Finding the "hyper-local" (or real) world in the digital one

PaidContent just put out its list of the top 50 digital media companies in the US. They base this on actual digital sales, either advertising or subscriptions or of content - with no numbers from traditional media sales (like printed magazines) and nothing from device sales, such as the iPad or Kindle.

The top spot goes to Google, of course, with more than three times the revenue of number two Yahoo. Spots three and four go to Apple and Microsoft.

Yawn. Pretty predictable, right?

Well, the list gets more interesting further down. This is PaidContent's take:

Businesses that generate digital revenue by selling ads dominate our list; companies that make most of their money selling online content or subscriptions took only 13 of the 50 spots. And while many traditional media companies may be struggling to grow their overall sales, they are generating significant revenue online. Twenty-one companies on our list have a substantial presence in non-online media, such as newspapers, phone books or TV.

Fair enough, but what struck me in the list is the prevalence of old-school, basic functions like Yellow Pages, hyper-local classifieds and sites focused on small businesses. In other words, this list was not all about the new fancy digital world (though that is there) but also about what makes our daily lives run in our immediate neighborhoods.

A digital Rotary Club, so to speak.

You've got three yellow page businesses on the list - AT&T (with YP.com and its 23 million monthly page views), SuperMedia (home of Superpages.com, among others) and the Yell Group (home of Yellowbook.com). And while AT&T obviously has other digital interests, the company entry on the PaidContent list deals almost exclusively with its printed directory business.

What do these old school print directory companies have that newer players lack? A big local sales force, it seems.

On another front, you've got ReachLocal, which offers marketing services to small businesses, and there is Classified Ventures, which runs the very local-focused cars.com and apartments.com, among others.

And one of the digital companies with the most buzz and fastest-growing influence right now is also hyper-local. Yelp.com allows people to review and rate local businesses and didn't even make the PaidContent list.

And to stretch this a bit, both Yahoo and Aol are making significant commitments to hyper-local news. Groupon is also decidedly local, as is, in the end, much of Google's advertising.

(An aside - local restaurant owners apparently are not in love with either Groupon or Yelp. Read this press release to find out why. I can't tell if they have a point or are just whining because their competitive world just got a bit more ... competitive.)

The lesson here? That the digital world is based in the real world. That our basic needs for information are not changing completely. That there is a lot of money to be made out there away from the glamour Facebook and Zynga.

Nathan Hegedus is a writer and editor for JG Communication, with a focus on magazines, white papers and corporate responsibility.

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Corporate responsibility reports: does anyone care? (I say yes)

How important are corporate responsibility reports? Does anyone read them? Do the right people read them, meaning, in a business sense, investors?

Or all they mostly for PR or to mollify a restless employee base?

Over The Guardian's The Sustainable Business Blog, Rory Sullivan makes a very convincing case that investors do not care about corporate responsibility reports, that they remain hyper-focused on the bottom line, not on the environmental or social impacts of their investments.

In other words, every environmentalist's worst nightmare.

But then, at the end, Sullivan turns a corner. This might be the business world today, he says. But the business world tomorrow will be different:

There is a growing consensus among investors that the production of a corporate responsibility report is effectively a minimum requirement for companies seeking to demonstrate that their social and environmental issues are being effectively managed.

The non-publication of a report, or the absence of published policies, targets and performance data, is increasingly likely to be taken as evidence that the company does not recognise social and environmental issues as management priorities, thereby raising wider questions about the quality of the company's risk management systems and processes.

Here at JG we have produced a series of corporate responsibility reports for various clients. So, obviously, I'm only writing about this on the company blog because I agree with Sullivan.

And I do really, really agree.

Right now, consumer companies are already judged by their perceived commitment to sustainability or corporate responsibility issues. And this trend will soon seep into the rest of the business world for what I see as two reasons.

The first is that poor communication on corporate responsibility will be bad business, as Sullivan says. But, also, to rip off a line from a presentation I saw recently, companies do not do business with companies. Instead, people at companies do business with people at other companies.

