Technology

Podcasts and Slideshare – a cool way to distribute ideas

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve been dabbling with Slideshare and love how it lets you create and embed content.

So when my friends at GreenNurture began creating a series of presentations, we experimented with not just regular presos, but wondered what if we package a media kit as a SlideShare? What if we published a Press Release in this rich format? What if…..

We tried a few, and guess what? Our presentations were so popular that SlideShare contacted us to say that they were featuring GreenNurture on the home page.

Today we have moved beyond that, and turned podcasts into a presentation. See below. I think it’s neat not because it pulls the format into a new skin, so to speak, but for anyone who does not want to download it to an MP3 player, but likes to listen to it on a computer, it adds a new experience. The forward buttons help you get back to a part of you missed.

And yes, there’s a word for this hybrid format –it’s called Slidecasting!

How Climate Gate is Leading Us to True Sustainability

View more presentations from GreenNurture.

Crowd-sourcing as internal communication tool

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Smart mobs, crowd-sourcing, citizen journalism –have you noticed how these waves of outside influence keep crashing on our shores?

Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, uses a powerful analogy of human intelligence and computers. If you consider thousands of computers in a building as heaters running at full capacity, he says, only a small part of the heat generated is being used to warm the building. The rest of the energy leaks outside. It could easily be distriuted to other parts of the enterprise.

Now consider the ‘leakage’ of intellectual capital in your office every day. Employees arrive at the workplace, power-up, and are left to run, but vast amounts of  knowledge and ideas are untapped. The occasional survey, the large meetings where no one wants to raise their hand only scratch the surface.

Crowd-sourcing (despite books like this on the future of business) as a driver of big ideas, or as an  internal communications / HR function has not taken off. When it has been attempted –in a controlled environment such as focus groups — the costs and time involved make it a very expensive nice-to-have.

So how do you connect the internal circuits of your human resource that occupy the building? I’ve come across voting tools, idea-generation apps and feedback systems. Here are a three:

  • IdeaScale – for community-level conversation tracking
  • ConceptShare – for teams of designers and Creatives to collaborate and generate ideas
  • GetSatisfaction -a tool for customers and employees to gather ‘social knowledge’

Feedback widgets are here –and coming soon to a mobile device near you. Many of them only go so far. Some experts even warn of getting entangled in intellectual property problems. But the big hurdle to consider is motivation. Engagement goes hand in hand with incentives -the old WIFM concept.

My client, Arizona-based GreenNurture has takes the concept of feedback and employee engagement further. Deeper! 

Here’s how it works: In a company that wants to deploy a sustainability program, employees login to a social media-like app, come up with ideas, start comment or conversation threads, make pledges and vote on each others ideas. When hundreds of them start talking to each other, some idea gets refined, tossed out or voted up. The cream rises to the top, so to speak. There’s more granular information, including an assessment tool, deep reports etc –making sure no ‘heat’ is lost.

If you are interested, check the demo here!

“Open exchange” on Twitter gets boost, but will we tweet not talk?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I was on the phone with my sister-in-law, a teacher in Sri Lanka, who complained that many young people are losing their ability to hold conversations, just while I was reading something at BBC, where the co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams states that Twitter intends it to facilitate an “open exchange of information.” I take it he means more dialog, better communication.

She: These people have way too much information in their heads and on their phones that they don’t communicate.

He: “Our goal at Twitter is to be a force for good”

She: “They don’t know how to write anymore, ..all this texting.”

He: “I think it will be how you get personal, customised information from every entity you care about, from your local café to your government, from your politician to your friends and family.”

I know we all see different parts of the anatomy of this elephant in the room. I promote micro-blogging as a way to connect the dots, and integrate with other forms of communication. But not at the expense of analog or ‘old media’ tools. Sometimes, the best way to chat is to pick up the phone, or walk over to the person in the next room or cubicle.

My eternal challenge to communicators is: When was the last time you wrote a letter?

Writing fires up different circuits in the brain. I subscribe to the idea that ‘writing is decision-making‘ with a specific person or narrow audience in mind. Not just sending off random thoughts in 140 characters. I love what Mr. Williams’ company has opened up. I just hope it makes people better communicators, not  message generators.

Community as fire pit?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

So what’s your definition of a community?

Members of your Facebok fan page? Those hundred-something peeps who follow you on Twitter? How about the ex colleagues of a former workplace in a large, unwieldly Google Group?  You probably have a stake in all or most of these right?

