Archive for the ‘Stories in the News’ Category

I absolutely hate taking photos all night and then coming home, having to either put the SD card into my computer, or I have to plug it in and upload them. Yes, it’s silly, and it doesn’t take much time, but it is time that I really don’t want to spend right after an awesome event. The problem is, if I don’t do it right away, I forget and then it’s weeks before I actually do it! Or worse, I will never get them printed and they will sit on the card forever. Cameras are awesome – but their main fault is the fact that you have to do something after you take the photos – which can waste a lot of time.

So, last week I got the new Sanyo Dual Camera* and an 8GB Eye-Fi SD card*. The camera is awesome, takes both photos and videos and sits in the palm of my hand. It is actually smaller than my DroidX, and only a little thicker. But what was even more awesome than the camera was the Eye-Fi card. When I got it, I didn’t really understand it – it says it has a wireless photo and video uploader built in. Not being hugely tech savvy about cameras, I had no idea what that meant. So, of course, I read the back. and basically it means that once you’ve set ut up to a computer, facebook, flickr, whatever, you can take pictures, come home, and it will automatically send the pictures to the chosen destination. It also said you could set up 32 wifi locations – so  you could use your camera in those places and it would send from there directly to your home computer or your online sharing? Yeah right. I was seriously doubtful – not because I didn’t think the technology was there but because it would make life way to easy. And companies rarely ever do that. So I decided to test it out and was shocked at (again) the simplicity. It was plug-install-and go. And so was taking the pictures. Snapped a couple of the dog outside, and came home…opened the camera, and it did the work. All uploaded into my folder, no buttons, nothing.

It just worked. And was simple. And removed all the headache.

There are tons of other products that have problems like this – they may be great to use, but there is some area where they fall apart. With DVD’s, it’s the packaging. Really, that huge packaging for such a small disk? Why not use CD packaging – it holds the same size disk, yet takes up so much less space. People could buy more of them and not need as much room. With computers, it is the set up time. Yes, you can hire someone to set everything up for you, but that has a high price tag and time away from the computer. It would be great if there was a way to order your computer with just the programs that you want, pre-installed. Like the app market on a phone, you would select the programs you want prior to the purchase. It would take away a ton of set up time and headaches. Or what about laundry? There are so few companies that have started making washer/dryers in one it is shocking – it just makes sense to me. Less space taken up, less issues with machines. Why do in two what you can in one? Email is also difficult – you go through them in the order received, and have to judge importance quickly or you will waste time. But if you mis-judge, you could miss an important email. What if there were a program that searched all incoming email for specific phrases and keywords and then organized based on your settings? This would allow you to know what was the most important before you started reading them!

The list could go one and on of products that waste time, energy or space and could be seriously streamlined. Which was why this product impressed me so much – and why I wrote a promotion-esque post.

What tools do you see that could be streamlined to be more effective? What about your daily activities?

*Full Disclosure* I was given the Sanyo camera and an Eye-Fi card for tweeting/managing Sanyo’s Twitter and Facebook page. For those who missed my tweets on Thursday and Friday, I am working with Social Rewards and Sanyo Dual Camera on Sanyo’s release of a new dual camera line – and a rewards program that is giving away cameras, a trip to the Palazzo Las Vegas and Eye-Fi video cards.

BUT!! (and this is a big one) They are not compensating me for this post – in fact, I wasn’t even asked to write it. I wrote this on my own accord, because I was so impressed with the Eye-Fi card and the built-in wireless uploading capabilities and how businesses could learn from this. As you have read in the past, I am not a huge fan of promotional posts – in fact, I often despise them. So, if you buy the eye-fi, awesome. If not, no big deal. I am not an affiliate and make no money should you choose to buy it (or the camera). But I was honestly so blown away by the coolness of the abilities of this eye-fi card – and how what they are doing can relate to other industries – that I felt it really necessary to talk about it.

taken by dimnikolov - from flickr

<rant>I have a serious issue with the lack of formality that has become acceptable in recent society.

