Year: 2015

Chocolate Reviews: Cacao Prieto Double Feature

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While in Seattle for Thanksgiving, I came across a shop in Pikes Place Market that sold a wide range of chocolate brands that I hadn’t seen before – just as one might find new craft beers when traveling to a different part of the country. I picked up two bars by Cacao Prieto: their Vanilla & Cassia (cinnamon ) and Mandarin & Bergamot flavors. I’ll admit that the vanilla and cassia was particularly interesting to me; while I love both flavors in general, cinnamon chocolate has often seemed to me to be a harsher flavor, not the subtle, light flavoring it can be in other foods.

Cacao Prieto front

Packaging

As the artisanal chocolate movement has grown in the US, brands are having to work hard to distinguish themselves (and to validate their pricing, which can often be $8-$9, 2-3 times as much as one might pay for a traditional gourmet chocolate bar by Lindt or Ghiradelli. Part of making that case to the customer is quality packaging that showcases the brand’s message. So I’m going to obsess a little over the packaging here, because it really did make a difference in which brand I chose to buy.

Cacao Prieto does a great job of creating beautiful wrappers for its chocolate. While the patterns don’t specifically indicate the flavors – they are intricate and floral for both bars – they’re elegant and just plain beautiful to look at. The paper feels heavy and slightly rough, with a slightly raised band for the product information – again indicating that care was taken in the packaging and leading to the follow-up assumption that similar care was taken with the chocolate.

Cacao Prieto back
I also liked how the “Certified Organic” sticker was positioned over one of the seams of the wrapper –s o you’d have to notice that brand message when slitting or tearing it open.

The Chocolate Bar

Cacao Prieto vanilla & cassia
These bars are visually striking as well, particularly the Vanilla & Cassia. When I opened it up, I thought for a moment that something had gone wrong with it in transit; it was a swirl of white and brown shades. However, this was clearly an intentional visual effect, and it was quite impressive.

The Orange & Bergamot, however, had a line of little white dots. Possibly these were the flavoring inclusions? This came across as a little odder – more like a quirk than a design decision.

Both broke easily and were tempered well to not melt in one’s hands.

Tasting
The Vanilla & Cassia was a very subtle flavor – just as I was hoping. It started soft with a hint of vanilla, than followed that with a swirl of cinnamon.

Orange & Bergamot was certainly serviceable. A clear, clean orange and citrus flavor, with maybe a hint of almost lime-like tartness from the bergamot.

Both had a clean finish, with minimal aftertaste. Very enjoyable, and a brand I’d pick up again if I found myself in the right store.

Space Alert & Crisis Communication

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space alert
Last week, a friend introduced me to a board game called Space Alert, a game of controlled cooperative chaos. You’re a team, new recruits crewing a tiny, poorly-built spaceship that has to go on 10-minute scouting missions. For those 10 minutes, a CD plays that tells you what problems you’ve encountered – broken computers, asteroids, alien attacks or communications breakdowns – and when you’ve encountered them.

You have a board that shows your spaceship and the various things you can do – charge up the reactor, fire the lasers, power up the shields, etc. You and your team have to work together to lay out on the table a series of cards to plan out in advance what moves and actions each of you will take to deal with every crisis and get home safe.

After the time is up, you’ll flip over your cards and go through the game again to see whether your plans actually worked as intended. Because you play the cards representing your “moves” face down, there’s infinite possibilities for chaos. Did you want to take the elevator down to recharge the nuclear reactor this turn? Whoops, the communications officer forgot to tell you that he already got in the elevator and it’s full. So you’ll have to wait until next turn to get down there and recharge the reactor. Of course, the security chief was expecting to use the power you generated to fire the lasers *this* turn, and now she’s stuck futilely hammering on the “laser” button as they make a sad sputtering noise like a deflating balloon and the enemies swoop in and start shooting…

…really, it’s a brilliant bit of concise, panicked, entertaining game design. And with the professional hat on, it’s a fantastic social media crisis simulator dressed up in board game clothes. At the beginning, you go in assuming that you know what you’re doing, and that everything will go smoothly. For a little bit, it does. But then, when things start to go wrong, suddenly everyone starts talking at cross-purposes under pressure. No one is clearly in charge, and information flows start to get clogged.

In both social and gaming, there need to be structure and processes for resolving each individual issue as well as for seeing the big picture. Before you reply on Facebook to a critic, does legal need to sign off? Are they familiar with the necessary turnaround time for social media? What do you do when other departments or executives start to reply on their own, or show up without complete information and start calling for specific actions? You’re going to get in each other’s way.

