Your first decision is selecting which kind of chocolate you want for your bar (although I was disappointed that dark chocolate was not yet available). Next up, you’ll view a select list of goodies to choose from that will fill the inside of your bar; things like vanilla chips and graham cracker crust. (No worries for the peanut allergic, there are no peanuts in the place.) Once you’ve picked your sweet indulgence, you’ll watch through the glass as your candy bar moves down the production line and the appropriate candies shake out into your creation. During the official cooling process, Hershey staff will escort you to the Design Center, where you’ll then get to make your personalized candy wrapper, complete with your name lazered into the side.

The design isn’t entirely from scratch, or I’d probably still be there, but it does offer your choice of background color, up to three pictures (logos), your name, and the ability to point and drag your designs around the wrapper. While the options do spark your imagination, the kids in our group, ages 10 and 8, needed help understanding how to change colors and make selections on the computer screens. (I wouldn’t recommend this for really young ones.) 

The design experience is interactive, colorful, and entertaining for those who like creative stuff. Hershey will need to figure out how to assist people at the computer screens, however, the idea is fun for most ages.

To add to the interactive element, Hershey could let me type in my bar code on their website and find out where my chocolate is from, or where my select candies are made, why they are healthy (relatively speaking) or some other fun facts. They don’t do anything to send me back to their website or engage me in other media and rope me in to other products, services or their brand.

Aside from media, Hershey does offer plenty of options under one roof. If your custom creation isn’t enough chocolate, you can take a free ride around Chocolate World. Their creativity (and free 3-hour parking) make the Innovation Center a pretty sweet deal.

I’m always looking to host our meetings somewhere interesting, out of the normal corporate board room atmosphere. For this particular meeting, I had selected a new sustainability company, and we were the first non-profit to use their meeting room as board space.

This was a particularly important board meeting with only one topic: money. We were asking the participants to fund a major expansion effort and a significant amount of team pre-work had gone into data gathering. I had spent hours reviewing the material and scribbling my talking points.

In preparation for the meeting,  we set up the tables in our usual style. Response to the agenda had been positive and we were expecting a strong board showing. I had carefully laid out my notes and files at the head table, topped off my coffee, and we were set to go. At that moment, the collapsible table did just that, it collapsed. Everything slid down into one heaping pile. We quickly scrambled to gather our things, reset and I began to re-introduce the discussion when the table collapsed a second time. My files and all my detailed notes crashed to the floor.  By now, the papers were so covered with coffee and pieces of fruit that there was no salvaging them – except to pitch them into the trash.

Safe to say my table had a slight flaw and we pushed it off to the side. I was mortified but had to laugh. It was so ironic for such chaos to erupt, especially given how much effort had gone into planning the meeting. Without my sopping notes, I had to go completely off memory for the discussion.

I’m pleased to report the rest of the meeting went well (despite a few lingering chuckles) and we have already secured a significant amount of the funding. Still, that meeting will go down as one of my more memorable moments in business and a lesson I won’t soon forget. Perhaps the corporate board room isn’t so bad afterall.

Google maps might get us to the venue, but it’s location tracking technology that identifies the closest Starbucks to the field. After a six hour drive drive around the D.C. beltway and a 7am alarm for pre-game warm ups, this is serious stuff.

Enroute to our hotel, one mom discovered that our destination, the Sleep Inn, touted a two star rating (and it lived up to this rating, unfortunately). Sometimes we have a little too much advance information.

During our Raleigh trip, we found a great outdoor dining spot (in November!) and hailed the rest of the troops with texting. (We’re waiting for Foursquare to go global.) A few camera phone photos of the entertainment were sent to the players who are now old enough to go to the movies, sans parents. (We like to shock our teenagers with the idea that we have fun without them.) Uploading photos to Facebook, as well as the game scores, keeps interested family members, and spouses at home, in the loop without having to send multiple emails.

With so much attention being paid to showcase tournaments and college coaches in the older age brackets, parents have the list of coach attendees for a game documented and emailed to their mobile device by the time we hit the parking lot.

At this point, most parents don’t get Twitter, at least not on our team, but I haven’t given up on them yet.  In our corner of the soccer world, technology has definitely made a positive impact in our ability to enjoy each other, get more out of our destination, and keep grandparents and siblings up-to-date.

