NYC Bucket List Challenge: Recap

Hello from Newport, RI!

The absurdly stressful process of moving out of New York was of course chaotic and I haven't been able to blog in a couple of weeks. Special thanks to my friends Brian & Tim and my neighbor Chris who helped me move a queen sized bed and box spring and a gigantic oak dresser down four flights of stairs, then take them to the corners in the middle of the night to avoid a fine.

I may be the only person in NYC who wasn't in the know about the particulars of New York's waste collection rules, but I see weird, large things abandoned on the curbs of NYC seemingly every day, so I didn't even think there were rules around it. In case any readers are moving out of NYC sometime soon, here is a pro tip: read up on Bulk Collection and get an understanding of the schedule in advance of your move. Otherwise, your landlord (and then you) can get fined.

Now that the craziness is over, here's a quick recap of my NYC Bucket List Challenge. I was only able to complete 31 out of 40 challenges because the end of September brought a wonderful wedding in Maryland to attend, a beautiful new baby to visit, and the largest climate march in history happening a block away from my apartment! All awesome reasons to miss a few challenges if you ask me.

Below is the final list. It's hard to pick, but I think my top 3 favorite challenges were going to AquaGrill with a few friends & ordering 3 dozen oysters, exploring Red Hook, Brooklyn and seeing my friend Kristen teach a geometry class in the South Bronx.

You can check out the hashtag #NYCBucketListChallenge on Instagram to see photos from some of my favorite challenges.

Thanks to everyone who joined me for these. It was a lot of fun and a great way to get to see people before leaving New York.

 

NYC Bucket List Challenge: Final List

1. Go rowing in Central Park (needs to happen on a Saturday or Sunday morning) done 9/8

2. Go to one more Yankee game (to see #2 play) done 8/23

3. Spend an afternoon in Dumbo

4. See Dark Universe at Hayden Planetarim  done 3/14

5. See Sleep No More done 4/14

6. Order something weird/difficult to pronounce in Chinatown  done 9/4

7. Do yoga every day for 7 consecutive days done week of 9/22

8. Go to the roof of Eataly  done 9/9

9. Walk down one street I’ve never walked down before done 9/4

10. Check out the Meatball Shop that just opened down the block from my apartment done 9/19

11. Find a Van Leeuwen Ice Cream Truck and eat vegan ice cream  done 8/22/14

12. Experience Barry’s Boot Camp done 9/23

13. Indulge in a pastry from Cafe Lalo, where You’ve Got Mail was filmed done 9/21

14. Watch Kristen teach geometry to high school sophomores in the South Bronx done 9/29

15. Venture to Red Hook done 9/6

16. See Macy’s 4th of July fireworks done 7/4

17. Hang out in FAO Schwarz done 9/19

18. Go to Smorgasburg attempted 9/19

19. Run a half marathon done 12/13

20. Use 2 Free Barre Classes coupon at Physique 57

 21. Go to a restaurant participating in Oyster Week (and eat oysters, obviously) Done 9/16

22. Volunteer for a good cause done 7/14

23. Buy a GroupOn for an out-of-the-ordinary activity in the area

24. Have brunch with a lot of friends done 9/21

25. See stand-up comedy

26. Go to Ellis Island done 9/20

27. Go to the MoMA

28. Walk over the Williamsburg Bridge done 12/13

29. Eat oysters at Aquagrill done 9/16

30. Catch up with someone I’ve been out-of-touch with done 9/16 x3

31. Discover a new trail/landmark in Central Park  done 9/2

32. Try to spot Bradley Cooper at a 6:30am Soul Cycle Class in Tribeca Done 9/16

33. Get a slice from Di Fara in Brooklyn

34. See art/ drink wine at a Thursday night Gallery Hop in Chelsea

35. Go to a speakeasy I’ve never been to before done 9/10

36. Eat at Rosemary’s

37. Finally start a blog done 6/14

38. Wait on line for bombolone/cookie/some kind of pastry at Levain Bakery  done 8/16/14

39. Drink wine at Tolani happy hour done 9/15

40. Go the the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Why Starbucks Spells Your Name Wrong

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPbrlNsMTg4[/embed]

New Tech: IKEA bookbook™

Loving this satirical marketing for the IKEA 2015 catalogue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOXQo7nURs0

#ThingsTimHowardCouldSave: July 4th on the East Coast

The #ThingsTimHowardCouldSave hashtag is hilarious.



