Peter Morrissey - friend and mentor

Missing a mentor today – Peter Morrissey remembered

A good friend and mentor died August 3. His passing reminds me again of how we’re formed by the people we admire.

I first met Peter Morrissey when our firm joined an international network of independent public relations agencies, Pinnacle Worldwide. Peter owned a firm in Boston that specialized in corporate reputation management and crisis communications.

It was easy to see why corporate executives trusted Peter. He was honest, whip smart and direct. He also was a teacher. He shared stories to illustrate lessons. And like a good Irishman, he had great stories to tell.

Among Peter’s corporate clients was Johnson & Johnson. He counseled the company and its McNeil Pharmaceuticals subsidiary when poison introduced into its Tylenol capsules killed seven Chicago-area residents in 1982. It’s now a classic case study in PR classes on crisis communications.

In addition to running his successful firm, Peter was the consummate good citizen. He taught at Boston University, was active in numerous community groups and served on the board of Boston Athletic Association, sponsors of the Boston Marathon.

I remember him most for what I learned listening to him. I suppose that’s why I enjoyed reading Rate Your Professor comments from students he taught at Boston University.

“Morrissey’s real-world experience as CEO of a highly successful PR firm makes his class probably the most useful I’ve taken at BU.“

“Professor Morrissey’s class was a great class. He brings his real-world experience of owning his own PR firm and working with big name clients to the class. Morrissey’s work in crisis communication especially is a case study for every intro to PR class everywhere.”

“I LOVE PROFESSOR MORRISSEY! If you want to go into PR, take as many of Morrissey’s classes as you can. Work hard, talk to him outside of class, and he will help you in your job search way more than Career Services ever could.”

Peter was the same way with his professional colleagues. He would help you any way he could. Mostly he helped me remember that, at its core, our profession is about serving our communities with integrity, honest communications and a commitment to do what’s right.

Peter taught that by how he lived.

generic theater audience

Rising above the Dark Knight tragedy

 by Jake Ten Pas

colorado theater massacre

The scene of the shooting, which claimed 12 lives so far and resulted in the injury of more than 70.

As a kid, I wore a shirt that read, “I prefer to be called Batman.” I don’t remember all the things that made Bob Kane’s character resonate with me so completely at that age, but as I’ve grown older, it’s been the duality of the character that’s kept me immersed in his saga.

Batman is a wounded character, a man marred by violence in youth, who spends the rest of his life trying to come to terms with what he’s lost, what he’s become and what he wants his world to be. He commits acts of violence in defense of a society he sees as salvageable against others whose violent streaks have turned them against that society. He eschews guns and avoids killing whenever possible.

After midnight today in Colorado, a pathetic real-life example of that darkness turned sour, senseless and violent, walked into a theater and killed 12 people and injured more than 70. Watching the news this morning, I struggled to keep it together. Was it because my wife and I were sitting in a local theater at exactly that time last night, and could just have easily have been in Aurora, Colo.? Was it because I think movies are one of the great cultural products of our society, and to see something that can bring so much joy and meaning to people’s lives turned to sorrow and fear is a philosophical tragedy? Was it because a story of positive transformation was itself turned back to horror?

I’ve been watching CNN since I woke up, and it was incredibly moving to hear the last Tweets of Jessica Ghawi, a 24-year-old aspiring journalist, read aloud. The last was sent just moments before the shooting began. The shooter was the same age as Ghawi.

batman sleeping gear

Batman has been my favorite comic character since I was a child. This wasn’t the shirt that read, “I prefer to be called Batman,” but these Underoos-style pajamas show my love for the Dark Knight just as well.

Even now, reactions to this madness are spreading throughout social media. Some folks are trying to make sense of it in real time, while others are striking out at the media. Some are using it as an excuse to make political or religious points, and others are exploiting it to sell clothes. Fear, sadness, greed, anger, apathy and so many other human traits are flowing through the arteries of Twitter, Facebook and the other channels we use to communicate with each other right now.

The term “going viral” gets tossed around a lot. Usually, it’s to describe a video of a cute cat or a drunk guy falling over or something else that brings us joy or at least a cynical-yet-harmless laugh. But an act of brutal violence has the potential to truly go viral, spreading like a disease that paralyzes us into paranoia, inaction and depression.

