Blogging workshop wrap up

April 29, 2009April 29, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

The blogging 101 workshop, at Jobing.com on Monday was quite an experience. As always, I ended up having a great learning experience myself. More on that later.

The topic, Using Blogging and Social Networking to Support Your Job Search, comes with a bunch of disclaimers. At the risk of seeming repetitive, I have to say that a blog will not and should not replace a resume. It may enhance your resume, but better still it gives you a way to rethink how you work on your resume. Or your reputation out there.

A resume, after all is a way to capture your reputation system on a sheet of paper, which is an odd thing to have to do in this day and age. That sheet of paper needs to become a living document, and not something that lives in a folder.

I happen to think that a blog is easier to maintain than a resume. Certainly much easier than a web site. (A few people in the audience had personal web sites. I do, too, and it’s a royal pain to update.) Indeed, a blog requires more care and feeding at the initial stage, but once you set up some good blogging habits, use a few simple tools and tricks, it’s not a huge chore.

Once you compare how limited you are with some of the existing tactics you use to define who you are, and what your potential is, a blog becomes a no-brainer.

: Comparison between different reputation ‘tools’

Big thank you to Pat Elliott for getting me involved with the Scottsdale Job Network.

Too many swine flu experts hyping it up?

April 28, 2009April 28, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

I have seen a flurry of responses to the outbreak of swine flu over the past few days, and have to wonder if our ability to monitor and repeat information often overstates the situation /crisis. Or exploit it.

I can say this with some confidence since:

(a) I work at a the Decision Theater, where we have conducted three pandemic flu exercises –the last of which was in February this year.

(b) We have to caution many people who ask, because everyone’s in reactive mode, not realizing that this is still an outbreak, not an epidemic, and still far from being declared a pandemic.

I suppose we could hype up the situation, and claim to be ‘experts’ in the field, just to get media attention. But we won’t go there. It is not in the public interest to add to the uncertainty.

Down-playing. Sort of. If at all, I have had to tell media who call that guess what, Arizona was recently ranked the most prepared state as far as pandemic plans. I also sat in a meeting where one researcher in this field noted that Mexico has some of the most advanced epidemiologists, and that their health care monitoring system was not to be doubted.

I have seen communicators jump into this space. Some in a good way. But as Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute noted, “too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.”

Here’s a short list of how some in the industry reacted:

On Sunday, while I was monitoring the information on the outbreak (at 10 pm Mountain Time), Gerard Baud pinged me about how his outfit is looking at the crisis, with a short podcast. Unfortunately it was an ad for a tele-seminar that you would have to pay for. I would have preferred if the response, in the public interest, was a free ‘seat’ at the teleconference for at least one person in the organization.

Melcrum today published a short but intelligent piece in the Melcrum Hub about an effective crisis communications plan. One of the points they raised seemed so pertinent to the present situation: Stick to the known facts. It’s so easy to go on anecdotal evidence –as in stuff you saw online, repeated by someone who thought she had heard it from a ‘source.’
Ragan Communications also published a good piece on it but unfortunately they too have connencted it to a webinar that will cost you $99.

Happy to note that IABC is making a teleseminar available free. Details here.

Bottom Line. I know times are tough. But people are also getting sick. There are lots of cities, school districts and healthcare systems who have plans but will like to see what else they could do. I don’t think at this time they should pay for learning about better communications to help their local community and their country.

Hey, that’s just me.

Jailbreak, compulsory-volunteering and other verbal baggage

April 27, 2009April 27, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Time once again for a look at words and expressions that creep up on us –or as someone about twenty years younger would say, “creep me out.”

“Did you jailbreak your iPhone?” To a lot of people not involved in a tech world they wonder what the heck you are talking about. Jails and phones don’t go hand in hand unless you tend to read Mossberg or Wired as bedtime stories. What ever happened to the old word “hack?” So much easier to understand. I know, I know, jailbreak speaks to Steve Jobs’ obsession with a locked down phone and the so-called walled gardens such as Facebook. Jailbreak is the semantic enemy of Open Source, I am told. Which brings me to…

Walled Gardens. The phrase has been around but it’s always being brought back. I deliberately said ‘so-called walled garden’ and added the Facebook reference so people understand what this obscure expression is all about. Wikipedia has a decent entry on it, so I won’t go into it. By the way, there’s lot of talk that Facebook is opening the gates to its walled garden, but that idea still needs to be explored –or flushed out?

Flesh-out or Flush-out? As Andrea Goulet, a copywriter whose blog is worth reading, notes that both expressions are used as a handle for brainstorming, but both have a yuck factor.

Edupunk. I have never heard of the word, but it makes perfect sense. It’s a sorrt of rebellion to standardized teaching methods. As Christopher Sessums explains, “Edupunk is … a sociohistorical reaction to an educational system that has allowed textbooks, tests, politicians, and schools of education to supervise teachers and create curricula that takes away educators’ professional responsibilities to build their own.”

Desertification. I heard Secretary Clinton use this in her Greening Diplomacy address. No she did not coin the word (there’s a long Wikipedia entry on it), and a desertification blog by a professor in Belgium.

Compulsory volunteering. Trust the government to come up with an oxymoron like this. The British govt, in this case. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a case for this earlier in the month.

