Communications

“Stop treating Facebook like the Yellow Pages”

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Evo Terra was firing rounds of ‘measurement’.

Jason Baer was his usual self –provocative, helpful, and making some terrific observations of where we are heading.

As with last year’s Social Media for Business Conference, (see post here) now better known as SMAZ, this year’s conference had some outstanding panels.

The event kicked off with Sitewire president, Greg Chapman making  statement that was more of less repeated at every session: “I am not a social media expert.”

Followed by a “however…”

So in the company of these non-experts, I learned some amazing things, and confirmed a lot of the approaches I’ve been taking. Here are the ones that I liked:

  • Don’t treat Facebook like the Yellow Pages.
  • Listen first, tweet, post later. Use Social Media as a listening post.
  • Be cognizant of the ‘channel agnostic customer.’
  • Google handles hyphens better than underscores, so be watchful when you write headlines, tags.
  • “Social media is free” is a huge misconception. There’s a human resource cost attached to it. Social media is not a strategy – it is what you embed into your Comms strategy, marketing strategy, PR strategy.
  • Google’s new search engine, Caffeine, will knock your socks off. Even if you’re in flip-flops 🙂
  • Content isn’t king. Optimized content is king!
  • Start with small things. If your boss or client wants to start tweeting, facebooking, start with small goals before the big-hairy-audacious ones
  • There’s a difference between a News Feed and a Life Feed on Facebook.
  • Train others freely. Give away secrets. The rising tide lifts all boats.
  • Differentiate between Goals and Tactics. people mix these up all the time.
  • Just like the way they confuse Strategies and Tactics, I suppose.

SMAZ also turns out to be a great way to connect with the people we only meet virtually here in the Phoenix area (I met many of our readers from ValleyPRBlog), whether no matter where we are on the analog-to-digital scale.

And lest we forget the person behind the curtain who makes this happen, I want to tip my hat to Fred VonGraf.

Maping what’s happening in Haiti

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Interesting how geomapping is taking off, as  interactive maps (and visualization) becomes a huge asset to crisis communications, journalism. You may recall how mapping was used for the Swine flu.

Now people can help map the relief operation in Haiti – at Ushahidi, a crowd-sourcing site I love to support.

It’s got links to video, news, pictures and ‘Todo’ lists. The site pulls together urgent need requests and status updates.

Like this desparate request:

@MelyMello @WFPlogistics so clos 2 airprt, can u help get help? 18°35’36.24″N, 72°16’40.37″W Othopedic clinic,needs narcotics,IV antibiotics,diesel,gas

Campaign to map Haiti

You can get involved via txt, email, hashtag. Details here: http://ow.ly/YsKP

Google pulls power of database + search for Haiti relief

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I find this amazing, how Google’s putting its weight behind the humanitarian effort with a simple Crisis Response page. Three examples:

1.  Google’s Crisis Response – Just two search boxes open up for the name of the person.

2. Disaster Relief Page – It also has a page filled with key disaster relief contact information – links and ways to donate via text messaging.

3. Citizen Tube – This wonderful citizen journalism hub on YouTube is has a great way to monitor reports.

Flickr shows its collaborative power in Haiti disaster

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I talk of Collaboration as one of the 4 legs of social media. Usually I use positive examples such as Spot.Us and a host of other experiments.

But as the horrors of the scale of the disaster in Haiti stream in, through citizen journalists, there’s one site to keep watching: Flickr.

Check this Group Pool, where everyone on the ground with a camera of sorts is helping record the event, sharing their resources. Images such as this one will fill our screens and lives in the next few weeks, thanks to them.

A note of caution: Some of these can be disturbing.

Is there a giant eraser, online?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Silly rhetorical question, this headline.

But I suppose some believe you can actually remove one’s digital trail. I am fascinated by the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine which has as this appropriate logo.

The service received a Cease and Desist letter from Facebook.So now there’s this countdown on its site. What does it claim to offer?

“This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.

Nice try.

Two ways to think of print

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’m never in agreement with those who write the obit for print.

But this week I received two magazines that give us reason to pause, and assess where we are headed.

dddd

The first is an ad, obviously. It appeared in Process magazine. The other is IABC‘s CW Magazine.

Full disclosure. I write a column for CW. In this issue I happen to talk about using quick response codes as a means of extending the conversation…beyond print.

I tend to agree with statements like this: “Actually print is where words go to live” – John Griffin, President of National Geographic‘s magazine group.

Print lives in zones we never imagined. Two examples again:

  • Take Scribd. Publishers such as New York Times and Simon & Schuster are part of this.
  • Then take a look at Living Stories, a Google Labs project involving the New York Times and Washington Post.

