Do you have a dime in your pocket, or in your purse? Or in the loose change in your car?

Send it to me. Seriously. (or not so seriously)

Think of some creative way to send me a dime. Snail mail (via Realize, 3249 Richwood Drive, Duluth, GA 30096), PayPal, air mail, parachuted in to my house, folded into some sort of origami, left on one of my office desks. I’ll take pictures as they come in and post them here.

All proceeds will benefit the Dream House for Kids, and I’ll present whatever money is raised at the Dream House 500 on October 2, 2010. As the donations arrive, I’ll also keep a running total here on the blog. (Classic thermometer gauge on right! )

I figure that pretty much all of us can spare a dime to help a medically fragile kid… Can you?

Entries!

Origami balloon with a dime in it!

The dime jar in my Alpharetta office

Someone left me two dimes and played off the Dream House 500 Twitter avatar (excuse the lousy phone pic):

Our first entry!

Tweet This Post

We have our Winners!

Tweet This Post

While at lunch with a local colleague, Dawn Gartin, we were talking about different types of social media, and how we both like to eventually meet our social media connections in real life whenever possible. In fact, Dawn and I had lunch for just that purpose. We met on Twitter, discovered we were both local to Northside Atlanta, and decided to meet up.

While talking about this, I came to a realization. While I’d love to sit and lunch with every one of my followers and friends, it would be timely and costly after a while. I think Dawn had a similar epiphany while we were sitting there, so we decided to host a Tweetup.

So if you do business in the northern ‘burbs of Atlanta, I’d like to take a moment and invite you to AlphaTweet on July 14th, 7:00PM, at Village Tavern. If you have questions, you can comment here or hit up @dawngartin, @johncloonan, or @loismarketing for details!

Tweet This Post

Today, June 21 is Ride to Work day! In honor of that, I contacted Cousins Properties, Inc., who runs the office building in which I work. They reserved the first three visitor spaces closest to the building for motorcycles only, and allowed me to put up some Ride to Work signs. (Note: they have since rescinded that, saying it wasn’t approved by the right person, took down all my signage, and made me move my motorcycle.)

Did you ride to work today? If you did, I’d encourage you to comment on why you rode to work today, or why you ride, period!

(By the way, comments are moderated, so they won’t appear immediately. I’ll approve ‘em as fast as I can, though!)

Ride to Work provides this list on their pass-out cards:

• Riding to work is fun
• Riding to work reduces traffic and parking congestion
• Riding to work uses less fuel than an automobile
• Riding to work leaves me alert and energized
• Riding to work results in less pollution than commuting in a larger vehicle
• Riding to work is less destructive to road surfaces, bridges, etc.
• Riding to work gets me to work (and back home) faster
• Riding to work demonstrates motorcycling as a social good

By the way, not only did I ride to work today (which I usually do), but I’m riding to a speaking engagement this evening, too. Probably going to pass out a few Ride to Work pass out cards with my business cards.

Tweet This Post

Articles like this one in the Orlando Sentinel (BP gas station boycott misses target, Beth Kassab, June 9, 2010) make me fume.

While Ms. Kassab certainly is right that boycotting BP stations will hurt mostly the operators of those stations and have a scant effect on the BP bottom line, she’s ignoring the trickle-down effect.

Let me offer this vignette, starting at the personal level.

I boycott BP gas stations, as do a number of people in my neighborhood. The BP franchise owner sees his or her revenues take a significant hit – perhaps enough to put him or her out of business. Does this hurt BP? Sure, one less BP-branded gas station isn’t necessarily going to make a big difference in a company like BP’s total revenue, but how about Russ Scaramella of Atlanta, who is used as an example in the article? He owns 32 of them. If his revenues dropped significantly enough for him to either go out of business or change those stations to another provider, that might make a small impact.

But let’s say that it doesn’t. There are 366 defined metropolitan statistical areas in the United States. Let’s say one operator the size of Russ Scaramella exists in each of those MSAs, and they each see a significant revenue hit, enough to either put them out of business or change their existing stations to another provider. Does that make enough impact to get BP’s attention? I’m guessing that we might be getting there.

