Follow up to yesterday’s post, Michael Sebastian at Ragan.com explores the topic with a great example from Wells Fargo.
Technology
Are we unready for the mobile interface?
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!’
Social media’s role in crisis, a learning curve
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 site. 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.”
Twitter questioning begins
I thought Kathleen Parker‘s column slamming –OK, questioning– the validity of Twitter was much. Followers, she describes as “a live self-selecting audience of brain voyeurs.”
And: “the impulse to stay incessantly in touch can be viewed either as gregarious or as a sign of consuming anxiety …the opiate of the obsessively compulsively disordered.”
Indeed, Parker also raises some good questions, such as whether we might find some value is all public officials practiced some form of instant communication.
But Jerry Bowles‘ post that I missed last week goes further, with the provocative “Twittering is for Birdbrains” headline. His point? That far to many people communicate the minutiae of their lives in this microblogging format and few communicate real ideas. Now I don’t entirely agree, but let’s be honest. Don’t many people’s tweets make us cringe? That shouldn’t cripple the medium altogether.
You bet I am monitoring the comments that ensue –even those in the twittersphere!
Football in 3D, if you miss the real life version
I am not sure what the purpose of thi is, to take a Real Life event like American football, and turn it into a 3D experience so people can watch it –live– in a theater. But I like the idea of experimenting wth the live broadcast format. It’s a merging of digital TV and the theater experience, with polarized glases for added impact.
The game wil take place between the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers so that people in Los Angeles, New York and Boston can watch it at a theater.
TV going digital is one thing. Taking a live event into a live theater experience is quite something else. I wonder how the Raiders and Chargers fans will respond. Imagine the shouting matches, the flag waving… Will they let people take pictures?
Analog-is-dead talk ignores hybrid experience
Forget the analog is dead predictions about books and newspapers. There’s a new one being resurrected, about the death of the computer mouse. Yes, indeed, touchpads have eroded the usage of mice. Pen devices and laser mice have emerged, too. But I don’t believe the mouse will “die” anytime soon, just as much as I don’t believe that analog and digital will be an either/or option. (I say this having written two letters on real paper yesterday, in addition to sending of some outstanding emails.)
It’s not just the digital versus the analog options we need to consider, but the hybrid form that might emerge. The Amazon Kindle may not replace my book – yet- but someday something like this eTouchBook application could make its way into my life. What’s the eTouchBook? It basically in the lab stage, where a book could be printed in a way that certain elements on the page could bridge into a digital environment. Imagine being able to move from a magazine article to an online video on your mobile device, or being able to “save” a short story you just read in an airport lounge as a text-to-speech podcast? I could visualize a time when we would enhance, not kill off our analog devices.
FREE IDEA: And here’s a mouse-based throwaway idea. Rather than bury my cordless computer mouse, I would be in the market for someone who could turn it into an MP3 player that downloads content direct to it. That way, when I shut down my laptop, I can still carry my reading material and listen to it offline.
White House 3.0 groundwork in place
Looks like the Obama team is using Change.gov to take the government into a 3.0 world. That’s right, they may as well skip past 2.0 and push into new territory. When was the last time you heard the government say that during this transition process, we the people could “participate in redefining our government?”
Take a look at their Newsroom and Blog links. Already you see signs that the old news page is merging with the blog, because you get a Newsroom: Blog category when you click on the Blog link.
And they’re quite up to speed on the Creative Commons 3.0 license, talking of a 21st Century government, where content will need attribution, but will be open to ‘remix.’
Would this make the WhiteHouse.gov interface (whose ‘interactive’ page inteprets interactivity as a Q & A exchange) obsolete? I can see it going through a huge overhaul?
Quotes for the week ending 29 November, 2008
“The impending total collapse of the dollar will render the true value of the average savings account or investment portfolio roughly equal to a bucket of warm piss.”
Thomas J. Wurtz, CFO of Wachovia, quoted in a press release about a new, daring billboard ad campaign
“If wearing your baby hurts your back or neck, you need positioning help, not Motrin”
Josh Bernoff, on the huge headache –um, backlash–Johnson & Johnson got on account of the ad about ‘wearing your baby’ in a sling.”
“Let’s face it: your beautifully lit, ideally scouted, model-perfect spot is likely going to be consumed in a 320×240 window. In that environment, Martin Scorsese would have a difficult time distinguishing between something shot on a Panavision Genesis versus a $150 Flip.”
Lewis Rothkopf, on the need to leverage broadband to narrowcast and target messaging in the way broadcasting has never done.
“Cheer up, it could be worse: it could be flu we’re facing and not merely a once in a 100 year meltdown in the financial system.”
Comment about a six-part drama, Survivors, on BBC1 where the story involves 90% of the population being wiped out in a flu pandemic.
“You get 14-year-old boys yelling out `I love you!’ because they learn these English expressions and try to use them.”
Kathleen Hampton, a teacher, using Skype to teach English to students in Korea in a reverse-outsourcing business from a town in Wyoming with a population of just 350.
“It’s not that we now have a president who’s black. It’s that for the first time we have a president who’s actually green.”
Oakland, Ca-based green-collar evangelist, Van Jones at GreenBuild conference this week.
“It’s a terrorist strike. Not entertainment. So tweeters, please be responsible with your tweets.”
A Twitter messge from Mumbai from primaveron@mumbai as the awful terrorist attack on the city broke out. Bloggers and the media took to new media to report the standoff and rescue operation
Digital books won’t make my bookshelf lighter
I have to be careful when saying that a digital product won’t undermine the analog experience. I hung on to my Canon Rebel 2000 for years until I realized the digital SLR was ‘not bad’ and in fact, good enough to make me switch. No need to belabor the vinyl music meets MP3 story.
So the news that Random House plans to digitize thousands of books to serve the nascent eBook demand, has me with mixed thoughts. On the one hand, I couldn’t see myself take a Kindle to bed, though I wouldn’t mind owning one. I can’t imagine how the book experience –that’s far beyond the reading experience–will ever be replicated or made obsolete by the tools we love in other platforms: scrolling, annotating, searching, linking etc.
In the end, the best way to think of the analog and digital bookshelf is not through the either/or lens. I may have a highly productive experience with a digi-book on a long plane flight, especially if it helps me load up the reader with other material and lighten my load. But I will always want that dead-tree experience for other times, even for that age old practice of standing in line for a book signing. Not that there won’t be a digital workaround for that soon!
Google’s SearchWiki shows where we are headed
If you’ve not heard of SearchWiki, prepare to be amazed. It’s going to change the way you think of Google. Tired of getting some really irrelevant results? Delete the ones you don’t like, add new URLs and markup the ones that you want to come back to later.
Actually it does more than even social bookmarking –a customized Delicious account, for instance — but considering how where Google is going with its new browser (Chrome), and wiki (Knol), this wikified browser experience could be the way Google learns more about users’ needs.
I can see where this might be going. A search engine meets wiki meets social bookmarking would infect us with the collaboration virus surging through our veins. Soon, we may be able to share our customized search results with a group (a Facebook widget might make sense too) we are collaborating with.
Take a test drive my HoiPolloi Google Search Page at this customized site.
You could switch between HoiPolloiSearch and regular Google search. Even the paid search results change when you toggle between both. The pages could be free of ads for non-profits, government or educationional organizations!
Hoipolloireport 