Less than 15 years ago, if you attended a play, dined at a 4 star restaurant, flew first class, etc; you dressed for the occasion. Last year, I went to see Wicked at the Pantages theater in LA. It was an amazing performance – moving and very well done. But I was rather annoyed with some of the attendees. They technically did nothing wrong, but seeing more than a quarter of the attendees in t-shirts, jeans and tennis shoes or flip flops seriously ticked me off. Why? Because just 12 years prior, I attended Phantom of the Opera in San Francisco and casual was not there…women in cocktail dresses, men in suits…the theater oozed glamor. Now, it’s like going to the movies, with a much pricier ticket! Dinners are the same way. Restaurants like Ruth Chris, Morton’s and Maestro’s all have signs out front – proper attired required. This used to mean, at a minimum, dressy jeans and a nice blouse for women and dress jeans and a button up for men. But, in the last few times my husband and I went to dinner at these restaurants, it seemed that shorts and flip flops were now “proper attire”…and I was properly appalled.

Dressing up for an event or a dinner has a reason: it shows respect for the performers, the other guests and the location. It says that you appreciate the value and that you respect where you are and what you are doing. Now it seems that “casual” is an acceptable attire no matter the venue, and I am both bothered and confused.

Let’s take a step back and look at this from a business perspective: Imagine if a client of yours walked into your office, where the  dress was business formal, in their sweats. What would you think? You would probably think they either had zero respect for you and your time, or that they just don’t care about why they were coming to see you. You would be bothered and probably lose some of the desire to work with them.

The way that you dress speaks volumes about who you are – and how you feel about yourself and society. And, there is absolutely zero reason that you can’t dress appropriately. Almost every clothing store, from Target to Barney’s caries business and formal dress clothes, which means that there is something for every budget. And, if you can afford a play ticket or a 4 star restaurant, you can certainly afford to dress up a bit. You don’t need designers and overprices closed to say “I care”, you just need a little more formality.

Does anyone else see this trend? What do you think of the casualness that has taken over society?</rant>

What do Time Warner, Conde Nast, Meredith Corporation, Dennis Publishing, Jann Wenner and Hearst Corporation have in common?

They are fierce competitors in the printing industry who banded together to take a stand on magazines, and create this amazing advertisement:

For those who are having trouble reading it, it says: “In these wired times of ours, you might think that people don’t read magazines. That the overwhelming allure of the online world has swept them right out of vogue. But it’s not true at all. From seventeen through their sunset years, folks are reading magazines more than they were just a few years ago. Sure, there’s a fortune being spent online. But, there’s also a lot of money being spent on magazines, with nearly 300 million paid subscriptions”.
(words in bold were the magazine covers with the corresponding name)

I found this ad between the pages of the most recent People magazine and despite my family looking at me like I was crazy, I had to stop reading and snap this picture. I love the ad for a number of reasons – first, it reminds me of being a kid and creating these posters for friends, replacing the words with candy bars and sweet treats on birthdays. Second, it is creative, using the titles of the magazines to tell the story which captures attention (you can’t tell me this wouldn’t make you pause…). Third, I love the mix of magazines, there is one for every age, and if you look at the lettering in “magazine” at the bottom, you will see quite a few other magazines have been featured (the M is from Maxim, G is from Rolling Stone, the ES is from Esquire…)  Finally, I love that the magazine publishers banded together to create this ad! The magazines featured are not all from the same publisher, which means that a large group of competitors had to come together and decide on one piece of advertising that represented them…which I can’t imagine was an easy feat.

We all know that there is a lot of money moving to the web, and the concern for traditional media is rising. But, the fact that these market leaders are willing to combine their creativity and money to create a message like this gives me hope that they may still have a trick or two up their sleeves to keep the attention in print.

Do you still read actual magazines? What do you think about this creative?

