Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line: FunnyBusiness

Leaked Black Friday Ads.Doth the retailers protest too much?

It's becoming a holiday tradition. Websites  now publicize the top secret, highly coveted day after Thanksgiving sales circulars. While one retailer issued a cease and desist order, the others are taking a wink-wink don't do that attitude.

Read my post at Blogher

Image credit: The EMG

Bully Bully For You

  According to a recent study up to 30% of all American workers say they have been "bullied" at work.

Many Americans are familiar with sexual and racial harassment, but not generalized workplace bullying,” said study team member Sarah Tracy of Arizona State University. Bullying can lead to higher company costs including increased employee illness, use of sick days, and medical costs, ultimately affecting productivity, she added.

Workplace bullying can include “screaming, cursing, spreading vicious rumors, destroying the target’s property or work product, excessive criticism, and sometimes hitting, slapping, and shoving.” Subtle behaviors, such as silent treatment, disregard of requests and exclusion from meetings, count as bullying.

Who falls prey to the office bully? Surprisingly it is not the grown up version of the awkward kid on the playground. In fact, according to the experts, office bullies go for the people who have the most potential to succeed. Gary Namie is a psychologist who  not only studies workplace bullying but who has founded the nonprofit , BullyBusters,which is working to get states to pass anti-bullying workplace legislation.( 10 states have introduced legislation, none has passed a law)

"It's much different than school-yard bullying," he says. "This target isn't the kid with the Coke-bottle glasses."                          

Instead, workplace bullies tend to drive out colleagues they view as threats: those who are technically competent, independent, possess good social skills, and have strong ethics (and thus may be whistleblowers).

Targets tend to be reluctant to report bullying, primarily for fear of retribution, but also because they run the risk of being labeled a whiner or a snitch, or losing their job outright if the               bully is their superior.             

There is little evidence that workplace bullies go  on to commit workplace violence. According to the Center for Disease Control's National  Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, co-workers commit  fewer than one in 10 acts of workplace violence.

            

While workplace bullying hasn't gotten a lot of attention in the U.S, it does seem to be a topic that has been "on the radar"in the UK and Australia  for several years. There are  several websites devoted to dealing with workplace bullying including Bully Online and Bullying that has posters and lots of information on how to deal with bullies.

How can you tell if you have a bully environment in your office? According to BullyOnline,

If you have a serial bully on the staff they will reveal themselves by their department showing excessive rates of

• staff turnover
• sickness absence
• stress breakdowns
• deaths in service
• ill-health retirements
• early retirements
• uses of disciplinary procedures
• grievances initiated
• suspensions
• dismissals
• uses of private security firms to snoop on employees
• litigation including employment tribunals or legal action against     employees

Hat Tip to my buddy Harold for pointing me in the right direction.

Image Credit: Flickr member Indignico

Smiley Face Rant

Smiley Faces are slang punctuation.  Not recognized as an official member of the punctuation family --it is nevertheless recognized as  punctuation by email providers. Several years ago Polytropos posted a Smiley Rant

What is it with software that automagically transforms the ASCII smiley symbol—:)—into an leering yellow circle? MS Word does it by default, as does Opera mail now, and Wordpress—and those are just the ones I’ve run across lately. They are not the same thing.  If I wanted an actual smiley face, I’d have used a freakin’ yellow crayon.

If you are interested in the official list of punctuation marks,check out punctuation on wikipedia

Now, there is the Smiley Face Intervention video. It will definitely make you pause they next time you want to end a sentence with :)

Video Credit:mark_day_comedy's videos

Notes FromThe Road: There's No Free Lunch

  Until 8:30 last night when my server brought in my room service order, I was feeling like the poster child for bargain traveling.

Airline ticket on Sun Country - round-trip from Minneapolis to Dulles $163.00.

You name your price  on Priceline and  I ended up with a room at the Hyatt Regency in Reston   for $100.

All that joy was squashed when I looked at my room service bill. Here's the order for myself and my 17- year- old daughter, Berit.

1 Fruit plate
1 Apple Cobbler
1 Sauteed Calamari
1 Loaded potato
1 Stinson  Merlot

Now this bill had two items that seemed redundant. A delivery charge and a room service charge.
If you take away the delivery charge and the service charge it's about  $40. With those two items it's  $50.14

When I called the front desk to explain the difference between the delivery charge and the service charge  I was asked, " were you happy with your server?"

Calling the woman who knocked on my door and brought in the tra, is a lot like calling the Dominos pizza guy a server,." Do you mean did she do a good job of putting the tray on the end of my bed? Sure, she did that just fine."
If a hotel wants to call delivery people servers then bring in a table, tablecloth and a lovely flower would be nice as well.

I'm not the only person who feels like this service charge/delivery charge is double dipping. A couple of months ago, Bill McGee,writing for USA TODAY shared his frustration over the extra charges.

