Feb 18, 2012
Picture this — open marketing mind securely in place… ready?
The restaurant provides customers with surgical gowns as they feast. The menu includes items like “Flatliner” fries, “Bypass” burgers (triple/quadruple/etc.) “ButterFat” shakes, and “Fat Bastard” wines. The sign on the front door says, “CASH ONLY — because you might die before the check clears.” At the Heart Attack Grill, “prescriptions” (not orders) are written by women dressed in short, tight nurse uniforms. Free meals await the over-350-pound crowd. The menu says, (and I LOVE this!)… “Plus 8.1% Sales Tax for our wasteful government to squander.” In addition, the menu offers Colt 45 beer in the can if you’re ‘feeling ghetto’ and mike’s hard lemonades to “get her to try new positions.”
So, I’m thinking it would be a pretty cool place to visit with a group of friends while in Vegas. I think about photos I could take there to share with y’all. There are other eateries that serve food just as full of grease and calories — they just don’t call a spade a spade. (It’s said a dinner portion of Chicken Alfredo at the Olive Garden is 1440 calories, while a double bypass burger is said to be around 1500. Not a lot of difference me thinks.)
‘Shelley A’ says they’ve got a pretty unique thing going on — a fun, distinctive experience. ‘Shelley B’ wonders if it’s a bit too risky… especially in light of the recent bad press… (their extremely obese spokesperson died last year and a customer recently had a heart-attack while dining). Hindsight is 20/20 yanno.
Here’s what I DO know… (both Shelley’s agree…)
It’s my opinion their Internet marketing plan sucks out loud. Why? First, their website’s main page is titled “Test.” It’s a map with their logo on top and links at the bottom. On the right are flowing EXTREMELY NEGATIVE Tweets posted in real-time. Just the FRONT page of their menu in PDF format is over 96MB to download (it’s the actual print copy from PrintPlace for crying out loud!)! One click and I had reduced the size (and the quality is still good) to less than 2 MB.
It’s seems to me that the Heart Attack Grill should invest in a bit of online reputation management and a quick design job for their website.
Feb 17, 2012
The photos I’ve shared here for the past few days were all taken with my iPhone camera while in a car. I will not say I was driving at the time they were taken because you aren’t supposed to use your phone to talk and drive at the same time, or text and drive at the same time — so I figure admitting to taking photos with it while driving would be a huge mistake. I will say all the photos were taken while in a moving vehicle operating at lawful speeds.
For those of you playing along at home… you don’t have to plan your next photo’s composition. All you have to do is pick up a camera… ANY camera (as evidenced by the photos I’ve shared over the past several days) and start capturing the world around you.
Feb 16, 2012
My brain is like a suitcase (a very old, beat-up one) that will only hold so much stuff. I cram and cram until not one more thing will fit. We know what happens to suitcases that are too full… all the stuff in there gets mooshed (yes, that’s a Shelley word) around and it takes forever to find that one thing that you put on top that’s now SOMEWHERE in there… probably near the bottom. So, I try to get EVERYTHING I can out of there, in order to leave room for all the stuff I DO need quick access to. So what do I do with everything that that won’t fit in my brain suitcase?
I make LISTS.
I order my lists into categories — ‘Do Now‘ (today to 1 week), ‘Focus Projects‘ (multiple action step items — 2 weeks to a month from today), and ‘On Radar‘ (things that I want to do within a year) — and keep them in electronic project files along with ideas I find really cool, things I just want to remember, things I hear about I don’t want to forget, dreams, goals, and a bajillion other things. My lists are what keep me going. They are the way I cope with prioritizing tasks.
So what do you do? What do your priority processes look like? Am I am alone in my list obsession? (Sort of like the lonely telephone pole in the photo below…)
Feb 15, 2012
My days are consumed with so much ‘busy work’ that I don’t have time to do the work things I really enjoy. I know. I know. Work is work… but some aspects are better than others for everyone. Right? I mention this because I’ve been hitting a ton of hours so I can cross a few things off the ‘to-do’ list to leave more time to dabble in creative business stuff.
So this week, I made it as far as Brownstown! And that fact has ZERO to do with today’s thought, which is… when you push yourself way past your level of expertise to the point of feeling uncomfortable to accomplish a goal — it’s risky because failure could certainly be an option. I’ve been outside of my comfort zone for the past few days working on one project in particular. I was in extreme discomfort WAY OVER MY HEAD. But as I look at the project finally taking shape… I’ve realized I’m much farther down the road than I thought possible. And, it feels really good. =)
