Quotes for the week ending 22 February, 2009

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“I would be happy to buy him a cup of coffee –decaf!”

White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, to the press, on the CNBC host Rick Santelli’s rant about Obama’s housing plan. Gibbs suggested Mr. Santelli ‘download, hit print and read the report.’

“It’s a crisis that strikes at the heart of the middle class. It begins with one house at a time in Mesa, Glendale or Tempe…”

President Barack Obama, on his visit to Dobson High School in Mesa, Arizona, where he announced the details of the housing plan that intends to address the key issues at the heart of the financial crisis.

“Thank you all for watching out for my brand, I appreciate each and every message”

Jeremy Owyang, to the many people who have informed hiom about the fake Twitter accounts in his name. Reported by Jacob Morgan.

“Business journalism sources come in all shapes and sizes, and my experience is that the ones who purport to have the most explosive stories are typically exaggerating their claims.”

Chris Roush, blogging at BusinessJournalism.org, on the need to verify a source that claims to be a whistleblower, in relation to a story of one in the Bernie Madoff fraud case

“Micro-payments won’t solve newspapers’ pay-or-perish problem, at least not under current proposals.”

Marshall W. Van Alstyne, associate professor, Boston University joining the debate on how to rescue journalism

“Twitter has a lot of power to, with simple changes like that, change the ecology of the system.”

Leo Laporte, host of the podcast, This Week in tech (TWIT) on the new feature that Twitter adds that gives some users a hugs boost in followers.

Joe The Plumber’s fingerprints in Mesa

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In less than an hour from now President Obama is coming to a school less than a mile from my home, to make the big announcement to address the housing crisis.

So I couldn’t resist driving by Dobson High a little while ago to check out the mood out here.

Contrary to what you might imagine watching some of the morning news reports, it’s not all human chaos and traffic snarls in Mesa. Traffic was moving smoothly, as people made their way with signs, lawn chairs, flags and cameras.

But along the way a little detail struck me as an example of how out of touch, or completely ignorant people are. Little signs on stakes –the kind that usually advertise weight-loss cures or ‘we buy ugly houses’ — try to lecture to Obama that ‘socialism is not the answer’ with allusions to the healthcare rescue plan. Has Joe the Plumber being recruited to do some sort of poster-PR for the other side? Someone did not get the memo that the Palin-led socialism canard flopped.

The people lining the streets outside St. Timothy’s Catholic Church have more to hope for and worry about than socialism. They see the economy through a different lens.

Twitter may be the worst way to..

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Fill in the blanks here, if you could.

I am sure you’ve heard of some bad etiquette and bad practice when it comes to using Twitter. I am a big fan of the this micro-messaging tool, but I occasionally come across stories where tweets are so inappropriate.

  • There was that incident last year of a journalist tweeting at a funeral of a kid.
  • Recently at the BBC, a possible case of someone being promoted to a top position using a tweet. When will someone get fired via a tweet, one wonders?
  • Using Twitter to push TMDI –too much damn information– that might overwhelm followers. I’ve unsubscribed the right non-word is ‘un-followed’ to one famous person for this reason.
  • A lazy journalist’s use of Twitter as a replacement for vox pops – – excellent analysis here.

Twitter may be a terrible way to tell your boss you are not coming to work (and forgetting to use the direct messaging function), flirt, attack someone, disclose something you should only be doing offline etc. I am sure there are dozens more examples. I like to hear.

(Image above linked to from NewsPhobia)

Audacity of suing ‘Hope’ by the Associated Press

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I can assume the Boston Globe will not sue me over linking to this juxtaposed image.

They don’t usually get that silly, as the Associated Press has been when it threatened to sue Shepard Fairey, the street artist who turned the man on the left to the icon on the right.

The HOPE poster is so well known there are ways to render your own mug shot with the same color and brush strokes.

But last week, as the story got more twisted —Fairey got arrested on an unrelated charge in Boston, and then sued the AP — one wonders what kind of image management the venerable Associated Press is going for. Especially since this is not the first time it’s let its lawyers handle its PR.

Last year AP went after bloggers trying to put limits on how much of its content could be considered fair use. It later retreated. Forget the power of mashups for a second. Making a street artist the poster boy of copyright violation doesn’t  score any points for AP.

Valentine’s day activism in a country that gave us Kama Sutra

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This sounds like a funny story, but it looks like the activisis in India are mad as hell and have taken to Facebook to air their grievances.

The Pink Chaddi Campaign is their way of tellling local government officials that they cannot be told to curb their romantic behavior. In the lead up to February 13th, the group  began asking women to find pink ‘chaddis’ and send them to Sri Ram Sena. The Facebook site grew quickly and as of Saturday had over 43,00o members.

On their blog, they noted:

From Kabul to Chennai to Guwahati to Singapore to LA women have signed up. It does not matter if you are actually not a pub-goer or not even much of a drinker. Let us raise a toast (it can be juice) to Indian women. Take a photo or video.

You’ve probably guessed what ‘chaddis’ are:  You’re right!

Shri Ram Sena is a fundamentalist Hindu organization (note: They were hugely pro-Obama!) in a city in Karnataka state, that threatened to attack women who celebrated Valentine’s Day.

On Saturday there were some reported arrests of those who did threaten couples.