And people care about the environment now. They care about sustainability (at least here in Sweden). So even if it is subtle, a passive approach to environmental or corporate responsibility - meaning no one knows what you do if you have no report - will leave behind a bad taste, or the least, mean a missed chance for enthusiasm ... and sales.




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Apps, the mobile web and the battle between platform and content

I was sitting in a meeting last week when someone said that "apps" were over. Done. Like as in so 2010. It's all about the mobile web, they said.

This really shook me. I mean, I still have a "feature phone," which means a relic, totally useless for data and not even with a nice pad for texting. I also do not own a tablet. So I haven't even started with apps yet (though I was all excited to someday go to an app store and have my mind just totally blown, man).

And now they're over?!?

Well, yes. According to VentureBeat and The Telegraph in the UK, apps are really over. From the Real Story Group:

But more importantly, mobile devices are a very volatile market. Even if you'd have the money to waste on building four different apps for the most important platforms, you may be hopelessly behind in a year's time. If the new Windows Phone 7 or MeeGo make a surge, what will you do? Ask for the budget to create even more apps? And if existing platforms start coming out in new form factors, will you update each one to make use of tablet resolutions? Do you really want to tie your mobile presence to something this fickle?

And it makes sense too. Why develop an "app" for eight different smartphone or tablet operating systems when you can just have a good mobile website for all?

Yeah, I always thought apps were stupid. Really. I have been thrilled to have that feature phone so I didn't have to deal with them.

But, really, what this highlighted to me was how muddled and shifting the balance between content, form and technology truly is right now.

I wrote a story late last year, in which Lucy Kueng, a media management expert, said that content dominates. The technology follows:

Very few people buy technology per se; they buy it because of what the technology can do for them. And they buy technology they don't particularly like if it allows them to access certain content. Thus the most compelling content is becoming ever more strategic and expensive ...

But - and here I get fuzzy and am just throwing ideas out here - isn't the platform driving the content at least to some degree? Paul Carr at TechChrunch argues that the web is nothing but an effective advertising platform, and that content on it is destined - shaped by the platform - to be driven to the lowest common denominator.

The truth is that the grand idea of the web as a content platform has failed. To make money on a web it’s all about grabbing more and more eyeballs to compensate for plummeting CPMs. On that web there’s no place for quality, and in five years time we’ll see the medium for what it really is: a brilliant advertising platform, and very little else.

And then - and I had to go here, yes - we come to Charlie Sheen and the train wreck of his recent life and media appearances.

Well, Charlie got himself on the Ustream video streaming platform the other night for his own talk show - Sheen's Korner. The host of the American version of Survivor tweeted that "the future of television is happening now," according to PaidContent. And perhaps hosted streaming is the future, where celebrities and entertainers can communicate more directly with their audiences, cutting out the middlemen of networks and studios.

But it didn't go so well for Charlie. The numbers were disappointing, he was rambling and incoherent and finally walked off the "set" on his second "show."

But what if he had been good? Would you go to a new streaming service to watch Charlie Sheen live? Is the content that important? Or will his old show, Two and a Half Men, chug on without him because it is on the right platform at the right time, regardless of quality?




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Three ways Al Jazeera is changing communication

No one knows what the future of media will look like. Are tablets and devices going to save the day for paid content? Are legacy media companies doomed? Is Facebook the new newspaper? Will Twitter bring democracy to the furthest, most repressive corners of the world?

I don't know, but I will venture a guess. Al Jazeera will be there at the end.

The Qatar-owned news network is at the center of a dizzying swirl of worldwide trends right now. Just to run down a few:

1. The role of social media in the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia has been widely debated. But whatever the actual influence is, Al Jazeera has been at the center of it.

A TechCrunch post detailed the surges of traffic to Al Jazeera outlets when former Egyptiain rule Hosni Mubarak resigned. And it turns out that during the heaviest surge, more than 70 percent of Al Jazeera's web traffic came as referrals from social media. And where did most of the referrals come from? Not Facebook, but Twitter. This is interesting because I've read that Facebook was the big driver for local organizers in Tunisia, not Twitter. But for Western news consumers, Twitter seems to be in the vanguard.

