Author: Angelo Fernando

Quotes for the week ending 27 Feb, 2010

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“A severe breach of rules by staff”.

Message by British telecom company, Vodafone, apologizing for an offensive message posted to its Twitter account

“The BBC is the arm of MI-6 … We will settle accounts with them when the time comes.”

Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, Iran’s chief of police

“the security tracking software has been completely disabled”

Christopher McGinley, Superintendent of the Lower Merion School District in Phiadelphia. One high school was accused of secretly turning on the web-cams of laptops loaned to students to take home.

“Twitter Toppled Toyota!”

Devang Murthy, in Topnews.in

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007 … Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second”

Twitter blog, charting the popularity of micro-blogging that created a 1,400% growth spurt last year.

“That Wacky Mahathir!”

Headline of a post by the Hugh Downs School of Communications at ASU, on the statement by Mahathir Mohamed, former PM of Mayalsia (who said earlier this year of the US that “If they can make Avatar, they can make anything.”)

What an inukshuk teaches content creators

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Beyond the visual effect of Bing –especially if you’ve been a Google user out of habit–there’s a lot we could learn from how the search engine treats relevance.

Take for instance its hot-linking parts of this iconic symbol of the Inuits– the inukshuk. It is on one level a way of creating a dynamic home page for searchers surrounded by Olympic-related information.

Embedding links is just a start. But like the inukshuk itself, that I quickly learned is more than a marker, it could sometimes create a ‘window’ to guide someone, and reveal something about the terrain –to suggest a good hunting or fishing area.

So the next time you are tasked with create content, think of it more than a pile of sentences. Stories are more than pyramids, inverted or not. They are windows to deeper knowledge. Like a good search engine, they surround a seeker with context, history and information that could be acted on.

Quotes for the week ending 20 Feb, 2010

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“This award celebrates the fact that, in today’s world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news.”

Judges for the George Polk Awards in journalism who honored a work produced anonymously, in a new category (videography) the video, of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was shot during antigovernment protests in Iran. This was the first time in the 61-year history of the awards that an anonymous person was recognized.

“You won’t be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked..”

Google. in a blog post on the buzz about Buzz. It said the company had heard the feedback –outcry, really– loud and clear about what Gmail users thought of the new social media feature. Google immediately changed the ‘auto-follow’ model to ‘auto-suggest’ and apologized.

“misleading, confusing and disingenuous,”

Plaintiff’s claim against Facebook’s new privacy settings –in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco

“My real apology to her will not come in the form of words; it will come from my behavior over time.”

Tiger Woods in his ‘press conference’

“Ask etymologists who work for any common language dictionary … and they will tell you that all dictionaries cannot Prescribe means, but instead only Describe meanings that are already being ascribed through common usage.”

“For those who don’t find that good enough or revealing enough at this point, well,  maybe they have their own issues.”

Michael Wilbon, sports reporter for the Washington Post about, commenting on Tiger’s apology, calling it ‘pretty powerful stuff.’

Russell-Oliver Brooklands, responding to a discussion in Melcrum’s Communicators’ Network (via LinkedIn) about the use of the word “fulsome”

When you have to explain “it’s company policy” you’re in damage control

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I am a big fan of Southwest Airlines, have talked-up and written about them before. So it’s confusing why this incident had to happen. (Variously referred to as the ‘too fat to fly’ snafu).

So while it was time Southwest explained what the policy was –a so-called ‘Customer Size Policy that they explained here — it was not winning anything. After-the-fact PR and damage control is not going to clean up the mess.  United Airlines learned it very recently.  Sure Mr. Smith has great tweets and some 1.6 million followers.

But you have to assume every passenger is a Kevin Smith with a network, and a voice, and an audience, even if it is an audience of a few dozen followers.

Is social media a huge productivity black hole?

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I think it’s a fair question, and one I raised in my second podcast for GreenNurture.

If you only read the tweets and sites that conform to your interest, you’d miss the contra views. As a writer, and practitioner, I keep an eye on those other points of view. (I get the usual snarky comment: “I don’t want to hear that someone’s having carrots for lunch”)

And there are mixed reviews pouring in every week about what social media is doing to employee productivity, with millions of employees taking to Facebook, Twitter and online games.

Here are a few recent reports:

I put the productivity gains question to Derrick Mains CEO of GreenNurture to find out what a CEO –who tweets much more than I– has to say. Mains has two words to describe its value: frontline intelligence. To him it’s a remake of that old static engagement tool –the suggestion box.

“Social media simply blew the sides of the suggestion box,” he says.

