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Those are the words of one of the Primal Quest’s participants when s/he was presumably asked ‘when will you finish the race?’

For those who don’t know, Primal Quest is “an expedition-level adventure race in which endurance athletes from around the world compete with one another and against a 600 mile (965+ KM) wilderness course.”

This year that race is now and the 600 miles are in the Black Hills and the Badlands.

I’ll admit that I am completely hooked on watching the progress of these remarkable young (and in some cases not so young) people.  They are such a contrast to the huge Harley populace that touched each and every sense of each and every one of us less than two weeks ago.

Today we drove from Rapid City to Spearfish and back again. It was a typical August Black Hills day – hot, dry, windy and dusty. My predictions from yesterday seem to be holding true because there were lots and lots of motorcycles on the road. There were also a lot of cops parked here and there, stalwarts reminding us all to behave.

The Sturgis Rally is an odd annual event. One that drives marketers to madness because there are no definitive indicators or metrics allowing an accurate prediction of how many wallets, er bikers will attend. One year there may be half a million, the next a mere 250,000.

Obviously, gas prices weigh in. Last year was perhaps the least attended rally in a long time. A gallon of gas? $3.94. This year we are sitting at around $2.36/gallon (unless you fill up on Mt. Rushmore Road, the rally goers most traveled road – it’s $2.47.) Continue reading »

Ok, so this was wild. I went to the grocery store at about 3:30 this afternoon to pick up a couple things. It’s Saturday, it’s summer and the mid afternoon store is usually pretty quiet. It wasn’t today.

Let me preface the rest of this post with the fact that the Black Hills of South Dakota hosts an unpredictable ‘rally’ every year at this time. It is the Sturgis Rally and it is hard to explain. I just say that hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists travel by plane or car (most of their bikes are trucked in separately) to gather, PARTY, with no particular agenda for 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 days. They stay in hotels but most of them camp in campgrounds that spring to life once a year.

It is an event that has a huge impact on our rural population and environment.

Last year was an off year. The numbers varied from 250,000-350,000 attendees. So no one knew what this year would bring. By the looks of the early, usual pre-camp setup days, it didn’t look like the numbers would be much better than last year. Continue reading »

I do all the time. I know he likes to eat. Every time I come home he picks up a shoe or a shawl or a shard of printed out news and brings it to me, tail wagging – happy and welcoming. Like the well trained owner that I am, I dig the dog food cup into his food bucket and after a couple of cool tricks on his part I pour the nuggets into his bowl.

It’s a heartwarming routine for me and a satisfying one for him.

Tonight he is lying next to my chair, sleeping. That is something else he enjoys. He is also a passionate lover of walks, playing and chasing anything that crawls, runs or flies. All of those activities are well covered. So we are happy.

You might say, in this case, I know my audience. I rarely tell him how awesome I am, I don’t preach the superb quality of his dog food ingredients. I have never shown him a power point presentation of the huge variety of bees, spiders, birds and squirrels his big back yard has to offer.

I just give him what he wants and it works splendidly. Simplistic I know. But a warm, fuzzy marketing success story none the less.

Michael Vick is young, famous and until recently had more money than god. Who knows what lead him to dog torture for pleasure? Michael Jackson was not young, he was very famous and had more money than Michael Vick. Who knows what lead him to self torture? Is money the common denominator? Maybe. It certainly helped.

My west of the Missouri River thinking says reality is to blame. It says reality is a slippery slope. If I came face to face with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (other than willing myself into butter on an Iranian summer day) I would have nothing to say to him. He would have nothing to say to me either. Our realities are universes apart.

If I ran into Michael Vick and I told him I had a dog – half pit bull – that I love. My reality might allow me to ask, ‘Dude, you did what? Shocked them, beat them, starved them, isolated them?’ Bet your life, I wouldn’t understand his answers. He lives in another reality that made that ok.

So it goes with hackers, cracker and identity thieves. Folks, these guys make Michael Vick look like a saint. Heed these warnings:

• Don’t use the same password for everything. Twitter, the sparkling new go-to site just got hacked and embarrassed big time.
• Install security software and keep it up to date.
• Archive your email.
• Don’t be lulled into the, ‘I have nothing to hide’ mentality. You have a social security number, one or two or three bank accounts and an identity that is worth big bucks –valuable assets that deserve as much protection as the contents of your car when you park at the grocery store.

You see the folks who are in the business of cyber theft live in a different reality. Think about it! Just for a minute. Please.

Point is – protect your identity. Keep a password cheat sheet. But keep it private. Don’t be lazy. And please, be tolerant of pit bulls. They are the best dogs in the world.

On June 22nd Amazon acquired online shoe/clothing merchant Zappos.com with a stock deal valued somewhere between $850 – $920 million.

I’m sure there a more reasons for this acquisition than meets the eye but the most stated reason is Zappos’ CEO’s philosophy of “karmic capitalism”. What goes around comes around couldn’t be truer in this case.

Tony Hsieh is Zappos’ CEO. He is a Harvard graduate with a degree in computer science. He made a bunch of money back in 1998 when he co-founded and sold LinkExchange to Microsoft. He joined the Zappos team in 2000 and has taken the company’s gross sales from $1.6 million to $1 billion in his tenure there.

What is remarkable about this young man is what how he accomplished this feet. He and his team created a Zappos ‘culture’ that is completely customer-centric. You can read Zappos 10 Core Values here. http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-values They included their employees and customers in this ‘culture’ and they tweeted – a lot. Not just a little bit of alot, they tweeted a lot of alot.

Search Engine Watch’s Sage Lewis wrote Zappos + Twitter = Innovative Success http://searchenginewatch.com/3631269 back in October of 2008. It is worth the read.

One thing that caught my eye was Sage Lewis’ point that dedicated Twitter activity garners links from other sites. At the time the article was written, Zappos had 2467 pages linking to their site. I did a link check when I read the article. Now they have 7116. Wow!

For those not obsessed with search engine optimization, incoming links from other sites is a significant factor (some say less so now) in who’s site show up where in a searched listing. They also bring very valuable, targeted direct traffic. In other words, incoming links add value to your company’s bottom line.

So does being a Twitter rockstar. And in the case of rock star, Zappos, it brings about 1 billion tidbits of value.

What were you doing 40 years ago today when Apollo 11 made its historic landing on the moon?

My unscientific statistics-ometer assumes about half of you weren’t doing anything because you were still twinkling away in your mom and dad’s eyes. For many of us, at the time much younger, ‘boomers’ however it was one of our first opportunities to actually watch history in the making.

On July 12, 1969 a Lunar Module camera provided live television coverage of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon’s surface at 8:56 pm MDT.

We were living on a wide shelf outcropping in a quonset hut at New Mexico’s Bandelier National Park along with several other employees who occupied similar shelf-plunked huts. The spacing was generous and the beauty was breathtaking It was primitive, isolated and as a result the small community of Bandelier workers was tight. Continue reading »