Now, if someone would just figure out how to improve the port-a-potty and buzz our mobile phone when laundry at the hotel is done, life would be even better.

Cruzcourt, the name of the virtual food service product, is geared toward companies with 100 employees or more, offering participants the ability to order individual meals or group lunches, delivered to the doorstep. Cruzstar manages the technical interface with caterers on the back-end by licensing their software as part of their business model.

In a brief video interview with Adrian Fang, cofounder of Cruzstar, and Stephanie Elzer, of Millersville University’s Software Productization Center (SPC), the team describes their collaborative efforts. Students and recent grads from computer science, graphic design, and communications joined forces with Cruzstar to develop the software and aid in creating brand marketing. Faculty member Nancy Mata directed student activities in marketing and design, which included detailing a set of brand standards for the company’s future use. Chris Willet, a recent graduate, led the student marketing initiative.

This is a solid demonstration of the value in bringing students, faculty, and entrepreneurs together. Cruzstar is ahead of schedule in launching their corporate beta and the students garnered hands-on experience dealing with the timelines and customer demands associated with a product launch.

The SPC is currently seeking follow-on funding to support their no fee collaboration with select companies. Let’s hope they get it. This is how young companies and bright minds get excited about living and working in Central PA. It’s experience they can sink their teeth into.

If we can cull a few women together, either small business owners or executives, for a regular lunch to discuss projects, partnerships, budgets – just about anything business-related, I’d be interested in picking their brains. I can extract valuable nuggets from that lunch much quicker than from the standard member powerpoint, and I don’t have bylaws to abide by or dues (other than bringing valuable insight to the table), and it’s on my own schedule.

Now that I am squarely in the “several years under my belt” category, I’m less tolerant of idle networking chatter. (The one exception being event networking, which if done right, can be valuable on a number of fronts.) With the pull of personal, professional, and community involvement, time becomes too valuable.

The national groups can be effective if you’re younger and just starting out in a field or in a new geographic area, however,  I’ve replaced regular monthly meetings, agendas and name badges, with more personal, professional discussions.

For those who appreciate the time and planning required to pull off an event like this, I’ll share a few details and photos of the weekend which culminated in a truly spectacular reception.

After an unlikely crew of adventure race winners were announced (complete with medals), we climbed aboard a school bus destined for the rehearsal dinner. It was clear we were in for a unique experience when the dinner program, touted as Blues & Brews, included hilarious family skits, poems, and songs, all carefully re-worded to capture the life and travels of the future bride and groom. (Our family recruited a guitar player to assist in our serenade and rescue us from complete embarrassment.) Fortunately the hired blues band was far superior to our enthusiastic, yet lame, musical attempts and the jitterbug ensued.

Following the wedding ceremony, the newlyweds were surprised at the church by the arrival of a terrific old ice cream truck that chauffeured them over the bay bridge and around the small town streets leading back to the reception tents. Upon arrival, a Mexican fiesta band greeted guests outside (the couple currently lives in Mexico) as we entered the pre-reception space. A string of lantern lights and a colorful pinata hung from the ceiling as guests mingled and checked the framed seating chart penned in calligraphy.  Each table was labeled with one of the couples’ prior travel destinations in the U.S. and abroad.

Once guests were permitted through the white netting of the main reception entrance, we were treated to an enormous room filled with white lights, candles, sofas and comfortable chairs encouraging casual chatter and candid photos.  (Later this room became the serving area for make-your-own-sundaes!)  The main reception space was covered with hard wood flooring, which dispensed of the grass and mud caused by the rain, and set us up for a long night of dancing (more on that in a minute). Beyond the lounging area, the dining and dancing venue was filled with gorgeous flowers of orange, red and yellow. Lights encircled the interior columns from floor to ceiling, draped in beautiful netting. A variety of centerpieces, including dozens of roses, candles, and arrangements blooming five feet above the tables, decorated the linens.

Following a few traditional reception rituals, the phenomenal eight member band, Eye2Eye, rocked the house for the remainder of the evening. Ties were tossed, jackets were thrown, and the ladies’ hair went up, all in a matter of minutes. Eye2Eye packed the dance floor the entire evening receiving an encore for “one more song” at the close of the reception.

