WOW. Thanks for the tip, PJ!

The Haunted House arms race has clearly started as we approach the high holy month of October. For haunt fans like me, this is our Christmas and our New Year.

Universal Studios just released new information about their SAW house. Apparently you will be sprayed with blood, you could be kidnapped and placed in a trap, and you will hear, see, and smell everything that is happening.

Click here and here to get more information.

That is just 1 of (I think) 8 houses. We are still waiting for more details, but we do know that there will also be a Chucky and Wolfman house as well as many scare zones.

Here is Universal’s HHN website.

For those of you wondering why I seldom go to any conventions in October, this is why. There is never enough time and money to see every haunted house, but I will sure try!

If you have any suggestions of great Halloween events I should talk about, just let me know!

THIS IS AMAZING!

I know that I tend to talk a lot in my tutorial section about what you shouldn’t do when marketing something creative, but this time I’m going to give you a terrific example of what you should do.

To fully illustrate the impact of this, I need to give you some background about me. I went to Universal Studios Florida’s Halloween Horror Nights for the first time last year and fell in love. USF has the budget and creativity to always put together a great event, so at that time, I intended to follow only HHN, and was not interested in the smaller HoS event at Busch Gardens.

Don’t get me wrong – I still love HHN and I know this year’s event will be super awesome, but their marketing hasn’t really done the trick to get me thinking and wondering about this year’s universe. I am a huge, rabid, foaming at the mouth SAW fan, so I am psyched to see the SAW house, but that is pretty much it.

This year, Busch Gardens Tampa’s Howl O Scream has it going on! We have a company here that truly understands two often overlooked things:

1. When you are smaller, you need to innovate.

2. Social media is about conversation. It isn’t about you, it’s about the fans.

They brought this year’s icon to life via the twitter account @MsVayne. At first, you find out that she is a fashion designer with some odd hangups, but not much more.

@HOSInsider also talks about the event, but serves to try and expose her for the monster she is. If you are subscribed to both, it can be very entertaining to watch the two of them go at it.

This is key – they reply to people. They talk to people. Yes, even to you and me. How many people go on twitter and talk to their navels? Too many. I routinely unfollow people who never reply to me because it becomes pointless after a short while. At best, you become bored. At worst, you feel slighted.

These folks know that you are their welcomed guest, so they treat the fans with respect and interaction.

Then there are the contests. A devious way to get their teaser videos out to the public is to post them in character on twitter and give free tickets away to the 31st person to retweet it. (Retweeting is quoting their tweet and sending it out to your twitter followers.) They do these at random times during the day.

Picture your average person who is bored in their office or school. This kind of thing can become really fun quite quickly! At first I wasn’t going to go to HoS. Now I really want to go. the best part about this kind of marketing is that it shows that they must really love what they do. They may not have the budget that Universal Studios has, but they sure as hell will put on an event that is just as fun.

I have never even gone to this thing and I am sure of that.

Holy crap while I was writing this they just cut over their site to what appears to be an interactive adventure game.

CHECK IT OUT GUYS!

I decided to stop by Jersey Gardens after work today to get some bras. This is an outlet mall that is near Newark airport.

Y’see, I have a dire bra situation going on. My boobs decided to spontaneously grow a cup size, such that I am now getting bruises and all kinds of pain from the bras that I do have,

DARK AND PENDULOUS! (Let’s see how many RHPS fans get that one…)

It’s gotten to the point that I thought about going free hang to my dayjob like a Scottish warrior.

Anywho, back to the topic at hand. The topic is what an absolute shithole Jersey Gardens is. The parking lost was crammed with people who can’t drive, the mall itself was crammed with many unsupervised children. Like, we’re talkin’ at least 50 of them as far as the eye can see. When you walk over the horizon new unsupervised children re-spawn there for you with the other NPCs.

After I got through this chaos to the bra store, I thought that the worst is over. I pick out like 6 bras and get in line for the fitting room. I’m there for about 20 minutes while some sales associates start having an argument:

“I AIN GON FIX YO SHIT I AIN GON FIX IT MAH TIME IS UP I GOTS TA GO HOME!!!”

The other responded, “TA HELL WIT YAW I DON CARE…”

Ok, awkward. I ignore it. Then some lady pushes in front of me not realizing that I am in line or not caring. Obviously the sales associates were too busy with whatever it was that they were doing to care, and at that point I ceased to care. This is when I took all the stuff I was waiting to try on, tossed it on the nearest table, and walked out.

Then I swam down the hall to a different store. Children pushing at my legs, pregnant parents with 5 children pushing in front of me with their big carts, and other general chaos.

I take out my cell and call Harknell, letting him know that I’ll be home soon. While I am on the phone I see something shiny in the Ann Taylor LOFT outlet store, so I dip my head in to see if it’s worth checking the whole store out. (This is where I get all of my dayjob clothes.) The greeter says hello to me. I pull my phone away and say hello back to her. Then I start to finish off my conversation so that I can shop, but before I can do so, the lady says, “Y’all got ta git off that phone and shop!!!”

I could see that she was so pleased with herself hat she had made a funny. I didn’t find it funny, though. I found it stupid at best and passive-aggressive at worst.

I’m thinking, excuse me? I just happened to walk in here for just a second to look at something on the front table while I was on my way out to my car.

But, since I generally don’t waste time humiliating idiots anymore, I simply turned around and left the store without buying anything.

Harknell says to me on the phone that this was indeed stupid, but he tells me to go ahead into the Saks 5th Avenue Outlet to at least see if they have any good deals because there’s hardly ever any people in there.

I do so, since Saks is on the way out to my car. I find 5 things to try on and, take it back to the fitting room. There are two women there. One asks me how many items I have. I tell her 5. She is about to let me into a room when the other one stops me and insists on counting out the items as if I were lying.

Again, I became suddenly so furious, that I nearly just walked out, but I didn’t. I don’t think it’s been since I was in High School that anyone has treated me like that.

I didn’t like any of the items and politely gave them back and left the shop. I wanted to say, “Be sure and count them again so that you know I didn’t try to STEAL anything.”

But instead, I just walked out.

I can totally rip a person in two mentally, but these days I generally save that for those who really, REALLY deserve it. One one hand, I can imagine that in this particular mall they get a lot of theft, but still I am never going back to Jersey Gardens again. It might be on the way back from work, but it’s not worth it.

I am beginning to think that outlets totally aren’t worth it these days. Maybe I’ll buy less stuff if I buy it full price, but the whole experience won’t be so stupid and the items won’t be possibly faulty. This is what happens when companies don’t pay their employees anything and everything is all about the bottom line. Nobody cares and it’s good for no one. This happens in regular malls, too. They lose customers like me with jobs and not a lot of time to spare on BS.

My 20s have made me disgruntled.

I am testing the AudioBoo service. I think I may not use this after I get my own audio hosting up and running on this blog. This seems convenient if you want to do it from your phone, but the profile doesn’t even let you put a link to your blog, and the site is ridiculously buggy. I had to put 2 support things in just to get it up and running.

Oh well, listen to my test:

Link.

This is amazing. Now we know what would happen if the Ghostbusters were around in the 50s!