For the 10th year in a row, Boise was ranked in the top ten of Forbes’ Best Places for Business and Careers (see list here).  We at Balihoo are indeed proud to be a part of the business community that has garnered such consecutively high rankings since 2000.

I wanted to provide some quick commentary on why Boise gets such consistently high rankings (see blog about other lists on which Boise is ranked).  As a Boise transplant - I chose to move here with my family from the NYC area after working for a startup back there – I believe I can still speak with some level of impartiality.

One reason for the ranking is no doubt Boise’s awesome balance of business vibrancy with outdoor recreation, as well as a decent amount of art and culture for a city our size.  People who move to Boise do so for the work_AND_life opportunity, not just the work.  It’s amazing to meet so many Boise transplants – or even people who grew up here, went to work in a big city, then came back – who say the same thing: they essentially just dropped everything to move here, either because they wanted to raise their family in a great place, or they were single/without kids and loved the outdoors and recreation.

Our office is a perfect testament to these two profiles.  We are a venture-backed startup, with the same underlying spirit and intensity as our startup brethren on the east and west coasts, but our people made the explicit choice to move for work AND life. We are a diverse office, but we are like-minded in that we’re either creative or technology people (or both) who want to work in a great company surrounded by smart, driven people.  No doubt, we still have to work hard to compete with all those companies just focusing on the “work” part of things, and of course it’s a challenge, but we manage to make it happen.

To personalize our company a bit, I pulled together some quick stats:

• About 35% of our employees moved to Boise from the Northwest - mainly Seattle and Portland.  They wanted to live in a place similar recreation and quality of life without the rain and traffic (Boise has 215 sunny days a year compared to Seattle’s 165)
• We have a decent contingent of “back east” people - about 15% of us are startup-minded people from the other side of the Mississippi who wanted a big change from the east coast grind
• We have a handful of international folks who now call Boise home
• And finally, we have people who’ve lived in California, Arizona, Alaska, Colorado, and Utah who came here for all the aforementioned reasons

A lot gets published about Boise, but here is “my” list of the top ten “little” reasons to live here:

1.  You can ride you bike to work from just about anywhere you live in the valley (on my ride I see wild quail every day and sometimes deer, otter, or eagles - pretty cool to see in a capital city)

2.  Traffic is almost non-existent – coming from NYC, I love to hear people talk about “the traffic” – that means they had to wait at a stop light or two on their way to work

3.  Parking is $1.50/hour in downtown garages (last I checked, NYC was around $28)

4.  There is a ski mountain 16 miles from downtown – still holding a base of 60” as we approach April

5.  I can fish 200 yards from the office in a clean river that holds naturally reproducing brown and rainbow trout

6.  The zoo is awesome for kids – it’s no San Diego zoo, for sure, but there is an awesome diversity of species and exhibits at a very reasonable cost

7.  I’m not sure exactly why, but our Thai food rocks – there are a lot of really good Thai restaurants all over the town

8.  There are 6 parks for my kids (with great swing sets and climbing structure) within a two-mile radius of my home, where I can feel safe letting my kids play.

9.  You can get really cheap flights to any city in the west, and our airport is incredibly convenient – so when you have a yen for “big city” things, you can be in SF, Seattle, LA, Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, or San Diego in 1-2 hours.

10.  Despite our “potato state” reputation, there are no potato farms to be seen in Boise – most of those are way out in Eastern Idaho, 5-6 hours away

Why stop at ten…perhaps my favorite thing about Boise is there is hardly ever a line at the DMV. Other places I’ve lived entailed a multi-day wait to renew a driver’s license.

“How’s that impartial?  There’s gotta be something wrong with Boise!,” you say?  I really have had only two complaints since I’ve lived here – we need some good Italian food, and you can’t get to the east coast on a direct flight.  But, I’m very willing to live with those two drawbacks in favor all the positives.

It’s 6 am, and I have a hankering for a Korean taco. I don’t even know what comprises such a food, but I want it. And I’m going straight to Twitter when I get to the office to check out why it’s all the rave and to locate the blessed taco truck that boasts such culinary mastery.