REASON I RAISE THIS: I often talk to people about writing, and people believe writing is very challenging and complicated. It is, if you bring all the baggage of buzz words and industry jargon. The moment you put pencil to paper or open up a Word template, the baggage seems to burst open and the jargon gets strewn all over your pretty page. Just be yourself, and strip out the jargon, and it’s suddenly very easy.

Quotes for the week ending

April 25, 2009April 24, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“I hate Earth Day the same way I hate Christmas and Thanksgiving … Should we only seek peace on Earth and be thankful one day a year?”

Justine Burt, on the ReGeneration blog

“Enough already. The Oprah and Ashton-i-zation of Twitter is good, if you believe, as I know many of you do, that the more universal Twitter becomes…”

Catherine P. Taylor, on how we are all guilty of being on a constant hunt for cool, but it’s all good.

“This abuse of trust, rather than the activity on Facebook, led to the ending of the work contract.”

Nationale Swisse, an employer who fired a woman who was on Facebook, after calling in sick to say she could not be working in front of a computer. The woman was supposedly on Facebook in bed, using her iPhone.

“conversation shouldn’t be a blind ambition with social media, but rather an end that you seek strategically.”

Rohit Bhargava, on why there are many valid business situations where a conversation via social media are not needed.

“Online media’s ‘favorite child status’ … appears to have diminished over the last few months.”

Nielsen’s Global Online Media Landscape report, 2009

“The world has changed. It is no longer round, nor flat. It is Twitter-bird shaped and people are talking about you, your products and services.”

Wayne Kurtzman, in Media Bullseye

Three simple lessons from a visit to Starbucks. Or Four.

April 23, 2009April 22, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Retail spaces can teach you a lot of things. I once interviewed a guy who worked for auto-supplies store in California filling the racks and managing the register. He ended up as president of the company. How? He says he looked beyond the boring details of his college job and saw retailing as a learning ground for all kinds of management ideas.

I was reminded of that at my stop at Starbucks last morning. The shelves and the signage were screaming with marketing messages but the barristas were doing some pretty amazing –if basic– things. Those we take for granted as communicators. So here are the three takeaways:

Know your audience. Not the trite know your audience by name, but know their preferences, to the point of knowing a bit of their personal lives.
Ask a lot of questions –even though you may *know* a lot about the audience, and have a big database of information in your head and on the corporate server. Ask and you will engage…
Engage in a genuine conversation –Go beyond the mundane greetings, and leave brand conversations to the brand folk.

I don’t think managers set a timer to make sure a patron is served within a certain time. If they do, it sure doesn’t show. The lines are long, but unlike the wait in a grocery store checkout, no one seems to get impatient when the customer interacts with the service provider. Which brings me to the fourth point:

4. Reset Expectations: Starbucks seems to set –or reset– people’s expectations when they step inside.

Do you?

Why do carriers still sell locked phones?

April 21, 2009April 20, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Imagine this scenario. You buy a tuxedo online from Kohls for an upcoming event. When it arrives you realize that it still has a security tag you cannot break. You call the store to find a way to remove it and they give you the runaround. Thy say they need to contact manufacturer, Croft and Barrow, to get an unlocked code. Please give them 48-hours until they they hear from the manufacturer, and email you. Meanwhile the event you need to attend comes and goes, but the product you paid for is unusable.

OK, hypothetical situation, but that’s what a locked cell phone represents. A crippled product. Companies such as T-Mobile that sell locked phones are blind to the reality that (a) the device, once paid for does not belong to them or the manufacturer anymore. It should be open by default (b) the world is flat and boundaries have blurred. People should not need customer service intervention to replace a SIM card when roaming.

I had the bad luck to travel to Sri Lanka earlier this month with such a crippled phone — a T-Mobile Dash made by HTC– because I had no time to call to check if it was locked or not. I realized my problem when I tried to swap my SIM card. I got online and found a way to chat with a customer service rep who said it can take up to 48 hours to get the phone unlocked.

I told her they had to be kidding. What kind of unconnected world were they operating in? Two days was a sort of a good turnaround, apparently.

She: When we have to email the manufacture it can take up to 14 days to get a response.

Not good enough, I said.

She: I will inform my supervisor of this issue to see if there is anything that we can do however when we have to e-mail the manufacture we just have to wait for there response as that is out of our hands to get a sooner responses.

Sooner, as in two weeks and counting. I am back in the US. Still no unlocked code. I called twice, checked my email and junk-mail folder. Still no code. That’s why there’s such a thing as text messaging, I tell them –to bypass email.

But the bigger question is not how long it takes to solve a problem, or how to communicate with a customer. The real question is: Why on earth do mobile phone companies sell locked-down smart phones? I can only imagine three reasons:

Forced loyalty. It makes customers feel they have to grovel to get their basic rights.
Easy revenue: Even if 10 percent of customers get trapped in a situation like this and roam, the money to be made is just too good to forfeit.
Clueless. Carriers don’t take trouble to understand just what usage patterns their customers have. They are still trapped into the old marketing mindset of selling ‘packages’ – few sizes fit all. Customers’ social, professional and economic patterns have changed but carriers have never bothered to find out.

It will take legislation for companies this backward to comply with basic customer rights. It will take a lot of disgruntled customers who say bye-bye to them, for the T-Mobiles of this world to wake up.

Hoipolloireport

Angelo Fernando's blog since 2004

Communications