Web Business Woman

By Guest Blogger, Donna DeClemente, Donna’s Promo Talk

How would you use Cisco TelePresence to make a difference in your business or organization? The folks at Cisco Systems want to know and are inviting business people from around the world to send them a video explaining why and how they would like to use Cisco TelePresence. This new contest offers winners in two categories, Productivity and Shaping the Future, a chance to win $3,000 each and 5 hours of Cisco TelePresence.

Erica Schroeder, the director of marketing for Cisco TelePresence, appears in a video on the “Why I Want Cisco TelePresence” Video Contest website in which she introduces the contest and provides some suggestions on how to participate. Erica says “Please tell us your stories…they can be serious, they can be funny, they can even be silly, but they need to follow the rules”. Erica also invites visitors to view some of the videos already submitted and vote on their favorites.

Some suggestions on how Cisco TelePresence could help a business include reducing travel and related expenses and encouraging decisions to be made faster. It could also increase intimacy with customers and suppliers, bring internal teams together faster and more effectively and bridge time and space challenges to increase productivity. 

There are also suggestions on how Cisco TelePresence could possibly make the future better. For example, by reducing travel Cisco TelePresence could improve your “green” footprint. It can also bring you closer to friends and relatives, possibly deliver healthcare to remote locations or bring you face-to-face with your favorite sports figure or celebrity.

Since I normally cover many promotional contests and sweepstakes that
are targeted to consumers, I thought I’d feature this particular
contest because it’s a great example of how a business can use
interactive promotion, including user-generated content contests, to
promote their products to a B2B market.

The contest will be accepting videos and votes up till September 8th. At that time the judges will award the prize in each category based on the originality and relevance to the theme as outlined in the official rules. They will then give a score to each video based on the number of times it was viewed and the rating it received from voters. They will also select a runner-up winner for both categories who will each be awarded $1,000.

As of today I see a total of only 13 videos that have been submitted. Most of them have been submitted from men, so come on ladies lets get some presence here! Sherry Chapman from Westinghouse Digital does have an advantage since she’s the first video submitted. The second is from a husband and wife team who hope that by using Cisco TelePresence Ann, the wife, wouldn’t have to travel as much to meet with customers and would then be able to spend more time with her husband, Jack!

So get out your digital video cameras or get in front of your webcam
and give Cisco some of your ideas. Hey what do you have to lose? The
site makes it easy to enter and upload your video.

Thanks to the Cisco marketing team for being creative and good luck to all the entrants.

Happy birthday, Millie! However many years young, you are an inspiration. Love the pics on your blog today. Love your blog in general.

The Thoroughly Modern Millie title reaches out across age groups and embraces us all. And what a looker you were, back in the day! Do you miss those days? Do you wonder how the time goes by? 

Ah, life is mysterious and delightful and women like you serve to remind us all that the main purpose of life is… LIVING! Keep up that blog, keep giving us that smile, keep showing the world your stuff. It’s too fabulous to keep to yourself. (and much thanks to your son, Steve, for starting your blog…good son that he is!) 

Have fun at the Jersey Boys, tonight. I am tres’ envious! Keep living life to the fullest – a testament to the true happiness in the world. Your smile brings joy to many. 

Hugs and more on this happy day, Millie.

by Guest Blogger, Lena West, Chief of Social Media Strategy at xynoMedia

Pre-blog content note: I could be presenting with Baat Enosh from @NCWIT at #SXSW next year! Vote for my panel here. (Hint: Just click the “thumbs up” button at the top.)

 This past weekend I had a darn near out-of-body experience. I could go into the details of what went down, but that would take too much time. Time I don’t have right now…and time you probably don’t have either.

Fast forward to me not being able to bend or stand due to a muscle spasm in my back. I’ve never had a muscle spasm before and if you’ve had one, you know it feels like you’re going to meet your Maker. I’ve known pain and suffering, but this was not a game. Less than 24-hours, one muscle relaxer and 10 hours of sleep (those pills knock you O-U-T!) later, I was on the massage table having some serious Tui-Na work done.

At my local massage spot, I have a favorite massage technician (yes, this is what they preferred to be called now…I think!) and she understands my trouble spots. Usually my upper shoulders…but maybe it’s the upcoming book in April 2010, the new direction of the business that we’re unveiling in September, the redesign of my living space…it all culminated into a HUGE knot right underneath my left shoulder blade.

So, I’m on the table and she starts to work out the knot. And, it’s K-I-L-L-I-N-G me. I mean, kicking-your-feet-in-sheer-duress pain. And, Yue says something to me that stopped me in my tracks.

She said, “Before it feels better, it’s going to have to hurt. Stay still.” Boy was THAT a metaphor for everything that’s going on in my orbit!?!

For whatever reason, when we initiate change or improvement (myself included), we have this false impression that it’s going to get better right away. We want to see marked improvement in hours and days; when in reality, improvement might not come for weeks…sometimes years. Sometimes (just sometimes!) before it feels better, you’re going to have to “man up” and deal with the pain. When we close ourselves off from this reality, we hoodwink ourselves into a false sense of reality — and that only makes the process and progress of change that much harder on our business, lives and soul.

Bottomline: What are YOU kicking and screaming about that you need to apply a level of acceptance around so that you can get to the next level? Hint: whatever you’re avoiding thinking about – yuh huh, that’s IT. That’s the ticket to this ride.

What ever happened to the 1960s?

I’m nostalgic. I can’t help it. Shades of 1963 – those good old days of Bye Bye Birdie and Ann Margret singing her heart out for Bobbie Rydel. Yep, those were the good old days. No worries about employment; no one complaining about taxes. No one bickering about healthcare, which is important, I agree, but shouldn’t the discussion be a discussion, not an on-going series of angry bickering? 

Ah, to get back to those good old days when life was good and teenagers went “steady” – before experimenting with drugs and sex. When Mom cooked at home and pizza was a treat, not Tuesday’s and Friday’s dinner. When Dad’s word was law, and woe be it to the kid who “talked back.” Those were the days of long, leisurely summers – when kids played outdoors all day, and no one feared the stranger in the beat-up old truck lumbering down the road.

Where did it all go? I lived my teen years during the mellow days of the 1960s, trudging back and forth to high school – by foot – carrying my books in the crook of my arm, laughing and joking with my friends about the latest movies and TV shows. Life was calmer then. Parents ruled. Teachers were to be feared (in case they gave you that dreaded “C” when your parents were expecting B+ or A, yes, even in Calculus). We were such naive children, then, living in a world that protected us from the twin sins of four-letter words and s-e-x.

Looking back, I’d say all of that innocence evaporated in the 70s, after Woodstock (and George Carlin with his “7 Words You Can Never Say On Television”) opened our eyes. Woodstock, John Lennon and the ‘later’ Beatles, the defiance of the Rolling Stones, and other rock bands, enticed us to snub our noses at movies like Bye, Bye Birdie where Dick Van Dyke had the audacity to sing, “Put On a Happy Face,” to his long-lamenting fiancé, Janet Leigh, as she despaired of ever getting her wedding ring. 

The 70s brought a freedom that had us falling into the rumbled beds of our hippie friends, and smoking pot. We thought free love was the answer to all the world’s problems. We did put on a happy face – covering our confusion and disorientation. Maybe some of us longed for the support of good parents, or the closeness of favorite siblings, but we didn’t show it. We didn’t wonder how we were going to pay for clothes or food or shoes. We just…did what we did, and expected the world to stop spinning. After all, we were never going to grow old or give in to the establishment. We were going to grow our own food, and make our own clothes, and name our kids Brooke, and Sunshine and River. The status quo be damned!

Until it all came to an end. Because the happy faces weren’t enough to carry us through. Time marched on and we woke up one day and we were the status quo.

I don’t want the 70s back. I want the 60s back. I want the world that came out of the 1950s, where Father Knows Best and Donna Reed were the experts of the day – forget Dr. Phil and Oprah.

I want the world I remember – full of true innocence, the innocence children deserve. I want my granddaughter to know what it was like to build forts out of nothing, and traipse around the neighborhood unsupervised, and eat watermelon for lunch, because you could.

Someone once said, “You can never go home again.” I don’t think they meant the physical place you call home. I think they meant “home” as in the place you lived as a child, and did childish things, and went to bed without a care in the world (reading books under the blankets, using a flashlight). Once the world takes that away, it’s gone for good.

Or is it? Can we recapture some of that sense of family, home, and caring that permeated the 1950s and 60s? Can we offer it to our children, to assure them that the world can be kind, and supporting, and that neighbors are good people, not ogres to be kept out by high fences? Can we put on a happy face that’s really happy?

I’m game. How about you?

By Guest Blogger, Mary Schmidt, Marketing Troubleshooter

Sure, we’re all connected up to here and over to there.  We’ve got a multitude of ways to supposedly communicate…and just as many ways to miscommunicate…often because we simply don’t read or listen to the first message or question.  (Methinks technology has made the problem far worse.  We’re so busy whizzing around the virtual world, we spare barely a glance to what’s actually in front of us. Tweet! Tweet! Gotta Tweet!) 

Does this sound familiar?  To save time, you give the relevant info in the subject line of the email: “Need your response re attending meeting at HQ from 1-2 pm Aug. 1″  And, then the questions come. Almost invariably, regardless of the info I provide in the subject line and body of the email, I get emails back asking me for the very info I’ve already provided.  If I respond “see ‘subject line’” I get the question again. (?!) I also often get asked “what’s your phone number?” – when it’s right there under my name.

The other day, I got an email asking how to log-in to a web site.  I had to control my inner snarkster and politely reply, “Click on member log-in.”  Seemingly the person had either not bothered to visit the site or had never done anything on the Web.   My bet? He simply didn’t bother to look.  Far easier to say I’d “never told him.” (Oh, c’mon. You need detailed instructions for this? It’s right there on the home page – and every other page, for that matter.)  

Then there was (what I thought) was a simple question for a web developer.  After I sent four emails… and he ignored the first three…then replied he didn’t understand and we’d need a phone call…I figured out the answer for myself (and I’m not all that technical.)  If he didn’t understand, why not tell me the first time around? 

A friend of mine will never, ever do business again with a magazine.  For a very simple reason – “her” sales rep ignored a very simple question about ad rates that she asked repeatedly.  Didn’t even bother to say “I don’t know” or “I’ll have to check into that.”  Buh-bye, full-color one page ad revenues. (But, hey, the magazine ad biz is booming, right?) 

I send a request for account cancellation in which I include the account number, my info, and reason for cancelling.  In return, I get multiple requests for the info I already provided (again and again).  Then I get multiple “are you really sure?” “Verification” emails. (Oh, call me cynical – but that’s also a way for the company to hang onto my money for a bit more time…and hope I drop the matter.)

So, maybe instead of ‘instantly responding” – we need to actually read/listen to/think about what that response should really be.  Would save us all a lot of time and aggravation.