via homedepot.com

Quintet is pleased to share our holiday thinkGIFT guide.
Check back every weekday before Christmas for a new gift idea.

In another year, a generator might not be the most welcome of holiday gifts, but after Connecticut trees were hammered by winds of Hurricane Irene and heavy/wet snow from a freak October storm, any one who lost power for days-on-end (everyone at our office!) would be thrilled to have this back-up waiting in the garage. Next time the lights go dark, be the thoughtful hero who gave the gift of power.

learn more at generac.com

via stamford.patch.com

Quintet is pleased to share our holiday thinkGIFT guide.
Check back every weekday before Christmas for a new gift idea.

Local Stamford resident and President’s Volunteer Service Award winner Christopher Meek, founded the non-profit SoliderSocks in 2009 to collect and send tube socks and other basic necessities to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Show your thanks by supporting our troops with the simple things they need.

Learn more at www.soldiersocks.com

Quintet is pleased to share our holiday thinkGIFT guide.
Check back every weekday before Christmas for a new gift idea.

These days people are buying new TVs with multiple devices such as surround sound and DVRs causing them to have multiple remotes.

Give them a rechargeable Harmony® One Advanced Universal Remote from Logitech. You will save them from having to buy batteries and allow them to just use 1 remote. Setup is done through your computer giving you flexibility and making it easy to configure through a setup wizard that includes most devices out there.

Note: You would need to buy an additional accessory to control a PS3 since the PS3 is Bluetooth.

via seaturtle.org

Quintet is pleased to share our holiday thinkGIFT guide.
Check back every weekday before Christmas for a new gift idea.

Bring wildlife conservation efforts to life. This program allows your favorite youngster to adopt and track a sea turtle via satellite. Other adoptable animals include bald eagles and sea lions.

Learn more at seaturtle.com/tracking/adopt

via Striiv

Quintet is pleased to share our holiday thinkGIFT guide.
Check back every weekday before Christmas for a new gift idea.

No time for the gym? Striiv acts like a personal trainer, counting every step of your day and making fitness more fun. Striiv was designed by a team of expert game developers who created some of the most popular games on the smartphones and Facebook. Help a loved one stay motivated and challenged to achieve his/her fitness goals.

Learn more at Striiv.com

Quintet is pleased to share our holiday thinkGIFT guide. Check back every weekday before Christmas for a new gift idea.

1 in 110 American children are affected by Autism. And it’s even 3-4x more common for boys than girls.  This non-profit seeks to raise awareness, fund research and advocate for the needs of those on the autism spectrum. Autism Speaks was founded by former Southport, CT residents Bob and Suzanne Wright.

learn more www.autismspeaks.com

Quintet is pleased to share our holiday thinkGIFT guide.
Check back every weekday before Christmas for a new gift idea.

You don’t have to be a photog to end up with hundreds of photos trapped on your smartphone.  Uploading photos to Instagram or Facebook isn’t the only answer for sharing and archiving. Print favorite shots instantly with a wireless mobile printer from Polaroid.

When you search with Google, Instant Pages predicts what site you probably will click on and starts prerendering the page for you in background, this results in sites loading a lot faster.

A concern about this has been that the prerendering will count as a page view and cause inaccurate Analytics for site traffic. To prevent this from happening Chrome uses a page visibility API which can tell site tracking services to know if the page is prerendering so that it knows it can ignore those stats.

It appears that Analytics providers are the only ones that need to make adjustments on their end. If you use Google Analytics you should be fine but for any other 3^rd party site traffic tracking software you should make sure they make use of the page visibility API so that their stats ignore prerendering of sites.

Below is a video demonstrating Instant Pages.

In honor of the summer vacation months, I now turn my head to how technology emulates and influences our traditions of past and future.   I was motivated to do so one day as I was anticipating my own vaunted getaway.  I found myself repeating a practice that I thought had no connection to modern interactive marketing trends – only to realize, I was wrong. Again.

What I was repeating is a long practiced road-trip tradition of mentally inventorying road-trip games.  These various kill-time endeavors reach from the annoying to useful to truly annoying to the essential. Games like – “Name that Semi” – a game where you try and call the truck maker name of a truck before others in the car.  In my day, just answering MACK Truck would net you 80% score without fail – it’s a harder game to play these days.  Or this one – “Punch bug yellow” – my children insist on playing this game 24/7 – 365 and my arm is sick of it.  (If you couldn’t tell, this is one of the “truly annoying” and painful games.  But my favorite and a favorite of every experienced road-trip-traveled parent is:  “Who can be quietest, the longest?”  This one is always executed with the wishful thought that “if only I could have started this a 1/2 hour ago.”  If these don’t strike a cord, Susan Fox’s article, Classic Road-Trip Games of Disney Family Fun has hand-ful more classics to give you the idea.

The surprising thing is – each and every one of these arcane and inane games shares a surprising common thread of connection to our modern technical lives.  They are all classic forms of the now in-vogue marketing strategy/term – Gamification.  As Wikipedia defines it:  gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the application and become engaged with it.

I see it as a marketing effort to turn either a brand interaction from boring to fun OR provide a fun experience during those times when a user is well – bored.  Which of course – is the point of road-trip games.  They are always engaged after hitting the n-teenth mile where everyone is about to keel over.

I guess this too has become the reason technology Gamified or “funware” brand experiences have become in vogue.  Apparently, all those people constantly checking-in, FarmVilling out, earning badges and becoming the mayor are just too bored with walking, crossing-the-street or say, engaging with the friend who’s house they just walked into on a visit.

And here is where the road-trip games and our new-tech versions differ.  The first – engages, and forces the assembled mass to face and conquer an entertainment challenge together – in the here, and now.  The other – pushes us away from the immediate situation, and people – and allows us to escape with a disconnected mass of “people” in the cloud.   So, this is the life we lead, with modern portable electronic entertainment devices that keep us connected, directed and spaced-out.

As a marketer and creative – I’m intrigued and entertained by the gamification strategy – I just hope they never come up with a funwared experience of “Smell the flowers.”

Sometimes you need to go organic or grass-roots, so here are a couple of unique options to try.

The first option is go to the Sunday New York Times Style section, and look for wedding announcements. This will provide a list from the tri-state area that is typically mid level executives and above, after all who else places their announcement in the most viewed wedding page in the U.S.A. The best thing about this listing is you are guaranteed to learn exactly what they do for their companies and just how important their job is. For example you will read, “…the groom John Smith is a Product Marketing Manager for Jones & Jones Pharmaceuticals in charge of their very successful anti-depression drug. Mr. Smith controls all media purchases for the drug in addition to product packaging.” I’m sure if the something that sounds important is left out by the happy couple their parents will be sure it is added, for this is also an opportunity for their friends to learn how successful their children have become. You do have to read through a few announcements with bride and grooms that don’t have positions of interest, but when you hit one it is great. A phone call congratulating them, mentioning you saw their announcement is always a good door opener.

Option 2 is a lunch time activity, or even better one done while traveling. Restaurants and hotels are always trying to encourage people to provide them with information for future mailings etc, so they invite guests to leave a business card for a chance to win a free lunch or stay. While you are waiting to be seated in the restaurant, or in the check-out line, you can casually check out the business cards. The prize is leads from your area if at a restaurant by your office, or if you are traveling and at a hotel, leads from a wider area. Now you are able to call or email the President or VP of Marketing directly, no more being blocked by a gate keeper, you have their direct line.

Lead gen doesn’t get any better than this!