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An online guide for signage around the office!

Nearly every business with a storefront has a welcome sign. On Twitter, that sign is the bio box underneath every user name.

A user’s bio box is a chance to announce who they are and it can be used in a lot of different ways. It can be used to announce affiliations, perhaps who a user works for. It can be a plug for a business. Or it can be completely nonsensical. Each approach has its advantages. Done right, each of them can lead to larger number of followers and a greater presence, perhaps the name of the game on the site.

Twitter, which celebrated its sixth anniversary on March, works in funny ways, influence and clout on the social media site still a murky science. Still, so much about having any kind of measurable influence on Twitter remains tied to credibility and announcing a big-name affiliation can exponentially increase followings. It’s why the most-followed people on there tend, by and large, not to be independent vagabonds.

This holds true for businesses, as well, with credibility an all-important factor for Twitter success. For businesses, a good Twitter bio is one more part of building a web presence. It shows transparency, announcing that the account in question isn’t some fly-by-night shadow operation. This is key. After all, what potential customer wants to do business with a company they can’t have some trust for at first glance?

Of course, for any business, person, or other entity, a sign alone can’t do it all. Most important is what it stands atop.

Word out of Southern California is that the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have purchased more than 70 billboards around LA, Orange, and Riverside counties to promote their new free agent slugger Albert Pujols. It’s interesting to think the Angels would need to promote a franchise player, though it’s certainly not the first time that a team has had a billboard or inspired one.

While Allen Iverson reigned supreme at shooting guard for the Philadelphia 76ers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a giant poster of him graced the side of a building, though it was taken down as soon as he left town. That makes sense, seeing as no city would want to advertise a long-departed star. A billboard of San Francisco Giants Cy Young-winning pitcher Tim Lincecum currently does likewise on the opposite side of the country where Iverson did his best work as a basketball player. Giants fans hope that billboard stays up for a long time to come.

Just across the bay from where Lincecum does his billboard-inspiring thing, a group of desperate Oakland Raiders fans took matters into their own hands a few years ago. Forlorn over longtime owner Al Davis’s ongoing failure to employ an offensive coordinator, the fans rented a billboard next to Interstate 880 to encourage him to finally hire one. The ploy got attention online and in local newspaper, and ultimately, it worked.

That being said, it took Davis’s death at 82 last year for the team to finally hire a general manager. Billboards can’t do everything, after all.

In his 1995 memoir of Redneck life, No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem, comic Jeff Foxworthy spends a few pages talking about his youthful pastime of stealing road signs.

Foxworthy writes on pages 321-322 of his bestseller:

I stole many. There’s an art to it. They’re not just wood. They’ve got bolts. To do the job correctly, you’ve got to carry the right size wrench and a big screwdriver. You hold the bolt on one side and crank it on the other. But you’ve got to do it at night. You drop one guy off and then you drive away, and you let the guy work. If you’re the job man, you shinny up a pole and you crank. If a car comes by you drop down and lie flat on the side of the road, and wait until the car goes away. It can take a long time. On a busy street, you may only get one or two wrench turns at a time. On a country road it’s a better deal. The hardest to swipe are interstate signs. One thing to remember, you don’t steal road signs just for the sake of stealing. It has to be something you want. For instance, if you find a sign that says ‘Dangerous Curves Ahead’ and the pictured curve in any way resembles a breast, it will be something you need. Dex got us one of those.

No word on when Foxworthy abandoned the transgression, but the guess here is that it came sometime before his career as a nationally famous redneck comic took off.

There’s a great story about the original publishing of the Lord of the Rings books and the uncertainty created between the issuing of the final two books in the series. It’s one of the great stories, too, in the history of guerilla marketing and best of all, it appears to have been organic and done by fans rather than some faceless ad agency.

In the months between the November 1954 publication of The Two Towers and the October 1955 debut of The Return of the King, there was some ambiguity regarding whether or not main character and hero Frodo was still alive. The second book ended with Frodo and trusty sidekick Samwise Gamgee in perilous straits on their journey to Mordor, in danger at the hands of Golum and other forces after the ring they possessed. Consider it the mother of all cliffhangers for perhaps the most popular book series of the 20th century and also a genius publicity move if there ever was one for what resulted. Whether or not it was J.R.R. Tolkien’s intent or if it spurred lead generation of sorts, i.e. greater interest in his series, would be interesting to know.

Had Tolkien wanted, he could have killed his two main characters off, written them out of the series in the one-year lag before his conclusion to it arrived. It would have been a bold creative move on Tolkien’s part, but perhaps an unmitigated disaster for public relations given the man-made billboards that appeared after the final book came out. Spray painted in places like the London Tube were words now immortal: FRODO LIVES!

The Philadelphia Phillies might have been the worst baseball team of the first half of the 20th century, having just one winning season in a three-decade stretch between 1918 and 1950. As such, the few fans whose attention they could hold sometimes mocked them. One sign at their home park, the Baker Bowl was for Lifebuoy soap. “The Phillies use Lifebuoy,” the popular joke went. “But they still stink.”

Signs have long held an iconic place in baseball history. At Ebbets Field, the Dodgers’ historic park during their time in Brooklyn, a narrow sign spanned for years along the right field fence, offering a free suit to any batter that could hit it. However, Dodger outfielders Andy Pafko and Carl Furillo were so slick that Mel Ott reputedly was the only visiting batter to ever hit it. The clothier behind the sign wound up giving Furillo a free suit after another person pointed out how many other suits Furillo had probably saved him.