The Consumerist, in the spirit of March Madness, has created The 2010 Worst Company in America bracket. Currently, the bracket has just finished round two and looks like this (click to visit the full image):

Image courtesy of Consumerist.com

Basically, each day, they pit another two companies against eachother (yesterday and today started the sweet 16 battles) and the one that gets the most votes as the worst company wins that round. The final match will determine the worst company in America. The first round of battles were based on industry, like Verizon vs AT&T (AT&T was worse) and Microsoft vs Apple (Apple was the worst). But, as it moves on, different industries will be battling each other. If you want to vote in each face off, make sure to check the link above and subscribe to that category.

I think that is is not only brilliant, but very interesting to think about. The only rule they had for nominating companies in the beginning was that they had to regularly provide goods or services directly to consumers. Once all the nominations were in, they tallied up the votes and created the brackets. Looking at the list, you’ll notice one thing – every company on here has made a lot of people very wealthy. These are not small businesses, and for the most part, are businesses that we work with on a daily basis. More than that, although many of us hate these companies, we still have to work with them because either someone we work with does or they are the only option. For example, I despise everything about AT&T, but have to deal with it on a daily basis because others use their pathetic services. I also find it interesting which companies are voted the worst…in this case, look at Apple vs Microsoft. I can not count the number of people who are “Apple this and Apple that” but when it came down to votes, more people thought Apple (pardon the pun) was the bad seed.

Anyway, I personally think this is a great way to give consumers a bit of a voice, and maybe show some of these big bad companies that they aren’t as great as they think they are.

Oh, and based on news stories, problems with the company and consumer reports recently… I’m thinking that GM and AT&T will face off in the Championship match, and GM will take the title of worst company in America.

Which company do you think it will be?

With all of the tweets and news stories going on around the newest web tool, Chat Roulette, I have to admit, I was curious. Although most of the conversation about the tool touted how awful it was, that every other person was behaving obscenely and it was a bored teenagers strange idea…I still wondered about it (darn that curiosity!). But, I hadn’t checked it out, I just simply didn’t have the time. I pushed it to the back of my mind, and kind of forgot about it.

Yesterday, me, my hubby, @vetlovingpetshb and @elecsecurityguy had brunch at Memphis in Santa Ana, and over unlimited mimosas and french toast, we got on the topic of weird tools and unique websites. Which of course, brought up Chat Roulette. We started talking about what we’d heard about it and what it was really like. None of us new more than the basic principal – go to the site, click play and wait to see who (or what) shows up. It was basically a video chat room, where you just clicked next to move onto another person/conversation. We had all heard that it was definitely nsfw, and that the majority of people on there were men, showing body parts that we had zero desire to see…but of course, after those mimosas, the curiosity came back and so we decided we just had to check it out (curiosity will getcha every time!).

The first tries to get the site to work completely failed…apparently Chat Roulette does not like Firefox. So, we switched over to Internet Explorer, got the ‘play’ button and took the chance. We clicked play, and waited. Three things we realized right away:

1. It auto turns on your own webcam which means the other person can see you laughing.
2. It auto turns on your microphone which means the other person can hear you laughing.
3. No one can prepare you for it, but you’ll definitely be laughing!

As all the news stories and tweets had told us, it was a strong mix of obscenity, with a few normal (albeit bored) people. We lasted about an hour on the site, clicking through about 15-20 different people, and had only one normal conversation, with a college kid in the UK who couldn’t sleep.

My final verdict? This site is a wreck, will end up the late night game at many sleepovers or drunken fraternity parties, and I doubt it will have any real staying power. That is unless they can figure out how to clean it up, segregate the types of conversations and turn it into a safer site for viewing…either way, I wouldn’t venture back.

Have you been to ChatRoulette? What did you discover?

In light of the recent article from Wired.com - 10 Years After: A Look Back at the Dotcom Boom and Bust (really awesome article) – I want to open the floor to you, and hear where you were then and where you are now.

Then, I was in High School, waiting for December to roll around so I could finally get my driver’s license. I worked part time after school with the Parks and Rec’s department in Los Gatos (my home town). I dreamed of going to Northeastern University to study International Business, working for the CIA in European espionage and becoming a best selling author by the time I was 30 writing CIA romance thrillers.

