Communications

Quotes for the week ending 27 Dec, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“I’d made sure I’d bought plastic handcuffs and a plastic whistle but I hadn’t realised that the costume had a metal ban.”

A clown, David Vaughan who was made to strip down to his underwear when passing through a security checkpoint in the Birmingham airport in the UK.

“So, although it’s true we need a president who can juggle several issues at once, we don’t need a president who falls prey to “continuous partial attention.”

Eric Weiner, author, in a column (memo) asking Barack Obama to kick the Blackberry habit.

“Vatican embraces iTunes prayer book.”

AP story on how the Vatican (which has a ‘Pontifical Council for Social Communications’) is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes app. Better still the application was created by an Italian priest.

“Only a tiny, tiny number of individuals could even theoretically ‘twitter for a living’ — just as almost no one successfully blogs for a living.”

Sam Lessin, CEO of Dropio, in Advertising Age, in a column about how advertisers could turn Twitter into an ad network.

“being in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

John Holden, the man tipped to be Obasmas’s science adviser, on how the US is currently addressing environmental issues.

“So, why exactly are you planning on the future being just like it is now, but with better uniforms?”

Seth Godin, on why predicting the future is futile, and why readiness is the only sensible strategy

Data becomes art: what a virus and a microblogger look like

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They steal your passwords, hide under the folds of your browser, and turn off your virus protection software.

Alex Dragulescu turned these deadly computer virus into visual models that look like works of art.

We work with huge amounts of data at the Decision Theater, and often over-simplify what we refer to as a ‘visualization’ — a JPG, a PowerPoint, a map are, after all, visualizations. But data can be rendered as a city, a strand of DNA, a mathematical model…a Twitter user’s digital profile? That’s an eye-opener for me.

Take this, from Alex Dragulescu. It’s a look at what Twitter users do when they micro-blog, creating a data profile as it were. As Alex puts it:

“we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create a portrait of the author.”

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

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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.

Quotes for the week ending 20 December, 2008

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“I’m not a journalist. But I am a publisher. I am a reporter. I am a media maker.”

Chris Brogan, in  a post explaining his ‘sponsored post’ for K-Mart

“For gaseous and predictable arguments ripped from the most recent front-page news stories and not much else, the Times is champion.”

Doug Maceachern, columnist for The Arizona Republic, firing back at the New York Times for an editorial dissing Arizona over governor governance after Janet napolitano leaves for a White House post.

“WAAAY too much “yay, all social media is good” group-think going on right now.”

Jason Baer, commenting on IABC Chair, Barbara Gibson’s post about  Chris Brogan’s experiment with a sposored post for K-Mart.

“the defendants in the case could be validly served by the plaintiff sending a message by computer to the Facebook page.”

Story of a ruling by an Australian court that a judgment could be ‘served’ to Facebook.

“It’s a big, fragmented mess.”

Steve Woodruff, founder of Impractivi, commenting on socvial media, in an interviw with CB Whittermore.

“That approach doesn’t work at a cocktail party, or at a funeral or in a social network.”

Seth Godin, on why traditional advertising doesn’t work, and why big companies are are asking the wrong questions in social media.

“The Lunesta moth. A potent symbol, but not a lot of depth.”

Alfred O’Neill, on why Pharma advertising is a square peg in a round hole.

“Eventually, given enough years in the biz, you know who will melt like a snowball in a rainstorm uphill on a Sunday in Jun…”

John Biggs, responding to a nasty email from a PR firm because TechCrunch called out the PR spam they were getting. The owner of the firm called them “nasty people” that will “melt away faster than a snowball going up hill in the rain.”

“Poor WSJ and NY Times—left 45 people voice mails. I am going to be so outed by those publications.”

Lois Whittman, the owner of the PR firm, inducted into TechCrunch’s hall of shame, above.

“If you come across any young PR professionals who have “McMurry” on their resume, you’d be lucky to have them on your team.”

Jessica Hansen, a Phoenix PP professional, responding to a reader comment on my post in ValleyPRBlog about TechCrunch’s fatwa against PR people.

Bernoff: Corporate blogs need to earn trust

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Josh Bernoff’s commentary around recent study by Forrester Research on the low trust of corporate blogs is very timely. At least for me. I contribute to a few other blogs outside of this one, and have just stared a corporate blog for the Decision Theater.

I instinctively shunned the style of a blog that deals with just my work place. Granted, it’s quite an unusual place, with a whole bunch of 3D visualization, technology bragging rights and is also the ‘front door’ to Arizona State University. But people come to walk through our doors for solutions, not brochure-speak, and I like to tell them that the “about us” part of the 5-screen presentation is really about our clients, and the big issues out there in decision-making.

Bernoff’s point is that a corporate blog shouldn’t come across as corporate stuff forced through a blog platform. In fact it should not be a 100 percent about the organization.

I couldn’t agree more.

  • I trust Dell and subscribe to their blogs like Digital Nomads not because of what ‘the company says about its products, but because of  the conversations they allow to take place around the Nomads idea.
  • I often click on a company’s blog before even read their press release, so why would I read a blog that is written like an extended press release?
  • The ‘platform’ doesn’t earn respect in an of itself. It’s the human voice. Reid Walker writes a blog about ‘WorldSourcing’ that happens to be a blog for Lenovo. He’s the VP of global communications, but writes about books, outsourcing, innovation… not about Lenovo ads or PR.

Where’s that 3D Web we were promised?

