Sonic Drive-In, Lee Jeans and L’Oreal Paris were recognized as brands that truly care. And that feels good working on projects that give back.

Companies That Care: Brands That Give Back
By Richard Eisenberg
In this economy getting the most for your money is more important than ever. And part of what defines good value is how your purchases give back to worthy causes. That’s why we created the Ladies’ Home Journal Do Good Stamp, which recognizes companies that contribute to making the world a better place. Meet eight very worthy honorees.

Technorati Tags: cause marketing, Barkley, Lee, Sonic, L’Oreal Paris

Why, you ask? In this day of social networks, you’d be surprised how easily you can connect to others through a few degrees of separation.

Let me use LinkedIn as an example. I currently have about 480 connections on LinkedIn. Three degrees, though, I’m connect to almost 3 million people.

Although Facebook doesn’t have the same “friend of a friend” contact mechanism, it is easy enough to see who each person is connected to and do some manual footwork to establish a connection.

So as I was working through my contact list that I exported from Outlook (about 1000 contacts in all), I noticed several that several email addresses were listed like the following:

/o=ORGANIZATION_NAME/ou=first administrative group/cn=Recipients/cn=Tester2 EX Tester2 Tester2LastName (Tester2@corp.organization.com)

You might ask why I use Outlook when I run a Mac as my main work laptop? Well, I use Outlook in Parallels when it comes to things like contact management because it seems easier to deal with (at least in my mind) than Entourage, Microsoft’s email and calendar client that we use on the Mac side.

Well, that format above isn’t very helpful when you are trying to import the list into another program, such as Evite, for sending out invitations to a party.

After a bit of searching, I stumbled upon the solution from a site in Australia with a blog entry title of Outlook Change Email Address Type.

The problem is due to the fact that we use Microsoft Exchange Server for our email and calendar management, and any internal email address it stores in a format that is easier for the server to read. This also has to do with the way that I added the contact.

In order to fix this and save the actual email address and not the MS Exchange Server information as part of the contact, you have to modify the contact and trick it into thinking it is a stand alone contact and not connected to the mail server.

The hack to change Email Address Type is below. Is it a hassle to fix? Definitely, as I had about 100 contacts that I had to correct, but maintaining the contact information is an important component of maintaining an active social network. I recommend exporting your contacts as a CSV format (comma delimited) and uploading them to sites like LinkedIn at least once a quarter.

LinkedIn and others due have plugins for Outlook that allow you to sync your data much easier, but I prefer the old school method, because it also forces me to cleanup my contacts.

1. Select the contact’s details.
2. In the General tab, replace the existing the e-mail address with a string starting with smtp:. For example, replace a.b@mail.x.com with smtp:a.b@mail.x.com. Note: you have to type in the new dummy address; if you use a suggestion from Outlook, the address type does not change.
3. Select the Properties context menu item of the dummy e-mail address. Outlook should display the E-mail Properties dialog. Note that the E-mail type: field now has a value of SMTP.
4. In this dialog, remove the smtp: prefix from the e-mail address.
5. Press the OK button and the dialog should close.
6. Initially, the Contact’s e-mail address does not seem to have changed. If you click on the Display As: field, Outlook corrects the e-mail address.
7. Delete the string in the Display As: field and press Enter. Outlook should refresh the Display As: field.
8. Save the updated contact.

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Outlook, Exchange, contact, export, email

As you might have noticed, my blogging has trailed off recently as I’ve been spending more time with Twitter and other emerging and social media (specifically mobile which I presented on several times in April).

Twitter is one of the shiny toys in the web 2.0 toolbox that is picking up momentum, and one that I believe is worth discussing (and educating those in the dark). I attempted to compile some of the recent blog posts, videos and articles on Twitter.

You can check out my Twitter profile at http://twitter.com/dustinj

Thanks everyone in the Twitterverse for the great content. I referenced the sources in the presentation.

Check it out below and please post comments / feedback.

| View | Upload your own | download PDF

Technorati Tags: Twitter, socialmedia, community, web2.0, Barkley

A good follow-up post by David today about the question he asked to his audience: Should digital agencies be blogging?

Blogging with a purpose is a key thread, but, as ask anyone that maintains a blog will tell you, it takes a fair amount of work, so if an agency commits to a blog they better have the resource to keep it moving. I think that is probably where agencies tend to fall short.

One of the comments that hit home for me was from Uwe:

“If you’re a digital agency claiming to participate in social media and conversational marketing, you should have a blog before you have a site. How can you claim to be a marathon runner if you never ran in your life?”
~Uwe.

I’ve got this blog, a personal blog, participate in our internal company blog and in the planning stages for another blog in the near future (stay tuned!).

As important as it is for agencies to be blogging, I think it is more important for agency employees to be blogging themselves. How can you speak about something you have no experience with?

