Mosey on over to the new Kitchen Sink Studios Facebook Page!

The folks at Kitchen Sink are dialed in to this Internet thingy. That's why they've created a new Facebook "fan" page to better communicate with folks like you. The new page will replace their old "group" page, which was a little cumbersome. So if you're on Facebook, please take a moment to visit the new page and sign up as a "fan".

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kitchen-Sink-Studios-Inc/77333862448

Muchas Gracias!

Chowing your way through the Great Recession

I rock the North Central area of Phoenix, and I’m darned proud of it. I love Kitchen Sink’s barrio, but go home to the Central and Camelback area at the end of each day. And while recently we’ve seen a very-welcome restaurant cluster pop up near the studio here at 3^rd Street and Garfield, what I’m seeing in North Central right now is downright prolific.

See, I thought I read something about some sort of recession, but it seems like everyone and his dog is opening a restaurant in North Central. It’s to the point where pretty soon, North Central may start to rival Old Town Scottsdale as the Valley’s premier restaurant destination. To wit:

• Recently opened near Central and Camelback: The new Postino and Maizie’s Café. And, rumor has it, the new Postino will be joined by its sister grocer, La Grande Orange, in the coming months.

• Seven million years old, but in case you haven’t heard: Cheese & Stuff at Central and Camelback had a sandwich that was written up in Esquire Magazine last year as one of the best sandwiches in the country.

• I don’t even need to remind you: Pane Bianco, Lux Coffee and the George & Dragon between Indian School and Camelback on Central.

• 7^th Street and Camelback stalwarts: Lola Tapas, Ticoz, Two Hippies Burritos, Rosie McCaffrey’s, Oregano’s, Sonoran Brewing Company.

• A little further north: Richardson’s, TexAZ Grill, Phoenix City Grill, Rokerij, Luci’s Healthy Marketplace.

• Even further north: Bomberos Wine Bar and Corbin’s, both at Central and Dunlap-ish.

• Just popped out of the oven: Parlor Pizzeria (18^th and Camelback…a little more toward the Biltmore, but still).

• Need a coffee fix in North Central? Dutch Brothers Drive-Thru Coffee at Central and Camelback, and the new Lola Coffee (from the folks who brought us Lola Tapas) at Central and Campbell.

• Still in the oven: St. Francis Restaurant at 111 E. Camelback, by renowned chef Aaron Chamberlain (Rubicon in San Francisco, which I’ve actually been to, believe it or not, and Jean Georges in New York).

• Also still in the oven, and in the heavy construction phase: Hula’s Modern Tiki, in the same center as the new Lola Coffee. The first AZ outlet for this concept…the others are in Monterey and Santa Cruz, California.

How are all these new places getting construction financing? How are all these old stalwarts surviving the Great Recession? Beats me, but I’m hungry just thinking about it. In any event, it’s a refreshing little boom in business and the kind of trend that threatens to turn Phoenix into a “real” city.

And if you’re not into these? Hey, there’s an Applebee’s at Central and Camelback as well.

Two wacky things are going on in the social networking/marketing world

A couple more things on social networking...we promise that the next post will be on something else.

• A few weeks ago, I saw that a friend had become a fan of a page on Facebook titled “Not Having George W. Bush As President.” Because I pay attention to politics, I thought it was a novel and humorous approach to starting a fan page, regardless of one’s own particular affiliation. And as one might imagine, the page rocketed in popularity — when I first saw it, there were about 40,000 fans; now there are more than 475,000.

Then I saw that those responsible for the “Not Having” page started sending out offshoot pages, such as “Telling Dick Cheney To Shut The Hell Up” and “Confirming Sonia Sotomayor To The Supreme Court.” And by the time the Sotomayor page got blasted out, I started to wonder if this wasn’t an organic occurrence at all — if it instead was something being done by the Democratic National Committee or MoveOn.org or someone like that.

Turns out that the page was started by a dude named John Hlinko, and a quick Google search tells us that he’s a Democratic political consultant who specializes in grassroots mobilization. Let me correct that a little bit — he’s a Democratic political consultant who specializes in grassroots mobilization who now has the ability to reach 475,000 people within a few seconds. Oh, and developing that capability was free.

Also recently, I took a quiz that got sent to me on the movie “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off.” (I’m proud to say I got a perfect score). But at the end of the quiz, I suddenly found myself signed up for an online movie rental service’s Facebook page. Now, I’m seeing the movie quizzes and other quizzes all the time, and they all seem to have an ulterior motive.

The point I’m getting at is that marketing in the Facebook era has taken on some completely different properties than traditional online marketing. People used to consider it a skeevy practice to do banner ads saying things like “What’s your true IQ” directing the viewer to some business’ page. But somehow, in the world of Facebook, this is considered completely normal and appropriate. Companies and organizations are less concerned about driving people to their brand than they are about simply creating a mechanism to reach the most people possible.

To me, it just seems like an odd change in decorum. But it’s one that as marketing professionals, we’re going to have to learn to either deal with or incorporate.

