Ah, this is just still bothering me. I really don’t get how this passed through all the legal and creative minds.

Really, apple? This was the best you could come up with? Steve, you have lost a little bit of your edge here.

Get more info on the iPad HERE.

I hadn’t heard of TalkShoe until my fave podcasters, the Manic Mommies, used this technology for their weekly podcast to do their first call in show, and I had to investigate. The description from the application developer’s site states it far better than I could:
“TalkShoe is a service that enables anyone to easily create, join, or listen to Live Interactive Discussions, Conversations, Podcasts and Audioblogs.” Additionally, TalkShoe has an open API so that others can easily integrate its features into their own solutions.

So if you’ve got something to say, and you’d rather say it than type it – this is the tool for you.

This tool crosses over many interests that I rant about on this blog – marketing, technology, and iPhone apps. Okay, technically it’s not an app but if you steer your iPhone web browser to http://iphone.talkshoe.com/, you’ll view a customized web page made specifically for using this service on your Apple gadget.

The uses of this service are many – you can schedule a call and have up to 250 people together at once (and you can even use your Facebook, MySpace, Meebo to post info to your friends and schedule a call directly with your friend list) or you could use this software and service to record and post your own podcast. Very tempting … luckily I don’t have any extra time in my day to do this. If you plan on pod-casting on a regular basis, there’s even a way to monetize your podcast by building a subscriber base and marketing to them with Blubrry, and the Talk Shoe Cashprogram.

Aside from using this tool to promote yourself and your services from your blog or web page, you can also use it to do research and collect information. Browse the listing of shows live, and you’ll see hundreds of entries on everything from metaphysical therapy to women who do too much to a show that takes it’s political stance from Logan’s Run.

As a podcast addict, I’m loving TalkShoe – it’s a great way for me to search for new content. And maybe at some point in the future when my littlest is out of diapers, I’ll be using this service to speak to y’all instead of type.

You know I love the web for freebie offers, can’t resist! Here’s another great marketing drive for Starbucks, buy a cup of coffee tomorrow morning (July 21st) and get a pastry for free. Print this coupon off their site, and bring it with you for free bakery goodness!

I was excited to find an email in my inbox today from Starbucks, asking me to visit their Facebook page so I could send a coupon for free ice cream to a fellow Facebook friend.

They’re currently running a promotion where you can send a coupon (it gets mailed, not emailed, which is the only downfall of this campaign … let’s keep things digital, baby!) for a FREE pint of Starbucks ice cream. There is a limit of the number of pint coupons they’ll give away – up to 20,000 coupons for a free pint every day through July 19 – and the link in my email drove me right to the Facebook fans page where I could sign up a friend to receive the coupon (okay I’ll fess up, I sent the coupon to myself!) and if the max number of coupons per hour has been given away already, you get linked to a printable coupon for a buck off their ice cream and you are asked to return later to try and get the coupon.

Social networking is huge, but rarely has a company made a significant attempt to really target spreading information via this path. Starbucks is providing a coupon for a free high value product directly from a facebook application – and actively building new lists of people to market to – very nice. And if that coupon’s unavailable, providing an alternate coupon so the user doesn’t feel like a total loser – that’s a win/win situation.

I’ll be printing my coupon now for the dollar off, and checking my mailbox for my free ice cream coupon in the weeks to come.

Boy am I glad I don’t have one of these phones! Talk about breaking rules! Magilla Marketing’s daily email showcased this incredible mess of an opt-out system for Tracfone today, and this article at directmag.com demonstrates what can happen when email marketers don’t follow the rules. In this case, tracfone requires you to input your phone’s serial number in order to opt out, and that serial number is located inside the phone, under the battery. Or possibly somewhere else, so look around. Aside from being incredibly frustrating, what tracfone is doing is illegal. What’s worse is that you get subscribed to tracfone’s email list simply by adding minutes to your phone and entering your email address. No warning, no alert, nothing. And apparently they send out 3-4 emails a week.

Need further confirmation? Review the rules for CAN-SPAM that were revised July 2008 here. Specifically:

“The rules say that the opt-out process can’t require any fees or the input of a password, login, or other information that would somehow hinder unsubscribing. The opt-out process must require no more than the recipient’s email address. (You can’t run people through multiple steps to verify their identity.) In addition, the opt-out procedures must either be a single email reply or a visit to a single web page (i.e., you can’t require people to run through promotional pages or hinder them in any way on their way to unsubscribing.)”

BOOOOO tracfone! Get with the program.

Not much … so sign up here for Taster’s Choice’s free samples. Gotta love when all you have to do is fill out a form and coffee comes right to your door.

