Before the age of the internet–well, before  age of the television, how companies treated their employees was largely a matter between the employee and the company.

I recently heard a BBC radio program about a young woman named Nellie Kershaw who, in the 1920’s suffered the first documented case of asbestos poisoning while working at Turner Brothers Asbestos in Manchester, UK.

Unable to work, Nellie corresponded with Turner Brothers requesting sickness benefits, she asked:

“What are you going to do about my case? I have been home 9 weeks now and have not received a penny — I think it’s time that there was something from you as the National Health refuses to pay me anything. I am needing nourishment and the money, I should have had 9 weeks wages now through no fault of my own.”

Nellie was flat-out refused any form of compensation because asbestos poisoning was not a recognized occupational disease at that time. Nellie died in her early 30’s and was buried in an unmarked grave because when Nellie’s husband asked Turner Brothers for help in paying for funeral arrangements, they again refused to provide any form of compensation.

History only remembers Nellie Kershaw because her case led to the implementation of the first asbestos industry regulations in 1931.

Fast forward just shy of 100 years. Chapman’s Ice Cream factory in Markdale Ontario is destroyed by fire. The factory had been in the town for 35 years. At the time of the fire Markdale had a population of 1400, and 350 of it’s residents worked at the factory.

Shortly after the fire, Chapman’s owners David and Penny Chapman announced that the company would pay salaried employees in full for one year, hourly employees for four months – and he would “take care of” them beyond that.

This decision was consistent with everything Chapman’s stood for as a company. It had long supported the community at a grassroots level–from supporting local baseball teams to donating large sums to the local hospital.

So I find myself staying at a cottage near Markdale nearly a year after the fire. On a ride up with a friend who has just moved from Toronto to a town near Markdale, my husband was bemoaning the poor (corporate type) ice cream available in the region.

Our friend staunchly defended Chapman’s  by telling the story of the fire and how Chapman’s stood up for its employees and for the town it is part of. Our friend said “you’ll never hear anyone in town say anything bad about Chapmans.”

I happened to take the kids for a scoop of the cold stuff  at Chilli Willi’s Ice Cream Parlour near Markdale.This particular parlour had to close its doors early when Chapman’s closure meant ice cream shortages. The owner would not carry another supplier. She decided to wait until Chapman’s was back up and running. Here, I heair a young man say how he likes the chocolate ice cream in the parlour better than the Chapman’s ice cream he gets at home. I think “this guy knows his Chapman’s.”

Not only does this story get lots of play in the local ice cream parlour and in and around Markdale, but the Washington Post wrote about the case as an example of exemplary corporate social responsibility.

Against this background of cynicism about business — sometimes deserved — David and Penny Chapman stand out. After the fire, they could have called it a career, taking their insurance money and retiring to a warmer climate. Instead they did something all too rare in today’s corporate culture — they thought of others.

Ice cream is a feel-good product; it puts smiles on children’s faces. And Chapman’s carried that feel-good-factor forward by supporting the folks who worked hard to make Chapman’s a success.

People in Markdale are loyal to Chapman’s ice cream. It’s practically the only brand you’ll see in general stores in the area. And, while I’m generally resistant to ‘big corporate’ entities like Chapman’s and the farming practices they employ, I have to say, the impact of Chapman’s gesture to employees put the sprinkles on top of their brand.

Chapman’s leveraged their role as a beloved Canadian organization in the following ad where they thank Canada for supporting them while they were rebuilding their plant.

Chapman’s has leveraged its “when-bad-things-happen-to-good-people tale. But they do it without being exploitive. They have turned a tragedy into a triumph for their brand, for their employees, for the town, and finally, for Canada, who cheers on the success of the ice cream brand because it’s nice, just like we are.

I’m sure that in California this story uses a Shark, but in Toronto, there’s an old joke that if you come across a bear in the woods, you don’t have to out-run the bear, just your friend. As Homer (Simpson) says, “it’s funny ’cause it’s true”.

So I’m finally ready to start using my ipad on the road–away from all the places I get wi-fi. I get the card from a Rogers store, plug it in, and go through the sequence to sign up for a plan.

There’s a glitch.

I call the number on the back of the card and Rogers starts passing me around like a considerably less-than-hot potato. That’s par for the course, of course–big companies have conditioned us to repeat our story and credentials over and over.

I would have just put them on speaker while subjugating myself to their process, but their music made me want to get hit in head with a part blunt, part spiky medieval weapon.

Of course each time it got worse.

They finally explained that I’d need to speak to Apple and gave me the right number. Again, I was told I’d need to wait, but before I got the gasoline and matches out to burn myself to death, they piped in Bob Dylan.

