Today about 150 engineers at chipmaker Intel (INTC) will kick off "Zero E-mail Fridays." E-mail isn't forbidden, but everyone is encouraged to phone or meet face-to-face. The goal is more direct, free-flowing communication and better exchange of ideas, Intel principal engineer Nathan Zeldes says in a company blog post.
Go on... take a look at the Daily Lark...
As the PR man, working late, looks at the photos of the fire's aftermath he managed to keep from the press, he reflects on the nature of his job:
I look at the photographs once more in the Manhattan sunset
The same light falls on the one of my wife and my kids
Then I put them back in the file
Permit myself a smile
Keeping them hidden was the best work I ever did‘Cause people like us, we do make the world better
And if it's better for us, it's better for everyone
I open the window to the rush hour sirens on West Street
I see the Power and the Glory all over this town
All over this town...
Nice piece in Wired on Twitter cloning which causes tiny blogs to bloom everywhere.
...the cloning of Twitter is largely an international phenomenon. There's Nowa from Japan, Robiz from Poland, TexteIn from Germany and Noumba from France. Mambler, a clone from Germany, even has its own Twitter-style shorthand language.
The Twitter mindset is one that meshes easily with blogging's youth
culture in regions of the world where SMS phone messaging is more
prevalent. Mambler creator Michael Baumann says SMS is widely used by
people under 30 in his native Germany, a main reason for the popularity
of Twitter-style services.
Interesting post on productivity and "getting in the flow".
1. Clear goals.
To enter the flow state, you need to define a short-term goal. If you’re working on a large multi-session project like a web app, decide your purpose for this single creative session. Be careful not to overqualify your purpose; your purpose should be “an arrow, not a container”. (- Steve Pavlina)
2. A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
3. A loss of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time.
5. Direct and immediate feedback; behaviour can be adjusted as needed.
6. Balance between ability level and challenge.
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. Intrinsically rewarding action, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. Focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself.
"I like to think of the blogosphere as a vast, earth-engirdling digestive track, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins). Another word for "parasitic," in this context, is "critical." Blogging is at its essence a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every nutritional molecule, whether real or imagined, is fully consumed. To be called a literary parasite is no insult. It's a compliment."
Nice post here by Richard Edelman on an event they staged last week. Some highlights:
Established communities will go social
Ebay. Amazon. Wikipedia. Motley Fool. New York Times. What do these sites all have in common? They are large content sites with enormous communities. As the web goes social, individuals in these communities want to meet, learn about, learn from or even date fellow members of these communities. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for established communities to introduce social and profile aspects to their communities. First, it is a move that will get tech pundits talking, and the cluetrain folks applauding, as it embraces social and conversational aspects of community. Second, it will increase engagement between customers, therefore increasing the amount of time people will spend on the site. It also increases the amount of social capital individuals invest into their relationship with the content site, ultimately making individuals ambassadors of the brands into which they invest time.
Flickr wins in Wired News reader poll. Interesting that Odeo also gets high marks - need to go play with that. del.icio.us comes in at #3 - probably my fave.
Without del.icio.us, I'd be drowning in a morass of bookmark clutter. Seriously, drowning. Every article I've saved for later, every YouTube video I've earmarked for repeat viewing, every cache of free MP3s, every (ahem) NSFW page I come across. It all gets posted to del.icio.us. It's truly a lifesaver.
Like many I'm sure, I watched the tributes to 9/11 last night. Behind the scenes a furore is bubbling regarding ABC's movie. According to the Holmes Report: "American Airlines offers a blistering response to Disney’s fabrication “The Path to 9-11” with a statement calling it “inaccurate and irresponsible” and Editor & Publisher’s coverage suggests that the airline might be considering legal action." It's stunning to me that any broadcaster could treat such a sensitive issue with this degree of insensitivity and lack or respect.
Meanwhile, apparently the Government's drug campaign worked in reverse. According to independent reports, "Instead of reducing the likelihood that kids would smoke marijuana, the ads increased it. Westat found that "greater exposure to the campaign was associated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others use marijuana." More exposure to the ads led to higher rates of first-time drug use among certain groups, like 14- to 16-year-olds and white kids." To assess the spend purely as an attempt to discourage drug use is to misunderstand the deeper motive in many Government advertising initiatives. Paul says it well:
"They are not designed to discourage kids from smoking pot; they’re designed to make sure kids know that smoking pot is WRONG. So the government sat on the results of the study for 18 months—spending another $220 million on ads it knew were not effective—not because it likes wasting money, but because the money wasn’t wasted. Its supporters, particularly those who believe pot smoking is immoral, want the government to lecture people about the immorality of smoking pot."
