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Green (organic) eggs and ham … and coffee!

I stopped in at my favourite coffee stand in Crescent Valley two days ago and in addition to an utterly delightful cup of uber dark java, I also had an opportunity to buy … green eggs.
I thought the hand-written sign was a joke: Green and brown eggs - $5 / doz.

“Did someone have eggs left over from Easter?” I asked. “No. The lady up the street has a chicken that lays green eggs.” This is too good to be true! First organic chicken manure and now organic green eggs. I’ve only ever heard of green eggs in Dr. Seuss. My mind was spinning! “A new way to get kids to eat eggs. A new way to get mothers to purchase eggs for $5 per dozen. A ready complement for organic chicken manure - $25 for the package.”

“Does she have a green pig?” I asked.

I bought the eggs out of sheer principle. We had them for breakfast, with ham. My children pulled their chairs around the stove and watched with eager anticipation to see if the insides were green too. They kinda were. While they were cooking we proceeded to recite every single page of the book “Green Eggs and Ham” by heart. It was the first time my son almost ate an entire egg and the whole experience made me laugh, all day long.

What does this have to do with rural communication? Nothing. Everything. Where else can you have a 15 minute conversation about the nature of things, buy a cup of coffee, green eggs, blown glass straws and ornaments from the glass blower who also lives “up the street” and homemade chocolate chip cookies? It’s not promoted, tweeted, or even advertised. It’s just one of those face-to-face, spur of the moment, “stop by sometime” things that I could not have planned better if I tried.

It’s all organic chicken manure

So, I’m driving to Trail, B.C., today and what do I see? A big, flashing sign. The kind they use for road closures and stuff. Except this one says “ORGANIC CHICKEN MANURE”.

Really? I was so moved by it (in the heart, not the bowel), that here I am, two years later, resurrecting my blog. It made me laugh. Only in rural B.C. Perhaps only in the West Kootenay. I dunno.

I brought the organic chicken manure topic up at dinner tonight. “What does it take to create organic manure?” I asked. I dummied it down a bit for the 6-year-old at the table. “What does it take to have an organic poo?” I asked. “Easy” say the kids. “Organic ice cream.”

Right! The chickens, in order to be organic, must be eating organic ice cream, which thereby makes them have organic poop. It then gets shoved into a plastic bag and sold to gardeners, which by in large live in rural areas, for $10 more than the stuff they can get out of their own chicken coops.

This, my friends, is brilliant. Marketing at its finest with a flashing street sign for communication. They should add someone dressed as a chicken and actually open an ice cream stand. Think of the possibilities! I wonder if it comes in different flavours …

The Gnomes Did It

These guys have nothing to do with rural communication...or do they?

Special Delivery

I’m at work, slowing plodding through the social media plan provided to the college by Yellowseed. Our department requested a very large overview of what our institution could be doing, in terms of social media outreach. Based on Yellowseed's suggestions, we are to pick and choose what will work best for us.

I came to the public relations section of the plan that suggests I should join CNW, PRWeb, and a few others, in order to distribute our press releases. I went to their sites and then I laughed. On average, each press release costs $100+ to send out, depending how far and how wide I want to go.

Sure, the release would get to where I want it to go, without me slogging around the internet, individual blogs, etc…but the reality is that I have no budget. Seriously, my PR budget is under $3000. Does Horton give a Hoot about what I have to say for a minimum of $100 a pop? Do you think I could talk my boss into it? While I’m at it, I may as well ask for a clipping/media tracking service, and an internal communication specialist, and a web marketing specialist, all of which I currently have my hand in.

Then I came across the only thing I want for Christmas this year: a Social Media Release Template. I was about to scribe a fancy letter to my IT department, which had a lot of whining in it, and then I stopped to think.

Last week, I sent out a press release – the traditional kind that apparently don’t work anymore – with two photos attached. Approximately half of the emails sent out came back to me because the organizations did not have enough room on their servers to handle the two photos! In fact, I’ve been told that I can’t send out PDFs because some of them can’t open them, and I’m not allowed to use Windows 2007 because many have not upgraded! Can you imagine what would happen if I sent out a press release as an html based social media release?

Once again, Rural Communication 1.5 comes back to haunt us. Sure, we like the technology, and the gorgeous things it does and can do. But, can we handle it? Are we ready for it? Would I get more coverage if I did things that way?

Not yet.

The Float

Today I write about floats. Not the kind with Coke and vanilla ice-cream, but the kind one may see in a David Lynch movie. The kind where you are standing on the side of a street on a hot summer day, beads of sweat running down your face and your legs, camera around your neck, hand raised up to your forehead to prevent the glare from getting in your eyes…waiting for something to happen.

Then you hear it – “WWWRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEERRRRR”. The sirens ring out and your kids start running in circles and the old man on the side of the road perks up from his nap. The parade is coming! The parade is coming!

Dancers, pipe bands, fancy cars and look! Here come the floats. What a concept. There are no GPS units in these babies telling us what to advertise as they grow closer to the credit union or the hardware store! Oh no. These are home-grown contraptions that people get truly excited about. Everything from a truck with a big sign, filled with balloons and individuals squirting water (which took 20 minutes to throw together), to the college’s float, which took a week to decorate and a large chunk of our advertising budget.

Is it worth it? Oh yes. Especially when you win “best float” and get media coverage for a week. Especially when your employees and their grandchildren are proudly riding it, waving to their friends and family. Especially when you stop to chat with an alumnus, see the float is leaving, start running after it, sprain your ankle and go on Workman’s Comp for 3 months (that’s my story).

Floats – the craziest, trippiest form of marketing and communication around. Rural, grassroot communication at its finest.

Metro vs Bucolic

Today I met with an editor of a local newspaper. He told me to enter my (ancient?) press releases through his website and to make it no longer than 150 words.

My immediate reaction was: “How on earth can I make a story into a 150 word paragraph? What’s the point?” The point is this: People want snippets of info. Short, sweet, to the point. They want the “Metro, all-news radio” version (which is gaining popularity in major city centres). It makes sense I suppose. We are in information overload most of the time. Usually we don’t want to learn too much or it makes our head spin. However, this can also be dangerous. What’s the real story behind the snippet? How many will dig? What’s being covered up?

I wonder if a metro publication would work out here. We’d have to change the name from “Metro” to "Bucolic" or something…