David Cushman of Faster Future has this neat presentation about how PR works completely differently in networked environments, like on the web or mobile devices. It’s all about group behavior:
David Cushman: Adapting brands to the networked world.
(via End Of Control)
Dipity lets you create timelines of all things internet. One of them I liked particularly, and that’s this timeline of internet memes:
Enjoy sifting through those classics!
(via)
Last Friday, I was very happy to get the chance to attend the first Berlin Music 2.0 dinner. (Thanks a lot to David of Hobnox for organizing it!) Over yummy pasta & wine a fun crowd of people discussed where online music is going (and how sad it is to see the RIAA shooting down another great service, Muxtape).
So who was there? At the table were Eric of Soundcloud (Soundcloud also sponsored the first Berlin Likemind recently), Anthony and Taylor of the HypeMachine, Thomas of P3000, and EJ, the head behind The Next Web. More folks and friends joined in later.
Three things connected all of us there: We love music; we work for the internets; and we share a passion for Berlin. Make sure to check out EJ’s post about why Berlin is one rocking start-up city. (Hint: Low rents are one point, but not the most important one.)
It was good fun, and showed me again that there’s so much going on in Berlin, we just need to meet up more often. So I’m looking forward to round two of both Likemind and the Music 2.0 dinner. If you’re in town, make sure to drop by.
CNN just introduced embeddable video. The CNN behind the Scenes blog has the details:
We are very happy to announce our latest move in that effort with the introduction of the CNN.com embeddable video player, a stand-alone video player that can be virally distributed by using a code snippet to embed on almost any site or blog that you choose. For the time being, the player is limited to a single clip and available in the player size, 384×216. We’ve also added a share feature to allow you to share videos on your favorite social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
The embedded player looks like this:
Seeing the CNN offer this feature is a really good sign that major media companies might eventually figure out how to work the internets. So far, all they tried was to keep readers & viewers on their site where they probably thought it was easier to sell ads. But this looks pretty good. What’s more, bloggers can now can more easily discuss politics online and provide some media coverage with their posts. It’s a clear win/win, and I can just hope that more media outlets will offer embedabble media. It’s an important step for them in order to stay relevant, and a nice hat tip to us bloggers.
(via The Next Web)
W00t: I just got this awesome custom waving cat icon. Melbourne-based multimedia designer and pixel artist Louise K of Agmyst Studio was so kind to create this image for me. Thanks, thanks & thanks, Louise!
Eventually, after years with a simple photo of a maneki neko I have at home, this blog now has it’s own, hand-made, unique icon. I love it!
For PR folks, pitching to the web is a problem. Talking to a PR firm recently, we ended up chatting about the challenges traditional PR firms face online. You have experienced professionals who know the ropes, the tricks of the trade, and their journalists. But facing a diffuse mass of bloggers is a different story altogether. What can you do about it?
Enter the Social Media Release, a concept that has developed over the last few months, maybe a year or two. The short-short version is this: Provide bloggers (and other online media) with as much material in as many formats as possible. These folks want to pick the materials they use, comment it, mash it up, and stir it thoroughly.
Are blogs like toys, fun but not professionally relevant? Not any more. (Image: Lego Blogger Picture by Flickr user minifig, released under Creative Commons.)
(For further reading I recommend: Brian Solis (read his stuff thoroughly, starting maybe with what he says about blogger relations, his definitive guide to social media releases and social media releases, everything you ever wanted to know as well as the evolution of the press release.) Also, PR-Squared has a well-maintained list of successful use-cases of social media releases in the wild. Just to pick one of those examples, Ford knows how to work the web: Note how everything is embeddable and the tons and tons of topic-related RSS feeds?)
Of course, this means you lose control over how your message is used, adapted, changed. The old rules of traditional media don’t apply here. They just don’t, so don’t even try. This is a hard lesson to learn for both PR firms and big brands, i.e. their clients. It requires a whole new approach to interacting with your stakeholders out there, and to some degree a new company culture.
