it all starts tomorrow
This morning as I was out walking the dog I heard a car crash at the intersection of washington. I looked up just as the car had bounced off a yet another car that was coming right for us.
Just as the car hit the sidewalk the driver swerved and slammed full speed right into the side of my building, maybe 10 feet in front of me, narrowly missing a whole group of people. One guy had to dive out of the way.
People say this all the time but it really felt like a movie. I wasnt there, I was just watching it all happen. It wasnt until I got home that the gravity of what had just happened really hit me, I saw Amy and I just started balling.
By the time I got home from work today most everything was good as new, except for this phonebooth which I am happy to report was the only real injury from this whole ordeal.
When it happened, I was standing where the woman and red is here…. too close
… too close
my hand is still shaking
Join us?
Tomorrow we have a big meeting to discuss the future of our membership program.
It should be an interesting discussion because we so rarely take the time to look back and evaluate instead of just plowing forward full steam ahead.
I expect a couple of things to come out of it:
Treating the thrift and bookstore programs more like loyalty programs
Overall goal with this population is to shop more regularly, but donations dont have to outway benefits given,
Free trials, and materials highlighting savings and benefits
Treating our direct mail pieces more philanthropic
Overall goal from this group is a profitable donations program
Buy a brick, more client story, $60 buys this, less focus on deals
Focus in bringing down overal cost of healthcare. $60 spend on healthcare at housing works saves medicaid $120.
All of the above reads like random notes but I’m not sure I see much concrete changes in this…we’ll see tomorrow I guess.
Making fundraising personal.
This is a feature we’ve been working on for a while now which will let people set up their own fundraising campaigns on the site. We are hoping to launch with Design on a Dime and feature some of the celebs from that group leading the charge.
Saying no
So I had an offer presented to me today that I think I have to reject. It’s not that the offer isn’t good, because it is, but it would mean I have to give up something else. As much as I’ve tried to make myself believe otherwise I’m just not ready to do that.
And ive struggled with this for a while now, and I’m not, at all, sure why. What I’d be giving up is objectively better then the new thing in almost every possible way. But the new thing is new and shinny, and the old one is just so….old.
But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it….
So I say no, and keep things as they were…..
Right?
Facebook me
I’m not sure if its part of a wider rollout or if i just got lucky to be the next on the list but I got access to the new facebook messages today.
The biggest thing that threw me off at first was the fact that the newest message was at the bottom when up until now it was the other way around. My first instinct was that this was horrible and that it was going to confuse the hell out of the Moms and grandmas that facebook is really hoping this catches on with.
But after I started playing with it and actually send a message I immediately got it.
This is about so much more then just having keithmancuso@facebook.com, this really is about combining “IMs” with email into one stream. And I think it works.
What I haven’t quite figured out is the text messaging thing, but maybe once more of my friends upgrade it will start making sense but I am not sure why i had to put my phone number into this.
The biggest feature however is that facebook messages has the best spam filter ever, where any message from anyone who isnt your facebook friend is automatically “spam”. This turns traditional spam filtering on its head, where the strategy used to be to flag messages that come in as junk, removing them from your inbox. Facebook messages requires you to approve senders to promote them to your inbox either by being facebook friends with them or by promoting their email addresses.
Theres still a lot of unanswered questions for me, IE will people be able to send a text to my facebook? will they use my same phone number to do that? What about text messages I send from my phone to my friends outside of facebook? will they show up here?
I’m going to try a little experiment and forward my gmail to facebook for a week (Starting today) and see how it goes, is this a better experience, will i give up gmail for good?
Off
So we had our marketing “offsite” today, which is always an interesting day because theres so much… hmm how do you say it, so many half ideas and good intentions. But sadly the resolutions I hope to walk away from a meeting like that with are rarely if ever there.
We did decide on two “big” goals for the department
1. Expand audiences
2. Be more strategic
I know..
I think the problem is not our problem but its a problem with the idea of doing this “big” picture meetings is that the bigger the picture the less tangible the results.
Even know we talked all day it never felt like there was time to go into anything really specific, some specific problems were brought up, but specific resolutions werent.
I shouldnt poo pooing the whole process because I do think these types of things are valuable, and I think some of the conversation was actually really good, it just feels like maybe we really need 2 days, or even 3 to make some breakthroughs. We get close to the edge but never really go over it
The one really good takeaway that I can see, however, is this idea of trying to do department by department marketing plans. In hindsight its amazing we got this far without them and some real good can come out of them, but again, vague.
Hopefully we keep filling in the details
Payments
Online payments is still an exhausting process, and for all the people out there claiming to have the simple turnkey way, no ones really figured it all out.
We’re coming really close to our own solution which give people the option of paying directly with a credit card or with paypal or google checkout logins, and all of them sync back to saleforce.com.
It’s finally looking nice, but its been an exhausting process, I really hope someone makes this easier, its got to be easier.
Re-Fashion NYC
Its almost here, graphics and ideas should be coming soon and bins rolling out in time for Earth Day. Amazing how far this come, now we will see if this will really start paying off.
Hypercritical about Hypercritical
John Siracusa was talking on episode #8 on Hypercritical today and was struggling to make an arguement that, while I think too a little to long to explain, was a very good point about the dangers of some of the decisions Apple has been making.
The basic idea is that apple has gotten big enough now that its business units have conflicting interests, most notably within the iOS universe.
It is in a position to start doing things within iOS that unfairly prop up its businesses built on that platform (ie. iBooks, GarageBand, MobileMe) could lead to two very bad conclusions.
1. It hurts the businesses because it limits competition and eventually removes the incentive to innovate
2. It hurts the platform because you have less developers working on “cool shit”
As he mentioned these are problems that lead to IE 6 remaining stale for so many years and to the eventual, if not yet fully realized, downfall of windows itself.
Is it possible for apple to avoid this fate?