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Whatever happened to all the business infatuation with the 3D Web?  Until a little over a year ago, when Second Life was all the rage, it seemed like we would one day interact with each other as avatars, on a 3D Web and two-dimensional interaction would be history. Young people would check into Habbo Hotel,  and business folks would mouse over to IBM, PR types would exchange virtual business cards on Reuters’ island, car buyers flock to Pontiac island, and those needing a technology fix would fly over to Circuit City.

It’s not entirely over with SL. Accenture is still recruiting  at their virtual career center there. But lately the bloom is off the rose, and instead of spending time over sculpted prims and private islands, people are getting into more pragmatic modes of interactivity. Reuters (!) reports that the Second Life Community Convention (in real life, mind you)  in Florida last September, only drew half the number of attendees that came in 2007.

Flash has grown up to a point that we could give users a simple 3D experience like this without crashing their computers. An interactive game or animation with data input could hop across a number of platforms. Even create realistic simulation and movement like this.

We don’t live in one dimensional worlds, and some form of 3D will be part of our online experience. But I was at a tech meetup yesterday and one of the takeaways from that was, despite all the ra ra about web 3.o being upon us, we all seemed to agree with Aaron Post that those sites that will be valuable will be those that have an offline component.

Offline, as in Real Life. As in the original 3D, interactive experience!

I say this, even though a lot of impressive work we do and showcase here at the Decision Theater is in 3D!

Bubble comment lets reader talk back. Scary! Fun!

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Have you heard of Bubble Comment? It sounded pretty cheesy at first until I clicked on a link someone had left on this article in Advertising Age.

Some background: Ken Wheaton, who writes a fabulous Adverting Age column, AdAges, wrote a piece poking fun of the whole Web 2.0 thing. Granted Wheaton was merely being funny, (“Web 2.0 Cured My Cancer and Made Me Taller — and Rich!”) but some didn’t get the joke. He also raised a lot of hackles by ending with some hard facts woven into the parody:

“You naysayers can laugh all you want. You’re just troglodytes caught up in old-word illusions like “ROI” and “profit” and “sales.” You probably scoffed at pioneering technologies such as Betamax, CueCat and Friendster, too, didn’t you? You talk trash about Web 2.0 and we’ll use the power of social media to bankrupt you just like we did Pepsi and Motrin”

So the responses have been a mix of furious and this-guy- is-surely-nuts. But the whole point of this is to highlight what one commenter did, rather than said.

Turn up your speaker volume, click on this link, wait a few seconds and you’ll see. I won’t give it away, except say that it takes speech bubbles to a dare-I-say 2.0 dimension.

Carbon Credits as an impulse buy

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So you’re quietly sipping your gin and tonic before dinner is served, and the inflight crew comes by rolling the duty free cart with overpriced items.

You tend to ignore these as silly impulse purchases until… you hear the two key words: “carbon credits.”

This purchase is not for your significant other for whom you forgot to get a gift , but for your significant ego. If you fly, you’ll be happy to know that you’re one of those contributing to 8 million tonnes of CO2 a year.  So, for much less than a Rolex (about $50 dollars) you could buy yourself a carbon offset to make up for the carbon your Sydney-London flight dumps on the planet. Visa o Amex? Would you like a receipt printed on the remains of a rain forest with that?

Where? On Virgin Atlantic.

Of course this carbon offset marketing plan has some unflattering background. Airlines like Virgin Atlantic have been lobbying hard to stop an aviation environmental tax! So instead of passing on the tax you, and having to call it a carbon tax (hey, you already pay a hefty airport tax) calling it a ‘credit’ has a better ring to it.

Kaching!

Are we unready for the mobile interface?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Someday the phone in your pocket will be less and less of a talking instrument, and more and more of a remote, a news conduit, a personal carbon footprint calculator, a gaming device, a…

You get the point.

But the fact is, many of our organizations are lagging in making much of our communication:

(a) Platform agnostic –a fancy way of saying it should be accessible on a Mac, PC, Windows Media device, Blackberry or iPhone

(b) Interactive –letting our visitors and audiences do something with the information, such as tagging, annotating, commenting, forwarding etc

(c) Portable –moving an applet from a web to a phone for instance.

I brought this up at a meeting recently where the topic of social networks came up. I am not a huge fan of creating one more cooler-than-yours social network, because we are all dealing with social network fatigue and it will only get worse. Making content portable to me is one way to solve it.

If we’re all going to gravitate toward “cloud computing” the mobile device might be the cloud’s best friend.

To get back to the ‘other’ functions of our mobile device, I just met with my good friend and marketing thinker, Steve England, who showed me some mind-blowing mobile applications. Granted, his phone is smarter than mine –I caught him ‘following’ Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki in a coffee shop! Steve’s working with a company that can print a bar code (like the one on the left) that could be scanned with any camera phone.

From an end-user perspective, these bar-codes are not only for consumer products but can act as visual cues that lead a person (like breadcrumbs?) from offline to online seamlessly, bypassing logins, account verification etc.

From a Communicator’s or Marcom manager’s perspective, these codes/icons could be even used on a touch-screen to deploy timely information to a niche opt-in group. On a wider scale, it’s being touted for emergency –and even ‘minor emergency’ alerts .

Right now, it’s probably a challenge for you to even read a PDF I send you on a phone, right? Coming soon, I may be able to reach you, even if you’ve accidentally left your phone at home, via a digital panel on a bus.

Now that would be  truly ‘mobile!’