Retailers are already pushing the Back-to-School shopping season, even though kids have barely gotten out of school for summer. There are simple reasons for why Back-to-School promotions are seemingly everywhere. Summer is a slow season for most retailers to begin with and back-to-school pretty much the only reason consumers to turn their wallet upside down and shake it hard until the holidays kick-off with Black Friday. On top of that, most retailers are mired in a brutal slump that started in 2007 and really kicked into full gear in September 2008. Getting people to spend these days take a lot ohard work, a lot of marketing, a lot of promotions and a lot of deals, specials, discounts, coupons, price cuts and other margin-denting offers.

Since there really isn’t anything else to build a sales-driving campaign around this time of the year retailers have prolonged the back-to-school shoping season by moving up its start date. Competition is fierce and even exhausting. Retail marketers have to carefully weigh how to spend their rather limited budgets. Sit on the advertising money for too long and you’ll lose mind share. Spend it too soon and you’ll fizzle before consumers really start buying.

USA Today has a list of what some retailers are doing and when in order to roll out the back-to-school season. Time Magazine’s Moneyland blog looks at why retailers are pushing back-to-school. The Boston Globe has a blog entry on a Back-to-School savings card that office-supplies super store Staples is peddling. The United States Census Bureau reported a couple of weeks ago that the number of companies with paid employees fell by almost 300,000 over the past two years, a development that’s put additional strain on retail businesses.

There is also a quite practical reason for why the back-to-school season is so drawn out: School starts at different times in different parts of the country.

The 2011 spring ratings book is nothing short of a disaster for WEEI, the station that only two years ago ruled the sports-talk roost in Boston. Reports the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn on Boston.com:

…98.5 The Sports Hub, the Bruins’ flagship station since launching in August 2009…, finished first in the market among the all-important men 25-54 demographic, earning an 8.8 share… WEEI-AM was tied for sixth (5.1). With the share in the Boston market for its Providence-based FM station included, WEEI moves up to fourth (5.6).

Finn notes that 98.5 handily beats WEEI among men 25-54 during the morning drive, midday, afternoon drive and evening shows.

I don’t think the reasons why 98.5 The Sports Hub beats WEEI have changed much over the past two years. It probably didn’t help WEEI any that the spring book coincided with the Boston Bruins captivating quest for the Stanley Cup. WEEI hosts have long had a hostile or dismissive attitude towards the Bruins and callers who wanted to talk about the team were openly laughed at by hosts.

WEEI thought they were a monopoly because they were so great, but it’s turned that they appeared great because they were in effect a local-market sports-talk monopoly.

Tomorrow is probably going to be more fun for 98.5 ad salesmen than for their colleagues at WEEI.

I saw this down at the playground the other day:

One of the online marketing recommendations dispensed at the Google AdWords seminar I criticized in a previous post was for small business owners to blog in order to become thought leaders in their respective industries. The presenter also urged attendants to stay away from social media where he predicted they would end up having conversations with themselves.

It requires severe selection bias to think it a good idea that small-business owners should aim to become thought leaders. Writing is a time-consuming undertaking and blogging even more so. To become an industry thought leader requires not only all of that but also a lot of work to become perceived as – industry thought leader. Yes, a good deal of marketing and self promotion are required to reach that pinnacle.

There is probably no shortage of small-business owners who would like to be industry thought leaders, just like there is no shortage of people who would like to become professional basketball players or movie stars. Aiming to become one, however, is not a particularly realistic business plan.

A more mundane but also more profitable path to take is strive to become what one might call a local service leader, that one person who people in one geographic area are most likely to recommend to their friends and neighbors. Social media, in particular FaceBook – where seemingly every mom in America hang out all day long – is probably a better way to go than an ambitious, frequently updated blog that saps its writer of time and energy.

There is another reason for small-business owners to secure accounts on leading social media sites: They are likely to rank high in seach engines for searches for the business. This way a small-business owner can push review-site listings lower and hopefully out of sight for most searchers. Among the sites small business owners should get an account and put up some basic information: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger/BlogSpot and Tumblr.

