Tomorrow, Groundhog Day, there will be another community blood drive at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

I can’t give, because it’s too soon after the last time. But you probably can. And of course, since I can’t do it this time, they’re giving away cool free stuff:

• A free American Red Cross Lifesavers t-shirt

• A free pound of Starbucks coffee

• A chance to win a pair of Delta Air Lines tickets

OK, so I’m jealous. But truth be told, last time around I managed to get my mitts on two rather nice long-sleeved T-shirts.

But the best reward is knowing that you’ve addressed the chronic shortage of life-giving blood in the Midlands.

The event will take place from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. To make an appointment, call 1-800-733-2767.

Tell them I sent you — in my place.

– Brad Warthen

Hope the folks at ADCO are happy to see “Famously Hot” everywhere. Good work that I think will pay dividends for years to come. Merry Merry!

Yes, we are — happy, that is. And it’s great to know that the mayor joins us in celebrating the success of Famously Hot!

The University of South Carolina just put out this release:

Up in smoke: Research shows graphic images can deter smokers

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but its worth might just be measurable in terms of lives, according to research by a University of South Carolina public health professor.

That’s because visual imagery on cigarette packages deters smoking, and the more graphic they are, the better the results, said Jim Thrasher, assistant professor in the Arnold School of Public Health Department of Health Promotion, Education and Behavior.

“Tobacco use continues to be the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and graphic health warnings are among the most cost-effective interventions that exist,” Thrasher said….

Of course, there’s graphic, and then there’s graphic.

The above image was the winner of a contest in California:

The challenge was to create a anti smoking ad powerful enough to turn people off cigarettes without resorting to the gruesome imagery so prevalent in anti-smoking campaigns. With the help of a couple of dancers, an up-for-anything ad agency and hundreds of yards of Lycra, Los Angeles photographer Ricardo Marenco did just that.

“I wanted to evoke a sea of people trapped inside their addiction,” says Marenco, who created the shot for the California Department of Public Health’s billboard and print campaign. To achieve his desired effect, he photographed the dancers individually inside 7-foot-tall Lycra cigarettes. Then he digitally overlaid embers and smoke from real cigarettes on the figures. The ads ran without any words, only a helpline number — the image said it all.

But apparently, you have to be really gross for some people. Below is one of the images that came with the USC release. Why is it in Spanish (“garganta” means “throat”)? Probably because of this part of the release:

As a result of his work with colleagues from Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, Mexico’s Minister of Health adopted their recommendations for which pictorial warnings to put on cigarette packages, which began circulating in September.

Thrasher, who has a joint research and faculty appointment with Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, is also assessing what labels are the most convincing for low socioeconomic status groups…

We much appreciate the two shout-outs we got from Kelly Barbrey Wednesday at the Hospitality Hotspotters meeting, giving us credit for helping the community come up with the “Famously Hot” campaign.

We’ve been greatly gratified by the wide acceptance the campaign has achieved, from social media to major local events to common, everyday conversation in the Columbia area.

But even we were not quite prepared for this photo that Kelly flashed on the screen at the gathering. It was taken at Williams-Brice Stadium during the USC-Georgia last year.

So now we have the key bodypainters demographic on board. Wow. We’ve achieved acceptance with every group now.

We’ve never felt validated with such … enthusiasm… before.

And now we can celebrate the wide acceptance of the campaign (which was created by guess who) at the official Famously Hot New Year’s Eve party:

Get excited because this New Year’s Eve, the biggest, most exciting event in the Southeast is the Famously Hot New Year celebration on South Carolina’s Main Street in the heart of Columbia, South Carolina. This is not your grandmother’s family get-together, unless of course, your family likes to party. With beer, wine, and champagne vendors, an ESPN Zone playing the college bowl games, a Palmetto Tree and Crescent moon display during the midnight countdown, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, George Clinton, and his group the Parliament Funkadelic headlining, this is a one-of-a-kind celebration you will not want to miss. Plus it’s FREE!

See you on Main Street in 19 days…

AT&T employs 2,477 people in South Carolina, with a payroll of $173 million. Not to mention handling all those billions of texts.

Today, ADCO’s Brad Warthen visited the nerve center of it all, the very synapses that handle 90 percent of AT&T’s wireless traffic in South Carolina. Where was that? Well, he can’t tell you. That was a condition of going there. Very hush-hush.

AT&T’s Pam Lackey and other officials had invited a number of media and economic development types out to let the community know that the company has spent $125 million this year in SC to improve wireless service, including new cell sites and the upgrade of dozens of others. For instance, Forest Acres should see improved service from a new cell site at Trenholm Road and North Beltline. Meanwhile, 60 towers in Richland County have been upgraded with “enhanced backhaul connections,” which has to do with enabling 4G speeds.

AT&T was showcasing its processing power today because increasingly, that’s what it’s about, explained Laurent Therivel, AT&T’s vice president and general manager of Mobility & Consumer Markets for North Carolina and South Carolina. Consumers are less interested in, say, how many songs they can store on a device; they want to make sure they have a good connection to Pandora. Even such apparently device-specific functions as Siri are all about the network. Smart as she is, if you don’t have a good network, Siri can’t think.

What made the biggest impression on Brad, aside from the fact that AT&T is really serious about enhancing customer service? This: The whole thing runs on batteries.

Really. At  one point, he was in this room that was like all the others, except a little chillier and darker. But the stacks of electronic paraphernalia in that room consisted entirely of batteries rather than high-tech switching equipment. Basically, the idea is that it doesn’t matter whether the grid is working or backup generation, so long as the batteries get recharged. If there’s an outage, the network never knows the difference.

That’s one way to make sure the call — or text, or data — always goes through.

1. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central)
2. The Colbert Report (Comedy Central)
3. Masterpiece (PBS)
4. 30 Rock (NBC)
5. Parks and Recreation (NBC)

And here are the Top Five for Republicans:

1. Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction(Speed)
2. This Old House (PBS)
3. The 700 Club (syndicated)
4. Swamp Loggers (Discovery)
5. Top Shot (History)

“Swamp Loggers?” So now we see who is watching all that “Redneck TV,” huh? And on the other side, I know whom to blame for the fact that it’s increasingly hard to tell news from satire.

But if there is anything of significance here, anything with policy implications, it’s that both left and right depend on PBS for some of their favorites shows. (Meanwhile, the liberals are so busy pursuing laughs that they have time for only two PBS faves, “Masterpiece” and “American Masters.” Apparently, as long as it’s got “Master” in it, they like it.)

How about that?

Maybe next time Republican lawmakers go to reflexively deep-six public broadcasting, they’ll stop and think how they’re go to explain to their base what they’re doing to “This Old House,” “New Yankee Workshop,” and “Antiques Roadshow.”

Last night, I saw “Back to the Future” for the first time in many a year. And I had to smile at the end. In 1985, it was still credible that we’d have flying cars in 2015. The shocking thing is that that leaves us only four years now. Well, at least it doesn’t take laying down much infrastructure, so I suppose it is conceivable (especially if we’re fueled by a Mr. Fusion).

But today, I saw something that is more likely to be our future — a plug-in electric car. In routine use.

I was visiting Mike Couick over at the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina in Cayce. As it happens, we were talking about sustainable energy (ADCO is working with the Central Midlands Council of Governments and a couple of private partners on a project for local governments). And when we walked outside after the interview, there was some right in front of us.

This Nissan Leaf belongs to ECSC, and is used to drive around the state on co-op business, which surprised me — I assumed it was for local use. How does it manage that sort of range? Mike said all the co-ops have charging stations.

Very cool, I thought.

Mike reminded me that this was really sort of retro, since the original automobiles were electric, before the internal combustion engine decided to eat the world (my wording, not his).

With that in mind, I can’t wait to get back to the future and drive one of these myself. And I’ll pass on the gullwing doors, Mr. DeLorean.

– Brad Warthen

Aerospace company lands in Orangeburg County

Aerostructures North America will open a new aerospace components assembly facility in the 150,000-square-foot Miller Valentine speculative building, located at 348 Millennium Drive, Orangeburg.

GKN South Carolina plans to create 278 jobs and invest a minimum of $38 million over the next six years.

The U.K.-based company’s plans were announced today after Orangeburg County Council approved a set of incentives for the new aerospace manufacturer Monday night.

Initially, the facility will perform assembly operations for a composite fuselage for Honda’s new HondaJet, a light business aircraft. GKN was awarded the HondaJet contract on Nov. 14…

“Over the longer term we expect the new site to serve a range of aerospace customers on assembly tasks across civil and military aviation,” Cummings added.

One of those customers is Boeing Co., which last summer opened a final assembly facility for the wide-body Dreamliner 787 passenger plant in North Charleston, about 70 miles from GKN’s new Orangeburg site near the intersection of Interstate 26 and U.S. Route 301.

GKN Aerospace is responsible for a number of components on the 787, including the plane’s acoustic exhaust and lightweight thrust links, according to an earlier press release on the company’s website…

More and more, we in South Carolina are finding ourselves up in the air. And that’s a good thing.

Adam Kreitman at The Daily Egg recommends being more focused on what the customer wants and needs from you. To accomplish this, he suggests an “About You” page as a better use of your potential client’s attention span:

There are a few main benefits an About You page provides.

1. It ensures at least one page of your website has copy that puts the focus right where it should be…on your customers!

2. The process of writing an About You page for your site forces you to think about who the ideal client for your business really is. Many small business owners, especially those just starting out, try to be everything to everybody. That often results in you wasting time chasing bad leads as well as servicing clients that can suck the life out of you and your business.

Writing copy for your About You page helps you clarify exactly the kind of client you’re looking to attract. You know, the ones that if you had 10 or 20 or 100 of, you’d be on Cloud 9.

(And even if you don’t want an About You page on your website, going through the process of writing out a profile of your ideal client is still a very worthwhile task!)

3. Prospects who aren’t a good fit for your business can disqualify themselves. When a prospect gets to that About You page, it should be crystal clear whether or not your business is a good fit for them. And if it’s not, they can move on, saving both of you the time of figuring that out later.

4. There’s a powerful psychological aspect to having an About You page on your website. When that ideal prospect comes to your site, you want them screaming out loud “Yes, that’s me!” when they read your About You page. You want to make them feel like that page is speaking directly to them and you understand them perfectly.

When you can give someone a feeling of excitement that they’ve found their Mothership, you’ve got a great shot of landing yourself a new client!

5. It makes you stand out from the crowd. I did exhaustive research (i.e. a few Google searches) and few websites have an About You page. In a web full of sites with the same Home, Products, Services, About Us, Contact Us, etc. options in the nav bar, the About You page is a great way to be different and set yourself apart from the competition.