Post 15, 2009: Chk-chk boom!

May 27, 2009 in Random, Ranting

There you go … now I’ve blogged about it too.

But frankly, this is all it deserves.

Post 14, 2009: Reviewing the Cuddlee

May 18, 2009 in Random, Ranting

Sometime last year, Jo White (aka @mediamum) wrote a series of tweets describing an object called a Snuggie.

If you are disinclined to follow the link it’s a fleecy blanket … with arms. And it has a “so bad, it’s good” advertorial I’ve embedded below.

There’s also a parody video.

Now you would think that after watching the parody, I’d think the Snuggie is a stupid, ugly thing. But no … ever since @Mediamum’s tweets I had been oddly intrigued by the Snuggie.

So when catchoftheday offered a local alternative/clone, the “Cuddlee”, at a price of less than $20 , including postage, I bought one.

It arrived with this …

… which gives you a fair idea of what is on offer.

But I felt like I should go further and describe it in more detail. So here goes.

The Cuddlee is made of thin polar fleece. Thin as in you can see through it. Perhaps thin as in “spare blanket from a $40/night
truckstop” is a more accurate description.

The garment, if that is the word, has at least been finished with a blanket stitch. But it is quite rough cut and there are some small tears around the outside.

The sleeves are enormous. You’ll start to remember really off jokes from Borat when you wear it.

It certainly warms up the front of you, but as soon as you put it on, your back feels cold. This could be solved with some kind of fastening mechanism, but I doubt the thin fabric could cope with that. The lack of fastener means the Cuddlee drapes awkwardly and is not easy to wear while walking. Nor is does it make any accommodation for the human neck and chin, and its rectangular shape means you have to somehow shunt bits of it out of the way so it does not cover your face. The resulting folds have nowhere to go and drape in a silly way.

As I have been warned, it makes a lot of static electricity. My daughter has walked away from it with her hair in considerable dissaray!

Having said that, I have found it quite useful when sitting down in front of my computer. The back of my chair keeps my back warm and the Cuddlee takes care of everything else, other than the rear of my calves.

The Cuddlee is, if anything, too large. I’m 190cm tall and heavily built and the garment covers me very comfortably when reclining on a pile of pillows.

Overall, the Cuddlee has some utility. It does keep you warm. But it is hideous, with its only aesthetic redeemer being the fact it makes you look a bit like the Avout from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

If  someone gave you a Cuddlee in, say, 1985, as a freebie when you flew business class on an airline owned by a developing nation’s government, you’d think it was pretty cool.

In 2009, it’s just tat. But it’s my tat and it’s quite warm and I think I will be able to hang onto it for one season before I feel like I’ve gotten $20 worth of fun out of it.

Post 13, 2009: Events need to get over the artefact, too

May 11, 2009 in Ranting, The future of journalism, Web 2.0, Work

I’ve written several times before that I try not to attend real-world press events. They are nearly always overly-long and contain too much marketing-speak, so are not often particularly good uses of my time.

I’ve been thinking about why, and I think there are some hints in the decline of newspapers.

The thing about newspapers is that while they are nice artefacts, the journalism they contain is what is really important. The artefact of the newspaper has massive cultural inertia for many people, but the sheaf of cellulose that arrives on my doorstep each morning is now just one of several ways to distribute and monetise journalism.

I’m beginning to think that press events (and many conferences) are in a similar position to many media outlets, i.e; wedded to the artefact of the get-together in a big room with adjacent catering facilities, when the real issue is not how to run good events but how to preserve the information transfer they allow while thinking about how to use technology other than that embedded in today’s most popular artefact.

There’s one barrier I perceive: no-one’s very good at using the technology yet. I’ve attended webinars that were just the usual drone-and-slides affairs. If I had any real wisdom in this area, I’d be starting a consultancy around it right now, to help businesses take advantage of web conferencing and similar technologies to improve the effectiveness of their communications. Because I don’t have that wisdom, I’m hoping someone else does so they can lead a charge towards new ways of sharing information that take the good bits from the meeting/event artefact of today and take steer it in useful new directions.

Post 12, 2009: Twitter means journos always have react quotes

April 24, 2009 in Web 2.0, Work

Maybe I am dense, but while writing a story this morning it hit me – I can now get instant reactions on almost any topic or issue via. Twitter. A quick search, a few cut and pastes and …. bang! … the voice of the people, fresh from the Net can adorn any story.

I slipped a couple into this yarn.

It’s kind of nice to know that there is now such a fine resource out there. It’s also nice to know that the material is written in a human voice, unlike the quote the story contains. It was sent to me via. a PR company.

There are questions about how to use Twitter in this way, of course. It can be hard to know if a Twitterer is really just an ordinary member of the public or truly representative of the community. I think permission is cool – you can block updates if you don’t want your Tweets re-used.

