A Return to Blogging

Yikes! The blog has fallen by the wayside. Transitioning into a new job, the swine flu and just plain busyness (and of course a little bit of laziness) are to blame.

My new year's resolution is to get back into blogging, at least once a week, so look for a new post coming up later this week/weekend. There is still plenty going on the marketing/social media/advertising/pr world that Makes Me Go Hmm.

Not to leave you without something that brought the 'hmm' out of me. I recently caught a commercial that piqued my interest. However slightly old, how about the Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet commercials where the woman claims she lost weight eating at Taco Bell? What?! Do we have the next Jared on our hands? I'm not all that familiar with the Taco Bell menu due to my straight up refusal to go there, exception being the times my TBell loving sorority sisters dragged me along in college, but if I'm remembering correctly the menu didn't exactly consist of healthy, weight loss friendly food. A ploy, truth, this one woman's odd metabolism? Read more here on AdAge.

To Virginia Tech and Hokie Football

Warning: This post has nothing to do with marketing, or anything remotely related to the topic. There are times for an aside and this is one of them. For a girl has to cheer on her beloved Hokies.

VT bush at the South Gate Entrance onto VT's campus

You may not believe it, but there is a place where people show up in their RVs on Wednesdays for football games that will be played on Saturday.

There is a place where students (and alumni) impatiently anticipate the publishing of the next edition of TailgateFever before the weekend’s game. They will proceed to quote and recite the best parts of the post with their fellow Hokies like it’s an inside joke between a small few, except the majority of Hokie Nation reads the blog and can quote it right back.

There is a place where students have to pull themselves away from the tailgate in order to head to class to take that unfortunately timed Thursday afternoon quiz before the much anticipated Thursday night game.

There is a place where people proudly shout “Let’s Go” with the answering response “Hokies” and jump to the rhythm of Metallica’s Enter Sandman waiting for the team to charge out of the tunnel and onto the field.

There is a place where people proudly (and shamelessly) do the Hokie Pokie between the 3rd and 4th quarters.

There is a place where every tried and true fan knows to come equipped to a game with a set of keys and that these keys should be vigorously shaken on an opposing team’s third down for a “Key Play”.

There is a place where the deafening roar of the crowd intimidates opponents and drowns out audibles.

There is a place where people are fully familiar with Beamerball and where Bud Foster is considered a god.

There is a place where alumni join the college kids downtown at TOTS to drink the highly coveted Rail and relive the glory days of college, celebrate the big win, or drown the sorrows of a loss.

There is a place where people love the colors burnt orange and Chicago maroon and never think twice about wearing them together.

There is a place where 30,000+ know how to answer the common question, “What is a Hokie?”.

This place is in Blacksburg, Virginia, affectionately name B-burg, or The ‘burg. This place is home to Virginia Tech. Saturday my beloved team and their traveling rafter of Hokie Faithful will venture down to Atlanta to play the Alabama Crimson Tide in one hell of a season opening game.

Now you VT readers, grab your tailgating beverage of choice, give yourself some goose bumps and watch every Hokies’ favorite YouTube video, or sing along to Tech Triumph.

Cheers and GO HOKIES!

Win against Clemson. Field rush circa 2006.

That's 'Tissue' to You

Last week while on Twitter I stumbled upon this screenshot of a Kleenex(R) Brand Tissue ad on Ad Age. The ad reads, "Kleenex should always be followed by (R) and the word 'Tissue'. Help us keep our identity, ours." (Click the image below to see the actual ad.)



While this problem can't be new, it looks like Kleenex(R) is confronting the genericized brand name issue.

It seems the Kleenex brand is trying to remind consumers that Kleenex brand tissues are a brand in a product category, and not the product category itself. Kleenex is not synonymous with tissue.

Similar brands that have faced such problems, Xerox, whose name became synonymous with making a copy. Even though the Xerox Corporation's effort to set their name apart and reinforce the word 'photocopy', xerox still ended up in the dictionary. The term xerox, as in to photocopy, seems to be used less today, which can probably be attributed to the rise in electronic documents.

Band-Aid brand also encountered similar genericized name issues as band-aid became synonymous with adhesive bandages of all sorts sizes, types, and brands.

