commbasics

 Today I... Helped a young entrepreneur in Qatar refine his executive summary on a social media app designed to help charities raise money. ( Linkedin ) Conducted a staff meeting ( Skype ) and reviewed documents and reports with the team in Boston and Austin ( Dropbox ) Encouraged a young friend in Washington state who was in a sudden moment of crisis. ( Facebook ) Finished editing a series of videos to help local voters work their way through the California ballot without using divisive campaign rhetoric. (Youtube) Helped someone adjust their security settings on Facebook so she wasn’t blasting everything about her life to everyone on the web. (Facebook) Suggested several candidates for a senior communications executive to a major semiconductor company identify. (Talent.me) Put the early workings together for a fund raising project to help teacher take care of their cars. (Causes.com) Set up a video channel to broadcast my daughter’s wedding to people who cannot attend. (Ustre...

For those who have not discovered him yet, Brian Solis is a social media guru who has turned the medium into a science.  If you can, pick up his book Engage ! and read it with a bottle of aspirin nearby, because you'll have a headache about a third of the way in.  Ever since I discovered him he regulalrly posts an explanation of something that has been noodling around in my brain.  It's kind of scary actually. For example, today he posts a piece about infographics  (that are all the rage now) and explains why they are so badly done in general. He asks,  "Are you trying to seek the embrace of your customers and the people who influence them or are you designing for those who will approve and fund your campaign?" In that simple question he wraps up about 6 months of discussions I've had with companies about developing shareable, engaging content.  I morphed my business out of PR a couple of years ago into whate we called a strat...

 EE Times recently published the results of a survey regarding engineers and social media, concluding that engineers use social media, but do not use social media for work.  This flies in the face of pretty much every other survey that shows engineers in almost every engineering discipline from software to car makers do, in fact use social media for collaboration and research.  For the moment, however, lets give the benefit of the doubt and say that electrical engineers have yet to figure out that social media can, in fact, make their jobs easier. That is going to change, very soon.  Last week, at TechCrunch , Mark Zuckerberg pre-announced Facebook's interest in establishing a search function that will enable people to find out what their coworkers/friends are reading and viewing.  For example, if you want to know if anyone has found interesting information about functional verification tools, you will just have to type "functional verification...

Lots of investors are worried that Web companies such as Google and Facebook don’t have a clear way to make money as people increasingly access their services on smartphones and tablets instead of personal computers. Small screen sizes, the intensely personal nature of phones, and other factors mean it’s not readily apparent what kind of advertising will work best on mobile devices. via www.forbes.com I remember when marketers were at the cutting edge of communication practices. I'm that old.

Continuing on with our discussion about good content, I've come across some fascinating data regarding how customers in the world of semiconductor design are consuming it and what it means for social media.  Let's start with a poll taken by a company I've been consulting to in recent weeks. The company wanted to get some attention from a select segment of customers.  The company estimates that their entire customer base consists of a few thousand people worldwide and they only need to reach a small part of that to be successful.  So they were looking into ways to best reach them.  Good content was a given in their estimation, but how to create that content and how to deliver it most efficiently was the question.  They had an assumption on what would be the best path that I questioned so I asked them to do something: talk to your current and potential customer about where they get their information. I've asked my clients to do this for many y...

Continuing on with our discussion on what makes good content, I want to give a big shout-out to Don Tuite from Electronic Design who provided, in a comment with an outstanding example of what it takes to make a good technical news story. Don pointed out that when he does a piece, he does a fair amount of editorializing, but that is tempered by a lot of information from many sources.  That speaks to the issue if truth in content.  An opinion is not necessarily untrue and passes the test when it is backed up by information from both sides.  To get to that point, however, requires a helluva lot of work. Don's outline of his process took not only days of research and discussion, but time to put it straight in his own head and then write down his perception of reality.  If lucky, he gets to do that 20 or 30 times a year.  There are about 5 editors in the industry like Don so we can count on about 150 stories with that kind of effort over the course of a yea...

This is a sidebar to the current discussion of trustworthy content. Learned something interesting today about those Facebook posts from groups or organizations that people like to "share." Most of them come from spammers.  For example, there is an organization called Activist.com.  You won't really find out who these people really are unless you are a hacker of some skill, but it's fairly easy to find that they have been blacklisted by several organizations.  Every time they get blacklisted they move to another server to wait until the heat dies off and the blacklisting expires.  Right now, they are working off their fourth server. In the case of Activist.com they are creating email lists for political campaigns to target who will give money to specific issues and candidates.  They don't particularly care what side they come down on because it's all good money. Here's how it works: Every time you see one of these FB memes th...