Hoi Polloi

Hoi Polloi has moved!

I have moved my blog to hoipolloi.wordpress.com from September.

This blog will no remain as an archive of 3+ years of posts.

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Is it live, or is it on ShootLive?

What technology would PR companies, the police, and the paparazzi want to get their hands on?

It's delivery that basically sends raw images from a video camera direct to the consumer. It is a service from ShootLive,  news agency for the digital age based in Nottingham, UK. The ShootLive service was used in the coverage of David Beckham's game in July.

Why does this change the game? Because of the need for speed. In journalism and in PR, or even in law enforcement, seconds make a difference. The scoop, the intervention of a criminal, the ability to relay instantaneous pictures of a tragedy such as an earthquake can impact lives.

Images from camera are streamed (as an XML feed) to a mobile phone in less than 60 seconds, the company says. What I like about all this is it doesn't make the end-user jump through hoops to receive it. Images could arrive as a multi-media text alert.

What could this do for marketing? Apart from the obvious ones that ESPNs of this world will jump onto, and be able to monetize, marketers could get users to opt-in to premium content. Think: Olympics, stage acts such a Live Earth, and even regional ones. The McDonald's and IBM's could sponsor XML feeds . Down the line when the genie is out of the bottle, cell phone carriers will use the technology too. Already, AT&T has a similar service called VideoShare where subscribers could stream video with a camera phone to another phone --while talking! These are both low-end ($29.99 and $79.99) Samsung phones not some souped-up smart varieties.

Stories in PR and social media

Summing up a few interesting stories last week.

1. The walled garden of Times Select may soon open up to the rest of us who don't want to part with $7.95 a month.

2. AT&T 'censors' Pearl Jam's words. they didn't want to to get Dixie Chicked, for supporting an anti-Bush band.

3. A company called Fatdoor has come up with an interesting way to use social networking to get to know the neighbors. It's a mashup of public information, a wiki, maps etc. Good explanation here. 

4. A very cool idea from Edinburg, England. Using a camera phone and text messaging to detect art.

5. Taking story #3 to its logical conclusion, how about using a social network to get to know your dog's owners? Technology Review magazine had a story about how your dog's FaceBook-like page (called a PetWork, I kid you not!) could enhance your social life.

And when I die would you Twitter my buddies?

A story in the Arizona Republic yesterday about a Tucson company creating graveside memory capsule may seem a bit awkward, but the technology got me thinking. If you could make a digital tribute downloadable at the grave, it opens up many other possibilities.

Indeed John Stevenson's product is more low tech than the competition, which the article says, is a digital headstone that plays a video. A sort of a flat screen atop one's final resting place.

Ten years ago, we would have never thought the media or digital content would visit this fine and private place but let's get real. If we use digi-formats to preserve everything we do while we are around (Flickr family albums, Facebook profiles, digital photo frames, and people who Twitter about everything they do in life) someone might as well put these profiles to use after we have hit the final escape button. It seems to me these are opportunities waiting to be tapped. Some free advice:

1. MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Plaxo memorials

2. Turning expired (no pun intended, honest!) domains into permanent markers that redirect to online memorials. Perhaps an idea for GoDaddy.

3. Archiving of Google search results for a person's name as a legacy (OK, vanity) item to stuff into the graveside memorial.

4. Preserving tweets from a heavy Twitter user.

5. WiFi for cemeteries. I bet this exists.

6. Bluetooth connectivity on headstones --to download those digital memories. Right now one needs to bring a laptop and cable to the grave.

7. The ability for people to text message condolences to the family from anywhere and turn these into a card or book.

Netiquette and Debbie Weil's email

Debbie Weil is a terrific writer and blogger. But she made one small slip a few weeks back that had some people --bloggers, mainly-- jumping all over it crying foul. Her crime: Allegedly attempting to "seed" a blog with comments.

The debate around "comment seeding" is not in the same league as, say, someone ratcheting up a company's image with fake posts, as did Whole Foods' CEO's Yahoo postings. But in the touchy blogosphere that is admirably the cheerleader for transparency, it comes off looking that way.

What Debbie did, as this accompanying post suggests, was send a few people an email asking for their reaction and/or comment. The reactions were swift and some severe --on her blog. Her email soliciting comments was posted.

As Debbie says, she was only using email as a back-channel, and didn't mean to deceive anyone.

There are two big issues here:

First the expectation of privacy. When someone contacts a professional colleague or 'friend' (itself an ambiguous term in the MySpace and FaceBook era) there is a tacit understanding that those conversations will be "off the record." But as any experienced PR person will tell you, there is no such thing as "off the record" anymore. Sadly so.