In both cases, when a crisis shows up, the response has to be:

  • Measured – appropriate for the reputational risks posed by the issue.
  • Coordinated – PR is just one member of a much larger “crew.” You’re the communications officer, but if you don’t have a plan in place across the organization to bring in the right people and express a unified brand message, you won’t make the
  • Goal-oriented – not responding just to respond, but intended to counter a false perception or address a concern with a tangible end state in mind.

All of these tie back to practice and preparation, whether it’s driven by the bitter experience of previous crises or a staged drill. You wouldn’t go into space without a test run – so why do so many brands venture out into social media without preparing for the risks?

Image is “space alert (3)” by yoppy, available under a CC BY 2.0 license. ©2008

Treating data with respect

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respect data
The New York Times ran an interesting piece on the opportunities and risks of data science yesterday. One mention was that IBM, which has been working to integrate its Watson big-data “artificial intelligence” into healthcare, has started to offer Watson Paths, a software program that allows doctors to see “the underlying evidence and inference paths Watson took in making a recommendation.” Along similar lines, it discussed the case for integrating a human element into big data-driven decisions in order to double-check the numbers and try to understand the processes used.

The volume of content online is often such that we have to use data analysis tools to find timely answers to any number of questions – who are the influential figures in your market? Which consumers matter? How should I tailor my product and my messaging to speak to these people? There are tools from Sysomos to Brandwatch, Klout to Traackr, Twitonomy to Google Analytics, and more – all to help you drive your marketing and PR decisions.

Some of these give you access to the raw data they work with. For example, if you pull social content from Sysomos, you’ll have the chance to review all the posts yourself to ensure that they’re vaguely on track (though you’ll still miss whatever’s in the database). Others don’t. If I search for influencers on Traackr, I don’t really know what goes into their database and their algorithms.

The old axiom of Garbage In, Garbage Out still applies
So when working with tools, brands and agencies need to think about what level of granularity they’re going to reach with the data, and to what extent they’re going to trust the tools to get the right answer on their own.

Many are basically black-boxes – and there’s a lot of inaccuracy in there. If you’ve ever tried automated social media sentiment analysis, you’ll see this in action. Where “I hate when I miss my [favorite brand] coffee in the morning” gets tracked as “Negative” for [favorite brand]. People are complicated, and it’s hard to measure the right things without knowing what’s being measured.

Transparency helps, when possible. Perhaps there should be more Watson Paths-style aids for marketers that show users how their tools are coming to their conclusions. It’s much easier to test different outcomes online on a micro scale than it is to make healthcare decisions. Yet broad campaign strategies and approaches still have a lot of momentum and funding invested in them, so in 21st century PR and marketing, we need to ensure we’re working with good data, not just any data.


Image is from the author’s collection.

Chocolate Reviews: Taza 70% Dark Chocolate

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Taza labels

I’ll be honest and spoil the conclusion up front. This is pretty much the best. Taza is a little company out in Somerville, Massachusetts, and they make a fantastic line of stone-ground chocolate products (and assorted accessories). There’s everything from vanilla to orange cinnamon to salted almond and salt-and-pepper (though not, I am sorry to say, any straight-up sea salt chocolate like Madacasse makes – more on that in a later post).

Packaging
The wrapper is a pretty standard red label. There’s 60%, 70% and 80% options, and each one is clearly colored so you always know what you’re picking up at the checkout counter. Opening the foil is actually one of the little pleasures of this bar, though. I’m a huge fan of bars that don’t assume that you’re going to eat the whole thing in one sitting. That means being able to close it back up reasonably well, which in turn means:
-Not having to rip the packaging to get it open
-Not so stiff that one cannot re-fold the foil around the leftover chocolate

This one succeeds on both counts. It’s easy to have a bit, then keep the rest to enjoy later. Plus it breaks easily and cleanly, and the divisions between pieces are distinct enough that a little summer heat won’t make everything mush together into one undifferentiated chocolate blob.

Flavor
Starts dark. Then bright. A little fruity. Melts in the mouth, but slowly. There’s a transformation that each piece goes through as it changes from a crisp and rough texture to smooth, a transformation that mirrors the changing flavor notes.

Overall

If I had to describe it as an experience – It’s like sipping wine on the porch at sunset. Thoughtful. Something you consume a little bit at a time and savor as a quiet evening slips away.

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Chocolate Reviews: Dolfin Pure Chocolate with Lavender

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Chocolate – good chocolate – should be a memorable experience from beginning to end. It’s a question of both branding and product quality (with a strong dose of the power of expectation) so that a particular bar will transcend the obvious taste blessings of a highly sugary food and become enjoyable for the sake of the deep, rich chocolate.

dolfin1

Opening
From the moment I read the label, this Belgian chocolate bar was memorable.

