Altyrian View

The Dallas Morning News has a great offer for you: Help us review the lost JFK files. Seems that a DA in Texas found some files relating to the Kennedy assassination. There are so many of them, they they are calling on readers to help out.

Given the volume, we haven’t been able to review most of the files. That’s why were calling on you. Here’s your chance to review never-seen-before materials related to the JFK assassination.

Take a look, and let us know if you see something interesting.

While I am thrilled to get a chance to review these documents myself (I never will, but I have the chance), this seems to be pure laziness on the part of the Dallas Morning News.

Our local PRSA chapter has a blog where member can post questions and information. This post piqued my interest:

I received an email from someone asking for some quick enlightenment on how to get the most for herself and her clients out of social media sites like stompernet and twitter. She wrote, “I’ve joined several but I’m just not sure what to do with them. how can I advise clients when I don’t get it?? Who in the world has time to sit on these sites and browse for other people you know or want to know or to write what you’re doing in a blog everyday?? And there are so many sites that seem to be “a must” how do you choose where to go? Last question.. how do people find you on these sites? Blog directories?”

I posted a reply, and for the sake of those reading this blog, here’s how I responded:

“I’ve joined several but I’m just not sure what to do with them. how can I advise clients when I don’t get it??”

Common Craft has some great, short videos that explain the basics of different social networking tools.

(more…)

Congratulations, Celebrex, you have created the worst television commercial ever. More discussion after the break.

So you’ve probably heard that Celebrex almost got pulled from the market because it was causing heart problems. Their response: Hey, any of these drugs can kill you - including ours.

They have created an ad that is so confusing and so difficult to look at that it is worthless in terms of marketing, in terms of advertising, in terms of PR. I have never seen an ad this bad, and it runs for an eternity.

If you have something nice to say about this ad, please comment. Perhaps I’m missing something (it is the end of the day after all). Unless I hear differently, this is officially the worst television commercial ever.

The good folks at Ragan interviewed me when I was in Vegas a few months ago. They did a great job of editing a 30 minute conversation down to just 8 minutes.

Before the interview we did quite a bit of basketball talk – UNC was to face Duke that weekend. I guess they figured that I worked at UNC because of how excited I am about the team. As most of you know, I’m still the VP of Communications at Altyris.

Discussions about Strategy Tavern, top 10 issues on marketers’ minds, the Virtual World Conference, low tech at the grocery store, television viewing habits, Lamborghini on iTunes, “beeping” four-letter words in ads, user generated content and how it is affecting politics in 2008 and Twitter.

As always, we want your feedback. You can send audio comments or email comments to our feedback email.

Yesterday I picked up a really sweet Flip Ultra camcorder. Try it out, I created the quick behind the scenes look at the prep for Altyrian View. You can watch the video below, and be on the lookout for a new podcast episode later this afternoon.

I’ll admit it: I’ve had a hard time seeing the value in Twitter. If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, check out this fantastic video to get you started.For me, there were too problems with Twitter: posting tweets and checking tweets for those people that I’m following. I had tried some 3rd party applications, but for the most part, I had a problem remembering to turn them on (sure I could have them auto-start on login, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do that).For me, the eye-opener was linking my Twitter account to iChat, the IM program that I use every day. Now, every time someone posts a tweet, it comes through on my iChat. Even easier, I can post from IM as well. Nothing new here, I just hadn’t used the feature before. Now, when someone tweets, I know it immediately. Typically, reading a tweet reminds me that I need to post what I’m doing. Now I’m on a roll…Now that I’m using Twitter more, I’ve needed a 3rd party app to get to some of the more “advanced” features (the ones you can’t do easily on IM). Neville Hobson sent me a direct tweet to check out Twhirl. It’s a great 3rd party app for Twitter.So, now that I’m finally tweeting, follow me. Better yet, let me follow you!

As many of you know, I am in Vegas this week speaking at the Social Media for Communications conference presented by Ragan Communications and PRSA.

It’s been a fantastic conference thus far, but the highlight has been the keynote by David Pogue. He’s the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and is the latest person to read this blog. 

“How do you know that, John?”

Well, David uses Google Alerts to follow the conversations that mention his name. If you are in public relations and you aren’t using Google Alerts, you need to check it out. Every day (or once a week or all the time), Google sends you an email if your name / company name comes up in a new post. 

So, instead of being old school and sending an email, I thought that I would post for all to see a note to David: 

David, fantastic keynote yesterday! Loved hearing the iPhone song - the video was great, but hearing it in person was a real treat.  

My question is this: since I’m sure you have told countless audiences that you use Google Alerts, has anyone ever pitched you by blog post? I can see advantages (only a moron would give a bad pitch for the world to see) and disadvantages (tons of alerts every day). Again, thanks for the presentation yesterday! 

You are in a big meeting, and your phone rings. Do you answer it? You talking to a friend that you haven’t seen in years. Do you answer a call, or let it go to voicemail?
If you are on live TV, you might think that you would ignore a cell phone call. This anchor, however, chose to take the call. The next morning (after she saw herself on YouTube, no doubt), she explained that she took the call because she was working on a big story. Kinda funny all the same…

During my presentations about social media, I’ve had many people ask me, “What is RSS (Really Simple Syndication)?” That’s a hard question to answer. Fortunately, Ed Lee has come up with a great analogy:

Your Web content is like water in a lake. Lots of people want it, and you want them to have it. They want to drink it, swim in it and play water polo in it.

But to get it, they need to visit the lake, fill their buckets and then go back to their homes to use it.

RSS enables your audience to create a stream from your lake(where the content is) to their home (where they need the content).

Follow this link to read Ed’s full article about RSS.