rock.

Bell is working with me on a very cool Olympic play I’ll disclose next week. I don’t feel compelled to rush into Facebook anytime soon, and as for Federated — we shall see.

Planning session tomorrow morning, working lunch, then back to the Cape of Cod where it looks, but doesn’t feel, like spring.

Ever played Buzzword Bingo? Take a list of pre-determined buzzwords – an hour long meeting or conference call, and instant messaging in the back channel so the players can call Bingo as someone drones on about paradigms, ideation, process planning, any one of a million acronyms, especially the buzzword of the decade:

Transparency.

Transparency gets tossed around a lot in Social Media Marketing, but it really came into its own in 2001 in the wake of Enron’s catastrophic shell game, and the ensuing passage of Sarbanes Oxley. Suddenly “transparency” was the order of the day and PR firms started churning out white papers proclaiming their clients were on the forefront of the transparent movement. Definition: everything is out in the open, opposite of opaque, no murkiness, we know it/you know it.

Social media is supposed to be accelerating the trend towards transparency. Like Wal-Mart’s behind-the-scenes support of the RV couple touring the United States who just happened to park that RV in a Wal-Mart parking lot so they could meet interesting Wal-Mart employees and talk about interesting Wal-Mart stuff to the latest form of astroturfing, Monsanto’s financial backing of a supposed grass-roots organization of dairy farmers who want to continue to use bovine hormones (Posilac) to induce an extra gallon of milk from their cows in the face of a national movement toward organic milk.
The New York Times wrote this weekend:

“That same year, the Monsanto dairy unit hired Osborn & Barr to handle, among other things, the Posilac brand, according to an article in the St. Louis Business Journal.

In 2007, Monsanto and several dairy organizations met by phone to “lay the groundwork” for a grass-roots organization, according to an online dairy industry newsletter.

Afact was created in the fall of 2007. In addition to receiving money from Monsanto, Afact has received help with its Web site from Osborn & Barr, said Monty G. Miller, a Colorado consultant who was hired to organize the group …

… In the presentation, Afact also listed “integrity,” “honesty” and “transparent” [emphasis mine] as “words we wish to embody.”

They could start by being more straightforward about who is behind Afact. ”

There it is – transparent – and the Times just wrote its obituary. George Orwell is smiling up in heaven. He wrote in his 1946 essay: “Politics and the English Language:”

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.“

Sat.-Mon: 3.8-3.10: Cotuit

Tues-Wed: 3.11.-3.12: NYC (Verge, Olympics stuff)

Thur-Sun: 3.13-3.16: Cotuit

NOTE: corporate email has “migrated” from dchurbuck AT us DOT lenovo DOT com  to dchurbuck AT lenovo DOT com. So drop the “us.” And, as always, my personal email remains my name with an @ sign in there someplace.

Congratulations to Andy Beal — the talent behind Marketing Pilgrim — on the publication of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online.

I’ve known Andy since I joined Lenovo in 2006 in the context of his SEO expertise. A year ago he interviewed me about reputation monitoring, incident detection, and problem resolution — something we spend a lot of time performing at Lenovo with our Social Media Marketing team led by Mark Hopkins and Tim Supples.

This is a very good book because it’s grounded in a ton of hard leg work and case study research — not hand waving theory with the usual Hallmark platitudes about authentic conversation stuff. Andy and his co-author Judy Strauss are not pushing a theoretical agenda — this isn’t one of those detestable business books that repeat the summary on the back cover blurb a hundred times. I’d rank it with Avinash’s Web Metrics as an essential and practical operators manual.

Beal’s strength in writing about the topic is his mastery of search — which is the fundamental enabler and catalyst to the entire field of SMM. Some would argue it’s the blogs, Andy realizes its the detection, the track back and the notifications that makes SMM possible and indeed, essential.

