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I've just read the latest speech by Annabel Crabbe on the changing face of the media and politics and thought it worth highlighting as, to my knowledge, it is the first serious piece by an Australian professional journalist in recognizing the changing face of journalism, politics and communication (including by government agencies).
Her views embody much of what I have believed over the last fifteen years and spoken personally about at conferences and in my blog over the last five years - the traditional view of journalism and politics is being washed away, being replaced with a far more equitable, if less controllable, environment.
Give Annabel's article a read at The Drum, An audience, an audience, my kingdom for an audience.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
The changing face of media, communications, politics and agency engagement | Tweet |
Monday, October 17, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
Treating bloggers right | Tweet |
Many organisations still haven't cottoned on to the influence of a number of blogs or how to appropriately approach and engage with them - including PR and advertising agencies who should know better.
I was reading an excellent example of this the other week, from The Bloggess, where a PR agency not only approached with an inappropriately targeted form letter, which indicated the agency hadn't even read her blog, but responded to her (relatively) polite reply with an annoyed response.
The situation really escalated, however, when a VP in the PR agency, in an internal email, called her a "F**king bitch" (without the asterisks). This email was accidentally (by the VP) also CCed to The Bloggess.
The Bloggess took a deep breath, and responded politely, however then received a torrent of abuse from the PR agency.
At this point she published the entire exchange on her blog - in a post that has already received 1,240 comments, has been shared on Facebook 8,397 times and via Twitter 5,328 times.
Her comments have also been shared widely and her post read by many of her 164,000 Twitter followers.
The Bloggess's post is a good read - particularly for government agencies and their PR representatives - on how to behave appropriately when engaging bloggers, and the potential fallout when they don't.
I'm also keeping a link handy to 'Here's a picture of Wil Wheaton collating papers' for those PR and advertising agencies who send me form emails asking me to post about their product or brand promotions on my blog (and yes there's been a few in the last six months - all Australian agencies).
I was reading an excellent example of this the other week, from The Bloggess, where a PR agency not only approached with an inappropriately targeted form letter, which indicated the agency hadn't even read her blog, but responded to her (relatively) polite reply with an annoyed response.
The situation really escalated, however, when a VP in the PR agency, in an internal email, called her a "F**king bitch" (without the asterisks). This email was accidentally (by the VP) also CCed to The Bloggess.
The Bloggess took a deep breath, and responded politely, however then received a torrent of abuse from the PR agency.
At this point she published the entire exchange on her blog - in a post that has already received 1,240 comments, has been shared on Facebook 8,397 times and via Twitter 5,328 times.
Her comments have also been shared widely and her post read by many of her 164,000 Twitter followers.
The Bloggess's post is a good read - particularly for government agencies and their PR representatives - on how to behave appropriately when engaging bloggers, and the potential fallout when they don't.
I'm also keeping a link handy to 'Here's a picture of Wil Wheaton collating papers' for those PR and advertising agencies who send me form emails asking me to post about their product or brand promotions on my blog (and yes there's been a few in the last six months - all Australian agencies).
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Allowing your customers to codesign your services | Tweet |
Crowdsourcing often seems to be a high stress area for organisations, who fear what might happen if they allowed their users to design their products and services.
However what is often forgotten is that it's not about handing over the design process, it is about sharing it as a codesign process - combining the brain power of a few internal or contracted specialist designers who don't necessarily use your products or services with the brain power of thousands of non-specialists who use or interact with your products and services, often on a regular basis.
A good example of this process was recently discussed in Inc., where Fiat crowd sourced the design of its 2009 concept car, the Fiat Mio.
The main part of this process was conducted in Spanish (as Fiat is Brazilian based), and while I watched it occur at the time, there was only a limited subset of the conversation in English.
However Fiat ended up involving people from 160 countries - taking on board over 10,000 suggestions. The website about the making of the car provides more information on how Fiat went about integrating these suggestions.
The concept car won widespread critical acclaim.
This isn't the only approach possible, and the article in Inc, Letting Your Customers Design Your Products, describes five different types of crowd sourcing:
However what is often forgotten is that it's not about handing over the design process, it is about sharing it as a codesign process - combining the brain power of a few internal or contracted specialist designers who don't necessarily use your products or services with the brain power of thousands of non-specialists who use or interact with your products and services, often on a regular basis.
A good example of this process was recently discussed in Inc., where Fiat crowd sourced the design of its 2009 concept car, the Fiat Mio.
The main part of this process was conducted in Spanish (as Fiat is Brazilian based), and while I watched it occur at the time, there was only a limited subset of the conversation in English.
However Fiat ended up involving people from 160 countries - taking on board over 10,000 suggestions. The website about the making of the car provides more information on how Fiat went about integrating these suggestions.
The concept car won widespread critical acclaim.
This isn't the only approach possible, and the article in Inc, Letting Your Customers Design Your Products, describes five different types of crowd sourcing:
- Crowdfunding: Sites such as Kickstarter that allow an individual or enterprise to receive funding.
- Distributed knowledge: The aggregation of data and information from a variety of sources.
- Cloud labor: Leveraging a virtual labor pool.
- Collective creativity: Tapping "creative" communities for user-generated art, media or content.
- Open innovation: The use of outside resources to generate new ideas and company processes.
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
RightClick presentation | Tweet |
I've been a little busy this week, what with my wedding on Saturday, however here, belatedly, is my presentation from last Friday at RightClick.
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