Copenhagen: global warming + polar bears — or process problems and bad information management?

In my idyllic Canadian childhood, I spent a lot of time learning about the polar bears.

Of all the animals the Inuit traditionally hunted, Nanuk, the polar bear, was the most prized. Native hunters considered Nanuk to be wise and powerful. When reincarnated as an animal, any Inuit lucky enough to be reincarnated as Nanuk would dance with joy.

This respect for the polar bear is evident in Inuit art. Sculptors who’ve grown up observing these bears in the wild marry the sinuous beauty of these creatures with their raw power.

Naturally, the breakdown of the Copenhagen talks last month brought me to tears. I imagine a future where my beloved bears suffer terribly, a la Arctic Tale.

Polar bear hunting: carving by Cape Dorset Artist, Alariaq Shaa

I was outraged that folks around the world could not agree to save the polar bears.

But then I realized that virtually everything I know about climate change comes from politician Al Gore.

Then I heard about ClimateGate.

Then I learned that Gore is the first “Green Billionaire.”

Then things started to smell a bit fishy. I felt I had to look into this further.

This month, I’ve been reading Heaven and Earth: Global Warming — The Missing Science, by Eureka Prize Winner Ian Plimer of the University of Adelaide.

“Only a geological perspective can provide a proper view of climate change. Professor Plimer’s book does a masterful job of demonstrating that Nature rules the climate, not human activity,” says S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia.

Professor Plimer suggests that the polar bears are endangered by Mother Nature, not by Man. Al Gore et al. disagree. Who’s right? Nobody knows!

Hey, wait! I’ve seen this movie before…

This is a scene from “Enterprise Computing: The Bad Old Days.” You know the plot… Every faction has its database. Each database exists in its own reality zone. There is no one shared version of the truth.

Hmmm…

No wonder the Copenhagen delegates couldn’t agree.

Why did Accenture hire Tiger Woods in the first place?

Connecting through DFW earlier this week, I caught a glimpse of something I’ve never seen before, people talking about advertising.

I wasn’t quick enough to get the camera pointed to capture the knot of people scratching their heads over Tiger Woods’ latest, but here’s a shot of the ad they were discussing.  Ah the irony!

Truer words were never spoken

Much had been written about Tiger Woods’s sponsors’ difficult (?) choice: to stand by their man or cut him loose.  Now we are seeing some companies taking a stand.

Gillette, for example, has concluded that Tiger is not “The best a man can get?”

Googling to see how Tiger’s other sponsors are faring, I noticed that the pages on Accenture’s web site that refer to the golfer have been taken down.

Duh!

The question here is: Why did Accenture chose Tiger Woods as a spokesman in the first place?

After all, the decision to hire an Accenture would be made at the highest levels of an organization and its Board.  Advertising doesn’t affect these decisions directly.  No, Accenture’s use of Tiger Woods would have been aimed at bolstering its corporate image.

Bloomberg reporters got to the heart of the matter: The firm’s initial public offering back in 2001 was the catalyst for the Tiger Woods campaign.

Now, I’m sure Accenture is hoping that the Tiger Woods campaign is in the 50% of advertising that’s not effective.

Top Five Madcap Marketing Moments

Do you remember the first time you ever noticed questionable judgment in marketing?

For me, it was Flamingo Brand frozen turkeys — the Quebec version of Butterball. As a kid, I could not get past the fact that the body of the realistic-looking flamingo in the logo was exactly the same shape of as a frozen turkey. How did my mom know that there was really a turkey in the package and not a flamingo?

As an adult, I have softened on this issue. I now realize: (a) seven-year-old children are not the target audience for frozen turkeys; (b) the logo looks about as much like a real flamingo as Barney looks like a real Tyrannosaurus Rex; and (c) no company would risk the damage to its reputation of passing off a flamingo as a turkey.

But I still can’t forgive Star-Kist Foods for that misguided creature, Charlie the Tuna.

People are still talking about this on. A user named hebneh posted this comment about five months ago on YouTube: “It never made sense that Charlie WANTED to be caught by Star-Kist so that he could be murdered and chopped into small pieces and put in a can. Instead of being grateful that he hadn’t been hooked, he was disappointed.”

I wish that misguided marketing folks had not felt it necessary to foist a New England Patriots baseball cap onto the head of the Dalai Lama. I believe the context is sufficient to get the point across that he is speaking at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. Don’t you?

Gilding the lily?

And why does the online advertising giant feel it is necessary to kill trees to reach small businesses? Maybe it is taking a page out of Narisco Rodriguez’s plan-book, switching up marketing channels to gain attention. The designer, who doesn’t have stores of his own, has also signed a deal with eBay Inc. to create a line that will be sold exclusively through the online marketplace. Of course I’m sure. I read it in the Wall Street Journal.

I would have felt better about receiving direct mail from Google if there had not been errors in my address. If Google is such a crack search company, why couldn’t it have known that Nina Lytton of lytton.com might be the same person as their customer NinaLytton @ gmail? I thought this kind of database marketing dopiness was limited to the likes of Verizon.