There have been many other great billboards or advertising promotions at parks. A huge bull at the Durham Bulls’ stadium promised free steaks for players if they could hit it with home runs. The San Francisco Giants keep a running total on their right field fence of how many home runs have splashed into McCovey Cove just beyond. And in the year or so leading up to the 2004 Triple-A All Star game, the Sacramento River Cats kept a countdown going of how many days remained until they would host it.

Indeed, signs are one more part of the greatest game in the history of American sports.

Once, sports stadiums and arenas used to have venerable names: Candlestick Park, Ebbets Field, the Boston Garden. Granted, Fenway Park and a few other classic baseball parks still exist, Lambeau Field shows no signs of going away, and a handful of other stadiums have stuck to tradition. Most every other team, though, has long since sold out.

Personally, I don’t get it. I don’t understand why an Overstock.com or a Qualcomm or a Continental Airlines would drop millions for naming rights to a ballpark. I would love to see marketing figures that show this leads to an increase in revenue or customers. Personally, it seems more of a vanity move to me. I just don’t see the profitability. And it blows my mind that in the middle of a recession, this tradition still goes on. Am I missing something here?

Course, I admit if I could name a stadium after myself or my company, I’d probably do it in a New York Minute. Heck, I’d have gold-plated urinals in the ballpark and hire attendants to carry me to my luxury box in a litter (that’s the ancient Chinese canopied platform the wealthy would be carried around in.) Those are all enticing, ego-gratifying ideas, like buying 50 copies of “Scarface” on Amazon or eating lobster at every meal. It doesn’t make them fiscally sound.

I don’t see the trend going away. In fact, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, with individual players being renamed for companies (Metta World Google, perchance?) maybe corporate America getting to devise rules for sporting events. Only in the latter scenario, I would add, is this anything other than easy money for sports teams.

Early one morning in June 2005, fire broke out at historic Joe Marty’s in Sacramento, California. One of the managers later admitted he’d been lighting off roach bombs the wee hours of that morning, and while a number of historic photos were rescued from the charred building, the overall damage was so bad the bar hasn’t been open since. The building has since been renovated and presumably restored, though it sits vacant on Broadway. And while the wait approaches its seventh year for a new business to take over, a storied sign sits in purgatory.

Joe Marty’s is named for a real person, a man who played five years of Major League Baseball from 1937 to 1941 with the Cubs and Phillies and might be one of the most famous players ever to come out of Sacramento. As a young outfielder on the San Francisco Seals of the old Pacific Coast League, Marty was thought to be a better prospect than teammate Joe DiMaggio by manager Lefty O’Doul, a better all-around player. However, injuries, drink, and World War II kept Marty from reaching his potential, and the bar he opened back home wound up being his greatest legacy. And while Marty died in 1984 at 71, his 60-plus-year-old vintage sign lives on.

Word around Northern California is that a number of sports memorabilia collectors have been keeping a close watch on the vacant business the last six years, and if its owners ever decide to sell, that sign will be in private hands immediately. For the time being, their wait looks indefinite.

My dad was born in 1954, and I sometimes envy the time he grew up in. Cars were cooler, Mustangs and Camaros of the late 1960s still muscle-bound kings of the road today. Music was better too, the Beatles and Rolling Stones cranking out good records on an annual basis, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, and company doing likewise in Motown and doing it on vinyl, still the best way to listen to an album. And whenever my dad and his friends wanted to make the trek, drive-in movie theaters beckoned.

My dad has stories about all the times he went to the drive-ins, though for various reasons, that trend missed my generation. I honestly can’t remember a time my friends and I went. Granted, a fraction of the number of drive-in theaters exist today, a victim of the times maybe or a pricing model that may have worked better in a perfect world. Perhaps advances in movie theater technology hurt the drive-in movement as well, two hours in a plush recliner and air-conditioned theater with exploding surround sound preferable to the same time in a Chevy Lumina on a hot August night with crackling speakers. I see the charm, but I don’t know if too many others do.

Drive-ins still exist of course, and for the sake of nostalgia, I doubt they’ll ever go away entirely. Some survive by hosting swap meets or flea markets during the day. It’s a far cry from my dad’s childhood, and much as I hate to admit it, the time he and his friends enjoyed is probably long gone.

Bill Veeck was a showman, an innovator. The former owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox was constantly coming up with new promotions from being the second owner in modern baseball history to sign a black player to sending a midget in to pinch hit to proceeding over the ill-fated Disco Demolition Night.

In between 3’7″ Eddie Gaedel’s trip to the plate in 1951 and Veeck’s 1979 literal disco inferno (a local DJ organized an on-field bonfire of disco records that degenerated into a riot) the owner did something else worth noting: Veeck invented the exploding scoreboard, perhaps the coolest sign in baseball history.

It happened during Veeck’s tenure with the Chicago White Sox. Taking over a team in 1959 that hadn’t been to the World Series since the notorious 1919 Fall Classic that eight of its players allegedly threw for a gambling payoff, Veeck found a lackluster fan base and economically-depressed club.

Veeck immediately went to work, enlisting former Detroit Tigers first baseman Hank Greenberg to help run his front office. While Greenberg put together a roster that would win the American League pennant that first season, Veeck resorted to his usual tricks and this time settled on a scoreboard that, for lack of a better word, exploded. Whenever a Chicago player hit a home run, fireworks would shoot off, bells would ring, and the 1812 overture would play.

Local fans loved it. Visiting teams made do as well, though at least one had fun with it. When the New York Yankees visited and one of their batters homered, manager Casey Stengel had his team hold sparklers up to celebrate.