The Deets

I dug a bit more into Target Rounders (first post here) - Target Corp’s undercover Word of Mouth Marketing operation - and found a few nuggets:

Application Process

The application form at TargetRounders.com is EXTENSIVE. They ask college students for tons of personal information: name, address, date of birth, gender, URLs to their profiles on every social networking site (facebook, myspace, friendster, etc),

And questions to help determine how influential they may be: how many online friends they have, number of IM buddies, numbers stored in their mobile phones, how many people they invite to parties.

Then they find out what their applicants may be willing to do for Target:

If you were selected for the Target Rounders which of the following activities would you most like to participate in?

-Give out samples to friends and classmates
-Forward offers to friends with IM, email, messaging and social networking sites
-Product feedback and reviews
-Graphic design
-Research panels and surveys
-Talk to new people about Target
-Report to Target on the latest trends

Is the applicant an influencer? Here’s how they try to find out:

How would you describe yourself in your circle of friends?
-I decide what we’re going to do. Period.
-I’m usually the one that turns them on to cool new stuff.
-I usually keep more to myself
-I’m a team player and I’ll be up for whatever my friends want to do.

Here’s an example discussion from the Target Rounders Facebook group where a few Rounders discuss the best way to promote free mint samples they’ve been sent:

Their privacy policy states that they may “share” user data with other divisions of Target and companies outside of Target. Of course, it also looks like they copy/pasted the privacy policy from Target.com, so it’s not clear that any work was put into making it applicable to Target Rounders.

Related Word of Mouth Marketing Programs

The firm running the Target’s Rounders campaign is New York based marketing firm, Drillteam. They run similar campaigns for Virgin Mobile (Insiders), and the Microsoft Zune (Masters). Their motto is, “Collaborating with Young Adults to Build Brands.”

Time to Open a 2nd Flank in the Battle for Coolness?

Personally, I’d like to see Target start a sister program for Target Rounders called Target Sharpeners. Target Sharpeners would work to make sure the Target brand isn’t associated with uncool people.

First, stores would give plain bags rather than bags with Target logos to uncool Target shoppers (homeless, disabled, overweight, old people).

Second, they’d identify influential losers and steer them toward competitor’s stores by intersecting them in front of Target stores and offering them Wal-Mart gift certificates if they’d immediately leave the property.

There’s more than one way to build brands, ya know.

I bet there’s a market for this in South Minneapolis:

House hunting for the health conscious

A real estate brokerage company in Colorado has branded itself around the idea of using bicycles to tour homes for sale. Pedal To Properties, based in Boulder, was founded in an effort to “combine health and home,” according to the company’s Web site.

Biking is a much better way to get a feel for a neighborhood than driving. A biking agent could surely build a business around hooking up the Minneapolis biking community with homes in bike-friendly neighborhoods.

TerraPass is rolling out a series of posts on green gifts for the holidays.

One that I’ve never seen before is a surge suppressor called the Smart Strip that lets you fully turn off power-sucking products that unnecessarily draw power 24-7. For example, if you’re computer’s turned off, it probably makes sense that your printer and scanner aren’t going to see any use, so they don’t need to be hovering around waiting to fulfill an assignment on a moment’s notice.

I decided to pick up a Kill-A-Watt. It’s a meter that helps you figure out how much energy your electronics are using. Maybe I’ll find out that our refrigerator is an energy hog, or that a stereo is costing us a bundle in sleep mode? I’ll report back on that once I’ve had a chance to try it. For $20, I have a feeling this will be a solid eco-investment.

Target has a team of “cool kids” called Target Rounders who earn points for talking about how cool Target is to their friends on Facebook. The quote below comes from a letter sent from Target to Rounder Rosie Siman before she decided to go public about the program after she grew uncomfortable with their tactics:

Target Update

Your mission: try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder. We love your enthusiasm for the Rounders, and I know it can be hard not to want to sing it from the mountaintops (and the shower, and on the bus…). However, we want to get other members of the Facebook group excited about Target, too! And we don’t want the Rounders program to steal the show from the real star here: Target and Target’s rockin’ Facebook group! So keep it like a secret!

I haven’t heard anything about this locally.

Be careful with aggressive Facebook marketing strategies. Does Target really need to run covert PR operations to get people to like them?

via Andy Sernovitz

Monday’s Fresh Air with Terri Gross episode featured an investigative reporter, Mark Schapiro, who took a look at why the European Union’s standards for toxic chemicals in foods, toys, and cosmetics are so different from the United States.

