Best Practices

Starbucks-meets-Obama-meets-Digg: crowdsourcing democracy

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

The president elect is taking a leaf off the social media marketing book to gather ideas from citizens.

Starbucks‘ MyStarbucksIdea has been around for several months, basically asking people to “Help shape the future of Starbucks.”

Now the Obama people have launched the Citizen’s Briefing Book –part of Change.gov. To contribute to the ‘book’ that will be printed using the best ideas and given to Obama, you have to sign in with your full name, email address and zip code.

People are sending up their ideas in droves. More than 9,500 on the Economy, and about half that on Energy and Environment, and a little less than that on Education. Ideas could be voted up or down, like Digg. Gives you –him– and the country a sense of the hot-button issues.

This kind of governance will radically change opinion polls, focus groups and political consultancy forever. And it’s only just begun

You’re never too old to use social media

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

At the IABC conference last year we heard Bill Marriott opine on the value of a blog, and how he does it. I called it a ‘cool way to tell stories.’

But I have to say that the storytelling function of the blog only scratches the surface of the value of  social media. What’s happening is not just the communicating but the connecting.

“Who says the Internet is only for young people?” That’s the provocative statement made by the Red Cross.

“At age 126, the American Red Cross loves the Internet … is becoming a leader in adopting social media.”

It’s using Twitter to get information out fast, such as publishing links to a shelter or evacuation area during a fire or storm. People need to connect to organizations like the Red Cross because that’s often the first –if not only- way to get important information at that time.

Just last month we saw how PSNH (Public Service of New Hampshire) turned to multiple new media channels from Twitter and Flickr to YouTube to keep in touch with its customers.

And how old is PSNH? It was born a year before the first transatlantic telephone call  was made between New York and London! So don’t let anyone in your organization tell you you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

David Pogue’s “imagine” on the mark, breaks the rules

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

This video by David Pogue on mobile technology is entertaining and thought provoking. So good it makes Jimmy Kimmel look like a high school skit.

It is a nice complement to that other lame version (for the XO laptop) by none other than the deceased Lennon.

“Imagine there’s no Apple, no products beginning with i…”

You may say it’s a nightmare, with Google, Mac and Dell

You might have real conversations, but the world would be… dull as hell!”

What was fun for me is that he demos Callwave, Google mobile text search, T-mobile, Pandora etc which I am huge fan of. The last bits are scintillating, especially the My Way parody for the iPhone. Pogue has other skits. Like this one on Voice Mail, to the tune of Sound of Silence.

Which makes me think that Pogue occupies a different kind of slot, even though he is nominally a technology critic for the New York Times. He often pokes a sharp stick at the trend or the tool he is reviewing, such as questioning (mostly in jest) the ‘psychosexual terminology of computing,’ and the tech impact on business and jobs. As in suggesting Bill Gate’s sings:

“I just called to say I bought you, I just called to say you’re unemployed,

I just called to say I own you, And to tell you that we’re truly overjoyed. . . . “

And again, his insight (a riff, really on Moore’s Law) with:

Pogue’s Law: any extra speed introduced by faster chips is soon offset by increasingly bloated software.

If only all technology columnists could be as eloquent.

Job hunting? Thead the social needle

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Chris Brogan published an eBook for those who might be wondering how to use social media to find work. It’s a quick read –19 pages — about threading the social needle, and being human and genuine about it.

Find it here.

Research backup: His guide comes at a time when there has been a noticeable shift in how recruiters use social networking sites –a 17 percent increase since 2006, according to SHRM. Interestingly, the top reason (69 percent) was “to recruit passive applicants who might not otherwise apply.”

Meaning, recruiters find you before you notice the job opening. Isn’t that much of social media has proved to be –an amazing on-demand tactic ? But the trick is, to be very pro-active first about social media, not passive!

Student Support: Finally, if you’re a student, or know a student in this difficult job market, check NUResume. It’s packed with helpful ideas, and tools. Also job openings.

2008 in Retrospect: The Good, The Bad, and The Absolutely Hilarious!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

We said goodbye to some extraordinary people this year.


PR disasters and signs of the times

  • Bill O’Reilley’s studio performance over a teleprompter
  • Scott McClellan‘s unconvincing tell-all book on his White House years.
  • New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer busted in prostitution scandal
  • Alaska Senator Ted Stevens found guilty of ethics violations
  • Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich charged with corruption
  • Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona launches immigration busts.
  • Sarah Palin ‘pranked’ by two Canadian radio DJs, into believing she was speaking to French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
  • The Big Three car makers, GM, Ford and Chrysler, arrived in DC to ask for a bailout in their corporate jets. They were sent back and returned, driving hybrid vehicles. One even car-pooled. Honest!
  • The Guardian in London, declares Gillette ad featuring (Roger) Federer, (Tiger) Woods and (Thierry) Henry the worst ad in 2008.

Milestones:

  • The 15th birthday of Hypertext – Tim Berners-Lee
  • Barack Obama elected the 44th president of the U.S.
  • The iPhone cuts its price, and adds a new model
  • The New Yorker‘s controversial cover on the Obamas
  • The 2008 Olympics in China
  • Dipnote celebrates one year as a blog
  • Blackberry introduces Storm, the answer to the iPhone
  • ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Comm celebrates 25 years
  • Saturday Night Live‘s YouTube skit on Sarah Palin
  • Arizona governor, Janet Napolitano, picked to be new Sec. of Homeland Security
  • Christian Science Monitor – shifts from daily to Weekly
  • bizAZ Magazine folds due to downturn in economy
  • The horrible Mumbai terrorist attacks, which now have a Wikipedia entry

2008: When the definition of PR was revised

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

2008 brought some sweeping changes to marketing, journalism and PR.

