Here is how you fix it….

Take out any cogs that are surplus to the three main centre ones.  I took out the three with crosses on them.

I have just done this today.  When I first tried the modified Ipod Car Cassette Adaptor in my car, I needed to fiddle around with the Rewind and Forward button to stop the tape from playing on the side that makes it noisy.  Once I got the tape to play the other side, all was sweet.  It’s a little louder without those minor cogs, but I usually listen to music at a level that covers this noise so not a worry for me.

I would like to thank Fallenposters who posted this tip on www.metafilter.com under the title “My Cassette Adapter is Flipping (haha) Annoying…”

Ps, I use an ipod car cassette adaptor with my Belkin FM Ipod adaptor – I need both because in Auckland the Ipod FM Transmitters don’t work because there are no free FM stations free, as the laws here are really loose so lots of geeks transmitting crap out into the air.

Hope this helps, please comment and let me know if you find this and it does help?

Also I will let you know how my modified Car Cassette Ipod Adaptor is going after a few weeks of use… if it craps out I will let you know asap.

This is my own personal list of SOCIAL MEDIA ‘trackers’ – websites that assist me in understanding what people are saying and thinking about my brands…

http://technorati.com – Who’s saying what. Right now in BLOGS

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/187381 – here’s a blog by Social Media Today which covers off the below tools;

http://www.alltop.com/- you can read more about what ALLTOP is at http://alltop.com/about/ but basically they say they arn’t a search engine, that they are instead more like an online magazine rack.

http://www.socialmention.com/- Real-time social media search and analysis.  This one shows what’s been said about your brand across the online universe.

http://www.bing.com/twitter/search – real time twitter search, giving you up to the minute news on what’s being said about your brand.

Social Media Today had KLOUT in their top 10, but I list KLOUT in an earlier blog, so not going to repeat myself.

http://backtweets.com/ – allows you to search for tweets with URL links in them.  Try the advanced search too.  Not sure how this works with shortened links though?

Wordle and Google Trends are also mentioned, but I know about both of these, so not going to write them up.

http://blogpulse.com/ – this site interestingly looks to be the handy work of ACNielsen – the global market researcher… very interesting as they aren’t usually forthcoming with information for FREE!

http://www.alexa.com/ – Free traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics, and more for WEBSITES!  Take a tour of ALEXA here

http://www.swixhq.com/SWIX.html – aptly named SOCIAL MEDIA ROI on the meta tag – SWIX claims it is like Google Analytics for Social Media… only problem is it’s only free during it’s Beta (trial-test stage).   And to use it you have to sign up… which I have not yet done.

More to come and I find more social media brand trackers…

Really enjoyed this blog, and the 109 comments left under it today…. http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/blogs/lady-in-the-red/3628150/What-is-the-OCR

I really wish we would learn more about this stuff at school, and I don’t mean at university.  Kiwi kids should be learning about the OCR, and Interest Rates, and Inflation etc as soon as they can add and subtract.

I reckon there should be a subject that fits right next to Maths and English that covers off ‘HOW TO LIVE SUCCESSFULLY IN NZ” and it should incoporate relevant laws, morgage trends, personal banking, and budgeting, motor car management, personal health management… you know all the things that you just have to do when you ‘grow up’.  It seems to me that all these things get taught in such a round about way, and I think we’d all be better off if we learnt it early on….  simple to say, difficult to do I guess.

Anyway, that is not why I am blogging today… today I am blogging because the below is what I thought was a very clear way of explaining the OCR……  It’s a comment from the blog link above….

“olstars #22   11:10 am Apr 28 2010

The main point of the OCR is *not* to give people more or less money, as you alude to (although that is a side effect), but rather to encourage or discourage spending/saving.

The idea is, that if the OCR goes up, this encourages people to save their money (because they get a better interest rate). It also discourages people from borrowing to spend (because it is now more expensive). both of those result in lower spending overall. OCR up = spending down.

Likewise, a drop in the OCR means borrowing to spend becomes cheaper and saving becomes less attractive – so stimulates spending in the economy. OCR down = spending up

A couple of prolems with this arise

1) A large amount of borrowing is long term (mortgages) which means a rise in the OCR translates to higher interest payments on exisitng variable mortgages, which results in people effectively borrowing more, not less as intended. (this is why inflation is sometime quoted as excluding housing spend)

2) NZ banks source a lot of their capital from foreign markets – meaning any change in the NZ OCR can only have a small impact on real interest rates that consumers face”

Check out the Curio Wine Collection website

Ever wondered how Social Media will affect traditional journalism?  I pondered this over a delicious hashbrown at HeadQuarters in Westhaven on Saturday morning (well worth checking out their hashbrowns by the way, because they are just awesome!)

