Technology

Industrial design could send a message

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

How could a building or  structural feature send a stronger message about what you stand for than other design elements –web site, brochures, annual reports– you put out on a regular basis?

Not everyone could build a spectacular ‘shrine’ like Apple has, in Manhattan.

At ASU, the Global Institute of Sustainability takes a more pragmatic approach, with wind turbines on the roof generating power, even while solar panels are being installed in other parts of the campuses so as to take care of 20 percent of the total energy.

And speaking of wind power, this story out of London, of designers creating a column of light using wind power is more than a fancy energy project. It demos the capacity of creativity that could be unleashed within the urban planing when you let energy send a message.

jason-brugesIn this ‘tower of power’ as it is being called, there are 120 LED’s being powered by a “gentle” wind. Nothing fancy in the set up. A laptop is the only piece of technology behind it, apart from these 1,200 tiny fans. The designer, Jason Bruges Studio, calls it a wind-light.

Maybe someday outdoor signs will be lit this way.

So that, beyond growing lettuce (watch this video!) on the vertical face of a billboard, as McDonald’s did in this very daring/cool design, existing structures could send a passive message, with some “gentle” asistance from the sun, water and wind.

Powerful feedback loops, and why should you care

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The challenge of facing the media cannot be solved by studying our talking points, and coming up with zingers. As the media morphs into a real-time machine with a Google-enhanced memory, there are forces to be aware of.

Dan Gillmor, who now heads the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, recounts an incident that took place in 2002 that is even more relevant today. He was reporting in near real time via his blog about a panel discussion where then Qwest CEO Joe Naccio “whined” about the difficulty of raising capital.

The conference was in Arizona, but within minutes of his posting the story, someone in Florida emailed him a link to a story about Naccio cashing $200 in stock even as his company stock prices dropped. Gillmor posted that link in his next post, and almost instantly, the audience began to turn hostile against Naccio.

The feedback loop had unexpectedly given the audience –not the audience Gillmor thought he was writing for, but which happened to be sitting sight next to him– a new perspective. That audience-with-an-audience was also something the speaker never thought he would be facing.

Why should you care as a communicator or marketer?

  • The audience tends to be smarter than you think. Its demographics and psychographics can shift radically, even though no one may have left the room.
  • The back-channel is always at work. In grade school it was a piece of paper that was surreptitiously circulated among the class oblivious to the teacher. Today all it takes is a tweet, an IM, a text message…
  • Creating and encouraging feedback loops tip you off to something you may have never seen coming. People will come up with amazing ideas, if they are asked.
  • Your customers/audience could come to your rescue. Before his last podcast, Mitch Joel put out a tweet saying he had a bad cold and was ‘crowdsourcing’ his next show. The response was amazing! The audience practically ran the show.

“Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist” and what passes for news

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

News is under attack from many sides. There are digital missiles, financial grenades, dwindling readership and viewership, and the there’s the credibility factor.

So a story like this of a fabricated, unverified “source” brings up serious issues. Says The New York Times, peeling back the curtain:

“Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.”

Which is to say, not just old media but new media and hybrid media tend to get taken for a ride very easily.

OK, so this was just a prank –a film maker trying to make a name, no different from say, Lonely Girl trying to make a career. But we have seen this script before haven’t we, and they have had serious consequences. Remember SwiftBoat, and Dan Rather’s “gate“, and Jason Blair, and … the list could go on.

Let’s face it. Trust, has been shifting from authority figures and truth verifiers to (drum roll…) “people like me.” But even we are easily influenced (duped?) by some digital presence from people like us. When we do our due diligence as communicators we tend to assume that:

  • Anyone with a web site is probably above board
  • An organization with a blog is actually quite real, if not transparent. Until it the blog is outed.
  • And anyone who uses Twitter, is transparency personified -until people like “Janet‘ show up

In a recent Harvard study, people trusted Cable news twice as much as Broadcast news. For print, credibility was nearly a quarter of Cable news. None of this is comforting. The Martin Eisenstadt story broke on Cable news first. But the scary part? Even bloggers were linking to the fake Mr. Eisenstadt!

fakenytFun Sidebar: If you think most of the news is made up, take a look at at this edition of the New York Times. From the cover story, you might gues it is a fake New York Times.

Quotes for the week ending 15 November, 2008

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“We are now offering a 25% Discount on all Collectable McCain/Palin08 products left in inventory”

Fire sale notice from the McCain-Palin campaign store.

“Simply put, things are already close enough between Change.gov and the Google Gang.”

Chris Soghoian, at CNetNews, commenting on Google’s relationship to the incoming White House administration. He also recommends BitTorrent for Pres. Obam’s fireside chats.

“massive employee raiding.”

Agency.com’s complaint that Scottsdale-AZ based agency, specifically Don Scales, a former Agency.com staffer, has been poaching its employees and clients.

“I go dark some weekends and evenings until 8 p.m. because my kids come first. It’s not easy, but I don’t need to be big on Digg.”

Jason Falls, Head of social media at Doe-Anderson, interviewd by Jason Baer

“Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.”

The not so shocking news that an unnamed source for the Sarah-doesn’t-know-Africa-is-a-continent story a fabricated person, carefully set up by two film-makers. Many media outlets were duped.

