Well, if you follow me on Twitter and were on this weekend, you likely heard about my recent experience with Toyota and specifically, McGee Toyota in Hanover, MA. It wasn’t pretty. So here’s my haiku for you based on my weekend – if you’d like the full story, read my blog post about the experience – and why it’s crucial for your sales team to understand that customer relationships are way more valuable than customer deals.

Toyota was wrong
Happy customers tell friends
Angry ones tell all

Now that the negative one is out of the way, here are two positive ones – because happy customers should share loudly, too.

Jet Blue I love you
Thanks for TVs and smiles
You get customers

Ideeli is cool
They sell lovely things to me
And they engage me

Follow the brand haiku to Bryan Person and his tribute to Nike, and see more haikus from those amazing marketers by watching Twitter for the hashtag #brandhaiku.

Thanks for the fun, creative and great idea – and invitation – Aaron! Readers, if you have a brand haiku, please play along in the comment section and on Twitter.

Death of Education and the Dawn of Learning
Here’s a great post on the Servant of Chaos blog that speaks to the way kids communicate in a Web 2.0 world and how the education system needs to catch up. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s employees and customers. Will your business survive if you don’t join the social media/network space?

Charity Auction: Buy Yourself a Social Media Guru
Buy yourself time with one of five social media and online marketing experts as part of this excellent charity auction. The toughest part will be deciding on which guru to bid on with the talents of Chris Brogan, Joseph Jaffe, Aaron Strout, Geoff Livingston and Greg Verdino up for grabs!

Basic Business Blogging Suggestions
Speaking of Chris Brogan, this post he wrote earlier this week provides some nice basic information for companies that are just starting to launch a blog. As usual, Chris’s community of readers are providing great comments to the post, so be sure to read through those as well!

Pork and Beans
I’ll wrap up this week with something entertaining. Here’s a link to the new Weezer video that has been released by the band to promote the new single. The relevance? They included noteable internet “celebrities” in the video which is a sure-fire way to boost it’s potential for going viral.

This month’s topic focused on hiring and getting hired in a Web 2.0 world. In support of the topic, Bryan recruited Stever Robbins, Aaron Strout, Todd Defren and Chris Brogan to present their perspective in support of the topic. Each speaker did a great job in telling their story as well as answering the audience’s questions during a short panel at the end.

I attended the event with video camera in hand to capture some footage for those who couldn’t be there in person. The first video we have available features Aaron Strout, VP of New Media for Mzinga speaking about his experience with hiring though the use of Twitter, LinkedIn and other web-based tools as opposed to requesting traditional paper resumes.

Once completed, the remaining presentations will be available on the PerkettPR Vimeo Channel. I’ll update this post and send out some “tweets” when the are complete and ready for viewing.

Thanks again to Bryan for hosting the event, and we’re looking forward to attending again next month!

UPDATE:

Additional videos: Chris Brogan

SXSW 2008: Mzinga from Download Squad on Vimeo.

[via downloadsquad.com]