Interesting Map of the news...
Plagiarism is apparently rampant in the Blogosphere... Oh dear...
One thing that is clear to me as I scan blogs is that few are content originators. Most are what I call "content illuminators". These are people who take other content and cast a new light on it with thoughtful observations and commentary. The majority seem to be "content pointers" - directing readers to news and views of interest.
The BG piece seems to confuse, at times, plagiarism and content origination. There is a difference between pointing to and illuminating others work and representing their content as your own. Maybe I misread the piece. My rules are simple - where you exclusively became aware of something via another blogger, show a little link love. And, do unto others as you'd have them do to you - don't knowingly steal content.
Steve covers the BG story. Nicholas writes an open letter to someone stealing his content. There is a piece in the Merc this morning titles "Of Plagiarism and Punishment".
And, there is the story on the front page of the FT last week (Lucy Kellaway's piece in the FT is worth the subscription price alone...) of the Raytheon CEO who's book - Unwritten Rules of Management - Raytheon distributed more than one-quarter of a million copies of. As the FT tells it:
"... a young engineer who spotted that 17 of the rules bore an uncanny resemblance to a book called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering published in 1944 by W.J. King. The young man wrote this up in his blog. From there, the story made it into newspapers." FT
Eventually his board nailed him by requiring him to forgo his pay rise for the year. It seems they have pulled the Rules, but here is a pretty good synopsis.
Gladwell is also onto Plagerism. Plagergate is upon us... He points back to an earlier New Yorker piece which is worth a read... He flags the relevant passage:
. . . this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from "The Silence of the Lambs." Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to "match" a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else's idea. But had we "matched" any of the Times' words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
"You either have a tremendous love for what you do, and passion for it, or you don't," Schultz told me. "So whether I'm talking to a barista, a customer, or investor, I really communicate how I feel about our company, our mission, and our values. It's our collective passion that provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace because we love what we do and we're inspired to do it better. When you're around people who share a collective passion around a common purpose, there's no telling what you can do."
I'm posting a little light - down at the Red Herring CMO conference. And, a bit of Deja vu - same place many of the big dot.com conferences took place during the boom.
The NYTimes reveals all.
According to The Washington Post, "Visits to Sites for Blogging, Local Information and Social Networks Drive Web Growth". If you are looking to build your ROI model for launching your enterprise into blogging and beyond, this makes the case pretty well:
While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that your little blog (or my little blog for that matter) is going to come close to rivaling the growth of MySpaces. The point I am making is that what this research tells is that to be successful as a publisher or marketer you don't have to be blogging - but you have to be participating in this medium and its relatives.
I admit, I'm obsessed with briefcases and bags. An obsession only rivaled by office stationary... Anyway, look at these beauties...
You've probably seen those Outback TV ads which suggests Australians are more advanced because they are a day ahead... well, not these guys who decided to steal critters from the local zoo...
"The original plan was to steal a koala - that's what they were going to use to swap [for] the drugs,'' Mr Kemp said.
"[But] apparently [the koala] scratched the shit out of them.''
"The blokes have quite a lot of scratches and lacerations caused by the koala.''
The thieves then decided to take a crocodile instead.
"I don't know what makes someone go, 'Oh we tried to steal a koala and that didn't work so lets go and steal a croc.' "
Police believe the crocodile was taken in the early hours of Saturday morning but Mr Kemp remembers seeing it on Sunday morning.
He thinks it must have been taken on Monday morning when another drama occurred at the zoo.
"One of the wombats got bitten by a snake. No one can officially remember seeing [the female] crocodile on Monday."
Some stories are just too good...
In a snipet from his upcoming book Tufte speaks to: Sparklines (Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics). Worth a read, if not just to look at the elegant graphics. Strangely, most communicators are word people. We speak in words and draw/write in words. Taking a look at this concept it could be a pretty good framework for putting images back into our communications.
Other stuff:
Who's Building the Next Web? - Next Frontiers - MSNBC.com
Newsweek discovers Web2.0 and puts it on the cover.
More on Google Finance. I still don't like it.
You guessed it, it's a blog. When you blog it is certainly content for the media to use - but it ain't a release. Although some blogs are increasingly reading like press releases... :-).
Blogs make news. Press releases make news. Things can result in a similar outcome, but be different.
Where Steve and I do agree is enough is enough on the old "die press release die" debate. So, rather than fuel the flames on this one all I'm going to say is scour through my blog for multiple entries on this.
A press release performs a technical communications function that is necessary to delineate official and non official communications. That it is sadly abused and often ill executed is a different issue.
