Thanks to my cousin, Kumar Pereira, for this reference about a campaign in Australia. Carlton Draught Beer’s web experience called "It’s a Big Ad." Hard to describe this, because it’s so funny and watchable. Find it here. It was a viral marketing campaign, spread via blogs.
Another great idea: Virgin Mobile offers what it calls a PressurePoint Presentation. For kids. It is part of an Enlightenment Kit they offer teens who are trying to persuade parents they need a cool new phone.
The Yahoo story is picking up steam. Wired News, mentioned this y’day:
Last week Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that monitors human rights and press freedom, revealed that Yahoo’s Hong Kong division helped Chinese authorities track journalist Shi Tao, who sent an e-mail through his Yahoo account allegedly containing state secrets.
Robert Scoble, the Microsoft blogger is always worth checking, even if you don’t work in Microsoft, or have any interest in the software biz. Why? he gives you a fresh perspective on how employees ought to speak on behalf of their companies, whether of not they blog about it.
Take this post from Friday, September 16. Scoble comments on a post from someone writing about his CEO, Steve Ballmer:
SteveB, the Web isn’t something you can win. The Web is something you can love. Or something you can hate. But it’s not something you can enslave or own — anymore than you can own or enslave oxygen or water.
I think SteveB assumes we all know what he’s talking about. I think he’s talking about businesses on the Web and not the Web itself. Sorta like you can own a fish that swims in the sea, but you can’t own the sea itself. I know I’ve often heard him speak and find myself saying "huh?" but when I add "profitable business" to what he’s saying it makes a lot more sense.
How often would talk back to your CEO like that?
Which brings me to aomething else. Corporate-lingua franca. In IABC’s magazine CW, this month, John Freivalds speaks of how marketing slogans, ads, trademarks are only a limited part f a company’s identity. He cites Microsoft as having a web site for developers and corporate communictors called Dr. International. How many companies take the time to give its external players that kind of support?
Thanks to Constan Basturea, for correcting me on the fact about my last post about the Katrina Wiki. It is not in any way connected with Wikipedia.
Here’s asn interesting use of VOIP, in the relief effort. A Skype call button to be placed on blogs and sites.
Hurricane Relief has a different approach now. Interesting how the new media work today.
Houston Chronicle has a Dome Blog
Craig’s List (for New Orleans has a Lost & Found information page.
Katrina Network is a portal for those affected.
Wikipedia has, well, everything about the diaster! Housing, volunteer info, jobs offered (in other states) to the evacuees.
Yahoo
continues to defy everyone, hiring Kevin Sites as its first correspondent.
Couldn’t have picked someone better, since Sites, a reporter (for
CNN and MSNBC) and blogger has covered the war, and continues to defy what war reporting
is all about. Radar magazine described him as a ‘heat seeking journalist’ (he covered
the Iraq war, Afghanistan, and the tsunami) since
he is known for the controversy after shooting the Mosque shooting.
See interview here. Sites’ observations the implications for the media are worth pondering.
“like most people
these days who are under 70, I don’t have time to sit down and watch the
nightly news. And I used to work for them. So most of my news searching comes
from the internet. I will look at blogs, I’ll look at irregular sources, but
also at a lot of the mainstream sites.”
His War Diaries, maintained as a blog, are some of the best reporting you’ll find. Take this observation, from Afghanistan.
This is how it works. There are two wires. They are insulated wires. But still. They are jammed into the socket openings in the wall. Follow the wires. They wrap a couple of times around a steel bed frame, across the floor and finally, thread the grooves carved into a brick, sitting on other bricks in the middle of the room. The wired brick is glowing.
On this chill night in December, this is where the orphans warm their hands–huddled around this glowing brick.They are not sad or whining or feeling sorry for themselves. They are laughing, campfire faces, flushed in red–happy for this one thing, this small warm thing.
As a follower of Apple innovation, can’t help noticing that the line "impossibly small" associated with the iPod Nano has the same ring as "insanely great."