2. And Al Jazeera may also revolutionize the moribund US news biz. Demand is sky high for Al Jazeera English - even though it is available in only 3 million homes in the US. But people are finding it through its website, through YouTube and through set-top boxes like Roku. From the Guardian:

The Qatar-based channel's acclaimed coverage of the Egyptian crisis has been referred to as the broadcaster's "CNN moment", doing for al-Jazeera English what the first Gulf war did for CNN, pushing it to the forefront of the public's consciousness. Put simply, must-see TV. Now the challenge is to translate the plaudits into the major cable or satellite distribution deal the channel has long sought without success in the US ...

With China investing $7bn in foreign language media, we may also be witnessing the beginning of a shift, albeit slight, in the nature of global TV news and debate.

In a landscape dominated by partisan talk - see Fox News (right) and MSNBC (left-ish) - and with CNN seen as largely ineffective, Al Jazeera seems to be finding the strongest niche of all - the good reporting, hard news niche.

That this is happening in a country that demonized Al Jazeera during the Iraq War, in which its public perception was that of terrorist accomplice, is really something. It either speaks to changing American attitudes or a serious void in the American media scene.

3. There is another component to Twitter and Al Jazeera - the English one. As English becomes more and more widely spoken, it provides a larger platform for a tweet from Tunisia or a news outlet from the Middle East. I discovered this in a comment by statica from another Guardian piece:

How much more powerfully would international support for the protests in Tianamen Square, those crying for help in Rwanda or Sarajevo, have been raised if individuals around the world could have had access to specific images & statements put out by people on the inside?

I guess we're finding that out now.

Much of this is relevant to us here as communicators in Sweden. The English bit. The global platform (opportunity for people up in the far north). The role of technology and news in ordering our societies.

I wonder what more we will find out tomorrow. No matter what it is, we'll probably see it on Al Jazeera.




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

The perspective of a baby in a bar in las palmas

This post is about perspective, about communications. It is very deep, I promise.

It is also about a funny, drunk baby trashing a bar.

An award winning short film called "Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas" by Swedish filmmaker Johannes Nyholm has gone viral, with more than 3.7 million YouTube views and counting.

Here is the author's synopsis, via NPR in the US:

A middle-aged lady on a holiday in the sun tries to make new friends and have a good time.

As with most things that go viral, the film has tapped into the big swirling mess of human opinion and perspective. In the comments on YouTube, you've got people appalled at the exploitation of the baby, alcoholics who defend it, people talking about how it depicts youth culture, and this rather perceptive one from waves2light:

This video does raise ethical and moral questions. But isn't that what art should do? Extend our perspective.

This is how most kids behave. She explores the world around her to extend her perspective. It's a learning process. This kid doesn't behave like a drunk. It is drunk people who sometimes behave like kids, forgetting everything they've learned ...

The reactions to the video are a good reminder that other people are not seeing what you see, not reading what you read, not hearing what you hear. Babies are like drunks. Or drunks are like babies. Or it's OK to use a baby like this. Or it is exploitation. Or it's funny. Or you are overreacting. And so on.

This is a lesson we need to really internalize as communicators. We have to know that people will see what they want to see in our work. But we can also be as clear as possible about our message, our theme, our vision to get as many of our ideas past the filter as possible.

Or you can be vague and provocative. Like this movie.

This is from a post by Wendy Mack, Change Catalyst:

Hundreds of others have said it, but apparently the point bears repeating: If you want your people to accept and support change, you must first show that you understand the organization from their perspective.

When we try to motivate others or mobilize energy for a change, the most important element is being able to connect with people. An authentic connection has a lot of ingredients, including understanding:

• What matters to this person;
• What is this person’s reality;
• What is this person trying to accomplish at work;
• What is getting in the way?

And to hit the way way back machine, like way back to the 80s, in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - which I just found in the back of our office library - you get this from author Steven Covey:

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

I wonder what that middle aged lady in Las Palmas would say about that?

She'd probably just pour a drink on my head ...