There are so many companies taking advantage of collecting just a bit of info on you to send out a sample, I’m always experimenting. It’s a good thing to set up an alternate email address just for your freebie sends, so that any additional messaging goes to one place and does not get in the way of your “real” email.

If you do any development for email, you know what I’m talking about when I say that Outlook 2007 has a crap rendering engine for html emails. For some reason, in the 2007 version of this software, they strayed from their usual way of displaying html emails and use Word as their rendering engine. The result? You have to use tables for layout (let’s travel back to 1995, shall we?), CSS has issues, and background images are just unusable. Avoid gradients like the plague in your email design because Outlook will never make them look right and you’ll either have to display the entire email as an image (poor usability practice) or just be okay with the fact that users viewing your email in Outlook will not see the same thing that everyone else does.

There’s a great site out there, fixoutlook.org, that is making a plea to Microsoft to please change their mind about continuing to use this crap rendering engine in the next phase of their product for 2010. Visit the site, then tweet about it and include the url to become a part of this massive campaign to attempt to change their mind.

I love when companies take a step beyond the norm in their marketing campaigns, Chili’s current promotion for their "10 under $7" menu is a perfect example.  They’re running commercials now for a fictional restaurant chain, P.J. Blands, and promoting the url http://www.pjblands.com.  Of course, I had to run to my laptop and see what it was all about. 

The high quality and high production values of this site are really impressive.  It’s unique that Chili’s has decided to put so much of their budget into creating a site that’s not exactly for their brand, but an offshoot of one of their commercials. There’s a tremendous amount of slickly integrated video in the site, on all of the sections Mr. Bland introduces his restaurant and products along with himself (he loves beige, what a shock!). I love the "behind the scenes" clips of creating the commercials with the food stylist using woodworking tools to make sure the food looks the best on screen. 

They have even created a game where you can go through the motions of banging out their food yourself. There are lots of games online where you work as a waitress or a cook, (I’ve got two on my iPhone – Hell’s Kitchen and Diner Dash, so this really appealed to me) and this is a really cute take on that concept.  

There’s some clever ways they have brought the Chili’s brand into the site – clicking on any of the menu items takes you to the Chili’s site, and if you stay on the site long enough the top left corner folds down to reveal images of Chili’s delicious food and promotions.  The most creative way of integrating the Chili’s brand is when a Chili pepper floats into screen hoisted by a hot air balloon and gets in the way of Mr. Bland and he waves it away with his hand as if swatting an annoying fly.

To take it one step further, they’ve even created a twitter account for P.J. Bland’s – and although all they seem to tweet about is how they can become a trending topic, it’s still pretty cool that they’re there at all, and they even follow back if you follow them.    My favorite tweet from Mr. Bland so far: "Well I tried to make #Bland a trending topic today, but to my surprise, I noticed it was already there. #Chrysler."

Big props to Hill Holliday for creating this campaign.  It’s the type of thing you pitch to a client but they usually say no to.  It’s really cool that they got to move forward with this idea and have created such a clean and clever site.

A super-short post, but this has to be the most clever idea for a business card.  I’m in the process of re-designing my cards for SiliconValleyGirl, and this really got me thinking about what I’m going to do.  It’s actually not a business card at all but a stamper that you just use on any handy piece of paper.  Too cool!

Seen the new GM ad? CLICK HERE if you haven’t. 

All I have to say is … GAG. I’m choking on iconic imagery that’s attempting to force me to feel better about the auto industry.  Sorry, I’ll need something strong to choke down THIS stuff.

I guess it’s good that someone got paid to create and produce this ad, and the companion web site mentioned in this ad, http://www.gmreinvention.com/.  Other than making this post, I’m going to keep my political emotions to myself.  In this world of shrinking jobs and marketing budgets, I am happy that some income was sent toward my fellow internet marketers.  And isn’t it wonderful that I can follow GM’s tweets and become a fan of their Facebook page?  Whee.

Although I will say, I think they could have thrown in a little more classic American imagery, because you can never get enough of flag waving and sports heroes in action at a time when our country is in financial crisis and we’ve just dumped buckets of money we’ll never get back into an auto industry that until now did not give a crap about anything other than selling more cars.  (Seriously, does Ali know he’s being used in this ad?)

Read more at AdAge.

Now for my money, I’d prefer to see ad spending for online initiatives more along the lines of GE’s Innovation site.  There’s a marketing budget usage to be proud of.

Have you plugged into the Smart Grid yet?  In one of many features on this promotional site for GE, they focus on ways to use less energy.  In this study, GE has enabled 6,600 participants in Oklahoma City to analyze their power usage and has provided tools for them to view how they are using energy so that they can make better choices.

Now THAT’S something that deserves a little flag waving and sports-iconic imagery.