One night last week the kids were getting in our hair, and I just couldn’t take one more “I’m bored”. For some unknown reason I thought it would be good to do something I haven’t done for MANY years – a jigsaw puzzle. Yep, I have reached the height of excitement. I was either channeling my inner old folks home, or grasping for any way to make this winter go away faster.

We had this 750 piece Chicago Skyline puzzle from Buffalo Games gathering dust on the shelf. My grandma gave it to me at least 5 years ago. The minute I cracked it open, we had instant family entertainment. Mason and Anna have never seen such a large and complex puzzle, and of course Tricia and I were eager to dig in. We spread out all of the pieces and flipped them over. We did an initial sort, looking for all of the edges. By the end of the first night we had the edges somewhat constructed, and Tricia completed all of the lettering at the bottom.

Over the next 10 days the puzzle quickly lost its luster for the rest of the family, but not for me. I was hooked. I attacked this thing every morning before breakfast, and during lunch, and instead of watching TV at night. The whole experience was so much more stimulating and calming than I ever remember it. I’m convinced that the old school jigsaw puzzle is every bit as useful to the brain as BrainAge could ever try to be. As I built the puzzle I kept building different strategies for organizing and completing the different sections.

Tonight, at 1am when I can’t sleep on the eve of our family vacation, I completed the beast. When it was done, I could only wonder if there were puzzling strategies out there from world champs of puzzling or something. Without knowing it, I had in fact followed the strategies that puzzle junkies who do this all the time devised. Building a puzzle has some intrinsic satisfaction for the builder in me. It was as much fun as a home improvement project or building a website.

To top this off, let’s visit our friend YouTube for some jigsaw inspiration.

This work-from-home guy’s birthday is coming up April 2nd. If anyone at Hudson actually reads this blog, you might want to watch this lovely vignette from our friends at CareerBuilder. My Workplace Worth suggests that I should ‘cut my losses’. Not that I want the stripper to bust out of a five layer cake with a gold plated watch, but c’mon people. Chocolate Fountain!

I’m growing weary of reading information created by the entire marketing consulting world. From self-pronounced social media experts, to agencies, to marketing vendors who blog, to the hundreds of marketing newsletters offering ‘5 ways to energize your online, social media marketing, personal branding spend, strategy ROI’, to mainstream magazines. It’s becoming overload. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to find and follow more pundits. What I find myself searching for are people like me.

I want to find some people who attend conferences, not speak at them. People who read books, not write them. People who are building interactive marketing strategy for their company, not giving advice to others. This is an open call to all internal marketers to connect with me. Why? I just want to read your tweets and your blogs as you build your strategy. I just haven’t found you very easily on the social networks – especially Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. But, I haven’t really been looking that hard either. All of the consultants flood the airwaves with their self-promotion so you haven’t been served to me on an over-tweeted platter.

So, today I started with a simple Google on ‘CMO Blogs’. I found this article from 2006 (*now that’s old news*) by Mario Sundar on Top 10 CMO Blogs. So now I follow Mario – the online Community manager at LinkedIn who writes an excellent blog. This led me to Eric Kintz who blogs about his work as a marketer at HP. He also wrote an informative post on why blogging as a marketer matters. That led me to dig into the work of David Churbuck, who blogs about his marketing efforts at Lenovo. He kindly outlined his thought process into his online strategy for the Lenovo 2008 Olympics sponsorship. He built a bold athlete 2.0 strategy that has value at its core, rather than overt company sponsorship.

Well, that’s my web wandering for the day. If you are out there, I’d love to connect with you, oh Internal Marketer. Here’s my criteria for the best connections.

Ahh…Easter. It’s that time of year in Western New York where every day is 40 degrees and overcast. Piles of old dirty snow line the sides of the road reminding you that winter was but 5 days ago, and it could yet bite again. It’s also the time to take an hour ride to Buffalo and visit the Broadway Market.

2008 Family excursion to the Buffalo Broadway Market

It is a place steeped with Polish tradition. The history is recounted on their website:

The Broadway Market is over 118 years old.

As immigrants flocked to the east side of Buffalo in the late 1800’s, they looked for the continuation of old world customs in their new and unfamiliar environment. While they wanted to enter the mainstream of city life, they also sought to preserve their Eastern European traditions and heritage. The Broadway Market would prove to serve these needs quite well….

…Famed for its ethnic old world shopping atmosphere, the Broadway Market’s fresh food merchant base is comprised of family-owned, family-operated butcher shops, poultry stands, fruit/vegetable stands and bakeries….

Since we won’t be around for Easter this year (we’ll be taking a vacation to the Bahamas), and we had a HUGE morning Easter Egg Hunt at our Friends’ house, we thought today would be great time to do the market. Normally, I starve myself before the trip so I can partake in the best Beef on Weck that Buffalo has to offer. Unfortunately, we hit McDonalds to be able to last in the car ride and we weren’t really hungry.

