Communicating Archives - Page 6 of 8

Genachowski and more on net neutrality

24 September, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

FCC Chairman Genchowski Craig Newmark put up a good article on his blog about Julius Genachowski’s^[1] position on net neutrality. I wrote a short article on it two days ago. Thanks, Craig, for mentioning OpenInternet.gov, where everyone can learn more about the issue. The full speech at the Brookings Institution is also available on OpenInternet.gov. The Internet, of course, is a world-wide resource, and not just a US institution, but the FCC regulates network operators in the US and the backbone connections that support huge portions of the net today, and what the FCC does on this issue is critical here as well as an example for the rest of the world.

Sometimes as tech fans and geeks we just assume that technology we invent will be used fairly and for the good of all. When I was inventing online learning (after a half dozen others had done it earlier—LOL) in the 1970s, I assumed that we were all working toward a common goal – making life and learning better and easier for everyone. Always surprises me when someone gains a patent on something like the process of pretest-prescribe-posttest^[2], which we had been doing since at least the 1970s (and perhaps since B. F. Skinner experimented with computer-based teaching machines in 1954.

But the point is that unless we scrupulously protect open and even-handed access to the Internet, and don’t allow anyone to corner the net and deny us access unless we pay more, we could end up with the same kinds of fees we now see for our telephone service (it hasn’t gotten cheaper for me in all the years I’ve had phones—it seems to go up every time I change providers). Take a look at Genachowski’s talk and you’ll see why I think there’s greater hope now for the net.

[1] Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission

[2] Interactive learning system with pretest

Craig Newmark is Founder and Customer Support Rep for Craig’s List.

Howard Rheingold- 21st Century Literacies

4 August, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Howard Rheingold’s message is that we need to attend to 21st-Century literacies. meaning that we need to know (or learn) how to sort out the good from the bad.

Howard suggests the critical skills are: attention; participation; collaboration; network-savvy and critical consumption (what Howard often calls crap detection).

JD Lasica interviewed Howard in Cambridge [see JD’s blog post] when we were on Traveling Geeks.

Reaching Advocates and Influencers

23 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Rather than blasting out advertising indiscriminately to everyone, firms are finding they can target individuals who like their brand and can influence others to see the brand more positively. There are more and more ways to find out who your brand’s advocates and influencers are. That’s because software is now tying the data together so we can actively decide how to reach and, more importantly interact with, our passionate customers. Social media allow us to openly and transparently interact with and have conversations with our customers.

Susan Bratton, JD Lasica, Renee Blodgett and Robert Scoble discuss these aspects of marketing and customer relations in this roundtable in Cambridge as a part of Traveling Geeks 2009.

Companies must go where their customers are

22 July, 2009 by sky 1 Comment

Companies are using social media to “be where their customers are.” In this panel, sponsored by Omobono and East of England International, up in Cambridge on Friday, Susan Bratton talks about this important change of orientation which more and more companies are putting into practice.

Earlier, in London, some of us had similar conversations with companies who are implementing social media strategies to be in closer touch with their customers. One of the companies I spoke with, in a conversation held under Chatham House Rule (meaning “not for attribution” or “off the record” in US press terminology), the head of customer support told me he had opened a Twitter account, reviews around 500 tweets a day, and helps between 10 and 50 dissatisfied customers resolve problems they’d been having with his company. This apparently takes him only a small amount of time (an hour or two, from what he said) and generates a huge amount of goodwill at very low cost, for his company.

I’ve been advising my clients for at least the past year to not worry about “attracting eyeballs to their web site” but instead to focus on making there presence felt “wherever the customer lives online.” In the case of my customers this means setting up Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, and then using those to engage in genuine conversations with customers – not one-way marketing-speak.

Oops, almost forgot – listen to what Susan has to say about all of this!

She calls it Social Influence Marketing and it has three core components: 1) Social Listening; 2) Participation; 3) “Appvertising” (Give-to-get).

China requires that all new computers contain censoring software

10 June, 2009 by sky 1 Comment

The debate continues around the world about whether computers should be required to blacklist porn and other sites, and now according to a New York Times report China will require pre-installed software on all new PCs that permits the government to proscribe sites that would be harmful to web surfers. If recent history is any guide, this means censoring sites that speak out against government policies or against corruption. [Update: China Backs down^[1]…read footnote in the expanded post] [Read more…]