Andrew Lark

Recommended Reads

• Gladwell on innovation...
• Dell vs. HP... conversations really do matter... good work Richard!
• Top Gurus.... including Michael

For Lack Of An Energy Policy...

Friedman really hits it in this Op-Ed... This sums it up really...

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

A Crime to Blog Opaquely...

Opaqueness was always going to be a problem in the blogosphere.  Seems the UK is moving to make it a crime:

The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.

"If advertisers and their agencies ignore the ethics of responsible advertising, the damage to the advertising and marketing industry generally will be considerable," said Marina Palomba, legal director at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the U.K.'s agency association.

Thanks to Steve for the pointer...

Recommended Reads

• NYT on Newscorp's head of content
• Capital Times goes offline... “We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”
• Good read - reflects many of Covey's 7 Habits thinking...
• Killer Text Tricks...
• Interesting data on Green on the Web...

RECOMMENDED READs

• Good overview of Google Reader, along with Tips
• Dell’s Embed-able, Subscribe-able, Share-able Video Ad - very cool
• Dell’s The Future of Storage, Assisted by Techdirt, Ars Technica - worth a look
• Dell, Starbucks, and the marketplace of ideas ... great story on Ideastorm... Congrats to the Starbucks team.

Recommended Reads

• Google the world's most powerful brand...?  Hmmmm, don't think so.  There is a difference between brand value and brand awareness.
• Top Tech Bloggers... no big surprises
• Another reason to use Skype...
• Bumpy ride for Linux in emerging markets... I wonder if these folks have actually been to an emerging market and see the incredible traction Linux has?
• Xobni sells to Microsoft... I hope this isn't the end of a great product.

Productivity Tip #4

I was inspired by today's NYTimes to circle back on my productivity tips related to the email deluge that hits your email box each day. If you are suffering through a mountain of email, here are some quick pointers to slay the mountain.

1. Maintain seperate email addresses for seperate purposes.  My Dell.com email is strictly for Dell.  I use my gmail account for all subscriptions.  My personal email is just that.  When I am looking in my inbox I am looking with purpose and less likely to get distracted.
2. Create rules related to the people that matter.  If I get an email from Michael or Mark, it glows red.
3. Create rules for all cc. mail.  The vice of many an office politician, cc. is an annoyance for the most part. So, all my cc. mail goes into a read later bucket.
4. Look at your email 2-3 times a day max.  Never engage in email ping pong if it can be avoided.  Outlook isn't a game.  By focusing your time on email you will motor through it faster, spending less time on correspondence that doesn't matter. "Mencken’s 100,000 letters serve as inspiration: we can handle more e-mail than we think we can, but should do so by attending to it only infrequently, at times of our own choosing."
5. Create automated responses.  I use my signatures for this.  I'm old school believing all email worthy of some response.  So, I have a ton of standardized responses.  I don't need to type "sure, I'd like to meet.  I'm snowed for the next week by Debora can work a time for us to connect" dozens of times a week.  So, it's a signature file.
6. Identify if an email is a task, reading assignment, or quick action.  If it is a task and you are using Outlook, drag it to your tasks folder and make a task out of it.  If a reading assignment, drag to a reading folder for when you do have time to read.  If a quick action, action and delete.
7. Empty your inbox each day.  Never, ever, leave it full and aging.
8. When on vacation, designate a colleague to scan and delete email.  If you have a full box on your return, look at the emails glowing read (see 2.) and delete the rest.  Trust me, if it is that important, they will bug you again.
9. There are plenty of other great thoughts over at lifehacker and other blogs.

recommended reading

• PopURLs Blue Edition... An Enterprise news format.
• Read/Write Web celebrates another birthday... Congrats to Richard!
• The Elevator Pitch & Twitter...
• Five Habits for Greener Computing...
• Special Alt Characters... ☺☻(remember to use the numeric keypad)

the new nomadism

This is a great read from over at the Economist.  Broken into a range of sections:

• The new nomadism
• Working from anywhere
• A nomadic environment
• Family ties
• Mobility and location
• Nomadic monitoring
• Homo mobilis
• Audio interview
• Sources and acknowledgments

At Dell we call this The Connected Era.  Here's a snippet:

Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people in particular more autonomous or more dependent. Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them. Activists are trying to piggyback on the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve the world, even as they worry about the same tools in the hands of the malicious. Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought. Beyond technology

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over.

