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I’m back to the grindstone after a week off for the holidays.
Things to expect here in the coming year:
Enjoy…
I’ve got a long and storied history with Twitter. At first, hated it. Then loved it…and recently have been somewhat ambivalent.
Personally I think the short form blog, which is what Twitter is, appeals to some of the very things that are wrong with modern society. It’s designed for the ADHD generation, feeds the growing cults of personality, and in general, is a prime expediter of the dumbing down process. The whole thing was designed to be scanned, not read, a very fact against which the writer in me is compelled to rebel. Beyond that, I attribute it to the ongoing decline of blogs and blog commenting.
That was until I saw a new app for the iPad called Flipboards (free). This app takes your twitter and facebook feeds, as well as just about anything else RSS and on the fly retrieves the summary data from the links which are embedded and constructs an online newspaper format for you to read it in.
So now, instead of reading a limited 140 character post, with an unintelligible shortened url, the app pulls down all the content, pictures and all and creates a very user friendly representation of the data.
That’s the point at which the world changed…
Now instead of this:
I get this:
(Sorry for the blurry photo – it’s actually visually stunning, but I had to take the pic with my iPhone in my dark cubicle and with my hand tremor in full force today, that’s as good as it gets)
Overnight, that makes Twitter (and Facebook) a crowd-sourced news clipping service which brings me all the news that’s fit to link.
Oh, and by the way, RSS is dead as a reading format. It’s now a cross-site content transfer language.
Try it, I think you’ll be as blown away as I am.
<This post has become our annual xmas season special. Enjoy…and may yoose keep ya’s noses clean, be good earners and stay in the good graces of the Reinfather for another year.>
Last night was the annual broadcast of the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer animation, which no doubt many of the parents in the audience had to sit through. So today, I share the classic MadTV “The Reinfather Trilogy” with you…
Warning: Extreme violence, incredibly vulgar langauge, blasphemy, poor table manners and in general none of these three videos should be played if you are prone to being offended, have small children near you, or will get in trouble for laughing out loud.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-qM78XinyE (embedding is disabled on this one…)
Raging Rudolph – Goodfellas Parody
The Reinfather – Godfather Parody
A Pack of Gifts Now – Apocalypse Now Parody
I don’t write about politics often, but the situation in Massachusetts just begs discussion.
Since the election a scant month ago, Massachusetts has been rocked once again by scandal, evidence of blatant corruption and put us in a circle that seems it will land our 4th House Speaker in a row in jail. The #3 guy in the House has already had to resign his position.
Here’s the stone cold truth: right now there is a veritable avalanche of evidence depicting the horrendous corruption in our state. Mob families have been brought down with less under the RICO statuate, which is unfortunately an apt description of our state government as it is today.
Let’s review the bits and pieces:
Perhaps instead of investigating the corruption in the Probation Dept., we should instead have a top down investigation of hiring practices in ALL the departments. Do you hear me, MassDOT, Lottery, etc.?
Our word for the day, ladies and gentlemen, is Kleptocracy (via Wikipedia)
a term applied to a government subject to control fraud that takes advantage of governmental corruption to extend the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats), via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service. The term means “rule by thieves“.
Let me ask you a simple question: How well do you think single party control of the state legislature and senate has worked for us?
As I sat in a meeting this morning, scanning email on my iPad, up popped this message: “The Smurfs would like to harvest cabbage.”
The darned push messages…it seems every application on the iPad now wants permission to send a push message. NYTimes.com breaking news? Maybe… Twitter? Probably not… My Monster Ranch, Empire Story, Virtual Villagers? Definitely not…
My kids have come to love the iPad. They really enjoy the games, and quite honestly, like most kids, they aren’t to discerning about how they configure the thing. So now, on top of ”did you make your bed” I now need to keep on them to “make sure you turned the push notifications off.” I feel like the darned IT department. After a whole day at the office, I now often go home and have to spend hours configuring a printer, or troubleshooting issues on the home network, or updating our online Netflix account, or Hulu or any one of a hundred connected things.
And it’s coming to the point where virtually any device can let me know that most important information: “The Smurfs would like to harvest cabbage.”
“We’re #2, we try harder” is a marketing strategy that has served Avis well for years. This morning I saw a corollary to that strategy, “we’re #16, we don’t even bother to try.”
