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175.74 Cans.
How do I know? It’s the Death By Caffeine Web site!
All you have to do is plug in your favorite energy drink, your body weight, press “Kill Me,” and then you will find out how many beverages it will take to croak you.
Good times.
Make sure you try it with a few different drinks and enjoy the funny messages.
Also, you can use the Death By Penguin Mints, which will figure out the lethal levels for caffeinated snacks.
Here is an important section from Seth Godin’s “Free Prize Inside”:
Most successes, though, are actually the result of what I’ll call soft innovation. Stuff like fast lube shops, cell phone pricing plans and purple ketchup.What really works? No surprise, it’s the soft stuff. The common sense, creative stuff that requires initiative and curiosity, not an advanced degree, to do.
The reason soft innovation works is that all breakthroughs (big and small) require quantum leaps. It’s much easier, of course to take a quantum leap with style or insight or guts (a nontechnical breakthrough) than it is by toying with the rules of physics or jumping Moore’s curve.
For all of my coworkers and bosses who keep an eye on this blog – soft innovation is what we need to be looking at.
It is easy to think that we need to change the world with our next big idea to be truly innovative. But I think that by not recognizing the importance of the soft stuff, we could be missing out on some great innovative potential.
Last night I skipped blogging to go down to the Denver Rescue Mission and help serve dinner to the homeless. As always, it was a very rewarding experience.
Please, if you are not doing so already, take at least an evening a month and go help out someone in your community. Whether it is the homeless, your neighbors, Boy Scouts, or anyone who is in need.
If everyone would just volunteer a night a month, the world would be a significantly better place.
Think about it.
So imagine this – you are the head of an airline that is on the brink of insolvency. In an attempt to find new and profitable markets, you add service to Budapest, Hungary. With the rollout of the new route, you know you need to market properly to a) let people know you are now flying to Budapest, and b) show your company as a leader in overseas travel.
You think through your options. You could tap into the Hungarian population in the United States by finding out where they are, where they congregate, and how they like to travel. Or you could find the demographic makeup of the average American who travels to Hungary and then target that population. You could even spend your advertising dollars to improve the planes on the Hungarian route, and build some buzz about the great flights to Hungary.
Or, you could advertise on bus stop billboards.
This is a marketing decision that Seth Godin recently pointed out on his blog. And, like him, I had to laugh at the old school scattergun approach to marketing this new airline route. I mean, what traditional marketing bozo decided that bus stop advertisements were going hit the right demographics for people who travel to Hungary?
The way I look at it, advertising is kinda like warfare. And like warfare, advertising has changed a lot over the last few decades. Bus stop advertising is like carpeting bombing in WWII. Carpet bombing is highly inaccurate, expensive, and takes way too much effort for what you are trying to accomplish.
New media advertising like community and search marketing are like smart bombs. You have a very good chance of reaching your target with lower effort and little need for disruption to non-targets. And in the end, if you use smart bombs, and not carpet bombing, the world is going to like you a hell of a lot more.
So why are big companies still opting for a carpet bombing strategy? Are the thinking that traditional marketing is really worth the money? Are the afraid to say no to their ad people? Or, do they reason that traditional marketing has always worked, so why stop?
Truthfully, I have no idea – but I would love to know. Maybe I am missing something.
Seth posts about a great cause that my friend Caree took up a while ago – saving people in the African country of Darfur.
Take a couple of minutes to use those dusty fax machines and send an note to your Congressman with at least one word on it – Darfur. Include your name and address and hopefully congressmen will start getting the point that there is a) genocide going on in Africa and b) something they can do about it.
Here is a link to get your congressman's contact information.
As they say in Starsky & Hutch – Do it…do it.
To get more information go here.
People forward people stuff. Sometimes it is funny. Today it was funny.
WARNING: While these videos are work safe, the sites they are on may not be.
Oh yeah – R.I.P. Addwaitya
Thanks Hugh!