Building a community is one part of the equation. Nurturing one –being the ‘community organizer’ — is something else.  My latest column in CW, the magazine of IABC talks of some easy ways to build an online community.

I think we often get distracted by the word media, and pay lip service to the word social. My definition of a community is a fire pit. It can be small, it is noisy, always generates some sparks, but it draws people together.

Enjoy!

Opt-in meets experience using QR Codes

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Anyone dabbling in communication tends to stoop at the altar of speed and instant gratification. They seem similar, but they are not. Speed of response or implementation is a critical component for some organizations, some industries.

Speed, in today’s world, is a given. If you’re in customer service and you don’t respond fast to an inquiry, you lose a lead. If you don’t respond to a complaint, you risk turning a small hiccup into a major snafu.

Instant gratification is a different animal. We gloss over what it really involves by regarding it with such clicles about ‘delighting the customer’ etc.

But what I am interested in is a hybrid of speed and instant grat. Especially the ability to deliver targeted information to mobile devices, since we are beginning to use our phones not just as lap-top replacements, but as a means to interact with content related to our professional and personal lives.

Custom QR code I created for Public Radius

That’s why I like the idea of Quick Response Codes – QR Codes. I covered it in a recent column for a magazine (IABC’s Communication World).

If it sounds too geeky, it’s not. Actually it’s more user-friendly than a typical bar code. Unlike a bar code you embed it with information that is linked to content you point it to somewhere on a server or blog. That content could be any digital file, such as a PDF, podcast, video or photo album.

If you like to read the article, here’s a link to a PDF

Updated: The QR code on the left is something I created for my company, Public Radius. Many of these codes can be photographed by a cell phone that seamlessly connects the device to content.  Some of  them require an initial download of an app. Some work without it –like a short code.

Quotes for the week ending 23 Jan, 2010

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“We’ve got the Internet here at Signal, and it’s been a miracle that we’ve been able to stay on air … “Don’t ask me how we’ve managed to do that.”

Mario Viau, station director at SignalFM, in Port-au-Prince, which has been on the air and online since the earthquake struck..

“Because this is just a dirge. I’m ready to shut it off. And I’m sure there’s plenty other about to do the same.

Anonymous commenter on the Rolling Stone blog that live blogged the Hope For Haiti Now telethon. He went on to say that Live Aid “existed to raise money for a terrible epidemic. But the performances were more like a giant party. People were interested, and it was a huge success. This sad telethon will be immediately forgotten. And that’s a shame. Wasted opportunity.”

“Good attitude Mr. Anonymous. With a mindset like that nothing will ever happen.”

Someone going by the name of Jeff, responding to the above poster.

“We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales.”

Message on the Twitter web site, supposedly after Haiti suffered aftershocks on Wednesday.

“It puts into the public domain every bit of information collected by public bodies that is not personal or sensitive, from alcohol-attributable mortality to years of life lost through TB. Happily, not all the data sets deal with death.”

Editorial in the Guardian, on the launch of new website, data.gov.uk, which Tim Berners Lee ( and professor Nigel Shadbolt) served as advisors, on the request of Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

“News Corp. needs Google more than Google needs News Corp.”

Greg Patterson, attorney at Espresso Pundit, in Mike Sunnucks’s story on the battle eating up over the Fair Use Doctrine

“Yet, honest Abe and HAL9000, both had one thing in common. They conveniently applied a Heuristic theory as they were, in fact, the only one calling the shots.”

Steven Lowell, PR Manager, Voice 123, on why failure, and the ‘Heuristic Algorithm’ is a bad long-term solution.

Quotes for the week ending 9 Jan, 2010

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“…we’re not saying you’re evil, Google–you just sometimes make us want to wear a tin hat.”

Kit Eaton at Fast Company, on Google’s Near Me Now app on its Android phones and the iPhone that he says  will make “a lot of location-based App Makers” furious.

“Yes, I’m serious…there are plenty of companies that still insist on running every single tweet through multiple PR teams to make sure the messaging is spot on.”

Matt Singley, on the 6 things you need to know about social media.

“your diaphragm changes — your voice comes across very differently.”

Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design and author of slide:ology, on presenting to remote audiences.

“Jay Leno is one of the most compelling entertainers in the world today … It has, however, presented some issues for our affiliates.”

NBC statement on its decision to move the time slot of Leno’s show.

“Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web 2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom.”

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a web site that claims it can erase a person’s presence from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace.

