Hundredth Monkey Magazine

Good thing Greensboro has the Interactive Resource Center to provide daytime support for our neighbors without homes. In November 2010, the IRC had about 74 intakes. One year later, last month, the IRC saw the number increase to 191.

Lamar Gibson, IRC business manager, today expressed some pride in the Center’s ability to manage the growing numbers, but he’s also concerned about the demand.

It’s good cause if you’re looking for a seasonal contribution. They need money, volunteers and in-kind services. Go check it out sometime, too. It’s an impressive facility with a very positive and progressive vibe.

My favorite media buy for 2011? The Lindley Park Gazette, a 12-page Xerographic neighborhood publication published and edited by ten-year-old Lucy Newsom and a staff of her contemporaries.

Why?

The Gazette gets delivered to over 100 homes in a neighborhood that is culturally congruous to King’s English and one of our clients, Ink Photography Production, and there have to be at least a few marketing managers living there.

At $5 an ad, that’s a couple cents per impression when you figure in pass-along and pickup readership from the publication’s one newspaper box in the center of the neighborhood’s business district.

Also, there’s the kids and dogs factor. Who wouldn’t love an earnest and whimsical product of neighborhood youngsters. And we made sure to put a Boston terrier in our ad, to boot.

Then there’s cause adoption. Ms. Newsom’s Gazette isn’t “cute,” it’s authentic. She’s covering historic progress in the neighborhood with archival photos, reporting on real issues, interviewing a neighborhood beekeeper and offering comic send up of newspaper horoscopes.

No. Keep the writer to come up with IDEAS for the photographer. But brand-supporting images are more important than ever in social media, especially with niche sites like one of our favorites, Pinterest.

We’re using Pinterest for two consumer brands.

It doesn’t have to be award-winning photography, but if you want a consumer to “pin you,” it needs to be interesting and incite some creativity in the consumer’s mind.

American Express Open Forum offers several case studies on visually-driven niche social media.

Participation should be consistent and authentic, behavior that makes sense for site etiquette. These niche communities, as strong as they are on their own, cannot exist in a silo. For them to truly succeed, they must be part of your larger brand story and be supported by the other channels.—Alicia Barnes, ModCloth (social media user), from Forum.

Adweek’s current issue features “The Blanding of America” and has a nice review and critique of the current pack of presidential hopefuls’ logos, none of which are anything to robocall home about.

We figure the clients for these designs (including a certain incumbent with the Shepard Fairey cachet) have egos as big as all outdoors, so maybe that’s half the problem and we should give the benefit of the doubt to the respective designers.

It’s bad enough having to design for some Dilbertesque megalomaniacs in the private sector. Can you imagine taking “creative” feedback from someone who has an entourage just to accept blame for bad ideas?

It’s a good non-partisan read for anyone considering their own corporate IDs.

Political branding today is, in a word, bad. The experts all say the typical Republican logo has lost its macho mojo–think Bush’s bold 2004 ‘W’ graphical byte, McCain’s 2008 optimum font, evoking the type on the Vietnam Memorial–and gone soft. It’s also lost its ideological heft. ‘I don’t think there’s much good out there,’ Milton Glaser, the National Medal of Arts recipient behind the ‘I Love New York’ logo and CBS Records’ ‘Bob Dylan’ poster–a black silhouette with psychedelic hair–tells Adweek.

Ad icon David Ogilvy admonished his staff to always use the clients’ products. For him that was Hathaway shirts and Dove “soap,” among others.

We put quotes around soap, because Dove is NOT soap.

Our client, South of France®, makes REAL soap. It’s French milled and comes in big honkin’ bars that smell great. So it’s easy for this former Irish Spring user to heartily endorse and use daily this client’s product.

If you’re not using real soap, you’re probably rubbing your body with petrochemicals and animal fat.

We just went live with a new social media campaign for South of France, anchored by their blog The Soap Dish and supported by presences on Facebook and Printerest.

King’s English is providing pro bono marketing services—including a new blog-based website—to the Interactive Resource Center, Greensboro’s day center for people dealing with homelessness, a couple blocks from our office.

Executive director Liz Seymour is providing forward-thinking, practical leadership for an innovative facility that provides recovery-based support for our neighbors who have become homeless.

Think of all the things you’d miss just during the daytime if you lost your home? No place to hang your coat. No place to take a shower. No place to sit down and relax. The IRC provides all this with lockers, free laundry, haircuts, interview wardrobe, comfortable chairs, a phone bank and a computer lab. And nobody hassles you to move on.

It’s a really upbeat space and one you might want to visit, which is easy to do. The site opens for community events from time to time. On October 7, IRC hosted the opening of Greensboro’s Artstock Studio Tour.

Mack and Mack’s dazzling but comfortable showroom displays the dressmaking genius of principal Robin Mack Davis. And once a month as part of Downtown Greensboro’s First Friday event, the F*Art Ensemble balances the elegance and sophistication with some of Greensboro’s best professional musicians breaking all the rules of orchestral protocol.

The loose confederation of Greensboro Symphony and jazz players might do a brash riff on Don McLean’s “Vincent” or compose an impromptu protest anthem for Occupy Wall Street. There’s plenty of serious chops on display, but also a lot of playfulness you’d expect to see in the high school band room…multi-instrumentalist Dave Doyle enjoys the sound of his freshly licked thumb sliding across the back of a broken cello to produce a sound that is both gastric and somehow appropriate, while pianist Gill Fray gets away with murder by finger plucking the strings Ms. Davis’ stately Steinway.

We always leave Mack and Mack both inspired and charmed, clear in the understanding that the shop is anything but stuffy.

The annual firm reception of Todd Herman Associates is one of those business after hours events I never want to miss. It’s always at a different location around the Triad, usually in Greensboro, and part of the fun is that over the years you get to sample the finger food of some great local restaurants and caterers.

You also get to run into colleagues you may only see once a year and compare notes. Occasionally, you make the acquaintance of a new face that can lead you to a new project or two, but that’s secondary.

It’s really just a tasty repast of light conversation and libations—red wine, in my case—that somehow magically leaves you with a sense of what the Todd Herman brand is all about.

Todd, the man who built the brand, says his firm reception is one of his best business builders. Nevertheless, you wouldn’t know it to be there. It feels too laid back for that. And there’s always a subtle altruistic pitch for one of Todd’s favorite causes, Greensboro Urban Ministry.

With all our recent talk about social media, I came away from this year’s event with the blinding flash of the obvious that the Todd Herman firm reception is social media, only in real time. No wonder it generates new business for the Triad’s most engaging business consultancy!

At the Todd Herman firm reception last night, IT consultant Bonnie Bastow was justifiably proud of her Gate City Rotary Club’s most successful fundraiser: the Avett Brothers at White Oak Amphitheatre tomorrow night.

The show is sold out and the club is feeling flush.

Today’s Downtown Alliance GSO meeting at the Green Bean included a talk with candidate Jay Ovittore, who is vying for the District 3 City Council seat this fall.

Ovittore seems to be in step with many of the Downtown Alliance GSO goals, citing a need to move incentives from developers to entrepreneurs and business owners, opposition to the teenage curfew and improving the public image of Greensboro politics as some of his objectives.

“We have to clean up our headlines,” said Ovittore over a large coffee beverage and Boylan’s Root Beer chaser, referring to the pettiness of Greensboro government, suggesting that it’s repellent to new business.

Ovittore, drummer in the Greensboro rock outfit The Five Ls, suggested a nuanced approach to busking regulations in Downtown (hypothetically saying a $50 license), while he’s 100-percent sympathetic to the cause of a downtown skate park that apparently has a grant waiting to be used that is currently in limbo for some byzantine set of powers-that-be reasons.

It’s encouraging to see an under-40 candidate stepping up to represent District 3 who has the charisma to win. Maybe if his rival, incumbent Zack Matheny, and At-Large Councilman Danny Thompson stay on the golf course arguing about taking credit for the Downtown curfew he can pull it off.