Interested huh? My colleague, Al Leach wrote an interesting piece in the Defintion 6 blog “Defining Insights” that I thought you might enjoy.

Babes and Some Basic Truths About Re-Connecting With Audiences

Friday, April 2, 2010 by Al Leach

Facebook’s Hottest TV babes, Celebrity babes on Twitter, Hot babes on LinkedIn, babes, babes, babes…

Did this get your attention? OK, so let’s progress.

I recently attended a few industry conferences on leveraging “Public Relations in the Social Media Era.” The sessions were eye-opening. With a show of hands, it seems most of the 500 attendees, who were charged with managing their brands’ PR function, didn’t understand much about how to harness the power of Social Media or how to convince their executive management to engage in it.

A prevailing theory shared with me follows: Social Media has enabled a two-way dialogue between brands and consumers. However, many brands over the last 50 years grew accustomed to telling customers via one-way conversations (advertising, promotion, news releases) that their product or service was essential to the customers’ aspirations or success. So, now there’s a disconnect.

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY CLICK HERE

What happens if someone posts an unflattering, or worse, a scandalous or compromising picture of you on Facebook? What are your rights? That’s a sensitivity that we need to start nurturing by training our kids — and our employees — to use online tools responsibly’, says Anna O’Brian, a PHD student in digital technology.

It is said that technology becomes part of our critical infrastructure when it crosses the threshold from the ‘techie’ world into the ‘everyday’ world like Skype, Google, and now Twitter.

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY CLICK HERE

I am a big fan of  I WANT MEDIA, a Web site focusing on diversified media news and resources. It provides quick access to media news and industry data, updated throughout the day. Founder Patrick Phillips has been polling his readers for years and this year they selected the founders of Twitter as their winners.

2009 Media Person(s) of the Year:The Twitter Guys

The founders of the social media phenomenon and “the biggest media story on the planet” are named the most noteworthy figures in media.

Twitter Guys Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams are the 2009 Media Persons of the Year, according to the annual online competition held by I Want Media.

Readers suggested 10 candidates for the week-long contest to the name figure (or figures) who had the most impact on the media landscape during the past year. The winner for 2008 was Arianna Huffington, who followed Hollywood’s Striking Writers in 2007.

Among the 2009 finalists with the most votes: Redbox, Glenn Beck and Oprah Winfrey. Write-in votes included Brian Roberts, Rush Limbaugh and Nikki Finke.

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY CLICK HERE

Interesting story from Adage.com via themediaminute.com

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Microsoft is, without a doubt, a giant in the world of online advertising, but lately it’s been about assembling the platforms that power advertising — both display and search — rather than building the media properties that attract eyeballs in the first place.

Which begs the question: Does Microsoft need media anymore?

Last week the Redmond, Wash., giant pulled the wraps off a redesign of MSN, the first top-to-bottom remake in more than a decade. Like Yahoo five months earlier, MSN did away with the ’90s-era clutter, adding white space and removing 50% of the links and all text ads. Also like Yahoo, MSN added Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and other social tools and services right into the home page. The hope here is that MSN can hang on to its slice of the market in a world increasingly owned by Facebook.

That won’t be easy. In the past five years, Facebook has gone from nothing to dominating 11% of all time spent in the U.S. on the web, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile the big three portals — MSN, Yahoo and AOL — together account for just 17%, down from 25%. Though on a global basis, Microsoft sites — including Microsoft.com, MSN and Bing.com — account for 14.5% of all time spent on the internet, according to ComScore. That’s quite a bit more than Google (9.3%), Yahoo (6.3%) or Facebook (5.1%).

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY FROM ADAGE.COM  CLICK HERE

Interesting article from AdWeek

MobJet, a So-Called ‘Twitter Killer,’ Expands

Service grows base in Asia and prepares to compete on world stage

Oct 27, 2009

- Rayana Pandey

Touted as a potential “Twitter Killer,” new social media service MobJet has launched in Singapore after its debut in Japan earlier this year.

The microblogging tool allows users to stay connected and communicate through an exchange of pictures, videos, audio files and text without the restriction of character limits.

Founded by Singapore-based entrepreneur and consultant James Skinner, MobJet claims it’s set to challenge Twitter on the world stage.

CLICK HERE FOR THE COMPLETE STORY FROM ADWEEK

If you have always dreamed about playing along with the band, the ZOOZbeat app for iPhone is the first mobile Music Recreation Studio that lets you do just that! Select your instrument and shake, tilt or tap ZOOZbeat on your iPhone to lay down your music tracks. Plus, you can share your MP3 file with the world. TechCrunch reported “Awesomeness … As addictive as it is entertaining.” Here’s a two minute video demo of ZOOZbeat on an iPhone.

If you want to see how you start with no Twitter Followers to help establish a Twitter presence to engage your fan base, Follow @ZOOZbeat. Rock on, Dan!

I like the beat and you can dance to it.

President Barack Obama’s administration has created pages on Facebook and MySpace, the most popular social-networking sites, along with Twitter, where users post short text messages, the White House said on its blog. The pages had already attracted more than 100,000 fans or followers yesterday — mostly on Facebook.

The effort builds on the president’s official Web site, WhiteHouse.gov, which debuted in 1994. The White House also uses YouTube, Google Inc.’s video-sharing site, and Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.’s photo service. As a candidate, Obama relied on Twitter and Facebook to reach constituents, especially younger voters.