Second: Social media Netiquette. "What's that?" you ask. In this huge, rough experiment we are engaging in, netiquette (which got attention when email and forums were the biggest things) has been dispatched to the basement. Dan York, wrote a related post around the same time that Debbie Weil was being harangued. It was about the need for updating netiquette to embrace social media realities. Is it OK to email a professional colleague about your organization or client, or would that be considered a shameless pitch? Or to turn it around, is it OK to decline to participate in the back-channel? Or are all the back-channels including IM and Twitter, no longer back-channels?

Debbie's slip, which is more a poorly worded piece of communication than anything else teaches us a lot.

Stop slamming Arizona!

While I was away on vacation, taking pictures of some amazing cities, celebrating their positive side, the Economist magazine trashed my stomping ground and I am not a happy puppy. I am particularly annoyed, since they conveniently ignored so many good things that are happening here.

If you haven't seen the Economist's July 26th article on Arizona ("Into the Ashes") go read it and come back.

Going by some letters in response to its editorial last Wednesday in the Republic, readers were as critical. Two out of three letters criticized the editorial for not facing reality. One, however was a letter from a couple who thought the criticism was undeserved. They signed off as being "London by birth, Arizona by choice."

Why such a paucity of positive commentary? More pertinently, where was our PR clout when this kind of 'rubbish,' as the Brits say, was in the works? How does someone from a magazine like this get to slant an article so bad, when some of the points raised are actually good: less smog than LA, new schools emerging, the opportunities that Light Rail will bring etc. They paint us as a "crime ridden mess" apparently because of the Light Rail system construction , snowbirds who leave their homes unattended, and clueless visitors.

That's like saying London is the armpit of England because of the overcrowded subway system, clueless tourists, constant terrorism issues, and Crossrail construction --conveniently ignoring the amazing positive sides of this colorful, cosmopolitan city.

Why are positive stories hidden from view, tucked in the back of the paper --like this today, about the growing state economy? It's time we started telling telling our own stories, if no one else will.

Where SEO meets social media meets PR

Yesterday, IABC's Phoenix chapter put together a terrific meeting on something that's on everyone's radar. I suspect the topic ("Using SEO & Other PR Tactics to Communicate with Social Communities in a Web 2.0 World") was intentionally long and geeky to make a point. More on this later.

MarketWire had pried open the controversial but hot topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media. Whenever these two buzz phrases occur in one sentence, advertising agencies, media relations people and marketers get a little hot around the collar. I know, because I used to work for a SEO-meets marketing company. There are lots of myths and concerns out there. Just a year ago SEO seemed like a lot of pixie dust before things like Twitter and User generated Content showed up. "Social bookmarking" sounded like something Paris Hilton does when thumbing through National Inquirer.

Unfortunately, the world inside corporate marketing is still looking at what's unfolding before us as pixie dust 2.0. Look around you. The world of marketing and PR is roughly divided into people who think "we don't have a budget for this crap" and those who go "could we upload this sucker to YouTube?" So it's about time we discuss Google Juice, and Digg, and the social media press release, and what in the world is Facebook up to, trying to upstage our beloved search engines.

Could people game the search engine, someone asked? Do "Diggs" mean anything a few days after the story breaks? Was there some 'white-hat' way to get better rankings on search results? Everyone probably knew the answer to that last one. Sure, there are black-hat methods of sneaking past the algorithm, and there's marketing.

You don't need to know how this algorithm thing works, but if you accept the logic behind it, then you gotta work on it. Good case in point: Southwest Airlines. Three years ago, they optimized a press release by editing it based on search terms they had been tracking. They tracked the results and saw a direct correlation to a spike in sales. They won an award for this. It's a matter of crafting headlines and knowing where to drop in a hyperlink, and a meta tag.

Which brings me to the MarketWire topic. Google (or Yahoo) the words "SEO PR social media" and see if IABC Phoenix is anywhere in sight. Now Google (or Yahoo) the topic (Using SEO & Other PR Tactics to Communicate with Social Communities in a Web 2.0 World) and see what pops up at the top of your search results. Brilliant huh?

Or is it still pixie dust?

Why we Google --and how!

Here are the results of our survey in June about the kinds of things and people we search for online. We asked ValleyPRblog readers, and communicators on social networks such LinkedIn and MyRagan to tell us a bit more about their Googling habits.

