Category Archives: Media & Culture

What are they tweeting about your company?

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Co-worker Jeff shares the following story from the road:

On Monday I was flying from St Louis to Milwaukee. My flight was delayed by an hour, which obviously I was frustrated. When I landed in Milwaukee, I went to the Enterprise counter to get my rental car. There was only one person working and 4-5 people waiting in line. When it was my turn, I gave her my info and then was told to sit and that somebody would come and get me in about 20 minutes. I told her that I was running late and that I was actually supposed to pick my car up earlier. She said she was hoping that the 20 minutes was an overestimate. I was steamed. But really I was steamed about the whole travel experience. So I tweeted that I had to wait 20 minutes for my car at Enterprise and why would only one person be working on a Monday, which I assume would be a busy business travel day.

Their person did come and get me within 20 minutes like the counter person had told me. I checked Twitter before I left the rental car garage and I had a mention from Enterprise Cares telling me sorry and asking me to follow her so she could direct message me. She also gave me her name (Elizabeth). I was very impressed by that customer service. So I followed her and immediately I had a direct message from her asking for my contract number and pick up location. I tweeted that I was very impressed with that service and that someone from the company actually acknowledged me and my comments. I sent her my info and explained that my frustration had been compounded by the fact that my flight was delayed. Not sure what will happen but just getting a sorry was good enough for me. By contrast, I tweeted about my AirTran flight being delayed on the way to Milwaukee and on the return flight to St Louis and have heard nothing.

Elizabeth transformed a frustrated customer into a happy customer. She put a human face on a corporation. And Jeff now knows someone at Enterprise he can call (tweet) on if he needs something. Companies large and small are figuring this out. How about yours?

If you can’t poke me, I don’t have to ignore you

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Mary Elizabeth Williams (Slate.com) has done better with Facebook than I but she’s much better at explaining why she’s ignoring your friend requests:

“When my friend list began to swell to unmanageable proportions, I found it increasingly difficult to weed out the dialogue with people I really liked from the random news from people I had nothing in common with. I relearned that some of them were really obnoxious. I was getting poked and superpoked and invited into mafia wars and invited to become a fan of people and things I was no fan of, all the damn time. As they say on Facebook, I unliked it. I unliked it a lot.”

“In the months since my self-imposed embargo, I’ve noticed how rarely new requests come with so much as two lines of introduction. Socializing is, for many, now a one-click affair — as easy as clicking Add or Accept. When someone does take the time to write a note, whether it’s a pal from the old neighborhood or a random reader, I write back. But I don’t want to collect names on a list like they’re seashells on the beach. So if we should meet at a party and hit it off, let’s have coffee or see a movie sometime. Let’s be friends in real life. And who knows? Maybe if it goes really well, someday, we can even be friends on Facebook.”

This is a thoughtful piece by someone who still likes many of the aspects of being on Facebook.

“The Internet Weakens Authority”

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There are a handful of people I regularly read in an effort to understand what’s happening in the world: Scott Adams, Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and Terry Heaton (I’ve left some out).

In this essay, Mr. Heaton explores what he calls the “second Gutenberg moment” we are experiencing:

“It isn’t technology that’s changing culture as much as it is the ability of people to act on long-held dissatisfaction. People, therefore, are the issue, empowered, connected and, yes, angry people. Nobody’s “in charge” of the revolution underway, but more and more people are realizing that if we’re going to fix what’s wrong, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.”

We’re sure to see some of that in November. And then there’s the question of who controls the knowledge:

“One-directional authority — especially that which is based in deliberately protected knowledge — cannot maintain control for long, once that knowledge is acquired and spread throughout its constituency. All that we know today in terms how we govern our lives will evaporate and be replaced by something very different in the decades to come.”

We see this in every institution: Busines, Religion, Education, Media, Medicine, Finance. I was certainly “guilty” of this when I was a Manager. Deciding what information got passed along and to whom. I still see it every day. But it’s getting harder.

Employees are connected. Nobody is walking around the office leaving memos on people’s desks. Email, Facebook, Twitter, texting… shit, the boss is often the last know something.

I’m confident I’ll be around for the disruptions to come and expect many will be painful, but necessary. I’m looking forward to them.

Gas Station TV

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My first look at GSTV (Gas Station TV) was at a Phillips 66 station on I-55. It probably took me no longer than 3 or 4 minutes to fill up and I guess there really isn’t much to do with that time, so why not. There were these really short sports/weather/news segments with commercial messages between each. Really can’t imagine someone paying for these but they obviously do. I foresee a time when we pay a premium to AVOID being hammered by ads. Ransom Ads.

Survey of radio newsrooms (1988)

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A big part of my job during my early days at Learfield was affiate relations. Periodically, I would survey the stations to learn more about how they used our news and sports. Here’s a snapshot from 1988.

