UB40 for a snowy day
Monthly Archive for December, 2008
- Image via Wikipedia
According to The Onion “Even CEO Can’t Figure Out How RadioShack Still in Business”
“Every location is full of bizarre adapters, random chargers, and old boom boxes, and some sales guy is constantly hovering over you. It’s like walking into your grandpa’s basement. You always expect to see something cool, but it never delivers.”
Confession: I’m a Ham operator and even I can’t figure out why RadioShack still exists. There was a time when you could get a decent shortwave receiver, a build your own AM radio kit or enough electronic components to keep a geeky teenage boy busy for days. Now the Internet and mail order has taken over the retail side of the radio and electronics hobby. Ironically, it is the existance of larger Internet-based retailers that have saved hobbies like shortwave, Ham radio, astronomy and a great deal of other old school pursuits.
RadioShack seems destined to join Gimbles, Mays and Crazy Eddies on the dust heap of retail history. But somehow it lingers on.
There are a lot of stores in the mall like that. Would you even care if American Eagle or Brookstone closed down? Did you notice the demise of the Sharper Image? The future of retailing looks bleak, especially after this year.
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Increasingly the discussions around marketing and social media move towards which team should “own” the social media toolkit. On the one hand, advertising with its huge budgets and teams of designers and code-monkeys seem to be the right home for online communications. But increasingly there is a call for social media to fall under the relm of the public relations team.
Kristin Maverick has a good post laying out the rational for this point of view, and cautioning (correctly):
But, as social media has changed the way we think, the traditional PR agency will also need to adapt to the new ways of handling these social media requests. While PR may be the right man for the job right now, it’s also important for PR to include others to help get it done. From partnerships with other specialists to new technologies and advancements emerging everyday, the acceptance of all things changing will only help create successful outcomes and ensure social media success.
I’m inclined to agree, both with the notion that social media is part of public relations, and that traditional PR agencies will have to grow and change their ways of doing business to get the job done. I suppose this is one of those challenges for 2009.
Aside from just “getting it,” whatever your definition of “it” might be, PR agencies are going to have to be a lot smarter on the nuts and bolts of how the Web and social media work. For one thing, to look at many agency web sites, one would be excused for believing the industry is trapped in the late 1990s. Too many agencies have flash intros or sites built entirely on Flash. Too many agencies tout their social media starts but don’t have blogs, or even RSS feeds for their client news. And too many agencies are treating social media now like they treated online communications in the 1990s – as something separate from the “real work” of media relations.
Most of all, PR agencies have to drop the habit of viewing each new social media tool as a means to shout their clients’ messages to as many people as they can grab.
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- Image via CrunchBase
Chris Brogan points to one of my biggest social media pet peeves of 2008. It’s those annoying ‘thanks for following me’ auto-responders on Twitter.
You don’t need to use robots to thank me and click on your stupid website. If you’re too busy to be an actual human on a social network, don’t join another social network. It’s okay. We understand. Lots of people think Twitter is stupid.
Agreed. I’m following you because I figured I’d return the courtesy. Not because I’m interested in finding success, losing weight, buying real estate, finding Jesus or sharing Fantasy Football picks. If that’s all you see in social media – a transaction – then please move on.
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I’ve added a few new bells and whistles around the old blog this week.
You might notice the “REBLOG” link at the bottom of each post – that’s from Zemanta. Adding the plug-in to Wordpress adds a tremendous amount of relevant material in the ‘Post’ interface, stuff from all over the Web to add to my posts. You can see some of that in this post. Anything to add more information is fine by me.
I’ve also added Disqus to my comment set-up. This adds a great deal of functionality, like the ability to continue the discussions or add video comments via Seesmic.
Finally, I’ve added Google Friend Connect over there on the far right side bar. You can log-in and as Google adds more functionality to the system, I’m sure there will be some cool bells and whistles as well as some amazing new toys for us to play with.
All of this seems to move us from the Age of Blogging to the Age of Spokes in a Larger Social Network of Blogs. There’s also a great deal going on under the hood in the latest version of Wordpress that seems to be moving us in this direction. It’s funny but for five years now I’ve been hearing the ‘blogs are passe’ meme and every time, some new functionality comes along that blows that notion out of the water. If you accept the notion that blogs are really just content-management / easy-datebase-backed-web-site tools for the masses, this can only be seen as a positive development for those of us who are passionate about self-publishing and our ability as publishers to change the world.
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