On Monday morning - which usually starts as a groggy blending of gunfire in Afghanistan while conversing with Hilary Clinton and Felipe Calderon about Cleveland State’s upset against Wake Forest, as NPR sputters out the radio trying to rouse me from sleep - I awoke to a news story convincing me to visit L.A. and track down a Korean BBQ taco truck that notifies its fans of its current location via Twitter. Kogi - the previously mentioned Korean taco restaurant on wheels - owes much thanks to viral Internet marketing.

Kogi’s cult followers continually check Twitter for the truck’s whereabouts and daily specials, and they often wait in line for hours to try the CIA top-chef’s blending of Korean kimchi flavors with Mexican spicy. They also post videos on You Tube and publish odes to Kogi on My Space. Click here to read the full story from NPR.

I recently attended a convention for one of our retail flooring clients, and their corporate marketing team held education sessions on Web 2.0 marketing. What does Facebook and Twitter mean to a 60 year-old second generation Carpet One owner who has advertised in traditional media for 50 years? Look at Kogi. The Kogi chef even admits that without Twitter he could still make great tacos, but he wouldn’t have anyone to sell them to.

I’m not posturing that my Carpet One owner should expect the dramatic increase in traffic that Kogi enjoys from online viral marketing. But I do think it’s worthy of some experimentation. For instance, the Carpet One owner could post a before-and-after video on You Tube of a customer’s home after installing her new Carpet One flooring. Our owner could start a Twitter profile and Facebook page for his business and ask his staff to follow them, as well as any of their friends and family and maybe acquaintances who bought flooring there. Throw links up on the Carpet One website to the video, Facebook and Twitter profiles, and have a sales manager start a blog that talks about your engagement online. The networking spawns organically, creating a sort of Twitter effect.

If you have ever visited Balihoo’s booth at a tradeshow you know that we REALLY love our schwag.  We are all about bottles, hats, stuffed dogs, laptop bags, frisbees, etc. 

And if you are familiar with Balihoo as a company you know that we are committed to providing franchisors, franchisees and local store marketers with all of the tools they need to successfully advertise locally. 

Therefore we are launching our first-ever ‘Balihoo Giveaway’.  To play ask yourself this simple question “What is MY best local store marketing practice?” 

What do YOU do that helps to generate local buzz and bring in customers? 

Send us your best practice (or two or three) in any form you would like - short film, picture with a tagline, word doc., postcard, etc.

Convey your best local store marketing practice any way that you prefer and send it to us by commenting on this blog posting or send it to us through twitter, facebook, myspace or even by snail mail!

On April 27th, we will be selecting 5 runner-ups and 1 grand prize winner!

The GRAND PRIZE winner will win a fully-loaded Balihoo Schwag bag! This Balihoo-branded laptop bag is packed with frisbees, hats, Scout puppies and more!

The 5 runners-up will win their very own Scout Puppy (stuffed animal).

Don’t forget to include your contact information with your entry/entries and check back to see if you are a winner!

Kudos to Pet Butler who announced their 2008 financials today and demonstrated 20% revenue growth and a 29% increase in the number of franchisees.  From the CEO: 

“The Pet Butler family has definitely been blessed and protected during these tough economic times.” says Founder and CEO, Matt “Red” Boswell.  “I attribute our growth to 3 factors: great people within our organization, a strong pet industry and busier-than-ever pet owners who just don’t have the time to ‘mess’ with the mess.”

Some interesting 2008 accomplishments you just can’t overlook:

All kidding aside, it’s a great accomplishment and truly amazing growth figures given the economic situation of 2008.  Congrats Pet Butler! 

That is hands-down the most common question we’re asked at Balihoo.  Quite frankly, there is no medium that has stood out in the past since so many factors affect the answer: from the product or service you are advertising, to the goals of your campaign, to the demographic you are trying to reach, to the varying price of the medium you are considering.  Instead of answering with one medium, we typically advocate our clients run integrated campaigns (see Katie’s blog post) that mix complementary mediums and give the advertiser the opportunity to gain from cross-medium synergies.

That said, we find ourselves recommending TV advertising more frequently than we have in the past relative to other mediums.  Why?  There are four main reasons.

• Prices have dropped significantly over the past six months-or-so due to the combination of the poor economy and drop-off in advertising after the presidential campaign.

• TV allows different geographic coverage options – Cable allows more precise geographic targeting while Network TV allows for larger area coverage at potentially attractive prices.

