Cool city

Thanks to Alicia for sharing this image video about yaybia's great home town of Minneapolis.



Lovely. Now I am homesick (not that I am not homesick the rest of the time, this just didn't help).

They just forgot to mention that those "climate-controlled" skywalks are not only there to shield all the dynamic business people from the burning sun. Now, if you want to attract visitors and investors it's probably NOT a good idea to hush up the very fact that everybody associates with your city in the first place. Winter? Non of our business! Let the Florida people deal with that while we ride our bikes in our evergreen city. Yeah, sure very convincing...

C'mon you urban marketing folks, who do you want to fool? Be proud, but also be self-depreciating and funny and above all, be real.

Minneapolis is in fact a great place. But at times it is also a cold place. Everybody knows that anyways, so just tell potential visitors that they can still do all the exciting stuff they can do in every major city plus all that extra cool stuff they can only ever experience in an extra cool city. That certain chiliness is the very thing that makes Minneapolis and its inhabitants special. And I know from experience how very special they are! Anyone can act cool in a sunny place, but it takes a lot to be hot when your city is cold half of the year.

Also, they forgot to mention yaybia in their video about all things great from Minneapolis. Somebody should definetely shoot a realness remake to set the record straight.

Slim Fast Drink

No guessing today. Just one of those surprising, yet oddly familiar ideas that leave me undecided between "Damn, that's cool!" and "Damn, why did I not think of that one?!" Or is it just my love of yummy water in clever bottles?



"Drink yourself slim with Bad Liebenzeller mineral water"

Apparently the media budget of Bad Liebenzeller mineral water was rather tight, so why not use what is already and inevitably around the water when you buy it. I am sure this idea will have a positive and very literal word-of-mouth effect for them.

The clever message in a bottle has been released by German creative agency Grabbarz & Partner (if you are into slightly trashy, geeky, witty webstuff - and as a yaybia reader I am sure you are - make sure to only check their website if you don't have anything important to do in the next couple of minutes. Or hours, for that matter).

Social Media's WIN of the week

With our good old Star Tribune filing for Chapter 11 bankrupcy today, it's no shocker to us Minnesotans that the world of traditional media is in some trouble. As a PR professional, it's easy to get a bit nervous that the people we are sending our messages out to may not be there the next day. That's why the smart PR agencies are turning to social media as well as old media for image building. This recent social media triumph has given us extra reassurance that this is the right thing to do.

Yesterday's NYC plane crash into the Hudson River was BIG news, with images being smattered all over CNN, Fox News, etc. But who had the scoop? Who had the very first photos of the crash? Sorry kids, it wasn't our silver fox Anderson Cooper, it was Twitter!

Thanks to the popularity of the micro-blogging site, the news of the crash spread quicker than reporters could get on the scene. A Twitter-user on a nearby ferry snapped a pic with his iPhone (brief sigh of envy) and sent it to the photo application called TwitPic. The tweet read: "http://twitpic.com/135xa - There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."


Freep.com reported that the picture spread around the social networking world so fast that it crashed the site when 7,000 people tried to view it at once. Amazing.

Ok ok... so Twitter isn't necessarily a news source per say, but Twitter and other frequently updated social networking sites are beginning to become a staple source of information for many who opt out of checking their newspaper in the early morning for the news. And with traditional media faltering on the scene, perhaps it's time to take a closer look at what social media can do for the communications world.