Now, I am happily married in South Orange County, driving an ’08 Mustang GT. I am a proud alum of Cal State Long Beach with a degree in Rhetorical Communications, the owner of Wright Creativity, and the writer of this blog. I love my business, and am excited every day to see where it will take me. Someday I still dream of becoming a best selling author, but of just plain romance novels and definitely not by the time I’m 30.

Your turn!

The final post topic I gathered from my readers and followers was from Angry Julie (the first two were from @HealthOC and @Hagre). She is convinced the world is dominated by bloggers and wanted to know my thoughts.

I think I agree! Why you ask?

Let’s start by looking at the sheer statistics (stats from Techcrunch, Technorati, comScore and FutureBuzz):

• 133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
• 346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs
• 900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period
• 1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)
• 77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs
• 81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere
• 59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

Need more convincing? Let’s look at the State of the Blogosphere and who these bloggers really are:

• Two-thirds are male
• 60% are 18-44
• The majority are more affluent and educated than the general population
• 75% have college degrees
• 40% have graduate degrees
• One in three has an annual household income of $75K+
• One in four has an annual household income of $100K+
• More than half are married
• More than half are parents

If all the facts aren’t working for you, let’s look at facebook and twitter for a minute. Think about tweets, status updates and timelines…how many links do you see on a daily basis? How many of those sites are run on a blog platform? If you said “almost all”, you’re right. It is rare to see links to “websites” any longer, even if you are referring someone to a product, you tend to send them articles (blogs) vs static sites (websites).

But, it’s not just the sheer volume of blogs anymore, it’s the volume of the voices. People blog about products, whether they like them or not. For example, when the new iPad hit last week, there were articles everywhere about it…and the majority of those articles were written on blogs! Who does the iPad need to impress? Those bloggers! What about something non techie, like a new food item? Doesn’t need to worry about bloggers right? Wrong. According to Technorati, there are over 33,000 blogs dedicated to just food (and the statistics are the same for almost all genres). Bloggers are the new journalists. They can write from anywhere, say (almost) anything about you, and are easily accessible. And if the blogger is popular? Their blogs can often outrank the “normal” articles on any given topic!

But of course, this is just what I see.

What do you think? Are bloggers running the world?

A recent article from Vanity Fair: America’s Tweethearts proves how little they actually understand twitter!

Thanks to @markdavidson, I discovered and read the story. Pretty soon, many of us were in conversation about the missteps and failings of the article.

Mark believes that it capitalizes on female stereotypes and paints these intelligent women as objects.

Joe mentioned that the people they chose were not a representation of real twitter elite.

Jason commented the entire article comes off as patronizing and is bothered that people find it interesting.

EricaJoy added a few others that should have been considered – and the fact that as it stood, it was crap.

While I agree with the points they made, I have a few of my own:

1. I believe that the article paints a poor picture of twitter and really fails to capture the point of the tool. Twitter isn’t about followers, it isn’t about popularity, and apart from @juliaroy, the key women in this article are very poor examples of twitter users. They all have 40k+ followers but follow, on average, less than 10% of them back! That means they are not conversing, not sharing and definitely not participating with their followers. Pathetic, and not the way twitter should be used.
2. The other “twilebrities” it mentions – Obama, Britney, Ashton – are just as bad as examples! None of these people will ever be asked how to use twitter to improve your business, they will never speak at a conference about combining twitter into a social media strategy. The people that do get asked those questions? And do speak at the conferences? THOSE are the “twilebrities”
3. This line from the article “Twitter doesn’t even require real sentences, only a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver” really twisted me…Twitter does require real sentences, real thought and real participation. If what you are doing is declarative and abbreviated palaver (which is really just big words for a short statement of unimportance) then you really are failing at twitter. And, the fact that Vanity Fair thinks that’s what twitter is – proves they have absolutely no idea how it really works.
4. And the last reason I know that Vanity Fair fails at twitter? Their account is run the same way…48k+ followers, only following about 300. How is that participation?

What do you think of the article?

All of you know how much I adore social media. The connections, the conversations, the possibilities. And when moments like this happen, it is even sweeter:

This story was originally shared on Catherine Favazza.com.

