The always-excellent cartoonist Matt sums things up very nicely in today’s Daily Telegraph with this front-page cartoon. In such a British tongue-in-cheek way, it captures the zeitgeist surrounding two highly topical and opinion-provoking events that have dominated the mainstream media during the past week. One is pretty serious, the other looks as if it is but really, it isn’t. The serious story is the one surrounding ex-Royal Bank of Scotland CEO Sir Fred Goodwin. It’s been making … [Read more...] about Capturing the zeitgeist
Archives for February 2009
Presenting social media in context
Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of participating in an online event that involved delivering a one-hour presentation that Finnish entrepreneur and communicator Andrea Vascellari recorded for use as part of his firm’s Open Innocell project. Open Innocell, is a project iTive started to work on in the beginning of 2008. During last year we helped 12 regions around Finland to share their best practices and develop their organizations with the help of social media and web 2.0 tools. The … [Read more...] about Presenting social media in context
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #426: February 26, 2009
Content summary: CDs for first-time commenters; upcoming FIR Interview; Shel at the East Bay Social Media Breakfast; Neville talks to Stuart Bruce at the Wolfstar party in London; Dan York reports on a career development and the Gmail outage; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: New research shows B2B buyers have very high social participation, Ryanair and the 'idiot bloggers', Annenberg research on impact of recession on PR, why ghost blogging is wrong; listeners' … [Read more...] about The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #426: February 26, 2009
The finger from Ryanair
This is either another indicator of organizational arrogance, or a sign that some very odd people work at the company, but take a look at what’s happening with Ryanair. Either way, it’s a huge public relations cock-up. If you’re a user of the Irish budget airline’s website and then write a blog post about your experience with it and finding a bug, complete with screenshots, here’s a taste of what you can expect from Ryanair if they come a-visiting and decide to join the conversation, … [Read more...] about The finger from Ryanair
Ignore the noise
Plenty of heaving shoulders and taking deep breaths this week over some of the utter drivel published in the mainstream media about Twitter and other social media. It’s mostly about Twitter, though. There’s so much of it – it’s not just the Daily Mail – that it’s hard to know where to start in commenting about any of it. Luckily, I can refer to Lloyd Davis’ excellent post that, to quote Lloyd’s own words, joins up some of the dots. Then check the comments – some well put … [Read more...] about Ignore the noise
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #425: February 23, 2009
Content summary: CDs for first-time commenters; upcoming FIR Interview; East Bay Social Media Breakfast on Feb 25; Michael Netzley interviews Edelman's Alan VanderMolen on the 2009 Trust Barometer research in Asia; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: How to reach baby boomers with social media, Humana opens up their boardroom via Twitter, two communication jobs to die for, Josh Bernoff's irrelevant email; listeners' comments discussion including Simon Young on New … [Read more...] about The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #425: February 23, 2009
Connecting government with its publics
A tweet from @downingstreet, the Twitter handle of the communications team in the Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street, prompted me to check in at Number10.gov.uk at 11am this morning to witness a question-and-answer session with members of the Cabinet being streamed live over the web from the venue of the regional Cabinet meeting in Southampton. I watched for over an hour as a succession of senior government ministers fielded wide-ranging questions from the floor, starting with Prime … [Read more...] about Connecting government with its publics
The hell of email
Sometimes, being an advocate of the “if it ain’t broke, break it†school of thought – the title of one of my long-time favourite business books which I bought when it was first published in the early 90s – can result in the opposite of what you want to achieve. So it was with my email which has been in purgatory for all of February. If you’re so inclined, you can read the gory details in earlier posts (start here and then here). But to summarize: I changed the structure of my email … [Read more...] about The hell of email