Blogging the salmonella outbreak

There are divisions of the Federal government  you probably never knew existed or paid attention to that are blogging –such as this or this.

So as they get up to speed with new media, it’s interesting to watch how the latest outbreak of salmonella poisoning –and the massive recall of peanut butter — has been enough to get a blog going. It’s barely two weeks old.

Called the PeanutButterRecall blog, the directors of the CDC and the FDA have begun communicating without simply relying on the statutory press release.

The site runs a bit slow, especially the link to the government database that lists hundreds of products from cookies to pet food to store brands, and the map is not exactly interactive, but who cares? Without waiting for the perfect format someone in the bowels of the crisis seems to have given the order for the PB Recall be covered from their perspective, with so many media lenses trained on them. One more thing, they also have a Twitter account.

Good job!

Sidebar: You can appreciate what these guys are doing when you look at the other Peanut Butter blogs out there. These are mainly run by fans or foodies, but they seem to be carrying on as if nothing has happened to the product.

 

Buzz ideas re-ignited

If you had been following the spike in attention given to the concept of buzz about five years back, you may have come across the name Emanuel Rosen. He came out with an amazing book, The Anatomy of Buzz that peeled back the layers of buzz –the nodes, connectors, clusters and triggers– that propels something into popularity.

So it came as a great surprise when I received an email from Rosen a few days back asking me if I was interested in reading his updated book. How did he find me, or know I was a big promoter of the book? Apparently I had referred to it in an article at that time –a Google search solved the mystery.

Before I sent him my address I called him –to make sure I was not responding to some phishing scam!– and he gave me the background to why the book needed to be ‘revisited’ (rather than updated). Two seconds into the conversation it struck me. This was before the iPhone, before YouTube, before a lot of things that have inbuilt wiring for buzz. We almost take buzz for granted. Buzzworthiness is almost a hidden design feature. No wonder this concept needed to be looked at once again.

More about the book, in a  few days.