If you saw the picture below with the caption Reluctant Revolutionary, who would you guess it was?
If you said Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, you would have been wrong like me. It's fed chief Ben Bernanke. So I've got to give it up to B-Week on that one as they totally pulled that one off.
This is totally off topic, but it's my blog and I can do what I want! Anyway "Dubya", aka President Bush, was recently interviewed by Maria "The Money Honey" Bartiromo for CNBC recently. First off I never got the whole fascination with her, and I certainly didn't get how people were actually trying to compare this chick to Sophia Loren....complete sacrilege...but I digress..... Anyway she asked Bush if ever used Google? According to CNBC's unofficial transcript, he replied: "Occasionally. One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps." The Google....That's too funny. Maybe we can refer to him as The Googler now, like some villain on Batman & Robin.... right in line with The Joker, The Penguin and The Riddler. I think the Prez could fit in quite nicely with Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin. Well at least he's used Google before, although he's still way behind his political rival from 2000 - Al "I invented the Internet" Gore. I just wonder if G-Dub has ever Googled for results on the phrase "miserable failure".
UPDATE:
This post was not meant to be any kind of political statement whatsoever. I'm not taking shots at the Prez, just having some fun. Hey you can't blame me for what gets returned by The Google when people search for "miserable failure". Here's an explanation from Google as to how this result happened. And thus a new term is born....Googlebombing. It's probably a good thing that Ted Kaczynski wrote his manifesto before the rise of Google. We'd probably be calling him the Googlebomer instead of his other name.
This is going off subject for me but I was really happy to see the commercials for the movie Akeelah and the Bee. Yeah I know, it looks like your typical family drama where you laugh, you cry , you hurl...ok you're not supposed to hurl but I couldn't resist. But here's where the curve ball gets thrown....Akeelah is a drama for the family with a great message about family, educational achievement, and realizing ones potential against all odds....starring black people. I'm not kidding....really I'm not. There are no men dressed as overweight women, thank goodness. Hey I sort of liked Big Momma's House, but did we really need another one as well as Tyler Perry's Madea? I think the black-man-dressed-as-overweight-old-black-grandmother genre has run it's course...at least one can hope. You'll also notice in this movie an alarming development - the lack of thugs, rappers, wannabe rappers, and the glorification of thuggish rapper wannabes. I almost thought there was an amendment to the US Constitution stating that all black movies must include these and other negative stereotypes - see cinematic masterpieces ATL, Get Rich or Die Trying and Hustle & Flow... which gave us the Grammy winning tour-de-force "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" (on a side note, shouldn't it be hard out there for pimps?). Better yet, don't see these movies at all.
What surprised me even more than this kind of movie being made (which says a lot) is that Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban was an executive producer, putting some of his impressive net worth into this project. I always liked Cuban and thought he was the kind of owner you'd want for your favorite team. I also consider him to be extremely intelligent. All you need to know is that he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for a cool billion or so right before the Internet bubble burst. So this guy could do anything he wants, and he chose to spend his time and money being a part of a positive family movie starring Ike and Tina Turner (better known as Laurence Fishburn and Angela Bassett). That's cool enough on its own, but then Cuban went above and beyond the call of duty when he announced a program that lets teachers see the movie for free, and by encouraging kids from their schools to see the movie, a lucky school could win a $100,000 donation. On his blog, Cuban explains how much he believes in the movie, and his enthusiasm for this endeavor is really great!
Maybe this more about CRM than I thought as this is a great way to promote to your target audiences. I mean this is the guy who handed out vouchers for free plane tickets to 19,000 Dallas Maverick fans as part of a fan appreciation campaign. I'm just glad he's bringing his maverick ways to the movies. Boy did we need it!
Over the last few years I've been fortunate enough to developed some great vendor, analyst and guru relationships withing the CRM community. This has given me a lot of access to many of the services and applications driving the industry. Especially when it comes to companies looking to get a foothold in the hot SMB space, where I do a great deal of consulting, writing, presenting, etc. Many of the tools are excellent and very affordable to small businesses. But there are some really small companies who are not ready to make the jump just yet. They still need better ways to manage information and more effectively collaborate with prospects and customers. The good news is there are a growing number of free services that are out there for you. Here are a few you should check out:
Like I said, there's a ton of really great tools out there that small businesses should be using to help be more productive and profitable. Inherit the web.....it's pretty cheap.
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