Interesting isn’t it?

Crowd-sourcing: we are smarter than me

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

On to the second C I talk about: the wisdom of the crowds concept, and the belief that “the people formerly known as incompetent” can actually make great contributions.

I see this in organizations where everyone may not be a ‘communicator’ but there are many who can be Antennas, Filters or Connectors.

The best examples of crowd sourcing tend to be in journalism. Two great sites come to mind:

  • Oh My News – the earliest citizen journalism site that began in South Korea.
  • Spot.Us – a community-funded news site I came to discover this year and support.

However, in two other very different areas we see it in action:

  • Google used our collective results for influenza related searches and came up with the Google Flu tracker.
  • Starbucks tapped into its customer base with MyStarbiucksIdea

Bottom line: People will contribute their ideas and when they do it is up to someone in the organization to recognize it, map it, use it.

Summing up 2009: 4Cs of Communication

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

It’s been a totally unpredictable year for me, as I am sure it was for you.

While I wanted to say Thank You to my readers, friends and family, former colleagues at ASU, I also wanted to share with all of you the core of what I believe in when it comes to the intersection of traditional and new media.

I call it the Four Cs. I realize there may be five, or seven. But think of these as four lenses through which you could clarify what’s happening to marketing, PR, media and advertising. It was a result of a mixed year.

  • It was an exciting year. I had a front seat in seeing communication change at a once top-down, yet collaborative environment such as Arizona State University (population 68,000 +) as faculty, staff and naysayers shifted gears to experiment with and then embrace social media.
  • It was a tough year. I travelled to Sri Lanka for a final goodbye to my dear sister, and experienced how the real power of community works minus Facebook and Tweetdeck.
  • It was a landmark year, when took the bold –some say much belated– step of hanging out my own shingle with Public Radius.
  • It was a  year of experimentation. I’ve recorded conversations with people in coffee shops, interviewed others via Skype, done a series of ‘Twinterviews,’ and even conducted a video conference for the State Department. While at ASU, I got into podcasting (covered topics such as the outbreak of swine flu), helped organizations and individuals start blogging for a variety of reasons –from job seeking to external communications.

So as we close out on 2009, I plan to condense the four things that I have learned. The starting Monday, I will cover them:

Collaboration. Crowd-sourcing. Content Curation. Community.

I hope they are valuable. Enjoy!

Wifi on board great, but airlines only scratch surface

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Ask anyone who flies often about wireless access on a plane, and you get responses that include words such as ‘spotty.’ ‘expensive,’ and ‘don’t even get me started…’

being someone who has put in a lot of international air miles, I always thought the airline business was one of those last areas to get bitten by the networking virus –social or otherwise. For the past decade we have seen carriers add it (Singapore Airlines did it 6 years ago), take it away, charge exorbitant fees for it, and generally make it difficult. Services such as Gogo Inflight (with a very slim list of partners) did not exactly get us all connected.

But I recently found out that Delta has been quietly rolling out its wi-fi onboard, and it’s got me all fired up. Delta has it on 325 planes –which accounts for “more than 1,200 flights a day”, says its blog.

My interest in wi-fi is more than just being able to connect to the outside world. I am interested in seeing how airlines make it possible for passengers to connect with each other, via a mini –ad-hoc even– social network. I know of someone who’s planning on taking this idea to a whole new level, but by his and other accounts, carriers are still not fired up. (The idea was also floated by Jeff Jarvis a year back, and Rohit Bhargava even before that but airlines are still differentiating around free meals or baggage fees.)

Oddly enough, airlines tend to approach networking with very narrow interests such as making it a branding exercise (getting us to fan them on Facebook), or a throwing it out as a perk (one more thing to pay for). Wi-fi is just one part of the equation.

Trapped in a tube, with limited movement, passengers who are allowed to connect with each other, or at least get to know each other a bit better, would have a direct bearing on brand loyalty, create offline networks, and start interesting conversations.

Think about it: these conversations won’t be limited to casual chit-chat at the gate. Just as how airlines allow us to pick our seat online, or print our boarding pass, they could automatically sign us up with a passenger network that works like LinkedIn, let us pick our business or special interest cluster. We could then contact flight mates prior to boarding, and find people who might be a few pixels away from what we do or plan to accomplish at our destination. Since we share one common element –the city we are flying out of or to- these connections could be valuable and create long-term interests.

Unlike hotels which tend to treat wi-fi as if it were Perrier, airlines can’t afford to miss this one.