Summing up 2009: 4Cs of Communication

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

It’s been a totally unpredictable year for me, as I am sure it was for you.

While I wanted to say Thank You to my readers, friends and family, former colleagues at ASU, I also wanted to share with all of you the core of what I believe in when it comes to the intersection of traditional and new media.

I call it the Four Cs. I realize there may be five, or seven. But think of these as four lenses through which you could clarify what’s happening to marketing, PR, media and advertising. It was a result of a mixed year.

  • It was an exciting year. I had a front seat in seeing communication change at a once top-down, yet collaborative environment such as Arizona State University (population 68,000 +) as faculty, staff and naysayers shifted gears to experiment with and then embrace social media.
  • It was a tough year. I travelled to Sri Lanka for a final goodbye to my dear sister, and experienced how the real power of community works minus Facebook and Tweetdeck.
  • It was a landmark year, when took the bold –some say much belated– step of hanging out my own shingle with Public Radius.
  • It was a  year of experimentation. I’ve recorded conversations with people in coffee shops, interviewed others via Skype, done a series of ‘Twinterviews,’ and even conducted a video conference for the State Department. While at ASU, I got into podcasting (covered topics such as the outbreak of swine flu), helped organizations and individuals start blogging for a variety of reasons –from job seeking to external communications.

So as we close out on 2009, I plan to condense the four things that I have learned. The starting Monday, I will cover them:

Collaboration. Crowd-sourcing. Content Curation. Community.

I hope they are valuable. Enjoy!

Video can be great. Cameras can be dangerous…

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

When I talk to people about why video can be a powerful tool, it’s easy to oversimplify and talk about producing in-house vlogs. But if you look at the variations, you’ll see they could range from citizen journalism submissions, to ‘anonymous’ viral stories, to damaging claims, to pranks. Hers are three uses of video that can make or break a brand’s reputation.

These two will go down in the books as the best and worst of how video mined social media in 2009.

Samsung created this contrived piece for Smart Led technology:

Hewlett Packard, on the other hand is at the receiving end, responding to this direct, damaging claim about its facial tracking technology in its web cams

And speaking of being at the receiving end, here’s how another brand faced the music, so to speak. My all time favorite this year.

What are your most memorable videos for 2009? Share a link with my readers, and us why video matters.

Wifi on board great, but airlines only scratch surface

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Ask anyone who flies often about wireless access on a plane, and you get responses that include words such as ‘spotty.’ ‘expensive,’ and ‘don’t even get me started…’

being someone who has put in a lot of international air miles, I always thought the airline business was one of those last areas to get bitten by the networking virus –social or otherwise. For the past decade we have seen carriers add it (Singapore Airlines did it 6 years ago), take it away, charge exorbitant fees for it, and generally make it difficult. Services such as Gogo Inflight (with a very slim list of partners) did not exactly get us all connected.

But I recently found out that Delta has been quietly rolling out its wi-fi onboard, and it’s got me all fired up. Delta has it on 325 planes –which accounts for “more than 1,200 flights a day”, says its blog.

My interest in wi-fi is more than just being able to connect to the outside world. I am interested in seeing how airlines make it possible for passengers to connect with each other, via a mini –ad-hoc even– social network. I know of someone who’s planning on taking this idea to a whole new level, but by his and other accounts, carriers are still not fired up. (The idea was also floated by Jeff Jarvis a year back, and Rohit Bhargava even before that but airlines are still differentiating around free meals or baggage fees.)

Oddly enough, airlines tend to approach networking with very narrow interests such as making it a branding exercise (getting us to fan them on Facebook), or a throwing it out as a perk (one more thing to pay for). Wi-fi is just one part of the equation.

Trapped in a tube, with limited movement, passengers who are allowed to connect with each other, or at least get to know each other a bit better, would have a direct bearing on brand loyalty, create offline networks, and start interesting conversations.

Think about it: these conversations won’t be limited to casual chit-chat at the gate. Just as how airlines allow us to pick our seat online, or print our boarding pass, they could automatically sign us up with a passenger network that works like LinkedIn, let us pick our business or special interest cluster. We could then contact flight mates prior to boarding, and find people who might be a few pixels away from what we do or plan to accomplish at our destination. Since we share one common element –the city we are flying out of or to- these connections could be valuable and create long-term interests.

Unlike hotels which tend to treat wi-fi as if it were Perrier, airlines can’t afford to miss this one.