Lavender? An unusual choice…

Here’s the label. I cracked it open in the company of a group of engineers and chemists, so the mention of “kilojoules” on the nutrition label caught everyone’s attention, beyond just the usual calories number. One wonders what more it provides to the average consumer. Perhaps this is the product of Belgian regulations, per the lower left of the label?

dolfin3

Presentation
You can’t just tear this bar open. No, you have to flip it over, unseal the plastic pouch, and then unwrap it until you can get the actual bar (in its own wrapper) out. I suppose if I was planning a backwoods expedition and wanted to keep my chocolate well protected, this would be handy, but it seems a little much for an everyday snack.

It did build the anticipation of something special, though, as we steadily unwrapped – almost like opening a Christmas present.

Opening it up
Breaks crisply into long rectangles. Nothing particularly notable about the texture.

dolfin2

The first bite
Well. When they said “Lavender,” they weren’t lying. This is seriously lavender.  I think there’s chocolate in there somewhere, but mostly it’s overwhelmed by the flavor.

Look, I’m a little biased. I have lavender hand soap in my apartment, so maybe it’s just hard to get away from that association. But if chocolate is even bringing soap into the equation, something is seriously wrong. I tried this with three others, and we all gave up after a bite or two.

Good for nibbling? No.
Good for devouring? Don’t even start.

How do you want to fail?

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Don't feel blue! Hopefully most of your failures won't be this bad.

Failing fast is a common mantra in tech and digital media – moving through a lot of wrong approaches in order to learn the lessons and get the experience needed to work through to the right approach. In particular, it’s great advice not to be afraid to plunge into ambitious projects and to deal with the issues that come up without being fazed.

However, it’s not enough just to fail. Failing is an art in itself.

Let’s say you’re working PR for a consumer tech company that uses online documentation as the first line of support for customers struggling to install and use a new product. But your product has gone through a lot of reworking, and your online support is far out of date.

So the question is – is the brand experience worse for:

  • A customer who goes to the website and gets no help at all?
  • A customer who goes to the website and gets the wrong answer to their problem?

Partially, the answer depends on in what way each support document is wrong – perhaps one has a button whose name has changed and another mis-addresses a critical functionality issue – but customers’ experiences with each of them reflect on your brand in different ways.

Or, if you’re coordinating with the engineers reworking your product as they try to update its software, there are similar questions to face: if you reset all customers’ software to fix an problem that only some customers are facing, will that be worse than letting the pre-existing issue continue?

No one’s perfect. One way or another, you’re going to fail some customers. How do you want to fail them?

Image is “IMG_1624” by Neal Jennings, available under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. ©2014

Farewell, Sir Terry

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The author may have too many books.

Sir Terry Pratchett died recently, at home and at peace with his family and cat.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact his writing had on me. I still have the very first book of his I read – Mort – that I took out time after time from the high school library until eventually it came home with me after graduation. Wry, wise and totally without pretention, Discworld books filled the tiny bookshelf over my bed in my freshman dorm room, then came with me in the following years when I wore out the binding of Thief of Time and gladly lost a half-dozen others on “indefinite loan” to new fans.

It’s not just that Sir Terry wrote books that were brilliantly fun, satirical – though never mean – and lighthearted (though they are) or that the use of clever footnotes is something I’ve always loved, or that he became a powerful speaker for Alzheimer’s awareness in his last years while continuing to turn out fantastically clever novels. I’d read them again for that alone, but it’s the deep, immense love of Humanity the Storyteller shining through each page that has stuck with me.

His books didn’t idealize people – they frequently mocked jingoism, closed-mindedness and more – but they recognized that, with all our faults and differences, we share a common nature. In Carpe Jugulum, the witch Granny Weatherwax sits with the conflicted young priest Father Oats, and says:

“…And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that . . .”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes . . .”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things . . . ”

Oats says “It’s a lot more complicated than that” – but the truth is that seeing people as people is perhaps the most complicated and most difficult duty of all. It doesn’t mean having to like everyone, or that everyone is moral – just that each person is a real, complex being full of hopes and dreams and fears.

And in all his stories, Sir Terry believed in finding that complexity and in demonstrating the power of stories to define us and empower us to define our world. We’re pattern-finding, storytelling beings who tell each other who we were, who we are and who we want to be through sharing stories, and more than that, by living them and believing in them.

After death on Discworld, people went to dozens of fates, but all of those fates were driven by the essential principle that what you believe happens, happens – the story you expect to be a part of, you are. And he argued that that metaphysical principle applied to the living as well. In Hogfather, Death talks to his daughter:

“HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.”

We live in a great world of stories – some that we lead, some that we’ve joined, and some that are being told without and around us. We’re all the centers of our own stories, and we have the power to define what other stories we want to be a part of – in a tapestry of a world that can be far more complex and more magnificent than even the immense breadth of Discworld, carried on the backs of four elephants and one giant space-going turtle.

