Event: Ignite Seattle

I am often amazed about the courage these people have to stand up in front of a large crowd and talk about their passion.

As a newcomer to the metro area, I am fortunate for having stumbled upon the Town Hall venue and this particular event. Imagine watching 15 speakers, allotted 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes speaking time, talk about a subject, business idea, traumatic experience, life experience, or why no one should eat cheese. What I liked about it was that the speakers were able to succinctly do their storytelling in an engaging way (through slides) that made us (the audience) care about their story.


As for myself, do I have a passion I could talk to a crowd about, and would it be inspirational to others? I have no idea. I've always thought that my life and work passions could intermingle; though I'm not sure if I can separate the idea of a hobby from a passion from a side project. I have few of the first, an undecided part on passion, and many side projects.

One of the speakers' advice was: don't think, just do. 

Save the date: May 16, that's the next Ignite Seattle at Town Hall (8th & Seneca)

Want an extra $5 on your Starbucks Card?

If you are unfamiliar with the Starbucks rewards card system, you might not know that you can transfer balances between Starbucks reward cards. Say if you got a stray $5 gift card from a promotion or as a holiday or workplace perk, you could take that balance and port it over to your regular Starbucks rewards card (or account, if you are using their mobile app for purchase transactions).

Starbucks promo email, 2013-02-20

When it comes to content and design, the Starbucks email and accompanying rewards landing page are minimalist. The content certainly does do the job of providing a meaningful amount of information that has a targeted call-to-action which encourages a user to do other steps, maybe check into what else Starbucks is offering, check on reward status or account balance, etc.

What you might not know is that you can also transfer a balance from a cash gift card, say a $100 Visa gift card to your Starbucks rewards card at any Starbucks-owned kiosk or store. And, if you're a Coinstar customer, you can convert your deposited coin balance to a Starbucks rewards card without incurring any service fees.

Want to know how they're tracking this campaign? By product SKU and registered reward card swipes at the register. This is an online/mobile campaign to drive in-store purchases.

And, if you're an avid coffee drinker, this is a darn good deal for 1 lb of whole bean coffee. 'Nuff said.

Weights and Measures

I was thinking about corn this morning and came to the realization that while I had the vague notion that corn commodities were measured in bushels, I hadn't thought about what that meant until I looked it up online. As it turns out, when the tv news channel reports about bushels of wheat or bushels of corn, they aren't referring to the same measurement. Corn used to be measured by volume, where one U.S. bushel of corn was equivalent to eight dry gallons of kernels.

One bushel of measurement is not the same for different types of grains and seeds. These differ from corn in that they are also measured by weight and moisture content. To understand how moisture content affects unit, pricing, and weight, let's use fresh chestnuts as an example. It takes roughly six weeks (according to Allen Creek Farms) to convert freshly harvested chestnuts into dried chestnuts (less than 15% moisture content) in order to store dried chestnuts or to grind it into flour. One pound of whole dried chestnuts can then be reconstituted into two pounds six ounces of rehydrated chestnuts, for culinary purposes.

Here is a basic guide to how other bushels are measured:

• oats: 32 lbs (in the US) or 34 lbs (in Canada)
• barley: 48 lbs
• malted barley: 34 lbs
• shelled corn at 15.5% moisture by weight: 56 lbs
• wheat at 13.5% moisture by weight: 60 lbs
• soybeans at 13% moisture by weight 60 lbs

That said, the next time you are in a discussion about weights and measures or someone casually asks for your definition of an "order of magnitude", it is best to ask what definitions are being used.

Target Ad Audience and Branding

I don't follow football, or much of sports for that matter except for the Olympics. The only time to tune in for Superbowl Sunday is to watch the cacophony of ads. At $4 million per 30 second slot, this is all the more reason to make whatever message your company wants to convey really count. Instead of harping on the truly terribly ads, I thought I might point out ones that really captured my attention. Movie previews are excluded. I looked at things like:

• Core (corporate) message or product brand easily understood?
• Speaks value to the right audiences?
• Feel good? Wacky? Clever?
• Did the end of the ad drive another campaign action?

Worth Mentioning to Others:

Budweiser: Clydesdales "Brotherhood" - 9.3 million views on YouTube (budweiser)
Jeep: Whole Again with Oprah narration - 1.3 million views (thejeepchannel)
Skechers: Man vs Cheetah - 335k views (skechersperformance)
Audi: Prom - 9.2 million views (audiofamerica)

These ads had multichannel flair, presumably to drive the audience from TV to social media. 

Oreo: Whisper Fight - 1.1 million views (oreo); Choose you side at Instagram (2200 followers before ad aired, post-Sunday almost 50k followers); would have a higher impact if the Instagram purl was advertised

Budweiser: Clydesdales "Brotherhood" - Name the baby Clydesdale (Hope and Stan), tweet name using #clydesdales @budweiser

Speed Stick:Unattended Laundry - 1.1 million views (speedstick); Tweet your #handleit moment

Asus Taichi Ultrabook

This looks promising. My Acer netbook experienced its first black screen of death last night and I had to use my other more powerful dinosaur to create a bios boot on a flash drive. The only noticeable spec difference between the two models for the Taichi is battery life, 5 hrs vs 8 hrs. I like that it has a solid state drive. Though, 128 gb seems paltry compared to my netbook's 400 gb. It would be sweet to deliver a presentation on it without having to turn the laptop around to an audience.

[Update: 2013-04] I went to a Microsoft Store to check it out and quite literally, the unit felt and looked as though someone had slapped an ultrabook and a touch tablet together. To make it worse, when you open the unit like a laptop, the touch screen is on the other side of the viewing screen. Both screens are not touch capable, only the tablet side is, which makes using Windows 8 really uncomfortable. I am not going to swipe with a mouse, tyvm.

Coffee and Soda

The Atlantic reports that soda sales in the US are in a free fall, down 40%, while coffee sales have surged up by 50%. This is not surprising given the health backlash from consumers about sugary drinks; except coffee drinks don't have the same stigmas attached.

There are parts of that article that I did find peculiar. For starters, there's a bit about market share and consumer age. I wondered how many 13 yr olds it took to become a statistically significant data point. There are 14.3% of them (in the age group 13-24) that consume coffee drinks. And, there's no mention about the study or the survey size used. The National Coffee Association does track this, and in their study (or at least the preview of it) for 2012, roughly 3,000 adults in the US were surveyed about their coffee drinking habits, but the age cut-off is 18 or older. There's more about coffee drinking statistics at SBDCNet, a clearinghouse for consumer research.

A Viscountess Salutation

I came across Craghoppers, a UK-based adventure travel clothing company, when visiting with avid travel friends in California this past winter. Whether your passion for travel is for exploring the outdoors or simply wanting to do so in style and comfort, Craghoppers is one of the few manufacturers whose clothing lines do both. Sure, you could cite other US clothing manufacturers that offer competitive products, but when it comes right down to it, there are just a handful who can do at a price point that doesn't turn you into a one-time buyer.

But, this post is about Craghopper's email marketing, which was very amusing when signing up for it. I wonder just how many ordinary citizens enjoy seeing non-standard salutations on their email or postal mail from this company. I would be curious to see what the peak and average transaction value per salutation segmentation this company gets.

Craghoppers.com email sign-up form