One thing he mentioned was government funded health care. If the government pays for everyone’s health care, they’ll apt to look for ways to improve the health of their citizens in order to save money on health care costs.

Shapiro also explained that the EU is now a larger and more influential market than the United States with 500,000,000 people vs America’s ~300 million. He said that the EU has banned the import of toys, baby products, and cosmetics containing chemicals considered harmful, which leads to the dumping of second-rate products in non-EU markets like the United States.

So, how does the EU determine what’s harmful? In part, based on research conducted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. We do the research, but the EU actually legislates to protect their citizens based on our research.

Interesting stuff. I’d encourage you to find time to listen to the show.

With Stephen Colbert off the “ert” during the writer’s strike, I’m taking this opportunity to steal a ThreatDown.

What kind of a ThreatDown? BEARS!

A DNR officer in Red Wing had to put a cap in a bear after it “was getting brave”:

DNR officer kills dangerous bear

A local Department of Natural Resources officer took the rare step last week of killing a bear after he said it became threatening to area residents.

Conservation officer Tyler Quandt said the black bear “was getting brave” in recent weeks, eventually pressing itself up against a Featherstone Township home last Tuesday.

The fall-out of the writers strike strikes Stephen where it hurts: ThreatDown territory.

Remind me not to rub up against any houses in a bear suit in Red Wing when Tyler Quandt is on duty.

Santa! Santa! Santa!, originally uploaded by edkohler.

Santa was representing at the Hollidazzle parade tonight. The kids went nuts.

I froze, but didn’t lose any digits.

A question in Amazon.com’s forum asks:

This is my first year divorced, should I buy anything for my ex on Christmas?

Someone doesn’t sound ready to let go, but the responses will probably help.

Back in 1983, my dad took a phone call from his friend Dan who called with an interesting piece of information. This happened to be October of ‘83 just after the invasion of Grenada on Ronald Reagan’s orders. Dan called to tell my dad that he had been trying to figure out why the heck the US was invading a small island when he stumbled across what he considered to be the only possible justification: secure access to Grenada’s nutmeg.

All of a sudden, it made sense. How is one supposed to make a decent pumpkin pie without nutmeg? Imagine how different life in the USA would be today if it wasn’t for Operation Urgent Fury.

Flash forward to today. We’ve started and are now bogged down in two wars with countries that did not attack us. But that doesn’t seem to be slowing down plans by the Bush administration to invade a third country that didn’t attack us.

Since a war with Iran makes no sense using Bush’s typical 9/11 fear mongering, I’ve been using Dan’s strategy of trying to get to the root justification of a war with Iran.

(By the way, some cynics would have you believe that out choice to invade Iraq rather than nuke-toting North Korea has something to do with the ocean of oil Iraq happens to sit on.)

I’ve stumbled across two recent nuggets of information about Iran that could potentially be the real justifications for an invasion that will surely lead to people being melted in their own homes. Oil? Too obvious.

1. Helium

2. Pistachios

1. Helium: It turns out that Iran is sitting on a ton of Helium. It’s not extracted directly, but it a byproduct of natural gas extraction, and Iran sits on a LOT of natural gas. While we obviously need that to fill balloons at the Republican National Convention next year, it’s also used in MRIs and has other industrial uses. Who knows what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s plans are for all that helium? Better to invade first, ask questions later. Plus, we’ll be able to pay for the war out of helium revenues, right?

2. Pistachios: On top of that is the pistachio situation. The Moderate Voice pointed me to an article that shows the United State’s Middle East ally, Israel, has been aiding and abetting terrorists by eating their nuts:

[US Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark] Keenum told [Israeli Agriculture Minister Shalom] Simhon that it was absurd that Israel was purchasing most of its pistachio nuts from an enemy state. According to the undersecretary, Washington was extremely troubled by this, as US pistachio growers have protested the fact that America’s friend favors Iranian pistachio nuts over American ones.

Simhon, who was surprised by the information, promised to act immediately to halt the import of the forbidden pistachio nuts. “Israel is not interested in helping Iran’s economy,” he said.

Iran is the world’s biggest exporter of pistachio nuts, while Israel is the world’s biggest importer of pistachio.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it sounds like Iran has some great nuts. Clearly, we’d be nuts NOT to invade Iran, thus freeing Iran’s nuts for nut lovers around the world. Until this happens, stick to freedom nuts from California.

T.J. Larson points out that the number of license mortgage brokers dropped from 4000 to 1400 this license renewal season.

I wonder where they ended up after giving up on lending?