Think about it – as more and more newspapers go online there will be more and more opportunity for newspapers to capture not only the demographics of their readers but also what their readers are actually reading and what they think about it.

Journalist’s will be made accountable based on click throughs & comments left – internet statistics will change the way Journo’s are measured.  Eventually newspapers will know which of their journalists are actually being read, and which are not.  Which of their journalists are popular and which are not, and which of their journalists are annoying the crap out of their readers and which are not.  Journalists adding true value will be promoted and offered more space – not because their editor likes them or their work – but because the ever important reader of the publication voted with their fingers and clicked/read/commented on that particular journo’s article.

It’s going to be a whole new ball game – Journo’s will be measured with internet driven KPI’s (key performance indicators).  Reader hurdle rates will provide newspaper owners with ammunition such as reader-reach to indicate a jouno’s value (salary bracket).  All of which will lead to the following important question being asked and answered: Should they (the journalist) be writing for the publication in the first place?

Gosh! Think about that – if newspapers go this way – imagine how slanted the news could get!  Journo’s will be fighting for popularity and looking to appease – readers rather than challenge them.  Common shock-jockey tactics used in this weekends paper (i.e. Fran O’Sullivan’s John Key article) may even cease to exist in an attempt to retain one’s job.

Can’t wait -  should be a rather exciting time really, well… if you’re on the outside looking in that is.

Follow me on twitter @sashadentremont

Great piece of marketing – surprisingly from Yellow – not the most dynamic of company’s I admit, because before you start doing this type of cool advertising you need a quality product.  I walk to work (I get to call myself CARBONZERO because of that fact) and on my way to work this morning I found this ‘tiny’ piece of art.  It made me smile, and I enjoyed its scale and message – it’s clever and I like clever, easy-to-get, marketing.   Its location is on a window of the WhiteCliffe Art school on St Georges Bay Road – Parnell.  The little ‘billboard-workers’ are no more than 2CM tall, as you can see in the above magnification.

I liken Yellow to the ‘old’  Kodak – who seemingly sat by and watched innovation in their market (digital camera’s) cause their core business to become obsolete (that’s ‘film-based-photography’ for you i-gen’s).  Of course they seem to have sorted out their stuff now and are doing well especially on the social media front – I follow @JeffreyHayzlett, he seems like a good guy – great twitter sharing – he has over 9,000 followers and is following 8,500 (remember you always need to look at both numbers to get a real picture of a tweeter).  And not that it counts, but I think very highly of him – he seems to be doing a great job leading the Kodak business – and he’s adding real value by sharing the company’s social media learnings.  Check out Kodak Social Media Tips.

It did take Kodak a while to sort their stuff out though, so perhaps Yellow is planning to launch its great new online directory or even better something (as a consumer) I can’t even fathom could exist.  But history would suggest that Yellow seems to have pretty much decided that the internet is a fad.  The last time I used their website – which by the way was the last time I WILL use their website -  I got so frustrated I gave up and googled my search and found the answer in seconds.

Anyway, here’s to a great marketing idea – now all they need to do is get their product sorted.

28 Sep 2009 addition

I have just been told about this artist called slinkachu check out “little people a tiny street art project” it’s O for Awesome!

Here is the second of five posts on the 2008 Curio Collection, as promised.

Harvested in the dead of the night, this elegant pinot noir has something of a dark, passionate nature.  With its Continental climate, the dry Bendigo sub-region of Central Otago reaches temperatures into the 30′s during the ripening season.  Duncan Cramp and his team picked in the coolness of the wee hours to protect the quality of the grapes used for this wine.

No stranger to hard work, Duncan and his family arrived in New Zealand from Zimbabwe, where their farm had been confiscated by Robert Mugabe’s militia.  When Duncan took on the job of managing Curio’s Bendigo vineyard, his determination to forge a new life for his family was backed up by many years of dry-land farming experience.

