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“Steve Jobs a ‘national treasure”
BBC, on the news that Jobs is taking an leave of absence for health reasons.
“We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?”
Tweet used by Israel government during press conference
“The blogosphere and new media are another war zone.”
Maj. Avital Leibovich, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ foreign press branch.
“Sea of Culture,” Gulf of YouTube,” Bay of Angst”
Areas named on a new map of the world.
“I am not ready to leave journalism; journalism is leaving me”
Former Tribune journalist, Dennis Welch, on starting up a blogger-meets-mainstream journalism site, Arizona Guardian.com, that will fill the gaps in how news is reported,covering more of the ‘why’ not the ‘what’ in news.
“The rebooting of our democracy has begun.”
Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and the TechPresident blog.
“I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive in manhattan”
Someone Tweeting on Thursday.
“There are people standing on the wings as the plane sits half submerged in the hudson”
His follow up a few seconds later
“True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here!’”
James Andrews, VP of Ketchum, who tweeted when he got off a plane in Memphis for a presentation. The client he was pitching to, wasn’t absolutely positively happy.
Someday the phone in your pocket will be less and less of a talking instrument, and more and more of a remote, a news conduit, a personal carbon footprint calculator, a gaming device, a…
You get the point.
But the fact is, many of our organizations are lagging in making much of our communication:
(a) Platform agnostic –a fancy way of saying it should be accessible on a Mac, PC, Windows Media device, Blackberry or iPhone
(b) Interactive –letting our visitors and audiences do something with the information, such as tagging, annotating, commenting, forwarding etc
(c) Portable –moving an applet from a web to a phone for instance.
I brought this up at a meeting recently where the topic of social networks came up. I am not a huge fan of creating one more cooler-than-yours social network, because we are all dealing with social network fatigue and it will only get worse. Making content portable to me is one way to solve it.
If we’re all going to gravitate toward “cloud computing” the mobile device might be the cloud’s best friend.
To get back to the ‘other’ functions of our mobile device, I just met with my good friend and marketing thinker, Steve England, who showed me some mind-blowing mobile applications. Granted, his phone is smarter than mine –I caught him ‘following’ Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki in a coffee shop! Steve’s working with a company that can print a bar code (like the one on the left) that could be scanned with any camera phone.
From an end-user perspective, these bar-codes are not only for consumer products but can act as visual cues that lead a person (like breadcrumbs?) from offline to online seamlessly, bypassing logins, account verification etc.
From a Communicator’s or Marcom manager’s perspective, these codes/icons could be even used on a touch-screen to deploy timely information to a niche opt-in group. On a wider scale, it’s being touted for emergency –and even ‘minor emergency’ alerts .
Right now, it’s probably a challenge for you to even read a PDF I send you on a phone, right? Coming soon, I may be able to reach you, even if you’ve accidentally left your phone at home, via a digital panel on a bus.
Now that would be truly ‘mobile!’
Is there a universal number to be on a ‘do not deliver’ list for phone books?
I just called Yellow Book and asked to be taken off their list. Tel: 800.373.3280.
I understand there is a business model behind the catalog business, and I would hate to see people lose jobs over this, but isn’t it time for regulation to reduce the number of unwanted phone books? What’s wrong with a system where the phone book company asks us to opt-in to receive one?
I notice that two cities are already considering a law to reduce phone books.
The Direct Marketing Association has DMAChoice.org. Isn’t it time the phone companies got their act together?
Very happy to be able to break the story about a pandemic flu exercise we conducted here at the Decision Theater at ASU.
It was an exercise that worked on several levels:
- Strategic Planning
- Testing Scenarios
- Communicating with multiple groups
- Testing a plan through systems dynamic model
I am in the Communications business, so I was keenly observing how different players interacted, assumed leadership positions, and communicated from within the ‘crisis.’
I was lucky to be the fly on the wall (the camera-toting fly, that is) so it got me thinking of the parallels there were for businesses. How do organizations communicate and act in a crisis? As in any marketing campaign or business crisis, the war room is staffed by team members who are are suddenly confronted with the need to operate without the usual props. They may have Blackberries, but the information is coming at them fast and furious through other channels. They may have strong opinions, but so too do the people across the table.
Then there was the interesting irony of some having too much information (mock TV news updates, threat levels, a web cam feed, fact sheets etc) on one side of the room, and others deprived of the usual sources of information (CNN, RSS feeds, radio etc) –all this according to plan. We hosted this event in two areas. Emergency Ops was situated in the ‘drum’ -the high-tech room with a 260-degree panoramic screen, laptops etc. Incident Command and the Executive Policy Group were situated in an adjacent conference room, tethered to the drum via a live camera feed and a land line. No cell phone communication was allowed between the rooms.
Communicators often face situations like this, albeit not in the same life-threatening context. How does a team of those representing PR, Marketing, Advertising, Web Design, HR, IT and Legal Affairs work in crisis mode, in a compressed time frame, when they barely talk to each other in normal life? We seldom act out scenarios, assuming bad things won’t happen to us. History tells us otherwise.
Unless we plan for these hypothetical ‘pandemic’ events we won’t really know. That’s the deeper meaning of strategic planning, isn’t it?