Add in those of us who are aware of all the BP brands, and who won’t be changing our oil with Castrol or grabbing a coffee at Wild Bean Café, and we might start to add up.

Maybe all that attention might make a warehouse club or airport think about where they buy their fuel, too.

Keep boycotting BP. If enough of us do, we can make a difference.

Tweet This Post

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Today is my 40th birthday, and I woke up today thinking that I was going to write a blog post filled with the usual mid-life angst of a Gen-X man turning 40.

And then my day happened.

I woke up today with the expectation that I was going to do nothing of any value. I took the day off from work, and got up at the crack of 10AM to a breakfast of Apples Pfankuchen and a pound of bacon. After a while, I got bathed and dressed.

Somewhere 2-ish I decided to go visit my elderly neighbor, Pat Godfrey. I just got back.

Somewhere in the midst of drinking beer and hanging out with Pat and his family, I realized that my angst was the sufferings of a fool. Why did I come to this conclusion?

Because Pat Godfrey, a man among men, is dying. He’s almost 90 years old, so it’s not so surprising, but at the same time, it’s a horror. Pat is one of the most vital men I’ve ever known. His life story would fill volumes, I’m certain, and I’ve only had the luxury of knowing Pat for a couple years. To give you some ideas, Pat was a pilot with Delta when they had six planes, the most advanced being the Ford Tri-Motor. He flew cargo from Miami to Brazil to Guyana to the Azores during WWII. He married a woman 20 years his junior, with whom he had four kids and recently celebrated 50 years of marriage. He’s built engines, two marriages, and four children. Pat Godfrey is truly a man among men. He still wakes each day with the anticipation of what might happen. Pat’s current life expectancy is measured in days.

I received well-wishes from friends, cards from friends and relatives, and fun things from Suzanne, but probably the greatest gift that I received today was the opportunity to spend one more day with Pat Godfrey. The opportunity to know Pat has made my life more complete.  Pat has made me realize that turning 40 is really just another day in the life of a man with a good job, a beautiful child; and a beautiful, wonderful woman in his life.

Tweet This Post

Crowdsourcing experiment:

Name my client’s software.

I recently decided to try a little experiment. One of my clients has a major piece of client-facing software, which they…

1. Use to enable their services
2. Offer freestanding as a licensed product
3. Offer as Software as a Service (SaaS)

One of the things they’d like for me to do is rename this piece of software. I have a few ideas that I’m going to throw into the mix, but overall, I’d like to try this as a crowdsourcing experiment.

What’s in it for me?

I’m going to give out Amex gift cards in the amounts of $100, $75, and $25 to the top three finalists.

So what do I do?

1. Read the description in the section below
2. Comment on this blog post with your suggestion. Make sure there’s a way to contact you in the comment, or…
3. Use the contact form on the Realize web site and send your suggestion. Make sure I can identify it as a suggestion for the contest, or…
4. Add your suggestion to the discussion on the Realize Facebook page. (It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you decided to like us, too), or…
5. Send me a direct message via Twitter. (@johncloonan), or…
6. If there’s any other way you can think of to contact Realize and leave us a suggestion with your contact info, go ahead.

Then what happens?

After reaching a critical mass of suggestions, I’m going to submit the most-frequently-suggested to the decision makers at my client. Whichever one is chosen will receive the $100 Amex gift card. The $75 and $25 cards will be awarded to the person who first suggested the next most-frequently-suggested names. I’ll also publish a list of the best of them here.

Description

The Client:

Core brand values:

• Agile
• Innovative
• Objective
• Efficient

What does the client do?

They manage the workforce supply chain, but what does that really mean? It means they provide services and solutions designed to save clients money and time on acquiring and managing their workforce, but don’t provide staffing services.

How about the software?

In short, the software automates the purchase and processing of professional services and labor, and provides near ERP-level data back to the client for decision support.

The value propositions of the software include:

• Creates process simplification and efficiency
• Provides data for management decision making
• Creates visibility into workforce supply chain processes

Tweet This Post

When I was growing up, my sister Kathleen seemed to be sick more often than me, or anyone else I knew. I always thought she was a hypochondriac. Well, I was completely wrong.

