Friday, July 17, 2009

We shall overcome

Sat in a meeting today to review the new Smarter Planet ads. Every time we do a round of these, I feel squished between those two blue bars. They close in on me like I'm in a scene from an Edgar Allen Poe story.

All our customers and partners keep telling us to "show the product", but I struggle to get anyone from creative to produce something like that. The Ogilvy people just give me blank stares, and go back to their iPhones. Whenever I do manage to sneak some pictures into a collateral piece, someone from repro always comes back complaining about cost of ink. Even this week's press releases went out with screenshots that were watermarked by newswire.com! On our own website!!!

maddening.

At least I can go to my happy place still. YAY for conferences! Give me more Enterprise 2.0!

Still pondering this Google situation. Wish I could just get some folks from ZRL to sniff a few passwords and then leak some capgemini documents on the web. Put the fear of god into some people.

Damn you standards and practices! Why must you stand in my way?

Okay back to figuring out how to convince creative that "Smart Work" sounds like a slogan from Office Space. I'm starting to wonder if they realize it's a comedy, not a documentary.

Mood: determined

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Victory dance!

They say all press is good press, but good press is better press. Today's press releases on the new Notes widgets and Foundations Reach are covered all over. Even got a great quote from fellow IBMer K.C.: "Whatever Lotus customers need, there's a widget for that." Take that, Redmond!

Tomorrow we have to figure out how to fight our two front war and keep Google at bay. More plans around LotusLive for sure!

Today's mood is Lifted!!

UPDATE: Kevin's quote was an Apple reference!? Drat!

Welcome to my secret diary

Someone I met at Lotusphere asked where my blog was. I can't do a real blog, of course, because that might qualify as actual communication that's associated with the Lotus brand. We IBMers are forbidden to do that.

Instead, we're charged with "cleverly" manipulating our business partners and customers into generating "buzz" for us. I say "cleverly" in quotes, because the only strategy anyone ever seems to buy into is to do something so incredibly bad that we get a news cycle of people making fun of us. It's so frustrating.

*sigh* I had some good ideas when I took this job, and now slowly, but surely, they are being crushed out of me.

Mood: depressed.