Blonde Productions Group

London’s Court of Appeals determined May 20 that Pringles are a food group, not just a snack, meaning that the chip is taxable at 15%, according to a report filed by msnbc.com. Across the pond, potato chips are subject to the tax while most foods are not.

The judges’ ruling was based on content value. A lot like the value between a good Internet site and one that’s lacking.

From the public-facing side of a website the SEO underpinnings aren’t necessarily evident. A flash home page, for example, might fill the senses with entertainment, but it can’t be optimized the way a hybrid html/flash page can. And if you’re seeking to boost your website to the top of the search engines, it’s essential that your website be able to be optimized.

The alternative is like dieting on martinis and chocolate-entertaining but valueless.

If you need help determining the nutritional value of your website as it exists today, or if you want a whole new website with exemplary content written by proven journalists, contact us at www.blondeproductionsgroup.com. Or call 720-221-7126.

Octane Coffee, Denver’s one and only coffee shop in a 1962 Globetrotter Airstream trailer, is pulling up to the Cherry Creek Farmer’s Market all summer long. We’ll be the ones with the small carbon footprint. The truck toting the Kerouac-esteemed Airstream is a Flex Fuel vehicle that runs on 85% ethanol fuel.

We are a homegrown Denver business and we’re coming out to support the independent Colorado agricultural industry. Well, that and we just plain love the straight-from-the-vine goods. We have teamed with another local business dedicated to sustainability, Coda Coffee, to bring you gourmet coffee and espresso beverages. What better way to start out your morning at the market than with an iced latte or a steaming Octane blend? If you are looking for breakfast we carry baked goods and biscotti in addition to the freshest breakfast burritos you will ever take to go.

We love to connect with our Cherry Creek community so come by and introduce yourself and grab a biscuit for your canine companion Saturdays May 2nd through October 31st from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

For the inside scoop on Saturday specials follow UseOctane on Twitter.

Think about it - just about everyone under 35 uses phone books as door stops and has no use at all for print media or land-line telephones. The X Generation, under 45 and over 35 are joining the electronic revolution in droves. Gen Y has only one question when it comes to old-school phone books: Why bother?

The masses today are wired, making big purchase decisions - homes and cars - and even casual connections like dinner reservations, through the virtual world. The web is where they do their business, locate product, reserve concert tickets, plan vacations and even get grad school credits.

They Google and Yahoo and Twitter and Facebook their way to an instant connection. They want what they want right now, and they expect it to be there in seconds on a hand-held, desk-top or lap-top with a minimum of typing and texting, and with a few simple clicks.

If making the leap from wired to wireless has you buffaloed, contact Blonde Productions Group, a member of the Unleaded Group for Twitter Tutoring and marketing consulting that will make a difference.

Just for grins: Does anyone out there remember phones with cords?

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.

In romantic relationships, the most ominous words spoken are “We have to talk.” Those four one-syllable words send men to their caves and prompt women to convene to discuss his inability to communicate.

Now that science has been taken to a whole new level: According to Nielsen Mobile, the second quarter of 2008 was the second consecutive quarter in which the average number of text messages sent was significantly higher than the average number of phone calls placed. While the number of calls has remained steady, text messages have soared-up 450% in the last two years.

The division in demographics has never been more apparent in the texting growth. Not surprisingly the 13 - 17 year-old group sent an average of 1,742 texts per month compared to 2,331 voice calls.

As cryptic as text messages can be, they’re now the preferred vehicle for transmitting communication. Void of sentence structure, proper grammar and sans the benefit of intonation, text messages are what young people today rely on. The critical mass of youngsters using near code to establish plans, convey emotions and transact financial matters (see www.mocapay.com) should send an alert to marketing experts to trim their message, focus on the call to action, and at all costs be brief.

Consider the crash of US Airways Flight 1549. Passengers instructed to prepare for a crash landing simultaneously tucked down while furiously texting loved ones to say goodbye in anticipation of not living through the Hudson River landing. Their relatives were among the first to hear the news that the airbus was crashing…even before it hit the water.

For a short course in concise messaging, contact Blonde Productions Group (www.blondeproductionsgroup.com) at 720-221-7126.

U hear?

When Barack Obama announced his choice for Vice President, the message was spread via approximately 2.9 million texts-the largest mobile marketing event in history. In one push of the “Send” button, Obama’s campaign revolutionized advertising technology.

In early 2008, the platform for Obama’s text campaign was launched during Super Bowl, the championship of NFL, also the championship of advertising campaigns. The ad promoted to viewers that they could text to Obama (62262) to receive future text updates from the campaign. Instantly, the assembled football fans were recruited. Their text contacts were now in the hands of the Obama campaign and they were on record as potential volunteers and/or voters.

Popularized by this event, mobile-marketing is without a doubt the future of advertising.  Companies like Gap and Allstate Insurance have taken the lead in text advertising.  Savvy enterprise had grasped that mobile marketing and social networking sites enabled them to communicate to a broad audience for little cost.

Blonde Productions Group (www.blondeproductionsgroup.com) calls this new medium “textology” both because it is short for text technology and because it recognizes the science of text message marketing. “Texting is the way to reach consumers 40 and under,” says Nancy Clark, president of Blonde Productions Group, a member of Unleaded Group in Denver, CO.

Textology isn’t just for industry giants; it can be utilized by any size of business. It is important to offer an incentive for the consumer to sign up for these updates.  In Obama’s case, it was the first release of information that appealed to audiences. A retail company can promote special offers or sales. Another angle is to text new releases of information-if your cupcake company releases a new flavored frosting, it’s worthy of a text release, especially if you add a call to action like: one free cupcake when you buy one dozen.

Caution: Don’t overdo text promotions by sending too many or sending insignificant information because recipients will want off the list. If your texts are timely, relevant and worth the customers’ time, they’ll be well received and they’ll drive extra business.

This type of communication is not only fast and direct, it is also easy.  You can create one sentence-long text and send it to everyone on your list at one time.  According to Time Magazine voters under age 25 contributed nearly 17,000 of Obama’s votes-significant in that he won the election by under 20,000 votes.

The demographic of young adults has adopted texting and technology to stay connected. This is the antithesis of first generation marketing using internet which underscored the anonymity of the internet space versus the community-building sense that facebook.com and other social networking sites offer. To this younger group in particular the connection is in the familiarity. Really. Friends text friends, so it just makes sense then that texts are bonds of friendship.

Consult with Blonde Productions Group’s textology experts to find out how to make your message most effective and how and when to send it. Until you get your texting down, you will want to call us at 720-221-7126 or email nancy@blondeproductionsgroup.com.