Snail mail from Google? Will wonders never cease!

And speaking of database-driven dopiness, did you appreciate the muffed marketing moment that has become known as the Snorkle announcement?

In a world moving to IT in the cloud, Sun and Oracle have made a hot box announcement. A better, cheaper, faster box, to be sure. But a box nonetheless.

A box!

Sun — pursuing the “network is the computer” vision for more than 20 years now — should have known better.

Hardware prices have been falling since computer dinosaurs roamed the earth. A faster, cheaper box is not news.

Where’s the story on headcount? Costs for development and management continue to rise. The energy and facilities savings are probably enormous. Yet a machine like this is a single point of failure big enough to take down the entire company. Where’s the story on how this box fits into a continuously operating cloud?

Think about it, Oracle! If you believe Sun’s shiny new box is powerful enough to house a whole data center or private cloud inside, you know customers aren’t going to buy one on speeds and feeds alone. So why promote it as though it were a just another workstation?  Sun tried to stop thinking like this 20 years ago.

How to get started with Twitter?

When I broke my leg in February, a lot of stuff fell right off my schedule. I thought, "What the heck, I’ve got nothing better to do. Time to finally figure out Twitter."

A month later, I still didn’t get it. In March, I was just about where David Letterman is now. Today, I have advanced to the Kevin Spacey level of enthusiasm. I am a little behind Kevin in followers.

Here is my Twitter conversion story.

It started at the HP Industry Analyst Meeting in March. I confessed my Twitter inadequacy to my buddy Jonathan Eunice. Between speakers, of course.

"Twitter is easy," he said. "Download TweetDeck. Then watch me."

So I did. Despite a lifetime of operant conditioning to fear new applications as much as a pigeon in a Skinner Box fears an electric shock in the floor after a red light goes on, I decided to take Jonathan’s advice. I waited for the end of the session, and downloaded TweetDeck during the coffee break.

Then I watched Jonathan and others, online, at #HPIAS09. It was easy. It was fun. It was even informative!

After the meeting came the letdown. I tried tweeting. I followed Ashton Kutcher and P.Diddy. I grew so close to my friend Marianne O’Connor’s thoughts that I stopped calling her and she started worrying . 

I still didn’t get it.

After Memorial Day, I found myself at the Wall Street Journal’s D7 conference. I knew by than that Twitter actually enhances, not distracts from, a meeting. I wanted to get out my laptop and follow along, but logistics got in the way. Unlike dear old HP, The Wall Street Journal is too stylish to provide tables. No, either balance a laptop on your knees, or use your smartphone. Because I already had a hot, bulky brace on my right knee, I asked my friend Doug Michels for help.

"Twitter is easy," he said. "Download Tweetie onto your iPhone. Then watch me."

I didn’t hesitate this time. I just took the plunge and downloaded Tweetie. Right during Irving Azoff’s talk! By the time the Ticketmaster Entertainment CEO got down off the stage, I was watching #D7 on Twitter. Again, Twitter really enhanced the meeting.

I went right from the #D7 conference to the Maui Brewers Festival, to help out Hawai’i Nui Brewing with booth duty and listen to the market. Sitting comfortably in the shade watching my business partners set up, I wondered "who else is Twittering here?"

No prizes for guessing that the leading edge adopters of Titter in Hawai’i are industry analysts. Of the craft beer industry, that is.

Everybody, meet beer industry analysts, Russel Kealoha and Bully O’Sullivan, of TwoBeerQueers.com

It is very cool to put something out to the Universe via Twitter and have someone walk around the corner looking for you five minutes later.  I learned quite a bit about Twitter from the Two Beer Queers.

Since then, I have learned that Hawaii is a hotbed of social networking. More about this later.

I also discovered things on Twitter about the beer business. My own business! I found out that we were participating in the Big Island United Way fund-raiser just in time to get it onto the website’s event calendar. We handled what techies would call a "service outage" when the tasting room in Hilo ran out of Mehana Mauna Kea Pale Ale in the critical week when the local astronomy community was buzzing with anticipation over the Thirty-Meter Telescope Decision. We have discovered areas where our web site is lame. We’ve realized that what is obvious to us is not always obvious to the customer.

On July 16, 2009, @HawaiiNuiBrew reached its 100th follower. Apparently, this puts us in the top 6% of Twitter. So I guess we’ve graduated from Twitter Kindergarten.

Yesterday afternoon, someone asked me the same question I asked Jonathan Eunice back in March: "I signed up for Twitter but I can’t seem to get any value."

I opened my mouth to repeat the advice that Jonathan and Doug had imparted to me, "It’s simple. Download TweetDeck. Download Tweetie. Then Watch me."

But then I realized, hey, he’s not sitting next to me at a high tech conference. He needs a solution that will stand alone in the real world. Let me think about this.