Colin and Ramsay

I’m taking a risk here, but it’s necessary. I realize I am crossing a line. I try to keep my social media presence friendly, informative and funny when I can. In the last few weeks, you’ve seen a lot of posts from me that have been more serious and not at all funny. If you’ve been following me here, on Facebook and on Twitter, you know I’m talking about the effort to Help Bring Noor and Ramsay Home.

I need you to do more.

Click on this page. Click “like”: http://bit.ly/noor-ramsay

If you know the story, skip this paragraph. My friend (and now my boss) Colin Bower had sole custody of his two sons Noor and Ramsay. His ex-wife kidnapped them and took them to Egypt more than a year ago. He has not seen them since. The only thing that can help at this point seems to be public pressure on the US and Egyptian governments. And in this day and age, the best way to do that is on the Internet.

We have been told that the State Department is watching the Facebook page and gauging public interest by the number of “likes.” The more people who click the “like” button, the better chance Colin has of seeing his sons again.

Click on this page. Click “like”: http://bit.ly/noor-ramsay

Have you gone to the page and clicked “like”? Have you shared it with your friends, told people about it, even clicked “Share” to post it to your Facebook wall? Many of you have. I notice and I genuinely appreciate it.

I see posts from my friends today promoting their blogs, their bands, sharing music videos and encouraging their friends to support restaurants and food trucks and other causes. That’s fine; I do that stuff too. But can you please spend five minutes to help Colin see his sons again?

Click on this page. Click “like”: http://bit.ly/noor-ramsay

If you’ve seen my appeals and those of many others and you haven’t done it yet, respond here and let me know why, or email me privately at dave at dbthomas dot com and tell me why. If there’s something holding you back — technological reasons, you’re not on Facebook, you’re not sure you want to commit before you know all the facts, whatever — let me know.

Maybe you are concerned about the facts. Understandable, considering all you know is what you’ve read online. But know this: I’m not. I know Colin, I’ve seen how he’s conducted himself through much of this ordeal. I’ve read what his old and close friends have said about him. I’ve met Noor and Ramsay’s grandfather.

If that isn’t enough, then think of it this way: more attention on the issue will at least help resolve it, which is best for the boys.

Click on this page. Click “like”: http://bit.ly/noor-ramsay

I can look and see that 80 of my 541 Facebook friends have liked the page. Have you?

Click on this page. Click “like”: http://bit.ly/noor-ramsay

PLEASE do it now. If you’re tired of hearing me talk about this, imagine what Colin is going through, spending more than a year wondering if his sons are alive, what they are being told about him and wondering if he’ll ever see them again.

If that doesn’t move you to click “like,” then go ahead and unfriend me now, because I’m not going to stop talking about this until Colin is with his boys.

Click on this page. Click “like”: http://bit.ly/noor-ramsay

Go to the bottom of the left column. Click “share.” Post it to your own Facebook page. Ask your friends to like the page.

Thank you very much.

I find I’m not using contractions as much anymore. I just wrote “he had been ready” when I’m sure I would ordinarily have written “he’d been.” (Of course, now that my mind is on it I’m using contractions in this post, so this is not a good test case.)

I blame the iPhone. It is much faster and easier when typing a text message or an email to write out the full words rather than go into the special characters menu for an apostrophe. (Just read that over and saw I’d written “it is” instead of “it’s.”) Also, the iPhone autocorrect feature has some quirks that sometimes mistake one contraction for another.

Now that I’m conscious of it I’m re-reading some things I’ve written recently. The lack of contractions seems to make my writing seem more formal, more stilted and, in a way, dumber.

Has mobile keyboarding changed the way you write?

photo by someToast

I have a love/hate relationship with bizspeak. I’m fascinated by the way phrases enter our lexicon, become popular, then die off. But I also get annoyed by hackneyed writing and lazy speech. Smart people usually fall back on cliches because they don’t have time to think of an original way to illustrate an idea, and that’s understandable.

Still, it sets my teeth on edge when I hear something like, “We’ll start at the 50,000 foot level, then do a core dump and a deep dive and brainstorm some value-add strategies to open the kimono.” David Meerman Scott does a great job skewering the phenomenon in his Gobbledygook Manifesto.

When I worked at Nortel, back in the late 20th century, there was a phrase in vogue that got used so confusingly that I’m convinced most people didn’t know what it meant. The phrase was sometimes rendered as “moving the goal posts” and sometimes as “moving the yard sticks.” Sometimes people said “moving the yard sticks” to indicate progress, as the ball moves forward on a football field. Others used “moving the goal posts” to mean the target had shifted after the project was underway.

Others used them interchangeably, or incorrectly, so that whenever anyone used either phrase, you had to stop and wonder if they meant it was a good thing or a bad thing.

