Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Blog

  • Gas stabilizers, hurricanes, and $6 gas

    It’s hurricane season beginning today. A bunch of folks are predicting above-average activity, meaning more hurricanes than average.

    We’re already at 4/gallon for gasoline.

    How much would gasoline go up if we get another Katrina?

    Gas before Katrina was in the2.25 range. Then it leaped to 3,3.50 in places before the markets resumed normal operation. An increase of 36%, give or take.

    A similar increase today would put gasoline at $6 or so, assuming it would be available.

    So this is the time of year to take the 5 gallon gas can to the local gas station, fill it up, and add a gas stabilizer to keep the fuel usable during longer periods of storage. In a Toyota Prius, 5 gallons will get you from Boston to Montreal or New York City – enough to get out of Dodge if things got unpleasant.

    What are you doing to prepare for a potentially above-average activity hurricane season?

  • Why not distance learning at community colleges?

    I saw this article in USA Today – community colleges, many of which are commuter schools, are cutting classes, typically on Fridays, to help students save money on gas.

    Here’s the question I have: why wouldn’t professors start assigning distance learning opportunities in class? Let’s say you’re taking a course on biology, an intro course. Instead of having a Friday class, instead of canceling a Friday class, the professor assigns MIT Professor Dr. Graham Walker’s Introduction to Biology lecture from iTunesU as the guest lecture of the week. Students would still be responsible for the contents of the lecture and its contents would be fair game for exams.

    Now, I know what some folks will say – community college students aren’t necessarily the most affluent students around, nor are they all likely to have high speed Internet access. Instead of a textbook, or in addition to a textbook, include the 149 iPod nano, and have a few computers in the classroom with the content pre-loaded. Students without a home computer and broadband can sync their iPods in class or after class for the distance learning day.

    With gasoline at4/gallon and so much good, free content online, the case for distance learning to substitute for lecture-style classes grows stronger by the day.

  • Brain Buster

    Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki for this one.

    Watch this video from Cisco.

    Brain buster.

    This reminds me of the first time I used talk on a Digital VAX, back in 1993. Talk was a UNIX-based synchronous chat client, and a fairly ugly one at that. I remember talking to folks I met on other UNIX systems at Harvard, Drew, and schools all over the world via this black and green terminal.

    The Cisco 3D teleconference is the same for me. This technology is just taking its first baby steps, and what it will look like in just 15 years is as unfathomable as where the Internet is today from my freshman year in college – when talk was insanely cool.

    How will college change when you can virtually attend anywhere?

    How will medicine change when a world class surgeon can remotely guide you as if he were standing next to you?

    How will politics change when you can’t shoot at someone at the podium?

    How will business change when you don’t need to get on a plane?

    How will family change when Grandma and Grandpa can visit without leaving home?

    Moments like this make me very happy.

  • Spot the terrorist!

    After reading this Boston Globe article about Dunkin Donuts pulling an ad because conservatives thought her scarf looked like a keffiyah, I thought I’d make a quick game for you to play. Like this? Please Digg it.

    Go Nuts

    How did you do?

    Come on, Dunkin Donuts. What the hell is wrong with you? I can’t tell which is worse – bowing to the lunatic ravings of American conservative extremists or thinking that the rest of America is so stupid that we can’t tell Rachael apart from Yasir.

  • Double shot of coffee today

    Check out the best marketing podcast ever made in a doughnut shop, Marketing Over Coffee. Today’s a double shot as we try out the Flip Cam.

  • Review: Flip Ultra 2GB

    Flip UltraI bought a Flip Ultra today. Lots of positives and negatives about this little camera, and limitations that need to be understood to get the best performance out of it.

    Positives

    • AA batteries
    • 2 GB internal memory for 60 minutes of record time
    • Firmware updates
    • Light
    • Portable
    • Stupid simple

    Negatives

    • Not going to sub for a high quality camcorder any time soon
    • Very susceptible to shake without tripod
    • No options for expandability
    • Fixed-length lens (yes, there’s a digital zoom, which is a joke)

    Now, I own a lot of gear. When I need to upgrade to quality video, I break out my MiniDV camera because nothing Flash-based captures video with the same quality as tape that I’ve found yet.

    When I want a balance of portability and optics, I’ll use my Sanyo Xacti.