• The second wacky thing going on is the announcement, which has been low-key so far, that Facebook is going to start allowing users to have personalized URLs. While MySpace has been doing this all along, Facebook users have a URL that is www.facebook.com/ a bunch of random numbers and letters. And, we get to go back and retro-pick our new URLs so that our friends can find us, kinda like when we were all able to pick our own e-mail addresses back in the day.

The change begins at midnight EDT on Friday; you will be able to log on and pick your own name at that time, and it is first come-first served.

Now, call me crazy, but isn’t this likely to set off an absolute free-for-all? After all, doing a Facebook page is free, and an individual can do as many as he or she wants. And while Facebook allows you to stake a claim to a name that you have trademarked, what’s to stop speculators from claiming anything that might be remotely interesting and then auctioning those pages off like domain names?

Except that the difference is, while domain names and MySpace names were registered over the course of several years and continue to be registered in the future, the 200 million Facebook users out there have a zero-hour when this takes effect. Aren’t a lot of the John Smiths of the world going to scramble online to try to become www.facebook.com/johnsmith?

I just think this is going to be a bigger deal than people think. It has the potential to become a new cottage industry, just as domain name sales is right now. And I hope Facebook’s servers are up to the challenge at midnight EDT on Friday…

A look back in the past for a peek at the future?

My wife is a huge fan of the film “You’ve Got Mail,” and so whenever it comes on and we’re both watching TV, I’m stuck with it for at least a few minutes.

Set in the late 20^th century, the film documents a budding romance between two people whose names I can’t remember, played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (note: this was back when Meg Ryan was still attractive). This romance manifests itself through the anonymity of the earliest form of today’s “social networking,” America Online.

Watching it now, the movie seems like it might as well have been filmed a million years ago. In today’s day and age, had Hanks and Ryan not met through a dating web site, they would have at least been directed to each other’s Facebook pages, and instead of fluttering around anonymously in each other’s online lives for months on end, Hanks would have immediately seen Ryan’s vacation pictures from Cabo and known who she was and how she looked in a bikini. (Anonymity has certainly been a victim as the web has developed over the years.)

Anyway, I was reminded by the movie of just how big AOL was at the time — in case you don’t recall, around that time, AOL bought Time Warner. It was the Internet startup with just a few years under its belt that became a superpower in the media industry almost overnight.

And then just a few days ago, Time Warner sold off America Online for virtually nothing, and all I could think was “Wow, AOL still exists?”

So now here we are in the brave new online universe, where everyone is signing up for social networking sites and businesses are scrambling to find ways to figure out how to make money off of them. Facebook and Twitter appear to be winning “the war,” just as AOL did at the dawn of the Internet, and yet neither one of them operates at anything close to a profit.

Because they are not profitable, there’s been a ton of speculation about how they’re actually going to make the leap to becoming profitable. We used to pay $20 per month for AOL (and I hated every second of it), but now when a rumor starts that Facebook may charge $1 per month, 100,000 people sign up for the page “Tell Facebook to take that dollar and…”

AND, remember that when social networking REALLY began to hit critical mass, it was MySpace that seemed to be leading the way. This was only a few years ago. Now, at least from a marketing standpoint, MySpace appears to be slowly deflating like a kiddie pool with a leak in the side.

My point is, while it makes all the sense in the world to direct marketing and PR efforts toward Facebook and MySpace and Twitter right now, we must keep in mind that they are going to have a shelf life, and it’s probably only going to be a few years.

There’s a million things that will, inevitably, do them in. In the case of AOL, it was competition and the expansion of the Internet as a whole; suddenly, everyone had e-mail for free through work or Hotmail.

In the case of the social networking sites, there are a number of things that could send them the way of the dodo. Someone could build a better mousetrap. They can try to make money by overwhelming people with ads, to the point where it’s a turn-off (which is precisely what’s happened to MySpace). They could overestimate the public’s willingness to pay for their services. Or, people could just get tired of it all and move on to something else.

In any event, it will be interesting to see if anyone makes a movie similar to “You’ve Got Mail” about the social networking era we’re in right now. (Perhaps Hanks and Ryan have some time on their hands.) And it will be interesting to see how we look back on that film in, say, the early part of the 2020s. I have a feeling that, as we sit in our jet pods that automatically manage our commute to Mars while we browse the Internet, we’ll think this whole era was pretty darn funny.

Cool new sushi joint in downtown; cool new grocer in North Central

Recent urban adventures have led the Kitchen Sink team and friends to a couple of cool new places...

