Category: Communication

Banning social media a band-aid solution

The Penrith Panthers have joined a bunch of other major sporting teams (including Manchester United) in banning their players from having a presence on popular social networks Twitter and Facebook. I can’t see, from a branding point of view, how this is a good thing for the club – surely having the players use these mediums productively, for the benefit of fans, would be a more beneficial long term strategy.

There is, of course, the danger of players being people. Being a bit too human. Airing dirty laundry. Or, doing what LeBron James just famously did in the U.S – using the medium to generate buzz around their playing future and leveraging up their salary and status. I can see why clubs would want to stop that sort of behaviour.

But the Panthers say they are doing this to “protect the players” essentially from themselves. Here’s what the Panthers have said about the policy (from FoxSports):

“We don’t want our players using these social networking websites. They are an invasion of privacy. They can be dangerous.”

Well, not really, they’re not an invasion of privacy but a forum where you can voluntarily make parts of your life unprivate. Nobody is questioning the capacity for these platforms to be misused. But dangerous? Not really.

Brisbane seem to have a more measured (and reasonable) approach:

“The Broncos have added a clause to their code of conduct that states any player posting a detrimental comment on Facebook or Twitter could be fined or suspended.”

My former employers had a policy along similar lines – with instructions not to engage in narky online flamewars (a paraphrase) we were to participate in online discussion in good humour, while recognising privacy and confidentiality concerns.

The FoxSports story, I think, hits the nail on the head when it comes to the motives of these moves:

“NRL clubs are deeply concerned about what players post in their status bar and whether their party photos are a “bad look”.”

It’s ultimately not about player safety – but about managing the NRL’s brand. And at this point I think the heavy handed “no go” social media policy is treating symptoms of the problem rather than its root cause. If players weren’t doing anything (in public, or private) that could be posted online in an embarrassing way – then there wouldn’t be a problem. Keeping the players off Facebook doesn’t stop photos being put up, nor does it stop those photos being sent to a journalist.

The real key to not damaging your brand via social networks is to not be doing stuff that would damage your brand. That’s where clubs should be directing their energy and attention.

There’s a further danger, which this story picks up, of players not present on Facebook being impersonated by people with less than optimal intentions. Apparently it’s happening with superstar Jarryd Hayne right now – and previously it has been an issue on Twitter for people like Kanye West (who apparently joined up just to avoid being impersonated). You can read his expletive laden all-caps tirade at Twitter impersonators from last May here at TechCrunch (I can’t find it on his actual blog)…

“THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON’T HAVE A #%$@@# TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS. REPEAT… THE HEADS OF TWITTER KNEW I DIDN’T HAVE A TWITTER AND THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS HAVE HIGH ACTIVITY ON THEM… IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE. HEY TWITTER, TAKE THE SO CALLED KANYE WEST TWITTER DOWN NOW …. WHY? … BECAUSE MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS LOUD!!!!!!!!!”

July 29, 2010

Wrap text with style with CSS Wrap Text

CSS text wrapper is a cool little webapp that generates shaped text frames for your website. You can customise them. This might prove useful if you’re doing something like a Christmas card and want to make a bunch of little baubles or something… or if your landing page has pictures. Check it out. Here are some samples.

July 28, 2010

The cult of Mac

Some people take their Mac fetish to a spiritual level – and it seems with good reason. There’s probably a conspiracy theory book in this. Apple has styled itself as a religion. Maybe.
Here are some potential “religious elements” identified in an interesting study, covered in this article from the Atlantic, entitled: “How the iPhone Became Divine: New Media, Religion and the Intertextual Circulation of Meaning“, it followed an earlier study on “The Cult of Macintosh.”

  1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
  2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
  3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
  4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company…”

The scholar responsible for that article summed up the Apple experience:

“When you’re buying into Mac, you’re buying into an ideology. You’re buying into a community.”

It’s funny. In a day and age where the church is trying to figure out how to learn from Apple, Apple seems to have flipped the metaphorical apple cart – in basing its business practices on the church.

July 24, 2010

How to write funny comics

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson responded to a piece of fan mail with these tips on creating funny comic strips. He’d know.