The phrase I’m hearing a lot these days is “move the needle,” as in “do something to create a measurable impact.” Not too bad, all things considered. But let’s hop on it before we get sick of it. Can we come up with another phrase that will mean the same thing?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Stuff the turkey
2. Butter the muffin
3. Inflate the balloon
4. Squeeze the turnip
5. Grate the cheese
6. Raise the barn
7. Float the armada
8. Pickle the okra

Your ideas? We’ll decide on it, then start using it. We won’t tell anyone. We’ll see if other people start using it. It’ll be our secret.

photo by Amarillo Chuck

I by no means live an uncomplicated life, but there is one practice I hit on a few years ago that is as simple as it is effective.

Throw away all your socks, and replace them with 10 identical white pairs and 10 identical black pairs. You never have to sort or match socks, and when you’re getting dressed, you just open the sock drawer and grab any two socks of the same color.

Plus, they all wear more or less evenly. So after six months or a year (I haven’t measured accurately), you throw them all away and start again.

Of course this doesn’t work if you’re a sockophile and like to match your socks to your outfit. And yes, it is much more applicable to men than to women. But if you don’t care that much about your hosiery, it works beautifully.

photo by bark

I was just perusing Facebook, as part of my getting-ready-to-write ritual. (It’s also part of my taking-a-break-from-writing ritual and my winding-down-from-writing ritual. Essentially, if it weren’t for Facebook, I could have finished this book in an afternoon.)

I came across a link to an article at PCMag.com entitled Suburu Slaps In-Car Wi-Fi into its 2011 Outback.

Interesting idea, but I was reading the article thinking, “I’m not sure it’s worth paying $29 a month for another Internet connection that you can only use in the car.” At least not for me. The only device I’m likely to connect when I’m in the car is my iPhone, and that’s already, you know, connected.

I am becoming increasingly averse to monthly fees. I will almost certainly cancel my XM Radio subscription, the next time I remember. Yes, there’s some good content, but there’s also lots of good content out there for free. (It should come as little shock that I spend the little time I have in the car alone listening to marketing podcasts like Six Pixels of Separation/Media Hacks, Marketing Over Coffee, For Immediate Release and Managing the Gray. Those are all free, as well as valuable. Those nine and ten and eleven bucks a month fees add up, after all. Then I came to this quote:

“We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: It doesn’t make sense to pay for most in-car Wi-Fi solutions from automakers,” writes editor David Thomas.

So I guess this idea isn’t playing very well with David Thomases.

Dad, what do you think?

photo by germanyengland

Last night The Mrs looked over my shoulder at Tweetdeck and said, “Everybody’s talking about Old Spice.” It’s the hottest topic in social media, marketing and advertising right now. Built on the success of the video embedded above, which now has more than 13 million views on YouTube, the integrated social media campaign features shirtless ab merchant Isaiah Mustafa, who recorded dozens of personalized YouTube responses to all kinds of people who mentioned Old Spice on Twitter and Facebook. And not just Ashton Kutcher and Alyssa Milano: in a quick scan I saw three videos addressed to people I know personally, not just through social media.

No doubt this campaign will win dozens of awards and be the subject of multiple case studies. I look forward to seeing some hard analytics showing how this campaign actually affects Old Spice sales. In the meantime, assuming one of the goals was to raise awareness of Old Spice, I think we can mark that goal achieved.

I just had a lunchtime conversation with my colleague John Mosier, who leads our content strategy initiatives. We talked about the reasons we think this campaign succeeded. In essence, they used the techniques of social media and raised them up to the brand level in a way that few companies have done.

In other words, they made it scale.

(It was no mean feat. This excellent article at ReadWriteWeb talks about the team that made it happen.)

Here’s what they did right:

1. They understood the communities they were addressing. They knew how people communicated in those channels and how they liked to be addressed. They spoke the right language. They even got positive responses to their video directed at the “anonymous” users of 4chan, which is perhaps not the easiest community to impress.
2. They understood the channels they were using, what the individual characteristics of those channels were and what benefit they could derive from each.
3. They had great content. Everybody wants their campaign to “go viral,” and the Old Spice campaign demonstrates once again what it takes to make that happen. The scripts for the videos are genuinely funny, edgy and innovative.
4. They had great talent. Despite my description above, Isaiah Mustafa is much more than a pretty torso. He’s a talented comic actor with great timing, and is apparently an ironman, considering he stood in a towel for a very long time, cranking out video after video. Isaiah was supported by a social media team and a group of writers who are obviously at the top of their game. I’ve watched a dozen of the videos and haven’t seen a single one that wasn’t genuinely funny.
5. They knew when to quit. Rather than milking it to the point where people were sick of it, they left on a high note, ending the personalized video responses today with a thank you video to everyone. The comments to that video on YouTube are mostly along the lines of “Oh, no! You can’t go!”

