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Short attention span vs social media

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Multi-tasking could be a terrible thing for our social life. For all our talk of interactive and conversations, we’re quietly downgrading our brains to Short Attention Span Interaction mode.

The long conversations we used to have on the phone and the face time we give our colleagues and friends are being overtaken by our capacity for IM, to micro-chat, and replace a lot of real conversations with virtual reality formats. We embrace social media, but it has a way of making us un-sociable as well. You may be doing some of this multi-tasking already; I am guilty of many as well.

  • Glancing at Blackberry during a business lunch or date, with the occasional “I have to take this…”
  • Scheduling conversations during commute, creating an elegant way to abruptly end a conversation with “you’re breaking. Let’s talk later.”
  • Chatting on IM when a phone call will work better -so that you can browse the web at the same time without getting caught.
  • Getting distracted while talking to your spouse on the phone because of a super urgent email you’re responding to.
  • Complaining that someone (usually a family member) was dumb enough to write you a real letter that she could have easily condensed it into an email.
  • Cutting off an employee interview in 20 minutes because of a ‘Blackberry urgency’ even though the candidate just started opening up.

10 things we obsessed about in 2007

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Here’s what I will remember about 2007 from the perspective of marketing, social media and communications. We obsessed about these stories in PR, marketing and social media.

1. Facebook made us rethink what social networking could do for one-to-one communications.

2. Network neutrality became a debate that not just the geeks and telcos were interested in.

3. Short codes gained popularity as the new URLs, as text messaging took off. Sadly, it took the shootings at Virginia tech for universities to realize the value of this kind of messaging.

4. Mashups became more entertaining than the original. Think: the “1984″ spoof ‘commercial‘ about Hillary Clinton, viewed over 3 million times.

5. It was the year micro-blogging (with Twitter and Jaiku) got taken seriously,

6. This was the year email spam (in the form of “co-worker spam” and “PR spam”) hit a tipping point, forcing communicators to take a good hard look at databases, and how to try to target better. Not convinced? See the rumpus Wired editor, Chris Anderson’s “sorry people you’re blocked” post did.

7. A new, intriguing search engine called Mahalo (made possible by humans, not just algorithms!), the future of Wikipedia, and whether “amateurish” knowledge is helping or hurting us.

8. The toy for grown ups: the iPhone, what else?

9. Beacon, Facebook’s daring experiment with something called “social ads.”

10. Obama-mania, both here and abroad.

(cross posted from ValleyPRblog)

Will PR and the media call a truce?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

The dust won’t settle for awhile since WIRED Editor Chris Anderson announced last week he was “banning” lazy PR people who pitched him with irrelevant stories. First strike and they’re history.

The discussion has got interesting. Here’s one, where Brian Solis asks if PR and media could sign a peace accord of sorts. He says:

I promise to fix this problem among those with whom I work with and can reach. I will also work with others whose voices are trusted among PR practitioners and their peers within the communities in which they seek guidance.

All he asks is that Anderson remove the list of names from his blog so as not to give the offenders a public shaming.

Anderson, however, is unapologetic:

Many people wrote to apologize, promising to reform their ways, and asked to be taken off the list. I’ve written to all of them to thank them for their commitment to change, but I’m not going to undo history.

Solis then brings up another uncomfortable topic –unethical cut-and-paste reporters. But outing them is not necessary, he says.

Terrific post, Brian.