I was just reading an interesting article on Mercola.com questioning the media/government hype of the swine flu -  Critical Alert: The Swine Flu Pandemic – Fact or Fiction?

It’s an interesting case study on how we perceive things and create our sense of reality. It doesn’t matter that the normal flu kills many more people but swine flu has been labelled a pandemic so it suddently creates far more fear in us.

Drug companies are particularly good at manufacturing fears and insecurities. While Mercola.com is run by a doctor who is clearly against vaccines, it does raise some concerns about how far marketing (especially with the aid of goverments) can go in misrepresenting the facts we need to make good decisions. In the case of flu vaccines, a friend of mine was only telling me this past week that she had visited a young man she knew in hospital struggling to survive after his body reacted badly to nothing more than a flu vaccine. I wonder had he known the risks whether he would now be fighting for his life.

In business, it is far too easy to just treat marketing as a game - where the goal is to sell as much as you can but with no real thought about what it is that you’re selling. I don’t think that pharmaceutical representatives who market drugs that are later found to have unacceptable risks are bad people. I just don’t think they stopped to think what they were selling.

Even if what you’re selling is not something likely to harm anybody any time soon, it’s worth just asking yourself, “What am I selling?” and then “How can I do better for my customer/client? How can I offer better value?”

No I’m not suggesting that you go out and start doing something illegal - I’m talking about how virtual adoption can be a really great idea to connect people with your product or service (and donate funds!).

While Miro (a pretty cool video service that is definitely worth checking out) claims to be the first to allow “adopting” code - this is hardly a new business model - you see it a lot in charities like environmental groups that allow you to adopt a tree that you don’t actually physically own but you’ve sponsored; or aid groups that let you sponsor a child and be able to send letters to them.

Through beautifully rendered graphics charting the anthropomorphised growth of your code, Miro creates a real sense of connection between you and what effectively is a bunch of characters.

Remember how successful Cabbage Patch Kids were in the 1980s? Yes, they were adorable - but the killer marketing move was in giving each Kid its own birth certificate - it was no longer just a doll, it was your child. Miro gives you an adoption certificate that you can even post on your blog and “watch yours grow”.

And one day, your code will grow up to be “a little buddy like these”…

This has a place outside charities and open source software like Miro, I’ve seen apple farmers let you sponsor an apple tree for a year and you get all the apples it produces sent to you. 

Can you think of something in your business that can be “adopted”?

Do you sometimes have difficulty remembering what life was like without the internet? Without broadband internet? Yet only 15 years ago, most people wouldn’t have even heard of it let alone had it connected in their homes. 

Clare at SoloPortfolio posted this picture:

It’s part of Accenture’s Virtual Corridor. The virtual corridor is an always connected HDTV videoconferencing interface that lets people from different offices, anywhere in the world, interact. Because it is always connected, if you want to have a conversation, you can just drop by and there that person is even though they may be miles away. There is no technology that gets in the way, the person is just there talking to you. There is even a virtual office for those who wish to have private conversations.

While this is cutting edge technology now, how soon will it be until this is commonplace?

I can hardly wait!

Cat

I just went to publish a post in WordPress and it wouldn’t show up in my browser even though the post was cleared published.

Fortunately, I realised that I had the WP Super Cache plugin  installed which makes my blog more static so that it calls on my web hosting’s server less, thus uses less of its resources. If that all sounded like gobbleygook - basically it makes your blog perform faster.

However, you have to remember to delete the old cached copy (which will show the new updated version of your blog) or else your new stuff won’t show.

I went and checked my options (It’s under WP Super Cache Manager in Settings) and sure I found that the “Clear all cache files when a post or page is published” option was unchecked. I checked this and clicked on “Update Status” and any new posts now show up immediately without me having to clear the cache.

Here’s a screenshot of the option which should be ticked: