Monthly Archives: November 2009

via BBC News Radio tonight, more than 100 Afghan women have SET THEMSELVES ON FIRE this year. In many cases, it is a fake kitchen fire or other domestic display of suicide by self-immolation as a way out of a particularly abusive relationship.

Holy crap, that is absolutely awful.

Are you ready, Paris Las Vegas senior management team? If you’re listening out there, I’m about to help add at least a half-million dollars to your annual bottom line, maybe more. It’s easy: all that it requires is one change to your Room Management Policy and a training session with your housekeeping staff.

Stop leaving the lights on in your unoccupied guest room bathrooms all day long.

Your “Conserve” cards in the rooms indicate that you want your guests’ help in saving water, energy, etc. But you’re cooking off electricity in every single room, in a few thousand rooms, every single day, most of the day, just so that a new guest has two seconds of extra light in the room hall upon entry.

Ridiculous, unnecessary policy – the Cost/Benefit Ratio on this policy is way way off.

[Your hallways are well-lit, people will be able to see their way into their rooms just fine. I assure you, no one cares, no one will notice, and if they do you'll hear about it at the front desk and you can change the gameplan for that guest in that room only for their stay.]

I don’t know what your electricity costs out here in Las Vegas, but for easy math let’s assume it’s a half dollar per day for 12 hours or so of electricity to power all those bathroom lightbulbs for no one:

$0.50 per day x 2900 rooms x 365 days = $529,000

You’re welcome. If you’d like to comp me a Suite for the opening of March Madness weekend in 2010, I’d be more than happy to take it. Cheers.

I’m up late in Las Vegas, as often happens here, but instead of hitting the tables I’m winding down after a long day of presentations and an enlightening team dinner.  Sportscenter coverage of the last day of World Cup Qualifying is helping out. Usually I reserve my personal blog for random, non-business-related musings on the recent successes and occasional failures of the soccer teams I support or less frequent posts on contemporary art, where to get a tasty microbrew in Seattle, or why I am frequently in awe of my young daughters.

When it comes to observations on the state of the social media marketing industry, my current profession, I typically rely on the talented team at my company and the ‘crowdsourced’ approach to opening our company blog, Twitter account, and Facebook Page to their thoughts as well as my own + our clients and partners. But tonight I feel like a brief post on how far our own agency, and the larger social media marketing industry, has come in the past three and half years since we started Spring Creek Group.

In a word, it’s just been amazing.

It will be an honor to present along with a valued and key client of ours tomorrow here at the WOMMA Summit, and I’m sure that tomorrow I’ll be just as amazed as I was today at how large, varied, and mature this field has become in just a few short years.  By learning together, we’re all demonstrating an openness to the change and dynamism that is the hallmark of the social media field.  In seeing contemporaries like Ant’s Eye View grow equally impressively and rapidly, I find encouragement that  the demand is still growing for talented strategists and efficient execution teams to bring brands and businesses of all types ever closer to their most valued assets: their own customers. And in talking to marketing innovators and leaders here like Rod Brooks at PEMCO, a Seattle company with local roots and national leadership in customer engagement and connection, I get a feel for the shared sense of opportunity out there to bring customers of all stripes more deeply into the growth, improvement, and narratives of organizations that are trying hard to continually do better for their customers as well as their stakeholders, employees, and shareholders.

It’s really a privilege and an honor to be a part of this revolution, and especially to be meeting with more of my colleagues and presenting with a key client stakeholder tomorrow. I can’t wait.

And with that, it’s time for me to do something most of Las Vegas is designed to keep me from doing: get some rest.

Cheers.

Pitchfork is offering, for one week only, the ability to view all 94 minutes of the recent documentary of Everyone’s Favorite Icelandic Orchestral Post-Rock Band (c)(TM) playing all over Europe and elsewhere.If you can’t get enough of slight, sun-starved men playing guitars with cello bows and so forth, enjoy the linky-mcjump-jump over to Pitchfork’s video here.

[...Or you can always just hang out on this post, imagining that you're watching the whole thing (thereby dramatically boosting this blog's average visitor time-0n-site up from the current figure of, well, let's just call it something that rounds to zero).]

On a par with a recently-noticed odd juxtaposition at my local Tully’s, this morning I overheard the following summary of today’s KUOW ‘Weekday’ show hosted by Steve Scher: “Today we will be talking about Honor Killings, which still occur around the world and even here in the U.S…   Also: Gardening!”