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May Is For Small Business, Soldiers And Graduation

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The grad kissed the pig! via soulati

The grad kissed the pig! via soulati

May is the month for Memorial Day, graduation from school, and a week to commemorate small businesses. What’s the common thread among these three?

Everyone knows someone in school. Every American knows someone protecting our country. Small business owners are so prolific and growing daily by the minute.

Entrepreneurs Are A Necessity

So often we small business owners get short shrift for what we accomplish as the engines of prosperity in America. There are days I feel that way, too, alongside the 600 brothers and sisters in small businesses surveyed and reported by Cox Media in the 2014 Small Business Barometer.

Cox Blue is a proponent of small businesses; you can see that theme throughout its website. In this sponsored post, I want to share some results of its study that hit home with me.

Cox Blue 2014 Small Business Barometer

[Read more…]

The Consumer Electronics Show, Cisco And AT&T

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Everywhere you look, news of the is rampant. The biggest names in sliced bread and IT will be present hawking their wares. My head is already spinning, and I’m not even there.

I’m going to predict, however, that and AT&T will steal thunder from many a company. I can promise that automobile manufacturers will have their hay day, too, as we’ve already seen new predictions about mobile computing in vehicles, new apps and email built into dashboards, self-parking cars for those who can’t parallel park, and autos that anticipate an accident before it occurs. BMW is a leader in consumer technology to elevate the status of the lowly automobile.

Cisco

In a full-page, color ad in the Wall Street Journal (yes, I’ve told you before, I read that thing in hard copy every darn day and tear out and mark up the stories I want to reference right here), Cisco published the most eye-catching ad to launch

Now as a hashtag, too, #IofE is just about every innovation bridging IT (internet technology) with consumers’ private lives, mostly in the home. Featuring sensors, apps, tags, and other IT gizmos, products and environments will turn into responsive devices.

  • Pill bottles will get empty and submit a refill to the pharmacist.
  • Clothing will detect when the kids get a fever.
  • Wearable tech is even now all the rage; it’s the biggest trend for the next two years hands down.
  • If the baseball breaks the window, an email shows up with recommendations for glass companies right in the neighborhood.

AT&T

Did you see its TV ad when the kids meet the parents at the get-away cabin? The dad asks if they locked down the house, and they said sure. When dad uses his smartphone to check, he clicks through and shuts down the lights, TV, thermostat, security system, and anything else electronically digitized. He probably closes the refrigerator door, too.

I wonder what all this innovation will do to the world? Will it create the haves and have nots, just like the current income disparity crisis in the country? Probably.

Recently, I went shopping for kidlet’s first mobile phone. There were only two models available not smartphones. Knowing those two models would soon be obsolete and I’d have to buy a smartphone anyway, I took the $.99 plunge for the iPhone 4S. Where they get you is in the data plan; that monthly fee to keep all the cell numbers functioning with Internet access.

I wonder how much it would be for me to wire up my house and connect every gizmo and gadget to AT&T. I also want to know how much Cisco is going to charge to “unlock the $19 trillion in potential opportunity.”

What do you think? Are we ready for this kind of exponential growth in smart technology to invade our homes? We may as well just turn over the keys to privacy right now; once the house is wired to a “secure” network via the behemoths, then Big Data is really going to the moon, eh?

Cisco & AT&T

I’m leaving you with this gem of a find via YouTube. I went looking for the AT&T home security commercial and look what I found? These two giants are already collaborating. As of exactly one year ago, this interview ran featuring peeps from each company. Take a look; it explains a ton about what’s happening in your home security automation.

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Fashion Brands And Fashionbi Big Data

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Fashionbi-Newspaper.jpg

Credit: Fashionbi Newspaper screenshot via https://fashionbi.com

The world’s largest fashion brands are ubiquitous. Every developed country and most every woman within yearns for a stylish handbag by Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, Hermes, Dior, Prada, or Yves St. Laurent. Across worldwide time zones and language barriers, a high-end and classy handbag requires no translation.

A handbag from either of these brands is more important than just being chic. Women in Hong Kong short on cash are using their hand bags from four global fashion brands as collateral for loans. The girl short on money between pay checks turns over her handbag for authentication via Milan Station Holdings and gets 80% of its value from Yes Lady Finance Co. When she’s able to pay off the loan, she earns back her handbag. The Wall Street Journal had this story Aug. 14, 2013, “Cash Is In The Bag, If It’s Gucci.”

What does that mean for the brand? Each has an iconic statement women want; what that means is the need for a more targeted focus on engaging with the customer and having the customer engage positively about and with the brand, called a net promoter score.
How do brands track and listen on a global scale?

Fashionbi Is Big Data of Fashion

Recently, I had the pleasure of being introduced to Italian startup, Fashionbi. It’s the “complete digital marketing tool for the fashion industry,” with big data and analytics crossing borders and time zones for the world’s global fashion brands. Based logically in Milan, Fashionbi has offices worldwide and is growing exponentially.
Its ability to track social media analytics on Twitter and Facebook via Profiles across the world, including Weibo in Chinese, puts Fashionbi squarely at the forefront of its sector as a company to watch and work with.

Not only can Fashionbi share brand engagement by social media channel, it can also provide deep analytics of content quality and value. I got a look at its dashboard for member users only, and it blew me away. The graphs and charts typical to any users’ dashboard put Slideshare presentations to shame.
When I saw the analytics Fashionbi produces with sleight of hand, I immediately suggested it launch or purchase a digital marketing shop to execute on the big data being produced every minute of every day across every time zone. The wealth of information in Fashionbi’s dashboards requires expert assistance from marketers and public relations to interpret the data and put it into action for fashion brands.

Care to learn more?

Fashionbi on YouTube

Check out this YouTube video, two minutes of polished and well-done by the folks at Fashionbi. Even if you’re not that interested in a high-end handbag from Louis Vuitton, you have to admit, the analytics this company produces is enough to make you slap happy.

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Use List.ly For Gifts And Curation

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This is my first share of a list via List.ly. And, the most absolutely astonishingly amazing thing is that I did not do it myself.

I was gifted of this list by none other than Jackson Middleton, who tweets and is of, and claims he’s “wearing a kilt right now” with coffee mug in hand. And another thing? I’ve never tweeted or engaged this wonderful man who came bearing gifts in the night.

Or, perhaps he didn’t and this was all part of some secret research I’m not privy to. Mr. Middleton was not available for tweets this early in the day, so my assumption is that this here below is a GIFT!

About Jackson Middleton

He writes a blog My favorite blog headline of all is his,

He is doing the best-ever mortgage, real estate and broker blog in all of Canada and perhaps in the U.S. Take a look at

I thought Nick Kellet was doing my content audit for his recent project for and I was cringing for those results. Nick, are you? Is Jackson your secret team member on your project? When I went up to List.ly and saw this list of 25 of my most recent blog posts on a list, my jaw dropped.

Sad, that I cannot seem to embed the list here, so I’ll suffice with an image and a link.

View more from

Using List.ly

This tool offers so many #RockHot opportunities.

  • You can gift someone as Jackson the Kilt Wearer did for me.
  • You can curate topics and people on a list to lure folks to participate.
  • You can do a personal branding list, which I did and it actually garnered traffic to my blog.
  • You can participate on others’ lists and add your  favorites. Heck, you can be sure your own blog is added, too!

I don’t even have this tool mastered one iota (so glad I could use that word), but the sky is the limit.

What can you share here about your List.ly experiences? Obviously, you can learn from a Ninja — Mr. Jackson Middleton!

 

The Happy Friday Series: Tunes Of Time

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What’s a great way to relax and turn off the brain after a long work week? I’ve been known to find some fun things posted online that teach me something, but not work-related.

#1. Watch and listen to this video, and, if you’re old enough, take a trip back in time. (If you aren’t old enough, imagine your parents or grandparents). We’re walking into Montgomery Ward, Wolf and Dessaur, Hills, Gimbles or any number of department stores around the country. You’re making your way through clothes, shoes and cameras on the way to the snack bar or soda fountain, and this music is playing in the background.


You’re familiar with services like Muzak (just purchased by Mood) which now offer a variety of formats to businesses via satellite. From the ’30s through the ’80s, many stores played music from Seeburg jukeboxes. Seeburg jukeboxes rotated through records that ran at 16 r.p.m. There were versions for both in-store and industrial uses, to keep customers and factory workers awake and on the job. Many people still collect and restore these devices. We may think some of the versions of pop songs are horrible, or, we might decide we actually like them!

#2. You’ve no doubt heard songs in languages other than English and maybe even tried to sing along without really knowing the words, let alone what they mean. Here’s how it sounded when a South American band sang the 1960s Kinks hit “A Well Respected Man” on an Argentine version of “American Bandstand.” Making the lyrics sound as close as possible to the English ones without actually knowing them, the teens in the audience loved it!

#3 I lived briefly in Quincy, a few blocks from the Mississippi River in Western Illinois. I commuted to work at a radio station in Hannibal, MO. One day in March the Illinois state offices and schools were closed for a holiday I had never heard of called . What I didn’t know is that there’s a pop song commemorating the occasion. Who’d have thunk?

#4. You know the familiar beginning to “I Love Lucy” the classic TV show that has been running in syndication for decades. What I learned on YouTube was that the original audiences saw a different open, with Lucy and Desi as cartoon characters, and you’d see Lucy and Desi promoting Phillip Morris cigarettes in the open and even in the body of the show as part of the script. Of course, there was the famous Phillip Morris bellboy. I’m not one to try to reach almost 60 years back in time to try to apply 2013 standards about smoking to a 1950s TV show, but I did find this information interesting. If you’ve researched 1950s and 1960s television, you know that even The Flintstones smoked. Incidentally, Desi and Lucy made sure their production company owned the filmed versions of the show and invented the rerun. Embed is disabled with this video but you can watch it here:  https://youtu.be/WrvHYUXo–o?t=11s

#5. What if you had a band in West Palm Beach, Florida, during the height of Beatlemania? Why, you’d reinvent yourselves as The American Beetles and tour South America! That’s exactly what this band did, scoring hit records and TV appearances all over Latin America.  Some very rare recordings are on YouTube, some as The Razor’s Edge.

So there you have it. Need something to do on a rainy day? Just look up useless, but fun, things on YouTube.

About The Author

Brad Lovett is a radio personality and behind-the-scenes wearer of many hats in the broadcast world of Knoxville, Tenn. He is accessible on his and via and Facebook where he’s most likely lurking and popping in with supportive comments.

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