I’ve decided to always link to Tweets and quote them whole. And I won’t be using them for every story.

But to add the “person in the street” reaction that is a journalistic convention, I think Twitter is very valuable.

(More so than blogs, on the topics I cover, a blogs are dominated by vendors or their employees. And they tend to spend their time calling one another names or spruiking their latest wares, rather than offering useful reactions).

Post 11, 2009: My completely random guess at what Apple will do next

April 21, 2009 in Uncategorized

The Macosphere seems to have assumed for some time that Apple has a tablet device of some sort up its sleeve, perhaps in the form of a big iPod Touch that one could use as a web tablet at home (a bit like a CrunchPad). Or at least some kind of Netbook response.

I’ve been thinking about this and wondering what Apple could do. Experience tells me their stuff needs a value add and use case others won’t consider.

So I reckon Apple will make a laptop with a detachable touchscreen. Connect the screen and you’ll be able to use it as a normal computer, complete with full keyboard. Detach it and you get a virtual keyboard, but WiFi access to data and apps on the laptop hard drive. Or if the main laptop is powered down, you get a web tablet offering a browser and access to web apps.

Why this arrangement? My belief is that the iPod Touch and iPhone are used an awful lot as web tablets in the home and office. There’s demand for such a device. And there are times when a very light computer designed mainly for reading – and very light typing – is appropriate. Tieing the web tablet and netbook to the heavier duty computer – and keeping the whole package portable – has immense appeal, IMHO.

Do I have any evidence for Apple considering this approach?

Not a shred. Not an atom.

But over here similar ideas are at least getting an airing. I am not a lone nutter, for once.

Post 08.1, 2009: PR truthiness fallout

April 21, 2009 in Uncategorized

I’ve been working with the PR agency that prompted me to write about “PR Truthiness” and the results were quite interesting.

Another member of the team there was very precise in explaining what a spokesperson could and could not comment on. They’d never done so before, or certainly not with the same depth.

In one way it’s appreciated, because it is a response. I feel my file there is probably marked “MAKE SURE YOU EXPLAIN EXACTLY WHAT THE INTERVIEW IS ABOUT OR HE WILL BLOG ABOUT US!!!”

I think it misses the point, though. The previous pitch simply had too much truthiness and that’s a stain that will take some time to fade.

Post 10, 2009: Some reasons why Twitter is and is not the new e-mail.

April 20, 2009 in P-aaaaargh!, Web 2.0, social networking

I’m getting a fair few Direct Messages and @messages from Twitter friends – and folks like PRs.

They’re using it as an alternative to conventional messaging tools like e-mail.

Is it a good idea?

Perhaps, because Tweets are:

• Short! (mercifully so compared to many emails)
• Intimate, thanks to Twitter’s rules it is very hard to spam someone
• Deniable – Email is pretty reliable these days and false positives in spam filters are rare. Twitter’s flakiness as a message delivery system is therefore potentially useful!

Perhaps not, because:

• Twitter is unreliable – if you want to communicate something important, will Twitter get the job done?
• Twitter messages don’t queue well. Many Twitter clients – and Twitter itself – collects @messages. But while I, for one, process all my emails every day, I might go days without reading every @ message I’ve been sent.
• I have a whole application that collects and stores email and makes them available offline. Most Twitter clients rely on a live link to Twitter and do not store many messages, reducing the chance I will read a tweet vs. reading an email.
• Direct Messages generate email anyway – so why use Twitter?
• Can you really say that in 140 characters? (Yes, probably, but I am saving that for another post)

What do you think?

Post 9, 2009: Enough already with the GFC as the reason to buy new IT

April 2, 2009 in Uncategorized

In product design laboratories around the world, are designers trying to make computing products more complex and more costly to operate?

Of course not.

Yet yesterday, and just about every other day this year, I’ve had vendors tell me their products are now money-savers and therefore essential for businesses impacted by the global financial crisis. As if more efficient products are not welcome in any financial climate. (And as if simply buying new products is the answer, given that there are also implementation costs to consider – and who has the free cashflow for that, these days?)

Yesterday’s event even advanced the argument that by making additional capex on new printers, businesses could improve their financial position to cope with the GFC by lowering costs. Somehow, throwing away old printers would also make them greener. And the whole announcement was supposed to represent the vendor’s very own “stimulus package.”

Spare me.

That’s what about half the journos in attendance at the event were also thinking, because they left half-way through. I reckon they did so because the event contained such crass simplifications of big issues.

Long story short? I reckon The GFC as a reason to buy IT has joined green IT as a dead meme, both killed by overuse, thin logic and reliance on stating the bleeding obvious and hoping it makes you look clever.

Post 8, 2009. PR “Truthiness”

March 19, 2009 in P-aaaaargh!, Worst Pitch Ever?, Worst practise

When I practised PR, there was often a certain amount of truthiness involved in the way I communicated with media.

I hope it was pretty harmless, because what I was trying to do was to explain to media how an event, issue or product could become a story for them, even though I knew the content on offer would not be 100% about the matters I felt could make a good story for an individual journo.

I’m pretty sure the practise is common, because many of the representations made to me by PR people today polish the truth to make it shiny and attractive. For example, I’ve been told an upgrade from version 3.4 to version 3.5 is a “revolutionary” change. And I was certainly never counselled by management not to do so during my five-and-a-bit years in PR.

It’s just part of the game.

But in the last few days, I feel I have been involved in an incident that tipped beyond the usual “standards” of truthiness.

Here’s what happened. I was invited to an event that I saw little value in attending but made further inquiries on the off-chance it was important. After some back and forth by email, I was told the event would include unusually deep levels of access to a vendor’s security team and its labs. On that basis, I decided to attend the event.

But at the event there was no access to the security team, other than a short presentation from its leader. And we were only able to view the labs through a window. I asked the PR agency concerned why the promised access had not taken place and they explained that the agenda had changed just prior to the event. I had not been informed of that change, an omission for which they apologised.

I have since checked with about half of the other journos who attended the event and, surprisingly, none of them were ever offered the unusually deep levels of access to the vendor’s security team. Nor did any of them receive a notice about a change of agenda for the event.

In my correspondence with the PR company concerned, I stated that I do not feel there was an intention to deceive in their offering me access to the security team. As I am not privy to all of the information sent to all the media in attendance at the event, I cannot say for sure if I was the only attendee offered the chance to access the security team. So it’s not certain I was misled.

But the incident smells. Badly. And I sure feel like the usual and accepted standards of “truthiness” have been abused.

Post 7, 2009. Twitter Do’s and Don’ts for PRs

March 2, 2009 in Work, social networking

I’m getting so many PR followers these days, and so few of them seem to do much more than open an account, that I figured it could be useful to offer some advice on how to get the most from Twitter.

So here goes!

Dont’s

Don’t lurk. Twitter has become very conversational. If you are listening, but not talking, you are not adding value to the social network and people will not value your input. In fact they’ll think you are a pathetic bandwagoning n00b, which will NOT be good for your reputation.
If you must lurk to get a feel for Twitter or to watch journos in the hope of learning something, do so by reading your intended friends’ tweets as RSS feeds before joining yourself. Consuming Twitter through feeds means you can do so anonymously, a good idea while you learn.

Don’t expect every Tweet you send to be read. Twitter is not like email: members don’t generally feel a compulsion to read every message they receive. Even @messages. This factoid will probably influence the way you use Twitter for pitching.

Don’t block your tweets. Twitter is a conversation. So if you block your tweets, but expect to read others, you are sending out some very mixed messages. My rule is that I block blockers, because I don’t want people to watch me who plainly have no interest in conversation.

Don’t expect that being a Twitter friend makes your relationship with a journalist any deeper. A dud pitch is a dud pitch, no matter how many times we have tweeted at each other.

Do’s

Converse. It doesn’t have to be about work and Twitter is not a place to display your refined thoughts. Let yourself go and people will respond. Lurk and nothing will happen.

Download a Twitter client or three. Twitter clients make Twitter a more prominent part of your day, thereby enhancing its usefulness. Or at least the likelihood that you’ll get the hang of Twitter. Give one or more a try. I like Twitbin.

Share. Let your followers know what you are reading, watching or listening to. This information offers important clues about your identity that lets journos understand you.

Be honest. When I am plugging a story, I write [plug] before the tweet. If you are tweeting for professional purposes, let the reader know or …

… Create two accounts – one for yourself, one for your professional tweets. Delineating your work and personal lives will be useful because it means both streams will have a clearer, more genuine, voice.

Learn about hashtags and how to use and follow them. Then you’ll be on your way to understanding Twitter as a way to measure public opinion.

Prepare to monitor and analyse Twitter streams during and after events (and phone interviews), as these will tell you a lot about how much attention is being paid to your clients and immediate response to their words. Perhaps you even need a plan B if the Twitter stream is hostile, mid-speech?

Consider using Twitter as a press release distribution mechanism. It’s less intrusive than email.

Do you have any other tips? Go wild in the comments.

Update

Another Do just occurred to me.

Post a few tweets before you start following media.  When you follow someone, they receive an email. To follow you, they must visit your Twitter address.

This takes a little time, so make it worth their while by making sure you have something to see.

Indeed, if you are trying to show media you are hip with the groovers on Twitter, nothing negates this more than a Twitter timeline with no Tweets on it. The only thing worse, IMHO, is a Twitter stream that contains just one tweet that says “I’m trying Twitter” or something similar. If that’s all that’s in your Twitter stream the first time a journo sees it, there’s every chance you’ll be perceived as a late-to-the-party try-hard.