“Create a video hub for the executive branch – call it GovTube – that aggregates all video content throughout the government in a searchable, user friendly video portal.”

One of the recomemndations by Dan Mannet, at TechPresident, for how the new administration could use multi-media.

Community funded journalism. If you write it will they come?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The concept of crowdsourcing and community funded media has always interested me. Maybe it is my roots. I grew up in an environment where community-based projects were quite the norm, long before people got wired.

So SpotUs, a community-funded journalism project by David Cohn (of NewsAssignment.net) is one of the trends I think we will be seeing a lot of, as news media cut corners and outsource the story to people closest to it. For now, those pitching stories to us (basically asking for donations or micro-funding) are few, and limited to the Bay area.

Like this one, by Aaron Crowe, who plans to investigate the cost and benefit of installing solar power in a home. The site has raised $315, with goal of $1,000 to get the reporter off and running.

You could argue that times are tough, and people won’t pay for something they could get (or at least think they could) for free, anyway. But I am optimistic. We may cut back on our lattes, and even newspaper subscriptions, but as soon as a news aggregator of relevant, timely, local news is able to deliver it in a way we cannot get anywhere else, the price may be right. Just you watch!

Stunning visualization of red and blue states

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

A colleague sent me this link from an NPR Science Friday story. It’s a story based on the voting pattern as seen through cartograms -maps that have been ‘density equalized’ by Michael Gastner and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan.

Being in the business of scientific visualization at the Decision Theater it’s fascinating to see science take a crack at politics, and why the red-state, blue-state concept trivializes the voting pattern.

The TV news networks, of course love the red-blue metaphor. We saw CNN‘s use of the ‘magic wall’ which was a recent creation by a company called Perceptive Pixel (it  sold similar walls to ABC and Fox).  MSNBC set up a 3D studio for some similar visual treats. CNN even played with teleporting, having the anchor interview a hologram, pushing visualization up several notches.

But NPR’s story is a great way to do a visual post-mortem of how the country voted. While holograms are just eye-candy, cartograms give a better picture of what happened. Gastner, by the way, lets you use his cartogram code, here, where there are more maps of the voting pattern. Talk about seeing things diffferently!

Small groups in larger network

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What do you think of this statement?

“We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups….”

A statement from Paul and Anne Ehrlich (quoted by Andrew Revkin) who writes about the challenges for 6 billion of us.

Planet earth, the largest social network, is more connected than we realize: we super poke each other in strange ways, and hear each others status updates whether we log on or not! What we do in our cave or cubicle often instantly influences or inspires someone else.

I was particularly interested in that comment of our small group vs big group idea. Are we a small group fighting for survival in a big group, or are we a big group breaking out into small groups in order to sustain ourselves? Geo-politically we have the EC, NAFTA, ASEAN etc.

There are plenty of examples in communications and networking why this might be the case. I am losing count of how many small groups I am part of. And that’s not counting the Facebook groups I grudgingly join, and most often turn down. Print folk, PR buddies, marketing practitioners, alumni groups, book clubs, listeners of common podcasts … our niches cut through the traditional demographic sectors every day.

The 140-character pitch and getting creative with Twitter

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

The over-used acronym KISS, could very well stand for Keep in short, stupid!

It’s probably more relevant today than it was a couple of years ago, where we are battling channel fatigue and attention deficit all at once.

So I was really interested in this post by a friend, Nathan Wagner, who just started his blog, Relevant Chews, about the need to hone down your elevator pitch to Twitter-length. Great food for thought.

On a similar note, I came across the Twinterview format (an interview using Twitter, if you have not guessed) also innovative, not just because of the way it uses the collaborative micro-blogging platform for the back and forth, but for the need to condense the Q and A into relevant chewable bites, if I may borrow from Wagner. I have to say I am guilty of sometimes framing a question that sounds more like a statement. (I am working on it.)

The reality is that the people we interview have a lot to say, so Twitter may seem a bit too condensed. But this might be one way to respect a person’s time, and get the interview when the he/she is on the move, undistracted, and ready to ‘talk.’ As we see in Jason Baer‘s twinterview with Scott Monty of Ford, both manage to squeeze in details, and url’s to make the exchange great.

When an employee blogs…

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

My article on Groundswell is now out in Communication World, the IABC magazine. It’s based on an interview I did with Josh Bernoff, the co-author of Groundswell. For my friends and readers who are not IABC members, here’s a downloadable PDF.

It deals with what to do to engage, not punish, the bottom-up movement. How to tap into the energy of employees and customers. Many people are still figuring out this stuff. What do I know? I am still learning on the job, but there’s no shortage of learning moments.

Some months back, we had the “Janet” incident with Exxon-Mobil. Last week there was the Virgin Atlantic Facebook incident. If you’re interested, there’s some excellent commentary about this in For Immediate Release, (show # 394)  the podcast by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson.

Being an e-Community Organizer pays off

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Lots of Groundswell talk surfacing again, especially since the community/grass roots/Net Roots strategy of the Obama campaign has shown to have paid off handsomely.

As Jeremiah Owyang shows us, the social networking prowess of the Obama campaign dwarfs anything done by the McCain group. Just the MySpace and FaceBook (im)balance is stunning 4:1!

Ignore the groundswell at your own peril, I guess.

The moral of the story: Never make fun of a community organizer.