In honor of Blog Action Day, I am breaking my tradition with posting a photo for Wordless Wednesday and joining in the conversation on this year’s topic – poverty. I have to admit I have never been in a position where I would say I was poor. In thinking about what to write, I decided to take a higher-level approach to helping organizations. This is based on my own personal experience as well as my involvement in being a member and leading Jaycees’ chapters.

Whenever we think of helping a cause – any cause – the first thing that comes to mind is donating money. For some people, this may be the only way they would want to help, and it doesn’t need to be elaborated on how money helps. However in times like today, when people either don’t have the funds to donate or are being cautious on any expenses other than what is absolutely required, we should seek other ways to help worthy causes and organizations that support them.

How?

Your Time - Many organizations can use volunteer help in their offices or in delivering their services, whether in your neighborhood or around the world. As well many general service and religious organizations do similar volunteering. There may be some costs involved in getting to your volunteering location (especially abroad) but your time is the key in what you are giving.

And why go it alone? Organize a family or company group.

Your services - What applies in our personal finances also applies in the finances of our businesses. By evaluating what your company does and finding a match in the community and in the world for someone who may be in need of it is surely a win-win. Whether you are a bakery or a Web developer like Dunkirk Systems, LLC, there are organizations that can use what you have to offer.

As with any donation, I recommend learning as much as you can about the organization. Read their Web site, talk with their executive director, visit their offices – whatever it takes for you to understand where what you are donating is going. This not only gives you a comfort level, but by this hands-on learning you can better tell the story of this organization to others.

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You have heard the saying ‘you are what you eat.’ But how about you are what you buy? Or the reverse? The latter question is the premise behind a great book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker.

In Buying In, Walker explores this relationship, or as he calls it dialogue, between what we buy and who we are. It is packed with examples of brands and consumer goods and the ways they interact with consumers, the very people who are on the selling side with the marketers and others who connect them with consumers. There are also many great terms that come from this book – from Pretty Good Problem describing a plethora of “pretty good” products to choose from, to Desire Code, which comprises all of the factors leading one to buy something to Murketing, a contraction of the words “murky” and “marketing” which are themes throughout the book.

My greatest takeaway from Buying In is the consumer can make – and sometimes demand – an individual connection with a product. Going away are the days of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods. The Internet has broken down the technical barriers between consumers and companies, and now companies need to realize this and converse with their customers. Technology alone won’t do it all, as there needs to be a fundamental realization first that a company wants to do this!

Another takeaway is consumers don’t want to feel like they have been sold something. Call it a win-win situation - or call it consumers don’t want to feel like they are at the bottom of a pipe of products being fed to them. Scion is cited as an example of this, where they took a non-traditional approach to reaching out to the Generation Y-ers, their target audience.

A final takeaway is that it may not be your product or service, rather how it is marketed. American Apparel moved form promoting their Los Angeles-based manufacturing and selling to wholesalers to retail stores selling hip clothing. Timberland created a professional shoe line to reconnect with their traditional market after growing a new base of younger, urban consumers.

Shortly after reading Buying In, I attended the Nokia OpenLab in Helsinki and saw in action a lot of what I read in Buying In. There were those who were Nokia mavens as well as those who have built businesses around Nokia products. Even Nokia has gotten into this by buying all of the Symbian operating system that powers their phones and turning it over to a non-profit foundation, open-sourcing it for all to develop on and extend. Where some may see this as a lack of control, Nokia doesn’t, and has profited well from this.

There are many other studies and examples in Buying In that get you thinking a lot about what you buy and why or what you sell and how. I highly recommend it to entrepreneurs and business people – large and small – as well as to those interested in why they may have the things they have.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Yesterday was the 31st annual running of the Chicago Marathon. Formerly known as the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon, it is now the Bank of America Chicago Marathon as the latter bank bought the former. Drawing over 45,000 runners, it is a major event winding through the Windy City.

With the name change came a brand change. This was not surprising, as Bank of America owns the marathon. This is the former branding for the marathon:

As you can see, the LaSalle Bank name is right on top, and the colors represent the green and gold of LaSalle and its former parent company ABN Amro. But the name is subtle, and the artwork pays homage to the Chicago skyline. When the marathon was rebranded, the following was originally used as the marathon, including on the marathon Web site:

However come race day, the remnants of the old artwork were no where to be found on TV or along the course, and just the following was used:

With bank acquisitions occurring at such a rapid pace, people are almost oblivious to it. Where protests still occur to this day over the elimination of the Marshall Field’s name by Macy’s, nobody is complaining about the loss of bank names. And my guess is I am one of the few griping about the elimination of this event's unique branding, only to be replaced with the rubber stamp of another brand. I am not a branding guru myself, but I would be interested in seeing how these 2 brands go head to head at Noah Brier’s brand tags site.

For the sake of full disclosure, I am a Bank of America shareholder, though I never purchased the stock. I originally purchased stock in BayBanks, which was acquired by Bank of Boston, which was acquired by Fleet, which was acquired by Bank of America. Where their tag line is “bank of opportunity” to me it should almost be “bank of mediocrity?”

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A few months back I was invited by Joffrey’s Coffee to taste and evaluate their coffee Jamaican Me Crazy. I liked the coffee, but it was a little mild for my taste. Needless to say I was not the only person in social media to evaluate their coffee. The other day I received a sample pouch of their incarnation based on that evaluation – Coffee 2.0.

Coffee 2.0 “contains many bug fixes” as Joffrey’s stated on the accompanying brochure and based on the feedback from over 1,500 bloggers, they created this blend that is mild tasting yet bold in the caffeine department. And as you can see from the accompanying photo of the package, they have embraced social media with their packaging, complete with tagging and caregories.

I decided to throw the coffee into production and sampled it in real-time on a weekday morning. It smelled great, but the taste was a little milder than I was used to. The sample pouch was of ground coffee, and I may order a bag of whole beans, as I typically add more beans than usually recommended when brewing coffee, so the taste could be adjusted to my liking. As for the “effectiveness” of the coffee, I was in good working form the day I drank it in the morning, so the caffeine levels were just right.

Even if I did not like the taste of the coffee at all, I surely like the approach. The idea of crowdsourcing, which I covered in a previous book takeaway, is increasing globally where the crowd – the potential customers – provide their input to the eventual products and services they will buy. Companies such as threadless and crowdSPRING in Chicago are blazing this trail and are quite successful. I hope to see Joffrey’s continue to be in this good company.

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A few months back when the Chicago Bulls announced they hired Vinny Del Negro as their new head coach, many people in Chicago said, “who?” I was not one of them. As someone who grew up in the Springfield, Massachusetts area in the 80’s, it was hard not to hear about his stellar school-boy record and play at NC State under legendary coach Jim Valvano. He then went onto play in the NBA as well in Italy.

The Bulls is Del Negro’s first coaching gig, as his previous non-playing experience in the NBA has been in the front office. Many people panned the team for picking such a green candidate, not to mention one at a young age of 42. What most people don’t realize is that he is not the first person from western Massachusetts who came to Chicago to make a name for themselves. A 21-year old native of Conway, Massachusetts, a few miles from Springfield, came to Chicago in 1856 to try to make it in the business world. His name was Marshall Field. Word is he did pretty well here.

Four years ago I arrived here in Chicago and started Dunkirk Systems, LLC, after several years in Boston after my start in western Massachusetts. Where I don’t have a monumental building on State Street or an NBA coach’s income, I can't complain that business has been great!

Welcome to Chicago Vinny, and good luck! Well, except when the Bulls are playing my Celtics.

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