Big Rocks

This morning when my alarm went off, I heard a commercial for Great Rock Golf Club, right around the corner from my house in Wading River. It made me think about the rock after which it is named and what it meant to my childhood. When I was a little kid, Great Rock was known as "Big Rock," and it was the stuff of local legend. Long Island is peppered with glacial erratics (boulders left by the retreat of the glaciers), some of which are utterly huge.

I was probably eight or nine when I first heard about Big Rock. I heard about it from the older kids living around the block. They claimed it was as big as a house and was somewhere in the woods behind our development. At the time, it seemed no one remembered quite how to get to it. It was another two or three years before a kid in my neighborhood who was in the know took me there.

From my house in Wading River, a hike to Big Rock on kiddie legs was a big deal and took most of an afternoon. I'll never forget the first time I saw it - indeed, the kids in the neighborhood who were fond of exaggerating things weren't exaggerating when they talked about Big Rock. It WAS as big as a house, and it looked even bigger to my 11-year-old eyes.

These days, Big Rock is now called Great Rock. (I guess "Big Rock" isn't a good enough name when you're trying to attract rich people to a country club atmosphere.) I might even join the club if they changed its name back to Big Rock

The glacial erratics in Wading River seem to serve as landmarks for young people. Big Rock was the one I was first introduced to. Sometime in my teens, I was introduced to Split Rock, which is a 15-minute walk toward the Shoreham Plant from Shoreham-Wading River High School. Off in the woods, where adult eyes weren't likely to see, is a huge glacial erratic split in half. All the kids used to congregate around it, Lord of the Flies-style, before high school parties and dances. Teens start campfires at its base and sit around sharing pilfered beers and whatnot. It's a rite of passage in SWR.

Maybe one day when I buy a house on Long Island I'll have a big boulder on the property somewhere. People seem fond of building rock walls and putting ornamental boulders out in front of the house in my old neighborhood. Big Rocks rock.

Will They Print It?

Since ketchup is a no-no on the South Beach Diet, and since a certain member of my household is a ketchup junkie, I decided to head over to MyHeinz.com and order a bottle of ketchup with a custom label. I submitted an order for a label that reads, in part, "Loaded with Sugar. Use Sparingly." I wonder if they'll print it, or if they'll pull a Nike on me.

AccuQuote Conversational Marketing Campaign Launched Yesterday

We launched a campaign yesterday designed to get interested people to talk one-on-one with our clients at AccuQuote. The campaign uses ads as conversation-starters, much like the Ford Bold Moves campaign that launched last week. The difference here is that AccuQuote is really committed to the conversation. Prior to the launch of this campaign, AccuQuote e-mailed a bunch of its existing customers, asking them to visit this thread and comment on their customer service experience. Seventy-nine comments later (as of this posting), AccuQuote wrote several incremental policies, mostly by dealing with concerns voiced by their customers.

AccuQuote also plans to tell its customers how they're taking the feedback that they get and change how they do business (for the better). The difference between what AccuQuote is doing and what a lot of other companies are doing in Conversational Marketing is that Accuquote is really listening, and they're backing that up with action. Anecdotally, I can tell you that AccuQuote's Sean Cheyney is taking a lot of the feedback from customers and making changes with respect to how often existing customers are contacted to review coverage. There are a lot of other things AccuQuote is learning - we're going to be posting about this in the coming weeks, so you'll have a lot more detail.

What's important is that in order to do this right, a company has to commit to the conversation, and show their customers that they care rather than simply tell them. I think Sean and his team are doing quite well.

More later...

Lemmings!

Lauren got me Lemmings for my PSP as part of my birthday gift. I must say it is like a stroll down memory lane. I don't think I've played this game since the days of DOS, and it's way cooler than I remember it.