• 46.9% of respondents said they Googled a company or web site of a person.
• 100% searched for a person by name.
• 34.5% of people Googled a person they may do business with.
• 18.8% Googled someone within their organization ("Someone I don't know in my organization, but am curious about")

When asked whom they most Googled in the last month, 63.3% said they checked out the same people in their organization, as above.

And how often do people Google someone?

• 32.3% said they do it several times a month.
• 22.6% said they do it many times a week.

But here's what's equally interesting. People sent me emails about whom they Googled, many admitting they regularly Google themselves. One user said he Googles someone 25-40 times a month! Others wrote to say they look up potential employers, social contacts, someone being profiled (a media person's response.)

What this might mean: People seem to be placing enormous weight on online reputation systems, and even ranking. We didn't ask respondents if they were looking for negative or positive factors, but from the tone of the emails and open-ended answers, combined with the stats above, a picture emerges: we do worry about what might pop up -at least when we Google (or Yahoo) ourselves!

People also seem to be doing some degree of due diligence about whom they come into contact with, or may be doing business with, using search engines to gather some 'context' before they meet a company, a potential employer, or a date. At the enterprise level, given the potential for organizations to leave unsightly digital trails, we see a whole industry of media monitoring, and reputation management taking off.

What do you think of all this?

Thinking beyond the iPhone

Al Ries must be keeping his fingers crossed.

Now that the blogosphere and the media is all abuzz about the iPhone's activation problems, the Positioning guru must wonder if he is right, after all.

Before the launch, he had declared that the iPhone was was "going to be a major disappointment" not in the activation department mind you, but because it was technology going off in the wrong direction. He believed that technology that took the path of divergence would succeed as it had in the past, but this new gizmo on the 'convergence' was bound to fail.

With all respect to Mr. Ries, I don't think it's good to predict  the future on the past. Not with Apple, the company that's defied going with the flow. It's got to where it is by not been fixated on the rear view mirror. Its Graphical User Interface was its way of sticking the middle finger at the geeky DOS world. It's

A smart phone is a convergent phenomenon. I don't have a problem with that. It happens to look like a phone, but it is anything but.  Even before the iPhone, we were able to do a Google search, maintain contact databases, use text messaging and email, and play music on these convergent devices. Millions of users didn't think it was headed in the wrong direction. Why? Because the interface simplified their lives.   

If you've been awed by the iPhone's stunning multi-touch interface, Jeff Hann's multi-touch sensing demo will give you a glimpse of where we are headed. It's not on a phone. But it's guaranteed to blow your mind!

The other Olympic logo, and what it teaches us about checking with Joe Public first.

  Discussing what constitutes a good logo, is as safe as discussing what makes up a great cup of tea.

In the latter, it's anything from the leaf structure, to the mountain elevation in which the shrub is grown, to the fermemtation process of the dry leaf, the water in which it is brewed, the milk you add, to the ritual (and crockery used) in serving the beverage. Tastes change, and ultimately it's the end user's perception rather than the 'tea taster's' that is relevant.

The Vancouver logo could add some perspective. It wasn't "awarded' to an agency, but was the result of a competition opened to the public, in the early spirit of, you know, user-generated content. There too, people weren't happy. (It was called the 'offspring of the Michelin Man, among other things!)

But there was a difference. In Vancouver, it was the design community that protested most. In the UK it was the hoi polloi that was livid--who said the logo looked like "two characters from The Simpsons engaged in a sexual act!"

Vancouver threw the logo design open to anyone. The brief specified that the logo must."

• Capture and reflect the unique image and spirit of Canada, Vancouver and Whistler
• Capture both Canada'€™s passion for winter sport, and the energy and excitement of the Olympic Winter Games
• Reflect Canada's love and commitment towards our spectacular natural environment
• Embody Canada’s values and aspirations, celebrating our diversity and inclusiveness
• Provide a broad symbolic platform for interpretive storytelling – an emblem that can convey a range of meanings

The winners explained that it represented the "inukshuk" or €œthat which stands in the capacity of a person" -- a sort of a guide to help people find their way through the wilderness. It stands for friendship in Inuktitut.

What does the London logo stand for? It was left to Sebastian Coe, Chairman of the 2012 Olympic commitee, who defending it saying:

"We don't do bland. This is not a bland city"

That's it?

Joe Gomez, from the UK sent me this, calling it an ill-fitting jigsaw, and a broken window that is"jagged and wobbly to look good on their laptops, mobiles and TV screens."

If Sebastian Coe is the equivalent of the 'tea taster,' I would rather trust Joe Public -you know, people like Joe.