On this podcast Mains talks of how organizations that frown on online social activity are missing out on frontline intelligence.

Download the podcast here.

Quotes for the week ending 13 Feb, 2010

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“Right, I think I’ve got it. It’s a mixture of Facebook’s more intimate networking and Twitter’s broadcast style.”

Rory Cellan-Jones reviewing Buzz, the social application from Google

“It is not the first time Google has tried to launch a social network.”

BBC.co.uk on Google taking on Facebook and Twitter

“Ashton Kutcher, who is famous for being married to Demi Moore, who is famous for having been married to Bruce Willis, is its high priest. This is the avatar of our new global culture. Wow.”

Michael Dentandt, at Trentonian

“I’m not tied to the term “citizen journalism … it’s going through an evolution. We’re just adding another voice.

Amra Tareen, CEO of Allvoices.com a citizen journalism who says that that in this period of displacement in journalism, the community judges the value of content.

“The whole country watches the Super Bowl, the whole country knows the score, and we get it wrong? Preposterous. Unbelievable. Embarrassing.”

Dennis Finley, Editor of a Virginia newspaper, the Pilot, on accidentally publishing a story that had probably been a placeholder for a possible win by the Colts over the Saints.

“Your paper makes a HUGE error and I am supposed to pay you $79 for a corrected framable(yes I am a Saintas fan)version!”

Reader responding to the Editor who also wrote that the the ‘error’ in question, in print, could be ordered from the web site for those who buy sports fronts suitable for framing! The reader continued: “Do the accountable thing and make the reprint available for free..I know when pigs fly right. WHO DAT!”

“Now, we all know that whether someone liked or disliked a spot is a bad proxy for effectiveness.”

Michael Learmonth, in AdAge, commenting on the high popularity of Google ad than ran during the Super Bowl –popular among among online audiences, that is . He also noted that “online popularity can start to wag the dog offline.”

“What people need to understand is that Forrester is an intellectual property company, and the opinions of our analysts are our product. Blogging is an extension of the other work we do — doing research, writing reports, working with clients, and giving speeches, for example.”

Josh Bernoff, on Forrester’s new blogging policy.

“Aren’t we all already swimming under copious amounts of status updates and shared media coming from services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare, etc.? Do we need another social filtering system?”

Jesse Hempel, at Fortune, underwhelmed by Google’s Buzz.

When life gives you lemons, don’t taint your lemonade, bro!

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Maybe the headline to this post ought to be “Why editors make poor marketers.”

The Virginian-Pilot “blew it” as its editor said, apologizing for the error. No small typo, this. They printed an entire story, photos and all, with a wrong headline claiming the Colts beat the Saints! The apologies were profuse:

But then the editor added this:

“We did remake the page for those who want to buy a Sports front suitable for framing. Just go to here to order it.”

The comeback from some readers was predictable! One reader wrote:

“Your paper makes a HUGE error and I am supposed to pay you $79 for a corrected framable(yes I am a Saintas fan)version! … The Virginian-Pilot, Toyota and the Chinese drywall manufacturers should go into business together, you all would be very succesful.” Ouch!

To use the editor’s own word — for the poor marketing ploy, not the headline error, “as far as errors go, this was a whopper.”

Opt-in meets experience using QR Codes

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Anyone dabbling in communication tends to stoop at the altar of speed and instant gratification. They seem similar, but they are not. Speed of response or implementation is a critical component for some organizations, some industries.

Speed, in today’s world, is a given. If you’re in customer service and you don’t respond fast to an inquiry, you lose a lead. If you don’t respond to a complaint, you risk turning a small hiccup into a major snafu.

Instant gratification is a different animal. We gloss over what it really involves by regarding it with such clicles about ‘delighting the customer’ etc.

But what I am interested in is a hybrid of speed and instant grat. Especially the ability to deliver targeted information to mobile devices, since we are beginning to use our phones not just as lap-top replacements, but as a means to interact with content related to our professional and personal lives.

Custom QR code I created for Public Radius

That’s why I like the idea of Quick Response Codes – QR Codes. I covered it in a recent column for a magazine (IABC’s Communication World).

If it sounds too geeky, it’s not. Actually it’s more user-friendly than a typical bar code. Unlike a bar code you embed it with information that is linked to content you point it to somewhere on a server or blog. That content could be any digital file, such as a PDF, podcast, video or photo album.

If you like to read the article, here’s a link to a PDF

Updated: The QR code on the left is something I created for my company, Public Radius. Many of these codes can be photographed by a cell phone that seamlessly connects the device to content.  Some of  them require an initial download of an app. Some work without it –like a short code.