I find it interesting that the Kleenex brand has recently employed such tactics for setting apart their brand. I wonder what suddenly spurred them to act on the issue. (This is the only ad I've from the company with such direction, but it's always possible that I haven't been looking in the right places.)

Still Kicking

Yikes! It's been over a month since the last post, but the blog is still kicking.

The dog days of summer have taken their toll on me. Finding the urge to spend every waking moment outside of my gray walled cubical in the out-of-doors soaking up the last few drops of 'the summer that never was' has left little time for blogging. Well no, there's been plenty of time for blogging, but it's not easily done without sitting behind a computer, and I've yet to venture to try a blog post on my iPhone. While the weather is nice, I'm trying to spend as little time as possible behind the computer when I'm outside of the office.

Image: The waves from Hurricane Bill in Newport, RI.

The snow could come in October, you just never know with New England, but my fingers will be crossed that it holds off a long while. However, this week as fall has suddenly shown itself. With the nighttime temps dipping into the 50s, I see a plethora of blogging in my future.

Some future, hopefully this week, topics to be covered include the Bud Light Fan Cans campaign, Kleenex(R) tissue ad campaign (think brand preservation like Xerox), and an update to 'what's reading'. It's a lofty agenda, so we'll see how much I can get to.

Social Networking: What’s Your Flavor?

As social networking has become all the rage, the list of networks to join has almost become endless. While I’ve been planning this blog post for over a week now, it became a little timelier with yesterday’s Mashable post informing readers that the number of social networking users has doubled since 2007. That’s pretty incredible if you think about it. According to a recent Forrester Research report as quoted by Mashable, 55.6 million adults visit social networks at least monthly, that equates to just under 1/3 of the population. In comparison, that was 17 percent of adults in 2007 and 18 percent in 2008. However, social networking use still pales in comparison to online shopping and email use among other things. We’ll see if the redirection of Twitter, from a focus on you the user to a focus on the entire world, encourages more adults to join and further increases this ever growing adult social networking usage trend.

With so many networks to choose from, I find myself having to limit which I belong to, mainly because there are only so many hours in the day. After 8+ hours of work, a trip to the gym, and any free time I might be able to scrounge up, I don’t find myself wanting to spend endless hours on the computer checking out the happenings on all of the networks I’m a part of. Don’t get me wrong, I like every other former college student used to lose hours of my life on Facebook, but I was only going to class, studying, pursing extracurriculars, and bar hopping. All of which allotted more free time to waste in such a manner. I would like to spend more time perusing the happenings and posts, but the real world just keeps me busier.

I currently belong to three networks, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and I used to be on MySpace back in college. I find my uses for each one very different. Twitter is my current favorite, mainly because it fulfills my news junkie quality. You can learn endless amounts of information on Twitter and you can share all kinds of information that you’ve learned or found interesting yourself. It’s fascinating. My use of Twitter is a mix between professional and personal. I follow all sorts of public relations, marketing, and advertising thought leaders. If these folks in my field are sharing their valuable opinions, knowledge, and experiences for free, how could I ever pass up not signing up to listen and interact? Not only am I hoping to, and already am, learning a lot from these folks, but I figure it can’t hurt future career aspirations to interact with industry professionals. Now, I feel like this means that I can’t go around tweeting worthless nonsense about my everyday happenings. This is fine with me though, I’d rather mainly share information than the ingredients of my breakfast. I also oversee and manage my employer’s Twitter account. I create tweet worthy content and interact with followers. It’s great to be able to apply all of the info I’ve learned from my favorite PR/marketing/social media thought leaders.

Next we come to Facebook. My use of Facebook has dropped dramatically from what it was back in college. While I used to seriously waste hours of time in one session, I now hop on for 10 minutes tops in most cases. Why has my usage changed? Well, partially for a lack of time like I mentioned before, but mainly because Facebook has changed so much over the past two years. Facebook is not Twitter, it never will be and it never should be. Original Facebook users like it because it’s Facebook. It’s a place where you can interact with friends, keep up with people you don’t talk to on a daily basis, and flip through a photo album to find out what’s going on in people’s lives. It’s a place where you can record your interests and your favorite things. But it’s changed so much I feel like I barely recognize it. Call me old, but I have trouble finding things on it, the status updates in the newsfeed irritate me, and I’d impossible to actually find the profile part my friends have recently updated. Other than creating content and assisting with my employer’s fan page, I don’t use my FB for professional interaction.