We started our tour by finding some hand painted wooden eggs. We usually get an egg for each of us.

Mason and Anna show off their hand-painted Polish wooden Easter eggs

Next, we had to pick up some Polish sausage and pierogies. We found 2 varieties at one of the meat shops so I got a package of each – one was Wardynski’s the other Redlinski’s. The pierogies were HUGE. Each one was the size of a Hostess Apple pie. Sauerkraut is my favorite, so I picked up 6. My next mission was to pick up some potent horseradish. I went for the “Broadway Market Horseradish”. I bought small jars this year, because it will stay fresher in smaller quantities once I open each jar. I topped off the visit by buying my typical obnoxious Polish-themed t-shirt. Thank goodness there’s a new one every year.

We met Matt and Alison at the market. This was their first trip, and since they will be hosting an Easter crowd next weekend, they purchased a Butter Lamb. Excellent call! We decided that we couldn’t carry around 6 pounds of meat and not give it a try, so we convinced Matt and Ali to invite us back to their place for a taste test.

Before we went though, we had to pick up one more sausage varietal. This time we acted on a hot tip from a Buffalo local who said to hit the Market in the Square grocery store in West Seneca for some Dubel’s sausage. We rushed back to the apartment and had a “Sausage Fest” complete with the appropriate laughter at how inappropriate that sounded. We had a very scientific toothpick system for keeping the different sausages straight. We all preferred the one without the toothpick which was Wardynski’s. It had by far the most complex and delicious grouping of spices.

Tricia and Alison get cheeky at the Sausage Fest

Thanks to Matt and Alison for letting us invade. It was fun spending our Easter tradition with you.

Apparently the future of customer relationships is empowering the rank-and-file to act as a conduit of the brand message within the online socialscape. This is suggested in a Wall Street Journal piece via Scott Monty. If that be the case, and we also agree that the job is less about ‘managing the message’ and more about interacting in the community on behalf of the company, then marketers better get into the education game quickly. We need to become fluent in online community and social media to the point of being able to teach it to the rest of our organizations.

Here’s a case in point. My wife wrote a scathing rant on her blog about an awful experience with our local Sears retailer. She followed up that missile with the typical phone runaround with varying levels of drones and retail managers until the issue was resolved. It is likely that this heated piece of prose will sit in net space for a long period of time, in all of it’s Google-optimized glory just waiting for other outlets to pick it up. Were the marketing team within the Sears hierarchy able to train every employee to use Google Alerts to find these gems, the response could be swift and genuine. We need to train our people to fight the company’s battles on the customers’ turf, out in the open. Those that do so, ultimately are going to win. There is a HUGE opportunity out there for new tools and new roles in teaching every employee to do social-media marketing. The content must shift from ‘What is Facebook, blogs, wikis, etc’ to ‘How to respond to a negative blog post about our company’.

I could not help but be drawn into the story line of this viral campaign. You have got to see this and try it for yourself. I sent the piece to myself so you could see it in action here:

Dead Man Blogging

Let me know what you think (beside how disturbing the actual message is).

Sunday was Mason’s final ski lesson for the season. The weather was heading toward perfect all week. A snow storm on Tuesday and Friday gave us 6 inches of fresh powder, while the Saturday temps in the low teens headed toward midday highs of 35 yesterday. With bright sunshine and no wind, there could not have been a better day for skiing ever. We went down as a caravan – the Rzepkowski’s and our friends the White’s as we had done earler in the year.

When we arrived at the mountain, the trails had just been groomed and Mason was psyched to try out his new skills on the real slopes. He started out his 10:15am lesson on the magic carpet, and quickly advanced to the real lift. He was now able to ski Swain completely on his own which was a huge difference from the first time this year.

While Mason took his lesson, Tricia, Anna and I went up the lift for some skiing together. Anna did very well with the help of an outstretched pole, or some between my legs skiing. Had the magic carpet not been packed with lesson kids, we should have had her ski there all day so that she could learn to stop. I can’t wait till she’s old enough for lessons next year at Powder Mills because I know that she’s going to pick this skiing thing up quick, and be racing by year’s end.

When Mason’s lesson ended, his instructor, Ron told me that he just wasn’t able to give Mason any instruction. There was another kid in his class that was over his head and needed to be carried down the hill. Ron offered to give Mason another lesson at noon. So, we went back to the lodge for a break and some lunch and convinced Mason that getting some more one on one ‘professional help’ would be great for him. In fact his second lesson was good for him as Ron told us that Mason made a lot of progress. He also said Mason’s legs were popped out by the end, and he needed a break.

