The revolution will be censored (and blogged!)

January 29, 2011January 28, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Unlike when utilities are down, life doesn’t appear to go quiet when the Internet is down. Or cut off.

While on-ramps to social media sites are blocked, as we see in Egypt this week, something else gets to work. Call it the Internet effect. The connected world has learned to find its way around broken nodes, to bypass toll-gates, and evade any form of censorship — soft or otherwise.

This is what happened in Egypt on Thursday.

Foreigns journalists were being attacked and arrested, including two AP journalists and a Guardian reporter who were beaten up. (Listen to the Guardian’s Jack Shenker’s recording of this.) He was released and was able to blog about it:

“Along with nearby protesters I fled back down the street before stopping at what appeared to be a safe distance. A few ordinarily dressed young men were running in my direction, and I assumed they were demonstrators also escaping the oncoming security troops. Two came towards me and suddenly threw out punches, sending me to the ground. I was then hauled back up by the scruff of the neck and dragged towards the advancing police lines… All attempts I made to tell them in Arabic and English that I was an international journalist were met with more punches and slaps;”

Other voices are getting out, too, despite the bans and threats. The next few days will certainly reveal if such attempts can contain the uprising, or backfire.

While Washington wrestles with the right response, other countries (and not just those countries in the region) are obviously watching this live-action drama closely. “Authoritarian governments” observed Clay Shirky, “stifle communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight.” But any attempts to promote social media as the tools for regime change are wrong, he warns. This is not what the Twittering masses want to believe.

Promoting access to media and social media as a basic human right is complicated from a foreign policy perspective. Consider what Wikileaks has just done!

But the lesson is clear. The world is quite a different place now, with amplified communication and greater means of collaboration.

Will game mechanics be the new marketing?

January 25, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

What is marketing, if it is not a total experience –between buyer and seller, service provider and end-user? When I hear someone dismissively saying that marketing is a game, it often means one of three things:

Marketing companies have ‘fixed’ the system in a way that you have to abide by their rules. In other words, you are some sort of a victim
Marketing is a pretend activity where they make it seem that you get some value, and you pretend that you love the brand. The transaction is not exactly mutually respectful
Marketing is a product of a bigger manufacturing and industrial gaming complex. One has to hack the game in order to gain an upper hand. As in jail-breaking an iPhone, being persistent about getting your rebates etc.

You probably have a few more variations of this.

But when I like to think of marketing as a game, I like to think of it in a good sense. Market situations are very fluid. Demand and supply, customer loyalty and brand choices are a product of many other dynamic situations -climate, timeliness, scarcity, local needs etc.

In this situation, game mechanics in marketing might be a clue to the future of marketing, now that games are being seen as not just a down-time experience. Game Zicherman, writing for Mashable pointed to five trends in game mechanics, where he predicts health –“Gamified health” –could incorporate more ‘fun’ elements, with apps that tie in to achievement levels.

Games could be also considered scenarios, and do not need to be called, or look like games. I just had a conversation with someone who’s using scenario-based experiences in financial planning. We talked about systems thinking, and how marketing could become a collaborative discussion with dynamic scenarios built-in. Similar approaches — scenario-based methods in law enforcement, for instance -have been attempted.

“In scenario-based learning, the situation is always dynamic. The officer is interacting with live role-players, who react to what the officer says and does. That is why scenarios are such an excellent training tool.”

But with the advent of games such as FourSquare and Gowalla, and the increasing role of a smart phone as a market navigation tool, marketing will surely begin to embed game mechanics this year. In 2010, Gartner noted that games were the No. 1 application, identifying mobile shopping, social networking, and productivity tools as big growth areas.

Maybe your next marketing effort will incorporate systems thinking, where your customers will be able to say that marketing is a game in which the odds are not stacked up against them.

Refresh Colombo sets stage for startups

January 16, 2011January 17, 2011 / Indu Nanayakkara / Leave a comment

Guest post by – Indulekha Nanayakkara

Calling all thought leaders!

Refresh Colombo may be one of the (if not the) fastest growing web/tech communities in Colombo that has a promising future to probably turn Colombo into a Silicon Valley in the next decade or so to come.

The community meets up once a month and share their expertise among the members. And all of this is done free of charge.

Refresh Colombo Intro from Hamid Afzal on Vimeo.

So how did it all start? When Samir and Sukanti Husain attended a TEDx event in Miami, back in early 2010, the two imagined making their motherland, Sri Lanka, the next Silicon Valley after listening to an inspiring speech by Alex de Carvalho – the founder of Refresh Miami, about his own dream for Miami.

Following Samir’s next trip to Colombo in June last year, Refresh Colombo was born. This was a result of the dedication of three amazing individuals – Nazly , Aloka and Milad along with a small but enthusiastic group of volunteers. The first Refresh Colombo meetup was held at the Chamber of Commerce in Colombo in July.

Although I missed the very first meetup by a matter of days I attended the second Refresh Colombo meetup in August, out of sheer curiosity. I was so taken up by the idea that I made it a point to attend the next meetup… and the next. Now, the monthly meetups are a must attend event for me. The fact that the organizers have made it an every “last Thursday of the month” event as of 2011 (and posted future meetups on the website) has made it much easier to keep the date free.