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

The (social media) crowd is not always right

The crowd is wise. The crowd is true. These days it is all about the power of connections, of networking, of buzz.

Well, yes, but not always.

Before the recent Grammy Awards in the US, the social media monitoring firm Meltwater came up with a very cool chart predicting the winners on social media "buzz," which is, says the company, "based on the volume of mentions and sentiment of the social media community across blogs, microblogs, social networks, comments, message boards, videos and Wikipedia."




Cutting edge, right? A new way of using communication? Maybe. It was cool enough to get a write up in Wired.

Except none of their favorites won. In fact, in two of three categories, the least favorite nominee on their chart actually won the Grammy - Lady Antebellum in Best Album and Esperanza Spalding in Best New Artist. In the Best Record category, the winner - Arcade Fire - wasn't even in the top five (I would have guessed Arcade Fire based purely on this incredible collaboration with Google - best used with Chrome).

Now these victories were a surprise to almost everybody. From an Associated Press story:

"Good thing for the Grammys that the awards continue to be de-emphasized, because it was a strange night even for a recording academy with a long history of head-scratching choices. Esperanza Spalding for best new artist? Song and record of the year "Need You Now" by Lady Antebellum? We doubt anyone will remember that song five years from now as they will, for example, Empire State of Mind."

But, regardless, it just goes to show that the wisdom of the social media crowd was, in this case, no more perceptive than anything else.

And so the Grammys remain a critical and popular mystery ... and Meltwater has not updated their blog entry either.




Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Can social media really change the world?

How much is social media changing our world? Is it simply a matter of keeping in touch with old classmates, or of supplementing the structure and activities of our daily life? Or are we talking about more radical change, of democracy spreading across the world, of entirely new models of content and new targets for that content?

There is obviously no easy answer to those questions. But people are starting to really dive into them, and as communicators, we need to pay attention, to be both attuned to the current climate and looking two steps ahead. It's that kind of world right now.

The hottest buzz on social media right now is in Egypt, with much talk about demonstrators organizing on Facebook, with the government shutting down the whole internet for days (with some unintended consequences like less spam) and with a Google executive jailed as a key leader of the democracy movement.

Stratfor has a long and nuanced take on the role of social media in the Egypt demonstrations. Basically, they say that social media is a tool, a powerful tool, but don't rely on it. Leaders still need to get out on the street and there needs to be personal contact. From their take:

The role of social media in protests and revolutions has garnered considerable media attention in recent years. Current conventional wisdom has it that social networks have made regime change easier to organize and execute. An underlying assumption is that social media is making it more difficult to sustain an authoritarian regime — even for hardened autocracies like Iran and Myanmar — which could usher in a new wave of democratization around the globe. In a Jan. 27 YouTube interview, U.S. President Barack Obama went as far as to compare social networking to universal liberties such as freedom of speech.

Social media alone, however, do not instigate revolutions. They are no more responsible for the recent unrest in Tunisia and Egypt than cassette-tape recordings of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini speeches were responsible for the 1979 revolution in Iran. Social media are tools that allow revolutionary groups to lower the costs of participation, organization, recruitment and training. But like any tool, social media have inherent weaknesses and strengths, and their effectiveness depends on how effectively leaders use them and how accessible they are to people who know how to use them.

This more or less agrees with Malcolm Gladwell's story in the New Yorker subtitled "Why the revolution will not be tweeted," in which he argued that personal links on social media were far, far weaker than links developed face to face. He got roundly criticized by social media advocates, as many in the blogsophere extrapolated that conservative Tea Party activists - more likely to have actual meetings - in the US were more cohesive than, say, the liberal (in the American sense) internet-based groups that helped get Barack Obama elected president in 2008.

But enough of the serious stuff. What about movies? Like "chick flicks" or action movies? Johanna Blakely at TED says they may not be long for the world.

In her talk, she points out that with social media, marketers and content producers know ever more about what we like and do not like. However, they actually know less about what big demographic groups we fall into. So they know that I am a baseball fan, like The White Stripes and that I went to journalism school, but they might not know that I am a white male in the coveted 18-49 age group.

