Canuckflack

“‘Death by Chocolate’ cookies could be hazardous…Bella Cucina’s Death by Chocolate cookies contain walnuts, which are not declared on the label and could be hazardous to anyone with nut allergies…” (CBC.ca)

And that’s why the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has issued an allergy alert about the cookies.

Interesting sidebar: this allergy alert has created problems for a completely separate cookie company based out of Delaware with an unfortunately common name.

“Bella Cucina… is not affiliated with a separate cookie company in Delaware called Bella’s Cookies. Recent news releases surfacing about the mislabeling in Bella Cucina’s “Death by Chocolate Cookies,” has search engines retrieving combinations of words like “Bella” & “Cookies”… Bella’s Cookies in Delaware is a completely different company…

Thanks,
Mark Leishear
Director of Sales & Marketing, Bella’s Cookies”

That comment from the Delaware company was posted in response to another blog posting that noted the allergy alert for the Canadian company.

Bella’s Cookies is responding quickly to a potential problem, and the rapid response may be a reflection of their effort to establish a solid online presence.

Mark Leishear, the gentleman quoted above, is the principle author on a Bella’s cookies blog. Makes sense, since he and his partner run the company. They’ve also created a Squidoo lens, and Leishear’s been loading a YouTube profile with cookie-friendly content.

So far, the Delaware company seems to be winning the Google juice battle.

[tags] recall, consumer safety, risk communication, chocolate cookie, comment policy, organic [/tags]

Have you seen the new Geico ads? Some ad pros don’t like them, and I have to admit that they don’t do anything to push me towards signing up for car or home insurance, but they are amusing in a post-mod sort of way.

I mean, a “whatever happened to” based on the life of the first Cabbage Patch kid?

[tags] Cabbage Patch Kids, Ben Winkler, Geico [/tags]

“You guys got nothing to worry about, I’m a professional.”

In some ways, corporate social responsibility programs can be a Faustian bargain. We’ve become accustomed to corporations claiming environmental and social awareness, but we still listen to their claims with a cocked ear. We need to see a concrete action plan. More importantly, we need independent and verified proof of an effective CSR plan.

That’s why Mattel’s recalls have been so damaging to their reputation. A twenty year relationship with your foreign contractors isn’t enough anymore. Especially when your compliance program, while extensive and detailed, is self-monitored.

Nike learned that lesson a few years ago. CSR is no longer a cape to be thrown over your corporate shoulders, at very little cost and relatively little effort. CSR now demands an dedicated corporate infrastructure, a detailed reporting program, and carefully maintained relationships with non-governmental organizations and verification authorities.

Today, the problems fall to Woolworths – the Australian supermarket chain. Despite a report full of CSR programming, Green groups have challenged the company’s claims that its premium paper products were composed of “Sustainable Forest Fibre.” In fact, they have far harsher things to say about Asia Pulp and Paper, the source of the fibre.

As a result, Woolworths has had to pull the product from the shelves. They’ve also begun to redesign the packaging, to eliminate the questioned claim of sustainability. Finally, they’ve asked the World Wildlife Foundation to audit their supplier’s claims.

And therein lays the problem. Most consumers would prefer to hear from a slightly scruffy and clearly environmentally concerned specialist directly and in advance, rather than waiting for one to be called in.

As soon as you have to start swearing that you’re not cheating, you become the Horshack, Epstein or Dylan McKay of the CSR world.

The standards for a CSR program have shifted. Self-monitoring, in the face of increasing claims of health and safety risk, does not appear sufficient. It doesn’t matter if your monitoring program is effective: it’s the appearance that matters.

Especially if the claims of risk are coming from groups vested with more authority in the subject. Even two environmental specialists in a basement office can send a corporation running if their claims appear weak. Once again, in a crunch it’s the appearance that matters.

h/t to PR Watch

[tags] csr, corporate sustainability, Woolworths, grocery, supermarket [/tags]

It’s tough being a small alternative paper. You have to be edgy. You have to be insightful. Sometimes, you have to fill a big news hole:

“…On Thursday, August 9, at 4:35 p.m., my Corolla came rumbling over the horizon of the causeway. Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries — the music that accompanies the napalming mission in Apocalypse Now — blared at full volume from the open windows. A small stack of dinner plates and a large claw hammer sat at my side. When I pulled up to the attendant, I waved a dollar bill in time with the ear-splitting German music and smashed the pile of plates into smithereens. White porcelain chips flew out of the car, striking the wall of the tollbooth …” (Miami New Times)

