Business, tech and sports made the list this week, but it was far from bland.

Be a Certified Mentor – The University of Wisconsin Green Bay (yes, that Green Bay, and for those outside of Wisconsin, there’s a lot more there than football!) is offering a virtual certificate in mentorship program. Over the years I have unofficially served in this role, namely as people have told me they consider me a mentor, something I was always proud to hear. This university certificate will take me through a formal process of being a mentor, and I am looking forward to taking it.

Ducking Email – A new message appeared on my DuckDuckGo home page in my browser (yes, DuckDuckGo is search engine of choice) promoting a new email protection service they are offering. It looks like you get an email address something like .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and you can use it to filter your own email thru their servers, where it will remove tracking, ads, etc. I signed up for the beta of this free service, though I doubt I can get .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), but that would be a cool email address nonetheless as I experiment with this service.

Tom the Troll – Being the GOAT has its privileges. Twice this week I saw signs of Tom Brady being Tom Brady, no matter who is around him, even the President of the United States at his own house. First the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team visited the White House after winning the Super Bowl over the winter. In his remarks at the 18 minute mark of this video from C-SPAN the 21-season quarterback cracked jokes about President Biden’s election victory and nickname from the former president. He then appeared in a commercial for the revamp of Subway sub shops’s menu even though he likely won’t eat there.

Getting Back in the Saddle On Stage – I caught the live broadcast of “So What?” a videocast by Trust Insights on the topic of returning to live presentations at events after over a year of webinar after webinar after webinar after... well you get the point. My good friend John Wall, who is as much of a marketing genius as he is a marketing realist, talked about his recent in-person conference with his colleagues among other marketing insights.

Get Out of My Building! – First Amazon wanted access to your car trunk to deliver packages, now they want access to your apartment building. Amazon Key for Business is going a little too far for me, but for others it may be just what they want.

Google Says Now Do This – Just when you thought owning a Web site was enough work, the search behemoth Google has rolled out Core Web Vitals. What is this? They are now saying page performance measurements will be taken into consideration with page ranking in search results. For example if your Web site has ginormous images and loads slow, you will rank lower. Note Core Web Vitals is a subset of Web Vitals, which contains more requirements. Talk to your Web consultant about this, and if you don’t have one – get one!

Go Bucks! – Congrats to the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team for winning the NBA Championships, their first in 50 years. Where I admit I don’t follow the sport that was invented about 5 miles from where I grew up as much as I used to, being in-state it’s hard to miss the coverage, namely of their exciting star Giannis Antetokounmpo. It was nice to see Bucks players from my childhood, namely Kareen Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, at the games.

Even Tom Hanks Can't Sell Me on This One – The Cleveland Indians baseball team is rebranding as the Cleveland Guardians. From the response I heard, the expression “meh” seemed universal. It will certainly drive sales of new merchandise, but will it bring back a World Series to the city on Lake Erie? Apparently Hanks’s tie to Cleveland goes to when he was starting out in his acting career.

A Different Take on BOGO – In what people call a tight real estate (or any) market, salespeople need to do what they can to stand out. Even if it means free animals, I guess? I saw this car when stopped at a light this past week and was so shocked I almost didn’t get the picture. Interestingly it was at the same intersection I got this picture of a few weeks ago of Jack. Let’s see what else this magic crossroad yields in the future.

Let the games begin!

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

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