We love the Smart is Sexy campaign from the UVM Room- Check out this Mission Statement

“Smart is Sexy� celebrates the inner beauty and confidence that comes with the pursuit of knowledge. We feel that there’s nothing more beautiful than recognizing your potential. We define a student as anyone who takes learning into their own hands. The idea of intelligence as being sexy came from three college students who wanted to spread the word that being smart is something to be proud of.

Here is a link to the facebook group.

And here is a link to another blog entry about Smart is Sexy.

I am all about the pink shirt too. Personally, I think they should have had a pocket so I could show off my pocket protector with style.

posted by M. Nedell 7-22-08

Sure - It took me all of 45 seconds to break the newest challenger to Google - cuil.com - which was built by some ex-Googlers and boasts being the World’’s largest search engine. So - like some blogs have already mentioned - Cuil isn”t so cool.

But - hey - it takes time to get cool. Fonzie didn”t ride a motorcycle until he was like what… 12…

And hey - you can”t be cool forever. At one point the Fonzie character was cool . Put him next to Jay-Z now-a-days though… So let’s try to remember that when we speak of Google’’s cool factor.

What is - might not be what is - later on down the road. Google wasn’t even around however many years ago - the internet is still in diapers - so while 40000 bloggers are rushing to jump on the bandwagon of denouncing the next Cuil thing I would like to kick back and say hey - be cool… give it a couple of years… coolness on the web is not a factor easily measured out of the box - especially when the box is placed next to the main industry goliath.

And I do like the black screen. If the Internet went all black for a week I think we would save 2 billion killowatt hours… On predominantly black screens… “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

posted by M. Nedell 7-22-08

Seth Godin is a genius. I know I”m not alone in thinking that, but nearly everything the guy writes seems to have a revolutionary tone to it, as if to say, “this is the way things are, but why aren”t we thinking about them in this way instead?”

On his blog, Seth announced a while back that he was looking for interns to work for him this summer (if you”re in college and interested in anything related to marketing or media, you”d be nuts not to look into it). His post two days ago leads me to believe hes getting a lot of run-of-the-mill, cookie-cutter resumes with nothing really tangible to them. No meat and potatoes.

He basically states that we live in an world where the people reading your resumes are so saturated by uniformity that to get noticed you have to break the mold. You have to hook them before you can show them what you can do and unless you can do that, you”re dead in the water.

In his post, Seth asks if you don”t have something special to show why you”re different from the competition, why should anyone else think you”re remarkable? A great question that seems to get down to the core of what we do in every facet of our work for a client. You have to set yourself apart from all others to get ahead. This includes everything you do for marketing, including your organization’s blog.

I see blog after blog from organizations around the world attempting to market themselves by talking about their new product and how they “get it” over the next guy who is trying to sell you the same thing. What I continually find is that they really don”t “get it” at all. What they get is that “blogging is ”in” right now.” They don”t seem to comprehend that blogging for the sake of blogging could actually hurt the way people feel about the authenticity of your organization.

To me, its a distress signal when I see an organization blogging about something that isn”t compelling. It shows me they need help. If you”re blogging and its not of any importance to anyone outside your organization (and maybe not even people within your organization) it is time to put the keyboard down.

We live in a world where people are so web-savvy and media-saturated that they can spot a fake without taking much more than a glance. Never forget how much competition there is out there. You may only have one chance to make an impression. Keep this in mind before you hop on the bandwagon of “the next big thing” that comes along.

Don”t put up videos on youtube just because your competitor did; don”t launch a facebook page just because you know your core audience spends most of their day friending and poking people; and most importantly, don”t blog unless you have something worth saying. Its a waste of your customers time, it makes you look careless, and like a standard resume on a heavy stock paper, it tells people you”re just like everyone else: easily forgettable.

Be different. Be compelling. Know you’re who you”re trying to sell to and make them want to know you in return.

posted by D. Mason 3-19-08

People take in a LOT of information these days. Think of how many different images and words you are exposed to in a day – from magazines to web banner ads to text messages, everybody’s got something to say. To keep from being overloaded by these messages, many times we will “tune them out�, especially if it is a message we feel we have identified previously.

Bearing that in mind, when it comes to Press Releases, you are essentially competing with a lot of different messages in many forms. Since the ultimate goal is to get your release published or at least noticed, here are a few tips of how to leverage what you do have on your side to hopefully get some buzz generated.

1. Get to the point – quickly. Make your point in the quickest, clearest way. Boil down the information to its essentials, and then arrange it so it makes sense. A press release is not the place for clever or flowery language, unless you have the rare skill of writing with brevity and wit. Save the commentary, opinions and clever observations for your blog – like I am!

2. Avoid Jargon. You know what you mean, and I may know what you mean, but the general public may not. A large part of boiling things down means to put them in terms that most will easily understand. Using confusing jargon is an easy way to lose a reader. Many people have access to and read press releases that have not been filtered by the media. Keep this in mind.

3. Make it Timely. Modern culture moves at the speed of light. What’s interesting to a reader one day will change the next. Keep your releases as current as possible. A good way to get into this habit is to write press releases on a consistent basis, even if you don’t feel like it is news. You never know what will be published, and this will keep you in the practice of completing releases in a timely manner.

4. The Web is your friend. The Web is not only your friend; it’s the dependable friend that you can call for a ride home. Most everyone uses it on a near-daily basis, space is unlimited, and many times you can control the content. What a great tool! Leverage this as much as you can by writing releases that contain keyword-rich copy and placing links in releases to deliver potential customers to landing pages on your Web site. Another idea to consider is adding social media tags to the release, such as DIGG, del.icio.us, and Technorati, to enable your release to be found easier on the web.

So in short: get to the point, make it clear, make it timely and leverage the web.

Good luck!

posted by K. Viles 1-12-08