Month: March 2008

“Arch” — what two film students with two FlipCams can do

A few weekends ago my son and his NYU buddy came to the Cape for some R&R and Guitar Hero. Beset with cabin fever they went looking for the household digital video camera, a tape-based Sony, but I suggested they use a FlipCam — the $150 device that has a USB jack and is drop dead simple. They scoffed, but four hours later, using Microsoft Movie Maker — they came up with this.

Any thing that scores Eno’s Music for Airports is okay in my book. No seagulls were harmed in the making — that’s actually a pretty recent kill — there’s lots of dead seabirds in the highwater line in February, probably the toughest month of the year to be a seagull. That, and characters talking in hillbilly accents shooting arrows and riding in a 5-series BMW …..

Scullblogging

Got on the water this morning — it was too smooth to ignore and the temps are positively spring-like. Being inspired by the crocus and grape hyacinth, I donned ye olde spandex and lugged the Empacher down the hill to the hahbah.

Being a fat f%$k, this not one of my finer rows. Here are the numbers:

8054 meters in 55 minutes, 30 seconds (I do this course in 38 minutes when I am fit) with 1167 strokes. I stopped a lot due to … of all things …. shin splints!

Went by some clammers — commercial guys — and shot the breeze for a while. A quahogger off of Bay Lane in Osterville agreed that you can’t buy a spring day on the water like we had today.

Bluetoothed Borg — how to share one headset with two devices

So, if you were here at Churbuck Central this morning, you’d be giving me grief for being a geek with not one of those mark-of-a-loser wireless headsets stuck in one ear … but two — stereo headsets, one in the left and one in the right.

The one in the left talks to the BlackBerry phone. It is a BlueAnt Z9 and I like it because it goes in my ear, not over it, like the Motorola H700 on my right ear which talks to my X61 Tablet and Skype and rests on top of my ear.

The BlueAnt is great for noisy situations. The Motorola … I’ve had it for sometime.

So why two? Well, I can’t figure out how to easily divide one head set between two apps — cell phone and Skype. Any suggestions?

The scandal of the apostrophe

Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy London put it best, in all of the Spitzer scandal, there was some element of the population, myself included, who were first struck and outraged by the lack of an apostrophe in the word “Emperors Club.”

Shocking. All the copyeditors and proofreaders of the world were aghast.

Apparently the New York Times feels the same way, for as of this morning they are referring to the high-priced escort service as the “Emperor’s Club.”

One could argue it was a club for Emperors (of whom there are few), or, as many of us word geeks inferred, it was the club belonging to the Emperor, and therefore needed an apostrophe to designate its possessive condition.

As for Client 9, I think of Patrick McGoohan — “Number Six” — running for his life in The Prisoner, chased by the evil beach ball.

“I am not a number — I am a free man!”

Verge ’08

In NYC today for the Ogilvy Verge conference — a one-day digital discussion for Ogilvy’s partners and clients.

Highlight was a late afternoon panel of John Battelle from Federated Media, John Bell from Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Project, Nick Denton of Gawker and Owen Van Natta of Facebook. No bon mots spring to mind, but the key insight was delivered by Battelle and confirmed by Denton — essentially, the current digital model of impression based media is not going to survive, that some new media model is required and has been lacking for over a decade, and that in the end the mostly likely place it will be found is in Social Media.

Battelle recounted a Dell campaign run in Facebook — seemed semi-interesting, but not earth shattering. Bell called out the move from 101 SMM to 201 and AP level discourse on the finer points. Indeed, moderator Polly LaBarre basically told the crowd of mostly clients that if they haven’t gotten the “transparent, authentic, marketing-is-a-conversation memo” then they were essentially under a rock.

Bell is working with me on a very cool Olympic play I’ll disclose next week. I don’t feel compelled to rush into Facebook anytime soon, and as for Federated — we shall see.

Planning session tomorrow morning, working lunch, then back to the Cape of Cod where it looks, but doesn’t feel, like spring.

The Twilight of Transparency

Ever played Buzzword Bingo? Take a list of pre-determined buzzwords – an hour long meeting or conference call, and instant messaging in the back channel so the players can call Bingo as someone drones on about paradigms, ideation, process planning, any one of a million acronyms, especially the buzzword of the decade:

Transparency.