My LinkedIn usage is at the opposite end of the realm from that of FB. I use linked in solely for professional reasons. There I connect with other professionals, join professional groups, cover and elaborate on the tasks of my current job, list previous jobs, my skills, strengths, etc. LinkedIn for me is like one giant resume. It’s the least exciting of the networks I belong to, probably because I’ve just never really gotten into using it on a daily basis and navigating it easily. Its purpose however is fantastic and I need to learn to use it more, which I have been trying to do recently.

What social networks do you use? Myspace, Friendfeed, Friendster, if it still exists, others? And better yet, if you use multiple networks, do you use them in the same manner for the same purposes or different networks for different purposes?

Back to the days of the coffeehouse?

15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, Inspired by Starbucks. That’s the name of the new local community coffeehouse concept brought to us by global giant Starbucks. This brand extension has me thoroughly intrigued.

The first store, 15th Ave… supposedly opened this week in Seattle. It will be followed by two more test stores, which will all have different names and be unbranded. This is to get at that local, one-of-a-kind coffee house feel that independent coffee shops seem to convey, and adopt a “community personality” as a company exec calls it. Not only will the new stores serve coffee, but they’ll also be adding beer, wine and live entertainment to their menu. Call me a coffeehouse novice, and maybe my polo shirt and boat shoe wearing personality deems me not crunchy enough to venture into authentic local coffeehouses, but I had no idea that they served beer and wine. The thoughts running through my head about this concept are endless, so I’ll try to only hit the highlights. (Read Huffington Post's take here.)

Starbucks Goes Back to its Roots with Café Concept -- That’s the title of the Ad Age article where I first read about these goings on. But can a business that owns 16,000 stores across the globe really turn back the clock to create the “local coffeehouse” or is the brand already too far beyond this? And in relation, does the unbranding and varying names of the coffeehouses fracture the brand leverage that comes with being affiliated with the Starbucks name? It is known all over the world after all. In applying a the concepts from the article Brand Leverage Power: The Critical Role of Brand Balance, by Vicki R. Lane, a brand extension article I read in my brand management course in grad school, I would consider Starbucks a “diamond” under the balanced brand category. In general, it has high consumer regard and familiarity, and thus has high leverage power. But I would assume in an extension situation they would leverage the brand name, not create a new unbranded product.

Enough people out there drink Starbucks because it’s Starbucks. If stores extend beyond Seattle are the 'Starbucks because it’s Starbucks' drinkers likely to hit up unaffiliated, unbranded stores, even if they are technically owned by Starbucks? These folks most likely aren’t the demographic being targeted by this extension, but they are avid Starbucks drinkers and fans, and probably the brand’s core consumer.

Just because you don’t call it Starbucks and offer more beverage options doesn’t mean it’s not Starbucks. This thought conjures up the “rose by any other name would smell as sweet” from Romeo and Juliet. Meaning it matters what something is, not what something is called. No they are not calling it Starbucks, but it’s still owned by Starbucks. Can they really create an environment so unique and intriguing to grab customers whether it has an unaffiliated coffeehouse name or not? With the news of this new venture all over the web it’s not like Starbucks can completely hide their brand affiliation with these new coffeehouses. Will someone seeking an authentic local coffeehouse venture into Starbucks’ take on such for Starbucks to effectively steal the consumers that frequent already established and authentic local coffeehouses? Notice this point could contradict the people drink Starbucks because it’s Starbucks point above, but will they still drink it if it doesn’t say Starbucks on the cup?

Or, will these stores become the next hit thing in coffee? If people drink Starbucks for the name, are they also likely to drink and sport 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea cups and merchandise because it’s Starbucks’ next hit thing? Thus, will these stores have enough of the Starbucks trendiness factor behind them for carry over and spur the next celeb hand accessory or runway prop?

As foreign the coffee and alcohol concept is to me, it apparently isn’t foreign to regions outside of Seattle and this company may have been beaten Starbucks to the punch. Café Caturra, whose motto is “Artisan coffee by day. Boutique wine by night. Simple, fresh food all day.” currently has three locations in and around Richmond, Virginia. Friends tell me it’s good; I will test it our for myself over the weekend and will report back with my take on a coffee/wine crossover establishment.