Here are the tips.

1. Materials are not important, so long as your work reproduces and reduces clearly. It’s what you do WITH the materials that counts.

2. I think characters are more important than jokes. Any cartoonist ought to be able to come up with funny gags, but the best strips have rounded, complex characters that readers can care about. Cartoon characters should be more than standing props to deliver jokes.

3. Don’t imitate other strips. Editors are looking for something new and original.

4. Most importantly, have fun with your work, and practice writing and drawing all you can.

Via Letters of Note.

July 24, 2010

Another guide to good writing

Guides to good writing are a dime a dozen in these parts. But I like reading them. And this seems as good as any a place to collate them. So here are some good principles for better prose from author Janet Fitch.

There are more details on each heading at the original link.

1. Write the sentence, not just the story
Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences… A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone’s writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

2. Pick a better verb
Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked… One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone.

3. Kill the cliché.
When you’re writing, anything you’ve ever heard or read before is a cliché… You’re a writer and you have to invent it from scratch, all by yourself. That’s why writing is a lot of work, and demands unflinching honesty.

4. Variety is the key.
Most people write the same sentence over and over again. Try to become stretchy–if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties.

5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses.
A dependent clause helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence… Often the story you’re looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

6. Use the landscape.
Always tell us where we are… Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.

7. Smarten up your protagonist.
Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating… Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

8. Learn to write dialogue.
Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet.

9. Write in scenes.
A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed… Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

10. Torture your protagonist.
We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

July 23, 2010

Keeping kids safe online…

I don’t often give serious parenting advice here. I know my audience. But my purpose for this post is twofold – first, to congratulate Steve Kryger from Communicate Jesus for this piece on Sydney Anglicans that has been syndicated on Gizmodo.com.au, and second, to share Steve’s list of ten tips for parents. I think they’re good, and a great acknowledgment that clean feed, or no clean feed, the issue requires a thought out approach from parents not a government mandate.

  1. Understand what your child is doing online (put the computer in a public space, talk to your children, use accountability software).
  2. Ask your child to explain to you what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
  3. Talk to your child about your values, and how these should be lived out, regardless of the environment.
  4. Filter the content that your family views online.
  5. Understand the minimum age requirements for different websites and technologies (children under 13 should not be on Facebook).
  6. Understand how these popular websites are used, and what the opportunities and threats are.
  7. Understand what avenues are at your disposal if something goes wrong (e.g. your child’s Facebook account is hacked).
  8. Consider how you will respond if you discover your child is acting inappropriately, or viewing inappropriate material.
  9. Decide when or if your child will get a mobile phone.
  10. Understand the new functions of mobile phones, and what the opportunities and threats are.

July 22, 2010

Style Guide: to infinitives and beyond

The Chicago Manual of Style is one of the seminal style guides in the world. If you’ve got a grammatical question or are pondering an obscure rule governing the use of the English language (like whether or not to capitalise the E in english, or the names of birds in a tourism brochure) then you should check it out. Especially interesting is the FAQ/Q&A section.

On split infinitives:

“CMOS has not, since the thirteenth edition (1983), frowned on the split infinitive. The fifteenth edition now suggests, to take one example, allowing split infinitives when an intervening adverb is used for emphasis (see paragraphs 5.106 and 5.160). In this day and age, it seems, an injunction against splitting infinitives is one of those shibboleths whose only reason for survival is to give increased meaning to the lives of those who can both identify by name a discrete grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic entity and notice when that entity has been somehow besmirched. Many such shibboleths—the en dash, for example—are worthy of being held onto… euphony or emphasis or clarity or all three can be improved by splitting the infinitive in certain situations. It’s one of the advantages of a language with two-word infinitives.”

Cop that one grammar nazis…

July 20, 2010

The death of the headline

SEO1 killed the headline. So says this piece from the Washington Post.