That’s from “For Whom the Hell Tolls:What’s it take to get a tollbooth attendant to crack? We wish we knew.”
[tags] toll booth, Corolla, alternative news, newsweekly [/tags]

“Op is a youth brand focused on the surf lifestyle,” said a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. “It will help expand the range of our apparel offering as we leverage the brand equity to address this growth lifestyle.” (Women’s Wear Daily)

That’s right. Wal-Mart has entered into a distribution contract with the holding company that now owns the Ocean Pacific brand. If you were holding out any hope that your rainbow-coloured board shorts and windbreakers, originally bought in 1982, were cool – forget about it. Unless you live in Japan. Don’t ask me to explain the Japanese retail market. Please.

In the rest of the world, Ocean Pacific’s old position as market leader in the “scruffy yet cool surf wear” market segment has been sucked out to sea by Hollister.

Still, some retail experts are holding out hope for Wal-Mart – if they handle the launch and the brand management right:

“It’s an incredible opportunity for Wal-Mart,” [former OP CEO Dick] Baker added. “To have a brand like this, a true American lifestyle surf brand, as part of their stable is great. … My only issue is if you look at the landscape of mid-tier and mass retailers, there’s been a lack of execution with these brand deals over the last 10 years. The good [deals] have been Mossimo and Target because there was a lot of product and brand strategy that went into it, and the Candie’s strategy with Kohl’s. Other than that, there’s a lot of roadkill of brands that attempted to fit into the retailer’s domain.”

Roadkill. Ouch. How about a rope-a-dope metaphor:

“… Harry Bernard [who] worked on research for Op’s repositioning by Baker … called the deal “a fascinating combination of totally different cultures. Wal-Mart has been hit across the bridge of the nose enough times to figure out they can’t do it on their own …

“They’re going to make it what they want to make it,” Baker said of Wal-Mart’s handling of Op. “If I were them, I would put a lot of time and effort into positioning and strategy. It’s an iconic American brand. If they do it incorrectly it will be an injustice.”

A final note: at Dick Baker’s house it seems that the easy and laid back nature of the surfer is not appreciated. This from an O.C. Register article about his wife’s otherwise very stylish redecoration of their house:

“…No eating on the couch: Key thing in my house: We only eat in the eating areas. If you are hungry in England or Italy in the middle of the day, you go to the kitchen, you have tea and you have a sweet, and look at a magazine. Or, if someone is there, you chat. You don’t zone out in front of a TV. Also from a cleanliness standpoint, you get kids and pizza and popcorn and a sofa, you’ve got a disaster.”

[tags] Wal-Mart, Ocean Pacific, OP, surf, Hollister [/tags]

How’s this for a “personal brand”? I don’t think I have to introduce Billy Beer. Personal qualities? Principal selling point? Emotions the marketer hopes to prompt? This picture of Billy Carter and his eponymous beer says it all.

The idea of a “personal brand” has become a familiar term, especially as a generation of ambitious and technically adept workers shape their identities at work, among their friends, in their community and with others in their profession.

It’s the logical extension of The Brand Called You – Tom Peters’ exhortation to strike your own path to personal and professional success.

“… It’s over. No more vertical. No more ladder. That’s not the way careers work anymore. Linearity is out. A career is now a checkerboard. Or even a maze. It’s full of moves that go sideways, forward, slide on the diagonal, even go backward when that makes sense. (It often does.) A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand …” (Fast Company)

That was 1997. We really didn’t understand what change the internet would bring in just a few years. I was still downloading .pdfs of the New York Times from Pointcast. Fast Company, whose design was edgy and innovative, was stuffed full of ads. I bought Christmas presents from eToys.

We had no idea that the internet would evolve, that it would eventually give every “me-preneur” a dozen different instruments to trumpet their personal brand. Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, online sites that solicit bylined articles by “experts.”
Despite the effort, some of these personal brands are, like Billy, one trick ponies. With a tin ear.

Whatever happened to uncertainty? Variety in thought and action? Floating ideas just to gauge the reaction? Rooting through sources, subjects and philosophies outside your comfort zone?

Apparently, that sort of behaviour won’t help your SEO. Your personal branding strategy. Your PageRank. Your ongoing campaign to segment and segment until you create a niche where you’re the only occupant.

But man, once you hit that sweet spot, you’ll have the power of buzz and exclusivity behind you!

At least until JR Beer comes along.

[tags] personal brand, Brand You, Tom Peters, branding [/tags]

Algonquin College is a local community college with some reputation for an innovative new media program. Which makes the news that college administrators have “suggested” instructors not “friend” students all the stranger.

