Communication – Page 32

Anti-product placement

I’m surprised this took so long, when I think about it… The New Yorker is reporting that certain brands are buying the products of their competitors and sending them, as freebies, to celebrities of questionable brand value hoping that they’ll stop using their own products, and start using their competitors.

The story focuses on a celeb named Snooki, I take it she’s the US equivalent of Matthew Newton.

“Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors’ bags!

Call it what you will — “preemptive product placement”? “unbranding”? — either way, it’s brilliant, and it makes total sense. As much as one might adore Miss Snickerdoodle, her ability to inspire dress-alikes among her fans is questionable. The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.”

August 26, 2010

An interview with Kanye

Kanye West doesn’t really do interviews. He doesn’t like journalists much. But his recent foray into Twitter has created some interesting opportunities for journalists to quote “on record” comments from Kanye. Here, Slate takes his comments on Twitter and builds an all access interview around them.

The summary of the method of putting this interview together is as follows:

“West has agreed to speak candidly to me on a wide variety of subjects, to run his mouth but remain pithy at the same time, and to grant me virtually round-the-clock access to his life—no publicist popping his head in and telling me there’s five minutes left. As conditions go for writing a profile, these are extremely favorable. No, I don’t get to ask any questions, but I do get a constantly updating record of West’s thoughts, whereabouts, cravings, jokes, meals, flirtations, bon mots, and on and on. In the face of a mountainous info dump like West’s, isn’t the basic work of profiling—building from the raw material of everything someone says and does toward a more focused sense of who they are—as relevant as ever?”

Here’s a sample of the “interview”…

“Flying back from Silicon Valley to New York, West wanted to show me images of some recent kingish purchases he’d made, along with various treasures he had his eye on. It was a giddy tour of ancien régime-looking finery that didn’t end until well after the plane had landed. There were two golden goblets—thin-stemmed and etched with an intricate floral pattern—that West said he planned to use for drinking water. He was particularly excited about a bowl that squats regally on a gold base. The bowl is made of milky, hand-painted porcelain, with two grippable gold lions curling up its sides. “I copped this to eat cereal out of,” he said, adding that he’s been fantasizing about buying a horse. It’s hard to say exactly how much, if at all, he was joking.”

August 26, 2010

Nailing jelly to a wall. Diagrammatically

Damien, in my previous post, asked what a Venn Diagram of nailing Jelly to a wall would look like. So here I am, obliging my readers as always…

August 25, 2010

An online pulpit? Ministry and social media

A couple of conversations online in the last two days, and a couple in the real world, have caused me to think about the pastoral implications of being part of the oversharing generation.

I have many politically motivated friends on Facebook who happen to be in vocational ministry. Conventional ministry, from the generation above mine, is that ministers shouldn’t be endorsing any particular political view (I think Peter Jensen articulated this best in his ABC interview a few weeks back).

People in ministry are in positions of influence. There’s something about the pastoral or discipleship relationship that inherently imbues strongly held personal opinions with a possibly unhelpful significance. We’re not good at splitting our personal convictions from our theology – partly because most of our personal convictions flow from our theological presuppositions (which are also personal convictions, but hopefully biblically based).

Anybody in this sort of relationship needs to maintain a detached objectivity and the ability to put forward views with nuance. But we also need to be able to speak of our convictions on non-essential issues without being slammed or defriended.

So the question I’m grappling with is as I move towards holding more “influence” as a vocational minister is how do I do that and remain a person of conviction who is prepared to put forward views on controversial issues like politics or education.

I have a real problem with people equating what Christians in ministry say online – either in their Facebook statuses or their blogs – with a “thus sayeth the Lord” statement on reality. We need a diversity of voices speaking on complex issues in order to nut out an appropriate position. I’ve spoken to people who’ve suggested it’s inappropriate for anybody in ministry to critique non-essential decisions of those they are pastoring because it’s not pastorally sensitive – but how do we critique the prevailing consensus, if we believe it’s wrong, without speaking our mind. So, for example, if your church has a culture of advocating for one particular method of educating children. If there are parents who look down their noses at other parents who don’t send their children to a particular brand of school (this is a purely hypothetical situation), then how do we put forward our views without causing some offense? How do we do it right? How do we maintain our humanity? We don’t want to be the “toe the party line” drones who are dominating our political landscape too afraid to say anything that might lose votes.

