kendall card 2.0

I was in downtown Salt Lake City today working at my client’s office (Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau) and went out to lunch with a Shawn, Kaitlyn and Larry. I’d never eaten at Lamb’s Grill Cafe, founded in 1919 by George Lamb. They even use the same recipe for the complimentary bread that George used when he opened the place. It’s an old style cafe with pretty good food and an amazing Chocolate Mouse desert that was very rich.

As we headed out to lunch Shawn grabbed his Flip Ultra Video camera, a really cool little gizmo that not only takes internet ready video but has an easy USB plugin built in along with some basic video mix software. Here’s the result of flipn’ in Salt Lake.

Ever had this question? I suppose if you’re a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an electrician, etc that you don’t hear that question all that often. But being a marketer/blogger/social media guru/content editor I get that question all the time. Perhaps what I don’t do is tell the story well enough about what it is that I do DO.

This article on wikipedia.org basically sums up what it is that I do when I get around to doing work stuff. The coolest part is that I love doing it. To quote Jack Black - “My life is good“.

Back in “the day” when athletes wanted to get sponsored by a company it involved printing up a bunch of photos that had either been published or which were keepers and creating a portfolio.

Then said athlete would put together a three-ring binder with the images and any articles or advertisements that featured the athlete. If they really wanted to impress they would have it bound in something more permanent than a three ring binder.

A few years ago some athletes started to use digital images in their portfolio and some went above and beyond by actually creating a web page to host said images rather than including them in an e-mail proposal. But the reality is 99.9% of all the athlete sites I’ve seen are sub par, leaving me wanting more.

I think more has arrived. Meet Landis Tanaka, a 15 year old skier from Alaska put this promo video together and hosted it on Brightcove. Sure, I’ve seen better skiers (not to say he doesn’t have skills) but I’ve never seen a better promo video or “portfolio” ever. Nice job Landis.

I think people must love to screw up a good thing. It’s true. Case in point - blog comment spam.

If you’ve got a blog you’ll know that comment spam is getting out of hand. True to form Seth Godin saw it coming back in March of 2005. Good guys keep improving comment moderation tools and bad guys keep creating more innovative ways to screw up the good thing that is the ability to comment on a blog, thus spending your hard earned 2 cents.

But the bad guys are scared so they hide behind anonymous names and servers.

One of the blogs I manage is the Backcountry Blog, which posts Backcountry.com customer adventures, gear reviews, outdoor industry fodder and anything outdoor related that I care to discuss. Recently a company called CouponAlbum.com has been comment spamming the blog with offers for a competitor of Backcountry.com - Dick’s Sporting Goods. At first I laughed about it but after the 4th or 5th comment I moderated I wasn’t laughing.

It got me thinking - does your company have a comment spam policy? I’m sure it has a privacy policy which it likely created after the need arose. What about creating a policy, taking a positive position before the need arises? Your company may not even have a blog yet, like Dick’s Sporting Goods or CouponAlbum.com, but they should have a policy about comment spam.

So I dropped the folks at Coupon Album a note. They said they welcome it.

Dear Customers, we always welcome your feedback and suggestions. Your inputs help us in providing better offers / deals to you.

Although I’m not a customer they weren’t really a reader of the Backcountry Blog. Here is the message I left them.

I see that you have a privacy policy for your customers which protects their privacy and information. But do you have a blog comment spam policy? You need one.

I manage the Backcountry Blog (http://backcountryblog.blogspot.com) and I would appreciate it if you’d stop comment spamming the blog with deal offers. Since I have moderating enabled it’s NEVER going to get published!

What’s most ironic is that these offers are for a competitor of Backcountry.com who owns the Backcountry Blog.

You bring shame to internet marketing by your back door attempts. Do something remarkable not something repulsive.

Yours in the web,

Kendall

If you know of a company that has a blog comment spam policy I’d love to see it. I haven’t heard of one yet and the need for one has definitely arrived.

When you’re starting a new company in a sea of 40+ year old companies and a handful of scrappy upstarts, you’ve got to go about things a bit different. Then again, you could likely pick up a 40 year old textbook on business and realize that different is primarily in the application, not the concept. Different doesn’t always mean extravagant, wild, extreme. Different could be focusing on the customer when your competition isn’t. That is indeed different.

One of the age old concepts of business is customer service. According to Seth Godin, customer service is an arm of marketing and quite likely it’s your least expensive way of going about it. If you’re looking at customer service as an expense then it’s time to be different.

Bluehouse Skis, who I recently wrote about, is going about customer service different when it comes to getting skis out to their customers. Be certain, if you order some skis, they are out the door pronto. But the opportunity arose the other day to be different and I think it will pay off.

BluehouseSkis.com

This is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while. It comes from The Edge which is a newsletter from Adobe.

While the 360 Flex Conference was going on in Seattle a group of guys who were attending the conference got together and donated their time to create a new flex application for Northwest Harvest. Northwest Harvest is a non-profit food program that provides food for nearly 300 food banks. The application will help them have a virtual food drive where anyone, anywhere can donate and will dramatically change the way they can operate.

I see some really cool results of this effort that are worth mentioning.

1. The code is open source and is available for any other food bank to use. It never ceases to amaze me how the “pay it forward” idea can snowball when you work within an open source platform
2. When people think of donating the first thing that comes to mind is opening the wallet. What’s more unique about this effort is that they donated a skill set that is finely tuned and hone.
3. As you watch the video, more than once it is said that the programmers who donated their time came away with more skills, new knowledge, new associations and expanded horizons. Time and time again I’m reminded of this in life - the more you give the more you receive. It’s a timeless law of humanity, one I believe in and one I hope to embrace more often.

