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.

… that I was buying into the lifestyle of a busy executive on the go, the kind of executive who might, at a moment’s notice, jet off to Baltimore – first class!

I love a good meme. This one was started by Christopher S. Penn, picked up by Olivier Blanchard and then by my friend DJ Waldow.

Here’s how Chris defined it:

We strive desperately to look for the next big thing, the next big secret, the magic wand that will make everything better. What we tend to overlook – or most of us, anyway – are the little secrets, the little hacks and tweaks you can make to your day, your year, your life to help things operate better.

So here are mine. Some of these are things I’ve learned and taken in, some are things I’ve learned and am trying to apply, and some are things I know I should be doing and don’t do very well at all.

1. Make the hard call first. I started my career as a reporter. I’m not a very confrontational person. I would often spend an entire day (or an entire week) dreading making a call I didn’t want to make. Twenty years later I know the secret: pick up the phone and make the call and get it out of your head.
2. Don’t assume people know what you’re talking about. I’ve been in dozens of meetings and conversations where people glossed over the simple, preliminary stuff and got right to the complex ideas, assuming that everyone else had read the agenda, the introductory email or remembered what happened in the last meeting. If it’s your idea or project, it will be very vivid to you. A lot of people in your audience might not have a clear idea of what you’re talking about and won’t stop you to ask. Restate the assumptions. Give a quick summary. Ask questions. Make sure people know what you’re talking about.
3. Learn to speak better. About two years ago I took the Ultimate Power Speak class from Bart Queen of Speak America. (Generally I run like hell from anything that looks like a motivational speaker, but Bart really knows his stuff and teaches a really simple and practical method.) One thing we learned in the class was how often we all say things like “um” and “and” and “but” and “so.” Record yourself sometime and listen to all the superfluous junk you utter. Then listen to the really great speakers and see how seldom they do it. It will mess with your head for quite a while and make you feel self-conscious whenever you open your mouth for weeks, but in the end you will be a much more powerful communicator.
4. Humor is possibly the most powerful communications tool. I’ve often been the guy on the communications team who wanted to do something goofy. Sometimes that’s made other people nervous. There are still a lot of people in corporate America who think we need to present ourselves as august and serious, or our customers won’t trust us. I’ve never found that to be true. It’s hard to be genuinely funny in a corporate context and nobody likes it when it’s forced. But when you can engage people with humor, they will like your message more and remember it longer. (Obviously a lot of this depends on what kind of business you’re in – I don’t think anybody wants a funny funeral home, for instance.)
5. People usually aren’t mean or stupid. We’ve all been in situations where we were dealing with someone far away, on the other end of a phone or an email thread, and things weren’t going the way we wanted. It’s easy to get mad and assume the other person is an idiot, or has a hidden agenda or is otherwise jerking you around. I’m 44 and have been working since I was 15. I worked construction for a summer. I’ve tended bar and cooked in restaurants. I’ve been a DJ. I’ve been a consultant. I’ve worked at big companies and small. The sum total of all that experience has shown me that people are usually pretty decent and well-meaning. Things run more smoothly (and with less angst) if you assume that than if you always assume the opposite.
6. Don’t live in your inbox. So many days I find myself picking up my iPhone as soon as the alarm goes off, waiting for my eyes to focus, and checking to see if I’ve gotten any work emails overnight (one of the particular features of working for a global company). When I get to the office, it’s really easy to go straight to Outlook and stay there all day. Break out of that. Make time to read and learn and create and interact. You might be the kind of person – like me – who thinks the person who emailed you is sitting there drumming her fingers waiting for a response. That’s probably not happening.
7. Don’t speed. Do the math. If you’re on your 20-mile morning commute, there is no substantial difference in what time you arrive at work if you drive 65 or 75 or 85. It’s a matter of a few minutes. Drive the speed limit. You’ll be much calmer when you arrive and you won’t have to spend your whole drive worrying about cops. Also, some of us have kids in the car, dammit.
8. Really, nobody cares how much your watch cost. I like watches. I have a bunch. I have some that cost ten bucks and one that cost more than my first car. No one has ever commented on that one. I have one watch that always gets comments from people: co-workers, flight attendants, waiters, people in elevators. Because it has an orange strap.
9. Save your indulgences for things that are worth it. This definitely falls into the “things I know I should be doing and don’t do very well” category. Every day we are confronted with opportunities to do things that aren’t good for us. Don’t eat the stale donut in the break room. Save the calories for something really good that you really love. Don’t sit on the couch for two hours staring at reruns of House Hunters. Go to bed, read a book or do something with your brain. Save that couch time for when you have a show or a movie you really want to see.
10. Know how you learn. Are you a visual learner? Do you have to get your hands on something to understand it? Do you glean information from lectures? Every day we are given dozens of opportunities to learn, in dozens of different formats. I can’t learn to use a new software application or tool, for instance, by having someone explain it to me. I need to play with it. My mind tends to wander in long lectures. Now I know not to bother dialing in for that “lunch and learn,” because I’ll just end up bored and drawn into my inbox.
11. You can only go without sleep for so long before you get sick or stupid or both. The older I get (and maybe it’s because I’m getting older), the more I realize that I need a full night’s sleep to be of any use, and if I go for too long sitting up every night working until midnight, I will get sick. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is go to bed.

