There was a lot of publicity around the recent blocking of social media sites by the Iranian government in an attempt to limit the publication of adverse news on the Iranian elections (I like this blog’s view). More recently, the Chinese government has decreed that all new PCs come equipped with PC screening software in an attempt to restore an element of control over its ever-increasing number of bloggers (China has the highest number of bloggers in the world). In both cases, what the governments have failed to recognise is one of the underlying principles of the web – that it was built to allow the exchange of information when access to distribution networks was limited. In other words, there is always a way.
What we often see is tools and sites being used in ways that had never been anticipated. So this week’s mail is dedicated to resilience. Things that we are not meant to be able to do, but still can. As the boundary between PR, Recruitment Advertising and mainstream Advertising blurs, we will have to consider adopting a much broader array of techniques to get our message in front of an audience. And as our ongoing Herts Police success shows, it is joined-up thinking that delivers results. And a good relationship between client and agency…
For those who are about to rock, we salute you
A friend of mine recently attended the AC/DC concert and spent many days beguiling me with details of how cool it was. For those of us who were unable to attend, Sony BMG issued the album in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s right, a full album, compete with videos made in ASCII characters in an Excel document. The idea was that it was a way of distributing music across company firewalls which would normally block anything other than the standard suite of Microsoft products. It is pretty cool, but also a stark reminder of how easy it is to transcend security procedures.
All your Easters come at once
A modern means of ‘signing’ your work (rather like the mice that you can often find carved into pews in churches, or the cameo appearances by Alfred Hitchcock in his movies), an Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page or video game. I’ve mentioned these before, but it is amazing just how many of these proliferate the media that we use on a day to day basis. My kids are pretty adept at stumbling up on these, but for those of us who are less trapdoor savvy, EEggs.com is a useful site. If you’re just interested in software eggs, click here.
Show me the money!!
OK, so it’s not an Easter Egg or an interesting use of an application, but it DOES make you think. If you get as finicky about long, drawn out meaningless meetings as I do, this tool is a stark reminder that time equals money. Simply plug in the average charge out rate of the individuals attending a meeting (I usually go for £100 or £120), enter the number of attendees and hey presto, an instant cost calculator. Next time you hold an internal meeting and someone is 15mins late, it is worth noting just how much billable time we are actually losing…
Extending the afterlife of a conference
Given how much ignorance there is about microblogging and Twitter in particular, I thought this article was very engaging. Skim down to the section headed ‘The Open Conversation’, which talks about how Twitter extended the shelf life of a conference on education reform. At a number of recent conferences, it has been interesting to see how Twitter and hashtags have been used to distribute and discuss particular topics and debates on a much broader basis.
“Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife. The sum total …added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.”