It’s hard to be stuck in the office during the summer months when the weather is so beautiful outside. So why not add some fun to your office? We’ve put together some sarcastic signs to give you a chuckle and distract you from thinking about all of the lucky ones relaxing on the beach while you ferociously type away at your computer. (Don’t worry – they’re all safe for work!)

Hope these signs gave you a little laugh. If you have any to share, please post a link in the comments!

With offices in both Columbus and New Jersey there was certainly a great deal of interest at The Supplies Guys last week in terms of where the twenty five year old basketball phenom, Lebron James would be calling home next season. After the devastating news broke that Cleveland’s “chosen one” would in fact be taking his talents to South Beach, I only began to wonder which of his top two destinations  (Ohio and Florida) were most interested in the events leading up to “the decision.”

Like any curious internet marketer, I decided to do jump into Google Trends and investigate. I wanted to compare “Lebron James” search related traffic over the past thirty days for the regions of Ohio and Florida. Below I have embedded graphs taken from Google Trends. The blue line represents the search volume. You will see that in Ohio, search volume began to pick up steam as far back as June 29th, 2010 and un-surprisingly climaxed on July 9th (the date of James’ televised decision). This graph tells us that on July 9th, search volume for Lebron James was over 7.5x greater than average. Now let’s compare these findings to those that originated in Florida.

First thing to point out is that the pattern of these graphs are nearly identical. However, when looking at the y-axis of the graph below notice that the search volume index is greater in Florida than Ohio. Looking at July 9th we can see that “Lebron James” related searches increased by 10x the average volume. So just what conclusions can we draw from this data?

First and foremost, during the week of James’ big decision, Floridian’s showed a greater average interest in Lebron James than searchers located in Ohio. Second, prior to this story breaking Lebron James really was not a topic of conversation to Floridian’s (which is shown in the low search volume for “Lebron James” prior to June 15th when compared to Ohio). What cannot be inferred from these graphs is the actual amount of search volume coming from each state. Now I could look into the number of Tweets by location, blog entries by location or some other social metric but quite frankly this topic is still too fresh to discuss. So feel free to conduct your own research and drop your findings in our comments or forward me the link to your blog that unveils the results!

Last Thursday, we sent out an email explaining new regulations that The Supplies Guys had found in the economic stimulus plan. In the email, we explained to all of our customers that the government was giving free ink and toner supplies to small businesses. The email read as follows:

Dear John Doe-

If you are a small business you should know of a provision in the latest government jobs bill, that as part of this new economic stimulus package, the United States Government is giving small businesses free printer supplies through 2011.

Bill S.3103 was introduced in the Senate this month with the title “Small Business Job Creation Act of 2010″ with the stated intent “to help small businesses create new jobs and drive our nation’s economic recovery.”

To be eligible for this provision, you must employ less than one person and have yearly revenues of one billion or more. Read the full details here.

Thank you,
The Supplies Guys

As you can see, the end of the email states the eligibility for this program – “employ less than one person and have yearly revenues of one billion or more.” As both are nearly impossible, we used that tagline to set up for the joke. From there, we used “Read the full details” as a link to the customer’s personal website that waited to surprise the customer with the following banner:

At The Supplies Guys, we had a good time executing this friendly April Fools joke, and hope that you all enjoyed receiving it!

It’s that time of year again, March Madness! The time of year when 65 college basketball teams are all competing for the same prize, pushing towards the same goal… To become the 2009 – 2010 NCAA Basketball National Champions.

While the coaches and players are preparing for the games to tip off on Thursday 3/18/2010, millions across the United States and throughout the world are also preparing… Their tournament brackets. This year, “bracketology” reached an all time high when the President of the United States publicly filled out his bracket on ESPN’s Sportscenter and then posted it online for millions to see. CLICK HERE to see President Obama’s NCAA Bracket.

With March Madness gaining popularity every year, I thought it would be worthwhile to review a few of the many different philosophies or strategies used to choose the right teams. Who knows – maybe you can use one of these strategies and be the envy of your office this year. What better way to review these strategies then to break down and analyze a few of our own brackets from within Supplies Guys.

#1 – EJ’s Strategy: Local, Local, Local. Picking the hometown Ohio State Buckeyes to go all of the way may not be too far of a longshot, but picking Ohio University (my alma mater!) over the much higher rated Georgetown was a pick most would shy away from (even me)… But hey, check the scoreboard! So, if you are proud of where you are from and want to support your local teams, this bracket strategy is an easy one and only takes about 5 minutes

#2 – Jeff’s Strategy: Go with what you know. Jeff admittedly has not been keeping up on much college basketball this season. So his strategy incorporates his general past knowledge of teams (like “I think Pittsburgh has been good recently”) combined with the knowledge he was able to gain this season by watching a few games. So, by watching a few Vanderbilt games and a few Baylor games this year, Jeff felt confident enough to take Vanderbilt to the “Sweet 16″ and Baylor to the finals. Those of you who have been keeping up on the first day’s results know that only one of those two teams are still alive in the tournament.

#3 – Tim’s Strategy: Numbers and Percentages. This strategy does take a little more time than the above mentioned strategies, but I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will pay off. This strategy takes a blended look comparing the teams overall record, their “Team Outlook Percentage” according to CBS Sports, and the overall consensus pick coming from the “experts”. Most would think Murray State would have no chance against Vanderbilt… But according to my research there was a good chance the 30-4 Murray State Racers could upset the much higher rated Vanderbilt team. Of course no strategy is foolproof, but with all of the data in front of you I believe it gives you the better chance to make the best “educated guesses”.

Feel free to share your bracket strategy… And check back here in a few weeks and we will see which strategy worked the best!