What happens when you merge high culture, urban revitalization, gourmet food, free flowing drinks, lots of really good looking people, and Detroit?

BravoBravo! happens.

And man, did it happen. Oh my gosh, that was a darn good party.

Last Friday, the Detroit Opera House hosted it's annual BravoBravo! Fundraiser and it was a raving success. A success to the tune of over $205,000 cash money raised. Put that money in the bank, baby.

First of all, it was a sell-out. 2,300 people, partying their butts off, and literally hanging from the balcony. Second, I didn't know so many good looking people lived around here.  Third, it proved in my mind that the only reason why Detroit doesn't have the stuff other big cool cities have is that we don't try enough. Because when we do try, we do it right.

Amy (the Former DIFF Ninja) Prior found some great videos on msnbc.com and thought they'd be a great fit for stuff we put on the DIFF. 

They are!

First, check out Germany's new version of fast food. A restaurant in Nuremberg features food that is delivered to your table via gravity powered slides. Yes, that's a bottle of beer being delivered to a happy patron at the end of the slide. I wonder how they know if someone has had too much?

Second, learn about 18-year old Army Specialist Monica Brown whose acts of heroism (against orders) in Afghanistan earned her the Silver Star Medal. Brown is only the second female since WWII to earn the Silver Star.

Great stories and great examples of the DIFF.

Thanks Amy!

I love good movies (and good television too – the key word there is "good").

I've loved them since I was a kid. In fact, I thought I was Kimba when I was about 5 years old. I'll get into that later, but now I want to talk about VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever a great new site my friend Sheila works on and told me about last week.

VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (from Gale Cengage Learning - the publishers of the VideoHound catalog series) is a really awesome resource for info on movies.  Aside from containing just about any movie I could think of, it has lots of great tools to locate your favorite movies.

If I were young and cool, I guess I'd say "why I heart WOMMA."

But since I'm no longer either, I'll stick with the traditional. "Why I love WOMMA."

Here's why.

Well, first, for those not in the know, WOMMA is the acronym for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. WOMMA is the trade association for word of mouth (WOM) marketers and currently has around 100 member companies. About half of the members are brands such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Dell, and Quicken Loans.  The other half are agencies that provide WOM services. For the full list check out the WOMMA member page.

This past weekend I was lucky enough to attend two very special fundraising events. They both made me realize that caring people are not a silent minority and that change can happen if we want it to.

The first event, the Keith Hamm Foundation's annual fundraiser, was a truly amazing night (I went this past Saturday night).  Here's a little background.

Last year I wrote about Quicken Loans VP Mark Miller being named the Michigan Lymphoma and Leukemia Society's Man of the Year for organizing the Keith Hamm Foundation, dedicated to the discovery of a cure for blood-borne cancers. Mark and his close friends created the Keith Hamm Foundation as a lasting memorial to Keith, who died of cancer last year.

This year's fundraiser was a great success and generated over $20,000 for cancer research.

Oh my gosh. I saw this article and wanted to cry.

How could something so good be so bad for you?

Men's Health has put out the 20 Worst Foods in America. Read it and weep.

Please, dear readers, learn from this great list. Next time you crave for that double deep fried overcooked cheesy beefy starchy thingy, think of this list before you scarf it down.

The worst food of all?

Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing which comes in with a whopping 2,900 calories,  182 grams of fat, and  240 grams of carbs. Ouch!

Here at the DIFF blog, we strongly agree that an ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure. Procrastinate and pay a higher price than you should have.

Just like the Boy Scouts, we believe in the motto "be prepared."

Ok, I'm lying. I'm like the biggest procrastinator in the world. I don't do anything until the last minute and that's just the way it is. With the exception, of course, of my taxes.

A wise college professor once told me, "the one place you never want to owe money to is the IRS. They don't like it and they always get what they are owed – with lots of interest and penalties."

Don't mess with the IRS.

Ok, here is my official and promised follow-up to my first post about the Knork last month.

First, I want to thank Lacy Simon, Knork Inc's vice president of marketing. Lacy found our first post (a testament to the power and connectivity of blogging) and sent me two sets of Knorks – a beautiful and super sturdy stainless steel set and a semi-disposable plastic set that's best for camping, picnics, and other outdoor use.

The Knorks have been tested and reviewed by several of my DIFF mates and me. We've scooped with them, cut with them, mashed with them and used them on various types of food.

Yesterday was opening day down at the old ball park in Detroit and although I didn't make it down there (Kelly did and got Tiger funky – that's her 3rd from the right) it got me thinking.

Thinking about what baseball means to me and why I love it so much.

