Keeping with tradition, the entire staff took two weeks off over the holidays. This means we are dangerously rested and ready to take on the toughest, most irascible marketing problems. To kick off the holiday, our staff, spouses, kids and significant others all gathered for a pre-holiday retreat at Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park. We saw each other in bathing suits for the first time and marveled at how toned and chiseled our company is!

We recently transferred our Eyechat Blog for the ophthalmic market to FatCow.com, a 100% wind powered web-hosting outfit. The point is that making green decisions is becoming much easier now that business and environmental interests are converging. Consumers are more educated about the environment than ever before. Greenness is not only a preference, but also an expectation. A study by the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario shows that consumers would be willing to pay at least a 10% premium for sustainable products.

Eco-Friendly Web Hosting Companies
Cheap Hosting Choice
Ecological Hosting (U.K.)
Super Green Hosting
FatCow

CURB is a self described "Natural Media Company" based in the U.K. Like all brilliant green media companies, CURB can whip up a crop circle with your logo in a jiffy. But CURB actually invents media, like snow tagging, and "clean advertising," which uses collected rainwater to clean messages in dirty streets with the help of laser-cut stencils. With the earth as its canvas, it's not surprising that ads by the young agency have already attracted major clients like Nike, Kia Motors and Budweiser. Visit CURB's portfolio, and, if you need mud slinging a little closer to home, call Ideopia. We'll start collecting rainwater.

A well-written profile on LinkedIn is key to making a good first impression and building trust with prospective connections.

Here are the key elements:

1. Who are you? Get to the point fast.
2. What do you do? Don't be encyclopedic. Tell us what's interesting and different.
3. Why should someone tap you as a resource or consider doing business with you? List special expertise and capabilities.
4. Convey passion and excitement for your work.
5. Cut everything else.

Many of us need and want to measure the output of our web sites in sales. This is particularly important with long sales cycles and cases where the sale isn't completed online. By defining intermediate measurements, you can identify trouble points, enhance information offered, or remove steps from the process. Analytics need to be customized for each site, but here are a few tracking ideas we use:

1. Purchase - Yes, the sale!
2. Specific action - The visitor downloads content, engages an interactive application, visits a key page.
3. Registration - Whether this is a lead form or an email signup, this is an important indication of engagement.
4. Call for more information - A prospect calls to make purchase or get more information.
5. Extended visit - Flag visits that exceed the average visit length. Investment of time can indicate serious interest.

With mortgage defaults and unemployment both running in the double figures, brands, just like consumers, are thinking twice before flaunting their bling. So kudos to Pepsi for pulling its Super Bowl advertising in favor of funding the "Pepsi Refresh Project." It's a multi-million dollar program that will grant money to charitable causes selected by consumers. This year, at least, that has to be a better investment in customer goodwill and involvement than a $3 million Super Bowl spot.

Of the many factors that determine the success of an email campaign, the time of day and day of week campaigns are deployed is the most often ignored. New research from Pivotal Veracity may just change your timing. It shows, for example, that the elapsed time from when messages are first sent and first seen has expanded from 23.2 hours in January 2009 to 25.9 hours in August 2009. This is critical if your email campaign is time sensitive.

Target an Episode

Pivotal Veracity also identifies 2 daily episodes especially pertinent to B2B mailings targeting office bound workers. The first period in the morning, from 7:30 to 9 a.m. is the most extended time people use to cope with their email. Later in the day, from 2 to 3 p.m., workers attend to their emails in shorter bursts. While mornings are popular, PV suggests that your customers may view your email as welcome relief later in the day.

The ideal time of deployment is a moving target. As soon as a day or time becomes "popular," it's time to move your campaign away from the onslaught of email competing for your customer's attention.

1. Protect your brand from change like a religious zealot. Your marketing mojo has worked for 100 years, and by golly it'll work for another 100. Convince yourself that all good change is evolutionary; that anything progressing faster than a terodactyl is downright dangerous.
2. Democracy rules. Vote on everything, especially creative work. And vote often. Phil in accounting. Lisa in customer service. Your mom. And, of course, legal. Your marketing will be stripped of anything that could possibly make it work, but an ass covered is an ass saved.
3. Believe your sacred brand lives in a vacuum where it is immune to cultural, technological and demographic changes. Like Women's Suffrage and the Internet, they're all fads anyway.
4. Worry about losing your job. That fear will protect you from taking any action that could positively move your business forward, while you may get lucky and ride the flat growth line into retirement.
5. Wear Teflon by Armani. Let the little guys take the fall. Make your subordinates more afraid of losing their job than you are of losing yours. After all, it's your job to cultivate talent internally.
6. Talk a good game. Drop buzzwords. Maybe Tweet once or twice. Reference articles about social media and forward them to higher ups. Everyone will know you're on top of this new fangled stuff, but don't do anything about it.
7. Congratulate yourself for being at the top of your industry without wondering if your industry will be there in 5 years.
8. Ignore criticism or even the hint of negative karma. Consumers are idiots or difficult cases. Research lies. And your agency's job is to suck up and take orders.
9. Never benchmark or evaluate your program against other industries much less competitors. Those guys are clueless and their ideas have no relevance to an aged and revered brand like yours.
10. Consumers are idiots (see No. 8). Listening to what they think or feel about your brand, or how it could better meet their needs is just stupid. What could possibly come from it? New product ideas. More share. Why bother? Your brand had this nailed 100 years ago.

Precious Moments - Awkward Family Photos is a hysterical slide show of your favorite dysfunctional family moments. View and forward to your psychiatrists.

Green Advertising - Check out GreenAdvertizing.com, the world's first carbon neutral advertising networks, which now include 170 publishers.

Super Sprayer - Watch graffiti artist Brandon McConnell create a cool work of art with spray paint - and fire! See below.