Churbuck.com

Okay, it took a couple years, but I have become a fan of CapeCast, the video blog produced by Eric Williams at the Cape Cod Times (where I started my journalism career in 1980 after college).

Williams, who has a Ronco voice and a penchant for driving around the outer Cape with a video camera, wears a red and black checked Elmer Fudd coat and is fond of making up soundtracks for his digressions. The songs are usually credited to “Lovehandle”

Here he tours the impossibly ugly Forefather Monument in Plymouth and sings the “Giant Statue Song”

And here he takes us on a tour of a Quaking Bog.

This is an acquired taste.

Cotuit all week this week and next.

May travel:

NYC  5.11-5.12 (NYU graduation).

Miami for WOMMA 5.13-5.14

Back to NYC on the 20th.  RTP the 21st for staff reviews.

Date: 04-26-2009
Distance: 5000 meters
Time: 20:40.0
Split: 2:04.0
Comments: Testing erg score integration with blog.
Tags: workout

… I slept an hour later than usual, woke to grey skies, ate bacon and eggs instead of beneficial oatmeal, did rapid-fire errands, stopped by the herring run just as the day turned awesome (I saw a big school of herring waiting in the top pool), installed a new mower blade and mowed the lawn, bought a six-pack of Offshore Ale, strung up my rod with a new lure, and hit the prettiest beach on Cape Cod for two hours of casting practice (no fish yet) in the setting sun before rushing home and catching the last five innings of a four-hour classic of a baseball game against Yankees (who also lost a nailbiter to the Sox the night before), cooking the entire time (rillettes, duck leg confit, vegetable stock, hummous) screaming at the TV in the kitchen, and scaring the dogs.

I congratulated my esteemed neighbor for doing the right thing, and she told me about an profile of your humble narrator in the Barnstable Enterprise.  I couldn’t find a copy, but someone dropped it by the house while I was running errands. I feel conspiciously auspicious. I’d point to it, but it’s not online and I am not in the mood for personal promotion.

A good friend dropped by and we got on the topic of seagull attacks and the time I watched a seagull poop into someone’s agape mouth aboard the Hyline ferry M/V Point Gammon when I worked on there as a deckhand in college.

Tomorrow I paint the bottom of the yacht and continue my gardening. My spring peas have sprouted and my arugula is showing itself.  The tulips have opened and the alcove reeks of hyacinths.

On a day like today it does not suck to be me.

I can’t blog about work for some reason, writer’s block and spring fever conspire to tie my tongue.

Reading Nigel Calder on Marine Diesel Engines and Peter Compton on Troubleshooting Marine Diesels. I am not a native motorhead but I like the concept of diesel engines, especially the image in my eye of rigging a replacement alternator belt out of a pair of pantyhose (pardon me mam, but can I have your stockings?) and fumbling in the dark in a wicked storm to close the seacock and clean the raw water intake.

I read Steven Johnson’s Ghost Maps after reading his tweet about The Invention of Air – loaded them onto the Kindle and read the former first; an account of the cholera epidemic of 1856 and the empirical proof the disease was transmitted through a corrupted well – and therefore was waterborne, and not, as was maintained by the health authorities, airborne via foul smells. I like medical detective stories and technical/scientific history – Berton Roueche’s Medical Detectives and Dava Sobel’s Longitude
are favorites – and Johnson is spectacularly smart. The epilogue is out of place, but compelling nevertheless, as it makes a case for urbanism as a dense force for progress and attacking the bucolic vision of telecommuting that I was partially guilty of spreading in the pages of Forbes from here on Cape Clam in the early 90s. Johnson makes the point that the filth of London in the middle of the 19^th century was poisoning and killing the very concept of mega-metropolises, but science and technology made the modern hive possible. Interesting thinking on modern squatters, the Slumdogification of the Third World, and how telecommuters make poor terrorist targets because you won’t find 50,000 of them stacked onto an acre in a skyscraper.

The Big One is reviewed below. I started on Ian MacEwan’s Saturday (following a strong New Yorker profile) and have yet to tackle the latest magazines, including the new Atlantic Monthly with a funny Facebook parody.

In the movie department. I still have some movies to finish in the Essential Art House collection. When I finish I’ll think about writing a post on each of the 50, but for now film criticism doesn’t feel like a strong suit. My son Eliot is providing me with Netflix queue advice, so I’m getting deeper into the Italians, having watched Luchino Visconti’s  Rocco and His Brothers yesterday on the plane from Seattle to Boston.

