Archive for May, 2008

I have a feeling someone is struggling to move tix to his July 4 show at GM Place.

Madonna, Kanye, Pemberton, Celine Dion, Cirque du Soleil, George Michael, Janet Jackson …. the concert dollar is getting squeezed and Georgie’s promoters are feeling the pinch.

Oh well, I like a going out of business sale as much as the next guy. If I have anything left after the H&M opening, Apple Store opening and Madonna on sale, I might pick some up.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Okay, it’s a day late - but worth the wait.

A new wine store has just opened in North Vancouver - Everything Wine. It’s on Marine Drive kitty corner from Indigo’s. It’s HUGE. Jen says it’s almost too big. You walk in and more than 3 000 different labels are staring back at you. If you don’t really know what you want, the sheer variety and selection will be enough to make you skulk over to the corner and just grab the first thing you see.

But take your time, ask some questions and taste. Yes, taste! Last week I lamented we usually have to taste with our eyes before we buy a bottle. We get seduced by the label with no real idea of what’s inside. Everything Wine gives you a chance to taste the wine, every afternoon from 2-6. FREE TASTINGS! Excellent.

They also have weekly special events, last week cracking open the perfect 100 point 2001 Y’Quem for $100 a ticket. Next Tuesday, May 27th, they’ll have a Taste of Italy for $25 a ticket.

This is what I mentioned a few weeks back in regards to Home Depot. They have classes educating consumers on how to use their products. More retailers need to get in the habit of making us confident consumers. A high end grocery store with cooking classes, a fitness store with free workout guides, a wine store with tasting sessions.

If they just tossed in a video blog a la Gary Vaynerchuk, and a website that better educated you on wine, this place would be perfectly set up to conquer.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Okay, we all pretty much agree David Cook was the class of the field once they got down to the top 12 on Idol.

But was he always that way? Let’s flash back to the first time he appeared before Simon, Randy and Paula.

So David got moved to Hollywood Week - but if Simon had his way, that’s where it would have ended.

Yay, it’s over. But get ready - Canadian Idol starts in 2 weeks. Ugh.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Working in radio locks me in to a pretty specific time frame. It’s not flexible, I’m on the air from 2p-7p every day. That’s it. That’s my shift. If I’m not there, it’s dead air.

I had an ex who joked that I would be so easy to cheat on, because she could just turn on the radio and know exactly where I was. Hmmmm I wonder why she’s an ex?

Jen’s a sales rep, so her schedule is a little more flexible and fluid. She has some conference calls and meetings, but really she makes her own hours to get the job done.

Z is pretty sick this week. The poor little bear is congested, has a runny nose and is having trouble sleeping. I caught a piece of what he has this weekend, and you can add achey and miserable into the mix.

Today as we were getting him ready to take him to daycare, he just started fighting. He was stuffy, coughing and crying. We couldn’t take him - but who would look after him? Jen had a day planned with her supervisor to get retrained coming back from mat leave, and I have to be on the air at 3.

Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, meet rock.

Eventually I traded shifts with our evening guy, so here I am at the radio station rocking the evening shift for the first time in more than a decade. It’s weird - but fun.

A caller just told me about Nannies On Call. A local company of bonded professional nannies who will offer care in a pinch.

Nannies on Call is Western Canada’s premier childcare agency serving Calgary, Vancouver and Whistler. We have been offering exceptional on call, temporary, part-time and full-time nanny services since 2001. You can put your mind at ease knowing that all of our nannies have been carefully screened – we ensure that our nannies are highly experienced, educated women with a passion for childcare.

The service is recommended by the concierge at the Fairmont Hotel, which makes sense. Away for a weekend and you want to leave the kids for a night - these pros will help.

$18/hr would have nicely covered the 2hr window between my work starting and Jen’s finishing today.

Next time.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

This article originally appeared in 24hrs Vancouver on May 21, 2008.

Don’t hate me, but I’m a daddy blogger.

I realized it this week when I looked down the article list at The Blog According to Buzz and found I had written more about the horrors of daycare and mango pits as teething aids than media and pop culture.

It’s not such a bad thing, I’m a new parent, it’s what my life is about right now and I’m meeting other new parents and sharing stories and support.

Heather Armstrong is perhaps the most famous parenting blogger on the internet. Online, she’s known as Dooce – a word that is also a verb. To be dooced is to be fired for writing about your work online. In 2002, Armstrong was fired as a graphic designer for writing about her experiences at a dot com startup. Since then she has told stories of depression, pregnancy, parenting and her family life in Utah. Her blog became so popular she didn’t need to look for another job and her husband quit his to handle the ad sales for Dooce.com.

You can read the full story here

… when you can watch YouTube the next morning?

David Cook blew it last night. He sang Collective Soul’s The World I Know.

He should have sang Billie Jean.

This means whiny, soft, sugary, lame, Broadway bound David Archuletta (and his crazy ass dad) will win.

It’s probably a good thing for Arch, I can’t imagine what his dad would have done to him if he lost.

In the end, just like in previous seasons, the loser will be the bigger winner. Cook will be on the radio by year’s end, Archuletta will be little more than Clay Aiken’s understudy.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Guy Kawasaki interviewed Pro Blogger, Darren Rowse, for his Sun Microsystems blog last week and a piece of conversation at the end grabbed me.

Question: What do you think of Seth Godin not having comments on his blog?

Answer: I think that it works well for Seth (as does many things he turns his attention to). While the common convention is to give your readers a space to interact with you in the comments directly below your posts Seth’s chosen to let his readers interact with what he has to say on their own blogs (or with him via email).