• The combination of TV and Internet search advertising is a strong one – think about it…many people today go to their computers to get more information right after they see an ad, or even better, people are surfing the web while watching TV; so a well-coordinated TV and Internet search campaign can produce wondrous results.

• TV can be a great medium for reaching a targeted demographic, which has been especially true in cable TV given the number of stations catering to specific audiences.  For example, if your target is women 35-55yrs-old who are homeowners, cable stations like HGTV and Food Network will undoubtedly reach your audience with very little “waste” (i.e. very economically) and they should probably be part of your advertising mix.  Network TV can provide similar targeting capabilities, but might not be as straightforward and require a little more expertise to plan effectively.

Our market-based experience is validated by a recent report published in AdAge titled, “Guess Which Medium Is as Effective as Ever?: TV”.  The article states that despite many “experts” predicting TV effectiveness would decline due to forces like TiVo and the Internet, it has actually increased in effectiveness based on studies conducted since the early 1990’s.

The report does list some caveats, the main one being “creative matters”.  Oftentimes the roadblock to affordable TV advertising is the production cost of a high-quality spot.  So many local cable spots are of poor quality, as I’m sure you’ve noticed in your local market, and actually do more harm than good to the advertiser over time.  Fortunately, for most of the franchise-based clients with whom we work, professional, customizable TV spots are provided by the franchisor, making TV advertising highly affordable, especially relative to any local competition that would have to spend thousands of dollars producing an ad.

The drawback for many people in utilizing TV is the complexity of placing an ad – you need to consider things like reach, frequency, ratings points, etc…  Even if you think you’re doing it right, if you aren’t doing the math and properly applying these measurements, you could very easily be “taken for a ride”.  Please heed my advice and have a media professional help you – any media buying fees will be nominal relative to the possible cost of inexperience.

The net here is that if you’re new to TV advertising or haven’t used it in awhile, I’d recommend investigating how you can add it into your integrated media mix.  Or, if you’re already using TV but haven’t “re-priced” your buys, now is the time to take another look at what you’re paying for your schedule and renegotiate.  If you make sure you have high-quality creative and rely on professional media planning, TV can deliver significant ROI for your marketing dollar.

Michael Josefowicz recently wrote an article for PBS in their MediaShift publication about How Print Publications Can Help Hyper-Local Sites. 

A good read overall (I’m a big fan of hyper local print) but the last two paragraphs I thought were most interesting and raised a few issues for me:

“How could a newspaper use hyper-local to get more than advertising dollars? Imagine a team composed of a commercial print sales person, a newspaper ad salesperson, and a graphic designer. That could be just the disruptive innovation that brings a huge new population into the local advertising marketplace. Add a local TV/radio person to the mix and all the elements are there.

One contact person to customize a marketing campaign that works — in print and the web and on local broadcast media. Of course, the price has to be right for the customer, but newspaper ads will be a lot less than a run-of-the-issue ad campaign from a major brand. But consider that at a time before Craigslist, those small item classified print ads were the most profitable revenue stream for most newspapers.”

While I think the spirit of his message is right-on, it’s his suggestion around the implementation that concerns me.  A few issues:

1. OK, I know that he’s writing from the perspective of the newspaper, but frankly turning the newspaper into a marketing communications agency is not in their best interest (nor the local tv station, radio, etc).  Let’s make sure this gets implemented by the correct (non-jaded) entity.  For a small business, they should be strategically buying local media, not just being sold. 
2. The problem with his approach is that it’s people-heavy.  Lots of groups have tried this approach before and failed, because of the huge requirement of people.   He needs to broaden his perspective and apply technology to this problem.  Technology is a fantastic aggregator of both data and rote work - components of this problem. 

Ultimately, the right thing is to focus on what’s best for the small business (or franchise) customer themselves - not on what’s right for the newspaper.  Solve the local advertising problem for the SMB and the local media outlets will benefit.  However, approaching the problem in the reverse is what’s gotten local media into this pickle to begin with. 

Just my two cents. 

Below is an excerpt from our bi-weekly internal company newsletter:

Local Search Statistics and Small Business:  Promote Your Business Using Local Search

Overview:  Local search is changing the local marketing game.  Includes a list of interesting and quite impressive statistics:

90% of online commercial searches result in a local offline purchase

61% of all local searches result in a transaction

97% of Americans use the internet to shop, of which 57% say that they “shop online, purchase offline.”