Watching a graphic rape and stabbing in black and white with subtitles while sitting in the aisle seat in row 16 on Delta may not be as heinous a public act as watching porn in the SUV on the Southeast Expressway during bumper to bumper traffic … with kids in the car … but I was horrified myself and had to build a blinder quickly out of the vomit bag and the current issue of Sky Magazine. Stay tuned for more films. Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies was a stand out. Yasijuro Ozu’s Floating Reeds was another. Watch this scene from Tarr. The dude is outstanding.

In the sporting department. I took in two actual ballgames whilst in Seattle. One with Mitch Ratcliffe in which the Seattle Mariners lost to the Detroit Tigers and again two nights later with colleagues and my stepbro Jos. Nick when the Mariners beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.  I ate sushi at the ball game just to earn the right to say I have eaten sushi at a ballpark. I’d get slapped around and given a wedgie if I tried that in Fenway. I have watched, listened, or downloaded all 15 of the Red Sox games and am happy with their current winning streak. I am not a hockey fan right now — I’m too baseball OCD — but I do like to watch this commercial.

Monday-Wed: Seattle
Thur-Sun: Cotuit

Last winter Mark Alan Lovewell, the fishing beat reporter for the Vineyard Gazette wrote that a new book about the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby had been optioned by the Dreamworks studio. Cool, I blogged. I’d pay to see that flick. The author of the optioned book, David Kinney, detected my blog post through the magic of the InterWebs and sent me an email asking if I’d like a copy to review. Sure, I said. Send it along.

I own about six feet of bookshelf space devoted to fishing books. There’s everything from how-to books such as Flounder Fishing and 99 Angling Tips from Lefty Kreh, to big important reference books like Fishes of the Gulf of Maine. In between are the few I pull down every few years and re-read; books like Dick Brown’s authoritative book on bonefish, Thomas McGuane’s 90 Degrees in the Shade, Peter Mathiessen’s Men’s Lives and the late Bob Post’s Reading the Water, the original book about fishing on the Vineyard. Until now, Post’s book has been the one to beat when tackling a subject as steeped in passion as the Derby, one of the oldest and most venerable fishing contests in the world.

It’s not often that a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter (Philadelphia Inquirer) sets his mind to fishing, but David Kinney took the kind of trip most anglers dream about in the fall of 2007; he fished the entire Derby with a fishing rod in one hand and a notebook in the other. In the new tradition set by David DiBenedetto a few years back in On the Run, Kinney inserts himself in the story as the eager student sitting at the knee of the venerable experts. With a big dose of humility and another of humor, Kinney does a great job of explaining the history of the Derby, the culture of the off-season Vineyard (and the on-season celebrity soaked world of waterfront wealth), and the great stories that go with serious fishing. He has pulled off a few feats most angling scribes can’t contemplate, most notably ingratiating himself into a closed secret society that makes the DaVinci Code look like a church bake sale. I can see why Dreamworks took the option on The Big One, there’s enough skull-duggery, intrigue, charges of cheating and lying to drive a dozen plots.

Kinney written a keeper of a fishing book, no mean feat in a genre that tends to get breathless with clichés and pedantic with tips that never seem so smart in actual practice. And spare us from the fishing book that clutters the story with recipes (even, my late mentor John Hersey was recipe-guilty in his Vineyard fishing classic: Blues). This is just a solid story, a great one in parts, thanks to the fortuitous coincidence that Kinney was hanging around with Derby winner and all-around angling ace Lev Wlodyka during “Sinkergate” – the amazing incident where a cow of a striped bass weighed in by Wlodyka was found to contain a pound and half of lead sinkers.

“Instead he reaches all the way into the farthest recesses of the stomach, and as his hand comes out there is a clattering on the dfloor at his feet. It sounds exactly like change falling out of a pants pocket. Martha thinks it is a joke at first, like that time the guy cutting open a leaderboard fish dropped a wrench out of his sleeve as he fumbled around in the stomach. It takes her a moment to see that nobody’s laughing. She looks at Lev and sees his face morph from shock to horror to embarrassment before he speaks.

“What the f#$k?”

“Inside Lev’s fish-of-a-lifetime, D.J. has found a fistful of lead weights.”