Something Every PR Person Should Read

Great post over at RRW on pitching them.  Some terrific rules for every PR pro.  I like the ideas on RSS especially and OPML files.  All PR Agencies should be doing what Voce are doing...

Voce Communications' Justin Kistner sent me a great OPML file in response to my asking on Twitter why so few PR people have sent my their clients' feeds. Here's the file Justin put together and here's what it contains:

• The feed for Voce's company blog, Voce Nation
• A feed for press releases, which he said was empty right now but will deliver the goods when there are items available
• A combined feed of all the Voce peoples' messages on Twitter, built using the attractive service Tweetpeek - something I hadn't seen before. I'm going to delete this feed from my reader just because I already converse with two thousand people on Twitter and I don't need more of those messages in my RSS reader. Better safe than sorry, though - an OPML file can be like a menu for subscribers to select from.
• The highlight of the file is a feed from Yahoo Pipes that splices together the blogs of all of Voce's PR clients. It's something that Justin can edit behind the scenes and I'll never know the difference - I'll just get posts from the feeds of new clients as he ads their feeds to the master feed I've subscribed to. It's a great solution to the problem.

Hugh Dumps Twitter...

I found it made me lazy as well... and my wife pointed it out... I still enjoy Twittering every now and then and keeping track of all those tweets... the utility is still there so I doubt Twitter is going to face any kind of mass exodus. Last time  I looked it's growth continues...

Stretched Exponential Relaxation

I always wanted to write a headline like that.

Stretched Exponential Relaxation is similar to the gradual decay of radioactive material - and as used in this Economist piece - is a perfect way of looking at how stories age.  Like radioactive material, they have a half life.  But the stretched bit gets at how much of a role other factors have.

Years ago, we described this as a "story getting legs" - as it jumped the average news cycle with non mainstream media continuing and expanding it.  Today we have the likes of TechMeme and Digg - who not only extend the story's half-life, they mash-it, expand it and grow its popularity.  Other factors like the time of day a story is posted and the category into which it was posted suddenly become important.

This is where the difference between novelty and popularity - and I would argue, prominence - becomes apparent.  You have a novel story - like the one in The Economist - it doesn't appear popular, or prominent, until the community takes hold of it and mashes-it-up in their own environment.  It's judged against a "river of news", ranked, tagged and categorized.

This has big ramifications for communicators. 

• Are we delivering news and igniting conversations at a time of day optimized for the community.  I'm wondering, for instance, if this doesn't cause everyone to rethink the early morning announcement?
• The social nature of the content and platform onto which information is released suddenly matters.
• The "cascade of conversation" is more important than the point of conversation.  To break out of an ever shrinking half-life the volume of conversations matters.  As does reader votes.

Bottom-line - the emphasis on storytelling needs to be paired with an emphasis on the mechanics of distribution.

Online social networks | Everywhere and nowhere | Economist.com

Interesting piece on the value of social networks... The Economist, in short, says...

So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on...

... The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks' lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users' information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

 

Online social networks | Everywhere and nowhere | Economist.com

on our graffiti campaign

Jeremiah just posted a case study on the Facebook-Graffiti campaign. His summary:

Unlike most marketing campaigns that deploy heavy ads, fake viral videos, or message bombardment, this campaign let go to gain more. Overall, this is a successful campaign as they turned the action over to the community, let them take charge, decide on the winners, all under the context of the regeneration campaign. The campaign moved the active community from Facebook closer to the branded Microsite, closer to the corporate website, migrating users in an opt-in manner that lead to hundreds of comments was clever. Well done.

Whine...

So I want to use my ATT calling card.  The number provided by the operator doesn't work.  The url on the back of their calling card leads to a dead page.  A search on the term "direct access number" - the language they use on the back of their card - yields a stupid, "tell us more about yourself" page.  Web incompetence at its finest.  Back to Skype.