CapsuleBlog

Link love

Today I have two highly recommended blogs for you to check out, if you haven't already. The first is Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist, written by one very smart and sassy woman. This is how she explains her blog -

Before I even knew how to write, I would dictate my days to my dad. As an entrepreneur I got a column in a national magazine and started spewing advice in places like Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the London Times. Then I got a six-figure book deal. Today, my column runs in more than 200 newspapers, but my blog is where my heart is.

What I think my life is about is figuring out how to find success at the intersection of work and life—one happy, synchronized adventure. It's a difficult task, and I don't want to do it alone. So my blog is a community where we all do it together.

The next link is another award-winning blog called Conversation Agent. Here, Valeria Maltoni explores all elements of the incredibly fast-moving tide of social media: what it's all about, what it means for who, and how to stay on top of the wave.

Good stuff.

Got a thing for circles?

Yeah, me either. But you'll like the logos here. Fifty of the best circular logos.

Dell's "Della" ain't so bella

Dell has recently discovered what happens when a questionable campaign angers your supposed target audience. A new sub-site was launched, called Della, to promote the company's line of Inspiron Mini 10 notebooks.

The site came under fire for using messaging that was a little - shall we say - stereotypical? Heavily featured among the stuff you'd expect to see on this kind of thing (product information etc) were "tips" about dieting and shopping. Hmmm. And of course, the color pink was just a tad overused.

Check out the Twitter search on this topic to see just what people were saying. Here's one response on Dell's Facebook page -

Just checked out Della, your new site for girls, er women. Way to develop marketing that talks down to women! Did your marketing team used to work for the car dealer who talked to my boy friend when I was buying the car, or the one who hand-picked the special "girlie" models for me, when I wanted to buy a pickup? Lamest move ever!

The beauty (or terror in some cases) of this kind of scenario is that communications tend to move at lightning speed. So, while it may have been a nightmare for Dell's PR team to receive such blastings within hours of the site being launched, it also provides the opportunity for immediate response and thus a better chance of adequately managing the crisis.

The site was soon altered to remove the offending sections along with a note reading “Some of you have read this article over the last several days & will notice a few modifications. You spoke, we listened. Thank you for your ongoing feedback.”

Let this be a lesson to others: pink does not a woman make.

The rise of the mommy bloggers

When Oprah covers something, you know it's so huge it may be almost over. First, she Twittered in all caps. Then, she had "mommy bloggers" call in via Skype to talk about why their writing is so popular.

You've probably already heard the term - they're a growing group of women online who are using the internet to connect with millions of others (almost) just like themselves. The difference is that most of the readers of blogs like dooce.com aren't earning enough income from advertising alone to support their entire family by writing mostly about poopy diapers.

General Mills recently announced a new project - My Blog Spark - to which 900 bloggers have been recruited (80% are mothers) to receive free product. These bloggers are not required to provide positive reviews nor are they required to disclose their participation in the campaign. General Mills does say, however, that they are "encouraged" to tell their readers about the project and that if somebody had something negative to say about a product, the hope is that she would first let General Mills know before blasting it out to the world.

After all we used to hear about the male domination of the tech world, I'm extremely happy to see that women have taken so well to the emerging technologies. But a word of caution to the mommy blogger preparing to give one lucky commenter a year's supply of Cheerios (which may or may not help heart health.) Your readers can sniff out authenticity much, much quicker than that poopy diaper. They want you to be straight up with them. The quickest whiff of fakery will have your daily visits dropping like flies.

Is naming a billion dollar entity different than a million dollar one?

Capsule recently helped name an international spin-off from Fiserv (a $10 billion business), now called StoneRiver and comprising one billion dollars in revenue. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to compare that process with our experience naming a million dollar business in the promotions category: Sidecar. Now that both projects are successfully completed, we can certainly say the difference is clear.

Hop on over to the Duets blog to read the rest of Aaron Keller's insight...