“I’ve been farming since I left school – that’s nearly 30 years ago”, says Duncan. “I’ve grown a lot of crops, but never grapes before. However the same challenges apply – pests, diseases, irrigation. Bendigo is hot and dry – conditions I’m well used to from Zimbabwe – we hardly ever use our windscreen wipers here.”

This wine is dedicated to Duncan and Janie Cramp, who have shown that the worst of times can lead to the best of wines.

This wine was made to express the best flavours of our Bendigo vineyard.  Selective use of oak in the winery has enhanced to ripe pinot flavours. The wine is vibrant with dark red fruit and delicate savoury notes.  Whole berries were allowed to remain intact at the commencement of fermentation.  After a  5 day cold soak, the must was allowed to warm up and the fermentation occurred un-inoculated .  The fermenting must was hand plunged 2-4 times per day and pressed off skins near dry.  Half of this wine was matured in French oak barriques.

Brix: 24.5
Alcohol: 14.0%
Residual Sugar: 5  g/L
PH: 3.49
Soil type:Alluvial silt and schist overlaying gravels
Clone: 5, 777 and Abel

STOCKISTS

RESTAURANTS
Auckland
Taiko Japanese Restaurant – Kingsland
Delicious Italian Restaurant – Grey Lynn
Little India – Kingsland
Christchurch
Rotherhams of Riccarton
Annies Wine Bar & Restaurant – Christchurch

FINE WINE STORES
Wanaka Fine Wines Ltd
Bacchus Cellars – Remuera

Follow Curio Wines

I’ve been using twitter since the 1st of August 2009.  As a wine-marketer I felt it was time for me to embrace this new communication tool to find out what all the tweet was about and understand why twittering has become a daily obsession for so many people around the world.

First some numbers…(source: Wikipedia unless otherwise stated)

1. Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide
2. In February 2009 Twitter was stated to have 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits
3. Twitter is ranked as the third most used social network
4. Twitter reaches over 28 million U.S. people monthly  (Source: Quantcast)
5. Sysomos recently analysed 11.5 Million twitter accounts and found…
6. 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day (Source: Sysomos)
7. 21% of users have never posted a Tweet (Source: Sysomos)
8. 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people (Source: Sysomos)
9. 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity (Source: Sysomos)
10. More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share. (Source: Sysomos)
11. There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%) (Source: Sysomos)

LEARNING ONE. Twitter is huge and comes with it’s own culture & unique language.   And what’s the best way to learn a new language or experience a new culture?  Simple… go where the language is spoken or live in the culture.   Some ‘experts’ will tell you not to enter the world of Social Media until you have a Social Media strategy but how can you develop a good Social Media strategy without first understanding Social Media?

LEARNING TWO. Twitter is promoted as a community, a place you can “share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” twitter home page.  My biggest revelation so far is that the ‘quality’ of your follower group is much more important than the number of followers you have.  That’s right, not all followers are created equal.  There are good (active) tweeters, these are people who join in on the twitter conversation by using twitter language like ‘@replies’ retweets (RT), and #hashtags (see below for more info on these twitter terms).  Then there are inactive twitter accounts that follow you but never offer any value or even worst bad ‘bot’ spammer followers who hope you will follow them back so they can load up your twitter inbox with tweetspam.

Trust me when I say the worst thing you can do when trying to build your brand on twitter is fall into the biggest twitter trap of all….endlessly searching for ways to get more followers.  Followers will come with time, because it takes time for people who are interested in what you’re tweeting about to find you.   As a global-marketer of a boutique New Zealand wine brand (Mud House Wines) I’m interested in tweeting with people who know and love Mud House Wines and also people who are interested in (surprise, surprise) boutique New Zealand wine.  I want to build stronger relationships with Mud House Wine enjoyers and ask them to share their positive experiences with their like minded followers.   In turn I will build awareness for Mud House Wines with the right people… just like old-school marketing… you need a targeted approach.

I’ve just started to investigate twitter management and measurement applications.  Because Twitter is open source (like facebook) developers around the world have made clever applications that can assist you in measuring your Twitter account in many different ways.

Some of my favourite management tools are…

• Seesmic
• Tweetdeck
• Hootsuite – Hootsuite is the first management tool that I have seen that assists you with managing multiply twitter accounts (like Seesmic and Tweetdeck) but that also offers measurement tools as well.