A "service charge" includes the tip. But a tip is not included in a "room service charge" or the more commonly used "delivery fee" or "delivery charge." So in the case of my burger, the $3.00 delivery charge was not a tip but the $3.78 service charge was (calculated as 18% of $21.00). Then the tax was added. Throw in my additional $3.00 tip, and this server was well compensated for the ten minutes spent carrying that tray to my room.

That is the same explanation they gave me last night. I still don't understand it. Aren't they charging for the exact same thing? Is this just a Washington, D.C. custom? Being a frequent room service orderer I think this is the first time I have seen this creative billing arrangement.

Is it new? Is it widespread? Are the hotels just trying to make up revenue because we no longer use the phones in the room?

Credit Image: Niemette

One-on-one marketing sells books

  On any given day John Shors may attend three or four book clubs -- always talking about the same book, "Beneath a Marble Sky." Shors is the book's author.

When the book-- an historical romance about the building of the Taj Mahal-- came out in hardback, it earned good reviews and mediocre sales. When it came out in paperback,Shors added a pesonal letter at the back of the book encouraging book clubs to book him for a personal engagement.

200 book clubs later, Shors' book sales are going great. It's number 350 on Amazon and getting 5 star reviews.

Book clubs are not the only people intriqued with Shors marketing strategy.He caught the eye of CBS Newsman Harry Smith. You can read his story or watch the video (beware you do have to watch some advertising before the interview  begins).

There is a second interview with just Smith chatting with Shors. You can watch that video as well.

Shors told Smith that his goal is to attend 1000 book clubs. He's booking book club discussions  through 2007.

A couple of years ago author Lorna Landvik ,"Patty Jane's House of Curls" visited my book club. It was great. Landvik lives in Minneapolis and she regularly attends book clubs in the cities. However, from a marketing perspective talking to the hometown crowd is probably not the best way to reach a wide audience.

Shors is taking  the book club personal appearance to a new level by making virtual guest appearances.Whether on a speaker phone or video conference-Shors visits these book club without stepping into their livingrooms--he is a virtual guest.

Watch the back of your paperbacks. I have a feeling that more and more authors will soon be hopping on the virtual book club tour.

French Newspaper decides Bloggers are no longer second class citizens

For some journalists, it's akin to Chicken Little declaring, "The sky is falling. The sky is falling."  Not only is the French newspaper Le Monde,welcoming bloggers ---they are giving them equal billing as professional journalists.

Mon Dieu.

From Loic Le Meur blog,

Le Monde is one of the first newspaper in the World to offer blogs to their readers, under the Le Monde brand. They have also published a ranking of the 10 top blogs, mixing their journalists blogs and their readers blogs, showing them at the same level, based on blog readers recommendations.

The Le Monde blogging policy comes at a time when American newspapers are continuing the slippery slope into circulation oblivion. A slip, that Jennifer Saba reports in Editor &Publisher ,the financial experts expected.

"Circulation declined as expected," wrote John Janedis, senior analyst with Wachovia Equity Research, in a note. He, like others, points to the effects of the Internet that is giving print circulation a whipping.
 
"We expect the companies in our coverage universe to continue to improve their online presence, using both their own Web sites, as well as to purchase other online assets, to help combat the continued decline in circ trends," Janedis wrote.
 
Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani doesn't even think yesterday's bad news -- daily circulation plunged 2.8% and Sunday fell 3.4%, one of, if not the worst drop in recent years -- will do much to shake The Street's confidence. Or lack thereof.
 
"Overall we believe these results are in line with expectations of low to mid single-digit average declines and therefore do not expect a material impact [on] the publishing stocks," Quadrani wrote in a note. For that, she's waiting for October advertising results.

The folks at Freakonomics have different take on the situation.They say the circulation drops are intentional

Not everyone is convinced that newspapers are dying, of course. Jack Welch wants to buy the Boston Globe; Dow Jones just managed to find a buyer who paid $282 million for six smaller newspapers; and of course several months ago, McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder. Circulation declines notwithstanding, these transactions suggest an underlying value that the newspapers’ own articles do not reflect.

The media executive Allan D. Mutter makes a very interesting point on his blog about circulation declines: a lot of them are essentially intentional. That is, circulation figures are falling in part because many newspapers—in response, I am guessing, to recent audit scandals at Newsday
and elsewhere—have stopped distributing free or cheap copies of their papers, which used to be helpful in padding circulation figures.

But, as Music City Mafia pointed out,

Circulation is the least of the newspaper’s worries. Advertisers are heading for the exits in droves. Car dealers have traditionally spent more money in the local paper than all other media combined. And that has held steady for decades. But newspapers share of dealer’s budgets (according tot the N.A.D.A) has deopped from 51% to 36% in the last two years. I assumer that similar numbers exist for your favorites: Real Estate Agents