Buttermilk & Molasses

Washington Post Takes Another Stab at Local

Like most daily newspapers of any heft, the Washington Post has been searching for years for the right mix of content, design and technology to give their local readers a close and personal window into the news. It's probably been close to twenty years since they launched their first batch of regional printed inserts; this week, the Post unveils its new "local" online edition for readers in DC, Maryland and Virginia.

All in all, it's not a bad looking page.

Hands On Day Totally Ruled

Let's get this out of the way fast: Hands On Day is the Richmond Folk Festival of community engagement.

The event, which matches hundreds of volunteers to dozens of community projects for a half day engagement, put the wraps on its second annual day of service today. And somewhere around 1,000 people are sleeping a little harder tonight. That's twice as many as last year, which makes 2010 an exciting opportunity to double up.

(Unless they immediately went home and took naps, like I did.)

It's almost embarrassing that my team was indoors all day, particularly when I look at photos from some of the project teams who spent the day working on houses, outdoor murals, park maintenance. It was cold, misty and wet outside today. Miserable might be an operative word.

The weather might have stopped my team -- which was set to paint murals on the asphalt playgrounds of Linwood Holton Elementary School (the puddle-strewn asphalt playgrounds) -- but Holton's assistant principal had other plans in mind for us.

Members of the Asian-American Society of Central Virginia and members of various Leadership Metro Richmond classes (above) were on hand to tackle whatever projects the school needed completed. The 15 volunteers at Holton jumped into action soon after everyone arrived -- painting sound-absorbing panels in the cafeteria, recording books onto tapes for students, cutting out several thousand letters and images out of construction paper for the teachers to use for bulletin boards. (Believe me when I say that the teachers will be most appreciative of the construction paper letters and images!)

Richmond Fire Chief Robert Creasy (above) and I were tagged as the project captains for the day, but I think we all agree that Eric from the Asian-American Society was the star of the show. He not only enlisted most of the volunteers on our project, but he went on a paint run when we ran short of supplies -- and returned to help us muscle through the final painting sprint.

Early in the afternoon, I went on a second paint run to the nearby Lowe's and (on a whim) swung by Pizza Hut to pick up lunch for the team. The four large pizzas were gone before we could even blink.

How great are the people who volunteered at Holton? Most of the team agreed to return when the sun came back out to tackle the outdoor painting and landscaping work that was deferred by the cruddy weather.

Did I mention that more than 1,000 volunteers turned out to tackle 40+ projects? John Murden at Church Hill People's News has the skinny on where to turn for more coverage:

More than 1,000 volunteers signed up for 40 service projects that all took place today as part of HandsOn Greater Richmond 2009, including projects at Armstrong High School and Bellevue Elementary. RVA Tweets has a running commentary from the day. The HandsOn Youtube page will be collecting video from the day and the HandsOn Flickr page will have photos from the day (and the local events ought to show up in the Church Hill Flickr pool, too).

Scoot (and Richmond) Go National

Over at CNN Money, which I'm sure all of you peruse with bated breath regularly, there's a fantastic piece on the hyper-energetic Chelsea Lahmers and her fast-growing Scoot Richmond scooter shop.

I don't own a scooter, but I've been an avid follower of Chelsea's business venture -- partly because it's cool, and partly because she's shown up in the oddest corners of my life (joining me and a blind date [her friend] for a beer at Ipanema [a long time ago!]; taking sculling lessons at the same time as Nikole and I did; at the farmers' market).

Fortune Magazine's Small Business team pulled together a Virginia-based panel to talk to the successful scooter vendor about ways to grow her business. It's a fantastic read, and is going to sort of make you want to buy a scooter.

In 2007 Lahmers sold 50 scooters at an average price of $3,400 (customers typically spend an additional $200 to $1,000 per scooter on accessories). Last year she sold 378 scooters, thanks largely to rising gas prices.

"We had people coming from Rhode Island to buy them," she marvels. Sales reached $1.1 million in 2008, up from $279,000 in Lahmers's first six months of business in 2007.