Some of my favourite measurement tools are…

• Bit.ly – tweeting is about sharing links, and bit.ly lets you track clicks on those links
• Twitalyzer – this is the tool that will teach you that the number of followers is only part of the Twitter game… take a look it’s great
• Klout – the more I use this one the more I like it

Here are some other measurement tools I have found… still working out if they are of value

• Social Mention
• TweetStats
• TwitterCounter
• Twitority
• Addictomatic
• Backtype
• Trendrr – this is more of a general social media conversation search tool
• Pipes
• Twitseeker
• TweetVolume
• Twinfluence
• Lijit – This may be more to do with blogs
• I’ll keep adding to this list as I find new ones, because new apps will pop up everyday
• If you find a new measurement app let me know – tweet it to me if you like

tweet sashadentremont

Twitter Terms Explained

@replies – when you find a tweet that you want to comment on,  you can reply to it by clicking reply (the curved arrow on the right-hand-side of the tweet) this will automatically place the twitter username in your tweet box, showing up like @sashadentremont, this means the person you are responding to will see your response pop up in their twitter inbox.

RT (retweets) – when you find a tweet you want to share with your followers, all you need to do is type RT in your tweet box, and then copy and paste the tweet after the RT, this is all about giving credit where credit is due, plus everyone likes to be retweeted, so you can’t so your twitter reputation any harm by retweeting as much as possible.  Here’s a good blog about How To ReTweet Properly

#hashtags – the best example I have seen so far of a #hashtag is the #FollowFriday #hashtag – as far as I can understand it #hashtags allow the twitter community to search under popular topics.. you can read more about #hashtags here and more about #FollowFriday here

As promised here is the first of five blogs Sasha will post on the 2008 CURIO collection.

When the pickers arrived at the Gane’s vineyard on the morning of April 4th 2008, they were imagining a steady but not-too-demanding day of work, punctuated by regular rest stop picnics involving Raewyn Gane’s legendary scones.  But when the winery announced that any grapes still  hanging after 4.30pm would be left behind, the shape of their day changed dramatically.   Nev Gane (viti legend and all round good guy) was overheard saying “We can’t stop, we can’t stop!”,  as Raewyn delivered buttered-and-jammed scones up and down the rows of vines to the pickers as they worked.

It was a frenzied finish to a stressful season.  Many sauvignon blanc growers in the area had ended up with ‘grubby’ crops – the expression used to describe grapes infected by botrytis –  the Gane’s had worked hard all season to keep their fruit in good order and were not about to let their beautiful grapes go to waste simply because they’d run out of picking time.

The pickers worked non-stop for seven hours, powered by Raewyn’s scones and the promise of ‘a bit of a party’ at the end of the day.  The power of Raewyn’s Scones are a mysterious and magical thing resulting in not a single grape being left behind.

The huge harvesting effort was validated twice, first when the Gane’s fruit was selected for the winery’s CURIO label, and second when the 2008 CURIO Gane’s Vineyard Wairau Valley Sauvignon Blanc picked up Silver at the Royal Easter Wine Awards.

Brix: 23.2
Alcohol: 13.5%           
Residual Sugar: 3 g/L
PH: 3.64
Soil type: deep fertile loam          
Clone: MS

STOCKISTS

RESTAURANTS
Auckland
Stamford Plaza – Auckland

Christchurch
Sticky Fingers Restaurant and Bar

Wellington
Museum Hotel
Bisque Restaurant
Scopa Caffe Cucina

FINE WINE STORES
Wanaka Fine Wines Ltd
Wine and More

Follow Curio Wines

Sasha has been busy the last few months developing a new range of wines called CURIO. The winery is launching CURIO August 23rd at WINE2009 in Auckland, New Zealand.

She wanted the packaging to be unique and innovative, and thinks the end result speaks for itself.

The 2008 CURIO collection consists of five single vineyard, small parcel cool climate wines;

2008 CURIO Gane’s Vineyard Wairau Valley Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc

2008 CURIO Castles Vineyard Awatere Valley Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc

2008 CURIO d’Auvergne Vineyard Wairau Valley Gewurztraminer

2008 CURIO Horrell Vineyard Nelson Pinot Gris

2008 CURIO Bendigo Vineyard Central Otago Pinot Noir

Sasha will blog about each wine separately (in due course) to let you know about the people & stories that made these wines possible, and of course she will tirelessly strive to bring each wine to life with the written word by endlessly tasting the range so you know what to expect and where to find them. You know… I often hear her exclaiming just how hard her job.