This one goes out to the former client who...

...was so irate about our blunder with an import to a new database that he reacted as if we had sold a toddler into slavery on a Thai fishing vessel.

Yes, we acknowledge that we failed to sandbox properly, and as a result he received an unwanted email asking for his feedback on our services. This was an error, and we regret it, though our attorneys maintain that reporting us to Interpol was unwarranted.

This is what a data management error that "leads to dramatic problems" looks like: Austerity that is starving Greek children. Because somebody bungled a formula in Excel, leading to an imposition of economic policy that has no apparent basis in fact and terrible consequences.

What's wore than working for nothing, for the exposure?

Spending the price of a house in Detroit, where there is a lack of ground level reporting, to learn how to be a journalist. Posted without comment.

Working from home: neither working nor home

Katie Roiphe at Slate has a point here: The infiltration of work technology into every corner of our lives is the meat, 'home office' is just the bread. Why wouldn't you want your employees to work remotely, if you think 'work' means 'respond to the items rated as urgent by the person at the other end of your electronic tether'? Really, how is having more places your staff can be made to report from, particularly places you don't even fund, a bad thing? Framed that way, remote officing is feudal. And it can be. At SJN Sales, we make a point of hiring only qualified self-starters. If you need to be contacted every 90 minutes, or reminded every 15, about your task list, you're not a fit here. We do engage in some structural design tricks to keep everyone on the job and producing, but we can't achieve anything moderately interesting, let alone strive for the extraordinary, when executive time is being used on task management. Best of luck to Yahoo! in getting the market to reward their offloading of staff. Meanwhile, if you're productive working from a home office part-time, we're always hiring.

The only business service called for in the Constitution

This graph from The Atlantic shows the volume and revenue problem.

It fails to touch on the expense problem, which was manufactured by Congress.

What is the public policy argument for overloading the future expense category of the only business service the Constitution requires, exactly? Please leave in comments.

I still twist the Oreo halves apart

Apparently it's a slow news day because more than half the stories in my feed today are about ads and tweets that happened adjacent to the Big Super Bowl Blackout, umm I mean game. And yes, Tyler you are correct, since I do not know what city the Ravens play in, I'm just a scammer who shouldn't have an opinion on the game.

But to hear CNET, CNET and the brilliant blackout tweet ,and other, ordinarily reasonable, news sources tell it, the game was the filling that the cookies keep from getting on your Cheeto covered hands. The blackout was the interruption that made the fame for the CK underwear workout. The game was, once the lights came back on,  a welcome relief from the gross GoDaddy kiss.

How did all this hyper entertaining advertising, especially the on-your-phone, in-your-lap, much ballyhooed and leaked in advance advertising fluff, get from a big brand agency to you on your couch?

"The key? Having OREO executives in the room, and ready to pull the trigger." This according to a very proud and pleased ad agency executive who equated 13,000+ retweets with successfully selling cookies.

Really? I thought the key was that a huge bungle, in the form of an inability to maintain the power grid and lights in a building that surely knew a lot of folks we're coming over with plans for plugging in,  led to an opportunity to entertain millions of folks already eating snacks, already in the pantry, with a quickly executed play in the moment, while a huge crew of furious managers and hardworking facilities folks tried to get the lights back on.

Ask a Girl Scout and you'll quickly find out that tweeting about cookies, in the dark or in the light, is quite different from actually selling the boxes.
Let me catch my, I must just not be the target fan breath, re-read the CNET piece, and summarize:  Social media works for big brands if they have every brand stake-holder, in a room, on a Sunday, waiting to pull the trigger on a Tweet?

I think this peek into the group decision making dynamics of big brands may readily explain why they are, in general, having such a tough time responding to the in-the-moment world of social marketing.

Sure occasionally some intern posts a very damaging view or item, pick your own recent example. Mistakes we would all hope to avoid, aside, if brand managers, and their agencies, want to stick with a crisis war room model, I see great days ahead for the smaller, more nimble players in virtually every market niche who can take advantage of a moment, while the big boys are waiting for a news cycle.

SJN Sales offers outsourced sales for tech firms and does not offer to Tweet, Hoot, or Like on behalf of our clients, but we sure do add to a relevant conversation when we see news that affects our client happening on line.

Marketing is a self congratulatory business and the Oreo and other Super Bowl advertising related news items are no exception. In my business we want to make more sales for our clients. Did Oreo or CK sell any extra cookies or skivvies? I bet the brand managers are meeting on that when the metrics trickle in. Good luck with that.