  • 2/3 of stations had a full-time news person (I’ll bet it’s not 1/3 today)
  • I was insensitive or stupid or both in asking about sex. It was a different time.
  • Almost half had a wire service?! Amazing. Can’t be more than 10% now.
  • “Cassette recorders” – Ah, my favorite. A world before digital recording.

Back in those pre-web days, we also did a newsletter each month. One page, front and back. I typed it on a typewriter, made copies and put them in the mail. Example: Missourinet newsletter – Jan87

The whole process now seems … quaint. Typewriters and envelopes, once a month. But there was a simplicity that seems appealing in retrospect.

Cognitive Surplus

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From Amazon: “For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.”

A few of my highlighted excerpts from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky (more after the jump).

“The postwar trends of emptying rural populations, urban growth, and increased suburban density, accompanied by rising educational attainment across almost all demographic groups, have marked a huge increase in the number of people paid to think or talk, rather than to produce or transport objects.” – page 4

“Someone born in 1960 has watched something like fifty thousand hours of TV already, and many watch another thirty thousand hours before she dies.” – page 6

“…in the whole of the developed world, the three most common activities are now work, sleep, and watching TV.” – page 6

“Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. … We spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials.” – page 10

“As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible.” – page 19

“Imagine that everything says 99 percent the same, that people continue to consume 99 percent of the television they used to, but 1 percent of that time gets carved out for producing and sharing. The connected population still watches well over a trillion hours of TV a year; 1 percent of that time is mor than one hundred Wikipedias’ worth of participation per year.” – page 23

“In 2010 the global internet-connected population will cross two billion people, and mobile hone accounts already number over three billion. Since there are something like 4.5 billion adults worldwide (roughly 30 percent of the global population is under fifteen), we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens.” – page 23

Continue reading →

Google Voice now for everyone

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Google Voice was “invitation only” for a long time but now they’ve opened it up so I’m going to start using the number I’ve had for a while. Only way I’m going to get the hang of it. Video above runs about 90 sec. The link in the sidebar will probably take you to my voice-mail, at least until I learn the ropes.

Image above is the Google Voice in-box. Google Voice does a fair job of transcribing the voice mail message (close enough). I can also play the message, of course.

I also received an email that had pretty much the same thing. You can also set it up for a text alert.

Google voice does a lot more but I’m not going to try to explain it until I have a better grasp. And the video at the top of this post really has all you need.

While I might not wan to give out my mobile number to everyone, I can safely give out my Google Voice number (573-200-6776) and rely on Google to help me manage it all. For example, I can have Barb’s calls come straight to my iPhone… while sending calls from her sister right into voice-mail.

“The internet: Everything you ever need to know”

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This list — by John Naughton– is pretty good. If one of the Learfield Grown-ups came into my office and asked, “So, what do I need to know about this internet thing? Keep it to 10 things or less.”, I’d send him this article. Here are just a few nuggets. I encourage you to read and bookmark the page.

“We’re living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don’t have the benefit of hindsight, we don’t really know where it’s taking us. And one thing we’ve learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies — and to underestimate their long-term implications.”

“The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what’s going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late.”

“HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE — Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.”

As a tool for a totalitarian government interested in the behaviour, social activities and thought-process of its subjects, the internet is just about perfect.

“Copying is to computers as breathing is to living organisms.”

These snippits make the article seem more negative than it is. That probably says more about me than the list. I especially liked the survey asking folks in the German city of Mainz (in 1472) what they thought about the implications of Gutenberg’s printing press.

Can Facebook really “connect?”

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Reading David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect has piqued my interest in the service (which I do not use) so I’m unconsciously on the lookout for anything FB related. Like this post (at Mashable) by Ori Brafman, the co-author of Click: The Magic of Instant Connections. An excerpt:

“Social psychologists have found that the distance separating people greatly influences the likelihood of a connection. Think back to your friends in school. How many of them had a last name that began with a letter close to yours on the alphabet? That’s because teachers routinely assign seats alphabetically based on last name. The closer you sat to someone, the more likely you were to hit it off. When a researcher asked police cadets to name their friends from the academy, ninety percent of them named someone who sat adjacent to them. Likewise, scientists proved more likely to collaborate with other scientists who sat in the same corridor.”

“Facebook used to be an intimate community that only included your college buddies. Now, the company is starting to be perceived as Big Brother-like. If we write on someone’s wall, who else will see it? If we comment on someone’s status, whose newsfeed will it show up in? Sometimes it’s as if Facebook is a hidden microphone that threatens to expose what we’d really like to say. Without that ability to be vulnerable, it is difficult to really connect with friends.”

This idea really comes through, again and again, in the first half of Kirkpatrick’s book. And this absence of real (okay, online “real”) connection might be what’s missing for me.