In a full-page ad in today’s SF Chronicle jobs section, Columbus Foods asks for help in hiring their employees who have lost their jobs after a recent fire. It’s a pretty dramatic and heartfelt demonstration of an employer’s loyalty to its employees, a vector of loyalty we don’t consider as often as its inverse.

We Need A Hand After The Disaster

On Thursday, July 23, 2009, a significant fire hit Columbus' Cabot Packaging and Slicing facility in South San Francisco. The building was completely destroyed.

Being in business for over 90 years, we have faced many challenges, but it is our employees'strength, dedication and resilience that has brought us our continued success. At Columbus, we have always had pride in the quality of our people.

We are still in business and, long-term, fully expect to come out stronger from this challenge. We have been able to relocate about 40% of the work force of this facility to our other locations and to associated companies. However, because of the fire, the remainder of the workers from the affected facility will be displaced. While we have provided generous severances, we want to do more to help these employees find new jobs.

So we are reaching out to the greater business community for help placing these skilled and loyal employees.It is important to us that we do everything we can to help them, as without them we would have never gotten to the place we are today. If you have any openings, please send correspondence to helpcabot@Columco.com. We will work with you and the employees affected by this disaster to ensure minimal disruption to their lives. And thank you in advance for lending any support.

• Harley-Davidson: You Can File Our Obituary Where The Sun Don't Shine – Passionate and 100% on-brand response to rumblings about Harley not making it through 2009. Seen as full-page ad in today's New York Times and presumably elsewhere
• Very slight story on how and why we use lines from movies in regular conversation – It also turns out that using movie quotes in everyday conversation is akin to telling a joke and a way to form solidarity with others, according to a researcher who has actually studied why we like to cite films in social situations.
  "People are doing it to feel good about themselves, to make others laugh, to make themselves laugh," said Richard Harris, a psychology professor at Kansas State University.
  Harris decided to ask hundreds of young adults about their film-quoting habits after he and his graduate students realized it was a common behavior that no one had looked at closely before.
  He found that all of the participants in his study had used movie quotes in conversation at one point or another. They overwhelmingly cited comedies, followed distantly by dramas and action adventure flicks.
  As for horror films, musicals and children's movies, "fuh-get about it." They were hardly ever cited.
  When asked about their emotions while quoting films, most people reported feeling happy.

• Listening to customer feedback? Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes (Thx, @susandra) – In '77, 3M decided to test-market. It failed to ignite interest. “When we did the follow-up research, there just weren’t a lot of people saying this was a product they wanted.”
  "We knew the test markets failed, but we just kept saying, ‘Maybe it was us. Maybe we did something wrong. Because it couldn’t be the product—the product was great.”
  To see for themselves how people responded to Post-it Notes, 2 execs cold-called offices, giving away samples and showing people how to use 'em. The responses were more enthusiastic. “Those things really were like cocaine. You got them into somebody’s hands, and they couldn’t help but play around with them.”
  1 more test was in order. They got newspapers to run stories about it. They festooned stationery stores with banner displays and point-of-purchase materials. 1000s of samples were sent to office managers, purchasing agents, lawyers, etc. People demonstrated it to potential customers. It was a huge success, and 3M decided to launch Post-Its.
• Listening to customer feedback? Peter Arnell Explains Failed Tropicana Package Design – Big outcry over the Tropicana packaging design (which this suggests was NOT tested but that's hard to believe) led to a return to the previous packaging.
• Listening to customer feedback? Malcolm Gladwell on the Aeron chair – The Aeron chair was originally despised and deemed ugly. It didn’t catch on for 2 years, and then it quickly became the most popular chair. Everyone came to love it. Gladwell concludes that people find responses about some topics extremely difficult to articulate. While they may think they dislike something (like the Aeron chair), in their hearts they may actually like it. There is a disconnect that causes people to express dislike in their heads while they actually like it in their hearts (and vice versa).
• Listening to customer feedback? Hate Facebook's new look? You'll like it soon enough. – Slate advances the point that people react to change negatively but eventually get used to the change and make it work.
• Listening to customer feedback? Problems With NBC’s ‘Parks & Recreation’ – When do you listen to negative feedback and when do you follow your vision? I think there's an important middle-ground that is often ignored: understanding what lies beneath that feedback and choosing carefully if and how to respond to it, or how to create supporting activities that help get over the barriers that the rejection points to

I wonder what the filmmaker is saying as he approaches people. I didn’t hear sumimasen which I understand to be similar to “excuse me.”

I got this strangely targeted spam today:

For FreshMeat:
Hi Steve,

Here’s an article I wrote that I think might work well in your
newsletter.

Please let me know if you decide to use it.

Shelley

Shelley Lowery
http://www.web-source.net/cgi-bin/t.cgi?l=bl1

>>>>
New Meta Tag Driving Targeted Traffic to Websites

By Shelley Lowery

The Aesop Meta Tag is a new standard that is dramatically
changing the way we search the Internet. This new Meta
Tag not only returns highly targeted search results, but it
also provides website owners with highly targeted traffic.

The concept is simple. The Aesop Meta Tag provides website
owners with a standardized method of classifying their web
pages into one of six categories. The Search Engine matches
the search terms with appropriate web pages according to
the classification. This enables the Search Engine to return
fast and relevant results for users — while at the same time,
driving highly targeted traffic to the websites.

When classifying a website, webmasters can categorize each
page within their website rather than just one general
classification. This allows for precise targeting not only for
specific search terms, but also for each page of a website.

The new classification categories are as follows:

Sales

The “Sales” classification signifies that the purpose of a web
page is to sell a product or service. This includes any web
page that plays a role in the sales process or leads to a sales
page. This classification will provide those selling a product or
service with highly targeted traffic, as the search results will
display a sales icon. This icon will immediately let the user
know that this particular page is selling a product or service.
If they’re in the market to buy, they’ll click through.

[snipped because who wants to read the rest of the thing?]

Anyway, here’s my reply. We’ll see what happens!

Thanks for your article Shelley. You obviously have taken a good look at FreshMeat, because you’ve hit right on the core of what I’m communicating to my readers.

I’m sure they’ll get a lot of pleasure out of your article.

Thanks again,
Steve Portigal

And yeah, I’m being sarcastic. FreshMeat is so completely unrelated it’s barely even funny. Check it out.