Something else came on that I didn’t like next, but at least it wasn’t the canned aspirational porn Rogers had subjected me to.

Both Rogers and Apple subscribe to a music service ostensibly designed to soothe the ire of a customer with a problem. Except one uses music I’m sure is part of the formula for RAGE from “28 Days Later” and the brilliant strategy of the other is to, simply, not do that.

All companies have problems. We accept that. But as a business owner or someone who cares about the brand they work for, how can you exploit the crummy reality of this fact?

How can your brand suck less than all of the services and products your prospects will be frustrated by today?

PS: Let me give you a tip–it’s not a greeter or a service person harassing them.

The subject of ear piercing came up with my 6 year old. For a couple reasons, I’d rather she not. But rather than be the “voice of authority” sure to inspire rebellion, I showed her this:

Needless to say, she thinks she should “wait a while” before piercing her ears.

What is to be learned from this little lesson in social media?

• Video is a very effective means of communication. Showing is much more effective than telling any day of the week. And it’s never been easier to shoot or upload. Get yourself a little camera like this Flip camera and shoot away.
• Eliminate the voice of authority. Of course I had an agenda in selecting that particular piece of footage. But, I didn’t say a word before or after the viewing to suggest my point of view. Similarly, let good video stand on its own. It doesn’t require commentary, voice over, supers, etc. to be effective
• Keep it short. Most adults have the attention span of a 6 year old. Make your point, and get out.
• Make it share worthy. Sure there were other videos of kids getting their ears pierced at the mall. And I did show them just to be balanced. But I wouldn’t post those vanilla vids on the blog. Borrrrring! This one’s the most share worthy (poor kid.)
• Give it a good title. Kylie’s ear piercing trauma. Now that’s a catchy title. I know what I’m getting with that one. Don’t give your video a generic name when you can tell people exactly what they’ll get when they click on the video.

Listening is my new obsession. I’m setting up a listening post for a client and I can’t stop clicking links to find new folks to listen to. I’m pretty sure this is connected to my obsession with other people’s pictures. But, I digress.

Don’t know what a Listening Post is? It means aggregating all the blogs you read and terms you’d like to search for into one location–the most common free one is Google Reader. Google Reader lets you subscribe to RSS or feeds from the blogs you read. Chris Brogan offers a succinct summary of the steps required to set up a Reader. But the long and short of it is that it is  an online subscription. Think of it as an actionable newspaper.

Your Reader can be just for your reading pleasure. But most likely, it’s content that you’ll want to share.  Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are great platforms for sharing interesting links. What better way to demonstrate the range of your knowledge and the boundlessness of your curiosity than to share these links with other folks who have similar interests.

The key to creating a good reader is finding the right content to subscribe to. And this is where the addictive part comes in. Trolling through blogs  is like searching through a treasure chest, digging deep for a really great vintage broach or like a crazy funky pirate ring.

Here are the simple first steps I’ve found work well:

1. Low Hanging Fruit: Gather feeds from the sites you read regularly. This’ll just make it simpler.
2. Competitor Sites: Never hurts to keep your eye on the competition
3. What your Key Audiences Read: If you know government stakeholders are reading the blog, then you should subscribe to policy feeds. If farmers are your audience, then you should be subscribing to this wonderful blog called The Bovine. Now you see why it’s so addictive. Who knew such a wonderful niche blog existed.
4. Review your Twitter Feed: Many of the people you follow and who follow you write blogs. There’s a good chance that you have alot in common. Check out their blogs and subscribe if the fit is right.
5. (Luke) Use the Links: Review the links on sites you find relevant and then start clicking like mad. Don’t be overwhelmed, like I said, most sites suck. Depending on your industry very few will be subscription worthy.
6. Subscribe to Keywords: This part’s kinda fun. Set up Google Alerts for words you want to monitor across the entire world wide web-o-sphere. Google Alerts gives you the option of feeding this information directly into your Reader. It sounds complicated. But I swear it’s not. What kids of words should you be searching for?

• Your organization’s name, name variations and your url (so, if you’re company is Shur Thing, you should search for ShurThing and www.shurthing.com)
• Your name and the names of others you want to follow (like your mentor and the competition’s executives)
• Competitors, with variations and urls
• Keywords. Want to keep track of new California wineries? Use those very terms.

I’ve been waiting a long time to find an article that helps me understand why Restoration Hardware carries items such as its Wine Barrel Chandelier described as “Handcrafted from French Oak Wine Barrel Staves and Hoops” in its mail order catalogue.

How many old French wine barrels can there be lying around? Who wants to buy this kind of item through the mail?

I finally found the quintessential article on Salon.com today called Overpriced Antiques for Anxious Yuppies. I found it by googling the words “Reclaimed wood restoration hardware bullshit.” Gotta love it when Google works so well.  The article does a brilliant job of describing our longing for objects that:

Trumpet their own authenticity and hint at a connection to the earth and an appreciation for craftsmanship and artistry and the untold charms of the world’s foreign peoples

But of course, the reality is these items are not authentic at all. They are just

Our new way of soothing ourselves over our lives of idle acquisition…We pretend to appreciate the strong hands that fashioned this hand-woven wool rug or built that delightful floor lamp. In this age of ephemeral digital connections and vaporous 24-hour media feeds when most of us spend our days squinting at computer screens, it makes sense that we would be infatuated by the notion of real labor, that we would cling to the concreteness of old stuff that looks like it has a long and storied history.

And now there’s a show that allows us to blow-up our fetish for the faux authentic. It’s called Man Shops Globe which follows Keith Johnson, the lucky fellow who is head buyer for Urban Outfitters (which owns Anthropologie) and travels the world in search of authentic objects to knock-off for our shopping pleasure.

It seems we are at the peak postmodernism where the search for ‘authenticity’ is utterly futile. Those exotic night markets in Thailand are ways for us to fetishize our idea of exoticism. And now, we don’t even need to support their “handicrafts” to decorate our homes like we’ve traveled the world.

Call it armchair exoticism. Call it faux authenticity. Bottom line is, it’s just more of the same conspicuous consumption.

My newsletter from Yelp had some interesting numbers in it today.

Though we don’t stop to think about much it, sites like Yelp, GigPark, Google Biz and  even Foursquare are a great resource for qualified leads.

They sit on a continuum of usefulness that ranges from a modern version of yellow pages to reading your mind.

According to Yelp,

27% of all Yelp searches come from our iPhone Application.

Last month (May), over half a million calls were made to local businesses directly from Yelp’s iPhone App. That’s about 1 call every 5 seconds to a business as a result of Yelp.

Nearly a million people mapped door-to-door directions to a local business from their Yelp iPhone App last month.

And these are only the iPhone numbers. (Don’t forget, we’re on Android, Palm, and Blackberry as well!) In addition, Yelp’s mobile traffic is only a fraction of our total traffic. Over 32 million people visited Yelp from desktop computers in the last 30 days.

That’s a lot of people. Even if you don’t use Yelp yourself, chances are you’ve googled something and had a Yelp listing come up.

Personally, I’ve been logging on and using Canada411.ca for years instead of cluttering my small house with big phone books.

And the last time I was north of Toronto proper I found the best Szechuan I’ve had since I moved here 14 years ago using Yelp.

I’m not sure anyone has an excuse not to spend the time it takes to fill in your profiles in these places (or have someone do it for you). Some of them even let you make an offer to prospective customers for free.

What services are you using?

They’re as ubiquitous as the name-on-a-string you wear around your neck at a conference. And, there’s no good reason for their existence. PVC Conference Folders with a logo proudly emblazoned on the front. They say just one thing about the conference host–they just couldn’t be bothered.

Yes, it’s handy to have some paper to jot down notes at a conference. And there are an endless number of  promotions companies who can’t wait to sell you their cheap, plastic conference folders and accompanying pen. 100 clipboards’ll run you $7.50 + a $60 set up fee. They can pump ‘em out like hotcakes. Or, like widgets. Pick your metaphor. But there’s one problem. They suck. Hard.

At Hypenotic headquarters, we’re used to asking, ‘why?’ Why a brochure? Why a website? Why a conference? When we questioned our client’s (the ‘raddest of the rad’ Matt Houghton) first instinct to give away vinyl folders he was immediately primed to switch gears. This was a guy who understood the value of authenticity better than anyone.

We were helping Matt put together a Media Lab for Push.ca, a Sympatico portal that is the most authentic Canadian voice on Skateboarding and Snowboarding. Push.ca was hosting the Media Lab to show potential advertisers Push.ca had the right people, content and ideas to speak to this niche audience.

The scene was set to give the attendees an experience that was as cool as this culture. We reserved the Gladstone Hotel, ordered upscale street food like nachos and grilled cheese sandwiches, and had the hottest lineup of former pros turned marketers to lend insight.

Instead of a vinyl conference folder, we came up with an environmentally friendly pad, with each cover hand screened with the Push.ca logo. The pads were screened by The Bait Shop, a spot so invested in skate culture that they have a half pipe in their showroom. Beyond the half pipe, their space features a  printshop and gallery. We further featured the Bait Shops’ skills by having them screenprint Push.ca t-shirts on site during the Media Lab, in full view of the participants. It was cool eye candy. When folks walked in, they were asked what colour shirt and what colour screen print they wanted. And, at the end of the day, they walked away with something authentic and hand rendered.