Top salespeople live everywhere

The original SJN Sales employees worked in one centralized location but spread out as management first experimented with, and then fully embraced, greeting requests for location flexibility that came in, one after the other as our sales team members had opportunities to follow spouses to great jobs or to accept that grad school fellowship. Now SJN Sales is completely distributed, and though we retain an Albuquerque home-base and think having a Mother Ship location is really important, our people are making sales on the road and in-between trips they are living in towns and cities from Washington to Floria, New York, to Nebraska.

We're growing and still figuring out how to keep company-wide relationships strong as we add widely divergent specialty teams, in different industries. We continue to find new ways of getting all SJN Sales people in a room, in ways that make the gatherings  a treat rather than an annoying exercise in wasting time.

SJN Sales is, as mentioned above, growing. And we think it's a great place to work. If you think you have what it takes to build sales for our clients and want to escape your commute, your cubicle or live in Anchorage adjacent, check out our openings at  SJN Sales Careers

If you haven't seen Twitter...

What Twitter Really Looks Like - The Atlantic

It's not a living thing, as such. But if you watch this graphical representation of Tweets around the world, something interesting is definitely going on.

Actual Facebook Graph Searches Below

So, spoiler alert: Facebook's new search tool is being used as designed, which allows searchers to elicit information about 'friends' and strangers that was never intended to be shared or searched.

'Current Employers of People Who Like Racism' ... and More Actual Facebook Graph Searches - The Atlantic

Funny story: at one time, SJN Sales had staffers called 'researchers'. Among other duties, these folks pulled the loose threads at the edge of every resume we received, looking for unrevealed data about the placement candidate. Once, this had the result of a sales job assignment being filled in 8 days (it had been empty for 7 months) by a candidate our researcher recruited. Her secret sauce? Recognizing that the hiring location was located near a state border, she made 15 calls across the line and matched a skilled sales pro with her dream job.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult to run Graph to make it do that kind of connecting for you--in fact, that's what it's for. So the interesting question is, What are the costs and benefits to all of us from anyone who can operate a keyboard getting access to the kinds of connections that once required both inspiration and skill? In the case of employment recruiting, the industry has changed so much that it doesn't exist anymore: SJN Sales reviews few resumes today, for the simple reason that we've become an outside sales company. What are the benign applications of this aggregation power, and do they outweigh the differentially extracted price paid for it? More from the tech desk at Slate.

Facebook attempts to grow out of its role as a waste of working hours

As this review by the Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen points up Facebook wants to eat your time. (My SIL who owns a chain of hair salons should be a flu outbreak tracking device: Her staff are playing more games (during no-shows) than last year at this time. ) We have a Facebook 'page' at SJN Sales, which no one knows how to use or why. Is Graph going to force us into contortions to meet the unstated specs of a whole 'nother marketing channel that cannot be ignored? Stay tuned...

The upside of warming

Econ 101 tells us that changes to the climate will shift business opportunity. SJN Sales has started representation for five companies providing solutions to climate change and shifting utility costs since 2009. These solutions have key features in common: They can deliver a solution to a problem business owners already have. We've had no success with the tools for tracking future impacts of the shifting high and low temps. They can be budgeted in an existing expense category. While it's true that in the future all CFOs will have a tab for 'environmental expense', it's also the case that today, no one does. Most important: They change how something works, not what staffers do. If you've ever delivered training that attempts to change the habits of workers who are already feeling competent on the job, you can see how important this is.

Delivering something to Asia?

Good luck with that. As explained in this review of UPS' attempt to add Dutch carrier TNT Express, DHL and FedEx are stronger across the Pacific, and will remain so since EU regulators rejected the merger. SJN Sales recently expanded our footprint to include an office in Bangkok, for the convenience of our Asian clients. We're delighted to be able to offer real-time conversations with staffing and sales clients throughout the region. Alas, we've also learned that anything larger than a legal size envelope can be complicated as well as expensive to get in hand from the US market. Thus demonstrating again that data is the cheap thing to exchange.

Ads that know where you're shopping, and what for?

In Alexis Madrigal's summary of ' Ads That Pop Up on Your Phone' the take-away is that locaiton-sensing push ads may change how your phone talks back. SJN Sales reviews 3 apps a month pitched to retailers, that allow the specific location to offer coupons or discounts. The issue is getting consumers to install them.