Another concept to make people take notice, watch, participate, smile. Build an impromptu slip-n-slide. Lather it up. Provide peanut gallery seating with flavored “icees.” Bring extra garbage bag sliding devices. Leave the hose on.

Then rinse and repeat next month. Get the kids in the paper. Show you’ve got a nice place to live.

I’d like see more people produce more “free outdoor movie” series in our hometowns. What feeling does that give you? I became a fan of the “oldies” movies showcased on summer Mondays in Bryant Park (NYC) and thought it might be interesting to setup a cool-but-cheap movie theater setup on the local park.

My vision is a kind of “Thursday Evening Film Series” community affair. “Classic movies under the stars.” The park opens for picnicking at 5pm with a live band (who performs gratis). The films begin at sunset, (typically between 8pm and 9pm). We ask people to bring their own blankets and lawn chairs (no plastic tarps, as they damage the grass). Give an award for the best tasting popcorn – or put a popcorn machine on wheels. Ask the local ice cream and coffee shops to stay open late. Perhaps other food vendors (sandwich/burger/pizza shops) could offer special to-go menus. And a local charity could raise money by offer food delivery service for $5 tips.

I’d love to learn how to license the oldies (think TCM-style). Then we grab a projector (I have a home movie one), 2 JBL EON’s, a small mixer and a DVD player. Setup a large white sheet with simple scaffolding or bungie cords holding the grommets. The sit back and let people laugh, cry and enjoy the moments.

“If the only prayer you say in your whole life is “Thank you,” that would suffice.”
~ Meister Eckhart

“One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.” ~ Louis L’Amour

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
~ Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

It takes a salesperson to know a salesperson. If you’ve ever had to pitch or sell something, Ogilvy’s recent promotion is a hoot. Check out their YouTube Channel on how to sell a brick: http://www.youtube.com/ogilvy

I was recently looking for an iPhone/iPad app that would help me by transcribing voice memos into notes whereby I could quickly store the notes in my contacts file (CRM). After a fruitless (and admittedly short) search, I gave up. Then today I received an invite to Google Voice.

In their own words:

“Welcome to Google Voice. You have now set up your cell phone to use Google for your voicemail. Every time you miss a call on your cell phone, Google Voice will record the voicemail, transcribe it to text and send it to you as an email and an SMS. They will also be saved online just like email. Of course, you can always listen to your messages by calling the access number shown at the top of your account, so you may want to save that number to your phone’s speed dial list. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.”

Sounds almost too good to be true – but I’m going to give it a try.

“All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim; have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible.”
~ Orison Swett Marden, 1850-1924, Writer, Physician, Hotel Owner and founder of Success Magazine

Loved this insight from Ad Age / iMedia Connection.

How Consumer Attitudes and Behaviors are Shaped in Social Media: 10 Essential Rules You’ve Never Heard
Posted by Taddy Hall

My good friends at Ad Age published a similar set of points on Monday. They seemed to resonate. Look forward to comments and continued discussion…

These days, everyone seems to have advice about how to run your social media marketing program. There are so many tips floating around, it’s hard to know what truly essential strategies you should follow to effectively use social media to build your business. Questions abound: do Facebook fans drive sales? Why should I fund forums for consumers to pillory my products, ridicule my service, and tout the competition? And, whatever I decide to do, how I will I know if it’s working?

In the search for Truth, sometimes Social Media is its own worst enemy. With a self-credentialed guru waiting at every click and blog, finding actionable, fact-based insight is tricky.

So, in a modest attempt to bring a dose of sanity to this intellectual frat party, I’ve reined my impulse to lob more “personal picks” into the fray. Instead, I’ll follow the wisdom of an august data mining colleague to just “let the data speak”.

Our process was to query data from hundreds of our brand clients to see what testable truths emerged – and here’s what we found: 10- rules that hold-up across category and time.

1. The 1% Rule: In category after category, our data shows a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who’s subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is .6% and rarely above 4%. However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers to identify and engage –and better, recognize and reward — these Super Influentials.