But she also hit some serious bumps.

For starters, Lahmers says, a former employee embezzled at least $50,000 last year (a criminal investigation is pending). In the wake of that setback, she isn't sure how best to restructure the books or track financial operations.

Understandably, she also worries about hiring. She needs help establishing a reliable interview and evaluation process that will let her spot issues that could cause trouble down the road.

In addition, Lahmers wants to expand her customer base. She currently draws a funky urban clientele. She would like to add suburbanites to the mix, but she doesn't "know who these people are or how to reach them."

Ready to confront these issues, Fortune Small Business's experts assemble at the shop before opening time on a recent Tuesday. After a tour of the retail floor and the repair facility, everyone gathers in the back room around a table surrounded by shelves stacked with cardboard boxes full of spare parts. Lahmers's mother, Jean West, who owns 5% of the company and is working to clean up the books, is also present.

Lahmers starts by telling the group she has spent the past year trying to untangle the financial mess resulting from the alleged embezzlement. The experience undermined her confidence, Lahmers says.

Delve into this great local story at CNN, or go hang out at Scoot's stylish website.

Rachel DePompa Kicks Ass (And Takes Names)

There's a time and a place for integrity in journalism. In fact, there are countless times and places for integrity in journalism.

One such moment is captured in a blog post by NBC12 reporter Rachel DePompa who essentially kicks the Richmond Free Press in the teeth for their tasteless, deliberate exploitation of last week's tragic GRTC bus accident:

The accident was terrible and tragic. A woman is killed by a GRTC bus while crossing the street. And late, last week the situation was compounded by an inappropriate picture in the Richmond Free Press. For those of you that don’t know, it was an up-close picture of the victim. She was dead on the street and under the bus. This is the kind of thing that gives all journalists a bad name.  SHAME ON YOU FREE PRESS!  I will not post the picture and I will not post a link to the Free Press, because the paper does not deserve any more attention. That picture was not necessary, it was inflammatory and hurtful to the family. There was no reason for people to see it. And the Editor and Chief is a coward in my book for not returning a single call to face the music to the obvious public outrage.  SHAME ON YOU FREE PRESS!

Every publication in Richmond should have called the Free Press out for lowering the bar to ground level last week.

Garry Trudeau's Funny Doonesbury Tweets

A few months back, Garry Trudeau penned a detailed transcript of Doonesbury correspondent Roland Hedley's coverage of the early spring meeting of the G-20 in London. (And a follow-up visit to Baghdad.) It ran in the New Yorker. Seemed appropriate to plug it -- or a few of the more amusing tweets -- while the G-20 is hanging out in Pittsburgh.

Idea for iPhone app: You launch it and YOUR GODDAM PLANE DOESN’T HAVE TO DROP 3,000 FEET TO AVOID MIDAIR COLLISION! I’d pay $2.99 for that. 7:31 A.M. Mar 31st

Just for the record, in my storied career, I have touched 16 heads of state, all above the waist, and been detained only once. 6:03 P.M. Apr 2nd

@ Camp Victory w. FLOTUS. Michelle rocking body armor, but no fashion face-off w. Mrs. Maliki, who may not even exist. 9:40 P.M. Apr 7th

FLOTUS rips off Kevlar to show bare arms to 30 startled Iraqi schoolgirls bused in from Syrian refugee camp. 9:43 P.M. Apr 7th

Endearing RVA Rap, Take Two

I'm throwing the obligatory embedded video above for the six of you who have not seen the almost-viral RiverCityVA804 video, which has gone from 300 to 15,000 views on YouTube over the past 24 hours. (Viral is a slower process in Richmond.)

Richmond.com's Karri Pfeifer has the scoop on the home grown rap video celebrating some of the aspects of Richmond culture that get the young, working hipsters appropriately excited about living and working here. It turns out that it was developed to get the young, working hipsters excited.