Tricia kept the boys and Anna in the lodge so Andy and I could hit the perfect conditions for some real skiing. We took a couple of GREAT runs, and then somehow I let Andy convince me to do a Nastar race. I’ve never raced in all my years of skiing. All you had to do was pay 5 bucks at the top of the hill and you could ski the course for time. I was definitely nervous and my first run didn’t calm my nerves at all. I fell on the second to last turn which cost me 15 seconds to end up at 45 seconds. We went up the hill again, and on my second run I managed to finish with a turtle-slow time of 35 seconds, but at least I stayed on course. Andy’s best time of the day I think was 29 seconds which awarded him a bronze medal. Racing was really fun, and I could have done it the rest of the day, but alas we wanted to get back to skiing with the kids.

In retrospect the second lesson for Mason wasn’t the best idea because it cut our family time short. Our second run together up to Mile Sweep, Mason skied awesome at the top of the hill. But his legs and mind were so shot, that he melted down somewhere in the middle and wanted me to carry him the rest of the way down the hill. I coaxed him down the rest of the way by holding a pole next to me. That was at the end of this highlights video – a summary of a day of great family fun and great times with great friends.

I hope we might get out one more time skiing this year if our busy schedules allow it. Otherwise, I won’t be sad if this perfect day of skiing is the exclamation point on a terrific 2008 at the slopes.

People work for bosses not companies. Today, that sentiment is more true for me than ever before. When the leadership team asked Rick Gray to emcee the annual Sales Awards conference I bet they thought he would have a humorous quip or two. Or maybe he would throw squishy balls with the Hudson logo into the audience (we are from the marketing department you know). I doubt that ANYONE would have expected this. Take a look at what someone caught on their camera phone.

While the song certainly has no chance for American Idol, it does show me a person willing to be creative, gutsy, and unafraid to shake things up. How could others in the crowd not be motivated by a fellow employee on fire for his company like that? That’s exactly the kind of person I like to work for. Nice job Rick!

This post also has me asking the inevitable question about whether or not to blog about my boss. This same question arose for Tiffany Monhollon in her post titled Is Your Boss Reading Your Blog?. She covered my sentiments very well:

I will also tell you that if I didn’t have a great relationship with my boss and know that he fully supports me as a person as well as the entirety of my career, I probably would have had a bit more pause in my decision. But in the end, it turned out to be the best move.

Learning about social media has been a good time for both of us. It has been one of the most challenging projects in my career. Why not blog my boss’s first public appearance on YouTube? We haven’t figured out the power of that medium yet, so we’re going to start now! If you like his song pass it on.

This is an excellent presentation by Jake McKee, a former LEGO employee who currently runs a social media consultancy. He relates the work of interacting with the adult consumer community of LEGO to the tenets of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I was riveted to the content, one because it was about LEGO, and 2 because it touches on so many of the new and challenging principles of marketing that must be grapsed. To me, it is crystal clear that marketing is fast becoming the art of managing the community not controlling the message.

Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter.

This weekend was not a weekend for the weak belly. After Tricia entertained the kids all week for their February break, we started our gall bladders on the right foot on Friday by packing in some fishfry over at the Ukrainian Home of Rochester. It is almost directly behind our house, and having driven by the Fish Fry Fridays sign many times, I wanted to get a peek inside. When we walked in and saw the mighty Haddock filets being carted to a dining room alive with accordion music, I knew we needed to stay.

Accordion player at Ukrainian Home of Rochester

Unfortunately for us, everyone else had the same idea. We put our name in at 6pm and weren’t eating until 7:30pm. While we waited I did get a chance to sample Ukrainian beer, Obolon Premium. Trust me, this beer tastes the opposite of premium. Luckily you don’t pay a lot for beer at your local ‘home’.
Tricia and Mom A put on a smiley face but under those toothy grins were some choice words for those of us there for the atmosphere.

Tricia and Mom A enjoying the 1.5 hour wait for their fish

I blame it on this guy I found there.

Is the glass half full?

The crispy breaded WHALE that they put on my plate ended up being very good. I also got to sample deep fried pierogies for the first time. All of this food seemed to be tied around my feet when I played volleyball at Hot Shots later that night.

Saturday night, Tricia cooked a deep fried turkey. This tasted awesome and yet again left my belly seeking rice cakes. Instead of listening to the beckon call of Pepto, I instead suggested that we drive to Buffalo on Sunday to see Matt and Alison, my bother and sister-in-law. Of course, when in Buffalo eat like a Buffalo – wings that is. We ended up at the Buffalo Sports Garden which is right around the corner from Matt and Ali’s apartment. The wings there are terrific as evidenced by this grainy blackberry photo.

Kris eating the Buffalo Delicacy

My stomach will definitely thank me for the return of the work week, where I’ll return to my treadmill and my fiber cereal induced equilibrium.