That’s a scene just made for Hollywood, indeed, it brings to mind the scene in Jaws when they gut open a shark and out falls a Louisiana license plate.

Kinney infiltrated one of the most close-mouthed, evasive, secretive, mendacious, fraternal secret societies in the world – Martha’s Vineyard fishing fanatics. Steve Amaral, Dick Hathaway, Whit Manter, Kib Bramhall, Nelson Bryant, Ed Jerome, Dave Skok, Chris Windram, Janet Messineo … these are names familiar to saltwater fishing fanatics throughout the eastern seaboard, perhaps the world, and Kinney hitches a ride with them in the fall of 2007, accompanying them and others to the beaches, rips and inlets of the island in search of the Derby winner. Along the way he weaves in sixty-plus years of Derby history, island culture, and current drama. Read this book: if only for the description of the complex culture that exists on the jetties at Menemsha – a place I avoided during that same Derby in 2007, when I used my boat to free myself from the crowd that lives there for 838 hours every fall. There is no better way to greet the spring fishing season in New England than to read a good book that confirms why we stand in the water, up to our knees, hoping against hope and the need for sleep for something to happen out there, in the dark, under the water on the end of our lines.

I leave you with the part that hit home the closest:

“People see Steve [Amaral] bringing in fish and they figure it’s all action for a fisherman like him, but they don’t see him on all those days when he comes home with nothing, all those nights when he’s working the beach and wondering why in the hell he’s out there and not home watching TV in his recliner. “Nothing’s easy in this business. You don’t go to the beach and they jump up on the sand.”

You can buy the book from Amazon.

via Bloggers Be Warned: FTC May Monitor What You Say – Advertising Age – News.

AdAge reports this old news (which has been sent to me by enough people that I have to comment)

“Thinking about letting a big-name blogger test-drive your new hybrid in the hope he’ll post a glowing review about it, or maybe sending some beverage products to an influencer, hoping she’ll spread the word?

“You might have to think twice, if the Federal Trade Commission follows through with its proposed plan to start regulating viral marketing and blogs.”

Libertarian sensibilities and First Amendment misgivings aside, I’d support a truth-in-blogging disclosure policy. I’m sickened by the ongoing”twilight of objectivity” as the  traditional press fades away, and the online replacements — from review sites gamed by business owners, to payola agencies that build buzz for a fee — aren’t stepping in with any kind of ethical compass.

Those who play it straight will have no problem. I just want to make sure when I see someone raving about a product or service that I know the terms on how they came to try it. If they bought it themselves, all the better. If they took a test drive or loaner — then tell me. If they cashed a check for the “review” — they better disclose or I hope both them and the writers of the check get whacked for the deception.

I just watched an excellent 90-minute PBS show on the Wampanoag experience from their first contact with the Pilgrims to the tragic conclusion of King Philips War in 1672.

I highly recommend it. It was very accurate and beautifully filmed.  Pretty interesting to hear Algonquin spoken in the Nipmuc dialect.

4.13-4.18: Cotuit
4.19-4.22: Seattle
Another week of working from home, then back to the Northwest for a three day strategy session.

My ISP – Meganet in Fall River, Mass. has me on a sick server that had made blog access all but impossible the past week. Things seem to be improving slowly, but not my mood. I had to call them to find out the problem was on their end, not mine, and then it was a case of “stay tuned” with no sense of when the problems would be resolved. I really miss the good old days when I hosted locally at Cape.com and knew the people running the operation. I’ve seen nothing but a reduction in service since Meganet took over Cape.com and that is sad.

A big side hobby of mine is cooking, primarily French and Italian with an occasional foray into Chinese (Hunan) and Cape Cod seafood classics. This winter I’ve been working my way through Michael Ruhlman’s excellent book on charcuterie – the ancient art of preserving, curing, and preparing meat – and yesterday I tackled the hardest recipe yet: chicken galantine.

The first step was to skin, in a single piece, a fresh organic chicken. This requires getting very intimate with the bird and a sharp boning knife. In the end it was easier than expected and I wound up with a rough rectangle of skin about 18″ wide and 10″ high. I laid it flat, unwrinkled on some plastic wrap, covered with another sheet, and tossed it into the freezer.

Then I butchered and deboned the filets, thighs and drums from the skinned carcass, turning the bones into a chicken stock which simmered for six hours.