I also agree with Tom - it's time for a rethink of the mainstream release - I like his ideas. But maybe where we diverge is that I like the idea of reinventing the release, not killing it. It remains an important communications tool.
Kevin has some good thoughts on this as well.
WSJ has a piece on corporate reputation focusing on Microsoft. It also flags the reputation conundrum - great reputation doesn't equate to great stock performance.
"A good reputation doesn't guarantee results. Microsoft's share price has been stagnant even as its reputation has been on the mend. But reputation can be especially important in recruiting and keeping employees, executives say."
Richard Edelman is quoted:
"Moreover, Mr. Edelman believes, Microsoft benefits from a "halo effect" of the independent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is hard to appear evil when you give $6 billion of your own money to combat disease -- even if the money was earned in part from anticompetitive practices."
Finally, some brevity in the world of PR! Richard Branson comments on the appointment of his new PR Pro:
“As my memory is so bad our primary criteria in selecting a replacement for Paul was finding someone who answers to the same name. Paul Charles fits the bill admirably and is apparently not too bad at PR (although we’ll soon train that out of him). ”
Thanks to David Henderson for the link.
... or are you a HEDI? Entertaining read...
GENERATION C
Aka Masters of the Youniverse. The C stands for content, but it may as well stand for control freak. Rarely satisfied with their lot, this tribe (mostly male, mostly 25-40) "create their own content". It's also C for conceited, as they all think they're hot enough to write a novel, make an iMovie, be a garage-band star, become a citizen journalist (blogger). In fact, they're the personification of gravanity (graffiti meets vanity) - the arrogant desire to make your mark in the public domain. Some fancy themselves as minipreneurs and indulge in eBay trading. Others settle for insperience - bringing luxury experiences into their homes via cineplexes, boom-boom rooms and spa-ties.
I'm off to DEMO in the morning. LogLogic will be announcing lots so stand-by. Will post from the show.
So, Nick Denton is lifting the lid on the Valley with ValleyWag... plenty of juicy gossip...
The NYT reports that the ex-chief of HealthSouth (he claims unknowingly) paid for positive coverage:
Throughout the six-month trial that led to Richard Scrushy's acquittal in the $2.7 billion fraud at HealthSouth Corp., a small, influential newspaper consistently printed articles sympathetic to the defense of the fired CEO.
Audry Lewis, the author of those stories in The Birmingham Times, the city's oldest black-owned paper, now says she was secretly working on behalf of Scrushy, who she says paid her $11,000 through a public relations firm and typically read her articles before publication.
It's just stunning that this kind of stuff keeps happening without any kind of ability for censure by industry bodies - both media and PR. I'm sure there are as many frustrated journalists as there are PRs who are sick of having their profession tarnished by this kind of behavior.
This is cool. Get your RSS feed as an email. I'm using this to get RSS feeds of news releases etc. in email on my Crackberry. I just don't have the time to look at another interface on that little screen, so the more I can get in email, the better. Squeet is sweet.
Read Harry's post on how he got to be #1 on Google. Lots of SEO wisdom and smarts:
"I'm telling you this so that you will:
Tom has a great list of things learnt in 2005. I especially like his first three:
Blogging is the most honest form of self-promotion bar none because if you can't walk the talk you won't get the clicks.
Content will be king because all those links have to point to something of value--otherwise they are pointless.
Every company is part media company--it is both publisher and publication and tells stories all the time.
Aside from being a pretty good bloke, Tom was one of the first hacks to jump ship and become a fulltime blogger.
Will be interesting to watch how SBC/ATT and Intel handle their new brand efforts and what, if any, role Participatory Communications will play in that. The WSJ covers how Intel is about to embark on a major transition:
The changes include a new version of the company's blue logo -- without the dropped "e" that has long been a part of Intel's branding -- along with a new tagline "Leap ahead," which emulates such campaigns as "Think different" from Apple Computer Inc. or "Just do it" from Nike Inc.
Intel will no longer use the well-known "Intel Inside" logo but is keeping the related marketing program that provides incentives to companies for using its products. - WSJ
I Hope Jeremy has big bandwidth and a big server because his account of the Alaska incident is scarry - and it's going to attract zillions of eyeballs. Via Jeff Jarvis. Compare his account with news reports- some of which are featuring Jeff's photos.
"Citizen Journalism" in action. Jeremy P makes a really interesting point that one lesson for any PR practioner facing a crisis is that you are going to need to manage transparency. It seems that Alaska employees are going nasty-comment-happy on Jeremy's (the Jeremy on the plane) blog. Assuming he would never know I guess, they commented away. Jeremy simply looked at the originating IP addresses, which were from Alaska. And he was gracious enough to suggest that they might have been hackers using Alaska's IP addresses. Not likely mate!
