Disruptive

Love it when a chart beats a logo

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

GatesWatching last evening’s live webcast by Bill and Melinda Gates, I liked how Bill zipped past Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and the Windows logo, to note that these ‘pictures’ don’t compare to something completely different –a chart showing  decreasing infant mortality rates.

I love it when presentations don’t use graphics as a crutch. (Love it when the first slide is not the darn company logo, as if to remind the brain dead in the audience as to who is presenting! Full disclosure: I have committed this crime myself, and know it sucks!)

Love it when someone stops a canned PowerPoint preso and uses the flip chart instead to draw some crude Venn diagram or stick figure to explain the point. (If you’ve not read The Back of a Napkin, I highly recommend it, as I have done before like a broken record.)

In somewhat ironic news, this month, Gates (who owns Corbis) supposedly ‘expanded his stock photo empire’ with a small stake in Eastman Kodak.

Quotes of the week ending 17 October 09

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

“the largest-ever social change event on the Web…”

CNN, on the third, annual Blog Action Day. The topic this year was climate change. According to Blogpulse, number of posts about climate change on a given day shot up by 500%

“Sometimes I feel like we’re a colony of ants who’ve come across a cell phone…”

Peter Hagoort, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. He was speaking of the way the brain processes thoughts and speech in milliseconds, but scientists still puzzle over how this happens.

“This is punitive. This is not just a matter of, ‘This is for the good of the company or the good of the nation.”

Banking analyst Nancy Bush, on the Treasury Dept, demanding that outgoing Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis returns about $1 million he received so far this year plus his $1.5 million salary for 2009

“iTunes is a pain in the posterior, and I never use it unless I absolutely have to.”

Sallie Goetsch, (she of the Podcast Asylum, a podcast and blog consultancy) in a contribution to For Immediate Release podcast

“Is print dead? No, but it just got a little less tasty.”

Jen Zingsheim, of Custom Scoop, on news that Conde Naste will be shutting down Gourmet Magazine

Quotes for the week ending 10 Oct 2009

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“In the surround-sound media environment of today, there is no shortage of places you can go to see an expert’s view of business and where it is headed. What I took from the first day of the World Business Forum, however, was just how important passion is as a common thread in the people (and their organizations) who are accomplishing something.”

Rohit Bhargava, on the World Business Forum

“While 60% of employees use word processing daily, only 42% actually create documents.”

Forrester Research report on technology adoption in the workplace.

“In a real-time, social media world, marketing has to react immediately to the successes and shortcomings of operations, product development, legal, finance, customer support, and the idiosyncrasies of company personnel.”

Jason Baer, on how social media gives everything a marketing focus.

“A turtle travels only when it sticks its neck out.”

Tweet by @lspearmanii

“Hi! This is your aspirin bottle calling. I haven’t seen you in a while…”

Peter Svensson, of the Associated Press, on the technology that connects the pill bottle cap to an AT&T network.

“Does our Cicero even glance at his speeches before reading them in public?”

George Will, conservative columnist for the washington Post, on Obama’s overuse of words and concepts in his speech at Copenhagen.

“Nice headlamps”

Headline of a billboard ad for a Northern Ireland used-car web site, that got the advertisement banned in the UK. The accompanying visual was not about cars…

Quotes for the week, ending 25 Sept 2009

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

“Lots of traffic, lots of talking, lots of everything. But listening to each other…”

Title card in YouTube video aimed at the leaders attending the UN General Assembly in New York this week. The video-as-open letter was by RelaxZen, a mood-altering drink –that was shipped to every world leader.

“We’ve also re-engaged the United Nations. We have paid our bills….”

Barack Obama, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, on the commitment of the US to change.

“You are only as relevant as their problem, and your pitch has to be empathetic of their situation.”

Nathan Wagner, Relevant Chews,on selling

“But of course we’re meeting all the time. We’re both involved in all the main meetings and talk all the time.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, responding to claim that Number 10 was snubbed by the White House, with regard to a personal meeting between the two heads of state.

“LookingGlass automatically rates each posting as positive or negative, so the Zune HD team could rank comments according to sentiment and see how customers are responding to the product and the campaign to sell it.”

Microsoft statement about its new image management tool that lets companies monitor, analyze and engage in social media, via its Silverlight technology

“These Squidoo lenses are for sale.”

