Tracking Pizzas and Rewarding Loyal Customers

One reason I loved teaching Marketing Communications this past spring was that I learned so much from my students, especially about ways young consumers interact with digital marketing. We’d discuss a new technology and its marketing implications, and I was always impressed by what quick adopters they were. Such is the nature of being young and bright, I suppose.

Photo by Jordan Fischer

When we discussed mobile marketing, they shared how they used their favorite apps and it always expanded the way I thought about opportunities.  While  tracking a pizza I order is a nonsensical idea to me, for students who live between their friends’ apartments and their own, being able to know exactly where the delivery guy is and how much time you have until you have to meet him at your apartment  is helpful.  The students’ willingness to share was such a gift, and it helped me see just how rapidly technology, particularly mobile, is changing the way we do business.

Technology goes through such rapid iterations that constant learning is a must. Otherwise, you’ll be still trying to master Twitter and Pinterest will sneak by and surpass it in traffic referrals. I think this constant learning is was draws me to digital marketing.  Its one of the fields where you learn by doing.  I’ve been doing some digital marketing work with a fast growing Wisconsin company, Bungee Loyalty Programs,  and I love how each time I do one thing, I learn another.  Its refreshing.   And that continual learning is something I am tremendously grateful for.

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Northwoods Bathroom Wisdom

Ah, the pleasure of visiting a Northwoods cottage on the lake. Where you live in your bathing suit, eat fish that you catch, and drink a lot of beer with your relatives (or better yet, friends’ relatives). Its gotta be one of the great pleasures of living in Wisconsin. You get to feel like you are roughin’ it, but in reality the septic tank is well disguised by what seems to be a fully plumbed bathroom. And there always seems to be motivational or humorous art to distract you; definitely something to be grateful for.

God don't make no junk.

Somehow, this song seems a fitting companion.

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Reading till my heart’s content

Some books transport you to a different world.  One where you could never possibly have lived and yet that nugget of time and space becomes so real while reading, it becomes part of your own personal history.  As though you were there, smelling the local fauna, feeling the tension of the political strife, holding the hands of characters you’ve never met.  Like a dream so vivid that after you wake up, you ask yourself which was the dream and which was reality. A good book will do that to you.  Cutting for Stone did that to me: took me to Ethiopia during the 1960s, had me escape via Eritrea in the 70s, and brought me to NYC in the 80s.  It also had me performing many more surgeries than I’ve ever wanted to: I could do without holding someone’s liver in my hands.  I am always so grateful for a writer like Abraham Verghese who toils for years to gift the world with his story.

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So Fresh and So Clean

Its been a dreadfully dry summer.  The bright side?  My laundry dries in minutes on the line.

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