And why we REALLY love it in Detroit.  Why we love our Tigers. Even during the dark years of the Tigers being one of the worst teams in history (1988-2006), we loved them.

Most folks I know around here grew up playing baseball for sure, but our love for the game goes beyond a simple nostalgic feeling toward a game you played as a kid. No, for Detroiters, baseball is bigger than that.

The "former" Diff Ninja sent me an interesting article today on abcnews.com about an injured Iraq War veteran whose recovery has been greatly helped by a service dog donated to him by the nonprofit Puppies Behind Bars (an organization that trains non-violent prison inmates how to raise service dogs, which in turn are donated to disabled folks in need of a service dog).

Sgt. Bill Campbell was severely injured by shrapnel and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and found himself unable to leave his home. Sgt. Campbell also has a debilitating fear of someone sneaking up on him from behind, which made his "everyday life virtually unbearable."

Then Pax, a 17-month old Golden Labrador, who was brought up by Puppies Behind Bars and actually trained to help those suffering from PTSD, came into Campbell's life and things began to change for the better.

Move over knife and fork, the knork is here.

The Washington Post reports today in "A Knork In the Road" about a really new and funky utensil that is destined to change the way we eat.

The knork.

Will it change us forever?

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Is a knork the DIFF? I'll let you decide.

We have a saying at Quicken Loans. "You see it when you believe it."

It's actually one of our ISMS, or principles that drive our corporate culture.

Anyway, I know it's true because I saw first-hand something that I would have considered impossible before I actually saw it.

I saw skiers who had one leg, no legs and even blind. Yes, that's right. Blind skiers, going full speed down the slopes. 

I'm not lying.

Last month when our friend and coworker Jarrett "Spiderman" Knyal died after a long battle with cancer, we put our heads and our pocketbooks together to help his surviving wife and two young children.

We are proud to announce that Quicken Loans employees raised over $13,000 for Jarrett's family which Quicken Loans generously matched. This will give Jarrett's family well over $26,000 that they didn't expect. 

Also, we've dedicated our Marketing Team parking spot (at the Quicken Loans headquarters) to Jarrett.  Going forward, we are purchasing the spot for $25 a week and sending the money to Jarrett's family to do with as they please. It's not a whole lot, but it might come in handy.

We hope our gifts of love help. Trust us, they are a just a small tribute to our friend Jarrett.  We'll miss him forever.

That's right, you heard it here first.

Quizzle, the coolest and newest site on the web about your home and your finances is LIVE.

It's been a long time coming, baby. And it's ready to roll!

Instead of me rewriting an entire post about Quizzle and how great it is, I'll simply reprint a few paragraphs from Ann-Marie's entry on the Quizzle blog and then invite you to go check it out for yourself. 

This is big folks. You are gonna love Quizzle.

Lots of people think coming in second place is a bad thing.

You aren't the best. You lost. You came in second.

Not me.

I'm thrilled. We are #2 baby! 

That's right.  FORTUNE released its "100 Best Companies to Work For" list today and guess what? Quicken Loans is #2 this year. 

Last year we were #17, which is pretty darn good in itself. Over 1500 companies compete to be on the list.  But to be #2?  Wow.  Nice.

And the only thing standing in our way to being the best place to work in the country??? THE GOOGLE! (I can live with that, I guess).

I didn't want to write this post. I've known for a few weeks I would have to, but I couldn't even start it.

My coworker and my friend – in fact he was one of the coolest guys I've ever known – died Wednesday afternoon after a long battle with cancer.  He was 44. That's way too young.

Jarrett "Spiderman" Knyal (or Jarrett "Cockroach" Knyal – depending on what day you talked to him) was one of the most inspirational people I've had the pleasure of working with.  He understood me when I said "I can't eat at P.F. Chang's, since no Chinese people eat there."  My other coworkers usually stare at me with blank faces when I say stuff like that, but Jarrett understood.

Well, anyway, to do a tribute for such a great person, to try to put in words what he meant to me and the impact he had on me, where do I start?

I guess when I first met him.

It's the goodbye blog posts that always make me the saddest. 

This one goes out to Melissa Morrison, who has decided to change her focus in life and become...a mom!

Man, I'll miss Melissa.

It's not just because she was a great person with a ton of knowledge about web marketing.

It's not just because she was a member of the DIFF team and helped out tremendously with planning and launching the blog.

It's because she was such a darn good project manager. I mean it. She really had the project management stuff down. Down pat.

There's a reason why Andy Sernovitz (CEO of the new Blog Council, the founder of GasPedal, and the former CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association – among many other things) is considered a leader in word of mouth marketing. 

He does stuff like send me the luggage tag in the picture at the right.  It's a little thing, but it's pretty cool. 