From what I can tell, one of his main reasons for this was to cut down the work that he needs to put into comment moderation. I understand the temptation to do this - I’ve just hired someone to help me with this very task on ProBlogger.

However another stroke of genius (I’m not sure if it’s intended) with this approach is that Seth has made his blog a little more viral by not having comments. What happens when he writes something that people want to respond to? In many cases they blog about it - ’sneezing’ his post further than his current readership. [source]

It’s the type of marketing every.single.producer craves. Word of mouth. It’s not an advertisement, it’s not a pushed out message. It’s an honest to goodness recommendation from a friend to two friends who tell two friends and so on and so on and so on.

In Seth’s case, closing off the conversation forces the conversation to continue in a way that spreads his message. It’s a sneeze that instantly goes viral. It’s fabulous and immediately understood imagery. When Seth catches a cold, he gives to his readers who instantly want to spread it with every.single.other.person. Seth is patient zero.

Most radio stations can’t quite do that - yet. There’s not enough of an army mobilized to take the message and spread it. The passion in the audience just isn’t there, so opening up a forum for conversation on a show blog, or station website would be a good start to foster a sense of community and encourage the listeners who do care.

Seth explored the notion of the marketing sneeze 2 years ago on his site.

Lessons Learned from Trader Joe’s

I was talking with a colleague today about the magic of Trader’s. Here’s how they make billions:

1. they target a consumer that cares a great deal about what they buy at the supermarket. As a result, their customers are more loyal, and more important, are willing to drive farther to get there. This means they can have smaller, lower-rent locations (and fewer of them) which drives up sales per square foot and profits.

2. These customers are big mouths. They sneeze. When they serve something from Trader’s they brag about, they tell the story of the store. This drives down advertising costs. [source]

So how can radio create something to sneeze at?

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Video, Websites are all necessary tools to get the word spread, but unless your tools are properly set up to encourage community and word of mouth, you’ll fall flat. You’ll also need something engaging to be spread - a cold.

The personality needs to be outrageous, the content needs to be contagious, the audience needs to feel engaged and connected to the product to want to sneeze about it anywhere they can.

There’s a disconnect right now. A bridge needs to be built on two fronts. One - from radio to technology. Two - from radio to listener.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

You’ve heard of The Flip, check out Darth Vado.. from Creative.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Janet Jackson told Ellen this week she’s hitting the road in September. It will be her first tour in 7 years, and just like last time she’s starting in Vancouver.

The 42-year-old singer, set to tackle her first tour in seven years, will perform across North America beginning Sept. 10 in Vancouver, she revealed in an appearance Monday on the television talk show Ellen.

Jackson’s event promoter, Live Nation, has so far only announced a few dates for her Rock Witchu tour, including concerts set for New York and Washington. A full itinerary is still pending.[source]

Janet is, without a doubt, one of the best interviews I have ever had.. let’s dial the clock back to August 1998 when she was out on the Velvet Rope tour.

The Rock Witchu adventure promises to be a greatest hits tour, Janet has set up a phone number, 1-323-622-8139, where fans can dial in and get their favourite track added to the set list.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Nat and Drew interviewed Lenore Skenazy from Free Range Kids last week. Lenore stirred up headlines and debates around the world when she let her 9 yr old son ride the New York subway system on his own.

Here’s the full chat:

 

 nat and drew with lenore skenazy of free range kids: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lenore’s on to something. It may be a little extreme in presentation, but the underlying theme is bang on - we need to let go.

When I was in elementary school, I road my bike to school, on my own, and came home every day for lunch. That was more than 3 km of back and forth commuting each day that I did - on my own. This was in the early 80s, while the likes of Clifford Robert Olson was crawling Richmond, yet I still went to school by myself.

When I was 11 years old, I was babysitting my 8 yr old brother and 5 yr old sister. When I was 12 I was taking the public bus to high school in Vancouver.

Lenore’s assertion that things today are not any worse than they were decades ago is bang on. We may perceive more mayhem and restlessness on the streets, but it’s really the media’s desire to play up drama that makes it so. The 6 oclock News is less about news and more about emotion. When Natalee Holloway goes missing in Aruba, it’s not a mention on the cast, its a series of sensational reports that runs for months.

To get us involved and loyal to the newscasts, they purport to act “on our side.” They’re constantly taking major headline stories and spinning them into a local or personal angle. Just this week, a story on collapsing schools in China turned into a cry for analysis on our own schools and their earthquake safety.

We can be forgiven if we think things are crazy out there for kids, it’s all we’re fed when we turn on the tv. However, if you look at the statistics, things haven’t changed in 20 yrs.

Olympian Silken Laumann heads up an initiative with similar ideals. She wants us to get back to encouraging kids to be kids.

To energize families and neighbourhoods through play and to help parents create the opportunities for their children to play freely and safely together – to recreate in a modern context the neighbourhoods we grew up in and to redefine for our kids the play time we enjoyed and took for granted would always be available to them [source]

By driving our kids everywhere, and keeping them constantly under a watchful eye, we give in to a sort of terrorism. We’re so afraid of something bad happening, we change our behaviour. It’s turning us into a generation of overparenters. I’m guilty of it as well, just look at how I lash out when I don’t think Z is getting all he deserves at daycare.

But I’m going to try and change that. Mellow out a bit. Let Z be Z and just be there for when he needs me, not for when I need him.

Responsive parenting means just that: we respond to children’s needs. It’s not the same as over-parenting, in which we anticipate, preempt, or take control of our children’s needs and developmental tasks.

…

While there have always been obsessive, overbearing parents, they used to be the exception, rather than the norm. [source]

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?