Ok, for all of you Intarweb searchers out there, look at these search results and tell me if something looks wrong:
MSN search for Auto Insurance Page 1, Page 2
If you take a look at all of the URLs, you will notice a pattern. Many of the domains being displayed, like auto-insurance.amazing-credit.com, auto-insurance.24x7-insurance.com, and auto-insurance.great-finance.com are all owned by the same person. And whoever it is has managed to spam the hell out of MSN using the same tactic over and over again.
And surprisingly, the results have been this way for a few weeks.
So, here is my open telegram to MSN regarding their search quality:
Dear MSN Search People STOP Your search results suck STOP They suck real, real bad STOP Fix your results before everyone notices your results suck as bad as they do STOP If you need an example, search for “auto insurance” STOP Seriously STOP Love, James, Chief of All Things, MarketingPunk.com STOP P.S. - Please tell those people over at AdCenter to get their sh!t together. STOP
Alright! I hope they get the telegram. If you are as bothered as I am, write your senator.
Over and out.
In a past life, I was a stockbroker. For three and a half years of my life, I lived and breathed the stock market. The day I left that job, I quit caring about the stock market.
So it takes a lot for me to get excited about anything that has to do with the stock market.
But I am diggin’ Google Finance. I know there are haters out there – like nitinjulka over at Search Engine Watch (the second post) – but I think it is pretty cool. And a friend of mine at work (who gives a damn about the market) really digs it and is going to start using it instead of Yahoo! finance. So suck it nitinjulka.
Check out the graphs feature – very groovy stuff.
After a very long delay, I have an Internet connection again. No more stealing people’s WiFi – just me and my wireless router – the way God intended.
So, where have I been all this time? I have been moving and waiting for Comcast to show up and plug me in.
Where did I move to? Just a few miles down the road from my old place to the Uptown area of Denver.
Why? These shots might explain it – here is the view from my living room and from my bedroom:
It must be true, it is in the New York Times.
Oh, and something to note that is hilarious (to me anyway) - Ogilvy's new seach marketing branch NeoSearch@Ogilvy has a way to go. Check out the search results for these phrases - NeoSearch@Ogilvy, NeoSearch Ogilvy, and Ogilvy NeoSearch .
Um yeah, that could be a problem for your street cred.
You have to watch it twice - and it will take a while to come up - but totally worth it.
You can also find the video at Brian Baute's site (faster).
Enjoy!
Necessary viewing – Seth Godin speaking at Google.
Nothing like a Seth explaining to a bunch of technologists that the reason that Google is so successful has little to do with their technology. He says it has to do with marketing (however inadvertent).
Take the 48 minutes to watch this. There is a reason why the entire blogoshpere is linking to this video.
There are a lot of businesses. Millions actually. And most of them are just businesses.
No personality- just businesses that are in business to do business.
Big companies with big marketing budgets usually have personalities. Their ad agency calls this branding, but it is really just a corporate personality.
Small and medium-sized business that can’t afford branding usually don’t have much of a personality. There are too many things to worry about already. There are customers who need to be served, bills to pay, and employees to deal with. They don’t have the money or the time to worry about their corporate personalities.
But ad agencies are lying to you when they tell you that branding gives your company a personality. And you are lying to yourself if you think building a corporate personality costs those big “branding dollars.”
Giving your company a personality can be done on the cheap, an important thing for a small or medium sized business.
The real cost of a corporate personality is commitment. A commitment to represent yourself through your corporate, personal and community communications with a consistent (and positive) personality.
Personality makes you a brand – not the other way around. Personality is what makes people remember you, for better or worse. A good personality makes people come back for more.
A personality can make your business remarkable.
So my questions for you are:
Does your business have a personality?
If yes, what is it and is it the personality you want to have?
And if no, why the hell not?
Welcome to Marketing Punk. I’m James Omdahl and I am a Denver, Colorado based online marketer and blogger. This blog is a compilation of the things that interest me online and offline. Topics will vary from blogging to search marketing to finding passion in your life to art to pretty much anything else that interests me. Thanks for visiting, come back often, and please take the time to leave a comment and let me know what you think about my posts.