But as PR got tight with marketing, technology and media, the old, timeworn, definitions had to be reworked, as the practice of PR changed. I found a thought provoking definition by Parry Headrick of Shift Communications) who called PR still about fishing, but:

“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.”

The use of word ‘channels’ is not accidental. The angling metaphor brings up interesting analogies.

Key issues were the blocking of PR Spam, and the assault on the ’embargo‘ that closed out the year.

Aerotropolis, Sustainability and the mixed lexicon in 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Looking back, it’s been a momentous year for me. Fresh into the first week in ’08, I took up an amazing job at the Decision Theater.

In 2008, the words that made an impact, in no particular order have been:

  • ‘CleanTech‘ is very exciting and relevant to my job, my family, my community. I don’t have to be a technology writer to want to explore it further.
  • Sustainability, which once seemed like a big word for making responsible decisions about forests and oceans, is now a lens through which we look at entire economic, social and business systems.
  • The obscure instrument called a ‘mortgage backed security‘ could unhinge our economy, including the free-fall of house prices in Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, England, the price of a gallon of gas, and a ‘cheap’ tree ornament made in China.
  • An ‘aerotropolis‘ which is a compressed urban environment around a commercial airport could revitalize community life.
  • The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig‘ became a silly diversion in the run up to the elections, but also stuck out as how quickly, an unplanned cosmetic element of a campaign could generate buzz.
  • The word ‘Outlier‘ which has been cropping up, has a mathematical connotation. As in: ‘numerically distant from the rest of the data.’
  • Android, the mobile operating system from Google, could be the OS we all gravitate to.
  • Meatball Sundae –a book by Seth Godin that was actually published in Dec ’07 – is the notion that applying new marketing on top of traditional products can have a gross results.

A new ‘out of office’ message. Harsh, but necessary

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Like many of you, I’m taking a few days off  always wondered what it might do if we were really honest in what we wrote in our Out Of Office message.

Such as:

“Hi! I am outa here. No email, no forwards to my Blackberry. (Ha! I don’t even use a BB!) If you really have to get a response, sorry but that’ll have to wait. I wouldn’t bother you when you are having surgery or on your honeymoon, so I won’t pretend that I would ‘get back to you shortly’ –that would be pure BS.”

Would that offend anyone?

So, this approach by Danah Boyd made me want to applaud.

“For those who are unaware of my approach to vacation … As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation … You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don’t worry… if you forget, you’ll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off, respect danah’s deeply needed vacation time, and try again after January 19.”

For all our transparency talk, we still ‘craft’ a lot of nonsense when it comes to our corporate communication channels. Voice mail out-of-office messages are no different. I’m going to experiment with mine in a few days, so if anyone has recommendations, love to hear.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington’s fatwa on PR

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better rein in your PR spammers I’m telling you why…

TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington has launched a missive a la Chris Anderson, saying PR firms are out of control. Specifically, it’s the PR people for the tech industry that have raised his ire. Now, he’s mad as hell and … will be putting a lump of coal in your stocking.

But it’s not just about PR spam, it’s about the abuse of the embargo. TechCrunch is now launching a sort of a fatwa against the embargo. See Death to the embargo.

“We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.”

Arrington also warns that his blacklist is coming. Is this drastic, or has this been coming?

Cross-posted to ValleyPRBlog. Join the discussion there!

Chris Brogan’s experiment: get over it!

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I had intended to say that Chris Brogan’s K-mart post was a storm in a teacup, until I saw Chris’ post on Saturday. (If you missed it, it’s K-Mart’s use of six bloggers to create some buzz about shopping for Christmas.) It’s more like a tornado in a branded shot glass.

It boils down to whether pay-per-post ought to be shunned by bloggers, and the larger, eternal question: “Are bloggers journalists?”

My initial thoughts were these:

  • People are so uncomfortable/unsure about social media that they think there’s one formula that everyone has to follow, and whoever breaks the formula is either crazy, desperate, or damn clever.
  • Money is a touchy subject when it comes to blogs -until people place ads in their navigation bar.

I didn’t think this was such a sell out, or that Chris had tiptoed to the ‘slippery slope’ as many have suggested. I have to laugh out loud when people talk about editorial integrity in the traditional media and that firewall between advertising and editorial.

Having bought media in the old and new media worlds, I know how this works, or doesn’t. You can not pay for editorial outright, most of the time. But you could be put into a sponsor bucket, and be ‘promised’ some coverage. Chris cut through those euphemisms, and said quite clearly what his purpose was.  Here’s why I like what he did:

  • He challenged the old way of thinking, and the old ‘rules’ that people imagine exist.
  • He stuck to the ‘markets are conversations’ idea, even before he cited Cluetrain Manifesto.
  • He was transparent. Bloody transparent. To the point of scanning his register receipt.

As Jeremiah Owyang noted in an earlier tweet:

“Expect more brands to ‘buy’ bloggers and tweeters as the economy dips, this truly is cost effective marketing.”

Some will be uncomfortable with this, but as old media explores a new model to retain readers and viewers –and sponsors– we need to become more open to experimentation.