A friend just called me out on Facebook for delivering Christopher Nolan’s talking points when I posted this status update: “Don’t let this madman change your weekend plans one bit. Feels gross to use the phrase ‘letting the terrorists win,’ but this was an act of terror, aimed right at the heart of what we do for entertainment as a culture. If you want to go to the movies, buy that ticket and don’t think for a second of one anomalous scumbag who used the only pathetic, overcompensating weapon in his arsenal – blind fear.”

Perhaps I should have voiced sympathy or compassion before anger and defiance. Perhaps it was me being a stereotypical man that drove me to transmute my feelings of sadness and helplessness to tough talk. There are bigger things at stake here than the movies, after all.

But if the movies represent for others what they represent for me – a mythology in which we can turn real-life pain and misery into something hopeful and worth living for, then maybe the movies aren’t such a small thing after all. While Nolan’s Batman films have certainly been theme park rides of action and visual dazzle, they also made up a story of redemption and personal transformation, of fighting to make the world a better place.

Batman and Bane

Batman squares off against villain Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.” Reports have the gunman dressed similarly to Bane, wearing some sort of gas mask and body armor.

Another friend posted, “Batman could have stopped him. Ironic.” His sister responded, “Too. Soon.” Maybe so, but maybe he was trying to turn the tragedy, something he couldn’t control, into something he could control through clever language. In a deeper way, the ideas behind Batman, that we can change, that we can do something useful with the hurt we hold inside, just might be able to stop the waves of fear and uncertainty radiating out from Aurora right now across every means of communication we use.

Whatever you decide to do this weekend, whoever you decide to do it with and however you choose to communicate about it, remember that it’s up to each and all of us how this story turns out.

Hate to sound trite, but my heart really does go out to every person in Colorado who lost somebody today. Nobody should have their childlike joy at sharing a movie with a theater full of fellow fans turned into a nightmare of lost hope. I’m going out tonight to be with my friends and watch live music in a crowded space, and I’m not going to worry that some sick, cowardly bastard might try to ruin that. Is that solidarity, revenge or just escapism?

I don’t know, but I prefer to be called Batman.

A tale of three car sites, only two of which do it right

by Jake Ten Pas

When I run a car into the ground, I do so in spectacular fashion. There was my 1991 GMC Jimmy, which crapped out on the backside of Steens Mountain. That it did so while rocketing down a roughly 45-degree incline with no guardrail and enough boulders littering the road to give Wile E. Coyote a panic attack was much to my copilot’s and my chagrin. The disc breaks gave up the ghost, and the ensuing frame rattling – not to mention near death experience – was enough to sour me on the vehicle for good.

Honda PilotI traded it in for a used 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which served me well for nearly a decade before the radiator exploded while driving to the coast for Memorial Day weekend this year. When I pulled into Burgerville to assess the situation and eat dinner, it was making a metal-on-metal sound that not even Lou Reed at his most avant-garde would have dared call music. When I exited BV, the lake of coolant under my vehicle was roughly the size of Titicaca, and I knew its number was up.

Over the course of the weekend, my research assistant/smoking hot wife gave the interwebs (and our local library) a beating they won’t soon forget. Faced with the choice of spending $400 on a new radiator – not to mention the impending kidney sale that would come when my transmission choked to death – or renting a car until I could find the time to comb the entire city of Portland for a worthy replacement, I chose neither. Thanks to some handy online resources, I was able to find almost exactly the car I was looking for and conclude the transaction with the good folks at Herzog-Meier by the end of the day Monday.

What resources enabled this modern-day miracle, this far-fetched feat of automotive fortuitousness?

Three things:

1) The Kelley Blue Book app – The free app will help you figure out what your current car is worth if you want to trade it in, as well as giving you a good idea of the value of any car you might consider buying and how it might hold its price. Why it does it right: With a simple, easy-to-navigate interface, you’d have to close your eyes and rubber-band your fingers together to not be able to work this app. Simply click new or used, the year, make and model, and you’re cruising.

kelly blue book app 2) Consumer Reports – Through Consumer Reports, we discovered a car that appealed to both my wife’s common sense and my style stipulations, all while getting a solid rating for durability, safety and resale value. The reputable car-and-consumer-electronics reviewers will tell you about the best makes, models and years of cars. Why it doesn’t do it right: Unfortunately, Consumer Reports has decided to charge for its online content, meaning you have to pay $6.95 a month or $30 a year to access this info on the web. The good news is, your local library likely carries Consumer reports. Save your money, and hit the stacks to do your research. Perhaps at some point, Consumer Reports will realize there’s more money to be made incorporating advertising or going the IMDB route – offering free and paid versions of its content – than there is in charging consumers directly.
consumer report app3) Autotrader.com – Say you know what kind of car you want, but you don’t want to drive all over town to find it. Autotrader can point you in the direction of a local dealership that carries it. That’s how we found my 2005 Honda Pilot at Herzog-Meier, which deals primarily in Volkswagens. Why it does it right: While the site isn’t pretty looking, it’s super functional. You can be as detailed or as general as you want when it comes to what you’re looking for, and Autotrader will give you a great idea of what’s available in your community. If you’re even earlier in the process than that, the site can show you what you might be able to afford in the first place. Now, if they could just consider hiring a new web designer, all would be right in their world.

auto trader app

The lesson here is simple. Know what your consumers are looking for from car sites and make it easy for them to find it. The Kelley Blue Book app and Autotrader both provide a great free service that will have people coming back the next time they need to buy a car and recommending the resources to their friends (I heard about Autotrader from my brother, who used it to buy his own car). While Consumer Reports knows what its online users want, it is clearly less concerned with effective, consumer-centric models of online commerce.

So it was that after a long day of looking, researching and haggling, I was able to drive home in a car that functioned properly, a novelty whose charm has yet to wear off. It might not be as exciting driving to work without having to worry if some aspect of my engine is going to malfunction horribly, leaving me on the side of the road or the back of an ambulance, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

While there’s no telling how my Honda Pilot will finally bite the dust, I have no doubt it will be spectacular. When it happens, assuming I live to tell the tale, I’ll be ready to research the next car I’ll doom to the monstrous fate of ferrying me into automotive Valhalla.

MeetUp - the social site that encourages you to meet in person.

MeetUp – The greatest social network you’ve never heard of

– by Cam Clark

One of the most prominent complaints I hear against social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter is that they actually make us less social. They suck you into interacting on a superficial, virtual basis rather than face-to-face.

There are arguments for and against this thought process, but for the past ten years one social network has been quietly and successfully nullifying these two assertions right under our noses by creating a network of people who meet virtually and congregate physically.
 

Meetup.com is one of the rare websites that actually encourages people to meet in real life. The website aims to help people create communities unified by a common interest, such as: politics, books, sports, movies, health, pets, jobs or other hobbies. Members just enter their ZIP code or their city and the topic they want to meet about, and the site helps them arrange a place and time to meet.

Meetup’s mission is “To revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.”

This under-recognized social networking site is the world’s largest network of local groups, with people getting together somewhere on the planet every 13 seconds. Meetup boasts an impressive 9 million visitors per month in 45,000 cities worldwide, and has 280,000 monthly Meetups on every topic imaginable. Sure, compared to Facebook numbers, 9 million is a drop in the bucket and the site could use a visual overhaul, but just because this site has been outshined by others does not mean you should ignore it.
 

 
I personally have made some great connections through this site, and in a very short time frame. I’ve pub-crawled with the “20 and 30 somethings in Portland,” happy-houred with the “Happy Hour Aficionados of Portland,” run with the “NoPo Run Club” and even sung my face off with the “Portland Karaoke Singles.” There is so much fun to be had.

If you don’t think you have time to check it out, do me a favor. Go to meetup.com, enter in a topic that interests you and your zip code, and just see what comes up. If you are unable to find anything interesting, come to one of our PR 3.0 meetings and I will buy you a beer. Or, maybe, just maybe, you will find a group of people that will forever change your life. Either way, what do you have to lose?

RIP MCA: In memory of an ill communicator

 by Jake Ten Pas

 

Beastie Boys

The Beasties all grown up, and probably looking better than the author of this blog will in another decade.

Today I lost a hero. I never knew him, and I’m not one who normally jumps on the celebrity death hysteria bandwagon. But when I call Adam Yauch, aka the Beastie Boys’ MCA, a hero, as in one I looked up to and who helped me to define my course in life, I’m serious as the cancer that claimed his life at the age of 47. We lost one ill communicator.

There’s a Beastie Boys album for every season of my life. I bought their first major label release, “Licensed to Ill,” in 1986, along with Run-DMC’s “Raising Hell.” They were the first two tapes I’d ever purchased with my own money, and while I’d dabble briefly in hair metal before grade school was through, it was hip-hop that would define the next decade of my life.

In middle school, I bought “Paul’s Boutique,” and I took it to a football game, only to have my friends make fun of me for continuing to buy music by a band many thought of as one-hit-wonders. After “Fight For Your Right (To Party)” became a runaway success, many looked at them as a novelty act, the great white hip-hope.

I ignored them, popped the green plastic tape in my Sony Sports Walkman and had my mind well and truly altered forever. Time and critical opinion have proven me right to buy that record, which is now known as one of the classics of the genre. But the personal impact was far greater. While the self-destruction in evidence on “Licensed” wasn’t gone, it had been transmuted into something funkier and more full of life. The music reflected their new So-Cal-infused perspective. The pastiche of “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” that closed out side two was absolutely revolutionary, and the funk dripping off songs like “Shake Your Rump” has yet to be matched.

 

Paul's Boutique

“Paul’s Boutique,” an album that changed lives.

In high school, The Beasties added live instruments to the mix on the albums “Check Your Head” and “Ill Communication.” Similarly, my tastes had begun to expand, and I was listening to the likes of Pink Floyd, Parliament-Funkadelic and the hardcore punk of the Dead Kennedys. A song like “Sabotage” perfectly brought so many of these strains together, and the video inspired pretty much every bad student film I tried to pass off as a class project during my junior and senior years.

But the Beastie Boys’ perspectives were changing, too, and from what I know, it was largely due to MCA. His awareness of Tibet’s struggle for freedom and the way women were treated in earlier lyrics by the band resulted in songs that were as smart and critical – both of themselves as individuals and society – as they were funky and funny. Just listen to “Bodhisattva Vow” and try not to reach a higher state of being.

At the same time, I was beginning to question my own political views. Was I really the little libertarian I’d always thought, or was there a compassionate streak in me that went beyond my firm commitment to social freedoms? Around that time, I saw a Sonic Youth poster that read, “I believe Anita Hill,” and learning more about that band’s views on women, and the Beastie Boys’ own changing perspective, helped me to realize that, even though I wasn’t yet, I wanted to be a feminist.

In college, there was “Hello Nasty,” a record that kind of got lost in the shuffle for me as my musical tastes blossomed like a mushroom crowd. Of course, the fact that those tastes had been so informed by the Beasties was lost on me at the time, but not now. I was scarfing down records by Can, Bootsy, Gong, Lee Perry and so many other groups I might never have been prepared for if not for the Beasties.

“To The 5 Boroughs” caught me in my post-college malaise, when I needed those stripped-down old-school sounds to remind me of who I was and what I wanted out of life. It and the soulful, groovy instrumentals of “The Mix-Up” propelled me through refining my writing and copyediting abilities at the local newspaper, a period that saw me realize just how important the written word was to my life. Really, words and the ability to communicate with other humans saved me from a deep hole in myself. Words and music, the two things the Beastie Boys gave me time and again.

 

Licensed to Ill

The Beastie Boys in the “Licensed to Ill” years. In retrospect, photos like this stand as proof that today’s punks might just be tomorrow’s philosophers.

The group’s last album, “The Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” came out last year, and I watched the epic 11-minute video for “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win” at my desk at AM:PM PR, the public relations company that is my newest endeavor. It was the video I’d dreamed of making as a kid, full of action figures, zombies, explosions and dope beats. It was probably the video they always dreamed of making as kids, too. Well, they did it.

MCA, Ad-Rock and Mike D lived their dreams, and they lived my dreams, too. Plus, when my life wasn’t as cool as theirs, they always reminded me to stay true, keep trying and never stop growing. If those seem like trite expressions of an infinitely more complex truth, well, there’s a reason I’ve never gone on a world tour with Run-DMC or met with the Dalai Lama.

When I heard the news today, oh Boys. I had to storm out of my office like Ben Stiller at the end of “There’s Something About Mary.” The tears were streaming no matter how soft I felt for not being able to stifle them. In a weird way, I think MCA would have been OK with that. In a genre known for absurd posturing, he was a voice of enlightenment and sensitivity, even when he was handing out lyrical beatdowns.

I’m not one to get all choked up over celebrity deaths. I don’t feel the need to mourn somebody just because everybody else is or because they made one single that I slow danced to one time at a middle school party.

But when somebody made songs – or films or books – that helped to define damn near every age of your life? That’s something much bigger. That’s somebody who grew with you, who grew as an artist as you grew as a person. I don’t know where MCA’s music ends and my life begins sometimes, and I wish I didn’t know where his life ended. How the hell am I supposed to face my 40s without a Beastie Boys record to help me make sense of it all? Namaste, you gruff-voiced truth spewer.

Exclamation decimation: The fine art of punkedyouwayshun

 by Jake Ten Pas

Can you hear me now?

How about now???????????

Do all those question marks make my query more apparent, or were you able to use your brain and understanding of context and punctuation to detect that I was asking you a question without all those unnecessary appendages?

 

Scarface

If you don’t want the Internet to look like Tony Montana’s mansion at the end of “Scarface,” ease up on those exclamation marks, mang.

I ask because while having a conversation with a friend recently, he informed me that people can’t hear you if you only use one exclamation mark to punctuate your sentences online. Basically, his point went like this:

“If you just use one exclamation mark, nobody even notices. It’s like you’re just kind of excited. But if you use three exclamation marks, then it’s like you’re really excited. If you use even more, like eleven exclamation marks, then you’re really, really excited.”

My side of the conversation is irrelevant, because very few people online appear to subscribe to any reasoning other than what my friend put forward. For kicks, let’s assume, briefly, that this isn’t the case, and I’ll thank you later for indulging me.

Those of us who have been expressing ourselves through the written word for longer than we’ve been on Facebook – or online – see things differently. Exclamation marks, or points, are like the grenade launchers attached to the bottoms of our M16s. We only use them when we really have to blow something up. When used all the time, the result is an Internet that looks like a lunar landscape. At first, it’s as full of craters as a strip-mining site, and eventually it’s just a void where once there was the potential for well-appointed discourse.

Notice how few exclamation points I’ve used in this blog entry so far. When I say, “Wake up and smell the brimstone! This collective punctuation abuse is dragging our language straight to hell!” Well, I think you probably get that I’m screaming it at you, or possibly from a window, a la “Network.”

If you’re a business, or just an independent contractor operating a Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or any other similar account in a professional capacity, it’s important to remember that, just because you hold the exclamation point button down, it doesn’t make your fans/followers automatically care. It just makes them deaf, so if and when you post something that actually matters, they won’t hear you. The same applies to all-caps, just in case you were about to ask.

Because I know some of you still will disagree, I’d like to show you a chart that I hope illustrates my point.

punctuation table

I hope that helped to clear it up for you. If you still have questions, make sure to tag the subject line of your email with 66 question marks (and mark it important) or I might not see it in my inbox.

Oh, and thanks!

curation

Curation key to a quieter internet

by Cam Clark

In 1990, when Sir Tim Burners Lee created the first ever web page, he imagined the web being a worldwide tool. I doubt, however, he ever could have imagined that in 2012 there would be more than a trillion web pages on the net. In fact, the Internet has become so large that one of Tim’s latest jobs has been to figure out a way to measure just how big the Internet really is, in both size and impact.

curation

So far, the ways invented to deal with this growing glut of web pages have come in the form of lists, directories, search engines and wikis. Even with all of that, the internet has become nothing more than semi-organized noise. All of these technologies are helpful but, with Internet users worldwide spending a collective 35 billion hours of time online every month, if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, navigating the internet can be a huge waste of time. How can we use that time more efficiently and find stories that are interesting, timely and relevant even if we don’t know they exist?

Currently this is accomplished in one of three ways:

1. Professional Curation – This is what we normally think of as news. For example, CNN.com. An editor there decides what information is important for you to see. This is good for world and national news. Websites linked to TV stations and newspapers are often the most trusted, but they may be poor at targeting your personal interests. They’re not extremely timely by today’s Internet standards, where a story that is 15 minutes old is considered stale, and they tend to lean toward the sensational.

2. Social Curation – This is the information that your friends share on places such as Facebook.com. It’s great for finding information that is of personal interest, obscure or local, but generally poor at finding the types of items a professional curator would choose.

3. Trending Curation – This is the opinion of the masses, as found on sites such as Google Trends or trending on twitter. These work well to keep you informed of up-to-the-minute breaking stories or the latest cute cat video, but information can be misleading if it turns out to be based on rumor.

If we are to stay sane and on top of what is happening in the world, we need to bring the concept of web curation to the next level. All the pieces are in place. It just comes down to combining them correctly. Easier said then done.

curation
What will this information source look like? How could these sources be combined to use each one’s strengths to limit their weaknesses? That is the part I haven’t fully figured out – yet. Maybe it will be some sort of dashboard that has a column of the most immediate trending information along with top stories from news organizations all vetted for truth and tailored to your specific tastes, geolocation and what your friends are posting about.

With Google Plus’ recent update to include trending information, I believe they are getting very close. The problem is, they don’t, at this time, have the same strength of social graph that Facebook has. Facebook also could attempt this, but it does not have the strength of search that Google has. Even if Facebook partnered with Bing or bought Yahoo!, both have less than 5% of the search market, so it’d still be a stretch.

What do you think the future of Sir Tim Burners Lee’s creation looks like? What would be the most useful combination of these three types of content for you to keep up with your friends and the world at large?

bundling PR services

Rethinking how we sell our PR services

marketing agency blueprint

As AM:PM PR approaches its second birthday, we’re changing how we sell our services. We’ve packaged services for clients – creating a prix fixe menu of options rather than the usual ala carte list.

PR services
We think bundling PR services and pricing them clearly will make it easier for clients to understand what they’re buying. It also recognizes how different the practice of public relations has become in the 24/7, constantly connected world we live in today.

Historically agencies based their pricing on billable hourly rates, much like lawyers and other professionals. Clients that have little experience using public relations agencies struggle to understand why services are billed hourly. Those with more experience may understand billable hours, but many don’t connect hours billed with results achieved.

The truth is that not every hour we work produces the same benefit for clients.

Over the Holidays, I read a book (The Marketing Agency Blueprint) and shared it with my colleagues. It triggered our effort to rethink how we price what we do so it makes more sense to our clients – and to us.

 

service bundling

Much like Progressive, we think bundling our services together might help us better serve our clients’ needs.

“The traditional billable-hour system is tied exclusively to outputs, not outcomes, and assumes that all agency activities … are of equal value,” declared Paul Roetzer, the book’s author and founder/CEO of PR 20/20 in Cleveland.

Today’s communications landscape has radically changed the contents of our PR toolkit. It requires us to be full-time listeners, even for our smallest clients. In the digital world, opportunities and risks don’t wait patiently for open times in our schedules.

Our ability to help a client requires a high level of trust in us, as communicators and strategists. Trust takes time to build. Our service packages anticipate that we will work with the client for a minimum of six months. It’s a step away from casual dating. It signals our priority is on building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.

We’re eager to talk about these packages with prospective clients, and learn from them whether this new format helps them better understand what they will get in working with us. Like everything in our business, the packages are subject to change. Our hope is that they will form the foundation for some great relationships.

Spreading the news

New website causes media sensation, freshens breath while you read

The word is out. Thanks to Gawker blogging about it, Perez Hilton tweeting a catty remark in regards to it, and Lady Gaga wearing an outfit made entirely from computer screens displaying it, you’ve by now heard that AM:PM PR has a new website.

First of all, we want to make it clear that this isn’t how we wanted to roll out the new site. We wanted you to find out by us telling you about it right here. But, as the recent media circus has made undeniable, the cat’s out of the bag. We might as well address a number of questions/misconceptions that have already popped up in our conversations with the media.

Claim: The website is based on complex numerology decoded from a previously unpublished section of “The Wu-Tang Manual.”

Reality: This is true.

Claim: Using AM:PM PR’s website can help cure depression, freshen breath while you read.

Reality: Again, this is true. Perhaps we’ll move on to some misconceptions.

Claim: Staring directly into Alexis’ eyes in the group shot on the homepage can make you go cross-eyed.

Reality: OK, also true, but only in extreme cases. This isn’t going well. Let’s give it one more shot.

Claim: This website revamping is a shameless promotional ploy for Pat’s upcoming, last-minute presidential run.

Reality: While Pat does have designs on world domination, and his common-sense perspective would certainly make for a refreshing alternative to some other candidates we might name, he won’t be running for president. At least not in 2012.

Speaking of Pat, stay tuned to this site for his upcoming blog post, which will offer an in-depth look at our new package-pricing system, and how we think that it will help us help you to reach what science has coined “maximum awesometude.”

In the meantime, know this:

– Yes, our new site will better emphasize the strategic relationship we have with ace app developers 7/Apps.

– No, you won’t be able to control our new website with your mind, a la Clint Eastwood’s jet in the film “Firefox.”

– Yes, site design and navigation have both been improved, creating an experience that one critic has called, “THE feel-good action-packed romantic rollercoaster thrillride of this year or any other.”

– No, no McCormicks were harmed during the making of the new site. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

– Yes, you will still have access to all the same great videos, hyperlocal storytelling, and dangerously sharp snark as before, but now it will have 30% less MSG.

Stay tuned, friends, family and cabal mates. The future is now, but we’re only leaking it one day at a time.

Consumer Electronics Show sans hoverboard

by Cam Clark

Last month I got the chance to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. CES is so huge that it is hard to comprehend even after going. It’s 28 football fields of consumer electronics – a geek’s paradise. I spent three days walking the floors and was only able to cover 3/4 of the entire show. Any more and my feet would have fallen off or my eyes would have exploded.

consumer electronics show
One of my favorite areas at the show was the personal health and fitness area. Health and fitness happens to be a personal passion of mine, so combining that with electronic gadgets completely sucked me in.

Taking a look at products like Nike Fuel, MotoACTV, Fitbit and BodyBugg, Wi-Fi Smart Scales and Lose It!, among many others, I started to see a trend toward allowing average people to collect large amounts of accurate data on themselves. Using devices and applications like these will allow you to be able to build a personal profile of all the health-related parts of your life.

You can track your weight, body mass index (BMI), blood pressure, caloric intake and output, and sleep patterns among others. With the help of Application Programming Interfaces (API) in the very near future, all of these devices will start to talk to each other, and you will be able to share this info with your doctor, personal trainer, or family.

consumer electronics show
Another amazing concept at CES was the idea of 3D printing at home. They’ve taken something that for years has been reserved for manufacturing companies with large piles of cash and produced it at a cost in the range of the normal human. Now, home inventors can make rapid prototypes. Missing a piece to your favorite board game? Print one. Your kid’s favorite action figure broke a limb? Print a new one. I personally think 3D printing is as big a deal as color printing.

Not everything at CES was earth-shattering. A lot was ho-hum and some things were just plain weird. Take for example the concept of Celebrities and Booth Babes. If I mention the names 50 Cent, Justin Bieber and Xzibit, images of stadiums or music venues may pop into your head. What if I told you that they were how some companies tried to draw people into their booths at the world’s largest electronics show. In my opinion, it was kind of odd.

consumer electronics show
Now, picture some extremely good-looking women prancing around in skimpy outfits and you may start to think of a beach in Brazil, a club in Miami or the red-light district in Amsterdam. But in the context of CES, you have yourself a “Booth Babe,” beautiful women strategically placed to catch the eye of the wandering geek. Sadly, it works. Unfortunately, no matter how strong the frontal cortex of a man, the reptilian brain is a force to be reckoned with.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time at CES and look forward to the experience again at some point. I’m still hoping that one of these years, I’ll finally get my hoverboard.