80% of budgets are spent within 50 miles of a consumer’s home

82% of local searches follow up offline (via an in-store visit or by telephone)

Balihoo Perspective:  Local search is here to stay.  It’s a way of marketing that if embraced, can and will significantly benefit your local business. More and more affiliates and franchisees are recognizing the importance of including search in their marketing plans – and with such impressive statistics how could we do anything but enthusiastically encourage them to do so?  Naturally, local PPC is a fundamental piece of the Balihoo solution. 

Dunkin’ Donuts:  A Recession-Resistant Franchise

Overview:   Regardless of the bad economy, consumers still want their morning coffee and donuts. With 98% brand awareness across the U.S. the Dunkin Donuts brand is powerful to say the least. “Our training and support teams deliver the information and tools that help foster our franchisees’ business.” 

Balihoo Perspective:  One area that you can be sure Dunkin’ Donuts corporate leaders pour some thought into is their national and local marketing.  In order for a brand that celebrates such remarkable, national brand awareness to maintain on top throughout the country their local store marketing must be consistent with their national advertising. As they continue to grow, they can ensure that their national brand remains consistent by providing all of their franchisees (new and old) with an platform containing highly branded, corporate-selected, customizable on-demand creative.

A Smaller Piece of the Pie 

Overview:  Once synonymous with a cheap meal – pizza is increasingly considered to be a pricy version of “fast food”. The pizza industry’s troubles actually started before the economic downturn – growth began to slow between 2002 and 2007 – due largely to consumers trying to eat more healthily and/or consumers turning to more gourmet pizza venues. Last year, while hamburger giant McDonald’s saw a 4% growth in 2008, Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa Jones all experienced losses. With the price of cheese (which makes up 40% of a pizza pie’s total cost) soaring to record levels, dropping the cost for consumers isn’t easily doable. Chains such as Pizza Hut and Domino’s have added oven-baked sandwiches (cheaper to produce) and tried to appear healthier by toting the use of “natural ingredients”.

Balihoo Perspective:  Interesting.  While I don’t think that the pizza franchise business is at risk of drying up, this article does indicate that something needs to be changed and since the price of cheese is entirely out of most people’s hands (if you have an “in” let us know) some large changes that can be made rest on marketing.  From a national advertising standpoint, I would guess that the 3 brands mentioned (Pizza Hut, Papa John’s and Domino’s) are all quite successful at garnering widespread brand awareness – however, what are they doing locally?  Have you seen a customized ad for any of those brands that makes you want to visit that particular store? If you want to establish a group of loyal customers, you need to provide them with some reason to feel connected to you – thus, the importance of customization. 

Brands Miss Opportunities with Generic Emails

Overview:  Emphasizes the importance of carefully targeting messages to buyers that include promotions in transactional messaging.  Currently, 58% of retailers send the same first promotional email to buyers as to non-buyers – missing out on the opportunity to personalized or adapt the first message based on what the customer purchased. 

Balihoo Perspective:  More and more consumers are adding company email addresses to their ‘safe lists’ to ensure that certain senders’ emails land in their inboxes – this increasing habit offers further reason to personalize the messages that are going to customers who have bought from you before – if they are willing to take the time to ensure your email doesn’t end up in their spam folder that in itself is a huge opportunity.

The Corporate Face on Facebook  

Overview:  Discusses what it takes for a company or corporation to successfully use social networking. Several tips given:   1. Be aware of what is being said about your company  2.) Have a strong social media strategy/plan in place 3.) Don’t mistake social media technology or a single application as your sole strategy 4.) Empower your employees by asking them to engage with the company’s social networking 

Balihoo Perspective:  With more and more dealers engaging in social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, it is important that we understand how local businesses can and should utilize such sites.  Above all else, when a business decides to turn to social networking he/she needs to continually update and communicate with their community.  By the way, join us on twitter by following us:  http://twitter.com/balihoo!

Guess Which Medium Is as Effective as Ever: TV 

Overview:  For over a decade now, we have been told that TV advertising is dwindling. Many are now surprised that there is no a growing body of evidence which suggests that TV advertising is not only still effective may actually be working better than ever. Unfortunately, despite the noted improved effectiveness since 1995, more than half the advertisers (16 of 29) report losing money by running TV ads. “The ones that did make a profit, though, did very well,” said Mr. Leonard Lodish, to the extent that on the whole, advertisers in the study made a profit from their TV ads after 1995, but lost money before 1995.