And with that, I’m off to bed. How about you? What are your little secrets?

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik / CC BY 2.0
]]> http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/04/08/still-more-11-little-secrets/feed/ 6 http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/28/didnt-they-have-their-own-chapter-in-gangs-of-new-york/ http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/28/didnt-they-have-their-own-chapter-in-gangs-of-new-york/#comments Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:02:07 +0000 Dave http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/28/didnt-they-have-their-own-chapter-in-gangs-of-new-york/



]]> http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/28/didnt-they-have-their-own-chapter-in-gangs-of-new-york/feed/ 0 http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/07/ive-stopped-waiting-for-my-hover-car-but-come-on/ http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/07/ive-stopped-waiting-for-my-hover-car-but-come-on/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:24:50 +0000 Dave http://dbthomas.com/blog/?p=1158



I’m not a big fan of the Oscars, but The Mrs is. In fact she just said, “I realized tonight that this is my Super Bowl.” When we cancelled our cable TV about four months ago, I think the prospect of being without a reliable source of supply on Oscar night seemed like a dim and distant danger.

We spent most of our non-parent time this afternoon trying to find someone streaming the actual ceremony. ABC in conjunction with Facebook streamed the red carpet ceremony (and Wayne Sutton was there tweeting for Kodak – go Wayne!), but nobody in the US was streaming the actual ceremony. The Mrs was getting a little panicky by around 7:00.

I did a Google search for “Oscar live stream” and got a lot of useless junk and nearly picked up a Trojan horse virus. Twitter came to the rescue. I did a search for “Oscar stream” and in and among the ill-informed retweeting of a misleadingly-titled Mashable article I found an actual live stream of the Oscars, from Sky Movies in the UK via Justin.TV. We kept our fingers crossed in the final minutes leading up to the 8:30 start time as some middleweight celebritainalists who we might not know even if we lived in England waffled on with the typical pre-Oscar waffle.

Now, at 8:34, The Mrs is relieved to see that they are, in fact, streaming the actual ceremony. Hopefully it lasts. Who knows how many international laws, copyrights and test-ban treaties they’re violating. I have no idea how it’s actually happening. It might be somebody in his mum’s basement in Barking with a disassembled cable box and a soldering iron. It doesn’t look like a webcam pointed at a TV screen, but it doesn’t exactly look totally legit, either.

Anybody remember this Qwest TV commercial where a guy is checking into a motel and asks the morose twenty-something clerk if there’s any in-room entertainment? She responds with, “All rooms have every movie ever made in any language anytime, day or night.”

What happened? That was a decade ago. When will that happen?

How soon until you can just go ahead and watch all the stuff that’s streaming all over the world, no matter where you are? I suppose for a while it will continue the way it’s going now: the companies that own the rights will continue to try to control the dissemination based on geographic, political and economic boundaries that mean nothing to the Web. And the people who like to subvert that kind of thing will keep trying to find ways around them.

Thirty-eight minutes in, and the stream is still streaming. So far so good.

I wonder how we’ll be watching it on Oscar Night 2011?

:::UPDATE::: It’s Monday morning and Jean just told me the pirate stream cut off just as things were getting interesting, so I guess it must have been discovered by Sky TV or U.N.C.L.E. or Interpol or whoever looks out for that stuff.

Come to think of it, it might actually have been Interpol.

The unkindest cut was that it happened just as she got a glimpse of Oprah. So cruel.

photo from nasaimages.org

]]> http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/07/ive-stopped-waiting-for-my-hover-car-but-come-on/feed/ 0 http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/02/ive-looked-at-clouds-from-both-sides-now/ http://dbthomas.com/blog/2010/03/02/ive-looked-at-clouds-from-both-sides-now/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:41:20 +0000 Dave http://dbthomas.com/blog/?p=1140

I have a huge amount of thinking-and-writing work that I need to do, which has a habit of not getting done in the office, where there’s an Outlook inbox and a door. I love the interaction I get with my colleagues, of course, but some days I need to shut myself away and concentrate on the big stuff that actually moves things forward, not just the little stuff that keeps things afloat.

So this morning I dropped The Boy off at daycare and headed to a nearby coffee shop, sat down and made an ambitious to-do list for the day, but felt pretty good about diving in.

Then I spent the next hour trying to connect to the @#$%! Internet.

I find it increasingly frustrating that my work needs to be tied to one network, on one machine. There are so many easy ways to put your data in the cloud and work on it from anywhere, on anything. It is literally easier for me to do about half of the things I do on a daily basis on my iPhone than on my computer, when you consider the need to turn it on, find a power source, wait for it to boot up and connect.

The upshot is that I’m back in the office (but dressed for being outside the office) with half the morning gone.

Bring on the cloud!

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