The note I’ve pasted below is unattributed, so I’m willing to withdraw it if challenged. But if it’s true, what was the motivation? Too many college instructors found wasted at keggers?

Even more damaging – the assertion that students are not “peers.” This from a college that encourages several professional development programs and career advancement courses?

“In order to maintain a professional working relationship at the college, with all students, it has been suggested that Profs not accept Facebook friendship requests from current students. Any current Facebook friendships should be terminated. However, once students have graduated, and become peers, then Facebook friendships can be restored.”

[tags] Facebook, Algonquin College, student relations [/tags]

We’re all used to talk about the “long tail” and that portion of the market that didn’t prove profitable until e-commerce tools helped “monetize” all those fans, hobbyists, obsessives, nit-pickers and contrarians.

The idea of “long tail,” as applied to the insurance industry, becomes known as “tail risk.” It’s the work of compensating for the risk of highly unlikely catastrophes – like Hurricane Katrina.

Michael Lewis discusses one expert’s work in assessing and monetizing “tail risk” in the latest New York Times Magazine (August 26).

It’s an interesting and informative piece, even if this quote wasn’t in it:

“If there’s been a theme to John’s life,” says his brother Nelson, “it’s pricing tail.”

John Seo works in the market for catastrophic bonds – or cat bonds. When Katrina hit, the market for cat bonds moved, just like it had after every catastrophe.

“A few investors would inevitably become jittery and sell their cat bonds at big discounts, what with the Weather Channel all hysteria all the time. (“The worst place to go if you’re taking risks,” says one cat-bond investor, “is the Weather Channel. They’re just screaming all the time.”)

And THAT is why I’m poor. Because I don’t have the nerve to bet on the Weather Channel.

[tags] economics, tail risk, long tail, quant, insurance risk, economics humour [/tags]

This morning, it’s a refreshing 15 degrees celsius. The sky is a crisp clean blue, with not a hint of a cloud. Thanks to several days of strong rain last week, the grass is a vibrant green, the bushes and trees are full of life, and the sidewalks and roads are as clean as can be.

On my daily commute, my bus travels down the Ottawa River Parkway. It parallels the wide Ottawa River for at least five kilometres. At one end, there are abandoned mill works and a lock, dating from the river’s past as a logging route. At the other, Parliament Hill – the seat of government.

Across the river, the less developed Quebec shore is covered in vegetation, all the way up to the escarpment in the Gatineau national park.

Ducks, geese, groundhogs, rabbits and the occasional deer are a regular sighting alongside the Parkway.

During the summer, the rapids found mid-river are a popular destination for world-class kayakers.

So why are all the mindless automatons blindly staring towards the front of the bus, their hands tightly gripping one of three things: their coffee, their briefcase, or the handrail on the seat in front of them?

Is there a compelling urge to see your office building before anyone else?

If I was fifteen and back in school, I’d be cutting on a day like today.

[tags] work/life balance, cutting school, absenteeism [/tags]

There’s a lot to be said for aggregating all the information you seed across your many online apps: Flickr, twitter, IM, del.icio.us, Facebook, your personal blog, and your work blog. Your family finds it much easier to keep up with your life. All those momentary details – like favourite coffee shop, new girlfriend, apartment changes, travel schedule – can be shared with family, friends and colleagues. People who want the “brand you” experience can refer to one handy url.

Trouble is, so can the less desirable. And I’m not just talking about Russian hackers who use that information to clone your credit card and buy Israeli diamonds and ship them to their cousin in Boca.

I’m talking about the mildly unstable.

Maybe an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend. Or that guy that no-one talked to in high school. Or an old neighbour who still thinks you killed her cat.

I think everyone has had that one moment – the moment where they regret being so open and transparent on the web. Maybe it was after the fifth unsolicited pitch of the morning. Or when some blogger inferred intellectual weakness and emotional immaturity based on something they wrote while on the can. Or when an old, old girlfriend “friended” them on Facebook.

I’m sure that, in some form, we all try to keep track of the personal and professional information we have made public while participating in our many social networks, 2.0 widgets and transitory communications like twitter.

At some point, all those digital breadcrumbs can be aggregated into a loaf of information. At what point to you pinch off access to that loaf?