Ike Pigott, at Media Bullseye, on Seth Godin’s rebranding Squidoo as a social engine that aggregates online chatter about a brand or company.  Pigott also calls this a sinister act of piracy! Squidoo already has “900,000 hand built lenses.”

“Chiggy-Wiggy.”

Soundtrack from the Bollywood movie, Blue, featuring Kylie Minogue and Oscar-winning composer, A.R. Rahman –he of of Slumdog Millionaire.

Quotes for the week ending 19 Sept, 2009

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“We sound like a support group for superheroes. ‘By day I do this, by night…'”

Joe Michels, on the Phoenix iPhone Developer Group, or Pi.

“The more times he is required to write “I will not call the president a liar” on a special blackboard set up in the well of the White House, the bigger hero he will become to a large chunk of the population.”

Michael Kinsley, on the Joe Wilson umbrage against Obama.

“Hello, Kevin Rudd. We are Anonymous. We have been watching you.”

Hackers who sent an anonymous message via a video and a manifesto (on this web site), to Australian Prime Minister.

“Google economist sees good signs in searches.”

Washington Post article on how search is predicting an economic recovery.

“From a technical perspective, the recession is very likely over at this point.”

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman

“My answer is not the answer, it is an answer. If you have a better or different answer, put it in the comments.”

Josh Bernoff, on a post that responds to social netiquette questions he receives.

Your new digital address? It could be Zooloo!

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

My first impression on checking out Zooloo was that it could fall into the category of YAWN — yet another whizzbang network. Would people have time for one more social entanglement?

Mural2I sprung the question to Zooloo’s CEO  Jeff Herzog who was inexplicably swinging a golf club when I visited the the offices. In the age of smart pointing devices and tons of content, a club as an over-sized pointing device might be a good idea –in case I completely missed the point 🙂

“Social is just one component,” he said, quickly focusing on the big differentiation: the fact that you could register, build and customize your digital footprint in a snap. ” Zooloo is a dashboard that brings together your digital and social life.”

In other words, a way to rein in internet clutter.

Like you, I am very suspicious of shiny new objects, and anything that promises to be game-changing, despite Herzog’s reputation for having created iCrossing. (Full disclosure here: I worked very briefly for iCrossing.) The mural on the wall (above), and toys strewn on the floor give you a sense that this is not your typical tech firm.

On the other hand, I work in an organization that uses a visualization space as a digital dashboard –a very large dashboard— so I know its potential in a data-rich world. But could a ‘dashboard for your digital life’ have enough takers?

For instance: How would a personalized social network be relevant to those people who did not spend their entire lives on the Net, I asked.

Long pause.  “Who are they?” he asked.

We laughed.

I was thinking of teachers, and hair-dressers, and the mechanic at my car dealership, a coffee shop owner… I ask them all the time, and they think all this tweeting, and blogging is a waste of time.

“Even for someone who spends just one-third of his or her life online, a dashboard like this would make that one-third of time spent online very productive,” Herzog shot back. It is “just 15 percent of the experience.” What’s connected to it, what surrounds that dashboard, is what differentiates it.” Hard to disagree with that. Still, Zooloo as a pretty neat concept. If not exactly novel (with such tools as Page Flakes, and apps like Eventbox) it fills a huge need. If one of the four benefits work, we could be talking of Zooloo the way we once talked about other brands with double O’s in their name:

  • One digital address. It will be the home of your personal brand, and where you can be contacted — “your next cell phone number,” as Zoolooites call it.
  • Time management: Why spend all that time opening up Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo, Flickr and Gmail, when you can access and update all of them in one place?
  • Privacy filter: We struggle with whom we can share what. Grandma doesn’t need to see what we uploaded to SlideShare. My directors don’t need to see my vacation photos. One dashboard with many filters can take away this headache. My LinkedIn buddies don’t need to see my Google docs…
  • A kind of lifehack: Simplifying everything we will add on to our already cluttered lives –blogging, shopping, file storage, email, news etc

I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t let me embed WordPress. The default blogging app was clumsy, to say the least. MAybe we are spoiled with the streamlined WordPress and Typepad interfaces. In the next few weeks I will check  it out a bit more, here. I’ll keep you posted.

Kill the leave behind for the long tail?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I had a very stimulating conversation with an editor today and we talked about the motivation to take everything that’s ink on paper to an online platform.

