British Petroleum's (BP's) failure to adequately enlist social media in the communications battle over the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill made picking a single video clip of the month too difficult. So I've chosen two BP commercial spoofs, both highlighting BP's growing credibility gap as it desperately tries to control information and ignores the new (social media era) communication rules: collaboration, openness, transparency, and timeliness. While BP is … [Read more...]
Archives for 2010
Exciting or Scary? Rise of Social Media Swarms
May 24, 2010 by
Today, we are on the verge of a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action. Social media is creating a new kind of communications fluidity, a fully immersive experience enabling conversations to be hijacked in ways unimaginable in decades past. Up until the 1980s, totalitarian governments, superpowers, media cartels, and leading brands had dominant control over national and even global dialogues because of superior resources and a monopoly … [Read more...]
My Membership in ‘Exclusive Club’ Ends
May 21, 2010 by
My membership in the "exclusive" Google Wave club is over. Google announced yesterday that it is making the invite-only, real-time communication tool available to everyone, including Google Apps users, at wave.google.com. Like last year's Google Wave introduction, the announcement took place at the Google I/O Conference. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical … [Read more...]
YouTube Celebrates Fifth Birthday
May 19, 2010 by
YouTube turns five years old this year. The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Feb. 14, 2005, and the website launched in beta form that May. Here's one of the videos the company has made to celebrate the milestone and its influence on early users—in this case, Federic Alvarez, a 30-year-old filmmaker from Uruguay behind the YouTube smash sci-fi short, Panic Attack: … [Read more...]
Super Shock! Non-Profit Client’s Domain Stolen
May 15, 2010 by
I was in for a shock last week when I visited the website of a non-profit whose website I recently redesigned in WordPress. Instead of seeing the non-profit’s website, I found a page full of ads reading at the top, “This page is parked free courtesy of [a different web hosting firm than the one the non-profit uses].” Using Network Solution’s WHOIS behind that domain? page, I discovered the non-profit’s domain registration information had been deleted, causing … [Read more...]
Video Clip of the Month: Chris Brogan Interview
May 1, 2010 by
My May 2010 video clip of the month is an interview Chris Brogan gave for the LikeMinds conference in the United Kingdom. Brogan, arguably one of the top social media experts in the world, discusses his vision for social media's future. Here's the YouTube video: … [Read more...]
Living Stories WordPress Plugin & Theme Released
April 30, 2010 by
Google released a Living Stories plugin and theme for WordPress yesterday enabling anyone who publishes through WordPress to organize coverage of an ongoing event on a single dynamic page. Living Stories is an experimental format for displaying news coverage that Google created in partnership with the New York Times and Washington Post. Google software engineer Eric Zhang wrote about the process of developing the plugin on the Google News Blog. "Our next step … [Read more...]
Ning Users to Say Good-Bye to Free Networks
April 18, 2010 by
Ning--the popular service allowing users to build their own social networks,--is making massive staff cutbacks, increasing its fees for premium services, and cutting off its free services. All Ning users who have been getting their social networks for free of charge will now be asked to start paying fees or phase off the Ning platform. Ning claims more than 46 million users spread over 300,000 social networks. The vast majority of its users are non-profits and … [Read more...]
Video Clip of the Month: Social Media for Good Causes
April 1, 2010 by
My April 2010 video clip of the month features Beth Kanter giving a 40-minute presentation on how non-profits can use social media to promote their causes and raise funds. Kanter is the author of Beth’s Blog, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for non-profits. Here's the YouTube video: … [Read more...]
A Peek at the Google Wave Extensions Gallery
March 13, 2010 by
Remember Google Wave? Last November I was pretty excited to get an invite to join Google's experimental real-time communication platform (which is still in preview and not released to the public). After I got the invite, I immediately logged on and played around a little bit—but largely by myself. With Google Wave, collaborators share e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves. Since I didn't have any collaborators, or at … [Read more...]
Do-It-Yourself Media Relations: 5 Easy Steps
March 7, 2010 by
Public relations is vital to building your company and promoting your brand. If you're a small business, non-profit, or start up, however, your budget might be too tight to hire a public relations firm to publicize your products and services to reporters and bloggers. Here are five easy steps for successful do-it-yourself media relations: 1. Create a Press Kit Every company should have a press kit: a hard-copy version, contained in an attractive folder, and an … [Read more...]
Video Clip of the Month: University ‘The Office’ Spoof
March 1, 2010 by
My March 2010 video clip of the month is a spoof of the NBC sitcom "The Office" that students at the University of Denver produced to show their frustrations with technology in the classroom. The video features “Michael,” a technology professor who hasn't kept up with the latest technology and is trying to wing his technology lectures. At one point, he hands out floppy disks so outdated his students’ laptops don’t even have drives to read them. Later, he tries to … [Read more...]
Pentagon Uses Twitter to Announce Policy Change
February 28, 2010 by
Breaking with tradition, the Pentagon used Twitter Friday to announce major changes in its social media policy. Under the new policy, military personnel can Tweet, blog, and update their Facebook pages on the U.S. military's non-classified computer networks. More than a dozen social media sites the Pentagon blocked in May 2007 will now be unblocked. Price Floyd, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, broke the news of the … [Read more...]
Off to My Satellite Office: Panera Bread
February 27, 2010 by
NOTE: This post is out of date. "Alice" starts Extended Day, the Montessori equivalent of full-day Kindergarten, in September 2011, which will make me available for semi full-time work. A client recently asked me to redo a company website in WordPress in five weeks. That means I may be spending a few evenings next month at my satellite office: Panera Bread. As I mentioned in my "My Life as a Communications Consultant" post, thanks to the Internet, I work from … [Read more...]
Twitter Code Swarm: A Mesmerizing Video
February 8, 2010 by
One of the things I love about Web 2.0 is all the creativity and collaboration it creates in the high tech community. Today, I want to share with you a Vimeo video from Ben Sandofsky, a team member of the new Twitter Engineering blog, which visualises Twitter's commits history in a beautiful and mesmerizing way. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to a software's code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. The video … [Read more...]
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