Check out this week’s Nashville Scene and read up on our favorite masked theatre troop, John Holleman and Company!

Oh, and don’t forget to go see their performance of Metamorphoses at Nashville’s Parthenon Feb 17 -19 and 24 -26.

Ah, yes. Let’s schedule a meeting.

You know, that one hour block of time we will all lovingly carve out in our day, which despite our best intentions WILL turn into a hairy, two and a half hour beast of random conversations and little to no actual productivity.

While we at FlackRabbit cannot completely solve the mystery of the chia-meeting – we are certainly happy to direct you to a fabulous blog that we feel has a great way of explaining things, in hopes that what they have to say might help you make those meetings more productive and positive for you and your team.

Basically, these folks at 37 Signals believe meetings are evil, but if you are going to have them:

Keep your meetings to one hour, make your agendas specific, solve an actual problem or two, make a plan for solving new problems, assign tasks, and then get the heck out of there.

To this we say, “Amen, brother.”

*Denotes obscure reference to Walt Disney’s The Parent Trap

It is amazing how many folks I am running into lately from college and high school. We go through the usual motions of current marital status, location and career – and then almost every one of them mentions how they really want to own their own X, or sell their own Y … they are just waiting for the right time, the right loan, or the right contact.

Just dreaming about it with an old friend makes them tear up. Can you imagine how excited they will be when they actually open that store, sell that painting, or start that charity?

While most of these folks are still putting together their plans, others have already started and are doing quite well, so today we are gonna give you a little inspiration at www.brittneycate.com. Fabulous product, great website and the cutest Auburn alum you ever saw. (Christy B. gave me your site info, Brittney - I am so excited for you!)

Take a look at Brittney’s site and see if it doesn’t inspire you to take your passion and make a living out of it.

Are you ready? We can’t wait to introduce you to the rest of the world

I am a huge believer in the power of a handwritten “thank you.”

I have always done the personal life thank you note thing for gifts, thoughtfulness, etc. But with email, voicemail and instant messaging, I never really knew a handwritten note had a place at the office until I attended a session at Nashville’s Center for Non Profit Management.

Our instructor gave us the challenge of writing at least two thank you notes a day. Handwritten. Email would not count.

Now, I am very much addicted to this practice. I find that although not many folks I write to ever even mention receiving my notes, every now and then I do receive a thank you note for sending a thank you note. That is cool.

So, the FlackRabbit professional goal challenge for February: Send at least two handwritten thank you notes each day.

There might be days you stay late to get it done, but there will never be a day you regret the effort.

Since I’m the geek in the house, I’ll tell you of some new geeky goodness that we’ve just added: FlackRabbit has just been made a beta tester for MSN adCenter. WOWZERS! That’s great! Uhh, what’s adCenter and why the silly capitalization issues? adCenter is Microsoft’s hot-out-of-the-oven response to Google AdWords (see the capitalization thingie again?). Place your bid on selected, relevant keywords and watch your site listing go up – on the paid section anyway.

“Well, that’s all and good but what does it mean for me and my business?” Well, according to BusinessWeek, Google’s…

simple text-ad service, called AdWords, enables marketers literally to count how many Net surfers click from a Google text ad to the company’s Web site. That ad model is increasingly preferred to traditional TV, print, and radio ads that have difficulty quantifying how many people are actually paying attention.

Meaning you can see how well your campaign is doing rather than hoping you’ve got the right message across. (I would have linked to the article but it’s members only – not like the jacket) Not convinced? Here’s a pretty good success story, same article:

It turns out that with AdWords, Vanguard in November spent less than 50 cents per click, one-tenth that of some rivals, and 14% of Net surfers exposed to the ad clicked through to its Web site. That performance beats the response rate from a typical direct-mail effort, for example, of about 2%. And it’s why Vanguard upped its Net ad spending by 33% since 2003…

Anyway, long story short: we have access to the next AdWords competitor and we’ll be putting it through the ringer. Stay tuned for feedback…and more weird capitalization.

Jim to Margie at 3:45 p.m. today: “Oh. I’ve got it. I don’t know if you just heard that over the phone – but my lightbulb just went off. Did you hear it?”

Jim at My Emma has been quite helpful to FlackRabbit recently, and his lightbulbs are our friends.

Sometimes the most fabulous folks will walk right up to you and ask to be your intern.

There are many funny things about having an intern. A personal favorite was watching Tara’s face fall when I made the torturous decree, “Interns may not wear flip flops to the office, not even on Friday.”

Another funny moment was trying to keep a straight face when Virginia finally got up the courage to ask, “Are you guys mad at each other? Because you never eat lunch together, but me and my friends eat together every day unless we are mad at each other.” (sigh) Bless them.

The cool thing is that between these “real world”revelations, I get to see these interns/kids/gofers become real working men and women. They starting showing up in suits and they simply beam when they complete that task they at first deemed “really, really hard.” The sad part is when they leave you. I hate it. But then you are given the even more gratifying duty of serving as a reference for The Great First Job Search.

Today, our fabulous former intern Lindsey called to thank us for the glowing recommendation we gave her new employer a few weeks back.

Only wish we could have kept you for ourselves.

Congrats on your new gig Lindsey! We are so proud of you.