Since most mass media and advertising is aimed at big demographic groups - if you are a working, married Hispanic 30-year-old woman you must like product X - this new source of information could cause a revolution in what groups content is made for.

She specifically talks about how this could end gender stereotyping, as women are targeted more for their actual preferences than for presumed "female" ones. She uses the demise of the fluffy romantic comedy as a prime example.

Is that as big a deal as Egypt? Nah. But it sure could change Saturday nights at my house ...





Nathan Hegedus


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Is Facebook the future of the newspaper?

It is easy to put even new forms of social media into boxes. Twitter good for news. Facebook for friend updates, social games, maybe marketing. But isn’t that just more of the same old thinking? In other words, could Facebook replace the local newspaper?

I worked at a local newspaper in the US for five years, first as a beat reporter then as a regional editor. This gave me a front row seat to the slow implosion of newspaper journalism in the US. Even at my paper, which avoided huge layoffs, reporting slots were constantly lost, even as we were expected - with little strategic thought - to put more news on the web faster and faster.

Yet local news is the one thing that can’t be outsourced to huge conglomerates like Google, right? Even though local newspapers have lost advertising and business space in every conceivable business and journalistic segment - real estate, cars, classified ads, personal ads, national news, international news - there is still no one else to cover the local high school basketball team. There is no one else keeping a watch on the city council, on the school board, or even with community reporters compiling lists of pancake breakfasts at the local volunteer fire station (I know I just dived deep into American, not international, cultural institutions, but I hope you get the idea).

So if local newspapers no longer had the money or the will to dive deep into the local market, I thought Patch.com, from AOL, was a great idea. AOL has hired up to 1000 reporters in the last year, each one attached to a website devoted to a single town or neighborhood. The idea is to make money by scale and going hyperlocal. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sees local news “as the last great white space” on the internet, a space still in need of gatekeepers to filter the relevant news for us..

Alleluia.

But the thing is, it might not be working. Turns out, not many local news sites have made it, says the New York Times. And, it turns out, both Yahoo! and Google are moving in on this space, Yahoo! with news aggregation and Google just in ads and recommendations.

Oh, and according to Ken Auletta in the New Yorker, the Patch content is, ummm, uneven at best.

But the idea I find the most provocative is this from The Business Insider, that Facebook may already serve as a local newspaper. And sites like Groupon, with their daily coupons, give you a great sense of what to do. From the story:

Patch is supposed to be a local news outlet, but Facebook is already giving people the local news they actually care about. It has the local events Armstrong wants Patch to report, but also observations from friends, and photos that are better than any society pages …

Turns out Facebook is already giving them something that's "good enough" but at even cheaper cost. Facebook has just 2,000 employees to Patch's 800.

It’s just another reminder that communication is changing faster than most of us can keep track of, that our supposedly expert visions of the future may be obsolete by, say, next week.

But at least you can find out about it on Facebook.

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Good communication is about bursting bubbles

We all live in bubbles of one sort or another. I live in a safe, progressive Sweden bubble and work in another bubble - a green, corporate responsibility, fight climate change through technology bubble.

In communications, it is important to know what bubbles you live in. You need to at least have an educated guess how your messages will play out in the big world outside your bubble.

I thought I knew this and lived it. Then I went on vacation to California.

I read a lot - and have written a little - about smart electricity meters. Here in my bubble they are wonderful things that will lead to more efficiency, lower bills and less carbon emissions. I have a picture in my mind of a futuristic European house filled with appliances talking to each other and running at all hours, making my life easy and saving me money.

This is not how smart meters are seen by many in the very liberal parts of northern California where I spent a few weeks. There are NO SMART METER signs on lots of lawns. People are getting arrested at protests, and a few local governments have banned them.

Why?

There are two main reasons. People are afraid of getting sick from the radiation, and they do not trust the utility with their private information.

Now, I would say the concerns are unfounded, but they are grounded in noble - and understandable - ideals -- good health and personal privacy.

So if I ever write or work on the subject of smart meters again, I will keep the angry signs of Sonoma County, California in mind.

