Chris Brogan’s experiment: get over it!

December 15, 2008December 15, 2008 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I had intended to say that Chris Brogan’s K-mart post was a storm in a teacup, until I saw Chris’ post on Saturday. (If you missed it, it’s K-Mart’s use of six bloggers to create some buzz about shopping for Christmas.) It’s more like a tornado in a branded shot glass.

It boils down to whether pay-per-post ought to be shunned by bloggers, and the larger, eternal question: “Are bloggers journalists?”

My initial thoughts were these:

People are so uncomfortable/unsure about social media that they think there’s one formula that everyone has to follow, and whoever breaks the formula is either crazy, desperate, or damn clever.
Money is a touchy subject when it comes to blogs -until people place ads in their navigation bar.

I didn’t think this was such a sell out, or that Chris had tiptoed to the ‘slippery slope’ as many have suggested. I have to laugh out loud when people talk about editorial integrity in the traditional media and that firewall between advertising and editorial.

Having bought media in the old and new media worlds, I know how this works, or doesn’t. You can not pay for editorial outright, most of the time. But you could be put into a sponsor bucket, and be ‘promised’ some coverage. Chris cut through those euphemisms, and said quite clearly what his purpose was. Here’s why I like what he did:

He challenged the old way of thinking, and the old ‘rules’ that people imagine exist.
He stuck to the ‘markets are conversations’ idea, even before he cited Cluetrain Manifesto.
He was transparent. Bloody transparent. To the point of scanning his register receipt.

As Jeremiah Owyang noted in an earlier tweet:

“Expect more brands to ‘buy’ bloggers and tweeters as the economy dips, this truly is cost effective marketing.”

Some will be uncomfortable with this, but as old media explores a new model to retain readers and viewers –and sponsors– we need to become more open to experimentation.

Are we unready for the mobile interface?

December 10, 2008December 11, 2008 / 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

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!’

Social media’s role in crisis, a learning curve

December 9, 2008 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Given that social media are always on, how should you exploit it for a breaking event?

If you’re in an incident command center, then you have powerful channel –more ears to the ground, more lenses, more raw “intelligence.”

If you’re a news organization, you have a potentially dangerous weapon. Meaning, you could easily abuse it and have hell to pay. CNN’s iReporters are citizen journalists, rated by visitors and viewers to the iReport sit e. How? “It’s all in the math,” they say. The rating system assigns Superstar status to those with more reports.

I’ve heard a lot recently about how social media played a important part in Mumbai attacks, in communicating and updating ongoing messages of distress, mainstream reporting and even some forms of citizen journalism. Often, we could not believe what we were seeing and reading about.

But we cheerleaders of new media tools need to be careful and also admit to the potential downsides of such raw, real-time communication.

On that note, it is heartening to see that the BBC is also admitting to some of the risks it should not have taken, such as being careless about fact checking: “simply monitoring, selecting and passing on the information we are getting as quickly as we can.” In other words, just because we do have access to more eyes and years and thumb typers, doesn’t mean we should compromise on what the media does best –act as a filter, and put things in context.

Takeaways:

1. Adaptation: The use of the microblogging format as a news medium is still a work in progress. As someone commenting on this story said, the Beeb should adapt its journalism to the new tools “instead of dropping Twitter with burnt fingers.”

If we look back at how television blundered and blundered when covering major events in its early days, (look how they still do even now!) social media channels like Twitter have a long ways to go.

2. Naivete. Just because technology is used ro do bad things doesn’t mean it should be off limits. There’s anxiety that Google Earth is dangerous because one of the Mumbai terrorists used it in the plot. As one person commented, “Did they use any sort of shoes or boots? What about rope? Let’s ban everything….” !

3. Collaboration. Twitter and Flickr played a big part in providing rich information. But it did not prove that new media was better than old media. As Gaurav Mishra notes, “Twitter, and new media and mainstream media complemented each other in covering this story.”

AdRants about Virgin Mobile, commenting on the offensive/kinky video featuring an intoxicated Mrs. Claus.

Article at Ragan.com featuring Katie Paine’s six steps in social media, where she advises against going for the nebulous value of media, and focusing on that which is measurable.

Headline of Op-Ed by Barack Obama, quoted in Politico, which notes the rising dissatisfaction of Liberals with Obama’s centrist policies.

Duncan Clark, on the Chinese government’s plan requiring foreign computer firms to submit security technology -which includes data encryption secrets –for government approval.

Artist Phillip George, on his line of 30 Inshallah surfboards featuring Islamic art on display a beach in Sydney.

Mark Walsh, on the news from a Forrester Research report that only 16 percent of people trust corporate blogs.

AdAge columnist, Ken Wheaton, making fun of the Web 2.0 cheerleaders.

Response to the article above, by reader Rodney Mason.