This piece of news seems incongruent with the economic crisis also impacting Britain.
British Prime Minister Grodon Brown announced he plans to give students without internet access, up to £700 in vouchers!
Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistaire Darling, has to wrestle with the terrible choice between raising taxes or truly debauching the pound.
JibJab has come out with another classic ‘toon to relieve the dark mood about the economy and the sniping that passes for campaignin’.
What’s more interesting than the entertaining usual suspects, is that this time around, being a social media election and all that, you can insert yourself into the video! Then post it to your social networking site, or grab the link.
The just published Technorati State of the Blogosphere report does a huge service not just to bloggers in general, but to anyone planning to use social media internally, or trying to do some media outreach.
The rest of the report makes an interesting case (there are more bloggers who are full time employees than you’d imagine) for the make up of “those people” and the content they deliver. For instance, there are more expert blogs than the snarky or confrontational type. Concealing identity is not such a huge thing, as people fear.
This blew my mind:
Talk about a groundswell!
This 5-part report, with two parts still to come, will be a wake up call for those still on those sidelines.
Stanford aw professor, Lawrence Lessig, has a great analysis of why Sarah Palin doesn’t stack up against other VPs in history (a claim she made to ABC’s Charlie Gibson recently).
He compares the experience factor to a long line of vice presidents, and concludes that yes she may be courageous and smart, but not enough to meet the challenges today.
Why is this interesting? Not just because this is an erudite response to a prepared (read: spun) answer for the media. But because this is a YouTube response that moves the news story (linked to and viewed more than 235,000 times on YouTube) forward.
Much of the media coverage of the candidates doesn’t get to this kind of detail. It’s amazing what those outside the realm of journalism can do with a story. Sure Lessig weighs in at the end, making it an Op-ed video. But it’s a lot more valid (and dare I say entertaining) than seeing governor Palin completely blanking out over the question about the “Bush doctrine.”
I spoke to a banker a few days back who was practically blaming Suze Orman for the panic about money market accounts. That’s not entirely fair, because Ms. Orman does distinguish between the the FDIC insured kind and the one that isn’t.
“If you own a money market through your bank, it is insured by the FDIC. But that’s not the same as a money market mutual fund…”
(from her web site as of 09/17)
Orman was the face of personal financial crisis management on cable, and these kind of panic-attack shows tend to get recycled a lot.
But how do those entrusted with Risk Management in the face of pundit-induced media panic, plan to communicate through a crisis? Fidelity is taking out full page ads in The New York Times. Like that would calm the nerves! How did the financial juggernauts plan for it, I wondered.
I came across a group calling itself the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group (CRMPG), with members form Goldman Sachs, Merill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, B of A, Citigroup and others that had put together a plan to prevent ‘future financial shocks.’
The word Communication occurs about 25 times in the 176-page document, which
“recommends strengthening the relationship between intermediaries and counterparties in sales, marketing, and ongoing communications associated with high-risk complex financial instruments.”
and encourages
“prompt and coherent flow of risk-related information within and across business units and, as needed, the prompt escalation of quality information to top management.”
In other words get the message across fast and furious –top-down, bottom-up, even sideways.
But as we all know, the information is stuck in the silos. And what happens then? The media try to pry open these silos and feed us tid-bits of information from pundits. Prompting Talking Points like this from Washington Mutual whose stock had begun to slide:
“On the morning of September 16, personal finance personality Suze Orman made some incorrect comments on the Today Show about the role a bank’s stock price plays in the safety and soundness of a bank…”
To get back to the CRMPG document, the lesson for all organizations is to begin to bridge the gaps between sales, marketing and communication departments long before Suze Ormans of this world communicate on their behalf.
Multi-tasking could be a terrible thing for our social life. For all our talk of interactive and conversations, we’re quietly downgrading our brains to Short Attention Span Interaction mode.
The long conversations we used to have on the phone and the face time we give our colleagues and friends are being overtaken by our capacity for IM, to micro-chat, and replace a lot of real conversations with virtual reality formats. We embrace social media, but it has a way of making us un-sociable as well. You may be doing some of this multi-tasking already; I am guilty of many as well.
For those who are interested in my recent column for IABC’s Communication World magazine, it’s about the rewiring of Encyclopedia Britannica –a topic I have previously blogged about.
Article from IABC here. If you’re not a member, get the PDF here. In keeping with the open-source theme of the article, I even found it has been featured here!
Excerpt: “Would you allow someone to add comments to documents on your web site or post an entry to your corporate blog? Britannica’s stand forces us to look at the backroom edit wars that go on in Wikipedia (which Wikipedia calls a “breach of wikiquette”) and the vitriolic rants on your unmoderated blog as confrontation, not collaboration.”
He shouldn’t have gone there, but he did. John McCain stood out as a different breed among the presidential hopefuls on the Republican side, watching as contenders like Rudi Giuliani and Mike Huckabee imploded. He displayed an unusual trait in politics: Presidential.
But the Karl Rovian attack ads unleashed by the McCain campaign are showing a new trait in McCain. Desperate. Heck, you don’t have to believe me. Even Karl Rove thinks they are going too far.
“I regret, and am sometimes offended by some of the negative aspects of this campaign,” he recently remarked in an ad released on YouTube. It’s as if he’s saying “I’m John McCain; I’m not sure what I was thinking when I approved this message.”
I guess being found out (even as far back as January this year) is also regrettable.
McCain’s campaign, seduced by the capacity to launch inexpensive ads via YouTube, will soon find it is backfiring. There’s too little thought put into these pictures + sound bites + title card videos that are caricatures of ads. They taint his political stance by naively allowing the “..and I approve this message” sound clip to be added to the video.
Will negative ads backfire for Obama? Absolutely! But McCain ought to know better, having being the target of such tactics in the previous election.
“The red phone is ringing at 3 a.m.”
“Make an impact. Engage your passion. Realize your potential”
“As communic8ters ar we boun 2 stik by thee rools?”
“When you have loss of life, spinning is unacceptable.”
“Public Relations used to be about Publicity … PR pros are now much more focused on the ‘Relations’ side of ‘Public Relations.”
“Where once there was but an ocean filled with a certain type of fish, today there are channels leading to different bodies of water, where the fish exhibit unusual behaviors and don’t respond to the old bait. It’s PR’s job to find out what these new fish in these unusual waters like to eat – before ever casting the first line.”
“That would buy about 50,000 cans of Red Bull …”
“Multiply my arrogance by 1000x and you get Carly Fiorina. Wow is she clueless.”
Just from a media monitoring perspective, I wonder who in the Feds, if at all, is monitoring statements and warning signs in the way marketers do.
Take this quote from Alan Greenspan, made in August this year:
“There may be numbers of banks and other financial institutions that, at the edge of defaulting, will end up being bailed out by governments.”
And this, in March, Yoshimi Watanabe, Japan’s financial services minister said this:
“It is essential [for the US] to understand that given Japan’s lesson, public fund injection is unavoidable.” Watanabe called on the US to “fix the hole in the bathtub.”
That same month, Greenspan said this:
“The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war.”
And last September, NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini made a dire warning of a ‘hard landing‘ of the US economy
Was the SEC walking around with noise-canceling headphones?
Just wondering.
Hoipolloireport 