Fred Sandsmark's Blog

You see the news stories every once in a while: a letter, mailed dozens of years ago and presumed lost, appears miraculously at the home of someone. The long-lost letter trope is also used in movies.

Well, it happened to me. How else can you explain this?



That's right: I got an AOL CD in the mail the other day. It has all the hallmarks of AOL mailings of 15 years ago: Unlimited dial-up access! One free month! No credit card required! Even the 10-digit registration number and two-word password that AOL used back in the 1990s.

Pew Internet now finds that 63 percent of US households now have broadband. The target market for this sort of offer must be miniscule. (How many computers even have dial-up modems anymore?) I wonder what the response rate for this kind of offer is, and what the economics of it are.

Labels: fun, Internet, ISP, marketing, technology

I saw this chart in a piece of marketing literature and had to laugh.



Looks like about 85% of stuff falls into the "Other" category. It reminds me of my paper filing system: one big bin labeled "Miscellaneous."

Labels: fun, marketing, technology

The CD of Jill Sobule's fan-sponsored album, California Years, arrived in the mail today. I'm officially a Junior Executive Producer!

Its appearance is a little spot of joy in an otherwise terribly stressful day.

Unfortunately I won't be able to listen to it carefully until tomorrow night. For now, I'm happy just to look at it on my desk.

Labels: fun, marketing, media, music, people, technology

Michelle Gamble-Risley, who as editor of California Computer News gave me an opportunity early in my freelancing career, was on ABC News recently, sharing career- and life-changing ideas from her new book, Second Bloom. Congratulations, Michelle!

Labels: books, friends, jobs, marketing, money, news, people, TV, video, writing

I wonder if Buy.com thinks anybody ever watches the homemade demonstration videos for its products. Case in point: the MySoldius1 Solar Charger. Click the "Watch Video" button on the left side of the screen, under the product image.

Between the one-take-is-plenty-but-lighting-doesn't-matter camerawork, the uninformed mumbling voiceover, and the hairy arms that seem to have never handled the product before, it's quite a piece of work.

My favorite lines: "Just plug it in there the right way and you're set to go," and "There's a few instructions on this sheet of paper right here that comes with your solar charger, and a few specifications right there."

Best of all: I bought the device anyway.

Labels: fun, gadgets, marketing, sales, solar, technology, video

When I tell people that I work at home, a common reaction is a sort of swooning: Oh, that must be nice, they say. Yes and no; I like setting my own hours and not having a commute, but I sometimes miss having colleagues whom I see regularly.

But perhaps I shouldn't long for coworkers after all. A survey (sponsored, almost inexplicably, by some mysterious Hormel lunch product), showed that 51 percent of surveyed workers identified their coworkers, and not the work itself, as the number one source of on-the-job stress.

Other findings:

Your Desk Is The New Water Cooler. A majority of office workers in America can’t get away from office gossip because most of it takes place right at their desk or a co-worker’s desk (53 percent), rather thansomewhere outside their workspace such as the water cooler (just 2 percent) or the kitchen or lunch room (22 percent).

Catchphrases That Drive You Crazy. The top three clichés that drive office workers nuts? “Think outside the box” (22 percent), “Team Player” (20 percent), and “Shoot me an email” (19 percent).

Flattery Doesn’t Get You Everywhere. Brownnosers are a major office offender. Among office workers familiar with NBC’s “The Office,” the character they’d least like to get stuck in an elevator with is irritating brownnoser Dwight Schrute, played by actor Rainn Wilson (27 percent).

A Lack of Long-Lasting Lunches. Unfortunately, many office workers just aren’t satisfied by their desktop dining: nearly half (46 percent) say they feel hungry again within just three hours of their midday meal.

Ah ha! That last point shows why a lunch-meat company sponsored the study. Another lunch-related data point from the survey: Nearly half of Americans who work in an office eat lunch at their desk at least three times a week.

The results don't strike me as all that surprising. What does surprise me is the casual use of the word "brownnoser" in the press release. Did the Hormel PR folks think at all about its origin? Then again, Houghton Mifflin on dictionary.com (linked above) says "Despite its scatological origin, today this slangy term is not considered particularly vulgar."

Labels: marketing, surveys, words, work, writing

I've looked at my fair share of brain MRIs and even played with OsiriX. Turns out I'm not the only person who finds neuroscience and brain imaging compelling.

A study, blogged about at Cognitive Daily, says that brain images make science articles more compelling to readers.

Not long ago we discussed work led by Deena Skolnick Weisberg showing that most people are more impressed by neuroscience explanations of psychological phenomena than plain-old psychology explanations. Talking about brains, it seems, is more convincing than simply talking about behavior, even when the neuroscience explanation doesn't actually add any substantive details.

The article's interesting and compelling. The comments are also worth reading; get ready for the advent of neuromarketing.

Labels: language, marketing, neuroscience, psychology, science

After a brief hiatus, Symantec has resurrected its CIO Digest magazine. for the current (April 2008) issue, I interviewed three healthcare IT leaders, asking them about their challenges with device management, enterprise security, storage, compliance, and communications. The article, entitled Best Medicine, can be found here (pdf).

Labels: clips, health, marketing, medicine, science, technology, writing

I saw an AP story about Jill Sobule, who's collecting money to record her next record. A snippet from the article:

Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing - we can fix that on our end."

For the $500 "gold level," Sobule will mention your name in a song, maybe even rhyme with it. The $750 "gold doubloons level" is "exactly like the gold level, but you give me more money."

I've seen Jill just once, at Judith Owen and Harry Shearer's Holiday Sing-Along in 2006. She was fabulous.

You can contribute at JillsNextRecord.com. I'm in; I just have to decide how much.

Labels: fun, marketing, music

I got this lovely personalized greeting in my email in-box this morning:



Oh, my. And the thing is, I know this company has my first name.

I don't hate email marketing. In fact, I wrote an article a couple of years ago on effective email marketing strategies for Cisco's IQ magazine. Maybe the Greenhouse Catalog should read it.

Labels: clips, email, marketing, technology