If you weren’t already aware, YMC has an amazing Pinterest page with almost 60 boards and more pins that I should really be counting. Those rumours of me walking into my #Pintervention one day are there for a reason, you know.
We’ve seen such amazing pins this month on Pinterest, I wanted to share a few of my favourites with you, as well as tell you about our three newest boards that we’ve added to our collection.
We discovered that as parents, we are ALL rock stars.
We learned a way to turn our backyard path into a scene from a Michael Jackson video.
We found out that sometimes super heroes show up disguised as people just doing their job.
We saw a new way to turn a favourite family dessert into a special treat.
We all had an “AHA!” moment that we need to remember for when summer gets here.
We saw the sweetness that comes when a tiny hand creates a portrait of huge love.
And we learned how the “meanest mother ever” is actually one heck of a smart woman.
Now for the best part. This month YMC added three new boards to our Pinterest collection. They are pretty much guaranteed to make your eyes pop and mouth water. Seriously.
So now you know what we've been up to on Pinterest—what have you been up to? Leave a comment with your Pinterest page url—we'd love to see your pins and follow you!
Meet Miguel Valenzuela. He’s an American living in Hokksund, Norway and a dad of two girls. One day his kids inspired him to create something amazing with LEGO—a robot that makes pancakes.
And not just everyday round pancakes either, you can program this amazing little invention to make pancakes of different shapes and even have them spell out a word.
Several months after a little bit of accidental inspiration (one daughter declaring to her sister that Daddy was going to build a pancake machine from LEGO), the LEGO Pancake bot was born and breakfast in the Valenzuela kitchen took on a whole new meaning.
Miguel has recently launched a campaign through Indiegogo to raise funds so that he can bring his LEGO Pancake Bot to the 2013 Maker Faire in San Mateo. If you have a budding LEGO builder in your house, take a look at his campaign—some of the premiums include the actual building instructions for the Pancake Bot. My little LEGO builder got his instructions today, and I’m looking forward to having my breakfast made for me one day by a LEGO Pancake bot of our own.
Check out Miguel's video of the LEGO Pancake bot at work, making Mickey Mouse pancakes for his kids. Very cool indeed.
Images courtesy of PancakeBot.com
BAM! All of a sudden this morning, my Twitter and Facebook feeds were full of posts about ING Direct.
What?
It’s all about an ad that ING Direct has recently promoted for RSP season. The tone of the ad is dark and at first glance, you’d think it was talking about something very serious, but it’s actually a tongue-in-cheek satire about the anxiety of RSP season. After the ad first aired, it didn’t take long for Canadians to speak up at the insensitive parallels between the tone of this ad and the underlying comparison to the effects of mental illness.
According to MarketingMag.ca, the ING Direct campaign was developed after “research into consumer attitudes towards RSP season found that it tends to produce symptoms such as stress, anxiety and confusion. “The message is ‘We can help you.’”
That may have been the intended message, but it's not the one that was received by a majority of Canadian viewers. It didn't take long before ING Direct’s Facebook page and Twitter handles were bombarded with comments about the ad, with demands for it to be removed.
Personally, I also thought the ad was in bad taste. Making any sort of comparison to an illness or disability to buying RSPs is tasteless and not something to be proud of at all. Clearly their marketing department made a mistake in the creation of this video, and it’s hard to understand why nobody stood up and said “Hey, this is offensive and wrong!”
So here we are now a few weeks after the video’s release, when all of a sudden thousands of Canadians are standing up and saying just that. They do not like what ING Direct did, and they went straight to social media to let them know.
And right here, I have to hand it to ING Direct and their social media department for how they handled the backlash.
They responded. To each and every person who commented.
ING Direct apologized, no excuses, just a straight out personal apology to everyone who left a comment about the video. Then they posted the apology on their Facebook and Twitter pages to reach out to others who had not commented yet. They let everyone know that they were listening, the ad was being pulled and that they were truly sorry for offending anyone with their commercial, that it was never their intention to make light of health concerns related to mental illness.
THAT is how you handle a mistake. Listen to what your followers and fans are saying to you. Own up to it, apologize for it and carry on.
I don’t like what ING Direct did, but I do like how they handled it.
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