Virginia Miracle

A friend and former colleague of mine has started a night and weekend passion project called RecipeComparison.

In a nutshell, the site allows you to “search for, compare, and share recipes” from popular recipe clearinghouse sites.  The comparison is unique.  It is a side by side look – allowing you to compare amounts and varieties by type of ingredient – like you would comparison shop for appliances or cars.

So…what audience is going to find this feature the most valuable?  As a non-foodie, it is very easy for me to see the value beyond folks who spend hours trying to make sure they are optimizing their pumpkin pie recipes (in all honesty, I actually HAVE gone through this process to find the ultimate macaroni & cheese recipe and it was pretty painful without this tool).   What about people trying to lose weight and find lighter versions of their favorites?  Or heads of household who are cooking for families with food allergies who need to make substitutes?

What would your advice be to the founders of RecipeComparison.com on how to get the word out about the site and its unique features (others include being able to keep a record of searches cross-recipe sites)?  Where would you start?

On Wednesday, I’ll post the advice that I gave to the founders, but in the meantime, I know they would appreciate collecting ALL the best practices and suggestions they can.  Bring it on!

Since my last post 2 weeks ago, the world has changed dramatically.  The financial world is collapsing, the presidential campaign has turned a very ugly page and I have no idea where to turn to learn each critical fact as it unfurls.  Such an uncertain time has changed what had receded into a casual awareness of the lack of Tim Russert on the media landscape and cranked it up to an active longing.

Evidently I am not alone.  Maybe it was seeing poor ancient Tom Brokaw attempting to wring value from the final presidential debate, maybe it was running into Tim’s son Luke on the streets of my neighborhood, but I started poking around to see if there are others who feel the same.  Tim left us almost 4 months ago now, but the loss to the nation seems heightened because of this nasty election +economy one-two punch.

If you feel the same, check out the official MySpace tribute page featuring a greeting from Luke or 1 of the 187 tribute groups on Facebook.  There have been a few new comments on these tributes in these last 48 hours since the debate.  But for an immediate pulse on the emotion of the country, there’s nothing like Twitter.

The image above is just a snippet of the interesting Tim related tweets from the last few hours – you can check out the most up to date Russert tweets here – Maybe this is yet an additional use for Twitter – a tool to host a collective, primal scream for what we lost on June 13, 2008.

RIP.  Elections and Sunday mornings will never be the same.

I am a huge, dorky, proud Bruce Hornsby fan.  You may say “as in THE RANGE?” and I will just sniff and bore you with Bruce’s phenomenal career milestones since the Range went to pasture nearly 20 years ago.  I had plans to go see Bruce a few weeks ago, but the show was canceled due to Hurricane Hanna.  While checking his site yesterday in hopes of identifying another date I can make this year, I found this:

I’m sorry – what?  “WHERE ARE THE LOCATIONS BRUCE IS PLAYING AT?”  Did the webmaster need to go this far out of his way to ruin the construction of this sentence?  How about the simple “Where is Bruce playing?” There’s no need to bring locations into this and certainly no need to abuse a perfectly good “at” by forcing it to dangle at the end of the question.

But, does it matter?  Does your brand suffer for using incorrect or inappropriate language to communicate with your core audience?

While I was mildly perturbed about the situation, I decided to reach out to a true grammar authority – Jennifer Goff, formerly “Grammar Police” at Brains on Fire – and ask her if she thinks good grammar matters.  In fitting style, she put it better than I ever could:

How you say something can be as powerful as what you say. Good grammar/spelling/language,

however you want to look at it, it’s the lowest common denominator of communication. And when I come across a person or a company or a brand that hasn’t taken that minimal time to just proofread, it makes me wonder what other details they’ll miss in my relationship.

gonna be some changes, changes made
can’t keep on doing what i’ve been doing these days
look in the mirror I see a clown’s face
gotta take it off, gotta get myself straight

For the 4th time in my young life, I am shopping for a house. My requirements have changed from the first time I bought (access to schools with foreign language immersion vs. stumbling distance from the best margarita in Austin), but shockingly little else about the process has. Where are my awesome social media apps to make this fun? Not being able to leave well enough alone, I started to ponder why.

• Some of the earliest examples of social media promoted the collective good – user reviews on restaurants or local businesses benefit the whole because when there is good food, we all win.
• And then there’s altruism/karma. If I waste $20 on a bad movie or discover a great book, chances are I may write a brief review just to let you know. It doesn’t really benefit me immediately, but I benefit from the reviews of others so its a positive cycle. Like blogging, this also appeals to ego.
• And then, of course, the fuzzy satisfaction of our ever-increasing digital interconnections. We Link, we Friend, we Match, we validate each other’s existence on the interweb by remarking on each other’s photos and vying for spots on blogrolls and in RSS feeds.

So where does the gnarly world of real estate fall in this spectrum? In most transactions, there is a winner and a loser. Can that dynamic thrive in social media? Trulia certainly doesn’t answer the call – it is little more than another online listing service with some Y!answers tacked on. And the dozens of MLS listing sites are just push marketing.

Enter FranklyMLS, claiming to be “The First Wiki MLS“. The wiki is built up by buyer’s agents – not the agents marketing the homes. In addition to the listing info, these agents add their own photos and important factual data that would be strategically missing from a seller’s MLS listing such as homes backing up to busy streets, being located under an overpass, having bizarre neighbors, etc. It is by no means an elegant UI, but the wiki contains meaty data and its sorting an searching features are tight. The FranklyMLS wiki saves the other buyer’s agents a lot of time and creates a great resource for those of us trying to wrap our arms around the concept of commuting 40 minutes to get to a house priced at $500 per square foot. In a recession.

Frank’s schtick “Don’t Buy! Ask Why!” is that listing agents can’t be trusted and you deserve to work with someone who will tell you the truth. The wiki extends the seller vs. buyer divide, but unites buyers and their representatives to share data as they search for deals that meet their needs. So while there isn’t a current solution for all parties to hug it out in social media, Frank has taken a big step for frightened buyers like me and I appreciate it. Now will someone give this great idea a cosmetic facelift?

Brother Ian over at Flagged For Follow Up recently touched a nerve on a recurring theme in my life – those uninitiated to social media claiming they can’t get involved because they don’t have time for that stuff.

I have no problem with anyone who doesn’t want to participate in social media. I don’t want to read a print newspaper anymore and am completely happy with agreeing to disagree on that point. Due to the very definition of what social media is, it only has value if other people with whom you want to stay connected to are also participating. So if they aren’t, it might have less value for you. But saying its because you don’t have time? Not sure I buy that.

Chances are all of us make the time doing things that are important to us – stopping at Starbucks for a coffee instead of drinking what comes out of the pot at home, watching TV, talking on the phone, etc. For those with networks of friends, thought leaders, and co-workers involved in social media, updating Facebook or reading a Twitter feed sometimes even saves the time of having to get long verbal updates from many individuals separately. Additionally, your personally crafted RSS feed can highlight only the information that you find most relevant instead of having to skim a paper or a host of sites to find what you need to be well informed.

Like Ian, I make time for social media because it is important to me, it is valuable to my job, it prioritizes relevant information for me, and it allows me to keep in touch with more people from more parts of my life than at any time in the past. And if I have to watch 1 fewer TV program per week to fit it in, I find that to be a good trade.