MOIRA SUSHI: There's a nice trend going on in downtown right now, a little "restaurant cluster" that's popping up near the KS studio. Recent new additions have included the Turf Pub and the Pasta Bar, but the very latest addition is Moira Sushi. Located on the ground floor of the four-story "Amsterdam" style condos at 3rd Street and McKinley, the joint somehow manages to be unpretentious and cool at the same time, with dark lighting and metal chairs somehow working with the dark walls and brick to make the place comfortable. And...AND...the sushi is damn good, even if you're not the biggest sushi aficionado in the world. The staff is friendly and readily accommodating, offering suggestions to the uninitiated and service with a wink and a smile. A recent Friday night, two of us enjoyed enough sushi to choke a Tokyoan and a couple of premier adult beverages each, and walked out the door having spent $90 including tip. Not totally Great Recession-proof pricing, but not too bad either. Hit 'em online at www.moirasushi.com.

LUCI'S HEALTHY MARKETPLACE: While making the pilgrimage to Dick's Hideaway on a recent weekday, our people in the field stumbled upon the recently opened Luci's at 16th Street and Bethany Home. The obvious comparison is to La Grande Orange, so if you like your LGO but maybe think it's a little too "girly," this is the joint for you. For example, you can get meat at Luci's. Good meat. The kind of meat that men kill, then process, then give to their wives to turn into something with a side of risotto and a nice Italian table wine, all of which can be purchased in said store. You can knock down some coffee there on comfortable sofas, grab a meal to go, and even eventually check out a cooking exhibit in their crazy in-store Viking kitchen. Where most grocery stores want you to buy your stuff and then go home, Luci's wants you to leave your home and hang out at the store. And yeah, they do the healthy organic thing, but it's not like they're beating you over the head with a tofu brick or something. You could hit their web site at www.lucishealthymarketplace.com, but you won't learn anything we haven't just told you.

Evolving from old media to new media

The folks at Kitchen Sink have been kind enough to let me riff a little bit about the current media and communications environment in Arizona on their blog here. By way of introduction, I'm a public relations and communications professional with more than 14 years in the business, six of which I've owned my own company.

I was working on a political campaign last year -- my first comprehensively statewide effort in a few years -- when I was smacked across the face with a new reality.

There is almost no local media left in Arizona anymore.

We've all read plenty about the struggles of conventional media in the new age, especially those of newspapers, but interacting with the media drove it home in an alarming way. I had a story to tell...there was simply no one in the conventional media to tell it to.

Don't believe me? Guess how many newspapers in Arizona have a dedicated presence at the Arizona capitol? The answer is...one. The Arizona Republic, of course. (CORRECTION: I was wrong about this; it was pointed out in comments that the Daily Star has one as well. I had heard that they pulled their presence but was mistaken. Apologies.) The rest of the state relies on two wire services for any capitol news. That means that for any given press release, there were only three beat reporters in the print market to send it to.

What about radio? Well, with the rise of syndicated talk radio shows, there are now only a handful of live, local-issue talk radio programs in the state that air on a regular basis. The two big Phoenix talk stations have a handful of shows each; the Tucson market has a total of two, and there are maybe two or three more statewide. The same holds true for stations that actually do their own news -- almost all the others rely on wire sources.

Television? Good luck. The competition is so cut-throat, and the stations are so short-staffed, that unless you have a truly compelling visual angle or sensational story, it's not going to happen.

So now what?

Good marketers and public relations professionals are increasingly learning how to master new media, including the ever-so-trendy social networking sites and blogs. Any good PR pro's distribution lists now include relevant blog sites that cater to the target audience. In politics, that's easy to find, but for traditional or product marketing it can require some diligent research.

And while everyone seems to have a Facebook or MySpace or Twitter presence these days, the key is to get people to follow you. So there are a few cardinal rules you have to follow:

1) Just building a page doesn't ensure people are going to see it.

2) In order to keep people interested, you have to continually feed the content beast. And don't make it dull, or people are going to drop you.

3) Have an endgame in mind. "Increasing awareness" is not it. Social networking programs work best when they "drive" the user somewhere, such as to your organizational/product web site. Once there, you have an opportunity to make sales pitches, capture data, or interact with the consumer in other ways. If you don't do that, the effort is pointless.

Even in the new age of media, there is no magic bullet -- although if you have the budget, Facebook and MySpace's advertising programs allow you to target your audiences extensively. It's still a mixture of savvy, creativity and luck to start a viral marketing phenomenon.

But by opening up your marketing and public relations programs to new media outlets -- with a few key caveats in mind -- you can overcome the shrinking of traditional media outlets by maximizing your new media opportunities.

Studio Space for Lease

PRIME STUDIO/ OFFICE SPACE

Are you ready to shed those cozy jammies and leave the house for a real studio environment? If you're looking for synergy and a professional, warm and inviting office space, look no further. Located in the heart of the Art District in downtown Phoenix. We're a 4 minute walk from Light Rail, about 38 seconds from freeway access and 42 steps from Roosevelt Pub- what could be better!?!? Come see for yourself...by the way, you can still wear your bunny slippers!

ALL INCLUSIVE OFFICE SPACE FROM $600/MO TO $1800/MO.
828 NORTH 3RD STREET, PHOENIX, AZ 85004
CONTACT: 602-258-3150
info@kitchensinkstudios.com