The St. Louis business community now knows all about my family’s hugely successful catering order that coincided with the All-Star Game. Yes, it’s true that my pride in my father’s accomplishments spurred this a bit, but without social media–and Twitter, specifically–his story would never have been told.

When I checked my RSS reader Monday morning, I saw a BusinessWeek article about the economic boost the All-Star Game is bringing to St. Louis. It caught my eye because I’m from St. Louis and because I knew about the event’s boost to my own family’s business. I tweeted:

St. Louis bringing in big bucks with All-Star Game: http://bit.ly/R3O53. (Ex: My dad has the largest catering order of his 30+ yr career.)

That message was then re-tweeted by the mayor of St. Louis (follow him: @MayorSlay), without the link to the original story that caught my eye. Soon, a reporter from the St. Louis Business Journal had contacted my family to discuss the details.

This is the new way news happens now. Because of my Tweet, the St. Louis Business Journal reported later that afternoon about my family’s business, Favazza’s Restaurant, received a major subcontract deal for the All-Star Game:

Favazza’s restaurant and catering was called on to provide three days of box lunches as a subcontractor for Sportservice at Busch Stadium and the Edward Jones Dome to meet demand for All-Star Game preparations.

Delaware North’s Sportservice needed a local caterer to help fill food service needs at Busch Stadium for the press and several groups through the St. Louis Cardinals, said John Favazza, part of the restaurant’s family ownership.

Then a few days ago, Sportservice at the Dome asked for help serving 650 police, firefighters and volunteers on duty for the event, Favazza said.

In the end, my parents, brothers, other family members and staff prepared food for 6,700 people, in one of the largest catering orders of my father’s 30+ year career, valued between $45,000 and $50,000.

During the Home Run Derby on Monday night, I tweeted a link to the Business Journal article and Bernie Miklasz, top sportswriter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a frequent customer of Favazza’s, replied: “@KatieFavazza That means I just had one of your roast beef sandwiches… it was good. thank you!”

I saved a Twitter account for my dad months ago and have been talking to him about using it for the restaurant; now, I have a feeling he might be convinced. To all my St. Louis readers and fans of Italian food, please follow @Favazzas in anticipation of forthcoming Tweets.

Have you had an experience with social media that changed your business? Or someone in social media that heavily influenced you? Share your story!

2 weeks ago (wow, does time go by fast, I thought it was just last week), I wrote about how we can change #followfriday to make it more beneficial for everyone involved. My idea had been to

only recommend one or two people each followfriday and include a little reason why. Not only does it make it easier for people do decide whether to follow them, but it is more special for those that I recommend.

Steve Woodruff took a common stand, but had gone a bit further and taken his recommendations off of twitter and to his blog. Last week, he suggested that we answer the question: “Which ONE of your Tweeple would you most want to go on a wine-testing with, & why?” I didn’t participate last week, as I was still testing out my ‘recommend less people with a reason for each’ on twitter. This week, he asked us to share with whom we would like to have an in-depth cultural conversation? This week, I decided to try it his way.

So, my #followfriday #ff2 (the new hashtag for longer followfriday recommendations) is @knealemann. He and I have conversed through twitter quite a few times, and his blog is one of my favorites to read. Unfortunately, due to the unreliability of email, the first time we tried to take our conversation off twitter, our lines got crossed and he missed a message from me, and thought that I wasn’t interested in continuing our conversation about business and life. The email thing leads me to a whole other story, but we’ll save that for another time. Anyway, Kneale is from Canada, and while not too far from California, the culture is definitely different, and one I have never experienced. I would be interested to see what the difference in business practices are – from email etiquette and office styles to commercials and marketing tactics. I would love to hear how and why he started his blog – what he has learned about it – and if the blogging groups are as prolific there as they are here. In reality, I would just love to chat with him, since after reading his work and his tweets, I think we would have a great conversation. Still not convinced he needs to be added to your twitter followers? He’s also pretty funny!

Who is your #followfriday #ff2 recommendation?