So, tell me again why you were thinking about getting one of those vinyl conference folders?

So Kraft decided to grind a negligible amount of cauliflower into it’s KD and place it under it’s  oh-so-credible “KD Smart” moniker.

Which is the smart part? Well, according to Yoni Freedhoff, Ottawa Family Doctor and founder of a multi-disciplinary, ethical, evidence-based nutrition and weight management centre (is that enough cred for you people?) a serving of this cauliflower goodness has the equivalent of 2 tablespoons of veggies as well as more fat, sugar and salt than regular KD. Oh, and it has 33% less actual KD than the other kinds.

The ad (which I spotted in Reader’s Digest) proudly introduces “Cauliflower that tastes like KD.” Yeah, that’s like calling German Chocolate Cake “Rasberries that taste like chocolate.” Or jeans, “Zippers with Legs”

And this from the folks who were behind Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign? I’m stunned, really. I think that the other supporters of Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation like Pepsi, General Mills and Kellogs should kick them out of the club.

This is the first submission in a new series I’m launching called Shit No One Needs. The articles in this series will highlight the consumer products and services that serve no real purpose to anyone. Other agencies market that kind of stuff really, really well. So well, they’ve helped convince lots of people to buy shit they don’t need. We choose to work with values based companies who do things people actually care about.

Years ago, Seth Godin wrote a blog post that spelled it out in his usual succinct manner:

If you’re a good marketer (or even worse, a great marketer), it means that you’re responsible for what you sell. When you choose to sell it, more of it gets sold.

We don’t choose to sell shit no one needs. We choose to talk about the stuff that gets sold that should not. So here goes…

No one needs exfoliator. They don’t need the kind made out of organic ingredients (that still has lots of unfriendly packaging) and they don’t need the kind with tiny beads made from big long chemical words no one can pronounce. Many of those complicated multi-sylabic words cause cancer and other unfun diseases. Check the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database for a listing of all the wonderful ingredients in exfoliants and other cosmetics.

Want to get rid of dead skin cells on your face + body. Here are simple instructions.

1. Step out of shower
2. Grab towel
3. Rub towel vigorously over face and body
4. Repeat

Don’t believe me? Read this. Don’t go and buy an exfoliating towel. That’s just redundant. Just use your plain old bath towel, and rub it around. You’ll feel glorious.

For an alternative perspective, watch this terrific video on exfoliation that encourages you to scrub your face with chemical beads before smearing petroleum jelly all over your face.

For more information on exfoliator and other heinous cosmetics check out Treehugger’s 5 Ugly Truths You May Not Know About the Beauty Industry.

And, stay tuned. Next stop cycle clips for your pants.

#1

An invitation to a very appetizing event featuring local food described in loving detail: “Be tantalized by the aroma of grilling steaks and chops from Cumbrae’s while savouring fine wines and beers from local vineyards and microbreweries.”

At the bottom of the page it reads “We thankfully acknowledge our fabulous local producers” with a list of event sponsors. The juxtaposition between the first and second parts of that sentence strikes me, and not just for its grammatical awkwardness. Why the sudden default to “event speak” with “thankfully acknowledge”? Especially in the context of so much other beautiful prose. Why not just say “The incredible local food you’ll be enjoying was donated by a bunch of generous Ontario local producers listed below.”

Why do we feel the need to revert of stuffy formalities in certain circumstances?

#2

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life is Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s version of memoir, written in encyclopedic form. Read her entry under ‘C’ for Clapping and see how funny this innovative format can be. It turns the genre of memoir inside out. The Village Voice says “taking the name of a genre obsessed with fixed knowledge, Rosenthal time and again pokes holes in the sober format.” Why not use a tired dying genre and repurpose it to tell your own story? Why revert to “we thankfully acknowledge” when there so many more meaningful ways to express oneself?

#3

CAMH, whom I have criticized in previous blogs, has struck one out of the park with their agency Zig by appropriating the genre of condominium advertising. The metaphor extends right down to a “model suite” you can visit on the Queen Street Site.

The metaphor is a fitting one, since, as CAMH President and CEO says:

“It’s about lifestyle, and dignified human surroundings for people with mental illness and addiction. It’s also about the city building aspect of what we’re doing – it’s really a new kind of hospital. It is very much a part of the community, and the community is part of it, which is something that hasn’t happened nearly enough in the world of mental illness and addiction.” (NOW Magazine)

The PSA genre, heavy with stories and serious issues gets a refreshing new life in the form of a new genre. The digital campaign is less bold in it’s departure from traditional PSA, reverting to stories and not taking the idea as far as it could. But, a noble effort nonetheless.