FutureComms

Facebook Shares: Would You Buy Them?

So after weeks of anticipation, Facebook’s finally gone public. And it’s fallen more than a little short of expectations. ‘Facebook’s IPO Sputters’ reported the Wall Street Journal, as bankers struggled to prevent the stock from ending its first day with a loss. ‘More Whimper than Bang’, said CBS News. Talk about anticlimax. It’s more Google Buzz than Apple iPad. So, interested in a view from the trenches, I carried out a small poll among my networks.

The Bullshit Way to Approach a Blogger

I recently received the following email:

That’s the full email in its entirety. And there is so much wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start.

Social in Action: When a Book Launch Takes on a Life of its Own

Last week hugely respected marketers Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston formally launched their new book, Marketing in the Round, in Chicago. I have never seen so much fuss over a book launch in my entire life. If you’re friends with them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d discovered a cure for cancer. And I mean this in the nicest way possible.

Have Comms Pros Forgotten How to be Professional?

There was a huge internet furore at the back end of last week over the fact that Mark Zuckerberg dared to wear a hoodie to presentations to talk up Facebook’s upcoming IPO. Parts of the media labelled him as arrogant, disrespectful and immature. And it set me thinking not so much about multi-billion dollar pitches (for which I admittedly only have a modicum of experience) but more about the online comms world in general, and whether its informal nature means we’re doing ourselves a disservice.

The Inherent Value of Regular Writing

There’s been lots of rhetoric recently about whether blogging is dying and why, or why not, this might be happening. Gini Dietrich recently looked at the benefits of business blogging on SpinSucks and asked, very openly, whether companies are just being lazy. Geoff Livingston wrote a month or so back about how the larger blogs are increasingly starting to dominate the blogosphere and command the traffic that is the lifeblood of any blog. But whatever the reason, it’s an issue that has really struck a chord with me, and something I feel deserves more attention.

When I commenced FutureComms at the start of the year it was at the expense of an established blog, TheSocialWeb. I wanted to try something different using Tumblr, mixing up feature posts, guest posts and short, snappy comments and quotes as a reaction to what I saw happening around me in the blogosphere. But due to the demands of my day job at BOTTLE and feeling a little jaded, it ground to a halt after just a couple of months. And so for the last few weeks I’ve been seemingly following the trend and considering giving up blogging completely, other than my weekly posts at BOTTLE Uncorked.

And then something happened.

Young people are ‘conditioned for connection’. Their brains are wired for the connected world. Whereas old folks like us have had to learn how to cope with new technology, these young people have been exposed to it their whole Iives.

Susan Murphy from ‘The Myth of Distraction in the Classroom’

Source: suzemuse.com

Revealed: The Secret to Awesome Online Influence

Warning: the following blog post may contain sarcasm

Poor old Klout. It does come in for a bashing from the digital communications community from time to time. So much so that some notable people have opted out, frustrated with the way in which it attempts to gauge influence, by how it can be gamed and alarmed by the way in which it uses, and sells, personal data - there have even been questions about whether Klout is actually operating illegally. Regardless of all that, however, people stick with it and it still seems to be gaining in popularity. So if you feel that your Klout score needs a boost in order to reflect your true level of guru-like ninja influence, I think I’ve stumbled across the secret for you: have a birthday.

I know it might not seem like the best way to demonstrate your awesome level of social media awesomeness, but at the end of the day Klout is the only proper way we can measure our social communications awesomeness, right? It is, after all, The Standard For Influence - it says so on the website. So it makes sense to do all we can to ensure our score is as guru-high as possible. After all, there’s no point in trying to sell your expert webinars and training courses on how to get an awesome Klout score if you can’t display your own awesome Klout score on your website. So my recommendation is to make sure you have a birthday every couple of months and to pimp this around your networks as much as you can. The effect of this is fantastic, as the graph below demonstrates.

40 Years of Tech, 40 Years of Me

1972. Iconic movies The Godfather, Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange were released to critical and public acclaim. David Bowie dominated the music scene in his new guise as Ziggy Stardust, with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars proving to be a seminal moment in pop history. And Led Zeppelin toured one of the best selling albums of all time, the untitled Led Zeppelin IV. Oh, and the internet was first demonstrated privately by the US Department of Defense…

Yes, it’s been 40 years since the internet was first developed. The initial system, called ARPAnet, was devised in 1969 and, after initial demonstrations in the early 1970s, came to fruition along with the first email program in 1973. So why raise it now? Well, today’s my 40^th birthday and, if you’ll forgive the self-indulgence that comes with a midlife crisis, I thought I’d take a look back at what tech was around 40 years ago. And it goes to show just how far we’ve come.

14 PR Pros Have Their Say On Flawed PRSA Definition

When the PRSA announced back in November that it was going to attempt to redefine public relations, I remember going on a bit of a Twitter rant (I know, not like me right?) about what a pointless and misguided exercise it was that was unlikely to bear any relation to working on the coalface of the PR industry. I’m not right very often, but on this occasion I was sadly bang on the money. The PRSA’s recently announced definition (and I’m not even going to type it because it winds me up too much) has left many PR professionals feeling frustrated at a missed opportunity and angry at how it does little to alter our perception as spin doctors.

I’ve given it a little while to let the dust settle, but my opinion hasn’t changed: the definition sucks. It spectacularly misses the point with some of the language it uses, and it paints PR further into a corner that is already rapidly decreasing in size. It’s difficult to believe that it’s taken the guts of four months to come up with something so generic, jargon-packed and out of touch. In fact, it’s so lame that it appears the entire project was nothing more than an exercise in stroking some already large and smug egos. But listen, this is just my opinion and FutureComms is supposed to be about the wider view. So I asked some other folk for their thoughts…

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