January 2005

Latest at NevilleHobson.com

• Complementary tools to listen to Twitter
  For listening to conversations on Twitter about your brand, your client’s brand or anything else you need to be paying attention to online, you are literally spoiled for choice. I think one of the simplest yet more effective tools available is Twitter search (known as Summize before Twitter acquired it), shown in the screenshot above [...]
• Tackling ivory towers and silos
  Downsizing is the undisputed global management trend of the moment, says The Economist in a feature in the current edition that discusses what some companies are doing to reduce costs beyond the job cuts that have been making the news recently. The Economist describes what companies like Nortel have been doing to cut costs. Action [...]
• FeedDemon the smooth operator
  FeedDemon – the best desktop RSS feed reader for Windows, in my view – will soon be out in a new version 2.8. As is typical in much software development these days, beta versions of the new release are publicly available for testing or trying out, always with the caveat that they are beta versions [...]
• Motrin: Where’s the authentic voice?
  Earlier I posted about the Motrin kerfuffle and the opportunity it presents brand owner McNeil to listen to customers and engage with them. Reading the apology text again that McNeil posted on the Motrin home page (above), there are a few things about it that bother me. First of all, it’s an image not text you [...]
• The Motrin storm: breathtaking speed and scale
  Four years ago, an online storm erupted over the best-selling bicycle lock brand in the USA and how anyone could open the lock with a simple ball-point pen. During a 10-day period, a groundswell of commentary and opinion about Kryptonite locks spread from enthusiasts talking on bike forums to the mainstream media, to a product [...]