Virginia Miracle

I am rounding out a truly amazing 2 weeks off.  And yes, I may have done a few hours of work during that time, but physically and psychologically, I have truly been present with family and friends in a new way.   With the reality that work is gearing back up, my mind is now on how best to spend my 2009 online time – to squeeze the most value, quality and fun out of every moment of the day.  Here is my very unscientific list of changes for 2009:

1) CHECK RSS TWICE A DAY.  Not 100x/ day, not 0x/ day.   I have a tendency to either get totally engrossed in other work and forget about the outside world, or to obsessively look for each incoming update.   Moderation in all things.

2) TWEET MEANINGFULLY.  This is hard.  While I believe slice-of-life entries are a great enhancement to your Twitter profile, it is important to keep the “signal to noise ratio” (in the words of Jeremy Epstein) high.  These last two weeks off have been primarily noise – beautiful noise, but noise nonetheless – but 2009 is going to be all about signal!

3) ENJOY CONNECTIONS; NOT COMMERCE.  Pre-Christmas browsing started me down the road to acquisition obsession.  Every luxury e-tailer having unheard of sales was more fuel on the fire.  It’s over. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twit2Fit, and SWOM provide shared value for me and my network and are about connections, not commercialism.

4) NO CASUAL GAMES.  These are the online equivalent of the junk food french fries that I vowed to kick in 2008 (and 2007, 2006, etc).  My current poison, having graduated from Bejeweled, is a little something that I like to call Big Money. (Warning: Click link at your own time-sucking risk).  Similar to Wesleyan Tetris that came within a hair of preventing me from completing my Junior year independent study in college, I need to go cold turkey.

5) MAKE BLOGGING A ROUTINE PRIORITY.  I am fairly regimented and take great joy in going to the the gym.  Because of that, I make time for it.  I plan to do the same for blogging in 2009.

6) REFOCUS. I also plan to return to the core purpose of this blog – highlighting the great work of specific brands in connecting with their customers.  This is the true meaning of “Marketing Environmentalism” and will be particularly important in these tough economic times.

My biggest offline resolution of 2009 is to have more fun.  I believe that trying to cut some of my “junk” online time – focusing on strengthening my knowlege, skills, and interpersonal connections – will help create the time to do what’s important offline: going to the playground with my son, to a restaurant with my husband, or outside to enjoy friends and DC.

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?