Month: January 2009

Categories
Enterprise 2.0 General

Career Renegade and nimble competitors

Career RenegadeFab, just had an e-mail from Eruditor to say that Johnathan Fields’ book “Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love” is whistling its way over from the land of America. This was recommended by Chris Brogan recently and I’m looking forward to a ‘good read’.

 

First time I’ve used Eruditor and they seem efficient. The book turns up in Amazon but is out of stock. More nimble and agile competitors are able to deliver. Funny how the once great progressives such as Amazon fall victim to their own success and cease to be in the vanguard. Seen all the more in more detail with Amazon’s paltry example of customer service with their lapsidaisical satellite Lovefilm.com and the degeneration of large swathes of their digital stock.

Categories
General

Helping the Chiswick Gardener

The Chiswick Gardener

the chiswick gardener

Helping The Chiswick Gardener with new floral display in W4. Full details are here.

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

‘Origami in the Pusuit of Perfection’ – Mabona Origami & Nordpol+

I’ve just added a case study on Asics Shoe Company by the Blog Council to Social Media Case Study The Hot List. I’m mentioning this one out as it has some fab animation by Nordpol+ and Mabona Origami, really nice:


Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo.

I love the bit about the raw egg dropped from an extreme height…

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0 Intranet

What should we call ‘Intranet Social Media’?

e2We have ‘Internal Communications’ as a reasonably well-established term for what happens inside the corporation, be it in vocal, print or electronic media forms. I’ve even found a nice and almost legalistically comprehensive definition from BNET:

communication between employees or departments across all levels or divisions of an organization. Internal communication is a form of corporate communication and can be formal or informal, upward, downward, or horizontal. It can take various forms such as team briefing, interviewing, employee or works councils, meetings, memos, an intranet, newsletters, the grapevine, and reports.

A further Google on just how long the term has been in existence has proved fruitless though, Miriam Webster has no definition and the Free Dictionary reverts to a revealing and accurate comparison, that of Internal Combustion:

a process in which a substance reacts with oxygen to give heat and light [!]

All the more problematic then when we come to social media. Social media is by definition, social. It happens out there, in the public sphere on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Twitter, Countless Blogs, forums, feeds , etc., etc.,. But as I’ve pointed out before, what we don’t see a lot of, is social media behind the firewall.

What’s more, we don’t even have a proper name for internal social media, social media that lives inside the firewall. Enterprise 2.0 goes someway in the direction but it seems to me at least as being too Operations driven rather than communication and collaboration lead. It also falls into the same trap as Web 2.0 and seems to curtail the simple richness that the term ‘social media’ has. Finally, it sounds, well just a bit too grand!

I suspect for now that Enterprise 2.0 will be the dominant term, but I wonder if a new, possible neologism will arrive…maybe social medianomics or some other horrid transmutation of the English language!

Is Enterprise 2.0 OK? Or, ideas on a postcard please….

Categories
Uncategorized

Tony Hart R.I.P

Categories
Communications

When your ship is sinking…

Shel Holtz has posted a fab article over at his blog ” A  Shel of my former self” called “Julia Hood of PRWeek elevates internal communications’ importance“. I’m pointing this out not only as it’s very worthwhile read (and it does what it says on the tin) but most particularly for this quote:

 

“When your ship is sinking, you don’t throw your radio overboard.” Dave Orman

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

2 new video case studies added

New video case studies on Best Buy and their Blue Shirt Nation and Gen Y recruits, plus MGM Grand and Employee Engagement added to Social Media Case Studies The Hot List.

 

I’m going to start tidying up, collating and providing more info on these case studies in the near future.

Categories
Uncategorized

Entropa: International Lampoon

Looks like the penny has finally been spent with The Times headline: David Cerny says hoax EU sculpture inspired by Monty Python. Yet another piece of European aggrandisement and misquoting by The Times, or is Cern being a little too modest? Surely the Czechs have enough right to celebrate their own absurd, surreal and avant garde history? Here’s Cery in his own words:

Grotesque hyperbole and mystification belongs among the trademarks of Czech culture and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art.  The images of individual parts of Entropa use artistic techniques often characterised by provocation. The piece thus also lampoons the socially activist art that balances on  the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space. We believe that the environment of Brussels is capable of  ironic self-reflection, we believe in the sense of humour of European nations and their representatives.

Indeed.

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Social Media is not Internal Communications

Over at ‘Community and Social Media’, Chris Brogan has brewed up a rich discussion over social media in the enterprise: Aligning Social Media Within Companies. Mr Brogan’s obvious clout within the sphere of social media is there for a reason. He draws in info from all ranges of sources and this recent post exemplifies what this means in practice, in spades.

His posts have relevancy and impact across the different spheres of communications and here for me, what the post underscores, is that social media is not internal comms. This is drawn out by asking:

What if project managers decide to use Flip cameras to capture their weekly status meetings, and then podcast the results to the other offices? Not really marketing, eh?

Nope, it’s internal comms, or at least that’s we called it when we cast video to offices globally. But then this was in a marketing department. The soup kettle gets upset when we bring in HR to the equation. Take Facebook for example, Chris does and says: 

I think most organizations keep these kinds of efforts tied to marketing, but is that where it belongs? What’s Human Resources relationship to Facebook and what should it be?

Good question, there’s soup everywhere now. That soup is social media – it’s not comms, it’s not marketing, it’s not IT and it’s not HR. We’re looking at collaboration as much as communication. We’re looking at feedback and feedout as internal comms crosses the firewall. 

But what is it? It’s something new that’s what it is, and it’s us. It’s communications Jim, it’s collaboration Jim, but not as we know it. The big question then – where will social media ‘live’ in the enterprise? Communications and PR, Marketing, HR, IT? That question has long been asked about internal comms; social media accelerates the debate. Enterprises are already roling out social media, some like Ford are ahead of the game. They’re all going to have to address this question of location very very soon if they want to embrace the advantages of social media within the firewall.

Categories
Film Theory

Film Studies

Over at Degenerasian, blogger Tracy sardonically remarks that she might get an A+ in porn studies. Background to this is Annanova reporting that the Mass Communications Department at Providence University in Taiwan is running a course in studying porn movies. I note this as I used to lecture on film and television studies and while pornography was beyond the pale, theories of sexuality and filmic study were de rigeur at the time.

Much of the Theory for these studies was provided by the French post-structuralist philosopher and post-Freudian analyst Jacques Lacan. My students were not much amused by Lacanian film theory, not the least because no one had thought to teach them basic Freud, so they naturally got a bit confused when ‘Jacques the Lack’ Lacan was trotted out. Lacan is not only notoriously difficult to read, it also implies to say the least a knowledge of Freud and Semiotics. We has done Semiotics via Barthes but not Sigmund, so against all the guidelines I provided a crash course in Freudian theory. Afterward, at least 2 of my students actually thanked me for it.

At another art college in the Midlands, the students did have a go at embarrassing me when they were given free reign on a presentation project. Two presentations stay in my mind. One chose a gay sadomasochistic manga cartoon as their topic with lurid drawings of blonde Aryan types being taken advantage of by Japanese warriors. Another chose Jeff Koons’ rather graphic art-house photographs of his liaison with his then wife La Cicciolina (Ilona Staller). I sat unphased throughout the presentations and marked the students on their attention to detail, use of Theory and presentation skills. I sometimes wonder if all these years on, they’re using those self-same skills in corporate-ville.