So that I wouldn’t forget anything, I decided to carry around a piece of paper with me, or rather a leftover envelope from our over-order of Christmas cards. Looking back on the week, I picked up a few useful pieces of knowledge, as well as some random information. So here goes.

• You can get Hood Dairy coffee creamers in the Midwest. Hood is a New England brand I grew up with and have never seen them outside of that area.
• I took my very first-ever yoga class this week, and I don’t know why I never did it before. It was awesome for my mind and my body. The class is an introduction to yoga offered by Tejas Yoga in Chicago’s South Loop, and where I can’t make it next week, this is something I want to make a regular part of my week.
• If you sign-up for Jason Jacobsohn’s Networking Insight newsletter, a great resource for networking tips, he will also put you on his Chicagoland Entrepreneur Events newsletter, listing the latest events for tech start-ups in the area.
• The 2014 Liver Life Walk to support the American Liver Foundation’s Great Lakes Chapter will be on SATURDAY, June 14, and The “A” Team is already registered.
• The days when neighbors who are having a party invite you as a courtesy, whether they want you to really come or you yourself want to go, are apparently over.
• I found the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for my wife, or at least I hope it is. As she reads The Hot Iron I will not mention what it is, but if you ask me, and promise not to tell her, I will share.
• In a conversation with Nan this week she said something we were talking about was not anything she would “die on the hill” over. I had never heard of that before, but I plan to use it.
• I had been seeing these winter coats with a small circle emblem and I had no idea what it says or what brand it was. Then one day at Mariano’s someone at the checkout in front of me had one and I was able to read it was Canada Goose. I had never heard of them, and where it may be a nice coat and all, I am sticking with my LL Bean which is about a quarter of the cost.
• Try calling a health insurance company and tell them they have been sending insurance materials, including insurance cards and statements, to someone at your home address who has never lived there. Not to mention they have been doing this for over a year and you have marked everything “return to sender, no such addressee” and put it back in the mail. You guessed it, they had no idea what to do with my call.
• There are politics of work, politics of play and even politics of choirs, but I’ll take The Politics of Dancing any day – enjoy this 80’s video below or watch it on YouTube and have a nice weekend!

---

This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

---

Did you enjoy this? Subscribe to The Hot Iron by RSS/XML feed or Read by Email

Blogging • Business • Technology • Thrive • What I Learned • (0) Comments • Permalink

If a day goes by where you don’t learn something new, what good is it really? Sometimes that new nugget of knowledge is welcomed and cherished, and sometimes it is scary as all hell and you wished you didn’t know it. Nonetheless, learning is what we do on this journey of life, whether we like it or not.

As this is the first “normal” Friday of the 2014, I have decided to start writing what I have learned in the previous week. As it is already 10 days into January, I will also include what I learned since New Year’s, and maybe a thing or 2 from the holidays.

So here goes:

• You know those latches that you put on your hotel room door at night? Do you think they are completely foolproof and nobody can get by them? I learned the hard way that you can, with a few pieces of paper and this creepy video on YouTube.
• There is a Village of Lakemoor, Illinois and they have red light cameras.
• While everybody is talking about how fast food employees don’t make enough money, do you know how much – or little – your child’s daycare teachers make? Or the person flying the airplane you are on now? As I have no links for this, it was based on personal conversations.
• I was not the only person waiting for the Hug Train when it pulled into Chicago last week. It was great meeting Molly and of course great seeing Arie again.
• I have always said you shouldn’t get used to a desk (and have thought of writing about that fact here at The Hot Iron) but I got a lot of work done this week back at OfficePort Chicago. Thanks to James, Shaul and Mike for allowing me to come back every so often to be productive and social! And if you are looking for co-working space in Chicago, you must check out OfficePort for yourself.
• With all of the problems Southwest Airlines had over the last week with snowstorms, delays and baggage handlers, one area where they really shined was with social media. I was able to rebook flights for family via Twitter direct messages. Seriously, and direct messages only! Thanks to Verity at Southwest for your help.
• Underground nuclear tests were done in Mississippi.
• There is something called krav maga and it is good for you.
• Recent start-ups in Chicago can allow me to: get my dry cleaning picked up and delivered within an hour of requesting it with Dryv, donate clothing and other items to Goodwill via UPS with Give Back Box, listen to the local news in a podcast-like format with Rivet News Radio, and if I had a store with ever-changing inventory I could easily maintain a Web site of it with Live Storefronts. I am exploring all of these services more and hope to write up more on them.

Maybe you learned something new yourself? Please share your thoughts in the comments of this post.

---

This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

---

Did you enjoy this? Subscribe to The Hot Iron by RSS/XML feed or Read by Email

Blogging • Business • Technology • Thrive • What I Learned • (0) Comments • Permalink

Editor’s Note – This is a guest post from CT Moore, a recovering agency hack who helps brand leverage search and social media to meet their business goals online. By day, he heads up Search and Social at Publikit, a boutique web dev agency in Montreal, and also runs Socialed, a digital consultancy that provides digital strategy to both start-ups and multinational brands alike. You can find out more about him through his personal blog.

Aha! Another year is about to come to close and a new one will soon begin. And if you’re any kind of marketer (or business person for that matter), you’ve probably started thinking about what you could start doing in 2014, or at least do better in 2014 than you did in 2013.

Well, if that’s the mind frame you’ve been in, I’d like to suggest 3 potential New Year’s Resolutions that you should probably apply toward your upcoming marketing efforts. I have to warn you, though: if you’ve already made up your mind on how to tackle things in 2014 and aren’t open to feedback, you should probably read no further — I’ll just end up saying “I told you so” ;)

#1 OWN Your Media

Paid media is the placement you pay for: ads, commercials, etc. Earned media is the PR and social media wins you get from doing awesome stuff and providing great customer service.

Owned media, however, is the stuff you produce that people actually care about. In fact, what kinda of makes it “media” is that people actually pay attention to it (unlike ads). It can be anything from just really helpful how-to’s to outright entertaining viral stuff, but the point is that it gets you exposure with the right target market, just like PR or advertising would.

The only difference is that you made it. And right now, 78% of CMOs believe that branded content is the future of marketing, with 25% of budgets going to content. So in 2014, start thinking about how to own your media.

In fact, start investing in media worth owning. Because, at the end of the day, content is a lot like tattoos: it can be either cheap or good, but not both.

Good content costs money to make, and you have to keep at it for a while before it pays-off; but when it pays-off, it really pays-off. From branding to public relations to SEO, it’s one of the few channels that also contributes something to all the other channels.

#2 Get Serious About Mobile

Yeah, I know: a lot of you think you’re serious about mobile? But are you really? I mean, are you anywhere near the companies whose marketing you admire/envy, and/or can you actually implement the kind of strategies they have going on??

Now, I could dig up a bunch of stats and quote them to create urgency and make you sympathetic to my point. But, instead, I’ll just guess (i.e. “assume”) that enough of you reading this have smart phones (and are sufficiently attached to them) that I don’t need to do that kinda thing. So let me leave you with a kind of barometer / checklist to figure out just how the eff you’re supposed to tackle mobile in 2014:

• Mobile Sites: I’m still shocked by just how many top-tier companies/sites/portals fail at this. If you don’t have a mobile site, get one. And if you already have one, make sure that I’m redirect to it if I visit your site from a mobile device.
• Mobile App: If your business is driven by user-experience (e.g. commerce) or content, release that App already! No repeat customer or returning user wants to deal with your mobile site. And even here I can think of a few content portals who have an otherwise great mobile engagement strategy but no mobile app…
• Mobile Campaigns: If you’re already investing in display ads, PPC, and/or SEO, start looking at how you can divert some of that toward targeting mobile users; there are enough of them using mobile apps and searching via mobile devices that you can’t afford no to.

Okay, so you get the point? Good! Let’s move on….

#3 Start Listening to Your Customers

So maybe you’re already doing the mobile and content thing, or may you’re not but (hopefully) are gonna start. Either way, you’re going to have to measure your progress. And, of course, you’re going to be measuring and monitoring what user actually do once they engage with your brand.

But are you being proactive in that measurement? In other words, are you actually trying to gage how your users specifically and the market at large feel about your industry?

For starters, start looking at what people are already saying about both you and your competitors. Tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud are great for this kind of thing. They let you monitor not only your brand name but what people are saying about your industry and competitors, in general.

Step it up a notch, though, by finding what your actual user and site visitor think. There are a few service providers that can help you do this, but the (ubiquitous) one that comes to mind is iPerceptions. You’ve probably come across them in the form of their 4Q survey, which is a free tool. But they also offer a bunch of voice of customer measurement tools you can upgrade to to make sense of the data that you collect via the 4Q survey.

The point is (1) stop assuming you think you know better than your (potential) customers, and (2) stop looking at what your users might’ve done and start considering what they’re actually looking for. Because that’s the kind of insight that’s not only gonna help you step up your marketing game, but develop better products and services, the likes of which you might’ve not otherwise considered…

New Year, New Start

If you’ve read this far, I want to make one thing clear: I’m not saying you have to follow my advice. I’m just saying you should.

You’re free, of course, to disregard my advice, but I’m confident enough that you’d be wrong to do so that I wrote this blog post and put my name on it. So give it some thought; sleep on it; and do whatever it is that you have to do to “tear sh*t up” in 2014 that you’ll be too busy either optimizing some version of your site or developing new product/service that you won’t give this post another thought ;)

---

This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

---

Did you enjoy this? Subscribe to The Hot Iron by RSS/XML feed or Read by Email.

  

---

Business • Guest Post • Mobile Technology • Strategize • Technology • Thrive • (0) Comments • Permalink

Today, December 30, marks the 7th anniversary of the very first blog post on The Hot Iron, appropriately titled, Hello World.

Rather than getting mushy about the past, I’d like to thank you for reading, whether this is the first time you have read something I have written, you for some reason have been with me for the past 7 years or you are somewhere in between.

It has been an up and down journey, but aren’t they all? This past year I have gotten re-energized about blogging, and I hope to keep it up in the coming year. Only time will tell.

As I have in the past, I have wanted to have some photo to accompany the years, and this year I chose Heaven on Seven, an amazing New Orleans-style restaurant in Chicago. If you come to the Windy City, you must try it. They have 2 locations – one on the Magnificent Mile and one on Wabash Avenue, where this sign is located in front of. Go to the latter – the feel is more authentic.

---

This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

---

Did you enjoy this? Subscribe to The Hot Iron by RSS/XML feed or Read by Email.

  

---

Announcements • Blogging • Social Media • Thrive • (4) Comments • Permalink

To all my readers and friends who celebrate the holiday, Merry Christmas!

I am writing this prior to completing the final touches on our Christmas for our 2 kids. Where they are excited for what Santa Claus will be bringing them on Christmas morning, I am also trying to carry on traditions for the holidays that were part of my own growing-up. In addition to many common ones – family gatherings, gift giving, the nativity, church, etc., here’s a few unique elements of my Christmas over the years that I am sharing with them, and I would like to share with you.

Zat You Santa Claus?

Pictured is a plastic illuminated Santa Claus that towers at 3 feet tall and is over 40 years old. It was always standing watch in our breezeway window in the house I grew up in through Christmas. But on Christmas day, Santa returned to his post in the basement, not to be illuminated until the following year. When my Mom moved from my childhood home, I took Santa in, and he has been with me now for almost 20 years.

An interesting story on the jolly old elf is when I moved to Chicago, I took Santa with me. Rather than putting himinto a moving box, he sat next to me on the drive from Boston to the Windy City, literally. Donning a baseball cap, he got his share of looks from passing cars and when I stopped along the way.

The Littlest Snowman

Have you ever heard of the story The Littlest Snowman? If you said you didn’t I wouldn’t be surprised, as many people have not. Yet for some reason, this is the one story I remember the most from Christmases long ago. My own copy of the book is long gone, but thanks to the magic of eBay, I was able to get an original copy of the hardcover Golden Book.

The story is somewhat similar to that of the other famous snowman, Frosty. Then again, we’re talking about snowmen, so other than coming to life and melting, they are limited in what they can do. But it is a cute story I remembered, and now I have read to my own kids several times through the month. Despite this, I have a sneaking suspicion Frosty is still their favorite.

Pizzelles

It would not be a complete story on Christmas by an Italian if there were no mention of food. Where there are many culinary traditions for the holidays, one that brings the most memories and has taken on a new meaning for me is pizzelles.

Pizzelles are a flat Italian cookie made with an iron that resembles a waffle iron. Made with basic ingredients, they were a staple for all Christmas and Easter gatherings of family, as most everybody had their own pizzelle iron and their own variation on the recipe. They are commonly flavored with anise, but can also be made with vanilla or even maple syrup- the latter was due to my family growing up in Vermont. On occasion we would have chocolate pizzelles made with cocoa powder, but anise was always my favorite.

This year I decided to carry on the tradition and make pizzelles myself. I used my Mom’s recipe, and had bought a new electric iron as hers had long ago stopped working. As you can see from the photo above, they turned out pretty good. These were from my first batch, which did not last long due to their popularity with family and visiting friends. They are really simple to make and I also had my youngest kid help in the mixing, extending the tradition to yet another generation.

Buon Natale

Thank you for allowing me to share a few of my unique Christmas traditions with you. I would like to hear what you do to make the holidays unique and you are welcome to share them in the comments of this post.

---

This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

---

Did you enjoy this? Subscribe to The Hot Iron by RSS/XML feed or Read by Email.

  

---

Diversions • Thrive • (2) Comments • Permalink