Day: October 26, 2006

Ode to my final flight on Southwest

O Orange and Blue Tubes filled with Balding Salarymen!

Conveyors of human cattle lowing and mooing in the A-B-C boarding chutes

Carriers of the Clampetts, but no Ellie Maes

Just the mobbed masses! They of squeaky wheeled Samsonite Sarcophagi

Mulleted madmen trying to pack a motorcycle engine into an overhead

They of the Red-lit Bose noise-cancelling headsets

They who believe twelve peanuts constitute a meal.

Farewell oh Greyhound Bus of the Skies
For next time I fly Jet Blue direct from Boston to Raleigh
And the only thing I’ll miss is the Singapore Noodles from Kwan’s in the Baltimore FoodCourt during my layovers

SpyCam is open for business

I now have a Lenovo USB “spy cam” perched on my monitor and am dying to start videoconferencing via Skype.

I am “davidchurbuck” if you want to give me a ping.

Richard Bissonnet, my buddy in Geneva, gave me a ring as sat here in the terminal at the Raleigh airport. This made for a most excellent torture test as I was connected via EVDO and had to scramble to plug in the camera, find some headphones, and start conferencing. And it worked. Richard sitting in his den drinking a glass of wine, me shouting over the terminal din to be heard. The microphone on the camera worked perfectly.

We need to hand out a thousand of these between Raleigh and Beijing and start doing some serious video communicating.

Connecting the Dots: Email? Direct mail? SEO? Free stuff?

Connecting the Dots: Email? Direct mail? SEO? Free stuff?

Thanks to Chris Murray for pointing me at this Steve Borsch post. Good stuff that goes into customer innovation, conversational marketing, and other on-the-fringe techniques. I like how his thinking about YouTube video/viral coincides with my own.

“There are no magic bullets. Most of these traditional (and even new) approaches are simply not working anymore. So what is, Borsch? What do you know that we don’t (and will you tell us)? I’ve certainly got some ideas but I do know that most methods of getting the attention of customers and prospects fail because most recipients are not interested, do not have a need, or already have what you’re trying to sell.

So let’s flip the problem around. Instead of figuring out how to find some sort of magic, efficient and more effective way to scream louder than your competition (or loud enough to be heard at all), instead let’s focus on ways to let your customers and prospects be heard and how you can give them what they need and help them buy.”