For future celebrations, I’ve decided to rent this crowd of friends who give adventure racing a good name. Although I am related to adventure racers, I relegate my activities to the sidelines taking photos and cheering. These racing buddies, normally fierce competitors, were flexible, friendly and enthusiastic. Their idea of “normal” involves biking on trails in desert-like conditions, orienteering in the dark-of-night across lakes, and carrying kayaks over mountaintops – for fun. A little rain during a wedding celebration wasn’t about to dampen their good time.

Using the Blurb software, I created a hard cover book, a first-of-its-kind accomplishment for me. Here are a few lessons from that experience.

Get organized at the start. Overtaken by shear enthusiasm, I jumped into the process without having my photo files and the order of the book well organized. This slowed the overall project as I went back and forth deciding the theme of the book. The photo file and an outline of topics should be created first.

Decide if you want hard cover  (no inside flaps) or soft cover. Blurb allows you to design different size books, soft or hard cover, and it’s inexpensive to purchase a single copy or in multiples. The content is limited only by your imagination.

Think about the memory required to use Blurb. My Dell computer is over two years old so the memory required slowed my computer to a grind.

How should you print the draft? Printing a rough draft of the book (which is highly recommended) took a long time on my little HP Officejet 5610, not to mention the ink depleted to print color photos. It would be worth saving the file and having Staples print draft copies next time.

Do you want to sell the finished product? If your looking for commercial opportunities for your book, check out this recent example to see how companies are using Blurb for distribution and promotion. IDEO’s Tim Brown posted on his Design Thinking blog a few words about their Human Centered Design Toolkit which is now available for purchase on Blurb.

Another project completed this summer was an Animoto video developed for the Innovation Transfer Network’s web launch in September. I’ve been an Animoto fan since I read about the company in the New York Times months ago. It’s inexpensive (approx $30/year for non corporate) and they do all the hard work of integrating the music, text (which was added later) and photo mixing, plus you can upgrade to DVD quality. It’s “automagic!” If you don’t like the first iteration, try again, and again, until you like what you see. This is a very user friendly web app. I’ve used it for graduations, birthdays and now for business. Like Blurb, organize your photos into one folder before you start.

A key to both projects is having access to quality photos on the target subject. That means thinking ahead when you engage a photographer or point and shoot with your own digital camera.

Next on my list is software for a business calendar, not a wall calender, including photos and text as well as white space for writing. If anyone has ideas on user friendly software for a novice, I’d love to hear suggestions. Otherwise, I’ll keep digging.

If you are thinking of an international exchange of some kind, we learned a few things in our experience that might help you:

1. Work an arrangement through close family ties. My brother-in-law travels on business in Europe and knows this French family well.  They approached him about the possibility of an American family who might want to swap kids for a few weeks. In this set up, it means you’ve got someone leading the charge who knows both parties (what you tolerate and what you won’t) and understands your family vibe. It helped prevent any major surprises of the kind we heard nightmares about, but fortunately did not experience ourselves.

2. You need a parent to man the fort. If there is a stay-at-home- parent in the picture, that works. If not, forget working and just enjoy the time to learn and help another young adult expand their horizons. Don’t plan any major projects during this time, something has to give.

3. It would be nice to know something of the language. We were grossly language ignorant and didn’t speak any French. Our daughter has a few years of French under her belt, however, as parents, we could have made it even more fun if we would have taken the time to listen to tapes or something. (Our guest did speak some English.) Worst case, even if we botched the language, we could have given her a few laughs at our feeble attempts. This isn’t a requirement, simply a “nice to have.”

4. Plan downtime. Although we took several excursions, we did schedule a week of low key time at home between all the traveling. This was a good thing, because after two trips, we were all dragging. The scenery was great, cities were fun, food yummy, but at some point you need a place to call your own and (as adults) time to work off the cookies, crepes, wine, cupcakes…so you can then go on trip #3 and start all over. This is in addition to the fact that our feet and knees could only take so much. By the time we hit the Air and Space Museum one late afternoon in Washington D.C., we only made it an hour. Fair warning, be careful how much you pack into the first day of a multi-day city tour.

5. Include some culture. While the girls wanted to shop endlessly, we did manage to successfully work in parks, museums and monuments. It was a nice break in the action and the girls ran out of spending money anyway. (How many t-shirts can they buy?)

