Month: February 2009

By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with

Fascinating. Paul Smith demonstrated a real-world example of how to use Twitter for powerful real-time research–in product development, marketing, or journalism.

He posed a question on behalf of a client who wanted to launch a Green product that would be made in China, and how that would be received by consumers–and posted several responses at the above link.

I’ve used Twitter to drive traffic to a survey, but this kind of direct and immediate feedback may be even better–because it’s much more human, not to mention faster. Who knew a year ago that Twitter could be used for market research?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Peace and War Tagged with

We’ve known for quite a while that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is rife with incredible corruption. Under the Bush administration, there were basically no safeguards, and stories of money diverted into the pockets of US looters were legion.

Still, I had no idea it was this bad. According to Patrick Cockburn of the respected UK newspaper The Independent, when you add up all the thefts of a few billion here, a few million there, it totals around $125 billion. That is two-and-a-quarter times as much as Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Perhaps the saddest part is that of course, this money is NOT being used to rebuild Iraq. And therefore, not creating some good will to mitigate the horrific effects of our totally unjustified invasion and occupation. A proper rebuilding effort would have gone a long way toward demonstrating that the US had at least some altruistic motives. Instead, the rubble grows, the infrastructure fails, and Americans are hated more than ever.

I hope the Obama administration cracks down on these crooks, gets the troops out (I notice the timeline just got longer, from 16 to 18 months), and shows the Iraqi people that we are made of stronger stuff, and take seriously the mission to help undo the calamity we created.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Four years FedEx took over the Kinko’s copy and office services company, the Kinko brand was dropped entirely in 2008; those services are now grouped under FedEx Office.

When Marketing Sherpa interviewed FedEx’s Director of Global Brand Management, Gayle Christensen, she outlined eight steps the company took to smooth the transition in the public eye and retain/acquire market share. (Note: Sherpa’s content goes behind a barrier, for purchase, after a few days. “Norman,” referred to in the quote, is Eric Norman, of the marketing strategy firm Sametz Blackstone Associates,)

What caught my eye was “Step #6. Set up interviews with bloggers”:

High-profile people (e.g., new chief executives) should do interviews with bloggers, trade publications, and other media outlets to address weak speculations and preclude skepticism, says Norman. “You have to engage folks who are writing about you,” he says. “If you are not engaged, you concede the control of the message to them.”

Find out who’s talking about the merger on social media outlets, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or niche online forums and blogs. Search for the merging companies’ names or set up an email alert, such as Google Alerts, for the company and brand names.

Make a point to comment on blogs or social media sites talking about the merger, especially if something is false.

I’m fascinated that setting up interviews with bloggers warrants a main headline, while traditional media is mentioned but glossed over in the paragraph. It shows how far we’ve come that bloggers are considered opinion molders, while traditional journalists are barely noticed. This is a growing trend, I think, and it has many implications for how we (as a society) deliver and digest news.

I’m a big believer in citizen journalism, including the blogosphere (I’ve blogged since 2004, after all), and participate actively in social media.

Still, I question the decision to pretty much ignore the mainstream press. There’s also a place for the trained and skilled journalist, who knows how to ask deep questions, has a really strong BS detector, and understands the importance of telling a story that encompasses multiple points of view. I, for one, am not ready to give that up just yet.

But I also note that for many years, some “mainstream” journalism outlets have had a very clear point of view, and have thrown objectivity out the window. While in recent years we’ve seen this very dramatically with, for instance, the strong right-wing bias of Fox News or the somewhat less strong liberal tilt of NBC, even during the golden news decade of the 1970s, there were news outlets such as New Hampshire’s Manchester Union-Leader that were unabashedly partisan and sharply opinionated.

With huge budget cutbacks, bean counters making policy decisions, and corporate ownership sometimes casting a pall over the selection of stories and the decisions about how much resources to use in pursuing them, the future of professional news gathering looks a bit shaky from here. I hope it pulls out in the clutch. It’s an important perspective, despite its flaws, and we’d be poorer for losing it.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Want to know why right-wing pundits far outnumber those on the left in mainstream US TV? Bloggers Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald shared a theory on Bill Moyers Journal: having someone like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now would interfere too much with the construct disseminated by US mainstream media that the US government and major corporations are our benevolent friends, and they don’t want to air views that might help explain why the US has enemies abroad.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, those preachers of hate, are OK in their view because they are simply putting out a more vitriolic version of the Reaganite “mainstream.” But the soft-spoken, highly articulate and very well informed Goodman (who I consider one of the best interviewers in contemporary journalism) is considered a threat!

Of course, this doesn’t explain how another articulate and well-informed progressive,
Rachel Maddow, gets air. But it says a lot about the nature of today’s corporate media.

In the “know your enemies” department, fans of intelligent TV must read this brief transcript or watch the video. It’s a shocker.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice

Editor’s note: Holly McCarthy submitted this provocative guest post, and I’m running it in the hope of starting some dialogue. I share some of Holly’s concerns about outsourcing (particularly about using it to duck around environmental laws), but also believe there can be ethical ways to do it, and that when done properly, it can be an important leg up to the hardest-pressed communities at the bottom of the world’s pyramid. Curious as to what others think.
–Shel Horowitz

Guest post by Holly McCarthy When we talk of business ethics, we’re generally referring to the right way to do business, the moral way that leads to principled profit. But the advent of globalization has brought on a new kind of ethical value that we must bow to, but one which we tend to ignore because it doesn’t concern us directly. I’m talking about the process of outsourcing, a practice that’s pretty common these days because of the low cost of labor in countries like India, China and the Philippines.

