Category Archives: digital media

the wired side of mass media

adobe shows off cs5.5

But can it sing? Judging by the handout highlights, it’s pretty clear we’ve moved well beyond desktop publishing. When I joined two dozen or so other invitation only attendees in Orlando April 5 for an Adobe technology sneak peek, bets at the $2 window were on a new full version Creative Suite release. Instead, a recalibrated release timetable was rolled out along with a CS5 dot-five version upgrade, company insight into areas of major focus, and a show and tell review of CS5’s major product (mainly Photoshop) improvements.

it slices, it dices, all very well

The two-hour session, held in an anteroom at the Seaworld Renaissance Orlando, was hosted by Scott Morris, Senior Director of Product Marketing, and Noha Edell, Senior Solutions Engineer, in a tag-team format of feature highlights and live how-to demos. Message of the day? An almost urgent awareness of the importance attached to serving content to mobile platforms; the role of metrics as the company extends channels (Omniture and hosted services); and a clarifying ceasefire in the Adobe-Apple Flash On-Flash Off Mobile War. Continue reading

prsa tampa holds first skype meeting

prsa first local professional organization to skype

The March, 2011 meeting of the Public Relations Society of America Tampa Bay chapter was the first local professional organization to feature live, over distance technology using Skype VoIP to bring in talent from afar and marked my debut as a producer and moderator of streaming social media content.

Skype allowed for a remarkably comfortable exchange of see you-see me conversation between the presenters beaming in from Baton Rouge, LA and Seattle, WA respectively. In addition the cloud presentation software Prezi was utilized for the first time as an alternative to the ubiquitous and to many banal Powerpoint bullet lists. Both techniques were employed after first being experienced at the Poynter Institute’s first Social Media Day in November, 2010.

The historic event featured two dynamic presenters from two different time zones: Monica Guzman (above, onscreen), Director of Editorial Outreach at Seattle’s intersect.com, and Louisianian Whitney Breaux, fellow PRSA and PRAL member, founder and exec director at Baton Rouge Social Media Club.

Whitney’s one of the first Baton Rouge practitioners I met as a new PRAL member, while my (virtual) introduction to Monica was at Poynter’s Social Media Day, which was also my first exposure to intersect’s remarkable social site. (Read more about the powerful features available at intersect in the PRSA December chapter newsletter here.)

Business Social Media uses Prezi cloud technology

With the explosion of social media niche channels circling the linchpin giants facebook, YouTube and twitter, tending the content garden is becoming a real exercise in time management and it’s become increasingly clear that the need to prioritize – triage might not be too strong a term – is becoming critical, as is the insight to quickly adapt to new channels as they become available.

Whitney (above, in monitor) spoke first about the evolving interest in her favorite project, the Baton Rouge Social Media Club, from startup to a fresh new design makeover just recently launched. Evidence of the buzz social media gets in Baton Rouge, state capital and home to Louisiana State University, is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that Tampa Bay – defined by St. Petersburg, Tampa and several professional sports teams – hasn’t yet caught up. She also talked about how her new position as director of social media at Wright-Fiegley Communications is already showing measureable results for the firm’s client roster, which includes several projects for the State of Louisiana.

Monica’s focus was on the remarkable flexibility offered by intersect that enables users to tag content in a linear fashion using both time and place locators. For example, looking for the intersection of Washington, DC and January 2009 returns a set of events remarkably different from the community view on the same day in Tampa, Baton Rouge or Seattle. For pr practitioners, there’s a very clear advantage to deploy intersect in the social media toolbox. I call it Google.

For business social, a term that seems to successfully encapsulate the real differences that exist between casual and professional internet chit chat, how that challenge is met could mean the difference between a well built out communications strategy and one that shortly after facebook falls off the radar.

say your neck’s busted in the middle of the woods

who ya gonna call? twitter: a lifeline like no other

This post on USA Today last August got me to thinking. Could this have been me on any number of Cycle World Treks? Well, yes it could, as a matter of fact, given my woeful state of experience and not really that nimble riding style.