It’s also tough to identify which bloggers to pitch, which services to use, and mainly: how to react to negative reactions on the web. For every campaign, you’ll have to find a decent strategy that works. A few basics like what’s listed in the articles above sure helps (think RSS feeds, embeddable pictures and videos, information in as many formats as possible). Also, forget embargoes, but that should be clear anyway.
If you’re a PR firm: How do YOU address bloggers (or do you at all)? If you’re a blogger, what are your experiences with being pitched?
Twitter still seems to be one of the bigger mysteries for many folks out there, particularly in the corporate sphere. No surprise, it’s one of those phenomena that aren’t easily understood at a first glance. (When looking at a few hundred web 2.0 services for a study I was working on, Twitter was one of the very few - maybe the only one - I thought wasn’t even worth signing up for. Err, right.)
So all the better that Joel Postman over at Socialized shares his experiences with corporate Twitter accounts. His seven rules for success:
- Create a Twitter profile that helps people verify your legitimacy
- Let consumers know who they are talking to
- Empower your Twitter representative to make a difference
- Protect consumer information
- Include your social media affiliations on your corporate web site news page
- Be human, and have a sense of humor
- Turn control over to “regular” employees
That’s the short-short version, so don’t miss out on Joel’s more in-depth explanations. Also, to get a better understand Twitter and where they’re coming from, I recommend this video interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Vator TV. Jack Dorsey spent 15 years writing dispatch software for couriers, taxis and 911, so he’s very familiar with the concept of background noise and what has been called ambient intimacy:
Out of Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino’s lab comes Constant Setting, a beautiful Flickr-based mashup. Constant Setting shows us photos (released under Creative Commons, tagged on Flickr with sunset and a location), from those places where the sun is setting right now. So what happens is, you get to see a never-ending flow of sunset photos from all over the world, following the sun setting around the globe. Beautiful - make sure to switch to full screen!
Image: Constant Setting, courtesy Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
Constant Setting was created by Alexandra D.S., D’Arcy Saum and Nick Chip. Read more on Alexandra’s blog, and don’t forget to watch the sunset.
When you’re creating the online experience for your organization, brand or even yourself, keep this simple advice in mind: Don’t be the capsule hotel, be the dinner party. It may sounds somewhat strange, but when I stumbled upon these two images I couldn’t help using them to illustrate this point: A shared online experience is always better than a solitary one.
Don’t be the capsule hotel, where people are isolated and by themselves. They may be technologically advanced and offer cool features, but they offer a solitary experience:
Image: Luxury Capsule by Flickr user madrigation
Be the dinner party. Everybody’s chatting away happily, and your friends are invited too:
Image: Friday Night Dinner Party by Flickr user Angelo
Even if it’s more crowded and maybe not as perfect as the capsule hotel experience, it’s more fun, more interesting, more social. You’d prefer sharing dinner with friends to a night in the capsule hotel anytime, wouldn’t you? Well, the same goes for online communities. Take all steps necessary to make sure you offer the most social, shared experience possible. It starts with simple, small steps: Let your guests talk to each other by enabling comments, and make it easy to get in touch by opening up contact channels. See what works for you and what doesn’t, but please, say goodbye to the idea of having a controlled user experience if that means cutting out social aspects.
The header seems somewhat to enthusiastic you say? Well, judge for yourself. A piece of software called Photographs from Washington University looks like it might seriously change the way we deal with video for good by combining video with high-resolution photo shots. Says Gizmodo:
Essentially, you shoot some crappy, low-rez video of a still scene. You then reshoot the same scene with a digital camera (with higher resolution). Software can automagically combine these images to upconvert the video AND fix problems in the image— all while compensating for 3D space. Make sense? The remarkable demo will clarify things a bit:
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.
It’s hard to tell how easy-to-use Photographs is at this point. But if the software works even remotely as well as it seems here, it’s just a matter of time until we see this pop up in consumer-grade tools. Wow.