So the question I had was, do those who salivate after the long tail value of content (be assured I am a champion of this) really think that the printed product will lose its audience?

After all, as the popular argument goes, why would anyone pick up a magazine or a paper, when they could read the same content on a mobile device or on a laptop? 

My short answer to that: “experience.”

Anyone could duplicate the story, or even enhance it, for an online audience. But it’s no substitute for the print experience. Content that can be folded, torn, highlighted, photo-copied, taped to a wall, or slipped into a folder can never be substituted. Even on a digital reader.

Then there is our appetite for short-form and long-form journalism. Our brains are wired to shuffle between short content and in-depth stories; our eyes are trained to scan headlines, sidebars and  info-graphics; our bodies trigger automatic responses to seeing large bold headlines of shocking news (like this and this).

To those who say, “yes, but newspapers are filled with yesterday’s news,” my response is that sometimes, the story the day after, put together by thoughtful editors, is what we really want. Could we forget the front pages of thistory –on 09/12?

  • When that United Airlines flight splash-landed in the Hudson, were you content having followed the tweets in real time? Or did you crack open the paper the next day to see how the ‘miracle’ unfolded?
  • As of this morning, the wires and other online media updated us on the passing of Ted Kennedy -a story that all ink-on-paper publications missed for obvious reasons. Would you skip the “old news” in tomorrow’s papers, or will you dive into those broad contextual pieces, timelines, photos, eulogies?

As I told my friend, the problem we are facing is people buying into idea (urban legend?) about people’s reading habits , and partly in the fancy notion that the opposite of the (printed) leave-behind is the (digital) long-tail.

I should be the last person to say this, but digital is not a great replacement for all communication. Some times it is a really bad choice; cutting back on newspapers will be a self-fulling prophecy feeding the idea rather than responding to the notion that “no one really reads!”

Quotes for the week, ending 22 August, 09

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“Welcome to the hunt!”

WIRED’s electronic manhunt, a game to find a Evan Ratliff. Anyone who comes up with a clue will get a free subscription of the magazine.

“The PR blogosphere is beating a dead horse – nonetheless, it’s a horse tied to a rocket.”

Dan Wool, Co-editor of ValleyPRBlog, on social media hype and how strange it is that after 5-6 years of it being mainstream, we’re still screaming that the sky is falling.

“As the TV networks and hundreds of other businesses realized, computers could be used to impress people. A poll prediction looked much more accurate on computer print-out paper than in human handwriting.”

Cory Doctorov, on the earliest use of a ‘computer’ to predict election results, in the fifties sixties

“This isn’t an announcement of my disappearance.”

Larry Lessig, saying he is taking a sabbatical form blogging

“Tap into the expertise of your organization, and create a ‘content stew”

Pam Slim, at Social Media Az conference in Tempe, Arizona


Social media for business conf. brings out heavyweights

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Al Maag, Chief communications officer at Avnet opens the Social Media AZ conference with a keynote that has everyone’s head nodding.

He talks of how he brought a technology company to consider using .social media to communicate, by asking the wrong questions, but being persistent in asking the right people. Turns out it was an integral part of Avnet’s brand strategy. His main approach to the C-Suite : He told then, look, “the train has left the station,” and we are going this route, because guess what, the competition is going to be on this train, anyway.

Some highlights of his presentation:

  • The Avnet’s Facebook program began in Europe. It’s Avnet’s way of sharing knowledge and enhancing talent.
  • The Avnet blog was not even claled a blog when they began
  • If you don’t have guts and self-esteem, don’t be in this job. (“I’ve been called Tweeterdumb” and “blog boy”)
  • Lose the battles …win the war
  • Just bring in a consultant. (Shel Holtz plug here)
  • LinkedIn is the new Rolodex, videos are vital, Twitter is not for everyone

AvnetonDemand.com was created with no budget

Al Maag’s blog is primarily to communicate with the media; he talks of things such as Woodstock (guitars) and

The line up of speakers is like a who’s who in new media, PR, interactive.

Mike Corak and Chis Sietsem on crafting a social media plan were good. Some of this is what we know, but it reassures me to see others think this way. Especially that Measurement, that much maligned word, is not just about traffic but measuring (knowing) engagement, sentiment..

Next session Elizabeth Hannan, says welcome to the hot room (a passing reference to the air conditioning here). It’s all about building community.