Blonde Productions Group

In the last week, I’ve been Plaxoed, Linked In, and one of my friends from Facebook has slapped too much private information on my wall. Curiously, I’ve not had a single mano-a-mano moment, or a phone conversation for that matter, with any of the above.

Like the Tivo my son hooked up to our TV years ago that started thinking for itself and recording Spanish-speaking movies because I had watched the Jennifer Lopez movie “Selena,” Plaxo, Linked In and Face Book are aggressively beginning to perform unwanted functions for me.

You have five invitations from Linked In, my email gives me a shout out.

Is John your friend? Facebook asks.

Maybe not today, I talk out loud. I mean, he is the mayor and I did get a $25 parking ticket from one of his Jeep-patrol this afternoon. His photo continues to smile back at me, unflinching.

Oh for pete’s sake, yes, I click.

Facebook has introduced a whole new level of he-said-she-said-I-heard troubles in my life lately starting with the client who shared with the partner of an employee that I had snubbed her on Facebook. You know that old business theory that complaints travel 9 times faster than compliments. This proved it in my book…Facebook that is.

What the complainer didn’t know was that I’d lost my passcode for my Facebook account and had not processed anybody’s invitations or requests to attend events since that loss. Like a bad Britney Spears rumor, my snub became legend.

Next time you send or receive an electronic message, remember this: more than half of all IMs, emails and texts are misunderstood.

Who’s graffiti is that on my wall?

Green these days is all about shades of the environment. Recycling. LEED certified. And carbon footprint surface to top-of-mind when thinking green. When the first Earth Day was celebrated in the last millennium who knew it would rewrite the Crayola box entirely?

We have entered the Green Age, ironically when estimates are that one in eight people nationwide have lost their jobs and have no green income to maintain even a pared-down lifestyle.

Last week, Unleaded Group interviewed a candidate for an open web programming/design position. With a nine-year track record under his belt, the 20-something applicant announced that he expected to earn $85k annually plus benefits.

Sound a little like Back To The Future?

I followed a Twitter exchange between a handful of web programmers/designers laid off from an Internet development company in mid-March only to confirm that indeed youth is wasted on the young. For the most part, they launched their Internet careers when green meant a wad of Benjamins as random as the bonuses paid on Wall Street. This particular Twitter solution to being unemployed was to meet at a local hangout and hide in a hangover.

In a short-lived email exchange with a young lady who came highly recommended for the same open position, her ballsy response smacked of naïveté. Before scheduling an interview mano-a-mano, she wanted to know the company’s business plans and a salary range for the position.

Across the board, industries are reporting their business is on average 30 to 35% off prior years performance. To those who haven’t yet weathered difficult economic times, the lessons to be learned are manifold. And yet the X and Y generations that grew up on the immediacy of microwaves and emails won’t get it for months to come that hiring in trying economic times means showing up with something you, as an employee, can contribute to the job…not just take away.

The big white wedding you’ve dreamed of since you were a little girl is finally here (sigh!). But what you didn’t factor in when you were wearing your mother’s castoff slip around as a gown, was that we would be in a recession when the happiest day of your life hit. You have the box of ideas you’ve torn out from magazines, but know that you thumb through them, you see they don’t exactly fit into your budget. It’s time for your fairytale to get real and that means you need to get innovative. But don’t get your garter in a wad yet. There are things you can do that guests will never notice or remember.

Above all, don’t eliminate the memories, insists Danielle Yuthas of Blonde Productions Group (www.blondeproductionsgroup.com) , a wedding videographer in Colorado.

After the guests have departed, the only thing you’ll have is the photos and video, so while brides and grooms might consider leaving out photos and videos entirely, it’s a decision they will regret later. Talk with your photographer and videographer about your vision for your photos and video prior to the wedding. That discussion will allow you to determine if you need a photographer on hand throughout the reception or if you’d rather have photos taken prior to the ceremony and of the ceremony itself, and then a video of the reception.

There are ways to cut costs sensibly when planning your wedding. Here are some that Blonde Productions Group and Unleaded Productions, members of the Unleaded Group along with www.unleadedsoftware.com, suggest you can save on your big day:

1. Paper is expensive. Try cutting down on paper and postage costs by sending an electronic save-the-date instead of a snail mail reminder. Sending an email or an evite still lets people know to mark the calendar and maybe even more effectively because they will have their Outlook email calendar right there. Even creating a brief video (about $250) asking people to join you on your wedding day, will cost less than mailing custom magnets or invitations. When you are ready to send out the official invitation, a good trick is to buy fancy stationery wholesale from Xpdex or Ebay and print it your self instead of paying extra for the paper itself when you buy it through a professional printer.

2. Cake. The newest way to save money on the cake is to have a fake cake-a professionally decorated frosting-covered foam block on display and then when it is time to serve it, the “chef” wheels the cake into the kitchen where no one can see it and then distributes pieces of less-expensive sheet cake. Guests never realize the pieces weren’t from the display cake. Renting a fake cake is a a switcharoo that no one suspects. You can even have pieces of real cake inserted into the fake cake just for the bride and groom so they can still participate in the cut-the-cake photo op. Or go with cupcakes to avoid the additional cost of cake-cutting (by the slice and sometimes upwards of $1.50 per slice) that is added to the tab at many wedding venues.

