Churbuck.com

David Hill, Lenovo’s VP of design, just sent me a link to Brandtags.net: cool site that associates the first thing that pops into your head when you see a brand logo. This is from Lacoste — the tennis shirt company with the little alligator logo. See the logo, what do you think of? I think “preppy.” Register and you can see what other people have tagged the brand as. This is a cool thing.

Yesterday one of my colleagues told me I’m in the top five highest users of the company’s employee purchase program — essentially the discount I get for buying PCs from Lenovo.

There is a limit to the number of times one can hit this program. It is meant for “family and friends” which I take liberally to mean anyone I see sitting on an airplane, train, park bench, or alone on a couch at a birthday party. Mac vs. PC? Here’s my discount code. Sick of the virus infested rowboat anchor your cat wouldn’t use as a litter box? Here’s my discount code.

My first year at the company I moved maybe 15 PCs. Now?  Who knows. But I once won a monitor for my efforts and free is good. I don’t suspect there are any internal contests running right now, but as a naughty experiment I tweeted my passcode yesterday in front of my colleague and boasted I would be the Man in a week.

Hmm. Now doubt and remorse have set in. We had an employee discount code go viral – and hosed the system so badly that the affected orders were known by his last name as we worked through the backlog. I hope not to become public enemy number one of the Employee Purchase Program team, but hey, a sale is a good thing. Right?

No. I won’t post the code here. This is a test of twitter — not blogs.  Posting the code here would be an automatic discount for anybody lazy enough to search for the info.  I deleted the tweet as well. So let’s see if 16 hours of visibility among my 270 followers (I have followers, I can summon them with a dog whistle which is inaudible to human ears and they come staggering out of the corn fields, arms outstretched, moaning) is enough to get me in trouble with the EPP lords.

Smart move by JetBlue and fairly simple. Search for twitters who mention the brand and follow them. As a JetBlue lover, it’s an easy decision for me in turn to follow them.

I project they will:

• monitor tweets for expressions of passenger unhappiness and respond quickly
• ping me with deals, offers, etc.

Now to do the same for Lenovo. Right now there is no Twitter account — per se — devoted to Lenovo. I monitor our terms, but the question is how much capacity is needed to do a capable job of monitoring.

Gravitational Pull – About

Aaron Pressman is an occasional commenter here and reporter at Businessweek up in and around Boston. His blog is a fine thing. Some good gadget geekery and nice photography here and there. Nothing like a pro’s writing to make you appreciate the difference from an average blahg:

“I’m Aaron Pressman, a professional journalist, but this is my personal blog. Hopefully, it’s a bit better organized than my home office. I’m also a gadget hound, a dad, a step-dad and a no-longer-suffering Red Sox fan (but, I guess, a now-painfully-suffering Patriots fan). You can see some of the paid writing I’ve done over the years, mainly about tech and finance, on my personal site. “

monkey language

I looked at this from my yard all weekend. (That’s my place in the back ground.) It’s a big old sail that an artist, Michael Marisi Orenstein painted.

“This fully functional sail is close to 100 feet long. It will be installed and exhibited this weekend as part of ArtAgua in Cotuit, Ma.”

Tuesday – 5.27 Cotuit (pushed RTP trip ahead a day so I can vote in the local elections. Churbuck.com endorses Peter D. Field (Cousin Pete) for Fire Commissioner. Cotusions — get out and vote from 4 to 8 pm.

Wednesday – Thursday 5.28-5.29 – RTP, workshops, performance review (mine), visit to the CrossFit Carolina gym in Raleigh (I am on my way to pulling a legit pull-up)

Friday – Monday 5.30-6.2 – Cotuit (boat painting)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web users ‘getting more selfish’

” …. many are “hot potato” driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%.

There were two reasons for this, he said.

“The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment,” Dr Nielsen told BBC News.”

I got tired of the discussion, tired of the comments. Nice lady from Honda sent an apology. She’s got her hands tied. Took them a month to figure out how to respond to me. I don’;t care anymore. Didn’t get what I wanted. Too tired to wage a campaign for a machine that shortens grass.