I don’t think a blog is the pulpit, but it is a pulpit. It’s a bit like Tony Abbott calling on people to only trust his carefully worded statements rather than his off the cuff responses. Sermons are tightly prepared exegesis aimed to teach people the word of God. Posts on a blog are opinion pieces that are hopefully not contrary to sound exegesis – but I don’t think the burden of responsibility is the same. We should be careful with how we use our tongues, and our keyboards, and should steer clear of slander, malice, dishonesty and gossip. But to suggest that we can’t speak out on issues that we feel strongly about by equating blogging with being a called and appointed “teacher” is a little wrongheaded, and opens up a can of worms. Should I, for instance, read a woman’s blog if blogging is teaching?

Conversely, I think we need to be really careful to present our personal views with appropriate nuance. When we speak out in favour of a particular methodology, or political party, we need to frame it somehow as personal opinion in an issue of liberty. And I think blogs are a terrible forum for this. Controversy is inherent to the medium. Controversial posts get more hits, more comments, and are more fun to write. Controversial posts are also a much better corrective against opposing views. They make people think, they prompt discussion. But controversy is often not pastorally sensitive (though I reckon Jesus, Peter, and Paul were all pretty controversial). It annoys me when people post such controversial ideas when I disagree with their fundamental views. I get a bit narky.

Here are some thoughts around this subject, in list form.

We all need to be careful to frame our views appropriately on issues of liberty.
We need to be prepared to participate in discussions in a loving manner when we agree and when we disagree in order for discussions not to be bogged down in player-hating.
We must recognise the limits of the medium – both in terms of non-verbal communication, and in terms of the form and function of blogs as dialogues primarily based on personal opinion not produced primarily as ministry, but rather as personal reflection and possibly the pursuit of wisdom (unless somebody deliberately sets out to have a ministry blog – but even then the medium needs to be taken into account). We interpret based on medium everywhere else. Peer reviewed journal articles are interpreted differently to the opinion column of a tabloid newspaper though both are ostensibly written communication.
We need to frame our disagreements in love and with a desire to be reaching the same goal. A more nuanced view (because most of us start on extremes, most of the time).
We need to be encouraging people to speak their minds on issues as part of the online conversation, and we need to be prepared to speak the truth with love if we think they’re wrong.
Any outcome that leads to those in ministry, who are hopefully generally well thought out theologically (and hopefully more broadly), being too scared to voice their opinions is less than ideal.
People in ministry need to be sensitive to those reading their thoughts and not create unnecessary obstacles.

August 24, 2010

A case for putting the “gimmicks” back into church marketing

This may just be the former PR professional in me. But, I’m a big fan of ministry gimmicks. I love a good “love” gimmick (with a caveat that it actually has to be matched by the real thing).

When I was involved in AFES at uni we used to take the “shock and awe” approach to promoting our mission weeks. The process basically went:

1. Put up a controversial poster.
2. Put up a second controversial poster.
3. Hope somebody out there might be offended enough to put up a response poster.
4. Put up a poster promoting our talks/explaining our angle.

I think that was uni ministry marketing strategy 101, though I did hear about one group who dressed up as death (complete with scythe) and walked around the uni campus reminding people of their mortality.

That kind of gimmick, and the previously described “marketing strategy” doesn’t really do a lot for me. It doesn’t teach the people taking part anything except how to annoy people or put up posters. It is low cost, especially if you’re masked. I don’t think it really works.

One of our most effective gimmicks at uni was holding a shoe shining booth – we cleaned and polished people’s shoes while telling them about whatever event we had coming up – and explaining that we wanted to serve our uni community.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about how churches can make positive contact with people they don’t know in their communities – and I reckon gimmicks are ideal for that. Like I said at the start – this only works if your church can actually back up the gimmick with substance, if you really do love your community and are prepared to put yourself out for them…

I think our “application” when it comes to the question of how we can serve others in Sunday School and in adult bible studies always ends up being a little inwards focused, or a bit “build it and they will come” – cooking a freezer full of meals that end up being distributed to your church family is a great way to serve one another, and kids promising to pick up their rubbish at home is also good (and a subset of “honouring your parents”). But I’m really keen for people to start thinking small about how they can meet non-Christians in a positive way, while obviously as Christians.

So here are three gimmicky ideas I’ve had (feel free to chuck some more in the comments).

1. Street Working Bee/Street Party – I like the idea of starting a community focus right outside the door of your building. Church buildings are brand assets because of their constant physical presence. If you can have all the people on your street thinking positive thoughts when they walk past, or look at, your building – then you’re on the way to getting them through the doors. But I digress. Here’s my idea – most churches have monthly working bees that attract a group of people willing to put in some hard yards to make the church facilities sparkle. Most houses in the street, and indeed most houses, would love to have a similar level of care and attention – so why not get our working bees serving others? Do the whole street. Send out fliers a month in advance advertising the availability of a few teams of workers and ask people to book in jobs. Hold a BBQ at the church at the end of the day.