I'm really late to the party, but I just learned our national hero is from New Jersey and even attended Montclair Kimberly Academy, a high school just up the road from the one I attended and one of its rivals.

Photoshop is not my forte, but here is my contribution to #ThingsTimHowardCouldSave. Here he is pushing Hurricane Arthur out to sea and saving July 4th on the East Coast.

[caption id="attachment_188" align="aligncenter" width="676"] Tim Howard Saving the East Coast from Hurricane Arthur.[/caption]

 

Cheap Sunglasses

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHe6lVOTFEU

Confession: I am a serial loser of designer sunglasses.

I've lost expensive sunglasses all over the world: In the subway in NYC, off a boat on the coast of Brisbane, AUS,  on a plane in New Zealand, in Pennsylvania, and at my office in Manhattan. I've even watched a pair fall off the hood of a car onto Route 6 on Cape Cod.

Quick tally of the damage (to the best of my memory):

• 4 pairs of Rayban aviators


• 1 pair of Ralph Lauren


• 1 pair of Rayban wayfarers (polarized)


• 1 pair of Warby Parker

In short, I just don't deserve to have expensive sunglasses. It's just not a good way for me to spend money.

Luckily, my coworker told me about Knockarounds last year. Knockaround is a San Diego-based company that makes pretty cool sunglasses for super cheap.

You can get polarized ones for $19:

[caption id="attachment_168" align="aligncenter" width="676"] Polarized Knockarounds[/caption]

The Originals are only $7!

[caption id="attachment_169" align="alignnone" width="676"] Original Knockaround[/caption]

Their Bio-Based line is a bit more expensive. According to their site, the plastic in these is 53% plant-based, derived from non-GMO castor plant:

[caption id="attachment_170" align="alignnone" width="676"] Bio-Based Knockarounds[/caption]

You can even customize a pair by style, colors, lens and texture:

[caption id="attachment_172" align="alignnone" width="676"] Custom Fort Knocks[/caption]

First time shoppers will be prompted to opt in to a 15% off coupon upon entering the site. Once you click to redeem, a timer starts and you've got 30 minutes to use it or lose it. This is the quickest deadline I've seen for redeeming a coupon, but it's a clever conversion strategy for cheap items like these.

Plus, I kind of love their Instagram campaign, #knocksonproduce.

[caption id="attachment_176" align="aligncenter" width="354"] #Knocksonproduce[/caption]

 

Also, they have Snoop Dogg on their website.

[caption id="attachment_173" align="aligncenter" width="480"] Snoop D-o-double-g.[/caption]

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls of CVS

Completing a purchase at a CVS starts off normally enough:

"Do you have an ExtraCare card?" the cashier asks.

"Yes", you say, handing over your key chain, unsure if you've ever gotten any real benefit from being an ExtraCare member but indifferent to it.

The cashier swipes the card and begins ringing up your products. He/she places them in plastic CVS brand bags your reusable earth-friendly canvas bag that you remembered to bring. You hand over your credit card to complete the transaction and wait for a receipt.

But then, something weird happens: Your receipt DOES. NOT. STOP. PRINTING.

Instead of a normal-sized piece of receipt paper, a seemingly infinite rectangle inscribed in strange glyphs rapidly cascades out of the register. It's another excessively long CVS coupon scroll!

The cashier puts the scroll of coupons in your bag, and it begins it's journey toward a) the pile of other two-foot-long scrolls you saved from previous trips and never bring back to CVS or b) your garbage can.

Either way, the unnecessary paper waste is destined for the top layer of Fresh Kills, where  it will hopefully decompose faster than the time it takes to chop down the trees needed to make the millions of other scrolls just like it. You can only hope it won't fly away and wrap itself around the neck of a poor, unsuspecting sea gull.

[caption id="attachment_106" align="aligncenter" width="676"] Two CVS scrolls cluttering up my apartment.[/caption]

Unlike the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, CVS scrolls are not fascinating texts written in Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew and Nabataean on parchment paper and papyrus. They are not studied by historians and scholars and they do not hold any historical significance whatsoever.  However, similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls, CVS scrolls are ancient.