Somewhere on the 6th floor of the NYC Googleplex, in the marker tray of a whiteboard, sits a silent Blackberry Pearl plugged into a wall.

I read somewhere that for some Europeans the loss of a phone is considered to be the loss of one’s network, of one’s social circle, an occasion for great angst and loathing.

Me? Happy as can be. Off I go to AT&T tomorrow to get me one of the big boy sized blackberries. The old one, which lost the latch to its battery cover, was ratty with scotch tape and is now dead to me.

Until then, I am a landline kind of guy.

May 1999, I spent two weeks in Paris, renting a flat on Ile St. Louis behind Notre Dame. Whenever I needed a new book I went to Shakespeare & Company on the Left Bank and bought something from George Whitman, the man in the video above. He was a hoot, a literary legend who let starving writers live in the bookstore in exchange for cooking and sweeping out. Apparently you did not want to get on George’s bad side. Fortunately I managed to stay on his good side, but not good enough to get a demo of his haircut technique.

I wonder if there is any empirical evidence that the end of a school year drives any shopping behavior associated with the return of campus notebooks to the home environment. I have two kids home from college, both carrying Lenovo Thinkpads (A Z60 and an R60) and both need some serious hard disk sanitation work.

Being a cheapskate, lesson learned the hard way: “Max out the harddrive when purchasing a laptop that is going to school.”  The sheer volume of media files, games, and assorted crud is astonishing and will fill all available storage at the worst possible time: namely right before finals when papers need to be written and the mission critical scenario of cramming kicks in.

So, home come these sick and bloated machines and I find myself ready to:

1. Buy ultrafast, ultra-high volume hard drives.
2. Buy an external drive with enough capacity to perform the transfer and rebuild of the OS on the new notebook drive.
3. Potentially replace keyboards if I detect any crud or spillage.
4. Buy more RAM? Maybe …
5. Not buy replacement screens like I had to do last summer.
6. Consider padded sleeves
7. Even consider NQA replacement plans because I am paranoid and my kids haven’t yet met a notebook they couldn’t accidentally destroy

So, note to self. Push a “Back from School Sale” for accessories and parts.

Monday 5/19- Cotuit

Tuesday 5/20 – NYC

Wed-Memorial Day 5/21 – 5/26 – Cotuit

following week 5/27-29 RTP

First week of June – Bangalore

CNET goes to CBS for $1.28 billion (thx Chris) – a 44% premium over yesterday’s closing price. Silicon Alley Reporter has the skinny and is blogging the call at 8:30 EST. What can I say? CNET started as a TV show, morphed into an online network, blazed some strong trails in the early days (from developing its own content management system, early moves into video and user reviews, extension quickly from computers to consumer electronics), grew like a weed, ate the traditional tech rags lunches, acquired ZDNet, then, post 2000 bubble-pop, hiccupped a little, soldiered on, the founders (Halsey Minor, et al) moved on, and then, indigniities of indignities, upstarts start picking fights with them.

The sale makes sense, but I never have really figured out CBS and the internet. Sure, there was CBS Marketwatch — a great site in the early days, but that was sold off to Dow Jones. Now Les Moonves is back in the game with a geek content acquisition? One getting the heck challenged out of it by the long tail specialist sites and gadget blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo? We shall see.

Then along came Carl Icahn, eater of companies, who decides to show Microsoft how to do a hostile takeover. Icahn, who is best known for his 1985 assault on TWA, has accumulated 50 million shares in Yahoo and is plotting a board takeover. As someone blogged yesterday, Jerry Yang is hiding under his desk.

…at the Harris-Teeter supermarket. Having given into the need to get a Harris-Teeter (why are names like “Teeter” and “Cooter” so southern? Harris-Teeter is now Harris-Cooter) VIC card (don’t ask: it’s one of those plastic barcode discount-getter cards) I went to the Courtesy Desk and filled out a form. As I put pen to paper I realized the following things are securely stored behind the Courtesy Desk and not out on the shelves.