About a month ago I received an email from Google AdWords with the following message:

Google seminars coming to Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut

Google invites you to some interactive seminars for your local businesses
community. Our certified trainers will show you how Google tools can help
you reach more customers, understand what customers are searching for, and
operate more efficiently.

In the workshops our trainers will cover online marketing best practices,
including how to:

– Reach the right audience using Google AdWords and boost your ad
performance by choosing the right keywords and writing compelling ads
– Claim your business on Google Maps and create a Google Place Page
– Use Google Analytics to track online traffic and optimize your website

These seminars are ideal for customers who are new to online advertising as
well as existing AdWords customers who want to get more results from their
online advertising investment.

[Date time and locations removed]

Registration is required to attend. Space is limited. First come, first
serve.

AdWords is Google’s Pay-Per-Click advertising program. You can see AdWords ads on the Google search results pages as well as third-party publishers web sites. From a business stand point, AdWords is Google. It is AdWords that enables Google to generously compensate its employees, and to almost willy-nilly buy companies and launch new products and services. In spite of dominating the market AdWords is not without its challenges. One is click fraud. Another is a reputedlyvery high churn rate, especially among smaller advertisers. I assumed that the seminars advertised in the email were part of a campaign to increase retention rate among new new AdWords advertisers.

I’ve been using AdWords on and off for many years, mostly just to test this that or the other thing, but also for cold-blooded no-nonsense customer acquisition. I am, however, not an AdWords power user and since the tool is constantly evolving I figured it would be a good idea to attend one of the seminars and learn something new about the program or mabe just develop a new way to approach it tactically and strategically. So I signed up.

Registration cost $75 which wasn’t exactly obvious from the sales pitch email, but that didn’t particularly bother me. After all, the sales funnel has to start somewhere. The registration fee didn’t seem unreasonable either. Besides covering the cost of the event it seemed like a good way to secure some level of committment from the attendees and thereby dent the turnover rate a little.

After registration had been completed it turned out that “our certified trainers” – ie Google’s – turned out to be from a company other than Google. Call it “the royal they.”

The seminar turned out to be a bit of a bust, and it deviated so much from the pitch that I am tempted to use words like “fraudulent” and “deceptive” to describe the whole affair but that’s probably too strong. Crossed wires and honest misunderstanding strike me as more accurate.

The presentation deck carried the headline “Online Marketing 101,” a level which is hardly “ideal for existing AdWords customers who want to get more results from their
online advertising investment” (however, as OM 101 it wasn’t bad at all and although I disagree with some of its recommendation I credit it for stressing the importance of email as part of the online marketing mix. The presenter also stated that it seems that companies that use AdWords do better in organic search listings than those that don’t, a statement that is, well, interesting for coming from one of “our certified trainers.” But I learned squat about AdWords).

Yesterday I received the following email from Google AdWords:

Google invites you to two interactive seminars for Massachusetts’ local business community. Our certified trainers will show you how Google tools can help you reach more customers, understand what customers are searching for, and operate more efficiently.

In our workshops our trainers will cover online marketing best practices, including how to:

Reach the right audience using Google AdWords and boost your ad performance by choosing the right keywords and writing compelling ads
Claim your business on Google Maps and create a Google Place Page
Use Google Analytics to track online traffic and optimize your website
These seminars are ideal for customers who are new to online advertising as well as existing AdWords customers who want to get more results from their online advertising investment.

[Date time and locations removed]

Registration is required to attend. Space is limited. First come, first serve. There is a fee to attend these events.

Fool me once…

Google AdWords is flailing. It appears anxious to both increase sign-up rates and lower retention rates. Certified third-party trainers are one of the methods the company is using to get there, but quality assurance is lacking. Until that changes small business owners in Massachusetts should consider seeking online-advertising advice elsewhere.