The story concerns Leigh Fazzina, a mountain biker in Connecticut who broke her neck on a downhill leg, but could easily apply to any number of scenarios. Being able to tweet when a voice connection is tenuous or impossible becomes a significant asset. Toss in location awareness and you’ve got a very sophisticated rescue tool in your pocket.

via Edelman Digital’s Friday Five

dropbox – the little widget that could

When a buddy in Baton Rouge recomended dropbox, I opened up with a suspicion-based defense of my not really that useful iDisc/Mobile.me online storage feature as being the same as, before politely thanking him for his interest and filing the info in “maybe later, sometime”. Times change, in this case a few months, and Bob’s your uncle, it works great for a whole bunch of stuff. Plus it’s infinitely better than Apple’s slower than a TSA patdown at a stripper’s convention alternative.

If you at any time need to backup critical data, synch client info, or work online from a remote location, dropbox is for you. Otherwise, just move along.

I could go on, but this Macworld review says it all, better, with examples. Dropbox Review | Macworld Wonder how long before they hook in a mail app to use with?

bmw summons orwell in fresh ad effort


In yet another example of how outclassed domestic powersports marketing is, now comes this head-turner from BMW Germany in the form of what could be tagged an alternative form of neuromarketing. The spot stars factory Superbike rider Ruben Xaus onboard an S1000RR in a black and white film noire quick cut that by itself is less than remarkable. Pretty, pouty, and predictable.

but on the other hand

The other hand is a fascinating little tidbit of technology more amusing than motivational. Using what appears to be relatively simple rear screen technology to flash project a logo, the spot, by German uber agency serviceplan, creates an afterimage on the retinas of the audience. Yeah, it’s going to get attention.

A BMW spokeswoman said, “We literally got inside people’s heads, involving them instead of boring them and generating a more intensive connection to our target group. Our brand should be innovative, emotional and dynamic.”

Hmmm. Given how twitchy German bureaucracy is about any kind of Orwellian influencers, let alone a method requiring YOU MUST OBEY! to interpret the eyeball afterglow, this may not be a long lasting campaign. But it will be memorable, make no mistake. And as for the subliminal alarmists: uh, if you have to direct behavior to experience behavior, it’s not.

quit picking up mud

When I see efforts like this, efforts that accept the challenge of creatively differentiating the brand from the same old same old, I say hell yes, go for it! Like Leo Burnett famously said, “When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”

ps – happy 20th birthday!

PS as in Photoshop, that is.

This year Adobe’s flagship application turned 20. Before, and thankfully briefly, there was bitmapped hell, which didn’t look like a giant killer as far as the graphic arts were concerned. But with the introduction of PS, the brothers Knoll were about to change the course of human history.

You don’t have to take my word for it. What Photoshop did was nothing short of revolutionary in terms of changing the way we, humans, communicate. And by pairing their imaging software with the first editions of desktop publishing in the form of Aldus’ Pagemaker, publishers – at least those able to afford fledgling Mac computers – set sail for an unimaginable brave new world. Continue reading

living in the truman show

ehsan maleki is a tehran photographer and bloggerI entered “iran election photos” to get a sense of how, in a little over two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, communication technology has changed the face of the world.

The first page of hits included Ehsan Maleki’s appropriately title Iran Election Photos, which led me to his wonderfully entertaining self-titled photo blog.

Just two weeks ago I posted new content that attempted to parse the world of emerging/social media in terms readers would find relevant in a tumultuous business climate. Nothing could better demonstrate the incredible gulf between old and new media than the events surrounding the Iranian elections – and the cellphone driven technology (twitter) that’s responsible. Continue reading

social media strategy…juggling twitter

comm trends - tweeting for effectManaging your online marketing assets didn’t get any easier when Twitter stampeded onto the scene a couple of months ago. The newest, and in some ways the most intriguing, social media limits messages (tweets) to 140 characters. So, like, where’s the value? Lets see if we can break it down.

Online communication – and really, that’s how the bulk of business is conducted these days – revolves around e-mail, web pages, blogs, RSS and social media sites like Facebook. Twitter, for not so obvious reasons, may be the missing link in connectivity. Continue reading

we’re back online – and a little wiser

Here’s what every webmaster has nightmares about. A freak explosion at the server farm that hosts our site, along with an estimated 700,000 others, knocked us off the net for three days and in the process delivered a near-miss dose of reality about the absolute necessity to have a redundancy plan as a backup for the unexpected.

What else? All site addressed email was immediately bounced back to the senders, and because it was the first of the month web crawlers from Google and others hit a brick wall of domain not found – and that translates into loss of ranking. Not critical for us, very critical for others, especially eCommerce sites. Continue reading