In the past couple weeks, Burger King, who has done an excellent job marketing recently with “The King”, has spent a lot of money advertising for Seattle’s Best Coffee. The big push is for “Free on Friday,” a take on the old, try it once and you’re ours strategy that works so well for heroin dealers in the hood. The problem here is this: if you’re product can’t back up your claims, your sunk. In this case, phase two of the marketing plan better be “we’ll pay you to drink it.”
The brew is a dark, foul concoction with strong overtones of varnish and the peaty hint of cow manure, subtly juxtaposed by an acerbic tinge of kerosene. For their part, Burger King provides the perfect accompaniment by failing to instruct their employee-bots on the correct regional definition of the word “regular” which, at least in the NE vernacular, implies the presence of cream and sugar. Not only did they not correctly install the accouterments, they failed to provide them in the bag so that I might correct their error.
The short version is this: the only thing this stuff might be “best” at is removing paint. Or perhaps opening a gastric ulcer in those unlucky enough to imbibe it.
Tomorrow, many are predicting that Apple will announce iTunes is moving to the cloud. Like everything else.
Welcome to the joys of virtual ownership. This is the place were we never really buy anything. We rent it. All the bits of our lives, the things we rely on day in and day out become mere sand slipping through our fingers.
Alvin Toffler predicted in “Futureshock” that we would eventually move past the service economy. I think we’re seeing that now. Instead of building products and selling them, we’re finding new and interesting ways to re-market things that are already built and the rent them to each other.
In the world of music, this new development is meant to make our iPods full of music obsolete. We’ll be paying micro-payments 0r global access fees to get access to all the music. So in truth, we won’t really own anything; except the rights to listen to music for a definitive period of time. There it is, the virtual timeshare.
Call me old fashion, but I really hate renting things. I hate paying twice. Even worse, I hate paying in perpetuity. The oil bill, the phone bill, the electric bill are services that really need to be monthly bills, but music? Video? Where does this stuff end?
It’s been a while since we had a jazz video. For some reason I had this little bit running around my mind this morning. Enjoy…
Keith Jarrett performing “Autumn Leaves”.
It’s may be well trod ground, but it’s still a topic that needs to be considered: What to do about reputation-damaging tweets or critics mobilizing on social media websites like Facebook. This week we get a brief glimpse into the world via the Boston Business Journal. In their survey, they found that 33% of PR professionals said their companies were not prepared to deal with social media attacks.
“Online threats to corporate reputation are escalating the social media imperative when it comes to the new skill sets and experiences required of today’s CCOs,” said George Jamison, one of the survey’s creators, in a statement. “Credible experience in this area has shifted from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ for the most desirable corporate leadership roles.”
Local companies say that it’s key for firms to establish a presence on social media sites before issues arise – not after.
Indeed, you need to “be there” before the problems occur. The problem is this: everyday it becomes harder and harder. SM staffs tend to be the first ones cut when the budget needs to be slimmed down, more and more services reach that critical level where they really need to be monitored. Last year we didn’t care about Foursquare, and the year before Yelp didn’t matter. How about today? What is going to really matter tomorrow?
Also, we miss a couple important facts: not every “dissatisfied customer” out there is going to be someone we can “fix” via social media. And, even worse, there are some we really shouldn’t be trying to fix. Face the facts, in business you do your best to please most of the people most of the time, but the threat of social media is that someone who doesn’t really understand will start to expect that we’re going to magically please ALL of the people, ALL of the time.
I think the best path forward here for business is to adopt the prime tenet of the Hypocratic Oath: “Primum non nocere – First, do no harm.” In short, we do our best to be conversant and transparent in our dealings with customers. An even hand goes a long, long way.
However, we need to remember the world is full of trolls and miscreants, and some of them love to dog a brand. One thing I can tell you from experience: engaging/enabling a troll is a recipe for pain and heart ache.
Here are a couple of things I learned from managing online communities that you should consider:
Further reading:
7 Truths About Running Online Communities
Forget Disclosure and Transparency – We Crave Honesty
5 Lessons from a Social Media Campaign Gone Horribly Wrong
Manifesto for Social Media: Stop Talking and Start Doing
Possibly the funniest social media bit I’ve seen in the past year…