2. The 2-4X Rule: When it comes to conversion, visitors driven to a site by influencers are 2-4X more likely to convert compared to visitors from other sources, such as display advertisements or paid search. That means your landing pages for people coming from shared links and social sites should reflect these visitors’ interests and offer enticing deals that will encourage these social visitors not only to convert, but to share the deals with others.

3. The New Media – New Pipes Rule: In today’s socially-driven internet, it matters far more what consumers do with your content than what you do with your content. What they say about your brand means more than what you say about your brand. Our data shows that content spread from consumer-to-consumer through word of mouth is far more powerful at driving brand preference and purchase intent than content distributed by the brand itself. This has profound implications in Social Media. To illustrate, if a brand puts content on its Facebook fan page, it is far less likely to go viral than if an influential consumer puts that very same piece of content on his or her page or posts it to a relevant community of enthusiasts.

4. The Martha Stewart Rule: Throw your own party, don’t just cater someone else’s! If you base your social campaigns in venues you don’t control – such as Facebook or YouTube – you may get great “attendance”, but data shows it’s hard to convert and retain these partygoers. If your goals are anything beyond building brand awareness, it’s better to have a house of your own where friends can find you — such as your own branded social site, contest site, or customer forum.

5. The Power of “Weak Links” Rule: Influentials generally do have many direct “friends” and “followers”, but what makes them truly valuable is number and relevance of their extended or indirect connections. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrated in Linked, you are far more likely to find your next job through a friend-of-a-friend than through an intimate contact. These “Weak Links” matter in the “real world”, and they matter even more online. A critical implication for marketers is the need to track the extended social graphs of their content if they are going to be able to understand and activate the dynamics of influence.

6. The Feed the Fire Rule: Consumers love to share relevant, engaging, useful, and entertaining content with their friends. Make it easy for them to find your content and make it easy for them to share your content. >90% of internet pages have fewer than 10 links pointing to them – making them effectively unfindable. Avoiding this abyss of irrelevance requires more thought and effort than just pasting a sharing tool on your pages. It means actively syndicating and curating your content and distributing it not only through your brand’s social graph, but through the graphs of your most influential advocates and fans. Easy ways to do this include following/friending your influential’s followers/friends and retweeting/posting content even if it’s not yours.

7. The More Things Change Rule: Our research consistently demonstrates that email and IM remain popular ways to share content. So don’t throw out your old email marketing methods just because Facebook and Twitter are the newest communication platforms du jour. The tried-and-true methods of getting customers to share links via email and IM are still extremely valuable sources of traffic. Furthermore, incorporating social elements into your email, such as incentives to share, can dramatically enhance an investment you’re already making.

8. Horse before the Cart Rule: Success in Social happens when brands infuse their content with Social dimensions (Facebook Connect, most notably) NOT when they simply stick their ads and content in Social forums. In other words, if you want to succeed in Social Media, your brands and content need to have social attributes – content worth sharing, brands worth talking about, sites that encourage consumer participation and dialog. If your Social strategy relies on advertising in Social, probably better to hang onto your money.

9. The PR Pitfalls Rule: Blogger outreach and content seeding may be popular ways to get your message out into the social world, but our data shows that more than 90% of seeding has no material impact. Up to 5% gets some response, but less than 2% of seeding drives valuable traffic. In other words, if you can’t track efficacy of these efforts, don’t bother.

10. The Customer Service Rule: Social marketing programs succeed when they provide a service to the consumer. Traditional media planning processes that begin with Reach and Frequency targets are largely unhelpful in Social Media. Reach and Frequency – as well as engagement, preference, and conversion – are positive consequences of giving consumers content that is sufficiently relevant and useful that they propagate your message across their own social graphs. Focus on providing useful content and offers to your target audience and they will spread your messages for you.

Social media isn’t a science, but applying data-backed principles to your social efforts provides a structured framework that will enable you to improve effectiveness and ROI over time. And one final note: every rule has exceptions. We live in dynamic times. Find what’s true for you – and share.

“It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson