WorldWideWaterCooler

At this year’s Northern Voice conference, one of the more visible sponsors was TravelMasters, who were obviously using the conference as a launching pad into the world of DIY marketing. Marching in with gusto, and with cookies.

photo from @julieszabo

Now, I will be the first to admit that (being in marketing) my tolerance for campaigns that miss the mark is exceedingly low.

But, of the people I talked to about the cookies, I’m not the only one who was a bit confused and left wanting (for substance, not cookies. The cookies were delicious.).

I want to like TravelMasters’ efforts – they’re branching out into a market that might make sense and they were certainly going in the right direction. But they could have done so. much. better.

If you can’t quite read the picture, the text is:

Kathleen’s Gingersnaps

1. Scoop premium vanilla ice cream in between two Gingersnaps. Roll cookies in toffee chips, wrap in plastic wrap, place in freezer
2. Spread chocolate spread over one cookie, top with slices of banana (sounds funny, but it’s delicious)
3. Mix a vanilla pudding package and 500ml whipping cream together to make “vanilla fluff”. Spread vanilla fluff over one cookie, top with sliced fruit
4. Spice up a roast pork gravy by substituting flour with crumbled gingersnaps
5. Grab a cookie and stuff it in your mouth….they are delicious on their own! Yum Yum!

If we can think to do that with a cookie, imagine what we can do with your next vacation
twitter tag #TMcookies

First, what TravelMasters did right:

• Targeted a conference where it can be reasonably assumed that many of the attendees are worldly, enjoy new experiences and have enough disposable income to take vacations. An excellent departure from the standard places travel agencies advertise (wedding fairs & home shows) and a good way to stand out!
• Provided a snack during the conference afternoons, when people are hungry and looking for a sugar fix
• Added some interest to the packaging to showcase their creativity
• Included a twitter tag to track conversations about the cookies, tying them into the social media part of the conference

Now, here’s how it could have been orders of magnitude better:

Who is Kathleen?! Sure, she makes a tasty gingersnap, but why do I care? Unless she is important to the company and its message (in which case, tell me who she is!), she is a distraction. Just call them “Gingersnaps from TravelMasters.”

Using the bag to tout their creativity is a big win, but the TravelMasters’ team did it in a way that creates a lot of cognitive dissonance (one of the few $3 words I still remember from university). I’m already at a social media conference, eating cookies. Now I’m reading about ways to be creative with the cookies. And out of nowhere: THINK ABOUT VACATIONS, QUICK!

I am not thinking about vacations now. I am wondering where the hell that came from, and wondering what it has to do with cookies or the conference.

How about instead, you put something on the packaging that shows how creative you are about snacks (which I’m already on) and travel, which is what you WANT me to think about?

Five things to do when you travel with our Gingersnaps (and I pulled these out of my arse in about 5 minutes):
1. Stash them in your carry-on when you fly to Paris (not liquid, so they pass the airplane food rule) for a better nosh when those intolerable nut-snacks come around
2. Share the cookies with someone on your bus tour in Auckland, make a new friend
3. Take some downtime, feed broken pieces to pigeons in Central Park
4. Stick your nose in the bag and breathe in the heady, sweet aroma when you’re walking past another open sewer grate in Thailand
5. Combat the munchies in Amsterdam. ‘Nuff said.

Adding the suggested twitter hashtag was also a great tie-in to the conference, but it’s a bit empty without a reason for me to tweet about the cookies. “If you build it, they will come” only works in Kevin Costner movies. You can’t just say “here, take your social media and get to it” – give me a reason to engage.

Along with the tag, ask me what other ideas I have for the cookies, or where I’d take them. Better, tell me to share my idea and enter everyone who shares into a contest for a travel perk or accessory.

Finally, maybe give me a reason to engage with your website. Put up a page where I can download the recipe (and while I’m there, remind me why I need you to book my next vacation).

And speaking of wanting me to think I need you to book my vacation, have a reason (beyond the cookies) for me to think that way!

I wandered up to the TravelMasters table at the conference and asked what made different from any other agency, and they gave me the line every other travel agency has ever given: “our agents have all traveled extensively, we have access to exclusive deals, we… (I tuned out).”

They had a captive audience in a pretty specific niche. Tell me something that matters to me and will pique my interest. I’m a tech-savvy person at a blogging conference. Set me up with a free travel blog, with a template customized to my destination. Give me a list of wireless hotspots in the city I’m visiting. Promise me one of the Lonely Planet iPhone apps for my destination. Something that shows you care about me as a customer, and understand me better than any of those other agencies who weren’t smart enough to show up at Northern Voice.

And on the chance that TravelMasters is monitoring for social media mentions and finds this – I’m going to New Orleans next week (first time) and Las Vegas two weeks after that (seventh time) – what would you suggest I do there with the cookies?

I’ve been completely burnt out since the conference ended on Saturday, but here are a few notes I wanted to get down before the post becomes completely irrelevanat:

- Whenever I go to a conference or event with people I know, I inevitably hang out with them, and don’t meet new people. I should work on that.

- There seemed to be a larger valley this year between the technophiles and the storytellers. That said, I think Eric Rice’s “Everything Casting” presentation managed to bring both sides of the picture together and I really enjoyed it. Check out the slides of his “Epsilon Construct” here.

-The Blogs in the Bedroom panel I sat on went pretty much as anticipated. I’ve heard mixed reviews, and have mixed feelings about the whole thing myself. I think the panel was a good idea in and of itself, but as panels sometimes do (since they’re fueled by the audience’s questions), it went in a direction that I don’t think lived up to its potential. Ah well.

- I also have the small complaint that at least two of the panelists and the moderator had no idea who I was or where my site was located. I know I’m not more than a minnow in an ever-growing pond, and that the moderator was put in as a last-minute schedule change in the busy couple days before the event, but I think doing 30 minutes of background research to acquaint one’s self on one’s fellow panelists (I know I did – isn’t that what “About Pages” are for?) is just good practice when doing these things.

-The most important lesson learned of the day: The Templeton doesn’t open until 9:00am on Saturdays. The Elbow Room doesn’t open until 8:00am on Saturdays. However, Two Parrots is open before 7:00am, and the breakfast is plentiful and very edible.

Oy. 6:25am. It’s darned early for a Saturday (or any other day in my world for that matter).

Just a quick reminder to anyone who cares, I’ll be at Northern Voice today, speaking on the “Blogs in the Bedroom” panel.

If I know you (and especially if I don’t), and you see me, say “hi” !

I’ll also be on msn: wierdchick[at]hotmail[dot]com & google talk: peechie[at]gmail[dot]com

Dating is hard. There, I said it.

I love being single, the potential of a new adventure with an as-yet-unmet Prince Charming, the freedom of painting the town and shamelessly flirting without remorse, and ultimately not having to think of the well-being of anyone but myself at the end of my day.

I do not so much love the loneliness when I could really use a shoulder to cry on or someone to snuggle with, the lack of meaningful date for any number of weddings and hallmark holidays, or (heaven forbid) the bit of longing I feel when I’d actually welcome someone else to consider at the end of my day.

And so, I date. And, as you can see from my Ridiculously High Standards it does not always go so well. I’ve tried all sorts of avenues for finding potential mates. Meeting men in bars, at extracurricular activities, at work, setups by friends, and on any number of online dating websites.

One place I haven’t met any dates yet though, is through this blog. I didn’t really think about it until I read a great piece by Al3x (via Richard), regarding blog-dating.

In my eyes, telling a blogger “hey, I love what you write every day, and you look kinda cute in that 200×100 pixel photo on your site” seems a lot less shallow than picking up a random attractive stranger at a bar. A blog date starts from mutual intellectual respect, and that’s a healthy thing.

Go forth, then, and mack. The only thing you have to lose are your TrackBacks.

You know Alex, I agree completely.

And really, all of this is a lead-up to say that while I may not have had any success finding dates via my blog, what I write about them afterward seems to be popular. So if you enjoy reading about my escapades, and would like to see me speak and/or pick my brain a bit about dating, blogging & the interactions and implications thereof, you may want to sashay your way over to the Northern Voice site and register for the conference on February 10th & 11th.

I’ll be participating in a panel on “Blogs and the Bedroom: Blogging and Relationships” as the token “single blogger” with the likes of Maryam Scoble (wife of megablogger Robert Scoble), blogging betrothed Chris Pirillo and Latthana ‘Ponzi’ Indharasophang, and married bloggers Ted & Julie Leung (and if any of these names, links, or statuses are incorrect, please email me!).

Of course, the entire conference was a blast last year (and really the kick in the pants I needed to take my site to the place it is today), and I recommend you go anyway. But if I’m the inspiration you need to make the committment to go, then so be it. And if I’m that kind of inspiration for you to go, don’t forget to ask me for a drink afterward!

Peter Tupper’s article on the information he gleaned from Northern Voice has just been posted in the Tyee.

I find it a bit ironic that as a journalist, whose article includes a segment on “the blogger as citizen journalist,” he (awkwardly) jumps around the who, what, where, when and how of the conference and sessions he attended – and entirely misses the why. From what little I remember of my own short forays into journalism, the why is the integral part of the article – the part that makes people care about reading the other 4 W’s.

Tupper writes that “[t]he soft glow of laptop and handheld screens in the lecture hall made it clear to me that this was a gathering of the early adopters. I felt a moment of technological inferiority, clutching my steno pad and cassette recorder.” I would assume from that remark that Tupper was brand new to blogging and had come to the conference to learn more about the medium. However a quick google search reveals that he’s been blogging since at least mid-2004, knows enough to have a Creative Commons License, and should be able to at least attempt to answer some of the questions he sets out asking in his article, especially since he asserts that “[c]onferences like Northern Voice are where people try to answer those questions.” Alas, no answers were to be found.

Instead, Tupper offers inadequate and incoherent summaries of what he pulled from the different speakers. He leaves the question of “why blog?” unanswered, then moves to speak briefly about the fact that RSS exists, though he never mentions exactly what it is, save for an aisde that “The development of the RSS standard is an unusually convoluted story.” It only gets worse from there on in.

I started this post having skimmed his article, and intended to read a bit deeper to hopefully pull some value out of it and point others to the posting when I myself am asked “What is a Blogging Conference anyway, and why did you go?”

Instead, I’m left wondering if his impression is an accurate reflection of what someone on the “outside” of blogging really sees: a bunch of technophiles, using confusing tools in a confusing way, to spread information inadequately – or so says the final section of his article explaining why American journalistic-style bloggers are so much better than their Canadian counterparts.

Personally, I learned a lot at the conference about what I feel my blog may be lacking, and how I’d like to take it to the next level. The only reason I haven’t posted my notes is that others have already done a much better job of it (find feeds to their notes here). I wouldn’t exactly call myself an early adopter – I’ve only been at this for about two years now – but I like to think I have a grasp on the concept of blogging, if not all of the accompanying technologies. From what I gathered, my peers felt much the same way about the sessions they attended (many of whom have been blogging much longer than I have).

But did Northern Voice miss addressing the “what is a blog?” segment of attendees? Were there enough of them in attendance to merit that kind of content? Did we as bloggers unintentionally exclude those new to the genre? Was the conference even marketed as a “find out about blogging” event – as opposed to an “improve your blogging skillset” event? (Juding from the audience response to Tim Bray‘s question “how many of you have a blog?” I would assume the latter – please correct me if I’m wrong…)

But Tupper doesn’t bring any of that into his hodge-podge summary. I’d be much more interested in hearing whether or not Mr. Tupper actually had his questions answered at the end of the day, and if he found value in the conference or not as a self-confessed late(r) adopter of blogging.

I’m hoping Tupper was just having a bad-writing day, and actually got more out of the conference than he indicates in the article, that the questions he posed were answered, and he took away some useful tools for his own blogging experience. Otherwise to the community of blogging enthusiasts and evangelists everywhere, I need to say Lucy, we gots some ‘splainin’ to do!

I’m at the Vancouver Northern Voice Blogging Conference today.

I forgot my camera. Good thing there will likely be a bajillion pictures on flickr before the end of the day. Some of them may be there already. (Update: as of posting time there are at least 24 pages of photos – find them here)

If you’re here too, you can find me on msn: wierdchick[at]hotmail[dot]com (as long as my wireless holds up – which is a whole other issue). Add me and say “hi.”