LECHTANSKI.NET

Let’s start with this. I am connected. I have a Blackberry. I blog. I tweet. I’m on Facebook. I’m LinkedIn. I have my own domain. This is all for both work and personal reasons.

I’ve found myself opening my Blackberry RSS reader at red traffic lights. I’ve had my lovely wife pull the Blackberry from my hands during dinner with friends. I’ve found myself watching TV while being logged onto Facebook, clicking through emails on my Blackberry and talking on the phone.

Frankly, I’ve hit a wall. It’s OK to be connected, but I have made the decision to not live my life connected moment to moment. Two things led to this decision.

1. A few years ago I was on a whale watching boat ride. Camera in hand, and hearing the oohs and ahhs of other passengers, I would swing around trying to capture the jumping whale on a memory stick. I was not very successful. And I didn’t get to actually see many of the whales because I was too busy staring at the LCD screen of my camera. Finally, I gave up on the camera and just started watching nature.
2. More recently I went to a marketing automation seminar a couple of weeks ago. Participants were encouraged to tweet the event in real time… during presentations. This seemed like a good idea, but I noticed that in order to tweet I needed to stop paying attention to the speaker. And then to follow the Twitter event feed, I was staring at my Blackberry, not paying much attention to the event itself. And to top that, most of the tweets were simple regurgitations of some of the key points of the person currently speaking.

I’m done. It’s over. I check my email when I have a second. I’ll tweet when something comes up (usually when I’m traveling).

As a marketer, I’ve been curious how these hyper-connected tools will be monetized. There is more to think about here. I’ve had my toe dipped in this water from a business perspective for a couple of years, but still, I’ve got to marinate a bit more on this.

Sure, there are only so many words in the English language. And being concerned with Branding myself, I understand the desire for a memorable and original organization name. But I have recently come upon a few company names that confuse me.

The late 90s brought us wacky, non sequitur company names. Ostensibly this was because of the quest for a unique .com url. So we got Monster.com, instead of jobs.com. Instead of Search.com we get Google.

But in some cases, I think we’ve gone round the bend. A few I’ve been seeing lately include:

• Survey Monkey – I would never send a survey to a customer that had the word Monkey anywhere near it. And I like monkeys as much as the next guy.
• Silverpop – This makes me think of either a metallic candy or being the first loser at the Olympics.
• Meltwater – If water is already melted, doesn’t that imply this company wants to charge me for something that has already been done?
• e{insert word] – To of course signify that your using electricity in your technological innovation.
• i[insert word] – Thank you, iPod.

I work for a rather conservative private company. As well, I get regular cold calls from company wanting to sell us services. To me the best names are ones that capture the essence of the product or service. And from a potential vendor perspective, I’d recommend using words that your potential customers will want to be associated with.

All this being said Survey Monkey is out there and doing fine, but I’ll stick with Constant Contact.

So, this has been bugging me since I read about it on Friday. I logged onto the soon-to-be former governor of Alaska’s Facebook page so I could read her statement criticizing everybody who was being critical of her impending resignation. But I got stuck reading to Wall Posts from her supporters.

Here are a few things that bother me about her decision and her supporters’ defense of it:

She says once she decided to not run for re-election, her role as a lame duck was pointless. My thought: bullshit. By not running for office again she would get the opportunity to put politics aside and work with whomever she wants to get things accomplished and display her “leadership” skills without worrying about campaigning, raising money or making interest groups happy. It’s an opportunity to do what you think is right, without the money, politics and influence that leads to compromise and homogenization.

President Obama resigned his office as Senator, which makes Palin’s resignation OK. Obama resigned his office because he was elected to a higher office. That’s pretty much how the system works! This would have been demonstrated by McCain had he won. Additionally this has happened with Bush II, Clinton, Ford, Johnson, etc. Voters tend to elect people that have proved electable.

Quitting now will give her the ability to accomplish more than if she was in office. Let’s use John Edwards to discuss this one. Edwards didn’t run for a second term in the Senate after the losing VP candidate with Kerry (but he did finish his term, as he committed to his constituents). His Titanic-sized ego wouldn’t let him run a losing campaign for Senator. He started the Poverty Center and worked on his Presidential campaign for 2 years. Look how that worked out. He was pretty much always running for 3rd place. And this was all before the love child/affair brouhaha.

Leaving office in Alaska will give her a bigger national pulpit. Again, ask John Edwards about that one. It gives her a bigger pulpit with the people that care about her already, conservative Republicans. She will have plenty of opportunities to preach to the choir (please forgive the metaphor). But once she leaves office, the newsworthiness of what she says on a random Tuesday will be significantly less.

Palin is getting judged so critically because she is a conservative family woman. Hillary got dragged over the rocks, through the mud and into the fire. Edwards got, rightfully, filleted. McCain got treated pretty roughly as a grump. Obama is still surrounded by crazy conspiracies. Media scrutiny and criticism is not exclusive to Party or gender. But it is an easy scapegoat. In fact given the pass the Bush Administration was given in the early aughts, I’m not sure the media is scrutinizing enough, holding our leaders accountable.

McCain decided to not win the campaign because he realized how bad the economy was, and whoever won would be limited to one term, sullied with the Bush recession. Huh? Someone ask Senator McCain about that one.

She quit because she foresees a higher calling. I hope that higher calling is her family or her religion. If she pursues any higher office, she better not expect her treatment to be any different.

I wrote almost a year ago about McDonald’s attempt to steal coffee customers from Starbucks. The Golden Arches attempt way back in July 2008 was to tell Starbucks customers they were snobs who only read obscure Russian literature (note the Commie undertone). At the same time, you were dumb to be paying $4 for coffee.

Flash forward to today. McDonalds is really pushing their espresso, mochas and iced mochas. How much do they cost? $3.99.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.