Betty Grogan, Director of Channel Sales @ Ergotron

I visited the Wellness House in Hinsdale, IL, and installed a LX Grommet Mount Arm for Marie in the Reception Area.

I got a hug from at least one of the volunteers. She said that in the past, she’d go home and have to put a heating pad on her shoulders, due to the strain of working on the computer. That day, she’d worked for over 3 hours and had NO PAIN.  The fact that this computer is shared by many volunteers makes the ergonomic arrangements even more important.

Found that grommet mounts and light colored pants are not a good mix when doing an install! Thanks to Dan Hallburg for the remote, on the spot, technical support. Tip: Try and download mfg. specs on how to remove base before going out to customer!

Jeremiah Owyang interviews Bob Pearson (Twitter at bobpdell) Vice President, Communities & Conversations at Dell. Isn’t it fascinating that Jeremiah solicited his questions for his interview from twitter followers.

A few major points from Bob Pearson:

• Dell is increasing its social media efforts in 2009
• These efforts are profitable and low cost
• One effort resulted in over a million dollars in sales
• But the main focus is to engage customers in conversation

Another thing I found interesting was Bob’s answer to the question, what is the URL to your homepage?

Go ahead and watch it for yourself. You can learn first hand from Dell how they’ve used these tools to increase revenues and reduce costs. Well worth the couple of minutes:

Why Dell Continues to Use Social Media

Steve Olson – Technical Manager, Ergotron, Inc. Blogging about Technology, Social Media, Lifestreaming, Productivity, Lifehacks and anything else that’s interesting.

I had an interesting exchange on  Facebook  this weekend from a good friend down in Texas.  His point was that saying it’s a little cold in Minnesota is like saying the battle of Gettysburg was a little skirmish.

We’re a pretty understated group up here.  It got me thinking about marketing from an understated point of view.

We don’t make claims we can’t support.

We don’t spend a lot of time patting ourselves on the back when we get thank you letters and testimonials from our users.

And, much to our PR agency’s chagrin, we don’t build up a lot of media hype about the initiatives we having going on that really will help the world.  No press tours.  No  speakers’ campaigns. 

We just keep working.

And I think that’s the right approach, and it may even be the best approach to take, considering our corporate culture, our E & B’s.

What I need to say though, is this: How do the words we use not turn in to “blah, blah, blah, blah Ergotron”?

We can truly PROVE our products increase corporate productivity.

We are working to SUBSTANTIATE our products improve corporate wellness.

These are important messages addressing critical concerns in today’s challenging economy. 

How do we authentically connect, when so many others make the same claims, but without the same honesty? This is something I hope to find out.

What do you think?

Jane Payfer, CMO @ Ergotron

Over the years, especially the last few, I’ve received many comments like, ‘how do you do it?’; ‘how do you get it all done?’; ‘you should teach a class on work/life balance!’ (Like I’d have time to do that!!); and finally, ‘you should blog about it!’….OK, I will.

Here’s a little background on me.

I am a daughter of almost 43 years, a wife of 20 years, a mother of three boys (ages 17, 11, and 6), and have been working all my life.  I grew up on a dairy farm in southern Minnesota and will never forget the days of baling hay, chopping corn, feeding calves and just plain having fun in the milkhouse squirting my sisters with the water hose!! 

It was a great way to grow up. We worked hard in the barn and in the fields, but set aside the time to be together—to eat, play Euchre and 500 and other board games, or to watch TV together (nearest movie theatre was about 50 miles away and there wasn’t a VCR in the house). And of course, take my mom and dad’s time to get to events that I participated in at school, which were many. 

I now look at the life that I have created with my family and realize that it isn’t much different from how I grew up. Times have changed for sure, but we still work hard and at the same time we take the time to make sure we don’t lose the balance of having a life outside of work. 

Sean and I decided before we got married that we wanted at least three children, but I also wanted to work. I have my four year degree and I wanted to get my money’s worth! 

So, after baby number one I took my maternity leave and went back to work after 8 weeks (big mistake – take the 12 weeks!)…six years later baby number two…five years after that, baby number three (20 weeks of mat leave/part-time working-well worth it!)

Many people ask if we planned to have the kids that far apart – heck yes!! Who wants to pay for three kids in daycare and three kids in college at the same time – NOT US!! 

I know everyone has a different philosophy on the timing of having children, but this is the route that we took and I’m very thankful that we made that decision. 

In having said that, the present day brings us to all three boys playing baseball and football and they wrestle, we currently are in the wrestling season, three days a week and most weekends now through March.  My middle guy is in choir (which is before school one day a week) and the two youngest have religion classes which rounds out the rest of the evenings during the week. 

The most important time of our week is Friday…it is our ‘family night.’ This is the night where we make sure that we eat together, talk together, play games or watch a TV or a movie. 

We’ve done really well to keep our Friday date with our family, and if there ever is a conflict, we just change to Saturday or Sunday night!   It’s something that the kids look forward to and so do we!   

To give you a little bit more info on my husband and I, we both work full time, love to spend time w/ family and friends, we both have motorcycles (he drives a Honda Goldwing and I drive a Harley Heritage Springer), and we always set aside time for ourselves (babies do survive without you for a night or two or more). 

Sean owns two gas/service stations (and no, he hasn’t made any money on gas for quite of few years – that is its own topic).  He works six days a week and his hours vary – leaves the house by 6am and we never know what time he’ll get home in the evenings.  Average is between 6pm, but can be as late as 8pm – depending on the car counts, issues with the pumps, building, employees, etc.  He is glad that he went into this business as he is now a self taught mechanic and entrepreneur and I couldn’t be more proud of him!! 

My official title is Marketing Director – Global Channel Operations…who would’ve thought a farmer’s daughter would have global marketing responsibilities!!  I have a group of 11 great people that I work with to get it done at Ergotron, so my days are filled with meetings, emails and managing the day to day ideas and issues that may not necessarily be on the agenda. 

We go with the flow and it’s all about flexibility. 

I don’t keep track of my work hours…I just know that it is many during the week.  For example I trained one of my employees in China at 6am my time on Wednesday and Thursday from my home office,  then last night after returning home from watching my kids wrestle I was checking email at 10pm. 

I feel fortunate that we have great leadership at our company who believe that we all need personal lives to be productive at work, which I believe is key to the whole meaning of work/life balance. 

I better get back to my busy day…I am working from home today, so I started at 6am to get on email…got the kids up and going (all were tired from last nights wrestling matches)…had a few conference calls…threw in a load of laundry which will probably be in the washer all day…started writing this blog… need to get back to email. Whew! Then take a Target run at some point (no milk or bread in the house this morning for kids breakfast – no I don’t feel guilty)…one more conference call today…and then work on cleaning out the 323 unread emails that I have in my inbox from the past month (hoping that it is mostly junk/FYI/cc’d emails and that there are no actions for me!!!). 

For family night tonight we are going to order in pizza and finally going to decorate our Christmas tree.  The comment from my youngest son yesterday morning was, ‘We are not ready for Christmas and it is you and Dad’s fault!’ 

I turned to him and told him that I could think of a few reasons why we didn’t get time to decorate the tree this week….a Vikings game, three nights of wrestling practice/meets, religion classes. 

I think Santa and the Good Lord will forgive me for not quite being ready for Christmas yet!! It’s all a matter of perspective if they could see it all from my view!

Daneen Kiger, Marketing Director – Global Channel Operations @ Ergotron