“WhiteHouse.gov is an important part of the administration’s effort to use the Internet to reach the public quickly and effectively — but it isn’t the only place,” the White House said on its blog post. “Technology has profoundly impacted how — and where — we all consume information and communicate with one another.”

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY CLICK HERE

For you in the PR biz and video ….(original video distr’d via Twitter was taken offline after 36 hours,
but damage is done–2 people/makers on FELONY charges,, Dominos apology video made late)

April 16, 2009, 06:40 AM -

The other day I followed a link on Twitter and was treated to a revolting video (warning: not for the squeamish) of a couple of Dominos employees doing horrible things to food they were preparing for a customer. Since my lady and I had coincidentally decided earlier that day that we were going to have Dominos for dinner, this was pretty disturbing to see. It so happens that I spent almost a decade working in various restaurant kitchens in my youth, and never saw this kind of behavior happening, so I tried to put the video out of my mind.

Not everyone has that kind of background, though, and as the video spread virally, Dominos took a serious reputation hit. The New York Times has all the details on the situation, and I won’t rehash them all here, but I just wanted to say, thank goodness for once the idiots that pull pranks like these are paying the price. The two employees were arrested and are facing felony charges, plus Dominos is readying a civil suit against them. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer pair of people. I could go right down my snarky rabbithole and talk about Darwinism (how dumb do you have to be to post something like that online, with your smiling faces showing clearly throughout the video) but I’ll stop for now.

On the flip side, Dominos is facing a publicity nightmare. That particular branch, in Conover, N.C., was most directly impacted (the Board of Health closed them temporarily and had them discard all opened food containers for fear of the two contaminating them) but the entire chain is suffering. The Times says:

In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged. The perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.

How do you put a price on that kind of reputation damage?

And how did this video go viral so incredibly quickly? Via Twitter, of course (in fact that’s where I first heard about it). Apparently the video was originally taken down, but not before someone else had copied it. That person reposted it, explaining why in the comments:

It [the video] was removed later this day but re-uploaded because these people deserve to be fired. If you want these people fired then Favorite, comment, and rate 5 stars so the word gets out and these people get fired.

Well, the Twitter community got wind of this, spread it around, and the plan worked: the people were not only fired but arrested. But at what cost to the chain? Should every Dominos store suffer because of two malicious individuals working in one location? Obviously not.

But the images are hard to get out of your head, aren’t they? How do you do damage control on this kind of situation? Patrick Doyle, President of Dominos, tried to fight fire with fire by posting his own video on YouTube (see below) but unsurprisingly that one hasn’t gone viral. Dominos can assure us that this was an isolated incident all they want, but will we really believe them? Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link; watching the video, the store itself seems very clean and orderly. But it just takes one hateful person handling your food to make everything else about the process moot. Every time I order take out now, I’m going to be thinking about what’s happening behind closed doors.

Maybe Dominos, and all restaurants with closed-off kitchens, need to install security cameras covering all the food preparation areas? Would that help? Or would malicious employees find a way to do their damage in corners where the cameras can’t see? Is there any process that could absolutely prevent this kind of incident? Please leave your ideas in the comment section.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/media/16dominos.html?_r=2&src=twt&twt=nytimes

Leadership
Yes, CEOs Should Facebook And Twitter
Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta
Web 2.0 is no longer just for teenagers.

Social networking has clearly reached a tipping point. Sites like MySpace and Facebook boast hundreds of millions of members. Barack Obama’s presidential victory demonstrated that platforms like YouTube and Twitter could transform electoral politics. Yet in corporations where such tools have been expected to bring profound transformations, there has been strong resistance to change.

Many corporate executives either dismiss social networking as a time-wasting distraction or regard it as a risk management problem. Much of their fear has focused on potential risks like security breaches and data privacy.

Web 2.0 evangelists, on the other hand, argue that social software can be used to boost productivity. They say it can facilitate an open-ended corporate culture that values transparency, collaboration and innovation. Most important, it can be an effective way to build a customer-centric organization that not only communicates authentically but also listens to customers and learns from that interaction.

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY FROM FORBES.COM CLICK HERE

(image courtesy of The Los Angeles Times)

Great article from the Los Angeles Times Online

by David Sarno

Sitting in the Flickr archives is a nearly 10-year-old document uploaded a couple of years ago by its author, Jack Dorsey (@jack), who started Twitter in 2006 along with co-founders Evan Williams (@ev) and Biz Stone (@biz).

The legal-pad sketch of the idea that would become Twitter has been noticed before, but given all the recent hype, we thought we’d track down Dorsey and ask him about it in a little more detail. In the following interview, Dorsey uses the document to touch on aspects of the micromessaging service’s history, including the inspirations and constraints that came to define one of the Web’s most rapidly growing information channels.

Twitter didn’t just fly out of thin air and land on a branch. As Dorsey explains, it has conceptual roots in the world of vehicle dispatch — where cars and bikes zooming around town must constantly squawk to each other about where they are and what they’re up to.

It was when Dorsey saw these systems through the eyes of the social, mobile Web, where anyone can squawk from anywhere, that Twitter’s Big Idea was born.

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY CLICK HERE