Monthly Archives: July 2010

Let me start with this, Jeremiah Owyang consistently writes papers, posts and articles that I read while nodding and murmuring Yep and Uh Huh. Until today.

Jeremiah wrote an article that I’d give an solid B- for Forbes. In How To Create A Customer Advocacy Program, and includes five easy steps for CMOs to follow. I read the article and went Uh huh, Yep, Yes, Are you CRAZY, and Sure. 80% for Jeremiah, and that is a B- with some crummy advice built in.

He starts strong, explaining why a company would need an advocacy program and then he gets to the five phases:

1. Get ready internally: Smart, yes, go read the article, because this is advice y’all probably need. Us bloggers require massaging, have someone in place to handle us.

2. Find the right advocates: yes, of course. This just makes sense. He goes into detail, and I promise you the devil is in the details, and I also promise you that the wrong team will sink you.

3. Build a relationship for the long term: You cannot begin to predict the future. Toyota has taken a beating, I’m sure their press relationships are more critical now than ever before.

4. Give them a platform — but do not pay them: This is where my head about spun off my shoulders. If you don’t pay for your outreach you will get messes like this.

Or when a man is trampled to death while working at WalMart your free employees might not know what to say.

Of course there’s always the Mc Donalds Moms (http://mcdonaldsmoms.com), whose website does not appear to be active, but they do have Quality Correspondents.

Is there any part of you that trusts these people with your brand? Mr. CMO please go grab an intern, any intern and ask yourself, “Do I want to empower this unpaid person with my brand’s reputation?” The chances are your answer to this is, “No”. The chances are also very good that any random intern has more training than the current crop of Brand Ambassadors.

I’m begging you Ms. CMO don’t listen to people who are selling you a package that includes free labor. These Brand Ambassadors do more harm than good to the smart consumer. I’m hopeful that you want the smart consumer.

5. Integrate them into your business and recognize them: Well yeah, of course. It’s a business, not a non profit. See #4, and let’s see if we can get y’all an A+ this time.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the runaway Toyota (and Lexus)  is more likely driver confusion than sticky gas pedals.

The findings by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration involve a sample of the reports in which a driver of a Toyota vehicle said the brakes were depressed but failed to stop the car from accelerating and ultimately crashing.

The U.S. Department of Transportation found that throttles were wide open and brakes not engaged on Toyotas involved in accidents blamed on sudden acceleration, said people familiar with the matter. Mike Ramsey discusses. Also, Joe White and Ashby Jones discuss the U.S. Court ruling striking down certain FCC rules against broadcast indecency.

A NHTSA spokeswoman declined to comment on the findings, which haven’t been released by the agency.

The data recorders analyzed by NHTSA were selected by the agency, not Toyota, based on complaints the drivers had filed with the government. Toyota hasn’t been involved in interpreting the data.

The Toyota findings appear to support Toyota’s position that sudden-acceleration reports involving its vehicles weren’t caused by electronic glitches in computer-controlled throttle systems, as some safety advocates and plaintiffs’ attorneys have alleged. More than 100 people have sued the car maker over crashes they claim were the result of faulty electronics.

Dumb hippies. (Yep, I’m one of them)

Alexander is an only child this week. Jane has gone to camp, so it’s just the three of us. To be perfectly frank, we are not quite a family this week. We are a couple with a kid.

Yesterday I asked Alexander if he’d like sausage, broccoli and rice for dinner. He was very enthusiastic, so I made the dinner. I did use a beef sausage instead of the Italian pork that he typically likes, but I did so knowing that there were breakfast steaks in the refrigerator, and I had an alternate meal in the event that he didn’t like the new food.

He didn’t like the new food.

I offered him the breakfast steaks and he said, “I’m not in the mood for this.”

At this point we require some back story. I cook dinner every night of the week. At noon each day I prep my lunch and our dinner. Every dinner has two greens, a starch and a protein. Every dinner has at least two things on the plate that every member of our family enjoys. If you do not the dinners I prepare, it is absolutely your problem.

When Alexander told us that he didn’t like the sausage and that he wasn’t in the mood for breakfast steak we asked him to eat his rice and broccoli. He said he wanted to, “look in the kitchen for something else.”

The answer was no. The process was long, but Alexander ultimately decided he wasn’t in the mood for broccoli, steak or rice and that he didn’t like sausage.

He went to bed hungry and crying.