1. Canned crabmeat
2. Lottery tickets
3. Tobacco
4. Infant formula

The last made me sad and I thought about people so strapped for cash they have to steal baby food, enough so that management has to hide it away and guard it.

On the face of it, Facebook groups would seem like one of those cheap, quick, and effective ways to build quick cross-enterprise communities. Set up a group, invite attendees, guide the non-users in how to establish an account, and then control membership.

The alternatives would be a paid account like 37Signal’s most excellent Basecamp, but that is less quick and less dirty than a Facebook group, which to my eyes has a lot in common with the Web 1.0 world of Yahoo Groups. One could also think about any number of wiki solutions, but let’s say the requirements come down to an virtual team room for a collection of four to 400, heck 4,000 users all united in some cause that requires a fast, familiar, and cheap platform.

Facebook would meet that bill except for one vital detail: not everybody can use it.

It’s blocked, along with some other social networks, by many corporate network admins. Right there game over. I was pretty surprised to be in a meeting today, to hear Facebook proposed, and then watch it get shot down in less than one minute as first one, then two, then three seriously senior IT people said their organization’s blocked Facebook. I would argue that no big deal, the platform was, after all, designed for college kids to check each other before attempting a hookup. Having old farts and suits invade it as an enterprise collaboration system was not its intention.

So, the old issue of cross-organizational collaboration is still with us. How would you solve it? Rules are: open platform, open APIs, no fee, no onerous set-up. Needs a file sharing/library including rich media hosting. Must be secure.

 

All Things Cahill » Blog Archive » Social Media – Shark Jumping?

Jeremiah’s Tweet that Avenue A has trademarked “social influence marketing” prompted me to ask rhetorically if the shark had been jumped. My good buddy Mark Cahill posted:

Half-a-century. Old fart. AARP. Etc.

Thanks to everybody for the birthday wishes. I’ve seen it blogged before, but it is truly amazing the impact of birthdate registration has on the automation of the experience.

Highlight of the day was just now when I strolled into the Durham Gold’s Gym, swiped my barcode thing, and the clerk’s PC played “Happy Birthday”, a cartoon cake popped up next to my name, and the man, instead of saying: “Here’s your towel” said “Happy birthday.”

Reel-Time, the Internet Journal of Saltwater Flyfishing used to wish me happy birthday, but it’s dead because SOMEONE forgot to renew the domain.

LinkedIn, Plaxo, The Ladders, Facebook, random financial newsletters, and my sister all emailed me today to say Happy Birthday.

Everytime any one IM’d the sentiment to me, I replied with “f%&k you” because that’s the nice guy I am. How did I spend the day? In a windowless ballroom with our Customer Advisory Council. Highlight was failing to perform 120 pull ups and dips at the gym as the CrossFit workout of the day insisted I must.

Ah. All I want now is a Red Sox game and an empty inbox.

Lenovo’s Web Marketer: Twittering’s Not for Twits

Warning, Raging Ego alert. Brandweek piece is live. Need a new headshot.

“Another big component in the strategy is online, where the effort is being headed by David Churbuck, vp-global Web marketing. Churbuck is an award-winning journalist who formerly worked at Forbes magazine, where he founded Forbes.com and helped develop the company’s digital strategy before joining Lenovo in 2006. At his new post, Churbuck gets to flex his journalistic muscles with an independent blog, churbuck.com/wordpress that covers various issues in marketing and media and rarely even mentions Lenovo. Churbuck is also an outspoken critic of some new media and a fairly avid user of Twitter, the social networking site that consists of short messages called “Tweets” from people in the community. Churbuck corresponded with Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman, who shot Churbuck the following questions via e-mail.”

Monday: 5-12, Cotuit

Tuesday-Thursday: 5-13 to 5-15: RTP

Friday-Sunday: 5-16 to 5-18: Cotuit