“My biggest beef with the New Newsroom, though, is what has happened to headlines. In old newsrooms, headline writing was considered an art. This might seem like a stretch to you, but not to copy editors, who graduated from college with a degree in English literature, did their master’s thesis on intimations of mortality in the early works of Molière, and then spent the next 20 years making sure to change commas to semicolons in the absence of a conjunction. The only really creative opportunity copy editors had was writing headlines, and they took it seriously…

Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don’t seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian. That’s because, on the Web, headlines aren’t designed to catch readers’ eyes. They are designed for “search engine optimization,” meaning that readers who are looking for information about something will find the story, giving the newspaper a coveted “eyeball.” Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers.”

I struggle to decide whether to write headlines for googlers or headlines for my own amusement. I mostly settle for the latter, unless I can’t think of anything punny.

1 Search Engine Optimisation

July 20, 2010

The reason I don’t post very often…

is because

I write like
William Shakespeare

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

& I don’t want to risk raising the tone above what the usual author is able to maintain.

July 20, 2010

Who do you write like?

I Write Like is a cool little online tool that compares your writing style to famous people.

I write like
George Orwell

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Knowing how you write like is only half the fun, what about how other people write like…

The Townsville Bulletin writes like:
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Kevin Rudd’s sorry speech was written like:
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

His farewell speech was more like a tech blogger:

Kevin Rudd writes like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Who do you write like?

July 19, 2010

Spicing up viral marketing with Old Spice

This Old Spice campaign is going to be dissected by social marketing students for years to come. It is almost perfectly executed (I can’t actually think of a flaw yet).

It all started with this critically successful commercial launched during this year’s Superbowl. A commercial which has now had more than 13 million views on YouTube.

It’s a one shot shoot, here’s the explanation of the process:

Here’s the accompanying 15 second ad.

Then there was an equally well executed follow up (with 7 million views).

That was apparently also shot in one take. Isaiah Mustafa, the actor (an ex NFL player) explains…

Game Reviews – E3 2011 – Movies and TV

This was the point at which the Old Spice campaign went from well executed and hilarious commercial to social media phenomenon. They organised an online campaign where the Old Spice Guy responded, in video, to interactions from around the internet. Here he responds to popular tech blog Gizmodo:

Here he helps someone propose to his girlfriend:

Here he, as Old Spice Guy, responds to himself, Isaiah Mustafa…

Here’s a great article unpacking the process of responding in real time (it’s obviously a massive, and very impressive, task).

“In the room there are two social media guys and a tech guy who built a system pulling in comments from around the web all together in real time… We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”

Here’s his sign off from a day of answering the audience:

It’s a campaign where everybody wins. Old Spice, the Creative company Wieden + Kennedy, the writers, Craig Allmen and Eric Kallman, the director and production company, and finally the actor himself.

Successful viral campaigns strike the right balance of humour, production quality, strategy, and level of interaction with the audience. If they’re pitched right they become juggernauts – like this one has – inspiring users to generate their own content. This is the Holy Grail of viral marketing. Getting people past talking about your product and into participating in your conversation.

Here’s an almost equally well produced parody.

This campaign, coupled with Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign from last year, will set the bar for thinking about integrating marketing campaigns across traditional and new media. It’s an amazingly well executed feat. To close, here’s an analysis of where advertising might go from this point, complete with a nice little quote about the social medium:

“Start here: as it became apparent that this wasn’t just a one-time media drop, but instead an ongoing live performance—a spectacle in progress—I was reminded of some thing that I heard Rex Sorgatz say years ago. I’ll paraphrase, broadly: blogs are actually more related to live theatre than they are to, say, newspapers. The things that make a blog good are almost exactly the things that make a live performance good—and the most important, the magic cata­lyst, is the interplay with the audience.”

July 17, 2010

Bruce Winter’s tips for apologetics

We’re doing a bit of a mini-subject on apologetics this semester as part of a weekly “preparations for ministry” session.

Yesterday’s session featured Bruce Winter sharing some insights on the important discipline of apologetics garnered from his extensive studies on Paul and his culture, and from his experience as an apologist in Singapore and while working as an academic in England (Cambridge).

Here are my notes:

Every Christian is required to be ready to give a reason to the hope that lies within them.

It’s interesting that the word there – apologia – goes beyond the idea of giving some answer. Stoic philosophers used apologia to argue their case while interacting in a substantial way with the mindset of the people they’re addressing.