[caption id="attachment_119" align="aligncenter" width="676"] Dead Sea Scrolls[/caption]

In the Digital Age, printing millions of yardstick-long bar code coupons is antiquated and wasteful. Especially since one of CVS's top competitors, Walgreens/Duane Reade, went digital with their customer rewards points long ago. At Duane Reade, they keep track of your accumulated points and apply the discounts to your next shop automatically. They don't expect you to carry around a scroll, search it for applicable discounts, and remember to bring it back to the store with you.

I decided to hop on Facebook and give CVS a heads up about their competitor's more eco- and customer-friendly practices and see what they had to say about their scrolls. Here was there response:



Apparently, you can choose a "Send to Card" option for your coupons here, which should cut down on the length of your CVS scrolls. You could do that or you could just shop at Duane Reade, where you don't have to login or click anything to take advantage of the discounts you earned.

When the best social media campaign is no social media campaign

After the mega-successes of social media campaigns like Ben & Jerry’s City-Churned and and HBO's #RoastJoffrey, we’ve been shining a celebratory spotlight on the two-way dialogue between consumers and brands and the innovative marketing possibilities of that message mechanism.

These campaigns have created an unprecedented change in the relationship between customers and brands: the customer loves the brand for acknowledging and appreciating them; the brand loves the costumer for providing crowd-sourced, marketable brand love and free broadcasting. More and more organizations are using this kind of participatory marketing that social media platforms allow for, and they should.

 Except when they shouldn’t.

An organization that probably should not jump on the conversational marketing bandwagon is the New York Police Department. A couple of months ago, the NYPD unintentionally started a worldwide conversation about police brutality with this open-ended tweet:

[caption id="attachment_55" align="aligncenter" width="464"] The tweet heard round the world #myNYPD[/caption]

Intended to be a crowd-sourced photo collection of happy citizens and NY police officers, the #myNYPD campaign quickly spiralled out of control as people began sharing images and anecdotes of police clashing with citizens in countries around the world.  The social/PR disaster highlighted the risks involved in launching a discussion-based social media campaign and the lack of control a brand/organization has over the direction of a conversation it starts.

Before deciding to execute a conversational campaign, an organization first needs to think about all of its product and service offerings and the inherent emotional response people have to those products and services.  Do those products/services evoke negative feelings? Are they somehow unpleasant, uncomfortable or controversial? Just because many organizations are using conversational campaigns successfully, doesn’t necessarily mean it makes sense for any organization to do one. For mission critical organizations like banks and government agencies, which often find themselves at the center of controversy, opening up a conversation on social media can be extremely risky business. If issuing parking tickets and arrests are in your repertoire of service offerings – it’s probably not worth the risk.

On the other hand, for more light-hearted brands whose products and services evoke mostly pleasant and positive feelings in people, a conversational campaign is more likely to be a huge hit than a potential risk.  For example, Oreo’s Snack Hackathon, which feature’s consumer-submitted “Snack Hacks” via a Tumblr blog, is a campaign that comes with very little risk comparatively.

No matter what an organization’s products/services are, three main areas of focus need to be part of the development of a conversational marketing campaign:

• Risk Assessment –Asking “If this conversation were to head in negative direction, what would that look like?” is a critical part of developing a conversational social campaign.  What does a bad direction look like? What does the worst case scenario look like? How many bad directions could there be and what is likelihood? Every decision comes with risk, of course, and there is always going to be some element of “you never know.” But every possible potential risk factor should be identified and thought about.


•  Sentiment Analysis – Social listening tools such as Crimson Hexagon or Sysomos often come with a hefty price tag, but they are crucial for big brand to use when developing a conversational social campaign.  You need to understand what conversations people are having about your brand before you insert yourself into those conversations. If there is a significant amount of passionately negative discussion happening about your brand, it may be too risky to launch a conversational campaign.


•  Contingency Planning– After identifying risks and understanding existing sentiment, a contingency plan can be developed.  In the event your campaign takes an unexpected turn, how will you respond? What resources will a good response plan involve?  Beyond action from your social/community team, your PR team and even C-level members of your organization may need to be involved in the preparation of a contingency plan.

Of course, no matter how well you plan, there is always going to be some element of “you never know” on social media. While brands enjoy the innovative marketing power that these digital channels have grown to provide, every businessperson needs to keep in mind that social media is still the tool of the masses. It’s the place where smaller, unpopular voices get heard alongside the bigger voices, and the place where people go to participate in democracy and start grassroots movements. You can’t be 100% sure what will happen when you open up a conversation to a worldwide audience, so think it through and plan smart!