7. A few weeks is a good starting point. If it’s your first time at this, and you are dual income parents, a couple of weeks of this positive chaos is probably good. You are “on call” the entire time and one can’t help but feel a sense of responsibility to safety, fun, and a quality experience. The host kid is in charge of entertainment 24/7, which is a tall order. In this case, the two got along beautifully, however, all of her attention was focused on making sure our guest was adequately tended to. No doubt, it will be the same when she is in France.

8. Be flexible. Combining cultures is a great learning experience, and not without little surprises. Our guest was a vegetarian…who knew? Not us. We managed and so did she. We discovered crepes are a beautiful thing because you can stuff them with anything!

9. Save the smallest room for last. We held off on the giant sleepover until our final journey.  During the initial trips, the girls roomed together and parents were down the hall.  Room fees being what they are in NYC, it made the most sense to “think small,” like one room. By then we had gotten used to walking around in our PJ’s and such, so it wasn’t so scary for her to see strange adults in their jammies across the room. We could have done it in the beginning, but it would have been a bit awkward.

10. Have faith in the youngsters to make it work. It was only a matter of days until the two girls were connected – literally – by an iTunes headset cord. Each teenager had a plug in their ear as they shared favorite songs on the subway, in bed, in the car, walking, on the bus. One of my favorite photos is this life moment posted above.

Wheels up in a few days… Merci!

Since one of my roles in life is to run outreach for the 13 colleges and universities in the Innovation Transfer Network (ITN), I was not surprised to see that the student body was well ahead of most (not all) of the university-lead efforts to dabble in social media. Tweets from the University of Florida, DePaul, Georgetown, UNC, Texas, Stanford, and Ohio appeared. While some campuses like Stanford (big surprise) are strong, the responses show many schools use social media to give updates on PC availability and scheduling, however, not to fully engage the students and faculty in discussions. At least not yet.

This is all timely in my world because I had just circulated a recent Ad Age article, “Universities Finally Espousing Branding”  to my ITN advisory board. The article depicted several universities stepping up efforts to brand their schools using nontraditional means. At our own June Advisory Board meeting, members had participated in a lively discussion around the upcoming launch of our new website (coming in September) and how it will impact our marketing efforts . We’re grappling with the most effective launch of an online community, faculty and business profiles, event promotion, along with video, photos, a new blog, twitter. Weighty stuff for a non-profit to tackle in education.

The exchange on Bistro is encouraging, nice to see we may be on the forefront of tackling some of these issues, especially as a group of smaller academic institutions. The web team and I are in the grind of the last month before it launches, so a little unexpected encouragement was a pleasant surprise.

Right now all of our interaction is grassroots, good old shoe leather pounding the pavement, connecting the business community with the appropriate student/faculty combination to accomplish their product development, market researh, or energy-saving innovation project. Our team knows it’s the tip of the iceberg. We’re looking to accelerate this connection process by adding the social element. I’ll let you know how it goes, post launch, from our pending new blog and twitter feed, of course.

Options like the Hudson are alternative venues that create a relaxing space to take in a day of intense speaker presentations. The event included plush red seats, a few signs up front, a multi-media screen and a blast of indie music thrown in for good measure. Nothing fancy, yet effective. Federated Media, the host, did a nice job mixing up the format with a splash of multi-panelist discussions, interviews and individual presenters. They speakers weren’t all fabulous, but the overall style and business variety – corporate, start-up, investors, and agencies – worked. And a few high-powered video ad campaigns from the likes of P&G and Intel added a little spice.

As the definition of an event space changes, there’s also a new definition of “audience participation.” Gone are the days when booting up your laptop during a presentation is taboo, an insult.  Granted, it was a social media crowd, but this event looked like a rock concert, except the “lighters” were blackberrys, netbooks, laptops and iPhones. (Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous tune even surfaced in one brand lesson when Marc Ruxin of McCann Worldgroup commented, “If everyone could have their own Freebird,” flashing a picture of the virtual Zippo lighter in full flame on the iPhone.)

Local venues need to be flexible and encourage new ways of using their space, especially if it attracts revenue, visibility and casts a creative light on future potential opportunities. The ability to accommodate technology requirements like videotaping, music and mics is basic stuff. We need to think outside the box seats. It’s valuable to offer a change of pace and not confine attendees to a stark conference room or corporate hotel. Event managers should feel inspired to push the envelope and bag the status quo.