How are we going to engage in apologia with people in the 21st century? Two Ways To Live isn’t going to work for everybody. We see from the way that Paul tackles apologetics that he engages the culture around him.

We need to engage the audience and move around their world – Paul’s letter to the Romans is a great apologia that removes objections to the gospel – objections that come from the mindset of people living in first century Rome.

Paul argues that we need to pull down every argument against God both within and outside the church – he talks about demolishing the stronghold of people’s ideas contrary to God, he distinguishes between the argument and the person. Paul demolishes and reconstructs these arguments “captive to Christ.

Acts 17 is a good example, and a good paradigm, of Paul connecting with the audience and their expectations and producing converts. This is the parliament of Athens.

Five things to learn from Paul to connect and engage with people’s world. This message needs to engage the thought world of the people around it.

  1. We have to connect our message with the audience we’re speaking to – Paul connects – he makes the connections the audience required (in introducing a new God to the council – eg the building of a temple, holy days/sacrifices), he also uses their culture (eg the statue of the unknown god) to engage.
  2. We have to structure our message in a way that provides a hearing for the gospel – The framework we present the gospel in changes based on the audience – talking to sciency people requires a different presentation to talking to people from different religious backgrounds. The main aim is that people hear the gospel connected to their world.
  3. Know how to connect the message, and know what it needs to correct – Paul knows that people need the gospel, but he also knows what the objections to it are, and he addresses them with the correction of the gospel.
  4. Converse with their world – it’s remarkable when you read historical sources talking about the nature of God and compare it to the way Paul quotes their arguments and poets/philosophers in his apologia. He understands their world, their language, and their issues. Paul is even able to point out inconsistencies in their current thinking and actions (they talk about the nature of Gods not living in temples made by man, but visit temples – Paul points out they aren’t living up to their basic beliefs and teachings.) He’s read the literature. He knows their teaching. He is well able to bring them to that point through the quotations of their poets.
  5. He confronts his audience – Paul doesn’t steer clear of the topic of God’s judgment and the predicament that places his audience in. God’s judgment coupled with God’s amnesty (he calls on all people, everywhere, to repent). Paul doesn’t compromise. He’s not prepared to negotiate on the fixed points that his audience was bound to be opposed to. It’s a different worldview.  Paul’s sermon in Acts 17 converts people from those opposing points of view and philosophy.

Some questions to ask regarding our approach:

  • How are we going to talk to different audiences?
  • How do we talk to those dealing with the certain uncertainty of death?
  • How do we connect with their views and preconceptions about Christianity and the world?
  • How can we talk to them about their world?
  • How do we talk to affluent people who think they have everything? Their question is different – “what’s missing?” – “what is it?” How do we raise the issue of the gospel in a way that articulates this need in a way they might never have considered?

A question to prompt thought in others is: If you had your life over again how would you do things differently? Everybody is fundamentally aware that they do the wrong thing at least occasionally.

We’re not dealing with blanks slates but people who have spent their lives deliberately ignoring (and justifying ignoring) general revelation. Romans 2 suggests that it’s our conscience that judges us as we face God at judgment day – so the question “how can God…” is irrelevant.

July 15, 2010

Reading between the lines: What the Oxford English Dictionary can teach us about typography

Dictionaries can be fun. This is an amusing article exploring the subject of typography through the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Take this 1688 quote for bake: “when Letters stick together in distributing… This is called the Letter is Baked.” So we learn that, when printing, the physical pieces of type occasionally stuck together, but we’re left to wonder why this happened, how severe it was, and how printers corrected it. Did baking ruin the type? Did each printer have his own method to prevent baking, a trade secret he passed down only to his apprentice? Did some Elizabethan Edison develop a method for casting type that eliminated baked letters altogether? These are the sorts of questions that the OED can raise, which can be investigated later (but will more likely just be blended in with the actual definition, creating a fictitious pseudo-history in the memory of the reader). Though sometimes the dictionary answers its own questions, as a similar citation for bake from 1963 shows that printers likely never overcame the issue of sticky letters.”