So far, we have been sharing ideas and information on topics such as:

Technology
Gadgets
Start-ups
Social media
SEO
Marketing
Social good
Web development
Web security
Gaming

As I see it, the community keeps growing and we’re successfully conquering a few challenges with each meetup. At October’s Refresh, Shazly did a live streaming over his phone as an experiment. Since then, we’ve had a few requests to live-stream the meetup for the benefit of those who are both not in the Country and Colombo. After playing around with various methods, we successfully live-streamed December’s Refresh Colombo using just a webcam and a laptop. We had a quite a following with that effort – including questions from the U.S. and Anuradhapura! which were over text, Twitter and call-ins.

In addition, Gihan offered to video record the meetup and now it’s available on the website as well. Meanwhile, there was a request for live-tweeting from the event after I did some live-tweeting for fun, at the October meetup. And for November’s meetup, the organizers asked me if I could do it from the official @RefreshColombo twitter account, instead of my own – to which I happily obliged and we had a lot of feedback from that session as well. And following a few requests from Sukanti and the Refresh Colombo organizers, I had the privilege of delivering a presentation on Social Media at the last meetup in December as the first woman speaker.

The way I see it, Sri Lanka has been amazingly adoptive of latest technologies. We have a wide telecommunication sector consisting of 5 mobile network service providers with and a thriving IT industry. But to take it to the next level, we need innovative thinkers, thought leaders and the right platform.

And I see, Refresh Colombo provides the perfect platform for anyone to share their knowledge and learn from the experts, which might give rise to some brilliant start-ups very soon – something that Zuckerberg would have probably wished for, when he was in College!

Digital media’s unpaved road

January 13, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I get asked often how I would handle a situation in an organization that uses a smattering of digital media. The easy answer would be “It depends.”

Not to be facetious, but it not only depends on the passion and the inclination to wade into the confusing digital communication environment (using strategies around incorporating Slideshare, Twitpic, AudioBoo, MediaWiki, UStream etc).

It depends on the people on your team who have an appetite for this. Not everyone feels comfortable in this environment. I sometimes talk of one of the most cynical team members in an organization who has become a pro in using digital media. His concern (“I don’t need to know what someone is having for lunch” – a famous knock on Twitter users) was that it might be a waste of time for him and the organization.

It helped that the organization thought differently, and it was my job to inspire him and others like him to take this unpaved road. Watch how Sean Smith, became a citizen reporter out of Vancouver, using nothing more than an Android phone. And yes, he began tweeting too, but not about his lunch menu!

Welcome to the discomfort zone!

If you’re in media relations or marketing, or even if you’re running a department that has nothing to do with PR, that road beckons. It’s still rugged, and may never be the smooth ‘superhighway’ we were once promised. But the traffic is building up. No you don’t have to be a pro at producing videos, or writing blog posts. (That’s why citizen journalists have become such an essential part of the news cycle.) But you and your team do have valuable knowledge that’s worth sharing. “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department,” someone –perhaps Seth Godin–once noted. Ditto for PR and customer service. Ditto for content creation, and digital marketing communications.

Welcome to the unpaved road.

Stop worrying about the technology, and start thinking of participating.

Where are the ‘conversations’ after the Tucson shootings?

January 10, 2011January 10, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The shootings last Saturday in Tucson set a horrific tone for the new year for all of us in Arizona.

The tone has all become politically charged, vitriolic, cascading into media finger-pointing, political caricatures, party bashing. It’s time for everyone to cool their jets, and rally together as a community. We are still in a state of shock.

Speaking of shock, this hit me when I ran into Walmart very early this morning to pick up a bottle of medicine for my daughter. There was hardly anyone in the store. I went up to a lady in the pharmacy stocking the shelves to ask for help and she shrieked! It must have seemed as if someone had crept up behind her. She apologized profusely, and pointed me to the shelf. But I went away thinking this might be the thumbnail of how we are all feeling as a nation, caught off guard.

We have seen a sad decline in discourse in this country. We don’t spend enough time engaging it it because, frankly, people don’t even know, or care, what discourse means. It’s not a synonym for comment wars. Or mocking wall postings and adhoc pages on Facebook. Or rude posters and Tshirts at rallies. I picked this definition (an archaic one for sure!) that says discourse is the “mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts.” The word ‘conversations’ — a term we social media types use flippantly, sometimes — have a lot to do with it.

Social media both informed us and confused us over the past few days. You probably saw this in the wrong ‘reports’ that were quickly repeated and re-tweeted. Things were less heated at Wikipedia, on the entry for Gabrielle Giffords. The editors were more civil, debating the reports that she had died, and whether to use the Sarah Palin map, just because other media were mentioning it. In short, there was –and still is — some restraint.

Maybe we could learn a thing of two from the discourse, based on established guidelines, at Wikipedia. Maybe we should all calm down a bit, and not feel the need to shriek when something of this magnitude creeps up on us.

Sidebar:

Here are some thoughtful commentaries on how social media has played out so far:

Social Media on Full Display in wake of Gabrielle Giffords shooting – Carli Brosseau, writing for the Tucson Citizen
Social media is like an all-you-can-eat buffet after the Tucson tragedy – Violet Blue, writing for ZDNet