[tags] lifestreams, tumblr, digital breadcrumbs, digital loaf [/tags]

Earlier this month, Joe Engressia died. That name may not mean very much, but the term “phone phreak” may. Engressia was one of the first phone phreaks: using his natural ability to whistle the tones that controlled the AT&T switching network, he helped a generation of nerds to discover their interest in electronics. Along the way, they manipulated the nation’s electronic infrastructure to learn new skills, meet new friends around the world, and talk about dating and sex.

Forty years ago, personal computing was a largely inconceivable proposition. Computers, networks, phone switches and other electronic equipment were the property of large corporations. Sure, there were engineers, technicians and researchers working for those corporations, but they were employees, generally following the rules and maintaining order in the systems.

It took a small group of technically-minded and generally socially awkward people to bend those systems to their own advantage, in the process creating some of the first electronic social networks. A lot has been written about the phone phreaks who delighted in developing new tools and techniques to thwart Ma Bell – here, here and here.

Ron Rosenbaum wrote about the phreaking culture in a 1971 article for Esquire: Secrets of the Little Blue Box.

“… (Joe)Engressia might have gone on whistling in the dark for a few friends for the rest of his life if the phone company hadn’t decided to expose him. He was warned, disciplined by the college, and the whole case became public. In the months following media reports of his talent, Engressia began receiving strange calls. There were calls from a group of kids in Los Angeles who could do some very strange things with the quirky General Telephone and Electronics circuitry in L.A. suburbs. There were calls from a group of mostly blind kids in —-, California, who had been doing some interesting experiments with Cap’n Crunch whistles and test loops. There was a group in Seattle, a group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few from New York, a few scattered across the country. Some of them had already equipped themselves with cassette and electronic M-F devices. For some of these groups, it was the first time they knew of the others.

The exposure of Engressia was the catalyst that linked the separate phone-phreak centers together. They all called Engressia. They talked to him about what he was doing and what they were doing. And then he told them — the scattered regional centers and lonely independent phone phreakers — about each other, gave them each other’s numbers to call, and within a year the scattered phone-phreak centers had grown into a nationwide underground. …

… The last big conference — the historic “2111″ conference — had been arranged through an unused Telex test-board trunk somewhere in the innards of a 4A switching machine in Vancouver, Canada. For months phone phreaks could M-F their way into Vancouver, beep out 604 (the Vancouver area code) and then beep out 2111 (the internal phone-company code for Telex testing), and find themselves at any time, day or night, on an open wire talking with an array of phone phreaks from coast to coast, operators from Bermuda, Tokyo and London who are phone-phreak sympathizers, and miscellaneous guests and technical experts. The conference was a massive exchange of information.

Phone phreaks picked each other’s brains clean, then developed new ways to pick the phone company’s brains clean. Ralph gave M F Boogies concerts with his home-entertainment-type electric organ, Captain Crunch demonstrated his round-the-world prowess with his notorious computerized unit and dropped leering hints of the “action” he was getting with his girl friends. (The Captain lives out or pretends to live out several kinds of fantasies to the gossipy delight of the blind phone phreaks who urge him on to further triumphs on behalf of all of them.)

The somewhat rowdy Northwest phone-phreak crowd let their bitter internal feud spill over into the peaceable conference line, escalating shortly into guerrilla warfare; Carl the East Coast international tone relations expert demonstrated newly opened direct M-F routes to central offices on the island of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf, introduced a new phone-phreak friend of his in Pretoria, and explained the technical operation of the new Oakland-to Vietnam linkages. (Many phone phreaks pick up spending money by M-F-ing calls from relatives to Vietnam G.I.’s, charging $5 for a whole hour of trans-Pacific conversation.)

Day and night the conference line was never dead. Blind phone phreaks all over the country, lonely and isolated in homes filled with active sighted brothers and sisters, or trapped with slow and unimaginative blind kids in straitjacket schools for the blind, knew that no matter how late it got they could dial up the conference and find instant electronic communion with two or three other blind kids awake over on the other side of America.

Talking together on a phone hookup, the blind phone phreaks say, is not much different from being there together. Physically, there was nothing more than a two-inch-square wafer of titanium inside a vast machine on Vancouver Island. For the blind kids there meant an exhilarating feeling of being in touch, through a kind of skill and magic which was peculiarly their own…”

[tags] Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, blue box, phreak, Engressia  [/tags]

Some people have an opinion about information design. Stephen Few really dislikes pie charts - 14 pages of illustrative and explicatory text about the weakenesses of pie charts.

This isn’t a new theme. Aside from past critcism from Edward Tufte and other information design specialists, Michael Janssen lumped the pie chart in with Jeff Spicolli, Stifler and other ne’er do-wells: 

“…Pie charts are the bad seed of the graph world. They aren’t very useful, hang out a lot, and don’t help you much. The worst thing about pie charts is that they aren’t even good at the thing they’re supposed to be the best at: comparing relative sizes.”

