Aerotropolis, Sustainability and the mixed lexicon in 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Looking back, it’s been a momentous year for me. Fresh into the first week in ’08, I took up an amazing job at the Decision Theater.

In 2008, the words that made an impact, in no particular order have been:

  • ‘CleanTech‘ is very exciting and relevant to my job, my family, my community. I don’t have to be a technology writer to want to explore it further.
  • Sustainability, which once seemed like a big word for making responsible decisions about forests and oceans, is now a lens through which we look at entire economic, social and business systems.
  • The obscure instrument called a ‘mortgage backed security‘ could unhinge our economy, including the free-fall of house prices in Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, England, the price of a gallon of gas, and a ‘cheap’ tree ornament made in China.
  • An ‘aerotropolis‘ which is a compressed urban environment around a commercial airport could revitalize community life.
  • The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig‘ became a silly diversion in the run up to the elections, but also stuck out as how quickly, an unplanned cosmetic element of a campaign could generate buzz.
  • The word ‘Outlier‘ which has been cropping up, has a mathematical connotation. As in: ‘numerically distant from the rest of the data.’
  • Android, the mobile operating system from Google, could be the OS we all gravitate to.
  • Meatball Sundae –a book by Seth Godin that was actually published in Dec ’07 – is the notion that applying new marketing on top of traditional products can have a gross results.

Quotes for the week ending 27 Dec, 2008

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“I’d made sure I’d bought plastic handcuffs and a plastic whistle but I hadn’t realised that the costume had a metal ban.”

A clown, David Vaughan who was made to strip down to his underwear when passing through a security checkpoint in the Birmingham airport in the UK.

“So, although it’s true we need a president who can juggle several issues at once, we don’t need a president who falls prey to “continuous partial attention.”

Eric Weiner, author, in a column (memo) asking Barack Obama to kick the Blackberry habit.

“Vatican embraces iTunes prayer book.”

AP story on how the Vatican (which has a ‘Pontifical Council for Social Communications’) is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes app. Better still the application was created by an Italian priest.

“Only a tiny, tiny number of individuals could even theoretically ‘twitter for a living’ — just as almost no one successfully blogs for a living.”

Sam Lessin, CEO of Dropio, in Advertising Age, in a column about how advertisers could turn Twitter into an ad network.

“being in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

John Holden, the man tipped to be Obasmas’s science adviser, on how the US is currently addressing environmental issues.

“So, why exactly are you planning on the future being just like it is now, but with better uniforms?”

Seth Godin, on why predicting the future is futile, and why readiness is the only sensible strategy

Kidnapping media people, not funny

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I have strong reservations about this PR stunt conducted by JWT in Sri Lanka on behalf of its client, marketing Reborn t-shirts.

While the idea seemed clever —faking the kidnapping of radio DJs to create buzz, it is very close to something else that has plagued the country: the political abduction of prominent people, including those from THE MEDIA. It even uses a yellow van as the abduction vehicle, alluding to the “white van syndrome” – a reference to the abduction vehicle of choice. White vans have been used to abduct people, who are then held at ransom. A prominent journalist, Keith Noyahr was abducted in May this year and beaten up badly, as reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

While the harsh treatment of prominent media people –even one this month — may be a fact of life in some parts, creating a parody of the situation only helps legitimize it.

Data becomes art: what a virus and a microblogger look like

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

They steal your passwords, hide under the folds of your browser, and turn off your virus protection software.

Alex Dragulescu turned these deadly computer virus into visual models that look like works of art.

We work with huge amounts of data at the Decision Theater, and often over-simplify what we refer to as a ‘visualization’ — a JPG, a PowerPoint, a map are, after all, visualizations. But data can be rendered as a city, a strand of DNA, a mathematical model…a Twitter user’s digital profile? That’s an eye-opener for me.

Take this, from Alex Dragulescu. It’s a look at what Twitter users do when they micro-blog, creating a data profile as it were. As Alex puts it:

“we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create a portrait of the author.”

A new ‘out of office’ message. Harsh, but necessary

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Like many of you, I’m taking a few days off  always wondered what it might do if we were really honest in what we wrote in our Out Of Office message.