Creative Commons the organization that introduced the world and content creators to the value of double c’s (instead of the stifling “c”) turns five today.
It was started byStanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, Cyberlaw, and intellectual property experts in 2002.
From New York to Bangalore, there are live parties going on. They’re even serving what’s known as ‘open source water.’ And Free Beer, brewed using an open source recipe. Really!
If you’re interested, see my longer post about the Creative Commons, at ValleyPRBlog.
Let’s drink to this!
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If you have winced when forced to buy tickets to a music act or the theatre at the "rack rate," you’ll like Seatwave.
It’s a sort of a trading hub for entertainment and sports tickets, where buyers and sellers post, bid and guarantee the sale through Seatwave which acts as the intermediary. Whether it’s for last minute Prince concert tickets (£ 35.95) Hairspray the musical (£ 49) or a test cricket match between India and England, they are available here. Needless to say they are largely for a British audience. But if you don’t mind paying it forward, so to speak, with £ 2,799 for the 2008 Super Bowl (here in Phoenix), that is supposedly the price range.
But the most interesting part of this bottom-up trading system is the fact that the acts reviewed by the hoi polloi, are impacting sales. Some in the audience are even writing reviews in the interval, the Producer of The Lord Of The Rings is quotes as saying.
And if you think this is wild, consider TxtReviews, a service in Canada offering people movie and book reviews via phone. In Canada, you need to send a message to this sort code 416 -7384397 (stands for 416 REVIEWS) with the movie name or book ISBN number and you’ll get a sms-abbreviated description back via a text message.
The Dow Chemical’s Human Element campaign may not have taken it to a level of humanizing it in it’s first iteration of the campaign, but it was a start of showing the company’s commitment to critical issues facing the world in which it operates.
This is tough when you’re a positioned in people’s minds as a “chemical” company. But they try.
So could press releases and advertising be part of an extreme makeover kit? Consider what they are up against. Dow inherited (OK, bought) Union Carbide in 2001. Those of you born before 1984 will remember that Union Carbide was associated with Bhopal, the huge pesticide-related tragedy in India that killed thousands of villagers. Dow has to operate in a PR world where organizations other than them keep this story alive, and issue ‘lipstick on a pig” press releases like this about long term contamination. Thanks to the internet and our access to information is only a keyword away, straightforward PR won’t cut it.
Against this backdrop, take a look at Dow’s second phase of the Human Element campaign. The press releases on the Dow site don’t scream out CSR (corporate social responsibility), but bring attention to climate change issues, water and food supplies are built-in. It’s sponsorship of Blue Planet Run with National Geographic has a non-linear approach to a PR campaign, that has advertising, celebrity, media, and outreach all blended together. There’s a Celebrity-endorsed sneaker selling on eBay (auction closes July 20th). There’s a team blog covering the 95-day, 16-country Blue Planet Run. And there are press releases like this that don’t tell you much considering what good in-depth coverage is coming off the blog.
No matter what your position is on Dow, you have to recognize that this is a well thought out program supported by good marketing communications. If it’s good PR, it’s because it’s so well integrated into the other components, and invisible.
Not all good brands can achieve this kind of success, being a magnet for the hipster, college crowd and being family friendly at the same time. I stop by at least three Einstein Brothers here in the valley, and each has its own niche. They have one thing in common: long lines of hungry people who stick around, too.
So what’s the lure of Einstein’s? Is it their brilliant invisible marketing, or is it a brand that classically fills a need? Personally, I’m not sure if it’s my weakness for bagels, the environment, or the coffee that pulls me back. The company says that "Marketing is a key ingredient in our business process. Our programs typically target very specific markets/regions…" Yet I don’t get postcards in the mail, I don’t see coupons, and I rarely see any advertising. Do they have a secret word-of-mouth channel?
The marketing side of me tells me it is the ambiance, not the baked goods. They have spared little in looking after the retail side of things. The menu boards are so much more friendly than, say Starbucks, their signage
gives them a mom-and-pop feel that doesn’t have "slick franchise" written all over it. The employees wear buttons with high-school like slogans ("Thrilled to Chill"), and take time to get to know you.
Then there’s my five-year old daughter, who’s a different market segment obviously. She will choose Einsteins over McDonald’s any day, making me wonder what’s their secret sauce. We have a father-and-daughter Sunday morning date. She loves reading the goofy murals about the ‘darn good coffee’ and posters that declare such things as ‘great moments in poultry’ while enjoying a cinnamon twist. But she also recognizes good customer service, that at her age is a significant thing. A former manager at the McClintock and Guadalupe store knew her by name. She was thrilled that "Uncle Ron" would come by and chat.
Tempe Einstein’s, the iconic store at the corner at Rural and University is a patently ASU hangout, with Sparky and ASU posters competing with drinks advertised as "The Cold and The Beautiful" or branding around Elmo.
The Phoenix store, at the corner of McDowell and 7th, shares the same wall as Starbucks, but if the lines are any indication of a brand’s strength, then Elmo wins hands down among the busy working crowd of doctors and women checking their Blackberries.
Even if you’re not in marketing, if you have to deal with multiple audiences, spend a few moments at Einsteins. It’s a lesson that’ll cost you less than two bucks.
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