Junk Charts pointed me to an infographic from the Onion: America’s Most Popular Charts, which really depicts pie charts at their most useless:

[tags] pie charts, graph, information design [/tags]

The new paper from the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy was tugging on my heartstrings from the moment I read its title:

Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal (.pdf)

William Powers, normally the media critic for the National Journal, has penned a wonderful and rambling discussion of modern attitudes towards news, newsprint and paper in general. Mixed throughout are citations from much older texts that speak of the impact of innovations in paper felt by contemporary societies.

More importantly, his essay doesn’t hew to either of the well-worn straw men seen in the current “online vs. traditional” discussion: online isn’t the harbinger of the end of paper, and paper isn’t naturally and eternally superior to the ephemeral qualities of online information.

Instead, Powers draws from texts, interviews, web extracts and book citations to look at the role of paper in our world today. At 74 pages the download may seem , but it’s a quick and interesting read.

Because I’m quirky sometimes, I was drawn to a story Powers tells of the clash between old and new cultures – a clash that modern store clerks are incapable of resolving:

“…I chose a box of basic cream-colored note paper, took it to the counter and handed the clerk my credit card. “Do you have cash?” she asked, explaining that the computer was down. I didn’t have enough – couldn’t she just get the charge approved over the phone?

Alas no, she said, waiting for the approval takes forever. “It can be, like, ten minutes.” We stared at each other for a moment. “Couldn’t you go around the neighborhood and find a cash machine and come back?” she asked off-handedly, as if I’d created the problem and needed to fix it. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. She shrugged. I left the box on the counter and walked out.

It was almost unimaginable: A chain store in a modern American city demanding payment in paper currency. One of the paramount values of consumer culture is convenience, and I suppose I was punishing the store for violating that ethos. But then, think about the errand that had taken me to Papyrus in the first place.

… The clerk was essentially asking me to make the same choice I’d already made, choose the paper medium over the electronic one, even though it required a little extra time and effort. And why not? The store is called Papyrus.”

I remember my first job, more than twenty years ago. I felt an enormous sense of pride when the assistant manager asked my to authorize a credit card. It was a VISA. Not a branded VISA – just a plain old card.

I ran the card through the table-mounted imprinter, making sure that I pressed hard enough to make an impression on all three tissue-thin pieces of paper. I asked the customer to sign.

Then, I picked up the phone and called VISA directly. I read the card number and the expiration date out loud – loud enough for most of the store to hear. Then I wrote the authorization code on the imprinted paper.

Even if one person today was willing to wait for that five minute process to finish, all the other people in line would not be willing to wait. And so, one of the daily applications for paper has disappeared.

[tags] death of paper, newspapers, online vs. inline, Powers, National Journal, Shorenstein [/tags]

Some people may say that the popularity of Freakonomics has had a negative effect on the weight and seriousness of subjects being researched and discussed in economics faculties across North America.

I’m just glad the Economist magazine isn’t the only source of humour for economists anymore.

Professor Robert Oxoby, of the University of Calgary, has published the results of what was, most likely, an argument in the faculty lounge:

On the Efficiency of AC/DC: Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson

We explore the effects of listening to the music of AC/DC in a simple bargaining environment.

An excerpt:

“…The question as to who was a better singer, Bon Scott or Brian Johnson, may never truly be resolved. However, our analysis suggests that in terms of affecting efficient decision making among listeners, Brian Johnson was a better singer. Our analysis has direct implications for policy and organizational design: when policymakers or employers are engaging in negotiations (or setting up environments in which other parties will negotiate) and are interested in playing the music of AC/DC, they should choose from the band’s Brian Johnson era discography.

Please, before you snort and perhaps mock, realize that this was a finely tuned scientific experiment:

“…In our Bon Scott treatment, participants listened to “It’s a Long Way to the Top” (featuring Bon Scott on vocals) from the album High Voltage. In our Brian Johnson treatment, participants listened to “Shoot to Thrill” (featuring Brian Johnson on vocals) from the album Back in Black. These songs were chosen in order to avoid pre-conceived preferences for the band’s biggest singles (e.g. “Highway to Hell,” “You Shook Me All Night Long”).”

Here’s the SSRN page.

H/T to Marginal Revolution.

[tags] economics, AC/DC, Bon Scott, Brian Johnson, University of Calgary [/tags]