And be grateful that they burst my bubble

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

When seeing is so much better than reading

I write. I am a writer. But I am also a writer who sometimes regrets not becoming a photographer and whose father works in TV. This has always given me comfort when faced with the stark realization that, when I worked at a newspaper, almost no one read my stories to the end. They looked at the pictures. They loved the ads. They might skim the headlines.

My beautiful kicker? Hmmm, maybe not.

Still, writing is important. But it is important to embrace the visual as well. My father keeps saying, "It's the video, stupid." as he wrote on the Huffington Post. And he is right. But there is more to this than just moving pictures. There are graphics. And graphics might even trump video.

Take this video (with written intro) from Streetfilms.org. Part of their "Fixing the Great Mistake" series, it highlights the work of Donald Appleyard, an American researcher who illustrated in San Francisco in 1981 how traffic kills neighborhoods.

You can say or write this. I like to say and write it, actually.

Traffic kills neighborhoods.

But it does not have the impact of Appleyard's graphics, which starkly illustrate how life on a high traffic street is significantly worse than life on a low traffic street.

To drive home the point, Streetfilms has done a brilliant job of using graphics to illustrate Appleyard's graphics. The end result? I now have a deep seated fear of traffic. Mission accomplished.

Revisiting Donald Appleyard's Livable Streets from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Another excellent example of the power of the cartoon. so to speak, is the recently cancelled Australian show The Hungry Beast. I love their clips on the Catholic Church, Google, the arms trade. This is their illustration of the mind-boggling entourage of U.S. President Barack Obama. You could write it out, but it would have half the power.

We're on this at JG Communication too, embracing graphics in our videos. We're on to a lot of stuff - video, audio, web design.

Oh, we write too.

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Are you influenced by a cup of coffee?

In my first class in journalism school, the professor walked in carrying a brown paper bag. He told us that in our future lives as journalists this brown paper bag should carry our lunches, even if our sources wanted to take us out, or if the company provided a buffet, or even free coffee and some buns.

This hard core line against outside influence caused much debate in our class. Many scoffed, many - including myself - became true believers. I think all of us slipped once we hit the real world. You try telling a restaurant owner that you won't eat their food or refusing a cup of coffee from the retired figure skating judge.

But I still have held true to the overall belief. Even the cup of coffee makes us predisposed to like the person giving it to us, or at least not resent them for not offering the coffee.

In journalism, this is a bad thing, supposedly, to be influenced like this. And I agree. Even if objectivity is a myth that should be tossed out, you also do not want to be so obviously beholden to people. Independence is perhaps the better ideal to shoot for.

But in communications, you want to be doing the influencing. You want that journalist to write the story, or the customer to buy the product, or the employee to just love our company magazine.

And apparently, we can make that happen, if we're smart enough, which is more than a little scary. Via Six Pixels of Separation, I came across this article from psychologywriter.org.uk, which basically destroys any notion of our free will in the face of outside stimuli:

From the effect of mirrors and the subliminal presentation of happy faces, to the sight of a briefcase and the power of mimicry, the range of factors influencing our behaviour without us realising it is overwhelming. Taken together, the research undermines the notion that our conscious selves are in control, and points instead to a sophisticated nonconscious mind, wide open to outside influences, as the real source of our decision making.

And then there is this from PsyBlog, just on coffee:

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine ... Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion ...

The reason that a lot of persuasive messages pass us by is simply that we're often not paying much attention to them; our minds easily wander and we prefer not to think too hard unless it's unavoidable. By increasing our arousal, though, caffeine makes us process incoming messages more thoroughly, potentially leading to increased persuasion.

It seems my professor was right. So fire up that coffee pot and pour me a hot cup of joe.

I like you better already.

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

communication confusion online and IRL :)

A few days back my wife, who is Swedish, said, in her fluent English, that something happened "IRL."

I had no idea what she was talking about.

So I paused dumbfounded for a few moments while I worked out from the depths of my brain that she meant "in real life."