I excised the tenderloins, sautéed them in olive oil, and ran the remainder of the breasts and dark meat through a fine sieve meat grinder. That all went into the food processor, along with a couple tablespoons of sautéed garlic and shallots deglazed with a cup of Madeira, two egg whites and a tablespoon of kosher salt and ground pepper. That all was ground to a fine paste for three minutes, then I folded in a cup of heavy cream, a half cup of fresh tarragon, chives and parsley and a pound of sliced sautéed organic mushrooms. Not a heart friendly recipe.

On a two-foot long, double thick piece of cheesecloth I laid out the frozen skin, scraping off the fat deposits while it thawed to a pliable state, then with a rubber spatula laid down a thick rectangle of the chicken meat mixture. Into that I laid down the previously browned tenderloins end-to-end and covered them with the remainder of the mixture. I rolled the skin around the mixture (a bit sloppy as there wasn’t enough skin to make a complete casing). I tied off the ends of the cheesecloth tube with string. Bound three thin strips of cheese cloth around the circumference of the long tube for support, then poached the whole affair in the chicken broth for an hour until the internal temperature of the galantine hit 160 fahrenheit – the magic number for poultry.

I let the galantine cool in the broth, opened it up six hours later, took a slice and ….

Not bad. I basically made a big herb flavored chicken sausage. A classic French “cold cut”, transforming an entire chicken, bones and all, into a compact tube about 12″ long and three inches across. Tarragon is a treacherous herb – too much and everything tastes like tarragon, but this isn’t too bad. The mushrooms held up and didn’t come off to slippery and slimy. This would be good with a summer salad, as an appetizer, maybe as the basis of a high end sandwich on a good Pullman loaf with homemade mayonnaise. If I was really fancy I’d cover it with aspic and do some aspic art stuff, but Escoffier I am not.

If you are into cooking challenges, get a copy of Ruhlman’s book, and I recommend his blog as well. Next challenge is duck confit – I finally found some duck legs at the local market ($3.80 apiece) and Ruhlman advises that one can cure them in olive oil, not the daunting quarts of duck fat that are all but impossible to find unless one renders their own ducks down. I have had some success this winter with cassoulet, and duck confit is a primary piece of that bean stew of goodness.

And if anyone knows a good source of pork back fat – I need it. The butchers on Cape Cod dread my appearances (“Any veal bones? Any uncured pork belly? Any back fat?”)

The cliche of a ship’s captain being the last to step off the slanted, sinking deck into the lifeboats; the person who “goes down with the ship.”  The stand-tall, imperious embodiment of leadership personified. Remember Captain Sullenberger walking the flooded aisle of his Airbus as it sank gently into the January Hudson? Checking twice for straggler passengers?

Now in the Gulf of Aden we have Massachusetts Maritime Academy graduate, Captain Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vermont selflessly offering himself to a band of Somali pirates so the crew of the Maersk Alabama could go free.

A family member told the Cape Cod Times:

“”What I understand is that he offered himself as the hostage,” she said. “That is what he would do. It’s just who he is and his response as a captain.”

Imagine the scene as the desperate pirates sit in a lifeboat, out of gas, floating listlessly in water and this arrives, the U.S.S. Bainbridge?

Break out the Depends.

ThinkPad tablets have been installed in the player’s lockers in the new Yankee Stadium (aka “The New Toilet” to Red Sox fans).

Seeing ThinkPads deployed in an innovative way makes me glad.

Seeing them in Jeter’s locker makes me squirrelly.

Check out the video at MLB.com at 2′50″ for the sighting in the wild.

Thanks to GottaBeMobile.com for the pointer.

This morning the New York Times reports on the annual meeting of the Associated Press, and the remarks by AP Chairman William Dean Singleton that the organization “was mad as hell” and not going to take it any more from the portals and internet sites that use, abuse and profit from  its content under the guise of “fair use.”

Rather than rely on the Times — an AP member — for the news, I dug out the full text of Mr. Singleton’s remarks:

“On Saturday, the AP Board of Directors unanimously decided to take all actions necessary to protect the content of the Associated Press and the AP Digital Cooperative from misappropriation on the Internet.

The board also unanimously agreed to work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and who reward the cooperative for its vast newsgathering efforts — and to seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don’t.

We believe all of your newspapers will join our battle to protect our content and receive appropriate compensation for it.

AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.