17 years ago, at the age of 21, my sister was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Since then, she’s undergone more surgeries and hospitalizations than any person should be able to bear. I could tell you innumerable stories about family events canceled or marred by my sister being hospitalized, and honestly there’s no telling what the toll has been on her son, now 10. Think about growing up where your mom is in the hospital seemingly almost as much as she is home.

Kathleen’s diagnosis has now changed to something they call “indeterminate colitis,” which means they don’t really know if she has Crohn’s or colitis, since she has symptoms and outcomes common to both.

Recently, my mom was diagnosed with this colitis, as well. Her mother, my grandmother, also suffered with it for over 50 years, when it finally killed her. As an IBS sufferer and a 3rd generation carrier of the gene, I’m likely to get it as well sometime in the future.

So why am I telling you all this? Because Kathleen is walking for a cure for Crohn’s and colitis on May 22nd, and I’d appreciate it if you’d support her in any way possible. This link will take you to her donation page.

Thank you,
John Cloonan
Realize, LLC

Tweet This Post

I was talking to an executive from a background check company that had been acquired by one of my clients, who is trying to make a decision about how to deal with the acquired brand – basically, keep it or roll it into the current brand as a product line.

During this conversation I asked the exec what he thought should be done. His response was “Well, there are some of our brands that have some brand equity – we have websites and good rankings on Google.”

Before I get endless comments about the importance of a good website and SEO, understand that I both realize and believe that SEO is important, and a good website is important. However, neither of these things directly equate to brand equity. Are they influencers? Certainly. Are they enough to create brand equity by themselves? Nope.

First, brand equity as a concept is widely misunderstood. True brand equity is the financial value of your brand. There are a variety of measurements that are used to yield this value, but they all have to do with your brand as an asset. What most people are talking about when they speak of brand equity is visibility. And brand visibility is an influencer of brand equity. A highly visible brand with positive brand associations will likely have more equity than a similar brand with less visibility.

SEO and a good website will certainly help create visibility, but what about the other piece – positive brand associations? Where do those come from?

Another client of mine just illustrated this perfectly. Charted Path, LLC is a start-up organization, and the owner, Mike Cleland, literally just got off the phone with me about 5 minutes ago to tell me that he realized what I’ve been trying to help him with all along – building his brand through both traditional marketing and getting his feet (barely) wet in social media. His website and blogging efforts are paying off, but only because his brand is authentic, and can survive social media transparency. He very quickly has built positive brand associations by establishing himself as an expert in his field through his website and blog, but also through positive client interactions on the projects he’s completed. (Of course, it probably doesn’t hurt that he’s a genuinely nice guy who truly knows what he’s talking about.)

Mike has a nice website, and is currently doing reasonably on Google ranking. But those things aren’t brand equity. The combination of those things and positive brand association are helping him create brand equity.

Tweet This Post

I saw on Twitter this morning a link to Bob Greene’s article entitled Olympic spirit fails a test. While I agree with him that the Olympic Committee’s response was lousy, I wanted to take a moment to comment. Why?

Because it was Nodar’s responsibility the moment he got on the sled.

I’m a motorcyclist and I take part in a lot of track days. For those of you not familiar with the track day concept, it’s where an organization rents a racetrack and then charges individuals to go ride on it. Most of these organizations do as much as they can conceive to run a safe, fun track day.

But on the other side of that coin, you have us, the riders. We’re out there trying to push our own personal skills envelope, to be faster, to wring every bit of performance out of ourselves and our machines. And sometimes a rider gets too far outside that envelope, and crashes.

And sometimes a rider dies.

And whose fault is it? My personal feeling is this – once I swing a leg over that machine and take control of it, everything that happens next is my responsibility. If I happen to die while doing this thing that I love, it’s nobody’s fault but my own. And I have told my significant others as much. I will not have my memory marred by lawsuits against the racetrack, other riders, or the track day organization.

I think Nodar Kumaritashvili might have felt the same way – I know many of us who participate in dangerous sports do. So mourn Nodar, and let the Olympic Committee know how poor their reaction was, but forget about trying to place blame. Let’s not mar Nodar’s memory that way.

Tweet This Post