Be sure to watch this video - click the image below

Thanks to my friend Jason Mitchell for passing this along.

Holy social tag jungle batman! (If at this point you’re wondering what the links below are hit the back button on your browser - which I’m assuming is Internet Explorer - and pick another result from the Google search)  But in all fairness, I didn’t score too well on the Social Scorecard.

Here is a collection of tags that I found on a recent blog post at HighSnobiety.com

Of the 38 social tags below (don’t mouse-over them and cheat), how many can you recognize and name? I recognized 8. I suck.

social bookmark now:

In the spirit of social status I present the Social Scorecard:

1-5 : You are still in the 1980’s.  It’s time to awake

6-12: You’re a wannabe.  You really think you are on top of your game.  News flash - you aren’t.

13-20: Take a bow.  Although school work wasn’t your deal you’ve been paying attention elsewhere

21-29: The FORCE is strong with this one.

30-38:  You are a social tag master.   All others must bow and worship your internet prowess.

If you dare to share, comment below with the number of tags you recognize.

The title of this post may throw some of you off, but for those that know me you’ll know that I’m a part of an online ski community known as the “Maggots”. It’s a long story which I’ll save for another post but I was reading the other day an essay I wrote over there (TetonGravity.com) this past winter and wanted to post it here to give you and insight into how online communities both impact as well as transition from online to real time.

——–

This past Friday I headed up Big Cottonwood Canyon for a dawn patrol with some buddies of mine (non mags). It was a peaceful morning, and a great skin up through a storm that was delivering double the snow that was predicted. After a great run down meadow chutes and a click of the poles bidding good-bye to my buddies, I headed up to Solitude for an early meeting.

As I walked through the village the snow was falling lightly and it caused me to reflect upon the last time I was here. It was New Years Eve 2 years ago when in the PNW they were suffering a most heinous dry winter and I was to meet up with Squirrel, GirlSki and others from the PNW who had driven all night in search of snow.

I remember meeting Splat for the first time that day, right there in the village center, and coincidentally riding the lift with Yeti who just weeks before I had been in a slight flame war with and how during that ride and the couple of runs that followed the flame was extinguished somewhere amidst the powder and the trees.

I thought about sharing those few sweet runs with MD9 and phUnk as we upped the ante each time through a cliff zone and on the last run through, me scoping out a landing zone the size of an elevator after which MD launched blindly 40 feet to a perfect landing followed by P Phunk himself. They trusted me, they trusted themselves.

As I walked past the Inn I sorely wished that Woodsy was still “keeping shop” so that I could stop in and enjoy a conversation or two. But not so, here on this Friday morning in November before the lifts were even turning it was silent in the village, mine one of only a few footsteps in the freshly fallen snow. What had previously been an unorganized meeting of maggots on my last visit to Solitude was now a lonely locale.

While hanging out in the ticket office near the rental and repair shot, waiting for the other half of my meeting to arrive I noticed a guy on the other end of the shop looking out the window, intensely watching the snow and the sky, studying the weather. He’d steal a glance back at me as I was enjoying some idle chit chat with the ticket guy. A few moments later I heard “Are you powstash?” and turning noticed the guy from the shop had made his way over to greet me.

Sure enough, a maggot. Skifishbum to be precise and with the shake of hands we’d become friends. As he tuned skis we chatted about my tour that morning and he told me of his day’s plans - a tour to Twin Lakes Pass and beyond. The sticker laden and well-used Bro’s in the ski rack told the story that he was a fellow maggot.

“Hey man, do your skis need a tune? Got any core shots I can fix for ya?”

Sure enough my Havocs were in serious need of a tune. After grabbing my skis from the car and handing them off my meeting was starting. A few minutes later I was back in the repair shop as SFB was just finishing up the tune and headed out the door. “Don’t worry about it, great to meet you man” he said as I shouldered my skis and headed back to the car, another meeting to make.

Walking back through the still mostly deserted village I couldn’t help but think about all the random “change for a nickel” stories there must be out there and how in the world of skiing, which is pretty small in itself, that there is a brotherhood of maggots to which I proudly belong.

Thanks Dave for that reminder.

In lieu of a couple of blog posts that I’m working on that can’t seem to get out of draft format and a blog presentation that I’m putting the icing on (presenting “Blogging With Purpose” tomorrow at Senator Bennett’s Rural Utah Business Conference), I wanted to post a cool little map tool I found from ConnectBlogs.com via David Miller’s blog.

My mother-in-law would absolutely love this tool (are you reading Mom?) since for the past 8 or 9 years she and the rest of the family have had little maps on the fridge indicating all the states they have visited. She set out on her quest and would color in each state as she went, eventually getting all the states. She’s now working on Europe. Looking at my map below I’ve not been so fortunate in my travels.

Get your own personalized map of the United States at world66.com

Image Hint: You’ll have to resize the image for most blogs since it will be quite large.  The one above was easy to edit with the follow text in the img src code tag - width=”385″ - You can also take out the text links that world66.com included in the code that you cut an pasted.

In anticipation for next week when I’ll be hearing Seth Godin speak, who happens to be one of my favorite authors on business and marketing, I’m posting a video of him speaking about his previous book “All Marketers Are Liars”.

Enjoy this video of his presentation to some Google Employees, hosted of course on Google Video.