Activism in India using social media is not new. Groups have lobbied local governments with massive text messaging campaigns, and for other forms of protest and solidarity. Last year there was a temporary ban on the use of SMS in Jammu and Kashmir.

Quotes for the week ending 15 Feb 2009

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“To the young people of China, please learn a lesson from this…”

Michael Phelps, in a another apology, this time to Chinese fans on a video call.

“Mass for us is a business that doesn’t work.”

Tom Ascheim, Newsweek‘s chief executive, on the redesign of the magazine that will focus on a narrow segment.

“Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader gets slimmer”

Amazon.com’s release of a slimmer version of its Kindle electronic reading device for $359

“I watched Nadya’s publicist on Dr. Phil the other night, and was ashamed for our profession.”

Linda VandeVrede, on ValleyPRBlog.com, commenting on a post about PR becoming tainted by ‘publicists.’

“The worst thing about the Suleman story is the way the freak-hungry media has rewarded her delinquency every step of the way.”

Tina Brown, writing for The Daily Beast, about the media’s swooning over Nadya Suleman and the cctuplets story

“Possibly in his law office, his feet on a cluttered desk, …his clothes a bit too small to fit his uncommon frame — maybe wondering if somebody might call him up and ask him to be commerce secretary.”

Barack Obama, using Abraham Lincoln’s birthday as a way of making light about how yet another nominee, Judd Greg, for the commerce secretary post withdrew from the post.

“It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs.”

Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute, one of those making symbolic but noisy objections to the new stimulus package that was approved by the Senate and the House this week.

“Reporters, bloggers, and the general public are being denied an opportunity to review one of the most important pieces of legislation sent through Congress in a long time.”

The Sunlight Foundation’s Paul Blumenthal, on the dangerous practice of ‘hiding’ the stimulus bill from the public and slamming it through.

“It could have been a computer failure or a human error.”

Russian space expert, Igor Lisov, on the collision of a Russian and US satellite, that raised the questions about the need for some type of international air traffic control with so much of space junk.

“Yesterday I testified before the Senate Budget Committee…”

Douglas Elmendor, Director of the government’s Congresional Budget Office, in a blog post about controlling health care costs. His no-frills blog is one of the many social media initiatives taken by the Federal government.

Blogging the salmonella outbreak

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There are divisions of the Federal government  you probably never knew existed or paid attention to that are blogging –such as this or this.

So as they get up to speed with new media, it’s interesting to watch how the latest outbreak of salmonella poisoning –and the massive recall of peanut butter — has been enough to get a blog going. It’s barely two weeks old.

Called the PeanutButterRecall blog, the directors of the CDC and the FDA have begun communicating without simply relying on the statutory press release.

The site runs a bit slow, especially the link to the government database that lists hundreds of products from cookies to pet food to store brands, and the map is not exactly interactive, but who cares? Without waiting for the perfect format someone in the bowels of the crisis seems to have given the order for the PB Recall be covered from their perspective, with so many media lenses trained on them. One more thing, they also have a Twitter account.

Good job!

Sidebar: You can appreciate what these guys are doing when you look at the other Peanut Butter blogs out there. These are mainly run by fans or foodies, but they seem to be carrying on as if nothing has happened to the product.

Buzz ideas re-ignited

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If you had been following the spike in attention given to the concept of buzz about five years back, you may have come across the name Emanuel Rosen. He came out with an amazing book, The Anatomy of Buzz that peeled back the layers of buzz –the nodes, connectors, clusters and triggers– that propels something into popularity.

So it came as a great surprise when I received an email from Rosen a few days back asking me if I was interested in reading his updated book. How did he find me, or know I was a big promoter of the book? Apparently I had referred to it in an article at that time –a Google search solved the mystery.

Before I sent him my address I called him –to make sure I was not responding to some phishing scam!– and he gave me the background to why the book needed to be ‘revisited’ (rather than updated). Two seconds into the conversation it struck me. This was before the iPhone, before YouTube, before a lot of things that have inbuilt wiring for buzz. We almost take buzz for granted. Buzzworthiness is almost a hidden design feature. No wonder this concept needed to be looked at once again.

More about the book, in a  few days.

Big guns atweeting – what could we learn from them?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

What does the Dalai Lama‘s office, Number 10 Downing Street, and the new Governor of Arizona have in common?

They’ve all taken to Twitter, lately.

You can tell the groundswell has moved up into the corporate office. Says the Dalai Lama’s office (which counts iJustine as one of the person it is following (?): “His Holiness thought it was prudent to make his office open and assessable to a more youth and technologically advancing audience.”

By now, you’ve probably come across a dozen uses of Twitter. I’m in a group at Arizona State University where more staff members than you would imagine have been tweeting.

We may all have different uses for this uncanny upstart of a micro-blogging tool that has suddenly made a come back –since it came into being in 2007. But the best one I came across this week was from Jason Calcanis, founder of Mahalo. “if I want to leak something to the press, I can do it by just saying ‘what do you think about this…?’ and if it’s notable, it will be on 10 blogs in a day.”

Calcanis, if you have been following him even outside of Twitter, is a self-proclaimed PR machine. Maybe we could pull the different strands together and learn a few good ideas from all of them.

If anyone cares to contribute to this thread, I’ll follow up with a Lessons Learned post that includes your comments. Thanks!