2. Get matching shirts and hang out at the local supermarket offering to help people – If your church is near a shopping centre, or there’s a “local supermarket” that most of your congregation shop at, then that’s a great place to find other people who could be part of your congregation (geographically speaking). Shopping centres are our cultural Mecca. I was thinking getting a team of people obviously marked out as members of a church to hang out at the shops and offer to carry people’s bags to the car, that sort of thing, might be a really nice way to get some positive interactions happening. It’s a good chance to talk to people (and you can subtly check out what people are spending their time and money on as a way of exegeting your suburb).

3. Get your Sunday School to make something for the kids in the neighbourhood – we were talking, at Clayfield, about our new series of Church4Kids Material, which includes a lesson on service. I don’t think my suggestion made the cut – but I reckon a great way to model service for kids, and a great way to “love” our neighbours, would be for the kids to help make up a massive batch of playdough, portion it up into containers, and have the leaders deliver it to houses in the streets around the church who have kids – complete with a little card explaining why the kids at church thought the kids not at church might like some playdough, and how it’s all about serving Jesus.

What are your thoughts on employing such obvious gimmicks as a means for sharing the gospel?

August 16, 2010

Warning: May contain traces of wikipedia

Wouldn’t it be nice if your morning news came with a straightforward interpretive key – something a little bit like these warning labels (available as a pdf) from this guy named Tom Scott.

This article contains unsourced, unverified information from Wikipedia.

Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about.

August 15, 2010

How the internet works: trending topics

This is a pretty funny story about how internet conspiracy theories spread. It all started with a serious Wired story about a vaccine that may mitigate stress related hormonal damage to your brain.

Headline: Under Pressure: The search for a stress vaccine.

It became a four hundred word tabloid story about a vaccine for stress.

Headline:Jab that could put a stop to stress without slowing us down.

Then a little conspiracy committee decided that what was going on was some sort of clinical trials of a mind altering, brain eating, drug that would be a tool of the nefarious one world government.

Headline: Establishment Media Pushes Brain Eating Vaccines.

This last group encouraged readers to search “brain eating vaccine” on google – and it quickly hit the google trends charts. One day I’m going to spend a bit of energy blogging specifically about the words that are on that chart at the time to see what happens to my traffic.

August 13, 2010

An infographic infographic

Here’s how to make an infographic. In case you’ve been wanting to jump on that particular viral bandwagon.

Via here.

August 11, 2010

Social Media Mythbusting

College Humor is a social media icon. They make funny videos that are popular and viral both on their own site and on YouTube. Chances are you’ve seen their stuff without necessarily realising it. The College Humor CEO, the typical 20-something webtrepreneur, shared ten social media myths that you might find enlightening if trying to understand social media or trying to “seed” your stuff on social media is your thing. Otherwise they’re a bit of an insight into how the Internet works… these points are fleshed out in detail here. But the ten myths are as follows (the myths are in bold – the truths are the italics bits):

People will want to watch your branded content: “If your goal is 75% to entertain and 25% to sell a product, you already have a handicap” (a sub point to this one is understanding the audience of the social media outlet you’re targeting – and contextualising appropriately).
People will be patient with your content “35% tune out soon after starting to watch a web video.”
People will find your content
The Internet is a level playing field ie. people with big readerships are more useful sharers of your content than say, this blog…
We have no idea why things go viral: “…all viral videos give the user a reason to pass it on. This all has to do with identity creation: What does passing this video on say about me?”
Experience beats documentation: “We have a new generation that puts documentation above experience. It’s all about Flickr feeds and Facebook status updates.”
You should build your own community and tools: “if you want people to share photos and whatnot, use Facebook and Flickr. You get much more exposure and reach in that way.”
Keep things professional: “Show the people behind the scenes. It gives your site personality and makes it sticky. Personality drives your brand.”
Traditional media is irrelevant to the web: “Content creators are always working to get to TV and film — that’s where the money is.”
People will create good content for you

College Humor apparently has this strategy for their content:

Only hit for nines and 10s.
The shorter the better.
The hook comes within the first 20 seconds.
Sweet spots College Humor taps into: Topical issues and “Candycorn” (cultural touchstones that everyone knows, but doesn’t actively think about).

August 9, 2010

Wikipatrol with Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker wrote the Mezzanine (the book I reviewed yesterday). He also wrote this article about Wikipedia, where he details time spent protecting obscure articles from deletion. A worthy cause.

He thinks Wikipedia is worth protecting because its checks and balances work well…

“Some articles are vandalised a lot. On January 11 this year, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark [7] was replaced with “one ugly animal”; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a “medium-sized inflatable banana”.

