Trying to get going today, and enjoying, not getting going – if you know what I mean.   I noted some interesting things I wanted to share.

First was the Worst Hotel in the World campaign that Rohit Bhargava wrote about in his Influential Marketing blog:

For Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam, the right strategy was exactly the opposite: embrace their awfulness and talk about it honestly. For 15 years, the hotel has been promoting itself as the “worst hotel in the world.” As anyone who has ever worked on promoting a destination or travel property knows, sometimes expectations can set you up for failure. Some frequent fliers expect to be upgraded to a seat they didn’t pay for, and then get angry when they are not. Patrons of luxury hotels expect perfection, and often feel justified to complain about any little thing, no matter how small. The solution, reasoned Hans Brinker‘s agency KesselsKramer, was to lower expectations to a point where people could no longer be disappointed. Thus the concept of the “worst hotel in the world” was born.

That’s an interesting approach – don’t know if it would work for everything but total transparency might work better now, than trying to put on a good face – why?

Because people know the “shiny apple” approach is fake.  They’d rather have real, than a fake image, perhaps, in many things (though not everything).

That reminds, me, in my usual tangential way – the Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum (now you know where I was, if you read my last post on Google, SEO, Publishers and Spam) – a magnificent show about an artist who went out of his way to be repulsive.

As I looked at the Francis Bacon exhibition – I could not help feeling – that as repugnent as the images were, at times, what he was expressing was the actual rage we all feel, and that, independent of his lifestyle, his work was honest, truthful to the vision he saw, and extremely powerful.

But … what the Worst Hotel in the World and Francis Bacon did – would be against everything that anyone has been told to do – put your best foot forward – always show the most attractive side of you – (and then, stick them with the worst of you once they get they get to know you better – ha, ha).

I won’t say anything more about it – but I think it’s worth thinking about – perhaps the way to success is not trying to show people what you want them to see, but show them what your hiding.   Of course, that’s not an easy thing to do – and it’s a controversial subject and approach, in any case.

Another interesting development to day is the UpNext NYC: What Mobile Maps Should Look Like that I saw in Read/WriteWeb (one of my favorite blogs to read):

I downloaded the application and tried it using Facebook Connect but got an application error – but I like the concept and while it’s just for NYC right now, I think it could be one of the killer applications coming up for Mobile Computing and life casting.