Executives at A. Eicoff & Co. said response rates from its TV ads haven’t deteriorated at all over the years. “The death of TV has been exaggerated,” said William McCabe, the shop’s senior VP-business development.

Balihoo Perspective:  Here at Balihoo we’ve continued to be believers in the value of targeted, well-placed, well-negotiated TV buys.  We continue to see it make a positive impact on our customers business’.  Experts theorize that marketing-mix models or matched-market tests may compensate for the impact of DVRs, fragmentation and clutter by making wiser, well-rounded bets. Delivering your message through the use of an integrated marketing plan increases the effectiveness of even the individual pieces that make up the plan (such your TV spot) - great support for employing a mixed marketing plan!

Skittles’ Kool-Aid Overdose

Overview: Last week, Skittles transformed its homepage into an online portal featuring a live Twitter feed alongside Facebook, Flickr and YouTube content. The stunt definitely spurred a huge amount of “chatter” on the networks - just two days after its launch, Skittles was forced to rethink the social media strategy after users flooded the site with profane “tweets”.  At the center of a very lively debate at the 4th Social Media Conference held in London last week, Skittles’ Twitter stunt is now stumping social media experts - stated lessons:

• Know your customer

• Know your brand

• Embrace both

• Share control

• Be part of the conversation - - don’t abdicate

Balihoo Perspective:  While many companies see social media as a relatively inexpensive “new” marketing tool that allows companies to reach new consumers and build brand loyalty at a fraction of the price of a traditional TV or print ad campaign, I doubt that many would completely let go of the reins and allow social networking to go wild on the brand’s account (as Skittles did). While both sides of the debate are understandable, clearly Skittles was successful in getting an entire industry involved in their brand, which can’t be a bad thing!

Despite Economy, Franchise Owner Satisfaction Remains High For Some

Overview: The 4th Annual Study of Franchisee Satisfaction identifies 115 top franchise opportunities that have above average owner satisfaction. The winning companies include: Church’s Chicken, FastSigns, Heaven’s Best Carpet Cleaning, Home Instead Senior Care, Interstate All Battery Centers, Jenny Craig, Nathan’s Famous, Proforma, Sotheby’s Realty and Value Place Hotels.

Balihoo Perspective:  The importance of having a good franchisor/franchisee relationship is emphasized here. Franchisors can and should provide their franchisees with the absolute best practices and marketing/training tools possible to help them flourish.  It’s a win-win solution for both franchisors and their franchisees.

Recently I got referred to a product called YouData that is attempting to change the advertising revenue model.  Under the YouData business model, you, the consumer get paid to view ads.  I decided to go check it out to see how it works.  I went to their site and filled out a MeFile, which essentially creates a demographic profile in which to match me up with the ads.  I then installed the ad display widget and started browsing ads that matched my profile.  It paid me to look at a list of ads and then paid more if I clicked their link through to advertisers sites.  In my experimentation, I racked up about $2.50 in my account.  About a week later I got an email notification that that dollar amount had been deposited into my PayPal account.  Ok - great, so a legit business that actually worked as they said it would! - Great start.

How does it work for advertisers? The advertiser defines the customer profile they are looking for in a specific ad, and anywhere the ad serving widget exists, the system will serve up ads specifically to customers based on their MeFile.  

How does it work for online publishers?  For the most part, YouData appears to be targeting blogger’s, but in theory any site that uses third party advertising (such as Google ad-words) could benefit from this service.  There is a impression split model where the revenue from the ads is shared between the consumer and the publisher.  They also have another feature that allows the consumer to tip the blogger by shifting some of their ‘earnings’ to the blogger.  (I would be curious to know how often user tip the publisher)

Interesting concept, but will it take off?

• Like any pay-out model on the Internet, people jaded by Internet scams may assume that there is some catch, which might prevent people from creating a MeFile, but with good business practices and effective word of mouth marketing, this can be overcome.
• How will the recent announcement of Google behavioral advertising impact the effectiveness of YouData?  YouData has a different business model but the service offering to advertisers is similar.  It is never fun to be competing with the big dogs.  Their current value proposition is the consumer payout model but the key will be getting that to scale.

