I’ve got some advice for Idea Grove, make your weblog more usable. It’s unclear when posts are made, other than the month, and the only RSS feeds I can see are for services. Hello! Earth to Idea Grove, if your goal is through your Media Orchard weblog “to cultivate fresh thinking about the media, marketing and public relations”, a little easier communications would go along way. I did get the feed, but I should have been able to easily subscribe without signing up for a RSS service.
OK, griping aside, now is the real topic of this post. Media Orchard has a great take on Lonaconing, Md.’s lightless Christmas. Local power company and Verizon pulled the plug on the town’s Christmas lights, which, in the past, strung from the companies’ polls. Townspeople responded by putting a giant Grinch nearby the local Verizon office with sign, ”Who really did steal Christmas from Lonaconing?”
Media Orhcard offers great advice:
Once Verizon and Allegheny Power understood the situation, they should have gone out of their way to help get the new lights up. By doing this, they’d have not only avoided the ‘Grinch’ label, but would have provided their PR teams a terrific holiday story to pitch to the media.
And the benefit of that goodwill? “Townspeople would have remembered Verizon’s good deed every Christmas season—just when they were doing their holiday shopping (for things like wireless phone service.)”, according to Media Orchard. Verizon’s folly could be competitors’ holly, I say. It’s probably a good time for Comcast, Cingular and other Verizon competitors to call on Lonaconing citizens with Christmas cheery deals.
People are sensitive about the holidays. Few years back, here in Kensington (also in Maryland), the town banned Santa Claus, because a few families complained. The tradition had been for Santa to ride through the streets on a fire truck, eventually stopping outside the town hall for the tree lighting. Ho. Ho. Ho. Santa would light the tree. The Santa ban raised quite the ruckus, with hundreds of protesters showing up for the tree lighting dressed as Santas. Quite a number of Santas rode motorcycles. Unfortunately, the police ended up hauling off a number of Santas to jail. 🙁
[Via Boing Boing]