No doubt we will see a flood of imitators trying to duplicate Old Spice’s formula. Many of those efforts will ring hollow. Inevitably, some will be downright embarrassing. I’m sure a lot of corporate marketers are looking at this and thinking, “All you need to make a splash on the Web is a good gimmick.”

Good marketers already know that breakthrough campaigns are built by smart people with great ideas, amazing content and a solid understanding of their customers and the places they congregate, backed by intelligent execution.

This blog post is now diamonds.

This isn’t the kind of thing I normally write about, and this post is far from comprehensive, but I got into a conversation with two colleagues recently about how to connect a computer to a TV and stream your shows without needing a cable box. I wrote them a long email with my experiences, and, as is my wont, I decided I’d post that email here in case it’s helpful.

The Mrs and I shut off our cable TV service about seven months ago and have since been using a Mac Mini plugged into our Vizio HDTV for streaming video. It’s not necessarily an easy transition and takes some fiddling, but if you’re the kind of person who likes fiddling, it’s a good way to save about a hundred clams a month (for now, until the cable companies and content providers figure out better ways to charge for it).

Here’s the advice I gave my colleagues:

Here’s a good video that lays out all the steps. It gets a bit bogged down in all the cable options. My advice would be to Google specific questions about your TV and your computer, e.g., “connect Macbook Pro to Vizio HDTV.” Most likely someone has already done what you’re trying to do.

Basically, hooking up your computer to a modern TV is no different than hooking it up to a monitor. You just need to find the right cables.

For us it was easiest to connect our Mac Mini to our Vizio TV using a VGA cable plugged in to the TV, and a mini display port to VGA adapter to plug it into the Mac.

A lot of PCs have a VGA port already, so for a PC you can get a VGA cable and just plug it in to both devices. I did that when I was using an HP laptop with the TV.

The next challenge once you get it plugged in is setting the display and finding the right resolution. The video gives a good overview of how to do that. One thing that helps is finding the “native resolution” of your TV, which is probably shown in your TV manual, or you can probably find it online. If you set your computer’s display properties to the same resolution as your TV’s native resolution, you should be able to get full screen video with no letterboxing effect.

Of course, as with all things computer, sometimes it works easily and sometimes it doesn’t. I tried to use my Mac Mini with a mini display port to HDMI adapter, following specific instructions people had posted on the web, and could never get the color or resolution right. I gave up and went back to the VGA cable, which works fine.

The VGA cable doesn’t transmit sound, however, so I had to plug my computer into my stereo with a headphone-out-to-RCA-in cable to get audio output, but I was going to do that anyway. If you can get an HDMI cable to work, it will transmit sound as well, through your TV’s speakers.

We mostly watch network shows free on Hulu.com. We also have Netflix, so we can stream movies and TV shows from netflix.com. For the few shows we like that are not available in either of those places, we buy a series subscription through iTunes and download them.

There’s also a free web-based service called Boxee that aggregates a lot of feeds and attempts to make this all more streamlined, but I haven’t given it a good try.

None of this is simple and tidy. It requires a lot of fiddling at the start and a lot of web searching, unless you hit it lucky right away. Then, you have to hunt to find the shows you want. Depending on the strength of the network connection in your neighborhood, you may find that streaming video starts and stops. Most of the services like Netflix and Hulu will allow the show to “buffer,” so that it runs smoothly, but that means you might wait a minute or two for it to start.

You can run a free test at Speedtest that will tell you the download and upload speeds for your network and give you an estimate of the time required to download different types of files. Be sure to test it more than once, at the times you are most likely to be streaming TV shows. If you get a reading significantly below average, you might want to call your cable company and ask. One of our neighbors found ours to be very low, and the cable company investigated and made some changes to match the high load in our neighborhood.

All in all, for us it’s been worth the $100 a month savings, and we find we’re watching TV more selectively, which was one of our goals. Also, there are fewer commercials on Hulu.com shows than on the broadcast equivalent, but already we’re seeing signs that is changing.

In other words, the free lunch won’t last forever. But for now, it’s worth it.

photo by Paulpod

I’m working at home today, having returned to meet the HVAC guy and finding out we need a new air conditioner. I was upstairs (since the upstairs AC unit is still okay, touch wood) and kept hearing what sounded like helicopters overhead. I went outside to look but didn’t see any.

After a while I was sure I heard one, then it sounded like two or more. I asked a question on Facebook and Twitter: “Okay, at the risk of sounding like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, why have I been hearing a helicopter in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area for the last hour or more? It’s almost never a good sign.”

I assumed it would be bad news. The only time a hovering helicopter is welcome, in my experience, is when UNC wins the NCAA championship.

Several folks responded right away to let me know what I could have found with a news search, that a light plane had crashed at Horace Williams Airport, not too far from where we live. Sadly, the news is reporting that one person was killed and two injured. One of the passengers is the brother of the American killed in the recent bombing in Uganda that targeted viewers of the World Cup final. He was flying home to be with his family. Thankfully, from what I can tell, he’s okay.

I’m sitting here in my bedroom now, listening to what sounds like several news helicopters, flying back and forth, no doubt broadcasting the same image of a crumpled airplane.

In 1995, a UNC law student named Wendell Williamson shot and killed two people near downtown Chapel Hill, UNC sophomore and lacrosse player Kevin Reichardt and Chapel Hill resident Ralph W. Walker, Jr. He also shot and injured two other people, including a young Chapel Hill police officer who was shot through the open window of her car as she rushed to the scene. As this 1999 article in Time points out, everybody who was in Chapel Hill at the time has a memory of that event. I had two friends who were downtown at the time and hid from the shootings in a parking garage. Another said Williamson shot at him and missed.

I was in Durham during the shootings. I don’t remember why, but I know it was after I had started working for myself because I had my first cell phone. I was driving back into Chapel Hill when my mother called. “Don’t worry,” she said, “your father is fine.” Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about because I hadn’t heard the news. My dad worked at UNC-Chapel Hill at the time, having retired from Nortel and taken an associate dean position at the School of Education.

I called and talked to him, then I pulled the car over, turned on the radio news and was overwhelmed by a deep sadness. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill since 1989. We moved around a lot when I was young, and Chapel Hill quickly felt like home when I moved here and took a job at The Chapel Hill News. Inside a year I knew lots of people, from the mayor to the door guy at The Cat’s Cradle to bank presidents and bartenders and musicians and town council members and business owners.

It turns out I probably also knew Williamson, as he and I were both regulars at the Hardback Cafe. I don’t really remember him, possibly because I was usually there in the evenings and he was a daytime regular.

Everybody says the same thing in the aftermath of senseless violence, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen here. If you’ve ever been to Chapel Hill, it’s a fairly typical, picturesque college town. When it gets mentioned in books, it’s usually called “leafy” or “sleepy.” It’s grown a lot in the 21 years that I’ve lived here, but it’s still a pretty laid-back and friendly place. The kind of place where tragedy feels more personal.

My apartment was near downtown. I found out later that Williamson had parked his car in the lot of the adjacent apartments, and walked into town via the same route I used. Sitting on the couch watching the news, I could see the helicopters outside my window. They would hover there, motionless, for as long as they could, then zoom off abruptly to refuel. Then they would come back. That went on for a long time; in my memory they were there for hours.

I remember wanting to shout at them to go away. The longer they hovered there, the more ghoulish, inhuman and robotic they began to look, like mechanized vultures.

That’s what I’m thinking of now, as the helicopters hover outside my window again. I can’t quite see them through the trees, except when they climb to get a different view, or, I assume, leave to refuel. I suppose they’ll be there through the evening news broadcasts, and we’ll be eating dinner to the sound of rotor blades.

Somehow I missed that Mashable had declared June 30 Social Media Day until yesterday. People are celebrating with meetups. I’m celebrating by sitting in a coffee shop working on my enterprise social media book and being distracted by Twitter and Facebook. Seems appropriate. (Writing blog posts is another of my favorite ways to distract myself from writing the book, ironically.)

I’ve spent most of my career in marketing and marketing communications, mostly for technology companies, but with some interesting detours, including one into the music industry. I’ve written everything from radio spots to 40-page technical marketing manuals. I’ve thought a lot about how people and companies communicate, and why those two are usually different.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince business people that it’s okay to talk like human beings. I’ve written and re-written press releases to try to make them sound like the way people talk, only to have the product manager or marketing manager put the buzzwords back in. “If we don’t use them,” they argued, “people will think we don’t know them.”

I’ve wondered for years about the real-world possibility of taking a radical transparency approach to corporate communications. I’ve been lucky enough to work for a few companies, most notably SAS, who really do live the values they profess. What would happen if a company told everybody everything? Not the proprietary details of the products they’re developing or who they’re about to acquire, but the internal debates and discussions that went into tough decisions. What if they really did say, “Whoops. We screwed up”?

What if companies talked to their customers as peers, as equals, as friends? Often the differences between the people on opposite ends of the telephone amount to where they’re sitting and the company name printed on their paychecks. Most of us spend the day talking to other people like us. What if we removed the artificial boundaries, which are almost solely boundaries of perception?

Social media is making all of that happen. It’s helping us see that companies are made up of people, with all the good and bad that entails. It is frightening. It is exhilarating. It is revolutionary. It is not going away. It is good. We will never go back to thinking of companies as gray, faceless edifices that speak with one voice. And hooray for that.

There is no field I would rather be in right now.

Happy Social Media Day!

image by Mashable.com