When Boston Bruins won the 2011 Stanley Cup by defeating the Canucks (and indirectly laying waste to Vancouver) they added the seventh major-league championship that the city’s four pro sports teams have won since 2002.

Here’s how I rank them in order of importance, starting from the bottom

7) Boston Celtics 2008 championship. It would have been 8th on my list had the Patriots not lost the Super Bowl at the end of the 2007 season. Basketball does nothing for me and I can’t remember anything at all about the Celtics run to victory other than that a person died at the hands of Boston police while celebrating. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy going to Celtics games.

6) Boston Red Sox win the 2007 World Series. It was fun. One last hurrah before the metaphorical house that steroids built came crashing down on the team with one of the league’s biggest payrolls.

5) New England Patriots win their second straight Super Bowl by defeating the Philadelphia Eagles. The Patriots concluded the most dominant phase of their dynasty. Back-to-back 14-2 seasons, back to back Super Bowl victories. So dominant were the Patriots that anything other than a repeat would have been an incredible letdown. That really took quite a bit of the enjoyment and thrill out of it.

4) Boston Bruins win the 2011 Stanley Cup. The Bruins, whose work ethic impressed me a good deal more than their skill during the regular season, strung together two months of unforgettable playoff drama (against Montreal, Tampa and Vancouver) and revenge (sweeping the Philadelphia Flyers). The Bruins triumph may turn out to mark the end of Boston’s spectacular run. The Celtics are fading away, the Red Sox remain competitive but lack that championship caliber edge they had until recently and the Patriots have completely lost their way.

3) New England Patriots win their second Super Bowl in three years. After a disappointing 2002 season that left out of the playoffs the Patriots came roaring back. A stumbling 2-2 start gave way to 15 straight victories, culminating in a highly entertaining Super Bowl that was part defensive stalemate and part Wild West shootout.

2) Boston Red Sox win the 2004 World Series. I think most fans in New England, and certainly in eastern Massachusetts, would put this at number one, but I disagree. While the Red Sox hadn’t won a World Series since 1918 they had a very strong team heading into the 2004 season. The heartbreak of 2003 – The Grady Little Mistake on the Mound where the team’s overmatched manager failed to pull a clearly tiring Pedro Martinez in the seventh game of the ACLS – had fans thirsting for payback. Things really got going when catcher Jason Varitek fed Antonio Rodriguez a mouthfull of leather glove, a move that set off a bench clearing brawl and a stunning regular-season come-from-behind victory. The real highlight of the 2004 playoffs was not the World Series victory – which had almost become a foregone conclusion – but the highly improbable seven-game ALCS series against the Yankees – the one where the Sox were down three games before Dave Roberts made the perhaps biggest steal in baseball history and got the biggest comeback moving. The biggest low-light also followed the series against the Yankees when a Boston police officer shot a female student in the head with a pepperball gun during the chaotic celebrations after the game.

1) New England Patriots win the Super Bowl! Boston was Loserville before Adam Vinatieri’s Greatest Toe On Turf edged out St. Louis Rams’ Greatest Show On Turf. The Patriots were no longer a laughingstock the way they had been before the Kraft family bought the team in 1994, but they certainly didn’t merit consideration as a Super Bowl contender. If you’re a Boston sports fan born in 1985 you had had an entirely different experience by the time you turned 15 than one born in 1996 would have had by 2011. If you’re 15 today pretty much all you know is that Boston teams win championships more or less all the time. It was the Patriots who started that run. Just months after the devastating Arab-Muslim 9/11 terror attacks – two of which were launched from Boston’s Logan airport – Robert Kraft could announce that we’re all patriots and the Patriots were the champions of the world. It was a wild end to a crazy season with twists-and-turns (like starting QB Drew Bledsoe getting knocked out in the second game of the season) and absurd luck (remember the non-fumble on the road against the Buffalo Bills?). The game winning drive in the dying seconds of the game was a stretch of championship-game winning drama yet to be rivalled. To top it off, the very last game in the old Foxboro Stadium turned out to be the Snow Bowl in which the infamous Tuck Rule helped the Patriots beat the Oakland Raiders in the divisional playoff round.

