Will Jamie Lee Curtis blog about her experiences with the Honda FCX – I hope so!

I hope you had a chance to read this article which I found on CNN Money this week about the new Honda FCX that is going to be released to the “public”.  Stew on that word “public” for a minute because I think that you will be surprised.

Honda expects to lease out a “few dozen” units this year and about 200 units over three years …

Move a bit further down the article and you see that some of the “public” people who are going to be receiving the “leases” (highly doubt Jamie Lee will be paying anything for this).

• Jamie Lee Curtis
• Christopher Guest (Jamie Lee’s husband)
• Laura Harris (actress from the show 24 on fox)
• Ron Yerxa (producer for Little Miss Sunshine – and others)

With only a “few dozen” which probably means 25 cars going out to the public I hope people like Jamie Lee and Laura Harris understand their responsibility as fuel cell car owner “community leaders”.  They are the community – I know – but their publicized success with these cars can lead to good things.

Just driving one of these around town to all of the Hollywood happening spots is not going to make these things sell.  True community leaders use tools on the Internet to connect with their peers and discuss their experience and help others understand things like benefit and value. I know these two ladies aren’t being casted in every upcoming movie – but I am sure they won’t be driving it as much as I would.

Now if only Honda would release some of their information on a social network site like YouTube – they may see that the audience they are trying to reach is completely obtainable today.  There is an amazing opportunity to solidify a brand and a product in the younger generation. Those who will tell their grandchildren that they actually drove a combustion engine once.

Interesting Facts

• Honda has operated an experimental Home Energy Station in Torrance, California, since 2003
• The Home Energy Station … [uses] … natural gas to produce hydrogen, and also generating heat for the home. It also produces electricity for the home

More Info:

• http://www.autobloggreen.com/search/?q=honda+fcx&searchsubmit=
• http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/

How long will your old marketing prowess last?

No doubt things are changing – the question is really has it changed?  Did you spend the last 4 (or more) years of your life studying a field that just did a complete flip?  What types of companies are looking for marketing “geniuses” whose college pedigree reads “Graduated 1995″?

I posted this on Twitter a few hours ago and I could not get it out of my head:

“If you are in marketing and you don’t use FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace and/or you don’t blog – get out. The field  will be passing you by soon”

There is still time (I think). When I see companies like the Undercurrent popping up it makes you wonder what value traditional marketing brings now a days.  Undercurrent is hiring “mavens” to spread messages with a virtual interview through a blog post asking you questions like “How would you spread a viral video”.

When I think about this I get scared.  Not because I don’t think that these types of things are cool (because I do) – but because there are a millions of marketing professionals out there who are going to lose their  jobs.

Remember door to door Encyclopedia Salesman (great book about that by Herman Miller – Death of a Salesman). Yeah – if your dad was one of those back in the early 80’s you know what I am about to ask – “Where is he now?”.  Replaced that’s where.

Tree falls in the woods…

How about the “Million Dollar Homepage” – do you remember that?  Here is the significance of that “experiment”- if you did not hear about this before it was posted on CNN, Time Magazine or any other mainstream media – it probably meant that you were already out of the picture.  This is the funny thing about where we are right now – there really will be an “in” and “out” crowd.  The reason this will happen is because there are information flows on the Internet that travel virally and if you aren’t near anyone that catches it (understands it)- you won’t even know it happened. In this case – a tree will fall in the woods and those near it will hear it and unless you talk to them you won’t know.

So when you think about the people that heard about the Million Dollar Homepage through non-traditional networks you begin to see where things are.  Those people have been entrenched in networks where information like this travels and they are essentially 2 years (plus) ahead of you – seriously.  This is how people like Michael Arrington has made his recognition – he is in the know – in an unfathomable way – point in case.

There was a great post today by Jeremiah Owyang which addressed where most corporations are on Social Media.  If you have not come to terms with what Social Media means and you have not come up with a plan to work that into your marketing plans than you better get a move on.  That 20 year old 1st year marketing college grad is suddenly looking a bit more attractive than you.

So for those that don’t have your bearings – here are some terms that your competition are going to be very familiar with shortly:

• Viral Loop
• Viral Networks
• Double Viral Loops

There is still some time – if you hurry.  Good thing this is all documented and you understand the basics.  Good luck.

Managing the unmanaged links

I got into a very interesting conversation with someone yesterday (I so wanted to write this last night but…) regarding the way WordPress and CommonSpot manage links.  I have been using WordPress for my blog for over a year now and I have to say that one of the most annoying things in WordPress is linking.  I am certainly not in the position of managing many pieces of content but I can say I much prefer the link management process in CommonSpot.

 

The Argument

(liberally paraphrased)

Content owners should not care that the link is managed – or to put this in context – if I need to link from one page in the CMS to another I should simply open the page I want to link to – copy the URL and paste it into my content.  The content management system should take the link and manage it automatically (e.g. perform normal link management duties).

Ignoring the technical difficulties of taking a web URL and mapping it back to a relational database link storage facility, lets dissect the process of finding a link:

1.) I need to know where I want to link to
2.) I need to find the link
3.) I need to insert that link

Since the web/usability and the like are interested in “clicks” here is how I would link to an existing post in WordPress vs. linking to an existing page in CommonSpot.

WordPress

1.) Open a new browser tab and go to the home page of my blog
2.) Enter text into the Search field and click “Search”
3.) Locate the post and click the post URL
4.) Copy the content of the URL into my clipboard
5.) Go back to my post
6.) Highlight the text I want and then click the “link” indicator
7.) Paste the content into the URL field – choose my options
8.) Click finish

CMS

1.) Highlight the content I want to link and click the “link” icon
2.) Choose “Link to existing page”
3.) Click Next
4.) Click Page Finder
5.) Choose my criteria and click Search
6.) Click the link that I want
7.) Click finish on the link dialog

(To be honest I had no idea which was going to have the most clicks before I started this)

My main argument is that the link finding process in WordPress seems less intuitive and more complicated then that tools provided by CommonSpot.  This assuming that WordPress had some of the same Link Management capabilities as CS then you would be left with this question:

Would users really like an interface similar to WordPress for locating links or is the abstract link finder in CommonSpot better?