Issue number one: The first unethical aspect of outsourcing is that we’re ignoring our own talent and paying people overseas just to cut costs. Our people are languishing without jobs and yet we’re shifting more and more jobs overseas. There are times when we even tend to hand over sensitive information to unknown faces who are connected to us through just a computer and an Internet connection, thus putting at risk our customers’ privacy and identity. Besides this, we are closing down offices in our country only to open new ones in other countries, thus effectively contributing to development on foreign lands and stagnation in our own.

Issue number two: We’ve also taken to shifting our manufacturing operations overseas, not only because of lower costs, but also because these countries do not have effective anti-pollution laws. We are luring them to ruin with huge amounts of money, and the sad part of this whole shady situation is that those who gain from this venture are not the ones who are affected by the effluents that result from the manufacturing process. It’s the poor and indigent people who live off the land who are hurt the most – they cannot afford bottled water like the rest of us and so must still drink from the stream that’s been polluted; they cannot afford to sit inside air-conditioned rooms and so must breathe in the polluted air; they cannot afford medication, and so they must suffer respiratory illnesses and other ailments in silence.

Outsourcing is and has always been a sore point with developed nations like the USA and the UK. The burgeoning of talent in developing countries, talent that is available at a fraction of the cost incurred in hiring local labor, had made organizations take the easy way out. Of course, when there’s money to be made, it’s understood that you want to be among the profits. But there’s an ethical line that cannot be crossed, and it’s up to you to decide where you want to draw it.

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of online universities. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with

Just yesterday, I blogged about the massive user outcry over Facebook’s new Terms of Use. Last night, CNet reported that the social networking giant had retreated.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the controversy, saying, “we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

And better still, this time the process will be collaborative–which is especially appropriate, given that Facebook exists because of content its users create:

If you’d like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we’ve created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I’m looking forward to reading your input.

I think I’ll sign up for that group!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

Facebook’s recently adopted Terms of Use are attracting harsh attention in the online world.

Ownership; Proprietary Rights

Except for User Content and Applications/Connect Sites, all materials, content and trademarks on the Facebook Service are the property of Facebook and/or its licensors and are protected by all relevant IP laws and other proprietary rights

OK, no problem so far; user content remains the property of those posting it, and Facebook quite correctly maintains its rights to its own intellectual property. But then a little later, the kicker. An apparent transfer of rights to Facebook, to use your content any way it wants, with no compensation to you.

Licenses

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.
(snip)
Submissions

You acknowledge and agree that any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, feedback or other information that you provide to Facebook (“Submissions”), are non-confidential and non-proprietary. Facebook will be entitled to the unrestricted use of any such Submission for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, without acknowledgment or compensation to you.

Say, what? By my reading, this not only gives Facebook the right to sell our content without even telling us, let alone cutting us in on the revenues, but also could be interpreted–it’s a stretch, but lawyers exist as an industry because of these sorts of stretches–as allowing the company the right to use any content that includes a please-link-back utility that includes Facebook.

Writing in The Consumerist, Chris Walters says this means “anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.”

As Amazon, Google, and other content platforms have claimed in the past, Facebook responds that it’s just claiming the rights necessary to operate the service:

We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site. That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend).

Quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it this way:

We wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want,” Zuckerberg said. “The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.

Still, like those other platforms, this response seems thin and inadequate. Surely a lawyer could easily create language that fully protects Facebook while at the same time making it completely unambiguous that user-posted content belongs to its creators, who are merely providing Facebook the right to display and link to it. Without sublicensing, monetary or other compensation, or other seizure of rights the company doesn’t need.

Meanwhile, I’m not a lawyer (and this is not legal advice), but here’s my gift to the Internet community. I freely grant anyone the right to use or modify the following paragraph (which will be posted to Facebook, since my blog automatically feeds into Facebook notes):

I hereby note that I was not presented with the option to sign or decline Facebook’s February 4, 2009 Terms of Use revision, and that while I allow Facebook to display my content on any page where I post it or on any page where another Facebook user links to it, I do not transfer ownership of my intellectual property, nor do I agree to allow Facebook to relicense or reprint my content outside these uses without my approval. I am willing to negotiate licensing and revenue-sharing agreements with Facebook, but I explicitly do not grant blanket permission.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Mycelium mushrooms reclaiming oil spills, sequestering carbon, fighting disease, hunger, and pests, more. One of the most inspirational videos I’ve ever seen. A must-view.

He even makes a claim that the Internet is essentially humanized mushroom technology.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War

Blackwater, a company heavily tarnished with a reputation for corruption and violence, a company that has done a lot of the heavy lifting for the Bush administration in Iraq, a company that was defeated in its plan to turn a US-Mexico border region into an armed camp…one of the most powerful private armies in the world–is feeling so much heat that it’s changed its name from Blackwater Worldwide to the innocuous-sounding (and totally vague) Xe.

It can run but it can’t hide. It’s still responsible for the atrocity/massacre at Nissur Square. It still has blood on its hands in incident after incident. And it’s still banned from future operations in Iraq.

It is an outrage that the US outsources its dirty work to companies like this (which pay their people a lot more than the government pays its soldiers), and then claims they can’t be held responsible for their actions because they’re outside the military system. That was the policy under Bush. I hope it changes under Obama.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , ,

From December, so a few references to Obama’s Cabinet choices have shifted. Vital analysis, lightheartedly delivered out of her personal experience, looking not only at implications of squandering water, but also on our current system’s vulnerabilities, and how much it will really take to rebuild infrastructure.

My favorite quote:

Here in California, fish have much better lawyers now than they did back in the day. Sustainability and environmental concerns are not going away in California or anywhere else.

If you don’t know Rachel Maddow, she’s a host on MS-NBC TV and AirAmerica radio, very progressive, very smart. I’ve been following her since her first radio gig maybe 10 or 12 years ago, here in Western Massachusetts.

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