    When I want to record a lot of video at conferences, this is the camera I’m going to use.

    There is one and only one reason I bought a Flip Ultra:

    The Flip Ultra uses AA batteries.

    When I’m at conferences, rarely do sessions last more than 60 minutes, so the Flip’s built in memory limitation isn’t a big deal.

    What is a big deal is that this little camera takes AA batteries. Rare is it when I don’t have a pile of 12 or so with me at any given time. Between sessions, I can dump the memory to my MacBook Pro and swap out batteries.

    If I use the MiniDV camera, I have to change tapes and use the AC adapter, which is a huge stumbling hazard for everyone around me.

    If I use the Xacti, I have to carry the AC charger with me and recharge the battery (and its two spares) throughout the day, which is a pain in the butt.

    If I use the Flip, I just swap out AAs and recharge everything in the hotel room overnight.

    The Flip is a single-use camera for me – I bought it specifically for use at conferences. I’m not going to film the next major motion picture with it, and I wholly acknowledge that it isn’t intended for that use at all. It will allow me, however, to capture lots of “good enough” video at conferences I go to, with a minimum of hassle when it comes to power and memory.

  • Food for thought on Memorial Day

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

    This world in arms is not spending money alone.

    It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

    – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

    Food for thought: the United States military budget is $713 billion dollars. (Slate) For every American man, woman, and child, that’s $2,376 paid out every year.

    Whatever your politics, understand that this reflects our national priorities, where we put our tax dollars to work, governed by who we vote for.

    Food for thought: two months’ worth of the military budget would wipe out the student loan debt of every current student in America and then some.

    Four months’ worth would send every student academically eligible to attend college to school for free.

    Three months’ worth would pay for the entire reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, erasing Katrina’s damage.

    As we remember those who have given their lives for the country, please consider carefully who you vote for this fall, and urge every American you know to get educated about the candidates and participate by voting and staying involved in the political process after the election. Hold your elected representatives accountable by staying in communication with them, sending them email, faxes, YouTube videos, whatever it takes to ensure your voice continues to be heard about the priorities that are important to you.

    “Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living.” – Mary “Mother” Jones

  • Staycationing

    Just added a new article to the Financial Aid Podcast blog – how to staycation properly. In a time of record gas prices, record food prices, record airline prices, record everything, this article will hopefully inspire you to try something different and lighten both your spirits and the load on your wallet.

  • Hope, advisement, and Melissa Rakes

    One of the highlights of this past EASFAA conference was not at the conference at all, but in the bar after the Monday sessions. I had the good fortune to sit down with Melissa Rakes, an Ed.D. student looking at how advisement works, and we got to talking about one of my favorite things – marketing, of course. We chatted about her doctoral thesis and a few different ideas and systems that could be applied to academic advisement, which was a lot of fun.

    I kept asking nearly absurd questions about porting existing business, sales, marketing, and motivational systems to education, because it seems to me that if Amway Motivational Organizations can generate books, tapes, CDs, etc. to keep their members moving ahead in an organization that statistically holds little hope for them at all, it should be a cakewalk for academic advisors to use the same tools and technologies to motivate their students in an educational system that DOES generate good results.

    One of the highlights of the conversation was on the topic of branding. I was mentioning Ze Frank’s fantastic explanation of branding as emotional aftertaste, and asked Melissa what she thought higher education’s brand was and is. We concluded that it’s hope. Not anything necessarily specific – lots of people go to college for lots of reasons, but hope seems to be a common thread. Hope for a great job, for freedom and independent, for a better future than past, hope as an emotion.

    I thought of the students who are first in their families to go to college, and the hope, excitement, and trepidation that they must feel in their first days in school – and how processes such as financial aid, enrollment, and other parts of academia’s paperwork bureaucracy do their very best to squash that hope under a mountain of paper.

    If advisors in higher education could communicate, reinforce, and energize hope consistently with the same aggressive methods of motivation that business uses, I’d bet that retention and dropout rates would plummet. Melissa’s got a few great projects underway, and I wish her outrageous success in all of them. I suspect she’s going to be one of higher education’s rock stars of the future.

  • Pimping the Financial Aid Podcast

    I’m happy to say that the Financial Aid Podcast just hit episode 800. Check out the episode – it’s 5 success stories powered by new media, ways in which new media has made a real difference.

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