This sounds chaotic, but most of the time the “unhelpful” or “inappropriate” changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicised helper bots. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead, it is a fast-paced game of paintball.”

Except sometimes these bots and human stompers want to stamp out whole articles. That’s where Baker and a team of anti-deleters step in…

“At the same time as I engaged in these tiny, fascinating (to me) “keep” tussles, hundreds of others were going on, all over Wikipedia. I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, a small group that opposes “extremist deletion, having seen it mentioned in John Broughton’s invaluable guide, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that should not be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming. I was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals [13]. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me – for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist”.”

It’s a tremendous article. Read it.

“Still, a lot of good work – verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange – is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow notion of what sort of curiosity an online encyclopedia should be able to satisfy in the years to come.”

August 7, 2010

Logo Redesign Flow Chart

Does your logo feature clipart? Or wordart? Maybe you need an update…

Via FlowingData.

UPDATE: This picture was created in response to Mikey’s comment. If your logo looks like this you might need a redesign…

August 7, 2010

How to produce a social media strategy

Every social media strategy I’ve ever read has been filled with weaselly buzzwords trying to capture the essence of online culture. Most of them sound a little like they’re written by a forty year old, with a business degree, who never really grew up.

If you’re not a forty year old, with a business degree, who never really grew up but would like to sound like one you can use this social media strategy generator (that has a very rude name). I’m not endorsing the name. Or the language. But the content will help you shape your organisation’s online presence for years to come. If you hit the “I’ve already *^#$%^& used that one” link you’ll get a new suggestion.

Here’s my new strategy.

“Ignite the existing community and attract new members by amplifying the experience with relevant and engaging content “

I think that means I need to write good posts in order to get more readers. And I need to encourage my readers to tell other readers. Have you told other readers. Please do.

Mission accomplished.

August 5, 2010

How to tell the internet to shut up

Comments are what makes the social internet go round – but they also are a classic example of the signal v noise aspect of effective communication. Annoyingly long comment threads obscure much goodness. You can, though I don’t recommend it, block comments from almost every site you visit around the world wide web, by installing this code snippet in your browser.

It comes with a warning:

Warning:

The stylesheet blindly hides blocks with IDs like “comments”, which could have unexpected side effects. (I’m told it hides the “discussion” section of Bugzilla installations, for example.) Disable shutup.css if you think you might be missing important page content.

Unlike the guy who wrote this plug-in – I like and value your comments, and would appreciate more of them…

July 30, 2010

Confessions: #2 sometimes I fake literary conversance

Making references to great literary works is a surefire way to impress educated people. Sometimes I do it even if I haven’t read the book – I find knowing a book’s opening and a little about the protagonist is enough to get by. Great literature often opens with a great, and memorable opening. It’s often possible to fake a workable knowledge of the classics just by paying attention to how other people use them.

For instance, this week, in Ben’s quiz, I made a “call me Ishmael” joke even though I’ve never actually read Moby Dick.

Do you have anything to confess?

July 29, 2010

Confessions: #1 penvy

As a trained, former professional, writer I can, at times, feel a little superior when reading other people’s writing. Stuff like “Oh. That idiot used the wrong there!” is a bit passe. It’s more issues of style and vocab that I start to develop my own personal writing hubris. And then I read stuff written by truly brilliant writers and crawl back into my hole. Or, I sit there stunned and try to deconstruct their work thinking “I could totally do that”… worse still are cases of “penvy” wishing that I had penned that exquisite sentence, or paragraph (it rarely applies to a whole novel – sustained great writing is difficult it’s more a flash of brilliance amongst sustained goodness).

Check out some of these essays from magazines compiled by Wired founding editor, and blogger, Kevin Kelly as the best of what’s around. Including this heartstopper from David Foster Wallace about the metaphysical, almost religious, experience of watching Roger Federer play tennis at his peak…

Look how he sets the scene for a match he’s describing (the Wimbeldon Final in 2006 between Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal).

“Plus it’s in the cathedral of Centre Court. And the men’s final is always on the fortnight’s second Sunday, the symbolism of which Wimbledon emphasizes by always omitting play on the first Sunday. And the spattery gale that has knocked over parking signs and everted umbrellas all morning suddenly quits an hour before match time, the sun emerging just as Centre Court’s tarp is rolled back and the net posts driven home.”

And this peerless description of Federer’s game:

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

That’s pretty high-brow. Rants can also give me a bit of penvy – like this rant about Twitter from McSweeneys. This is a massive sentence.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer’s glue in secret alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares, because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy, incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality, through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens.

July 29, 2010