Go in joy, Sir Terry, knowing the delight you have left behind you. Your words have sunk deep into the hearts of your readers, and no matter what, in the words of the golem Dorfl in Feet of Clay:

“WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN.”

Image from the author’s personal collection

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Chocolate Reviews: Seattle Chocolates’ Orange Appeal

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There’s a lot of orange chocolate out there, from the ubiquitous Christmas chocolate oranges (in my household, it used to be a regular orange until we realized that chocolate was a) tasty and b) more likely to last more than a day) to bars with various-sized chunks of orange peel. Those can be problematic if they’re too big. Chocolate is not a food you should have to pick out of your teeth like celery.

This isn’t my first go-round with Seattle Chocolates’ orange bar; I get them every Thanksgiving from my fiancee’s family, since it’s their local brand. Does familiarity breed contempt? Or is this a delicious regular treat?

orange1

Presentation

A pretty classic bar with a simple wrapper that slides off and then dark foil around the chocolate itself. Each bar comes in four thick rectangles, and breaks easily. I’ve found the foil to be great at keeping mess under control – it breaks cleanly without being opened, and then you can pull out the piece or two you want and wrap it back up easily. It’s not silver foil either, which helps if you (like me) have a candy box full of a half-dozen silver-wrapped in-progress bars and face the impossibility of telling which is which. On this one, the shape and the color make it easy to distinguish.

orange2

The first bite

The orange peel is well-distributed throughout the bar, so you get a good balance of orange flavor and chewy orange bits. The chocolate itself (53%) is fine as a base but unmemorable (it has a dark chocolate shell on the outside and a milk chocolate (33%) inside.

Texturally, this is hard to take a little bit of, because the orange peel gets in the way and the chocolate itself comes off in big chunks when you bite into it. They’re thick sections, too. The orange peel adds some chewiness and interesting variation to each bite, and also makes you want to eat it in large amounts.

Overall

It’s all about the orange. This is a delicious orange chocolate, and although the chocolate part considered by itself is pretty unmemorable, it’s absolutely worth eating. I’m always happy to get these around the holidays!

Good for nibbling? Not really. The shape and taste don’t lend itself to savoring in little bits. I found myself looking for orange segments as the key flavor element.
Good for devouring? Absolutely.

 

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Learning to Notice ideas

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I know these aren't Fate dice, but they'll do.

Before I talk about ideas, I have a short story about games. Bear with me, if you will.

Every weekend, I spend a few hours playing a roleplaying game called Fate. It’s a fantasy setting (dragons, pirates, gnomes, all sorts of similar excellent critters) and the characters we play are – well, not heroes exactly, but people trying to shape a world that’s much bigger than they are.

One of us is a world-class swordswoman, another silver-tongued, others wield the primal forces of the world. Me, I’m good at a skill called Notice. All it does is let you notice things. But what that means (in this particular game) is that it lets you define the scene. Roll well, and you can describe a detail that might not have been there before, a detail that you can turn to your advantage.

So we’re facing off with some palace guards in an open southern courtyard. I look around for something I can turn to my advantage. Roll Notice – and I have the opportunity to add to the scene the detail that there’s a big awning providing some shade from the sun over half the courtyard. We knock it down, and suddenly half the guards are tangled up in cloth, making things easier for our merry crew.

What am I getting at with all this?

For clients, I often take the data they’ve collected (let’s say, social media data, or customer metrics) and making recommendations based on it. That’s the scene set before you. Here’s the numbers you have – what do you do now? And that’s a great place to work from (many folks don’t even collect metrics, so if they don’t, you may want to work on selling that in first).

But there are many things that aren’t in the numbers. Or at least, not in those numbers. Those are easy – they’re in front of you and you know they relate. But you don’t want to get so focused on the scene that’s been set before you that you forget to search for the detail you could add to the scene. What isn’t there that – if it were – would be fantastic for you? Then, can you get it to be there somehow?

It’s not a new idea – the idea of thinking about a problem sideways, or from another angle. But I think it’s still worth asking: What can you add to the scene?

Image is “Dice five” by @Doug88888, available under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. ©2008

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What do you think about chocolate?

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Chocolate

I like good, dark chocolate. Chocolate that makes you want to savor it one tiny bite at a time because it has the depth and complexity to make each one interesting. Chocolate that does something interesting with its flavor, chocolate that breaks down the lines with a sharp “crack.” Chocolate that brings a savory spice, a clean fruitiness or a deep bitterness to the end of a meal or a late-night snack.

Flavored chocolates are fantastic (or those with caramelized orange, ginger, etc.), filled chocolates seldom so (if I wanted nougat, I would have bought nougat).

I don’t promise you’ll like what I like, but I hope you’ll understand why I like it.

Image is “Mmmmm Chocolate [274/366]” by Tim Sackton, available under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. ©2012