The popcorn challenge started as a friendly banter between friends and competitors on facebook and I have to say when I first heard about it I thought it sounded like a fun friendly rivalry. This happens to be between Bob’s Sporting Goods and Dennis Company with great potential for cross promoting for all the businesses involved.

Yes, it is a fun and friendly contest and promotion but I was also schooled in popcorn machines. Who knew there was a difference?

As someone who enjoys vintage Americana and old movies I was delighted to learn about the Manley Popcorn Company and their machines. Click here for a history on the company that brought you movie theater popcorn!

Dennis Company in Raymond boasts a vintage Manley Popcorn Machine with Joe as the head popcorn chef. I have yet to taste corn popped in a Manly but I am excited for tomorrows challenge when I get to sample the corn popped in a iconic piece of American made history!

The Manley Popcorn Machine at the Raymond Dennis Company.

A Manley with great style looks to be early 1950′s my guess is it served  many bags of popcorn to movie patrons during the golden age of movies.

Not sure if this is a Manley but these wagons would park out in front of the theater selling popcorn to people heading into the theater. Eventually theater owners realized they could be reaping these popcorn profits themselves and movie theater popcorn was born.

Taste the difference yourself at the Popcorn Challenge noon tomorrow at the Lost Roo. The winner will be determined in a blind taste test by the esteemed judging panel consisting of Michael Lalewicz from the The Depot Restaurant, Mike Littawa from the Breakers Long Beach, Blane Walker from the 42nd Street Cafe, Betsy Millard from the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum, Brady Turner from Adrift Hotel & Spa, Andi Day from Long Beach Peninsula Visitors Bureau, and Jan Grambo from the Lighthouse Oceanfront Resort. The real winner of the challenge will be ether Cowlitz County CASA or the Boys & Girls Club of the Long Beach Peninsula with the loser of the challenge donating $250 to the others charity of choice.

UPDATE: We’re shutting down the shop on Monday so we can all attend this workshop. Hope to see you there!

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Brad Worthley is a acclaimed customer service trainer whose client list includes Macys, Nordstrom, McDonalds, Alaska Airlines and Western Union, as well as small and medium organizations from a variety of industries. His mission? To help organizations create service cultures: A place where employees love to work and customers love to do business.

Brad equips companies with dynamic customer service and leadership essentials. Brad’s research shows that it is easy to change people, but unless the leadership has undergone specialized training on how to manage a service culture, the employees will revert back to their old ways within 90 days.

• Eliminate office politics
• Increase employee retention
• Increase employee performance
• Increase customer retention
• Increase sales
• Increase profits

Renowned for captivating his audiences, many have referred to his lively presentations as “shows”.

• Brad keeps seminar participants entertained while helping them retain the information they learn.
• He is a master storyteller and delivers his powerful message from the customer’s perspective.

Thanks to the Willapa Harbor Chamber of Commerce and the Long Beach Peninsula Visitors Bureau, you can attend a Brad Worthley seminar in  your own back yard on April 11th.  In fact, you can even afford to bring–or send–your front line employees!  These two organizations are subsidizing the cost of the workshop, making it only $10 each – INCLUDING LUNCH!  If you’re a member of the Willapa Harbor Chamber (details), it’s only $5!  You can’t beat that.

You want a sweeter deal still? Okay, how’s this?  Pacific Transit will take care of transportation to South Bend if only 15 Peninsulans register to take them up on the deal by April 1st.  Free transportation, free lunch, and only $5-10 for a speaker one would typically pay $50 to see?  Come on!

Register: Contact the Willapa Harbor Chamber at 360-942-5419 or info@willapaharbor.org

What do Clatsop Community Bank, Knutsen Insurance, Clatsop Coin and Town & Country Home Furnishings have in common?

They all believe in protecting their customers’ personal information and are sponsoring a community “Shred-It” event:

Saturday, April 16th

10:00 am – 1:00 pm

Outside the Astoria Branch of Clatsop Community Bank

10th & Commercial Streets – Astoria

Suggested Donation of $5 per ‘banker’s box’ or large bag

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“Fantastic job on the e-letter!!!! As usual…. Do you know how much we appreciate you and your crew? You just don’t know!”

–World Kite Museum & Hall of Fame

Thanks, Kay & Sharon.  YOU have no idea how motivated we are by praise! D

You may have noticed we took a break from the blog.  Partially, I’ll tell the truth, we’ve just plain been busier than a cattle dog at round-up.  But also because we wanted to see what would happen if we just QUIT.

We use our own site a fair amount to test what we think we know about the search engines.  Having recently reached placement we felt pretty good about, we confirmed for ourselves that our current process for achieving and holding rank was solid.  So what would happen if the only thing we changed was to simply stop tending our blog?  After all, it happens to our clients; they do everything right, get a solid site designed and built, push on the flywheel of promotion until the machine is whizzing along…and then something happens.  Crisis.  Emergency.  Busy season.  Staff changes.  So what happens if you just STOP?

A lot!

The first thing we noticed was a steep drop-off of our Facebook fan activity. You social networkers are a fickle bunch!   We expected that; social networking is about building relationships.  Without our giving you meaningful substance, It isn’t surprising you forgot about us.  Businesses should be forgotten if they stop giving you something you want and/or need.  We responded by posting directly to our Facebook page and those stats went back up, but not as high as when our blog is also pushing posts to our wall.  You effectively told us you want our meatier content as well as our more amusing observations and anecdotes when it comes to Facebook.

But what about our website stats? We had a drop in return visitors; there wasn’t anything new for folks to read so they stopped coming to look for it.  We had a slight drop in new visitors; I would expect that to continue to decline if we don’t start posting again since new visitors largely come to us from sharing of our posts by our customers and fans/friends.  The ‘stickiness’, or amount of time people spend on our site per visit, actually increased.  Were you looking for something interesting to read, since there wasn’t that something new?

The most important thing we learned is that our most engaged customers noticed we were gone–and told us so.    While I could make a pithy statement about you being the people we write for, I’ll refrain from stroking your ego while saying exactly that.  You ARE who we write for because you most align with our mission and core values.  By being engaged, you’re more fun to work with, you get more results from our joint efforts, and you make more profit for both your company and ours. We write for you because you put our words to work and we both reap the rewards.

To those of you who missed us: Thank You!

To those of you who didn’t: Why not?  Are you ready to up your engagement level and let us help you improve return on investment (I’m just sayin’…grin)?  Or maybe there are topics you’d be more interested in having us write about?  If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Keleigh