Mr. G. and I shook, and fought back tears of our own. We did it for his own good. Family dinners were devolving, and Alexander was manipulating his way into the pantry, eating cereal and fruit. Further, we would eat our dinner while Alexander moaned about the food I’d made, and then when we were done, he would be starting his alternate meal.

It was very unpleasant.

Last night, while shaking and trying to not cry, I put rice down the kitchen sink. I wasn’t thinking straight, and if you don’t cook you might not know that rice absorbs water and expands. Like a sponge.

So I made a little video about how to unclog your kitchen sink… you know… in the unlikely event that you ever put rice down the drain.

Sorry for the mediocre video quality. It’s been that kind of day.

Recently I got a DM (direct message on twitter) from a fellow blogger asking me what to do about the angry comments on her site. The comments ranged from “you are stupid” to quite vulgar. The most remarkable part of it is that she was reviewing a cell phone. The post wasn’t about politics, sex or religion, it was a tech review, and tech reviews don’t often inspire ire.

I gave the blogger the same advice I give every mom blogger who asks: Treat your blog like your living room. If you wouldn’t be spoken to in that manner in your home, you have every right to remove it from you blog. Understand that I see disagreement as a pleasant intellectual exercise, and I assert that it can be done respectfully, joyously even.

I don’t actually follow my own advice (you’ll find that I am in the habit of ignoring all good advice no matter who it comes from), and you might see a number of revolting comments splattered about the pages here. I am not often bothered by what strangers say. I’ve been blogging a very long time, and more often than not I find that the comment says more about the person who writes it than it does about the person who receives it.

I’m afraid that niche blogging has stripped away our ability to debate. If I’m looking to talk about balancing motherhood and career I’d land at Ad Hoc Mom, if I wanted to talk about breastfeeding I’d find myself at PhD In Parenting, and to get a little bit greener every day I’d be at Eco Child’s Play. The audience at Joy Trip is described as people who are environmentally conscientious with a bend toward type-A athleticism, if you’re going to argue that BASE jumping should be banned, they are not your group.

What do you think would happen if a Quiver Full Family was given a column at the Huffington Post? For those of you unaware the Quiver Full movement comes from this passage in Psalms:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.
Psalm 127:3-5 (KJV)

Quiver Full families take that passage quite seriously, often having a dozen, or more, children. Would a liberal “news source” like HuffPo be able to provide an extreme example with a thoughtful audience? Will Fox News ever be taken seriously by anyone but the far right?

Is there any chance that a respectful discussion would ensue, or have we taken our blogs, our news sources and our commentary and placed them into compartments, labeling them niche, in hopes that no one notices that we only want to talk to people just like ourselves?

What is so terrifying about just being a blogger? When did we lose the ability to debate without attack? Why would we only want to get news from people just like us?

A few weeks ago I met Andrea Fellman, and she was telling me about a trip she would be taking to Mexico with some amazing Mom Bloggers. My reaction was, “Oh my gawd Mexico! You couldn’t pay me to go there, make sure they get kidnap insurance. You can’t tell anyone you have it, but you absolutely must have kidnap insurance.”

According to Mindy, you don’t have to pay anyone to go there.

I get it. There are plenty of trips I’d love to take, but they almost all involve my family, or at the very least a little weekend with my husband. There’s one more trip I’d like to take without my family, but there really has to be an alignment of the stars for the scheduling to work well. Hopefully the stars align for Mindy and she enjoys this trip.

Blogger trips (junkets seems to be a bit of an overstatement) are the new perk. They appear to be first class travel that may or may not have anything to do with the actual product.

Which is fine.

I want nothing more than to take my family to Arusha and meet the twitter kids. I’d probably take a trip from any brand for that opportunity (but I doubt it would come to fruition).

What do y’all think? Are these trips good for moms?

Things I should let parents discover on their own:

• You love each child differently, but you don’t love one more than the other
• Babies are resilient, and sometimes we drop them
• Heads bleed a lot, if there is water involved it is even more dramatic
• The sun will rise and set on you, until third grade, then they will realize you are not cool
• Diapers leak, and not just urine escapes
• Childbirth hurts, no amount of blowing hee into the air will take the pain away
• Your breasts will never be the same again, this is not a good thing
• It only gets more expensive

Every other part of it is really quite wonderful, but good grief I should have my jaw wired shut when talking to new parents.