You will be hearing more about this important and exciting campaign in the coming weeks and months, but I wanted to share this with you today. I know all of you will be looking forward to playing a big role in this cooperative effort. “

Here’s the problem in a nutshell.  The AP is ticked off at Yahoo and Google and other big portals for running ads against excerpts of its content — even when those excerpts and headlines link to the full-text version on the original AP member newspaper’s website. AP wants to be paid by the portals for the privilege of lifting its headline and ledes and then linking back to the full-text. They’ve been moaning about this since early 2008.

From the Times article:

“This is not about defining fair use,” said Sue A. Cross, a senior vice president of the group, who added several times during an interview that news organizations want to work with the aggregators, not against them. “There’s a bigger economic issue at stake here that we’re trying to tackle.”

But the details remain to be worked out, she said, including how to limit use of articles and how to share revenue. When asked if The A.P. would require a licensing agreement before a search engine could show specific material, Ms. Cross said, “that could be an element of it,” but added, “it’s not that formed.”

This reminds me of the edict of a former CEO of a former employer (not Forbes) who decided that he would ban links into his content by competitors.

This also reminds me of the lawsuit pending here in Massachusetts by Gatehouse Media against the Times and Boston Globe for linking to Gatehouse’s weekly newspaper websites and drawing its headlines and leads together in an attempt to create “hyper-local” aggregators.

I see two fundamental religious differences in the philosophy of linking and linkage.

1. Internet geeks and techies, like myself, see the “hyperlink” as the essence of the Web and that most content on the web should be linkable and not walled off.

2. Publishers and lawyers want to be compensated for the cost of producing the content that gets linked to, and are aggravated by ads sold against a page containing a link to the page they created.

Prediction? AP is clutching at straws. This is an embarrassment for them and their members who are hurting hard and need all the traffic they can get. The quid pro quo in linkage is traffic and the portals are dumping billions of free page views into their laps. Shut off the links and start chasing sites on a battle against the concept of “fair use,” replacing the debate into one about “fair share” and no one wins.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.

4/6-4/8 – Cotuit
4/9 – Boston
4/10-4/19 Cotuit
Seattle trip forthcoming, no RTP in the plans.

1. I heard an osprey in the rain today.
2. I heard “pinkletinks” or spring peepers, in an Osterville cranberry bog on Tuesday afternoon.
3. The crocuses have faded and the hyacinths are blooming.
4. The garlic has topped the manure.
5. I’ve seen two lacrosse games this week.
More to come ….

At some point last fall, some smart and brave person at Hyundai made the brilliant decision to look ahead into the future a few months and realize that consumers would place a new car nearly last on their list of life’s necessities come January. By being the first automaker to promise a money-back guarantee should the buyer lose their job, Hyundai accomplished several brilliant marketing moves.

1. They established empathy with their customers.

2. They beat their competition who thought “employee pricing” — letting consumers buy at the same price as insiders — represented empathy. The competition has followed suit and looks like followers.

3. They tapped into the zeitgeist without resorting to the unimaginative marketing message most brands follow these days which is lower total cost of ownership – the aftersale expense which few consumers want to depress themselves with in the elation of acquiring something new. Do you want to talk about depreciation, mean-time-between-failure, and service costs? Meet my accountant.

Marketers have diminished options in a down economy if they cling to their old campaign playbooks. Those playbooks are what I call megaphone tactics. Yell a lot in the right places with the right people by your side and good things will happen.  This is good for selling cigarettes, booze, and hairspray circa the Mad Men Era of the 1960s.

First to go overboard — sports sponsorships. Read Bill Simmons’ great obituary on the NBA “The No Benjamins Association” on ESPN and look at the NASCAR cars rolling around the ovals with white hoods where the sponsor’s logo used to go.

“Here’s a little game to play during your next NBA outing: Look around for how many suites are dark. (You’ll notice them specifically in the corners or behind the baskets.) A dark suite means either that nobody bought it or that somebody did buy it for the season, then made the decision, “Screw it, let’s save the $1,200 [or whatever the number is] on food and drink and not give tonight’s suite tickets to anyone.”

Sports marketing has been whacked. Corporate home rentals for the Masters in Augusta is off 20% this year and woe to the recipient of government bailout money who buys a hospitality box in a baseball stadium this spring.