In my personal opinion, I’m not going to head to a Starbucks spin-off to grab a glass of wine or a beer, but I’m also the type of person to take my coffee on the run. Now, I wouldn’t mind taking a glass of wine on the run occasionally, but I’m pretty sure that’s not legal, or at least not legal in any place I’ve ever resided. I don’t sit and hangout at a Starbucks or any other coffee establishment for limited amounts of time. I might have used it as the occasional grad school/undergrad project meeting place, but I generally find the atmosphere too distracting to get anything of importance accomplished. Too much people watching to indulge in.

Those are my thoughts, questions, and opinions as they relate to Starbucks local coffeehouse venture. Maybe Starbucks will successfully blow a coffeehouse novice like me away with this concept. I am more of a daily Dunkin’ Donuts coffee girl after all.

What's Reading?

In addition to all of my fabulous hobbies, like running, going to the gym, surfing the interwebs, being a news junkie, drooling over JCrew merchandise, collecting shoes, self-educating with marketing and public relations blogs, tweeting, at least once daily visits to Dunkin' Donuts, and eating more fruit than the average person should consume (this happens only during the summer months), complaining about Boston and the not so fantastic weather, daydreaming about D.C. and Virginia, AND missing my Hokies, just to name a few, I also find time to read.

So now that you know all of my hobbies, big and small, I thought it might be fun to keep a list of all of the books I'm reading and have read recently. If I can remember to, I'll even report on how they are going, my thoughts about them while reading, and my thoughts after finishing the book.

Now, here's my take on reading: it's good for you. That pretty much means I read almost anything and everything. Yes, that means I read mindless chic lit sometimes too. But if you put it in front on me chances are I'll read it, or at least give it a try. I have to disclose one thing when it comes to reading though. During a visit to the New Bedford, MA whaling museum a few summers ago my dad purchased me a copy of Moby Dick. I never had to read it in school, but apparently the rest of the world did. I gave old Moby one hell of a try, but after about 50 or so pages I gave up. I couldn't get into it and I just couldn't go on any further. Maybe one of these days I'll dig it out and try again.

Anyway... these are the following titles that I'm currently reading, and yes, I'm typically reading more than one book at a time as I try to balance pleasure reading with self-education reading.

1. Dreams from My Father, by the man himself, Barack Obama. First thing I have to say about this book is, it's not at all what I expected and I wish I'd started reading it at Christmas when I got it. Not only is Mr. Obama a fantastic writer, but I keep forgetting that this is actually a real story of someone's life and not just another fiction read. I'm only about a quarter of the way into it, but it pulls you in and I'd recommend it to anyone.

2. World Wide Rave, by David Meerman Scott. This is a book I'm reading for self-education/career field reasons. I'm trying to keep up on all of the emerging PR and marketing tactics. Like Dreams from My Father, I've been meaning to read this book for months as well. I only started the book Monday, but so far the book is fantastic with all kinds of advice, tips, and full of stories from PR/marketing folks who've successfully created WWRaves. Scott also wrote The News Rules of Marketing and PR, which in my opinion is a must read for every marketing/PR professional.

3. I just finished Quentins, by Maeve Binchy which I borrowed of our communal bookshelf down in my apartment's entry way. It was a decent book and I used to read a lot of her stuff back in high school. Always set in Ireland, I find her books give you a view of life outside of your current surroundings. The naivity of the main character annoyed me a little bit, but the book ended well and it was an enjoyable read.

4. In the spring I also finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss. It's a funny little book about punctuation. Good to read if you want to brush up on such.

I think that covers everything I'm reading at the current moment and the titles I can remember having finished recently. Up on the docket I have Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. Seeing the movie inspired me to reread the book. It was great the first time around and I'm excited to read it again. I've also have One Fifth Avenue, by Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex & The City, so obviously this one's going to be good! My next self-educating book is going to be Puting the Public Back in Public Relations by Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge. It's about social media reinventing and changing PR. And last but I'm sure not least, I want to reread the 6th and 7th Harry Potter books. If my 59 year old dad read them, I figure it's ok for me to do so too!

Phew, so that's what I've got for now. If you can't find me at work or pursuing one of my hobbies, then you'll find me with my nose in a book.