Photo of an accident that helped snarl traffic on eastbound Route 9 in Framingham on June 2, 2011.

Georgetown Cupcake is of course the cupcake bakery made famous by not only its truly delicious cupcakes but also the reality TV show D.C. Cupcakes. Below are a few photos of the Georgetown Cupcake store in Bethesda, MD, (the main one really is in Georgetown, but we didn’t go there) and a half-dozen cupcakes and the box they were packaged in.

Here’s a tight-angle shot of the Georgetown Cupcake storefront in Bethesda. The store is located in a quite charming block – Bethesda Row – with a good deal of foot traffic and dozens of restaurants and stores adjacent to a somewhat large parking lot and a parking garage. It reminded me a bit of Coolidge Corner in Brookline, or perhaps the best parts of Newbury Street in Boston. Very, pleasant, in short. The large sign in the window announces the new season of D.C. Cupcakes.

The traditional display of the cupcakes is pretty much pitch perfect. It’s how baked goods should be displayed, although it is admittedly not the most cost-efficient way to do it.

The Georgetwon Cupcake cupcakes box – sort of like Tiffany for cupcakes!

(But don’t try to be cute by putting a cupcake in a Tiffany box. No woman is going to find that clever or amusing.)

Here’s what the cupcakes looked like when we opened them in our hotel room next to Dupont Circle in the District. Not bad at all. Great taste, too.

We also visited a cupcakes bakery on Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle. I am by no means a cupcake expert – or even much of a cupcake fan – but the Georgetown Cupcake cupcakes really are noteworthy for their presentation and taste. As a point of comparison, the bakery on Connecticut Avenue had run out of bags, which is the kind of unimpressive inventory management that just happens to favor the seller over the buyer.

The once widely popular hand-sized Flip camcorder has been discontinued by Cisco, which purchased the camera’s manufacturer, Pure Digital, in 2009 for a staggering, MySpace-like sum of $590 million just two years ago.

This paragraph from New York Times article on the Flip camera’s demise is painfully accurate:

At the same time [as smartphones undermined Flip's market], the smartphone has crushed the market for GPS devices, put a serious dent in the point-and-shoot camera industry and threatens the existence of many other everyday devices — the wristwatch, the alarm clock and the portable music player.

The rise of the smartphone has monkeywrenched business plans for many retailers and manufacturers who used to make decent money from MP3 players and GPS devices. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if smartphones take a huge bite out of the thumb drive market within a couple of years. The rapid rise of the smartphone – and now iPad, which has killed off the once-promising netbook market – is a headache for merchandisers trying to cobble together competitive product mixes.

As far as the Flip goes, I was a very early adopter of it but I quickly found it unimpressive. It wasn’t any better than my digital point-and-shoot Fujifilm camera, had an abysmal zoom and its software features were a tad too barebones for my taste. It’s real competitive advantage was its compact size and that obviously made it very vulnerable to competition from smartphones. Flip made the same mistake as Palm did by not transitioning to becoming a phone as quickly as possible. And now it’s too late, although I imagine Cisco will sell the brand name to a low-end electronics company that will slap the Flip name on all sorts of products, including cheap smartphones.

(I really wanted to include a photo of my Flip camera in this post but I can’t find it. It’s packed away somewhere, perhaps next to my Microsoft Velo)

The population of Boston in 2010 was 617,594 according to the United States Census Bureau’s decennial population count.

That was an increase of almost 5% from 2000, when the city’s population was 589,141, but quite a bit less than what recent population estimates had suggested would be the case.

Here’s the breakdown of the 2010 population by race:

White: 47%
Black: 22%
Latino: 17%
Asian: 9%

The number of children in Boston declined to about 104,000 in 2010 from about 117,000 in 2000.