3. Timing. Even though it may be cheaper, it’s understandable if you don’t want to have your wedding on a weeknight or a Sunday. The best thing to do is to have the wedding early in the day on a weekend. Your food and alcohol (and maybe even venue rental) bill will be significantly less for a reception following an 11 a.m. ceremony than it would be following a 7 p.m. wedding. If your heart is set on the 7 p.m. wedding, designate an end time. Hold your reception at a local mansion or in a boat house at a park that allow guests to stay until 10 p.m. When the lights come on, the guests will go instead of dancing and drinking into the night at a five-star hotel…on your tab. You will be long-gone on your honey moon anyway.

Contact Blonde Productions Group (www.blondeproductionsgroup.com) and Unleaded Productions (www.denvervideo.com) for our seriously cost-effective wedding video rates.

Remember the last wedding you went to? Think of what you remember about it. What kind of save the date did they send 9 months before? What did the cake taste like? It may be that all you remember is dancing the chicken dance at the reception.

There are places to save money when throwing a wedding and it’s not on the video or photography.

When you think back on your wedding years from now, what is it that will prompt memories? Chances are you will be viewing your video or looking through your wedding photo album. Take it from a pro, says Danielle Yuthas, wedding videographer with Blonde Productions Group and Unleaded Productions (www.denvervideo.com) of Unleaded Group (www.unleadedsoftware.com).

Professional photography and videography are the last things you want to skim on. They last. And they are the only things that will endure for generations.

Remember looking back on your grandmother’s wedding album and your mother’s wedding video? Documentation in print and on video is lasting. Was that a white rose or a gardenia in the centerpiece? I’m sure thou smelled lovely, but who cared? A wedding video will allow you to relive your day forever.

Contact Danielle Yuthas at 720-221-7126 for a personal consultation regarding your wedding video. Email her at Danielle@unleadedgroup.com.

What can you say in 140 characters or less? Evidently, enough to get your job offer rescinded.

Popular social networking site, Twitter, is a forum for members to update what they are doing for up-to-the-minute lowdown on everyone you want to follow. You can follow celebrities, publications, web sites, blogs and friends. But use caution, because even people who aren’t following you can search your tweets. In an article on MSNBC it explained how a Cisco new-hire was let go before he even started the job. “Here’s the tweet the now Web-infamous ‘theconnor’ shared with the world: ‘Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.’” To which Tim Levand at Cisco tweeted back, “Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

Is the question why would he tweet that? Or is it why Cisco spent the time to monitor this new employee’s tweets? Either way, the offender has become known as “Cisco Fatty” all over the Internet. Ciscofatty.com was created and so was a YouTube video.

This is yet another classic cautionary tale much like the bank intern who was fired for telling his employer he couldn’t be at work because of a family emergency then showing up in a time-stamped photo on facebook of him dressed in a fairy Halloween costume holding a beer.

The moral of the story is never tell the truth online when you lied offline unless you want to get caught. MSNBC says, “It’s like virtual Darwinism. The “Cisco Fattys” of the world are damned by their own senselessness. It’s only a matter of time before each they stumble on the Twitterific platform of their ruin.”

So now I wonder what’s next for these Internet blabbermouths. It could also be that as more and more web 2.0 outlets emerge, more sites become mainstream which would result in significantly more time and energy required to spider all of the social networking sites and posts created by one person. So did Cisco monitor theconnor on facebook, myspace and linked in too? What will happen when the number of popular sites increases? How extensively will they search the person?

It’s possible that eventually embarrassing facebook posts, myspace profiles, tweets and blogs will be so common that human resources professionals and business owners will not pay attention to them anymore. Nearly everyone has something they shouldn’t on those sites so employers may have to give up and turn a blind eye.

Then there is the risk that all social media users will become cautious and post everything anonymously. But that would defeat the purpose of sites like facebook and linkedin where the objective is to allow viewers to get to know you. It would also be difficult to find people to follow you on Twitter and connect with friends if they don’t know who you are. Social networking is like being at a party. Only a party where the whole world can access what you said and what you looked like. Maybe knowing whatever you do on Friday night, your BFF will post on facebook Saturday, which your boss will see before Monday morning, will create a more discrete America. Just today I read an inappropriate blog that is not the sort of thing you would like your best friends mom to read followed by a series of backpedaling tweets written by the author expressing her embarrassment over said best friend’s mom having her blog on RSS feed.

What will the web 2.0 generation be like in 10 years? You college roommates may still harbor drunken photos well into your professional career or a disgruntled old flame could come out with photos of you in a previous relationship even though you are now married with children. Employees can air the dirty laundry of employers and on it goes. And what’s up with my mom being on facebook now? Censor Alert. Censor Alert. It’s the age-old rule that people only publicize an opinion about something if they are passionately in favor of or vehemently against it. The only difference is it’s becoming increasingly easier, more personal and more widely distributed.