Second to go overboard: feel-good branding. Those “eagles-on-proud-wings-standing-on-a-rock-spire-in-Utah” ads are done.  If it doesn’t have a solid call to action (please buy our crap now, please), then it’s not running. Just for grins, next time you’re on the mid-town tunnel approach to Manhattan or on any prime billboard region, count up how many are paid and how many are public service announcements.

Third to die: print ads. Sorry, read the remaining headlines while you can, this is the season when dead-tree publishing gets slammed. Business rags are seeing ad counts down 33% year on year. I won’t echo-chamber the terrible news of newspaper bankruptcies in Seattle, Denver, etc. …. The print puppy died and daddy isn’t bringing home a new one.

So, I could wring my hands and be all dour, but no. Instead I want to point out that for those marketers who still have money to put in market, they seem to cling to last year’s playbook, just tuning the message around the advertising equivalent of a slasher flick to say everything must go, go, go at prices too insane to believe. I see it in the airline spam: Lufthansa offering off the wall fares to Paris –  $200 roundtrips to Europe.

What is happening at places like Hyundai is a realization that the rules have changed. Consumers are sitting on their wallets and will continue to. The question marketing needs to consider is not how to align to a corporate strategy built around volumes and market share — cascading strategy based on sales yields little more than direct marketing and demand generation tactics which do nothing to distinguish the company from its competition.

Standing apart from the competition is the heart of the whole branding thing. Differentiating on price is a fool’s game and leads to the whole slasher flick thing. Tossing the brand overboard in a down market strikes me as the equivalent of eating next season’s seed corn.

My modest proposal? If your marketing budget has tanked, and is down 50 percent from last year, the last thing you want to do is spread yourself thin trying to cover last year’s tactics.  This is the time to take a flyer, to do something innovative, to take a risk and consider the high risk tactic that was dreamed about in good times. This is not the time to fall back on classic Four-P marketing. Of those four p’s — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — I recommend.

Product: not the time to roll out a premium luxe model. Nor is it time to start reducing features around the product.  Example — this is not the time to reduce warranty terms, replace stainless steel screws with plastic screws, or cut any corners. The customers are more vigilant than ever. I saw an amazing presentation by the marketing reporter at Businessweek at Google last week and he showed how peanut butter makers are screwing us out of an ounce not by making the jar smaller. Oh no. They use a concave dent on the bottom of the jar (called a “punt” for you oenophiles) to reduce the volume. This is dickheaded and will come back to bite people.

Price: See my screed on taking the marketing message down to the gutter. Anyone can cut a price.  Smart brands like Hyundai go a step further and say “we feel your pain and fear and will do something about it.”

Place: I would not recommend buying the naming rights to a baseball stadium. I would slam the brakes on all traditional media and go 101% online.  Call me digital, but there it is. The traditional media has lost its mass audience effect big time. Media has exploded and fragmented into a million niches. The only way to accurately chase the audience is with a ninja digital team.  I am serious about this. This  Deprecession is the catalyst that is killing the generational gulf between digital immigrants and digital natives. You stand up and wave a traditional campaign, media plan and I guarantee your days are numbered.

Promotion: This is where the opportunity to put on the thinking caps is. No, no viral. No UGC on YouTube. I’m talking killing the notion of the campaign — as Charlene Li said yesterday on a panel, “campaigns are designed to end” — and move to an organic, ongoing, pervasive conversational model with the crowd. This is not social media marketing hand wringing — 99% of the self-annointed gurus couldn’t run a valid social plan if they were paid to do it. This is 180 degree flip from one-way blah-blah message marketing, expensive research and focus groups, and dumb people saying “I know half my advertising works, just not ….”

Promotions need to die and be replaced with full marketing empathy. This is the time to design a product with the customers, the time to listen to their feedback, give them something in a novel way, and break the model being chased by the competition. This is the time to break out with no questions asked service, with golden-rule customer service, with beyond the pale actions that will define the organization and make it beloved, not loathed. This isn’t about freebies, giveaways and concessions. It’s about constant listening and response. ComCast, JetBlue, these are the listeners and doers.

Anyway, enough dour ranting. Bottom line — this recession is the opportunity to kill off the tried and true and invent something new. Even if you decide to only risk a small portion of your seed corn this year, do it, and do it with every expectation of failing, but do it knowing that the customers will notice and maybe even like you for it.

I recommend a re-reading of Doc Searls’ seminal definition of conversational marketing, it’s worth the time.