Yep, after snarling at the concept of a bunch of big corporate/organization bloggers getting together behind closed doors to wear funny hats and plot total world domination, I accepted Andy Sernovitz’s invitation (with a nudge from buddy Mike Prosceno at SAP) , got our CMO to pony up the fee, and as of earlier this week Lenovo is a member of the Blog Council.

Yes we joined. But the headline says “I” because that is more authentic and transparent and makes me (not “us”) accountable.

This was a tough decision, but in the end I followed the advice of a very smart person at McKinsey who once told a client when confronted with some difficult choices to exercise all three. I won’t say why, the answer is, let’s say, confidential and I have a lifetime oath of McKinsey omerta to respect.

This is a confidential organization — meaning it’s off the record. So don’t expect much more on the B.C. here.

Subject: Your company …

“said it would be 2-3 weeks to get my computer and yet it arrived in LESS THAN ONE WEEK!. I intend to tell all my friends about this, so consider yourself warned.”

I have been in solid meetings the past two days and yesterday watched a presentation that reminded me of the story of the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in 1972.
The pilots were coming in for a landing but the “gear down” light didn’t illuminate in the cockpit. They tapped the light. They flipped switches. The co-pilot opened a hatch and climbed down to see what the problem was. They continued to obsess about the light but they didn’t notice when one of them bumped into the steering column and turned off the autopilot, putting the jet into a slow descent.

No one looked out the windshield. They were looking at the dead nose gear light.

Splat. 99 dead. 77 survived.

Metrics — the act of collecting data about systems and processes — and then reporting them in dashboards can lead to the type of tunnel vision those pilots displayed 36 years ago. The obsession with gathering status reports for the sake of gathering status reports can divert the organization and its people from the task at hand. If you’re trying to smelt gold but you spend so much time tracking ingot development that you fail to notice that you’re in fact smelting lead — then you’re going to be really good at ingot development, but oblivious to the quality of the final output. This is why formerly good things get ruined when big companies acquire them and start to obsess about the efficiencies. “We’ll just swap out the good stuff for the okay stuff and no one will notice.”
Subjectivity — the measurement of quality — is it good? is it bad? Do we suck or do we rock? Those unmeasurable intangibles are dismissed by technocrats as “feeling” behavior prized by people to sloppy to appreciate precision. Or, they attempt to quantify the subjective with surveys and stupid metrics like “sentiment.”
Objectivity — the measurement of facts — has become de rigeur ever since Neutron Jack Welch of GE set forth the commandment that you have to measure it to manage it. And so commenced the age of the tyranny of metrics. The Excel tyrants are really really good at demanding status reports and updates, but the reality is no one looks at their work and is terrified to say: “Go away. Here’s a beach. Start counting grains of sand and give me a TPS report by tomorrow.”

Metrics people — turn yourself into analysts by looking out the window and telling your boss the swamp is getting really close.

I was clicking through and found this wonderful column of “add-to” tags on someone’s blog.

You have to be a paste-eater to understand, but the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons — Gary Gygax — passed away yesterday.

Constantine von Hoffman and Tim Abbott are blogging.

Con writes:

“Also at some other time I will tell you the story of how Mrs. Collateral Damage got me to come out of the geek closet. The punch line, though, “How many Friday nights do the you have to spend playing D&D with the guys from Worcester Poly before you admit you’re a nerd?”

In the words of one of my favorite t-shirts: I am not a nerd. I am a 12th level paladin.”

Tim:

“I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons.  Back in the analog 1970′s, all that virtual reality required were some odd-shaped dice, pencils, graph paper, and above all a passion for all things swords and sorcery and someone to share it with.  While the power of persistent digital worlds has supplanted the bibliocentric medium that Gygax created, it owes a tremendous debt to D&D (as D&D, it must be said, owes another to Tolkien).”

I never played the game — knew some people who did and they were definitely wedgie-bait (not to say either Con nor Tim are deserving of a wedgie). I suppose World of Warcraft has basically ended D&D.