Now IRL is a fairly common internet abbreviation. From its entry on Wikipedia:

In its use for differentiating online personal worlds from "offline" life, the term (IRL) has a much shorter history and a more unclear future, as the Internet has existed for a much shorter time.

Sociologists engaged in the study of the Internet have determined that someday, a distinction between online and real-life worlds may seem "quaint", noting that certain types of online activity, such as sexual tensions, have already made a full transition to complete legitimacy and "reality."

Interesting. However, I have never personally had anyone, ever, use IRL with me, either online or IRL. My wife and I talked about this, and we came to the conclusion that these kinds of English abbreviations - ones that I might consider more in the realm of teenagers - have been taken up in Swedish even by people like my wife and I - those boring full word types.

And this made me think of emoticons, how I also try to never, ever, ever, under the pain of death, use emoticons - smiley faces, winking faces, all that. It's a guy thing, it seems, an effort not to look too effeminate.

From YourTango.com and a post titled "Dudes Don't Emoticon:

Guys also are anti-emoticon because most of us aren't sure what they mean. While we may say "constituency" when we mean "consistency," us dudes like to think that we're straight-shooters when it comes to communication, and we're perfectly happy to admit that we have no idea what message ":p" actually sends.

This got me to thinking about intercultural communication - which is at the heart of so much of our work here at JG, working with international companies that span many, many cultures.

As easy as the internet has made communication - along with a common use of English - the waters are almost more treacherous now - age, culture, language, gender, online vs. offline.

Who knows how men of my age in, say, Malaysia use emoticons or abbreviations? How about 20-something women in Paraguay? Have dudes in Uganda have taken up IRL or its close cousin f2f?

I don't. But now I feel like I need to find out ... IRL. ;)

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Brands Gone Wild: Balancing The Personal And The Corporate

The social media world is all about branding. My company is building its brand. Our customers are building their brands. Our contacts at those customers are building their personal brands, and I am building my personal brand.

That’s a lot of messages, and they are bound to come into conflict. I think most of us would automatically subordinate our personal brands to the messages of the company and the client. You know, they pay the bills.

But maybe I just don’t have a strong enough brand. This is from PRSquared:

While we’ve all grown accustomed to the fact that prospective employers will be Googling us and scouring our Facebook profiles for incriminating photos, at some point the reverse will also be true: star employees will carefully evaluate the reputation and social streams of their would-be employers, to determine whether they want to associate their personal brand with that of the corporation. This will only accelerate as the improving economy increases young employees’ options.

It makes sense. It takes an incredible commitment to cultivate a personal brand. To go from 3 Facebook friends to 3,000 is no small feat; same goes for Twitter — to grow a personal fan base requires a savvy combination of content creation, curation, promotion and cool.

The post goes on to give some advice to both sides of the equation – basically that companies need to find ways to best use their employees’ brands, and that employees need to remember that they also need to work.

I think this says something larger about where our society is going, about some shifting balance between empowered individuals and traditional - and still necessary - groups.

But this is mostly a practical business reminder that the employer-employee power balance is shifting in the social media world, that communication is becoming more important on so many levels, and that things are a long way from settling down.

Nathan Hegedus

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Never stop repeating your message

The dentists chair is a somewhat unlikely place to be given a refresher course in communications.

But in the 25 minutes of this Summer's visit, the friendly dentist told me on no less than five occasions that I really should use dental floss.

It's an occupational hazard that you monitor the communicative abilities of just about everyone you encounter and this dentist was no exception. She was a superstar. She had one primary message and hammered it home by telling me five times in five different ways the virtues of dental floss.

Changing someone's behaviour is quite a communications challenge. My dentist had less than half an hour to make an impression strong enough to change my behaviour. She did it by clear and repetitive communication. It was primarily a 30 minute communications assignment she had that day

Am I flossing? Well. I've bought the stuff and got it tangled in my teeth a few times so we're getting there.



Colm O'Callaghan is JG Communication’s Head of Operations so when he’s not blogging he’s looking after the day to day business at this wonderful communicaitons agency.
So, who’s JG Communication? We’re Sweden’s largest and, we think, ‘leading’ communications agency in Sweden. We help our clients have conversations with the people that matter most to them using the tools that matter most to us, words, sound and vision.