Mission accomplished. Well, for 15,000 of them.

It all started with YRichmond, a local "talent and retention program powered by C3 to attract and retain top talent in the Richmond area," said Katie Coleman, recruiting manager for First Market Bank and committee member at YRichmond.

"Jim Ukrop, Chairman of First Market Bank, approached me with the idea of adding to this internship program by creating some sort of advertisement for recruiters, such as myself, to take with us on campuses and advertise the city of Richmond," Coleman said.

Members of the YRichmond steering committee came up with the idea of doing a video; Coleman took it to fellow YRichmonder Dana Bolfing from Park Group, who drafted her coworkers Nathan Burns and Stuart Holt to help with the project.

The only thing missing? Some on-air talent and that’s where Sam Abouhasira and Blaine Lay, two financial services advisors from First Market Bank branches, come in. That’s right, those guys are not actors, they’re not singers, they’re not dancers. They’re financial service advisors, which sounds like a job that doesn’t usually involve a lot of singing or dancing.

And it doesn’t.

"I [don’t] officially [have any training] but I do some of that in my own in my own time … I write some poetry and rhymes," Abouhasira said.

It was a 12 hour filming project with a bit of time in the editing booth tacked on. It's gotten a lot of attention, and may well attract a handful of new recruits to Richmond's young professional class. It sure beats the "Easy To Love" slogan.

Richmond's Endearing Rap Promo

You know, cynic that I sometimes am, I really wanted to hate it. But it's just too endearing in the way it captures the lifestyle of one segment of Richmond's more essential populations -- the younger, quasi-professional set who make the downtown hum at all hours of the day.

Yes, I'm talking about "RiverCityVA804 The Video." A good-natured riff on the old SNL "Lazy Sunday/Chronicles of Narnia" bit.

Watch it above, or go see it on YouTube.

A Classic Come Back

I noticed Simon Owens' re-review of the seminal classic The Cluetrain Manifesto and made a mental note way back in the spring to hunt down the 10-year anniversary edition. While my subconscious was looking for the trademark orange jacket, the local bookstores were stocking the shelves with a new yellow jacketed edition.

It's finally on my desk, waiting for a few spare hours to re-devour it; I gave my first copy to the current COO at my former place of employment way back in 1999 and never got it back.

At any rate, Simon Owens spoke to the three of the book's four authors earlier this year about the staying power of the quasi-manifesto on information and culture. Here's Rick Levine's take on Twitter:

I think what's happening -- what Twitter does is it's forcing you to start a conversation. When there's a company on Twitter, on the other end of that wire there's a person typing 140 characters. They work for a company, but it makes it much harder to have a corporate pre-digested official response. So what we were talking about in Cluetrain was saying there had to be a real person on the other end of the line who is participating in the conversation.

With just a blog, it's still possible to be a corporate shill doing blog postings. And that's not human, no more reflection of a real person's voice than any PR exercise. So it's possible to masquerade in a blog and have some lip service to corporate PR. It's much harder with Twitter because it is a real conversation, it's happening more in real time, and the good news is that it's forcing companies to have a human voice in the conversation.

Today: Live Blogging Social Media B2B Discussion

Later this morning, I'll be live blogging Sonali Shetty's presentation on digital branding at the Virginia International Business Council meeting -- she'll be speaking on digital branding and social media, especially as it relates to B2B. You can follow along starting at 11:40 at Compleo's live blog page here.

Gay RVA Breaks Out Of The Closet

A new weblog popped onto the scene early in the spring, and it was quickly evident that Gay RVA was taking the Richmond web community by storm -- the happy result of editor Kevin Clay's obsessive desire to put out some solid news and information coverage of interest to Richmond's burgeoning gay (and lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer) community (and the rest of us). In the months since its launch, Gay RVA has become quite a voice about town.

Gay RVA broke out with a new site design earlier this month, and it is now one of the nicest looking news/weblog sites around. It's also bubbling over with news, a calendar of events and other information.