Ran Dumb

May 22, 2007

Just some quick thoughts, take them as you might…

Twitter.com is a ridiculous waste of time and quite addictive. Look me up there – my name is bowlofcheese.

Too few people understand marketing/advertising and WAY TOO MANY of them think that the more crap you throw into the mix equals more messages that get across. When will people understand that if a message is simple and memorable, it works way better than a handful of lesser messages. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, by doing this list of random things, I’m giving readers too many messages and I’ll be lucky if they remember any of them. Worst case, they’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling in their belly and have to check back to find out more stuff even if they forget why they’re coming back.)

I am still trying to get people to use the word STABBY in the context of being hungry. e.g. I’m really stabby for a roast beef sandwich.

The mycokerewards.com site redesign is difficult to load, conflicts with FireFox noscript and needs to be simplified.

The Pawtucket Red Sox are usually a better take than the regular big league team, but so far this year the guys at Fenway have been impressive. That’s probably the kiss of death. Sorry.

Podcasting CAN improve internal and external communications for many companies. Too bad 84% of them won’t figure that out until the next great thing comes along and podcasting has started to fade.

My two new favorite sites for user-created content are Gather.com and Helium.com. Both have some good energy and should separate themselves from the pack fairly soon. In the interest of full disclosure, I recently declined a writing position with Gather and I am a contributor to both the Gather and Helium sites.

I still love Kayak.com for travel pricing, but Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity still do a great job.

Enough tech talk…there is EVERYTHING right with the soft-serve ice cream at The Big 1 in Merrimack, NH. And my recent column for Gatehouse Media (nee the Hingham Journal) has not gotten many hackles up. In fact, I ran into two sets of people who agreed entirely with my comments. Maybe I’m becoming too mainstream. Hmmm.

More to come…