Transparency gets tossed around a lot in Social Media Marketing, but it really came into its own in 2001 in the wake of Enron’s catastrophic shell game, and the ensuing passage of Sarbanes Oxley. Suddenly “transparency” was the order of the day and PR firms started churning out white papers proclaiming their clients were on the forefront of the transparent movement. Definition: everything is out in the open, opposite of opaque, no murkiness, we know it/you know it.

Social media is supposed to be accelerating the trend towards transparency. Like Wal-Mart’s behind-the-scenes support of the RV couple touring the United States who just happened to park that RV in a Wal-Mart parking lot so they could meet interesting Wal-Mart employees and talk about interesting Wal-Mart stuff to the latest form of astroturfing, Monsanto’s financial backing of a supposed grass-roots organization of dairy farmers who want to continue to use bovine hormones (Posilac) to induce an extra gallon of milk from their cows in the face of a national movement toward organic milk.
The New York Times wrote this weekend:

“That same year, the Monsanto dairy unit hired Osborn & Barr to handle, among other things, the Posilac brand, according to an article in the St. Louis Business Journal.

In 2007, Monsanto and several dairy organizations met by phone to “lay the groundwork” for a grass-roots organization, according to an online dairy industry newsletter.

Afact was created in the fall of 2007. In addition to receiving money from Monsanto, Afact has received help with its Web site from Osborn & Barr, said Monty G. Miller, a Colorado consultant who was hired to organize the group …

… In the presentation, Afact also listed “integrity,” “honesty” and “transparent” [emphasis mine] as “words we wish to embody.”

They could start by being more straightforward about who is behind Afact. ”

There it is – transparent – and the Times just wrote its obituary. George Orwell is smiling up in heaven. He wrote in his 1946 essay: “Politics and the English Language:”

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.“

Whereabouts 3.8-3.16

Sat.-Mon: 3.8-3.10: Cotuit

Tues-Wed: 3.11.-3.12: NYC (Verge, Olympics stuff)

Thur-Sun: 3.13-3.16: Cotuit

NOTE: corporate email has “migrated” from dchurbuck AT us DOT lenovo DOT com  to dchurbuck AT lenovo DOT com. So drop the “us.” And, as always, my personal email remains my name with an @ sign in there someplace.

What I’m Reading — Radically Transparent

Congratulations to Andy Beal — the talent behind Marketing Pilgrim — on the publication of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online.

I’ve known Andy since I joined Lenovo in 2006 in the context of his SEO expertise. A year ago he interviewed me about reputation monitoring, incident detection, and problem resolution — something we spend a lot of time performing at Lenovo with our Social Media Marketing team led by Mark Hopkins and Tim Supples.

This is a very good book because it’s grounded in a ton of hard leg work and case study research — not hand waving theory with the usual Hallmark platitudes about authentic conversation stuff. Andy and his co-author Judy Strauss are not pushing a theoretical agenda — this isn’t one of those detestable business books that repeat the summary on the back cover blurb a hundred times. I’d rank it with Avinash’s Web Metrics as an essential and practical operators manual.

Beal’s strength in writing about the topic is his mastery of search — which is the fundamental enabler and catalyst to the entire field of SMM. Some would argue it’s the blogs, Andy realizes its the detection, the track back and the notifications that makes SMM possible and indeed, essential.

I joined the Blog Council

Yep, after snarling at the concept of a bunch of big corporate/organization bloggers getting together behind closed doors to wear funny hats and plot total world domination, I accepted Andy Sernovitz’s invitation (with a nudge from buddy Mike Prosceno at SAP) , got our CMO to pony up the fee, and as of earlier this week Lenovo is a member of the Blog Council.

Yes we joined. But the headline says “I” because that is more authentic and transparent and makes me (not “us”) accountable.

This was a tough decision, but in the end I followed the advice of a very smart person at McKinsey who once told a client when confronted with some difficult choices to exercise all three. I won’t say why, the answer is, let’s say, confidential and I have a lifetime oath of McKinsey omerta to respect.

This is a confidential organization — meaning it’s off the record. So don’t expect much more on the B.C. here.