At the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas this past November (the one where Quicken Loans won a WOMMIE award for our Yahoo! Answers program), he passed around a hat, collecting business cards without telling why he wanted the cards.

It was 10 years ago today that the word "Web log" was coined by a guy named Jorn Barger who maintained a website with his opinion and comments on a variety of subjects.

Two years later, online journal author Peter Merholz took the word "weblog" and split it into "We blog."

Not long after, blog became the favored word for a weblog, and it remains so today.

You can read the whole story on NPR.  They even provide a pretty interesting timeline of how the internet, the world wide web and blogs evolved.

Enjoy!

The other day the Kauf was driving down the freeway and noticed a sign on the back of a Staples truck claiming that Staples trucks never go over 60 mph in an effort to reduce fuel usage. 

Huh?  Did he read that right?

Yup, he did.

It's part of the Staples Soul campaign. We like it!

Just sharing something that Ann-Marie sent to me that you might enjoy (if you haven't seen it yet).

Yesterday the Consumerist did a post about a great customer service email response from Amazon. I won't go into detail on it here. Just read it and laugh out loud, if you so choose.

Good job on your sense of humor, Amazon! 

Edson (I can hook you up at Best Buy) McLean was right. It really is a Jeep thing!

I just got back from eight days in beautiful St. Maarten and I have to admit, one of the best parts of my trip was the Jeep I rented. It made all the difference in the world.

First, being the word of mouth aficionado I am, I'll get my recommendations out of the way:

1. I highly recommend St. Maarten/St. Martin as a vacation destination. It was amazing.
2. I highly recommend using vacationstogo.com for your travel stuff.  They were great.  Cheap and everything totally worked out.
3. I highly recommend staying at the Princess Height Condominiums if you go to St. Maarten. It was a great place and absolutely worth the price.

That leaves me to my last recommendation.  If you do go to St. Maarten (or any place like it with roads that are, well, less than perfectly paved and more like a roller coaster track than a well designed road) rent a Jeep (and use Prestige Value Rental Cars - a local company that was great). I loved every minute of my Jeep and I will NEVER drive in a place like St. Maarten with anything less!

Something stinks at Detroit Metro Airport and it isn't fumes from burning jet fuel.

It's the fact that Detroit Metro is the slowest airport I've ever been to (anywhere in the world) when it comes to waiting for baggage to be unloaded.

The other day I waited (at 1 in the morning) over an hour to get my bags after my US Airways flight from Charlotte to Detroit. It was a frustrating ending to a perfect vacation in beautiful St. Maarten (I'll talk about that in a later post). 

What the heck is going on that makes it take an hour to unload bags from a plane?  How come they can do it in 15 minutes pretty much everywhere else?

It's a shame that Detroit, the organized labor capital of the world, does such a poor job on a task like bagging handling.  I have no idea what the problem is.  Are there too few workers?  Are the workers just slow and apathetic?  To be honest I don't care. I just don't want to wait an hour for my luggage ever again.

Long before there were X Games, extreme sports and reality TV, there was Evel Knievel.

Evel Knievel was the man.  Straight up and no lies. 

He was a daredevil like no other in modern history and he paid a big price for his feats. He once claimed he broke every bone in his body and I don't doubt it. 

Part athlete, part showman, part huckster, Evel did stuff that made the world gasp back in the 70s.  Kids wanted to be him.  Adults thought he was nuts.

I used to put bike ramps out in the street and see how far I could jump.

I still have scars.

I've know Greg Bowens for more than 25 years. We went to Cass Tech together in downtown Detroit and I worked with Greg for a short time when he was the press secretary for former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer. Oh, how I long for the days of such high caliber leadership in Detroit. Archer was one of the good ones.  Trust me on that.

Anyway, no sense in crying over past mayors. Let's deal with today.

That is exactly what Greg does in his blog "get positive with me" (the pic of the windmills is from his blog – keep reading and you'll understand what it's all about).

I was lucky last week to get a chance to hear Richard Tait, CEO of Cranium, give a keynote luncheon address at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's 3rd Annual Summit in Las Vegas.

Tait is a great speaker and has really put together (with the help of others) a great company.  It's all about the culture (check out Cranium's blog).  I can appreciate that working for Quicken Loans.  In fact, watching his presentation I realized there are some very close similarities between Cranium and Quicken Loans.

Both companies owe their huge business successes to the same thing - strong corporate cultures that breed innovation.

Go to www.freerice.com and do your part to eliminate world hunger while you test your English language skills.

What a cool site!

And talk about viral.  The first day the site began donations, 830 grains of rice were donated.  77,126,310 grains of rice were donated yesterday! 

FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com, and according to its site, has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

So, check it out, test (and hopefully improve) your English language skills, and get some rice in the mouths of those who need it most.  The more words you get right the more grains of rice are donated.  It's that simple. 

In this case simple is very good.

I salute the folks behind freerice.com for not only creating a great site for two great reasons, but also creating something that is actually "viral" – one of the most misunderstood and overused terms in business today! 

Oh yeah. We won a WOMMIE!

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association picked Quicken Loans as a winner of a 2007 WOMMIE award (four awards were given from a field of over 50 entries).  We were up against some pretty heavy hitters, so it's a great feeling to be recognized for our word of mouth efforts.

We won a WOMMIE for our Yahoo! Answers Knowledge Partner profile, the Quicken Loans Home Loan Guru, which I've been very involved with since we launched it in April.  I'm a huge fan of Yahoo! Answers and I can't tell you how happy I am that our campaign to provide good information on Answers has been recognized as an industry-leading word of mouth marketing project.

If you haven't checked out Answers, I recommend it.  It's informative, interesting, and most of all, a lot of fun.  You can find just about anything from the more than 20 million users.

I want to thank the Word of Mouth Marketing Assocation for recognizing our efforts and Yahoo for developing one of the best sites on the web. 

We are honored and consider word of mouth marketing a huge opportunity for future business growth.

Awwww. Our little baby is growing up.  Yup, our beloved experiment in controlled corporate communication chaos turns one today. 

We've had some ups and downs (thankfully mostly ups) and yes, we did win an award or two.  The DIFF proudly and humbly accepted a couple of Silver W3 awards for best homepage, business and best copywriting. 

Is writing for a blog considered copywriting?  I always thought coming up with stuff like "Coke – it's the real thing" or "Built Ford tough" is copywriting.  I think of blog writing as storytelling – much less polished and more personal than typical business copywriting. 

It's really a coincidence that the same two years of life, my Army years, produced my own personal examples of the best and worst leaders I ever knew.  One of the best was 1st Sgt. Whatshisname.  He was a great leader. And then there was Sgt. P.

Sgt P was a first-class jerk.

Since that time, I've know some pretty darn good leaders (met a few in the last few years) and I ran head first into a few REALLY bad ones back when I worked for the government of a "large northern industrial city."  A city known for the automobile….

Anyway, I actually had pretty much forgotten about Sgt. P until a few months ago when I was walking through the Detroit Institute of Arts and someone yelled out my name. 

"Hey, Closson!" said a loud voice that startled me out of my art-induced stupor.   

Today, exactly 140 years ago, we took possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for less than two cents an acre.  Not a bad deal, even in 1867.  But not everyone saw it that way.

Many folks saw it as a stupid idea and just another example of government waste.  Why, after all, would the U.S. want 586,412 square miles of some of the worlds' roughest, coldest, practically uninhabited terrain? 

They called Alaska "Andrew Johnson's Polar Bear Garden."

They were wrong.  And when gold was discovered in the Klondike River in 1896, they reconsidered the deal and decided that Andrew J. did the right thing.

All my life Detroit has been on a 5-year plan.

In the late 70s the plan was to build the Renaissance Center and Hart Plaza, stirring economic development and transforming the riverfront from an industrial port to an entertainment destination with festivals, restaurants and other stuff.  It didn't really work.

In the 80s the plan was to build the Detroit People Mover and Detroit Trolley line, which would spur economic development and connect the various parts of downtown with 100s of thousands of daily riders going from place to place.  It, uh, didn't really work.

After a long hiatus, Grilled Cheese Wednesday returned this week and man, was it a tasty break in our workday.

Grill Master Lea Puckett manned the electric table grill and cooked those babies to a crispy-brown that reminded me of Michigan cider mill donuts (I'm sorry if you've never had cider mill donuts). 

And the taste.  The cheese melted in my mouth and filled my palate with a heavenly essence that would most certainly make Chef Emeril Lagasse say "BAM!"

And best of all, we raised money for a Texas kindergarten class that needed some character building books but had no budget. 

Never fear kiddies, Grilled Cheese Wednesdays is here!

Yesterday, Moondog came to visit the Quicken Loans headquarters.  Moondog is the official mascot of the NBA Eastern Conference champion Cleveland Cavaliers (sister company of Quicken Loans). 

Moondog brought the Eastern Conference championship trophy with him.  Pretty cool.

Adam (Tiny) Lewinski couldn't help but pick up poor Moondog and give him a big hug. 

What does this have to do with "the DIFF concept?"

Well, I don't know.  But think about it.  When is the last time the NBA Eastern Conference trophy, as well as an offical NBA team mascot came to your office?