At Barkley, we put together a training program to help all employees get a blog started. This is part of a larger initiative that includes other topics such as mobile, virtual worlds and other hot topics. Will all employees be blog experts? No, but that’s not the point. The point is to expose employees to some areas that may be new to them to help provide context and I think the plan is working.

Technorati Tags: Armano, blogging, trends, advertising, agency, web20

As part of that, it is nice to be able to forward all of the content to the test device, including voice calls and text messages. The devices already have email capability, either through the BlackBerry server or directly with Microsoft Exchange, so that isn’t a problem.

And most mobile carriers such as Sprint offer an easy way to forward calls. Here is the call forwarding info from Sprint:

To activate Call Forwarding:
1. Press * 7 2 on your Sprint PCS phone.
2. Enter the ten-digit phone number (area code + telephone number) of the phone you want your calls forwarded to.
3. Press TALK (a tone will confirm that Call Forwarding is active).

There is a fee for call forwarding in the tune of $0.20 per minute from Sprint, but I don’t use the voice feature that much so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. As a side note, I saved the call forwarding info as a contact so I would have ready access to it from my phone in case I forget how to enable/disable the feature.

Via the Windows Mobile Blog, I stumbled upon an application called The Mobile Secretary. This little application has some very cool features, including the ability to forward text messages.

This app allows your Windows Mobile device to automatically respond to a missed call with a custom text message and optionally with your current calendar information. You can customize the messages for various groups of people as well. What if someone calls from their home phone number? Well, as long as you have a contact’s various phone numbers in your contact database, the text message will always be sent to their mobile phone.

Sometimes I use a secondary mobile phone that has a different phone number from my main phone. In this case, I usually forward my calls to the secondary phone so that friends can still reach me. This works well until someone sends a text message to my main phone. So, I added a text message forwarding feature to The Mobile Secretary. Just enter in the phone number in which to forward to, and all text messages sent to your device will be resent to the other device. There is also the option of appending the sender info to the message so that you know who it originally came from as well.

I’m sure there are other applications out there that do this, but to find one that is free is pretty cool. Do you have any apps for your mobile phone that you can’t live without?

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile, SMS, forward, mobile, text messaging

Mark Logan, VP / Director of Interactive here at Barkley wrote an article on mobile marketing 101: share the love that people share with their phones.

He hits on some key points for integrating mobile into your overall marketing strategies.

• Embrace User Control
• Get Personal
• Optimize for Mobile
• Provide Value

Check out the full article for more details or Mark’s blog for additional mobile topics.

Meanwhile, I’m getting a crash course in iPhone 101. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: mobile, howto, guide, Barkley

I’m not sure if an iPhone increases your coolness factor, but I’ll find out in the next 2 weeks. I’ll be giving a presentation on the iPhone to the rest of our company (Barkley) August 1st.

Do you have hands on experience with the device? I’d be interested in your thoughts as I build my presentation over the next 1 1/2 weeks. There are hundreds of blogs and reviews I’ll be revisiting as well.

In the interim, check out the Zeus Jones article iPhone as human digital device for some brain-twisting discussions around the iPhone as an interface between the physical world and virtual world.

I think they are on to something here. If you can incorporate speech to text (physical to digital) and text to speech (digital to physical) with a device that has other appeal and is already carried with you 24/7, you are able to extend the functionality even further. Are there issues to be worked out? Of course, but I think there is hidden potential there.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Zeus Jones, mobile

My wife Lora is due with our first little one on October 16. I found out last night that Jeremy, one of my Barkley colleagues, has been added to the growing list of families with babies on the way. I know of about 10 others off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s more.

It seems like everyone is having babies that I work with these days, which is cool.

According to our HR department, about 10% of our employees had babies last year. That’s pretty high.

Anyhoo, the point of this post was that I thought I had a good idea for a t-shirt. My idea, you ask? Well, pretty basic text with the phrase:
My wife is pregnant. What’s your excuse?

Well, as it turns out, there are over 23,600 maternity t-shirts on cafepress.

So, as you can imagine, there are about 40 designs similar to my idea. Maybe that just means I had a good idea, but was a little late to the party.

Technorati Tags: baby, pregnancy, cafepress, t-shirt, maternity

For those not in the know, from 8 p.m. until midnight, anyone who visits a participating SONIC Drive-In can get a free Root Beer Float.

Technorati Tags: SONIC, root beer, float

Tim Westergren, Chief Strategy Officer & Founder of Pandora, stopped by to visit Barkley today, and will be holding a Kansas City get-together at the Screenland Theatre in the Crossroads tonight at 7 PM. Check out the Pandora blog for details.

If you haven’t heard of Pandora, it is a great online music service that helps match your musical tastes to other music you may like. My brief explanation doesn’t do it justice, so be sure to check out Pandora for more details, and if you are available tonight, try and stop by the get-together.

If you listen to music (who doesn’t?), you will be amazed to hear about the Music Genome Project and all of the other exciting things going on with the company.

Technorati Tags: Tim Westergren, Pandora, Music Genome Project