Here’s why the Oxford English Dictionary is cool:

“Indeed, the dictionary serves as an ad-hoc catalog of every experience that any English-speaking person felt interesting enough to write down.”

July 13, 2010

Comic Sans fights back in an expletive laced tirade

Comic Sans, the world’s most maligned typeface, has come out swinging via this imagined monologue from McSweeny’s Mike Lacher. A sample (the language is a little blue).

“You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the **** what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the **** up for once.

People love me. Why? Because I’m fun. I’m the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in m********* spring.”

July 12, 2010

How Should Jesus Smell? Scent branding church

Scent branding fascinates me. It seems so obvious. Appealing to all the senses – especially when taste is so related to smell. It’s like nailing two senses with one blow. I went to a tourism marketing seminar with Tom O’Toole, the owner of the Beechworth Bakery. One of the first things he did when turning the bakery into a landmark tourist attraction and nationally renowned bakery was to pump the smells from the kitchen out onto the street. I read elsewhere that fast food joints use similar strategies (which is why they always smell so good).

Smells effect us all. They trigger memories, comfort us, stimulate us, warn us off dodgy food… Jasmine is apparently as effective as valium. Smells are chemically complex – the aroma of your freshly ground pile of coffee can be formed by as many as 800 different aromatic compounds. Smell is powerful stuff – and besides food chains and deodorant manufacturers its been a pretty underutilised element of branding. Sure, we describe new purchases by their scent (cars, leather etc) – but this seems more a marker of quality than a factor in the purchase decision (though you wouldn’t buy a stinky new car). Scent marketers Air Aroma cite research that suggests that 75% of our daily emotions are triggered by smell.

The practice of creating artificial smells is pretty controversial (unless you’re a celebrity launching a perfume brand – ala Bruce Willis… because smelling like a sweaty male action figure is awesome.

Hotels have trademarked fragrances that get pumped into their lobbies and rooms take this little anecdote for example:

Since Le Méridien was founded in 1972 by Air France, Penot and Roschi took a very old copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince—the author was a pilot—and had the rich smell of the book’s pages analyzed. (Capturing the scents of familiar objects is quite standard in this industry, though presumably the choice of this particular old book for the testing was more whimsical then determinative.) They used the results to create a scent, which they took to Ziegler. She decided it would be Le Méridien’s signature fragrance, its olfactory logo.

Scent branding isn’t new, the article above dates its use in travel to the 1970s – it even has a name for the part of your brain that the method targets: “Singapore Airlines has a branded scent… used in all of its planes, a light sweet scent like pure steam from fresh rice. If you’re booking a flight…you’ll find it that much harder to go with the competition because the Singapore scent builds the brand in the limbic system.”

The future of the hotel industry will apparently involve us selecting a scent for our room at check in, and the room smelling of roses (or whatever we choose) by the time we get to the door. Some people see this practice as a form of subliminal manipulation, or have problems with the ethics of the perfume industry.

Natalie Dee, a designer, very usefully put together this periodic table of smellements – a grading of smells we find pleasant or noxious.

And, incidentally, it’s now possible, through the availability of precise scientific measuring tools like mass-spectrometers (made famous by NCIS), to analyse a person’s “scent print”…

“Florida International University chemist Kenneth Furton studies the smells that might be of greatest use in a crime investigation. These, he says, are the ones that come from the hands. (Murderers rarely wield weapons in their underarms.) For the last five years, Furton has been cataloging the many chemicals that compose hand scent, including odoriferous acids, alcohols, aldehydes, hydrocarbons, esters, ketones, and nitrogen-containing compounds.”

Robyn tells me that using aromatic oils in the classroom also helped moderate behaviour – lavender calmed the kids down, lemon and eucalyptus perked them up.

Which all adds up to a compelling case for harnessing smells in branding – but is this an area churches should be playing in? Should we install ventilation systems dedicated to pumping the odour of a well read bible through the auditorium at reading time? Should we be pumping the smell of morning tea onto the street to entice people in on a Sunday? What smell do you think captures, or enhances the church experience? What did Jesus smell like? A mix of sawdust, dirt, and after his anointing a liberal dash of perfume. Was that the first case of scent branding?

July 12, 2010