This weekend, I met with Darcy, Jenn, PJ and Victoria at Momofuku Milk Bar to have a long overdue reunion and visit our fellow FCI graduate Christina.  While eating some of Christina’s creations (volcano, pork bun, blue cheese polenta, cinnamon bun and an assortment of soft serves) Darcy, Jenn, PJ and Victoria all agreed to start contributing to Chocolate Cubed!  They all bring very different passions to the team, which you will see expressed through their desserts, cakes, cookies and all their recipes.  Our goal of this site it to help motivate us to bake more as well as to share our ideas with the community, while learning from it at the same time.  

Over the next few weeks we will be writing bios of each of the chefs and then introducing them to you one by one.   I hope you are as excited as I am.

Share/Save

Whenever I look at the statistics for this site, I am always surprised by the amount of traffic I get from queries that include the word “chocolate” or “recipe”.  I shouldn’t be surprised because I have done some work in search engine optimization and the fact that the word “chocolate” is in every page title and is part of every URL makes the search engines think this site is all about chocolate.

So, instead of fighting to rank on other topics and inflating my bounce rate because I don’t talk enough about chocolate goodies, I have decided to convert this into a baking blog.  I have asked some of my fellow classmates from pastry school to help contribute and hope to begin this week.  For those of you that actually want to hear me rant about other stuff, I am going to launch jordansalvit.com over the next week as well.

I am very excited about this change and hope you are too!  Yay for more pastries and chocolate goodies!

Share/Save

This morning’s NYTimes business section had an article by Janet Rae-Dupree about the people and companies trying to get tax credits for innovation, because innovation creates jobs.  I wholeheartedly agree and want to mention a couple of examples.  Yahoo!, Google, Intel, Apple and Pfizer are just a few of the many examples of companies that created hundreds of thousands of jobs by innovating.  Google’s success generated almost 20,000 jobs according to WikiHow and that is not including all the peripheral Google-related jobs.  The SEM business took a whole new twist when Google launched adwords and its auction model.  SEO is now a full-time job for many people and that is because search engines now drive businesses.  

Joseph Stiglitz was quoted in the article as saying all our bailouts are focusing on the past, not the future.  Will throwing money at corporations for innovation work?  or should the government be investing in small businesses?  I am not sure either will work effectively.  This is a little farfetched, but what about making all college graduates publish at least 1 academic paper before graduating?  This would show them the power of creating new ideas and the validity of peer review.  I am not sure it would create jobs, but it would certainly make our society one of thinkers and creators, two ingredients for innovation.

Share/Save

Since President-Elect Obama was voted into office in November, I have seen people counting the days till January 20th, 2009, Inauguration Day.  There is a hope that on the 20th the world will change.  The economy will be better.  U.S. relations with the world powers will be better.  Everything will be better because President G W Bush will be out of office.  This  seems ludicrous to me.  Is this a result of the marketing genius that got Obama elected?  Is “Change We Can Believe In” going to be a let down?  I am hopeful that Obama will change the way government operates, but it cannot happen within the first 100 days.  

This got me thinking about marketing an unproven product.  Setting expectations too high could cause a huge backlash that could ruin a company or product.  Nowadays with twitter and ratings sites like yelp, a set of unhappy customers all responding to good marketing is hard to bounce back from.  Any tips to manage those expectations from the start without losing market share?  What about ways of fixing a fiasco?

Share/Save

As 2008 comes to a close everyone is talking about what is next.  What is going to define 2009?  Is it going to be a new widget?  a new phone? Will Apple come out with a new device that is all the rage?  Will Dell win back its share of the laptop market?  Is Obama going to change the world?  The fact that everyone is talking about it and is excited about something new is exciting in and of itself.  To me, this means our creativity is firing and innovation is abound. 

As a marketer, I read David Mullen’s 5 PR Predictions and think he has some great points.  I want to focus on his point about measuring people.  I agree with David that we will start measuring people instead of impressions, but I think it will go a lot further than that.  I don’t think the economy is turning around so quickly, which will cause companies to be very “bottom line centric”.  Companies will want to show how their investment in Web 2.0 has paid off and that will mean qualifying the active users/visitors.  It will mean developing ways to report how effective social networking tools are, like managing a twitter account.  Yes, twitter allows the company to talk to it’s customers one-to-one, but did that person buy something?  Did they click on an ad?  Did they refer someone?  How long did the cycle take? 

I think 2009 is going to be the year of the number crunchers and web analysts.  Maybe it is time to take a statistics refresher course.

Share/Save

Bob Herbert wrote an interesting op-ed piece this morning in the NY Times titled “Stop Being Stupid“.  Bob credits Madoff for saying that he paid investors with “money that wasn’t there”.  The piece ends by saying that we need to go into serious debt to jump start our economy and that we need to start investing in world-class infrastructure.  

I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation?  Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to.  Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science.  What is the next frontier?  Artificially Intelligent robots in every home?  Mars?  Flying Cars?  What is America’s dream?  Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.

Share/Save

Since I came back from vacation in September, I have had a very hard time getting back into blogging.  I have taken up twitter in the meantime, which has occupied more time than I ever imagined, but blogging and micro-blogging are very different.  Until now, every time I blogged I felt that I needed to have a position and a wel thought out argument about an article I read, a site I saw or an idea that I wanted to rant about.  I am starting to think that I was very wrong and didn’t truly get the idea of blogging, which is why I found it so hard to write something every week.

I now think that blogging is about being part of the conversation: the conversation of the web.   It should be an extension of what I micro-blog about and give me and my followers a larger space to converse.

Any thoughts?

Share/Save

Over the weekend I found out about this amazing event on the west coast:  Cupcake Camp.  Ariel Waldman organized the first camp this past spring in San Francisco and is in the process of organizing the second for this December.  It got me thinking that although foodies gather in NYC regularly to eat out and try all the cupcake places, including Magnolia, Crumbs, Buttercup, Cupcake cafe, etc…, it would be even more fun to have a camp.  Camp would be about learning different techniques, the effects of different ingredients and of course eat lots of yummy cupcake varieties.

I am not really sure how to go about this, but before I start any planning, are there any people in NYC that would be interested?  If so, send me a note either via twitter or comment here.  I bet I can talk to my old alma mater and see if they’d be interested in helping out.  If not, there are some fun people that I graduated the pastry program with that would love this.  

Although this is slightly premature, I am very excited about the idea!  If you are too, let me know!

Share/Save

At the end of last week, I was instructed by the SVP of Marketing, my client, to find a way to cut at least 15% of their SEM budget without risking too much revenue.  After slicing and dicing all the numbers and looking at the twenty different portfolios with thousands of keywords in each, we (me and webmetro) could only find 7.5% to cut.  I knew this wasn’t acceptable, but presented the findings and was of course told to find another way.  So back to the drawing board it was. Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Save

I was talking to a colleague at my client’s office last week about office culture when she mentioned this month’s feature article from the Harvard Business Review.  The article is titled “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity” and was written by Ed Catmull, the cofounder of Pixar and the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios.  The article chronicles the successful steps they took to set up their community and the issues they had along the way.  

Read the rest of this entry »

Share/Save