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Live feeds – do they let people make up their own minds?

100 days into the BP oil disaster, there is no doubt that the company handled the PR around the incident appallingly – as mentioned by my colleague Colm O'Callaghan in an earlier blog post. Ironically, perhaps the biggest PR gain from the ordeal was being forced to open up its live feed from the remotely operated vehicles.

Since then, BP has built an entire web site around the "initiative." Whether you are of the conspiracy bent and think it is all a cover up, or a believer that the spill footage is accurate, the hit rate on BP's and other sites, says a lot about people's desire to know – a quick Google search finds 9 million pages of "BP live feed" and YouTube users have created a further 1600 entries (admittedly many of them are from people with "proof" of the conspiracy.)

Perhaps the interest stems from BP's initial closed-lip policy, which left most wondering what they were trying to hide. Perhaps the chance to see for themselves, rather than rely on the corporate spin machine, was the motivation. As one blogger, Amy Judd summed it up in mid-July: "Many are looking at the live feed link to make sure no oil can be seen leaking in to the water."

Interestingly, once the feed was in the public domain, the online backlash against BP started to turn (well, a little bit). Instead of blanket condemnation, commentators started talking about the "extraordinary" lengths BP was taking. Public comments in response to CNN and BBC articles moved from indignant outrage at the corporate machine to cautious optimism that a solution was just around the corner.

Obviously, this will not counteract the bad publicity around the world's worst oil spill, but it has certainly put a "cap" on it.

A similar phenomenon was seen during the height of the Iceland volcano eruptions. PR was obviously not an issue here – I don't think the volcano was overly concerned about public backlash – but there was a similar amount of gloom and doom in the opening days; travelers stranded, airlines losing massive revenue, tourism destroyed, whole economies suffering.

But with the ash cloud on again/off again, people turned to the live feed from the volcano itself for "accurate" information. One friend traveling from the UK told me she checked the footage herself the morning of the flight to decide whether it was worth making the taxi ride to the airport.

Link: the original live feed site (obviously without a feed now). It's worth making the journey just to play the Volcanic Airways game!

Michelle Walkden

Communications consultant

So, who’s JG Communication? We’re Sweden’s largest and, we think, ‘leading’ communications agency in Sweden. We help our clients have conversations with the people that matter most to them using the tools that matter most to us, words, sound and vision


Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation

Wut u doing l8r

Wut u doing l8r. Can't wait to tell u bout JW. ROTFLMAO. Cya

What on earth is happing to our language? It started off with text (SMS) and then instant messaging. But now this shorthand is beginning to appear everywhere. It's not that I hate the lack of grammar and the spelling nightmare – who am I kidding, yes I do – but this need to abbreviate everything is destroying the richness of English.

Long considered the most diverse and expressive language in the world, English is being abused and corrupted in our haste to express ourselves faster. (I argue though the amount of time it takes to translate ROTFLMAO when you read is actually slower than reading the actual words).

My youngest brother grew up in the IM era (I did not) and has no trouble at all sending me long and complicated digital messages in shorthand. I struggle through them and get the idea, but I miss the emotion and connection I get when reading something in "proper" English.

I'm not suggesting a return to Shakespearean prose, after all Claudio's cry "Done to death by slanderous tongue, was the hero that here lies" is not that easy to understand at first glance either. I fear however, that our eagerness to embrace this abbreviated communication style is eliminating words that by their very nature can not easily be bastardised. How can you possibly turn magnificence, glittering, torture or translucent into four-letter contractions? How do you express the real joy of watching your child take his first steps with "OMG was gr8." And how does "143" really tell someone the depth of your feelings?
wot d hell

Michelle Walkden

Communications consultant

So, who’s JG Communication? We’re Sweden’s largest and, we think, ‘leading’ communications agency in Sweden. We help our clients have conversations with the people that matter most to them using the tools that matter most to us, words, sound and vision.

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation