Traingle Shaped Crayons - BETTER

This will be just a quick one. Was having a nice Father's Day lunch out today and as most restaurants do these days, the hostess left some crayons for the kids to use with a little activity sheet. The different thing today was, the crayons were triangular, not round. They are especially designed for restaurants so that they do not roll of the table. I must say that this is absolutely brilliant. I don't know how many times we've had to pick crayons up off the (likely very dirty) floor under a table at a restaurant. This is a very simple solution to one of the biggest problems facing parents with kids out to eat.

Whoever invented these triangular shaped crayons, you get a BETTER.

While these were not Crayola, here is a link to some of their triangle shaped crayons (which I had no idea existed until I searched on Google).

Social Media's Trojan Farce - BITTER

An interesting thing is happening as of late. More and more people are getting their news online, especially from social media sites, instead of from TV and newspapers. There is an unfortunate problem with this that needs to be discussed, though. On the Internet, there are few editors. Anyone can write anything. And then someone comes along and takes an unedited, unchecked piece of information and propagates it as fact, often citing it in a blog or other article of their own.

A recent example of this involves a blog post titled, "Riding Social Media's Trojan Horse", by Alexandra Samuel via the Harvard Business Publishing website. In the story, she discussed 3 high profile companies, McDonald's, Hertz, and Walmart, that didn't fare well as the result of social media exposure.

In each case, Alexandra goes into a brief overview of the situation each company faced, hyperlinking key phrases which link back to the original "news story". While these links make her story seem far more legitimate, each link merely points back to another blogger's post.

In the McDonald's case, the source blog is riddled with guesswork and no fact checking to back it up. The author, Mack Collier, never indicates whether or not he tried to contact McDonald's to find out why comments were taking so long to show up on their blog (which means he didn't). So he just suggests that they are likely censoring it. But he doesn't know. Alexandra herself provides mostly facts in her description of the story, but it doesn't change the fact that she is republishing what are essentially another bloggers comments and assumptions as fact.

The same goes for the Hertz incident. It gets a bit worse here because the video clip that she references in her post directly contradicts most of what is written. She mentions that the lone Hertz agent leaves the customers unattended, which is completely untrue. In the video you can see at least one other person working at the counter and at least one customer using one of the rental kiosks. The problem is, the guy who shot the video is aggressively narrating and tries to convince the viewer that you are not seeing what you really are are seeing. And he does a good job. If Alexandra has read the comments on that video, they go at least 50/50 with many disgusted with the way the person behaved toward the Hertz agent. Again though, the video itself is treated as worthy of reference as fact.

It is more of the same again for Walmart. While this story does seem grounded in basic fact, one has to be concerned when reading that media mentions went from positive to criticism. The media site that gets linked to for the criticism? Wikinomics. I was expecting maybe USA Today or CNN. Wikinomics is not mentioned by name, though, as it is relatively unknown and will likely detract from the believability of the story.

Let's face facts. Most readers will not follow any of the links from this story. The mere presence of hyperlinks gives the blog post more implied credibility, as does it being published on a site with Harvard in the name. Does it really have credibility? I don't think so. Neither Alexandra nor any of her sources seems to have many any attempts to contact the companies being discussed to get a balanced view of any of the situations being presented. The 3 companies are vilified and the court of public opinion adjourned. Funny enough, I think that is the real point of the blog post. It tries to talk about how social media can burn a company that isn't ready. However, I'm not sure Alexandra really meant to be pushing the problems with social media to the next level.

Could each of the companies have done a better job? Absolutely. I just don't think any of them have been treated fairly here in a blog post masquerading as a well researched news story.

Somehow, we are letting the people who normally get interviewed by reporters on street corners become the reporters themselves. What we end up with isn't reporting at all. It's commenting. And that's what most blogs are (including mine). They are usually just some person's comments. That's not really news, is it? But that's how it is received and most readers are none the wiser.

Since this blog post was published, it has been tweeted over 100 times, bookmarked about half that, and cited in other blog posts that have since gone on to be pushed out by some high profile Twitter users like @guykawasaki. In the end, this "article" has been sent to hundreds of thousands of readers, most of whom will implicitly trust it as valid and trustworthy news.

Bloggers masquerading as reporters (you know who you are), you get a BITTER.

Cheesecake Factory - No Children's Menu - BITTER

In today's day and age, there is simply no excuse not to have a children's menu at a restaurant, especially at a family friendly restaurant like the Cheesecake Factory. The menu that they do have is in the ballpark of about 15 pages, and not even 1/2 of one page is a children's menu. They have 2 full pages of cheesecake flavors, and no children's menu. They are doubly at fault for not having children's sized portions of either meals or deserts.

So I was there last weekend and when asking for a children's menu I was told that they had "kid-friendly" items on the regular menu like chicken fingers. Great. I ordered that for my 4 year old and was told it would be the appetizer portion. OK. That should be somewhere near appropriate. Right? No. They served a large bowl (yes, a bowl) of chicken fingers to a 4 year old child who would normally eat 4 small chicken nuggets. 90% of what was in that bowl got thrown away on my dime.

When it came to desert, same deal. No children's portions. So instead of getting 4 deserts, we got only 2. And since my 4 year old doesn't like cheesecake, that meant I didn't get to eat cheesecake since we had to share. And after sharing? We still threw half the cake in the trash because of how ridiculously big the portions are.

Back to the point. It is just plain lazy and completely ridiculous that the Cheesecake Factory has no children's menu. They get a BITTER.

A BETTER Funeral Home

Unfortunately, I found myself spending a couple of days at a funeral home recently. All other things aside, I came across something quite unique when I went inside with my wife and children. Right off the main entrance was a special children's play room. It was decorated straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog, really nicely taken care of in every way. There was a bookshelf full of puzzles and books, a mini kitchen, Etch-a-Sketch, toy vacuum, toy fish tank, and various blocks and Lego's. In all the various funeral homes I've ever visited, I've never come across anything other than basic sitting rooms full of chairs and tissue boxes. It was definitely a Purple Cow in a sea of tradition.

Scott's Turf Builder - Shame Marketing - BITTER

Scott's is running a commercial for its Turf Builder product right now which I really don't like. It falls into a category of ads I called either "stigma marketing" or "shame marketing". (Dan and Chip Heath did a great piece on this concept in Fast Company last year.) These ads try to create a problem to make the viewer feel ashamed or embarassed.

In this particular commercial, a husband and wife are discussing the tradgic problems they had with their lawn. It was riddled with dandelions and they were the bain of their neighborhood. They felt awful because they never wanted to be "that neighbor". Finally, though, after using Scott's Turf Builder, their lawn was cleaned up and perfect. They profess that, "now the neighbors wave at us" as if prior to "perfecting" their lawn they were treated like the scum of the earth. Its the equivalent of trying to make all women think they need to be a size 4 to be accepted. Truly ridiculous.

At what point did someone decide that dandelions were the worst things in the world? I have small children and, at one point, was a child myself. These were actually the greatest things in the world at the time. Free flowers you could pick and attempt to cultivate in a paper cup. Spores you could try to blow out like birthday candles. This is living to a child. When did the lawn become the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

When I eventually do have a front lawn of my own, I fully intend to go natural with it. No chemicals fertlizers or weed killers. Just hopefully a lawn without any big missing patches and hopfully a few of mother nature's beauties for the kids to bring in to their mother.

Scott's, for trying to make all of us feel criminal, you get a BITTER.

No Turn Signals - BITTER

While I'm on the subject of driving, what's up with nobody using their turn signal anymore. People don't use it making a simple turn and they don't use it when they change lanes at 80 miles per hour in front of you. I've recently heard this regarded as the single biggest danger on the road today.

There's a great scene in the film, "Shoot 'em Up", with Clive Owen where someone cuts him off without using a turn signal and he instantly goes into a tirade about it. It's what we've all felt I think. Unlike the rest of us, he catches up to the guy and runs him off the road. If only.....

A BETTER Traffic Light

Is there anything worse than sitting at a red light at midnight for a minute or two when there isn't a car in sight? OK. Of course there is. But when you think about it, the whole thing is really silly. You, sitting there at midnight, with no cars around. That's not why they put the traffic light there is it?

They put it there to manage traffic at rush hour most likely. If you drive the road any other time of day, you'll just be inconvenienced a little.

There isn't one person reading this who hasn't contemplated running the red light if only they knew they wouldn't get caught. Why? Because we all know it's ridiculous to sit at a red light when there is clearly no danger.

I'm of the basic opinion that all traffic lights, at least on purely 2 lane roads, shift over to blinking red and yellow signals after say, 10pm. One side is typically the busier side, so it gets the flashing yellow. The less travelled way gets a blinking red, which means drivers have to stop, but then can go if there is a clear roadway.

Sure, some traffic lights do this. But doesn't it seem like this is a rather arbitrary decision when the light is put in place? I'm just asking for a little coordination and a standard policy. It could make life just a little bit better for people who actually have to be out driving late at night.