Day: December 5, 2007

Winging the non-presentation

Five days of sweating the big Powerpoint for the industry analysts. Step up to the podium plug in the projector cable, stick in the USB thingy for the wireless pointer, hit FN-F7 to pull up the presentation manager, output to projector and ….

Major lock up.  We’re talking Han Solo in Carbonite. Total freeze. I know, immediately, given squirrely nature of machine, that this powerpoint is not happening. So ….

I start the tapdance, remember Mister Gifford’s Fifth Form class on public speaking and my days on the debate team, and go totally extemporaneous.

No William Jennings Bryan, no Cross of Gold, I just stood in front of a dark screen in front of 50 analysts and colleagues and winged it.

It was fun. Better than talking through the slides, showing the graphs, the charts, the screen shots. I just yakked and had a nice conversation with the crowd. I won’t say it was my best presentation ever, and it sucked to burn so many psychic karma points obsessing over the slides …. there is some recycle potential and this fricking machine gets the Uncle Fester Wipe Out next week in Raleigh.

Carbon Footprints of Screensavers

Dinner last night with some very smart Gartner analysts who talked about the relative watt drain of different screen savers. Seriously, these guys are quantifying the power consumption of 3-D Pipes and Starfield. Average burden is 3 watts …..

They also slammed the claim stated last week at the CMO Summit that an unnamed Wall Street financial institution consumes as much electricity as the entire state of Connecticut — total albino alligator. They did say a rack in a data center does consume as much juice as three typical households.

Cool stuff ….

Social Media Marketing and the Class of ’08

ForbesOnTech: Blog Monitoring; Its Understood by Soon to Graduate Students

Former colleague Jim Forbes on his discussions with college students about the impact of Social Media Marketing and Corporate Journalism on the customer-corporate relationship:

“Not one of the students I talked to suggested or seemed to seriously consider countering negative blog posts with counter attacks. I suspect that there’s an instinctive awareness of basic public opinion among young people that have grown up with social media that helps them understand that exchanges of bodily fluids with online polecats is a wasted effort.”