Such as:

“Hi! I am outa here. No email, no forwards to my Blackberry. (Ha! I don’t even use a BB!) If you really have to get a response, sorry but that’ll have to wait. I wouldn’t bother you when you are having surgery or on your honeymoon, so I won’t pretend that I would ‘get back to you shortly’ –that would be pure BS.”

Would that offend anyone?

So, this approach by Danah Boyd made me want to applaud.

“For those who are unaware of my approach to vacation … As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation … You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don’t worry… if you forget, you’ll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off, respect danah’s deeply needed vacation time, and try again after January 19.”

For all our transparency talk, we still ‘craft’ a lot of nonsense when it comes to our corporate communication channels. Voice mail out-of-office messages are no different. I’m going to experiment with mine in a few days, so if anyone has recommendations, love to hear.

Quotes for the week ending 20 December, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“I’m not a journalist. But I am a publisher. I am a reporter. I am a media maker.”

Chris Brogan, in  a post explaining his ‘sponsored post’ for K-Mart

“For gaseous and predictable arguments ripped from the most recent front-page news stories and not much else, the Times is champion.”

Doug Maceachern, columnist for The Arizona Republic, firing back at the New York Times for an editorial dissing Arizona over governor governance after Janet napolitano leaves for a White House post.

“WAAAY too much “yay, all social media is good” group-think going on right now.”

Jason Baer, commenting on IABC Chair, Barbara Gibson’s post about  Chris Brogan’s experiment with a sposored post for K-Mart.

“the defendants in the case could be validly served by the plaintiff sending a message by computer to the Facebook page.”

Story of a ruling by an Australian court that a judgment could be ‘served’ to Facebook.

“It’s a big, fragmented mess.”

Steve Woodruff, founder of Impractivi, commenting on socvial media, in an interviw with CB Whittermore.

“That approach doesn’t work at a cocktail party, or at a funeral or in a social network.”

Seth Godin, on why traditional advertising doesn’t work, and why big companies are are asking the wrong questions in social media.

“The Lunesta moth. A potent symbol, but not a lot of depth.”

Alfred O’Neill, on why Pharma advertising is a square peg in a round hole.

“Eventually, given enough years in the biz, you know who will melt like a snowball in a rainstorm uphill on a Sunday in Jun…”

John Biggs, responding to a nasty email from a PR firm because TechCrunch called out the PR spam they were getting. The owner of the firm called them “nasty people” that will “melt away faster than a snowball going up hill in the rain.”

“Poor WSJ and NY Times—left 45 people voice mails. I am going to be so outed by those publications.”

Lois Whittman, the owner of the PR firm, inducted into TechCrunch’s hall of shame, above.

“If you come across any young PR professionals who have “McMurry” on their resume, you’d be lucky to have them on your team.”

Jessica Hansen, a Phoenix PP professional, responding to a reader comment on my post in ValleyPRBlog about TechCrunch’s fatwa against PR people.

Bernoff: Corporate blogs need to earn trust

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Josh Bernoff’s commentary around recent study by Forrester Research on the low trust of corporate blogs is very timely. At least for me. I contribute to a few other blogs outside of this one, and have just stared a corporate blog for the Decision Theater.

I instinctively shunned the style of a blog that deals with just my work place. Granted, it’s quite an unusual place, with a whole bunch of 3D visualization, technology bragging rights and is also the ‘front door’ to Arizona State University. But people come to walk through our doors for solutions, not brochure-speak, and I like to tell them that the “about us” part of the 5-screen presentation is really about our clients, and the big issues out there in decision-making.

Bernoff’s point is that a corporate blog shouldn’t come across as corporate stuff forced through a blog platform. In fact it should not be a 100 percent about the organization.

I couldn’t agree more.

  • I trust Dell and subscribe to their blogs like Digital Nomads not because of what ‘the company says about its products, but because of  the conversations they allow to take place around the Nomads idea.
  • I often click on a company’s blog before even read their press release, so why would I read a blog that is written like an extended press release?
  • The ‘platform’ doesn’t earn respect in an of itself. It’s the human voice. Reid Walker writes a blog about ‘WorldSourcing’ that happens to be a blog for Lenovo. He’s the VP of global communications, but writes about books, outsourcing, innovation… not about Lenovo ads or PR.