Today, the WSJ has an article on the new "monster burgers". However, the tag on A1, in the "Inside Today's Journal" section, reads "Flouting a low-carb culture, Hardee's Monster Thickbuger is fattening sales." In actually, they're probably flouting a low CALORIE culture. Given the amount of fat and protein in one of these things, it's probably terrific for somebody on Atkins, and extremely low in carbs.

Business 2.0 search

Interesting new trick from Business.com. Search on professionals.

John Perry Barlow has a neat post on randomly talking to people from other countries. Something out of the norm.

Interesting study from the Pew Internet Project indicating that very few consumers can distinguish between paid search engine ads, and organic.

No luck with the DMA on e-marketing groups. On to the AMA. Neat listing of archived Webcasts. Coincidentally, nice take from blogads.com on the current AMA blogging day. Still need to find a local group, though.

I'm looking for a group of E-marketing folks in the Northern Virginia area. Something that meets monthly and lets people swap stories, techiques, and information on projects they're looking for.In a quick search online I found, the eMarketing AssociationNext, the DMA. They've got "The DMA Developing Effective E-Mail Marketing Seminar" at . $800 for 1 day, if you're a member. For $800, here's what you get.
First, however, if you click on the Registration, Dates, Location page and click on Description, you don't actually go to the Description, you go to their info on DMD, a conference in June.
For your $800, you have either one of three seminar leaders, or all three. All of whom appear to run agencies that would be happy to help you in this area. And, probably do a version of this presentation while pitching you business. Let's look at the main areas:
Basic Terminology and Definitions: Good to know. Worth $100/hour for somone to define what e-mail is, and how it works? Debatable.
Overview of Industry and government regulations and current/pending legislation This is important. Good way to torpedo an e-marketing campaign is to ignore this. Good to be aware of this. Any decent agency will at the very least, try to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot.
Netizen Psychology--> Ok. We're going to need some stats here to make this worthwhile.
Why E-Mail is a Powerful Marketing Medium --> Presumably, if you're attending, you're aware of this. There's the promise of some numbers and projections, but you're probably already sold on this, if you're at the conference.
E-Mail's Role in the Relationship Marketing Spectrum - Crucial. Highlighting examples of how it's used in all of these areas would be very useful.
Opt-In and Opt-Out vs. SPAM and Crafting an E-Mail Campaign Writing Effective E-Mail --> All of these are important. However, there are either two tracks people are going to be on. They'll either be looking to do this themselves, or work with an agency to develop a campaign. Hopefully, they can provide information to each. Measuring Success B-To-B vs. Consumer MarketingCase Studies [I think this has the potential to be the most valuable part here]. My biggest issue is that people who are willing to shell out $800 tend to be from big companies. Big companies are most likely to here a lot of this from agencies who come in to pitch business. If an agency is pitching a Fortune 500 company, they're going through a lot of this information in order to make a sale, or start a campaign.So, on some level, people are going to pay $800 to hear information they'd probably hear anyway.Or, if you want to pay me $100/hour, I'll come to your office to talk about e-marketing.

I decided to check out the website for the new show "Ultimate Fighter." They actually do a pretty good job of a website, with what appears to be everything someone would want to know about the show. No search engine advertising that I can find though, although it is pretty easy to find your way there through organic search listings.

Let's say your car was damaged in an accident. And, let's say that you had come away from your purchase process with the very strong impression that you would get a loaner car when you were in for service. And, let's suppose you were told that body work was not covered, just routine service.

If you were going to spend approximately $400/day for the time your car was in the bodyshop, and that you had to go rent a car, what would your reaction be?
Mine? I was ticked.

Oddly, in spite of the fact I work in e-marketing, I contemplated bringing a sign down to the dealership on a Saturday morning, and walking on the sidewalk with it. But, I thought better of that. The 2005 version? A small webpage, easily set up in Blogger. Comments on, to see if anyone else had similar experiences. And, a $10 investment in Google Adwords with the keywords of the dealership name and the make of car that they sold. Oddly, no one else had those keywords, so anyone searching by dealership name and make would see my little ad on the right, asking "Trouble with loaner cars? Tell your story". It'll be interesting how much the old rule of thumb of a disgruntled customer telling 10 people is multiplied in cyberspace.

I finally got the Linksys Wireless Music System hooked up. A few issues, including a need to follow the directions exactly in terms of timeline, or else the whole "power down/power up" cycle needed to start. But, it seems to work great now. Good sound quality from the speakers. Automatically hooks into the Music Match Jukebox, and associated Internet radio stations. Getting it to work with Rhapsody is seeming to take a bit of time. It seems like the Rhapsody auto-logout feature, may require a trip to the main computer to start it up, before it streams over to the radio. But, overall, a nice toy when everything is working.

It's so nice when a piece of consumer technology works well. Had some digital photos, decided to try out the CVS photo kiosk. It's a nice, easy to use machine (with readers for most varieties of memory cards, CDs, etc.) and an easy to use interface. It did glitch once when I had selected about 12 out of 50 pictures, and went back to the beginning. But, overall a very pleasant way to pick out some pictures I had took, took about 10 minutes, and it's about half the cost of printing them on a home printer. And, as an extra added bonus, there was a "print from cell phone option" that allowed you to beam pictures using the infrared to the machine. Which worked flawlessly. Very impressive. The interesting implication for CVS and Kodak was that there were a few folks waiting behind me to use the digital print machine, and none of them looked like they had a very technical background.

Post on checking how many people link to images of your product.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/[product name]

Kleenex has introduced an Anti-Viral Tissue. Apparently, the idea is that this kills the viruses that you, the unwary consumer, would either sneeze onto your hands, and/or carry around in your pocket, until you could dispose of said tissue. There's even an FAQ on this. And, a game. You're "missile firing pencil" shoots at germs. Nicely done version of Space Invaders, but, is it really the best product move to have germs destroying the protective boxes of Kleenex? After all the Kleenex are supposed to be killing the germs. After playing the game, I want to order the pencil.
Originally, I was going to post due to the commercial I heard for the product, which portrayed a Zen person (presumably, due to the terrible Indian accident of the actor) who is confronted that by using these Kleenexes (Kleenexi?) he's killing hundreds of thousands of germs. Apparently, making fun of people with funny accents is still in style at ad agencies.

Fun new app. 43 things. See what the 43 things other people want to do are. Neat little app to see what's on the mind of folks. Of course, those folks are the types of folks who publicize their life goals on the Internet.