A Tale of Two Fonts

We love anything to do with printing and consider ourselves to be somewhat of "font-geeks." This story on how changing fonts in an email can save ink (when printing) really made us laugh!

A little fun

We took a moment to have a baby shower for our very own Marlene. As usual, the guys took the baby shower games very seriously and got competitive. Check out our Facebook page for more photos.

Not-so-junk mail

In her Frugal Confessions blog, author Amanda Grossman makes a case for reading and keeping direct mail she gets. "...companies in the same line of work are competing for our business. This helps us out because typically they will undercut the price of offerings of each other, making the consumer the winner in the end. But this also helps us out because I can now use these mailings and advertisements as a negotiating tool to call up our current providers and talk them into giving us a more competitive price."

She goes on to state, " If your current cable, home phone, insurance company, etc. is more expensive than a similar offering from another company, take the opportunity to call up your provider and ask them to reduce their price…or you will walk. They may ask you to prove this competitor’s price, in which case you will have the proof in your mailbox. "

Smart words indeed. Read the full post here.

Alphabets

Today in 1956, the NATO Phonetic Alphabet was first used by the International Civil Aviation Organization to standardize airline pilot-to-tower communications. Not sure what this alphabet is? It's the familiar Alpha-Bravo-Charlie-Delta... system where each letter is represented by a word. What you may not know is that there were several previous versions, dating back to World War I. Previous alphabets were Apples-Butter-Charlie-Duf (what IS a duf?) or even Able-Baker-Charlie-Dog. What this tells us is that languages may change, so you need to continually adapt to be understood, whether it be the airport tower or your customer....

Successful Soup

Have you ever heard someone say "We don't need marketing, we can't even handle the sales we have." While having a lot of business right now is indeed a blessing, your competition is doing anything but sitting still.

"Marketing must be as natural and routine as making payroll, paying taxes, and taking out the trash," says marketing guru Lauron Sonnier. "You have to keep stirring the pot."

What the heck is a Picayune?

We love talking about football, so when the Saints won the Superbowl, I went to nola.com, the official website of the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune. It got me thinking, just what is a picayune? At first I thought it was based on pica (say pie-kah), a unit of print size measurement (which is 1/6 of one inch). It turns out to something totally else, read more after the jump to Wikipedia.

The Deck is Dead....

How many presentations have you been to where the well-meaning speaker gave you a photocopy of the PowerPoint presentation? The most effective use of PowerPoint is to present visual information to a group that backs up what the speaker is saying. So many times, you get a poorly-copied black & white version (or deck) of the presentation -- often stapled in the wrong corner (what’s up with that?) Many times you would dutifully cart it back to your office or cube or recycling bin….

We met with an existing client today and created a “leave-behind” presentation book. It contained the information that we shared in the meeting, plus some extras. It was very easy – and cost effective – to do and they seemed to really appreciate it. So next time, instead of a deck, think about what you want your audience to remember and leave that behind.