Marie-Lynn Richard

After 7 years of specifically living by this credo, I am still doing things with the people I have met along the way. And it’s quite easy to get started. When someone you know tells you what they want to do, what their dream is… just make it come true!

The Holstee Manifesto Lifecycle Video from Holstee on Vimeo.

I have become totally enamored with The Age of Persuasion, a CBC Radio show with Terry O’Reilly about marketing. Kudos to the episodes on ‘Green Washing‘ and ‘Luxury Advertising‘. In his episode on the marketing of expensive things nobody really needs, O’Reilly says: “Luxury marketers have to ‘create’ a vision of the future that propels their customers to a place they could not have imagined themselves.” which struck a huge cord with me. As someone with a very active imagination, I constantly create futures and imagine in great details the road that will propel me there. That’s why I call my own brand of fantasizing ‘Planning’ which probably explains my high success rate. I have a great appreciation for quality, which is not a mainstay of products today, so I am very familiar with luxury goods but I really don’t crave them and now I know that it’s probably because the vision that is created in their ad campaigns pales in comparison with my ‘Planning’! The Age of Persuasion is available on iTunes.

Google recently announced that it’s going after content farms lowering the ranking of sites its new algorithm has identified as low-value. You know those annoying sites that offer absolutely nothing to the reader but a bunch of Adsense ads. This could make highly capitalized companies like Demand Media, Yahoo! and AOL shake in their boots as they continue to use their content development workflows to cram out crowd-sourced McContent purchased at, what I consider, sub-par wages.

As I enjoy my first day of corporate freedom and ponder which ventures to take on next I say ‘it’s a bout time!’ and ‘I love you Google’!!!
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Last week I was flabbergasted when a colleague was offered a list of my friends and (OMG!) friends of friends, after signing up and adding me on Facebook. Why did this happen? I wasn’t able to replicate this ‘feature’ exactly, however, I was able, without much effort to retrieve my own friends list anonymously, even though it is purposefully hidden from everyone. Add this unintentional feature to the ‘real name from email’ vulnerability and you have a powerful information tool in Facebook.
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While there are many interesting TED talks emerging from TEDWomen, I enjoyed Arianna Huffington’s short talk on the merits of sleep.

TED is often self indulgent for me because I just enjoy people telling the world what I have been thinking and saying myself for years! Sleep and silence are my favorite luxuries. In fact I just spent about a week and a half going to bed at 8-9pm. If it was always my choice I would go to bed earlier than my 10-year-old daughter! While sleep (and silence) are free, they are a hard to sell to people who have been wearing their ever beeping ‘connectedness’ and black circled weary eyes as a badge of honor for years. So thank you Arianna for helping along my favorite cause. Luckily I am in a relationship with someone who also believes sleep will cure anything (preferably 8-9 hours a night) but his preferred sleeping schedule is 3am-12pm and mine is 9pm-6am. Luckily, we are both well-rested individuals who have ample presence of mind and are not irritable so we make it work!
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