So, if your communications policy doesn't cover commenting on blogs as an employee - then you might want to make sure it does.. and then make sure employees know it. And, if your crisis communications plan doesn't feature monitoring of and communications with the blogosphere - better get on that as well.
Awhile ago I wrote about how one of the key tenets of the Participatory Age is "triangulation". Using Google or Yahoo, you can pretty much triangulate any content on the web, skirting around the charging (business) models and formats in which the orignial content resided. Content gets repackaged and "place shifted" (taken from one format, say, a chapter of a book - and represented, say, in an online guide).
Steve has a great example of this in his post on O'Reilly's Hacks Books. I'll leave it to you to read - you'll get the idea pretty quick. The other value of triangulation is the other content that gets connected to what you were orignially looking for.
Thursday's edition of the FT had some telling quotes from P&G Chief, Lafley:
<blockquote>"Just as I believe the consumer has power in the purchase chain, I think the consumer has the power in the consumption and media and message chain. So she's the boss - or he's the boss. And so the world is shifting from a 'push' to a 'pull'. She and he have a lot more choices."</blockquote>
OK, so I've got a stationary, notebook, pen fetish. If i stopped buying now, I wouldn't ever need another. My justification is the perpetual fight against clutter and time... It's great to read about a fellow sufferer...
John, "...having unhappily put up with an unwieldy multitude of diaries, address books and notepads for years, Mr. Berendt caught the Gutenberg spirit three years ago and indulged in a little obsessive-compulsive print project of his own. He printed up all the letters and numbers he would need to spell out the months and days of the week (no need for K, X, Q or Z) and sent them to a company that makes rubber stamps to order."
A lovely story from the NYTimes...
One of these for Christmas please... Have been hunting for a Skype phone that supports Mac and these look great.
Worth a read... a classic applied to the Web. Richard describes it as follows:
Robert Bringhurst's book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer's bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field. Indeed the renowned typographer Hermann Zapf proclaims the book to be
a must for everybody in the graphic arts, and especially for our new friends entering the field.In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, I have structured this website to step through Bringhurst's working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS. The future is considered with coverage of CSS3, and practicality is ever present with workarounds, alternatives and compromises for less able browsers.
Thanks to Stowe for The top ten "buzz words" to be added to the T9 dictionary (a predictive text input dictionary for users to tap into when texting on their mobile phones):
Lifehack - a tool or technique that makes some aspect of one's life easier or more efficient
Mashup - new information created by combining data from two different sources
Placeshift - to redirect a TV signal so the viewer can watch a show on a device other than his or her television
Playlistism - judging a person based on what songs are on the playlist of his or her digital music player
Podjack - to plug the cord of one's digital music player into the jack of another person's player to hear what the person is listening to
Puggle - a dog bred from a pug and a beagle
Sideload - to transfer music or other content to a cell phone using the cell phone provider's network
Vlog - a blog that contains mostly video content
Vodcast - a video podcast
Ubersexual - a heterosexual man who is masculine, confident, compassionate and stylish
Transparency is always the best practice in any crisis and it seem that CBS is getting more transparent. Launched back in September and just spotted by me (sigh!) is CBS PublicEye blog- it shines a light on what goes on inside the CBS newsroom. You can take a peek inside an editorial meeting, see how the evening line-up is determined, or, follow a 'day in the life'of a Whitehouse story. Ok - so this is more about PR and education than it is transparency, but it is really interesting and worth a look.
Jerry Yang, co-founder and chairman of Yahoo! (YHOO), pointed out that the U.S. remains far behind some Asian countries in broadband. Korea and Japan, for example, offer consumers far faster broadband connections than the standard in the U.S.That's a problem, said Reed Hastings, CEO of the DVD-rental service Netflix (NFLX). Hastings thinks the next phase of the Web won't arrive until people in the U.S. can get bandwidth of 10 megabits per second, or about 10 times the common rate here, at a comparable price. Only then, for instance, will people really be able to watch video online comfortably. But he says that's now three to six years off.
Enjoyed a great panel discussion with Buzz Bruggeman from Activewords on buzz marketing. If you get a chance to hear him speak, listen. And try the product, it is great.
In a 1999 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Joan Magretta and Nan Stone wrote: "Before Peter Drucker, most people thought about their businesses with a manufacturing mindset, defining a business based on what it produced. Today, the marketing mindset prevails. It was Mr. Drucker's critical insight that instead of buying a 'product' the customer buys the satisfaction of a need." - WSJ
