Werewolf Bar Mitzvah

Gotta love Tracy Morgan from 30Rock!

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Blog Action Day 2008 is today

Image via WikipediaThis is the second time I'm participating in Blog Action Day; this year's topic is poverty. The idea of blog action day is to use the power of social media to increase awareness for the issue of poverty and to encourage a discussion. I'll use this post to promote Kiva, one of my favorite financial websites. Kiva supports entrepreneurs (mostly women) in emerging economies by providing peer-to-peer microcredits. The money is provided interest-free by people like you and me and is distributed and tracked by Kiva. I've made my first reinvestment on Kiva this year, after my support for a Popcorn maker was paid back in full. I encourage you all to support Kiva - with support from a lot of people they just won a $300,000 grant from American Express but they rely on people like us to keep them going.

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The power of emotion in communicating your value proposition

I just came across this beautiful little Spanish video (it's subtitled) explaining the value of appealing to emotions rather than the analytical mind.




Make sure you read the analysis here at FutureNow.
As a Marketer, appealing to emotions can be highly beneficial, but as Jeff Sexton points out, it's hard to do without a great copywriter. I've had the pleasure to work with several good copywriters in the past, yet I've recently had a hard time finding a great freelancer who's still affordable. Therefore, if there are any strong copywriters out there who understand the value of appealing to emotions, drop me a note by leaving a comment!

WaMu is already JP Morgan Chase

Seems like the designer at Washington Mutual was up all night - when you go to their homepage, you're already welcomed to JP Morgan Chase! I'm not sure what the Whoo hoo(TM) is but the employees must definitely have felt it after this overnight takeover/ liquidation of the company.

Washington Mutual, JP Morgan Chase, Finance

Smart labels keep your wine (or other perishables) under control

What a great idea by Paksense of Boise, Idaho. These new labels can be attached to a case of wine that is being shipped and tell the buyer right away whether the wine has been maintained at the correct temperature. I could imagine this going into pharmaceutical shipments as well - and even things like steak or oysters. Here's the full story.

innovation wine packaging

Yoursphere.com launches as a paid social network for teens

Anastasia over at Ypulse just wrote about Yoursphere, a new social network targeted at teens that just launched. The "interesting" twist about it is that it's actually not free but $4.95 a month! In exchange, kids can enjoy "no creepers", contests and rewards on the site (the rewards are for surfing the site and probably completing tasks.
This sounds like a total flop to me as the kids will certainly not take to it and even if some parents will fork over, the kids won't start using this.
I'm a big believer in the subscription model for social sites, but only if they provide actual value (i.e. premium features such as more storage, features). Having your parents on board certainly doesn't count as added value...