Political science discussion on the way home

Actual conversation we had in the car on the way home about why there are only 4 days of day camp this week (instead of the typical 5).


Mom: We're celebrating July 4th this week, so we get Friday off. Who did America win independence from?

Katye (enthusiastically):  France! No, Boston!

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Colin (hedging his bets): Great Britain. Or maybe slavery.

Mom: Right. America was a British colony.


Katye: What's a colony?


Cameron (must participate even if I have no idea what's happening): Is Colin a colony?

Case study in how not to do marketing

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So I've been toying with the idea of getting an electric bike. These are all the rage in China, which makes perfect sense. But it'd be great for me on the short trips to the grocery where the thought of getting up and down the hill with groceries puts me right into the car (yes, I'm pathetic that way).

But that's not the point of this article; instead, this is a case study in what happens when you haven't thought your marketing all the way through to the point of sale.

I say all this, by the way, as a Best Buy shareholder. Sigh. Anyway, here's the good, bad, and the ugly.

• The good: Articles about Best Buy carrying electric bikes surface in the blogosphere (see example article below). Good way to leverage social media to build awareness.
• Still good: My local store puts up a banner visible from US-101 proclaiming, "Electric bikes are here, come in for a test ride!". Again, good: a direct, clear call to action in a place where lots of people will see it, including thousands of people stuck in commute-time traffic. Perfect target market.
• Here's where it goes from bad to comically worse:
  
• Attempt 1 to test ride a bike: Two weeks after the banner went up, I walk into the store for a test ride. Some of the bikes they are supposed to carry are not even on the floor; two models are in boxes. No one in the store knows when they are coming out of the boxes or when the rest of the models are arriving. Test ride? Nope, not sure when you can do that either. FAIL.
• Attempt 2 to test ride a bike: Two weeks later, I call the store. They say, "nope, still not on out of the boxes -- should be good to go this weekend". Remember, at this point, the store has a freeway-visible banner up for at least a month with that precise call-to-action emblazoned on it. FAIL.
  
• Attempt 3 to test ride a bike: Two weeks after Attempt 2, I drop by the store. Sure enough, the bikes (and the Segway) are on the floor out of the boxes. After asking a half dozen blue shirts for a test ride, I'm finally directed to the Appliances team. The Appliance guy makes a call, and says, "yup, it's what I suspected. We only have one guy who can help with test rides, and he's in once a week on Fridays. Please come back then." FAIL.

Why generate the awareness and then the leads when you can't deliver on the call-to-action? Looks like the bike-enthusiast bloggers who were dismissive about Best Buy being in this business at all were right.

p.s. Digging this Zemanta add-on, which I blogged about earlier. Definitely saves a lot of back-and-forth with other browser windows.

Related articles by Zemanta

• In China, Bicycles Are Back - But Now They're Battery Powered (time.com)
• Best Buy to Sell Brammo Bikes (shoppingblog.com)
• Best Buy Will Start Selling Electric Bikes (keetsa.com)

Recommended Firefox extensions

I have the following confession: it's hard to write down paragraph-sized blog thoughts when it's so much easier to post word and sentence-sized thoughts via Twitter and Facebook. Pathetic but true.

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Anyway, to buck the trend, I'm here to recommend a few extensions: three for folks who run Firefox on a few different machines (e.g., work, home, in a virtual machine) and one for the dwindling numbers who still blog (though also good for the increasing number of Gmail users).

First an aside about Firefox. I've definitely flirted with a few other browsers in the past 3 months (Safari, Chrome, and Opera) -- primarily for speed. The new Javascript engines in Chrome and Safari are super fast, and you can definitely tell in everyday browsing. But Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is pretty fast too and also offers the killer feature of supporting a wide variety of extensions. So until Chrome or Safari create a rich ecosystem of must-have extensions, I'll always have Firefox on my machine.

OK, onto the extension recommendations. First, for the nomadic Firefox users:

• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) synchronizes bookmarks (and saved passwords, though I don't use that feature -- see below for why) across IE and Firefox. It mostly just works, though does insist on alphabetizing the contents of your Bookmark Bar which I found somewhat annoying. I use separate work and a home profiles to keep a separate set of bookmarks. For those into the teams behind the features, Xmarks was cofounded by Mitch Kapor, the guy who built Lotus 1-2-3 and was the founding Chair of Mozilla (the fine folks who build Firefox, Thunderbird and more).
• LastPass stores your username, passwords, and profiles (for filling out those pesky forms) "in the cloud" and features browser plug-ins for both Firefox and IE which will leap into action and offer to fill out your password when you hit a site that needs one. When I was on Windows, I used something called Roboform which did the same thing -- but Roboform didn't have a Mac version when I converted. So I gave LastPass a whirl, and it's generally the first plug-in I donwload after I install a fresh version of Firefox. (Try 1Password if you are addicted to Safari and don't need something that works across platforms and browsers.)
• FEBE does for Firefox extensions, themes and preferences what Lastpass does for passwords. It allows you to back them up and import them. Super handy if you find yourself installing Firefox on lots of different machines and dread the task of downloading all those extensions into your brand-new Firefox installations. It supports saving your stash-o-goodies on Box.net for storage in the cloud.

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Finally, here's a recommendation for bloggers or Gmail'ers who want to create fancy email messages. Zemanta is a plugin that will automatically recommend tags, links, pictures, and other resources for your blog posts or email messages as you are typing them. Some might find this a little big brother-ish, but I find it super useful. It might even get me to blog more.

As I've been typing this entry, for example, it's offered to insert links for Mozilla, Mitch Kapor, Foxmarks, Opera, Xmarks, and more. In other words, I didn't have to insert the links manually.

It's also offered to insert a list of relevant tags on ths blog post (not as relevant to me, since this mostly just a personal blog).

And it's recommended a set of images to insert such as pictures of Mitch Kapor and Jon Stephenson von Tezchner, the cofounder of Opera, the Firefox and Opera and Foxmarks and Facebook logos), and so on. When you drag-and-drop them into your post, it automatically inserts the images as well as the reference links below the images. Genius!