Then, of course, there’s the long anticipated iTunes phone, ROKR, Apple’s alliance with Motorola. Cingular wireless will be the only mobile phone carrier carrying the ROKR.
Both were officially launched on Wednesday. Just watch as word-of-mouth takes over. Today, a google search for the word ROKR generated 2.2 million results. Already ‘Nano’ and ‘Apple’ yield some 6.3 million results.
Having converted this blog to a relief blog soon after the tsunami (the project has now moved here) I cannot help notice the similarities with Katrina. WeBranding is one blog that seems to have done just that. The relief site is now at this link. It links this Katrina Data Project, for instance.
There’s also this Hurricane Watch blog.
But it’s not just the bloggers who are providing great coverage.
Check this Lexis Nexis site.
Then, there is the Times Picaune site, NOLA, that’s doing a terrific job.
I also recommend a look at this book project, First Book, a non-profit organization that is now helpng children affected by the hurricane.
Soon the term ‘Broadcatching’ will move into your lexicon, just like the way ‘narowcasting’ crept in. Even now, it’s the province of the technology folk, who use RSS and Bittorrent, which is a file distribution Peer-to-peer software. The idea is not new.Jon Udell wrote about it last year.
(In case you are not someone who uses RSS, which is an aggregrator of blogs, it’s worth a try. There’s an easy Web-based RSS solution called Bloglines, and others such as Newsgator.)
But to get back to Broadcatching, it is all about timeshifting, and offloading TV content to another device so that you can view it later. One user describes it like this:
Between this and my iPods, I don’t use media anymore, just mass storage.
The reason this is important for communicators, is that distributing content to TV stations, and monitoring broadcasts, will soon have new avenues, as TV (like newspapers and radio before it) quietly becomes a web experience. Already the iPod and other MP3 players are allowing people to take their radio shows and lectures with them. Broadcatching will shake up the entire TV industry and change the way the format their programs, make them available, and even how they blend advertising into them.
I cannot help noticing the similarities between what happened last December in South Asia, and what’s happening now in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. As someone who runs a tsunali relief site, I have to say that the response to that tragedy then was beyond magination. People were not simply generous, but it demonstrated the power of true networking.
I may be wrong, but the grass roots movements appear to be slow to get behind this enormous tragedy in our country. However, there are organizations that have responded, as true marketers and communicators should. Here are some:
Marketing Sherpa:http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3068 This is a list of Marketing, PR, and Advertising organizations who have got things moving.
Jeremy Pepper has a post about what PR people can do.
One blog stands out for reporting the true situation from the ground.
I suppose it’s suddenly dawning upon everyone that gas price hikes across the country are just the tip of the iceberg. The ripple effect on many aspects of the economy will be huge, and we better get prepared to deal with it, no matter whatbusiness we are in. A snapshot of that, at a local level, can be found in this post on Dave Barry’s blog, where someone from Houston observes:
As a Houstonian, I am embarrassed to admit that on the radio, TV, and even here in the office, people’s comments have gone from "Oh, that’s terrible!" to "Wait a minute, they’re all coming here?!? 25,000?!? What about us?"
It’s not just neighboring cities and states that need to wake up to this reality. I just returned from a visit to Sri Lanka, where all the fund raising in the world (and the world was very generous) has not begun to solve the social problems that the tsunami has created. People are still living under plastic sheets…
One last thought: Communications. We hear that communications is coming to the Astro Dome. If we were able to track this massive hurricane, why was it not possible to deploy temporary transmitters in advance of, or immediately following Katrina to the areas where flooding was predicted, knowing fully well that existing cell phone and other communications infrastructure would fail? I say this because I there are companies who send up balloons into disaster areas, and others that can provide mobile transmitters. Space Data Corp is one of them that comes to mind.
In Sri Lanka, a local private telecom company rushed in and installed temporary towers to stricken areas, even before the waters receded. Roads were inaccessible for days, but communication was up, fast.
Hoipolloireport 