In the localized online marketing space, there is definitely some opportunity for YouData, and as I understand it they are having some success in this area.   Combining the MeFile concept with traditional ad-server localization would create a powerful observation.

Overall a great concept that we have actually thrown around here at Balihoo in the past.  Its always inspiring to see companies changing traditional business models, and look forward to seeing more from them.  Meanwhile, a few more clicks and the first pitcher is on me!

Here at Balihoo we talk about how franchisors can create and implement a “Breakthrough Local Store Marketing Strategy”.  Is your LSM Strategy Breakthrough?  If you can’t answer a resounding YES to the below questions, it’s time to review the strategies and tools you have in place to enable local demand generation efforts:

6 Questions to discover if your LSM Strategy is Breakthrough:

1. Are all local store marketing effort implemented by my franchisees 100% in concert with our national brand?
2. Are my marketing and advertising materials currently being distributed to all franchisees in the most effective, cost-efficient manner possible?
3. Are we leveraging our national buying power to get the best pricing for local marketing efforts across all mediums?
4. Do my franchisees all have a clear and actionable local marketing strategy that leverages best-practices across the entire network?
5. Do I make marketing EASY for my franchisees so they can focus more on running their business?
6. Do I have clear visibility into all local marketing efforts including creative, spend and results? 

 Can’t answer yes to all the above?  We can help - complete local store marketing solution for franchisors. 

Last week I was graciously invited, along with several other Boise-based business leaders, to present a “messy business problem” to an MBA class at Boise State University.  (Note: Boise State isn’t just great at football – the school has a well-respected MBA program of which we are proud to be a part.)  The deal was we present a big, messy problem and in return the MBA students would work on solutions and present them to us next month.

While I expected to find a wide array of unrelated, business-specific problems from these business leaders, I was surprised to find that there were two common, reoccurring themes.  First, they wanted to know how to solve the pervasive problem of email overload in their business.  Second, they were looking for creative ways to continually promote work-life balance in the face of this harsh economy that demands they do more with less.

At first I was a bit surprised email overload could be a “biggest, messiest” problem for a business from a CEO’s or company president’s perspective, but when I stepped back and thought how much time everyone in my company spends on email, it’s not too hard to quantify the problem and see the magnitude is quite large.  What I think: email has actually gotten worse over the past few years due to the myriad inbound mediums of subscriptions, blogs, twitters, and newsletters on top of an already high load of email from colleagues and clients on a minute-by-minute basis.  I really feel like I need to read the subscriptions and such to keep up with my industry and profession, but have little time to do so.  There are obviously tools and techniques to help alleviate some of this pain – at Balihoo we heavily rely upon instant messenger, use a wiki for process management, communicate through this blog, and have an open seating arrangement promotes more communication and less email.  There are also tools – like Google reader  - to help remove some of the subscription-based emails – one of our venture investors wrote a good article about this last week (see it here), so I won’t rehash it here.  I certainly don’t have all the answers, but do think we need to continually address it as a business ourselves, so I’m really looking forward to the students’ ideas.

The second problem was especially interesting to me as COO of Balihoo since my main job is productivity and operation of the company - balancing work-life in the face of an economy that demands businesses operate leaner than ever.  As a manager, this is a tough issue – of course you want everyone to pursue all the things outside the office that make them happy, but the counter is as business leaders it’s our primary responsibility to our stakeholders to ensure the company performs well in the face of perhaps the worst economy in generations.  The reality is we need everyone to work harder today; if everyone doesn’t pull hard together during these times, any company – not just Balihoo – puts its jobs and overall viability in jeopardy.  This fact puts businesses like Balihoo, who espouse work-life passion, in a bit of a vicious paradox: doing “fun” things, inside or outside the office, often just cuts into the time we have to work on business deliverables, but we still do them anyway as we believe it’s the right thing to do in principle and pays long term dividends in terms of team building, company esprit, and morale.

The thing I love most about Balihoo is I am surrounded by great people at Balihoo who I think understand this – if not they wouldn’t be working so hard to build the world’s best marketing solution for franchises.   I guess deep inside I fundamentally believe we will all be rewarded for today’s work down the road (maybe I’m more of a believer of Karma than I thought) and in a shorter term sense, get rewarded by keeping our jobs in a very tough economic climate.  Nonetheless, I can’t wait to get some good ideas from the students next month and I’ll certainly blog about their ideas once I get them.