To fear is to fail

This article is from the master himself, Seth Godin… and very applicable to our current political climate and certain youth leaders…

I quote:

“Possibly the oldest human worldview is fear of strangers. And right next to that is anger as a byproduct of fear.

If a candidate wants to gain attention and possibly votes, then, it makes short-term sense to stir up fear of strangers and turn it into anger. It might even work (once). But it makes it virtually impossible to govern. It’s a short-term strategy that eats itself, because sooner or later, everyone is a stranger, and fear is no foundation for work that matters.

It seems as though we’re entering a season in which it’s easy to ostracize or become righteously indignant over someone’s national origin, skin color, religion or sexual orientation.

If this is the best a politician can do to organize and lead, then we all lose.”

Brain storming / crowdsourcing with Twitter

Have a peek at this idea as resported by the team at Springwise.com - http://springwise.com/weekly/2009-09-09.htm#ideasculture.

It’s awesome - giving a Team a tricky problem and waking up the next morning to a bunch of solutions!

From my side, I can think of using this internally for feedback from staff on how to improve a product / process flow or literally anything. Giving it a time limit is also very clever, as it creates a happening and immediate vibe around an issue.

More info on Crowdsourcing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_sourcing.

Will the potential applications for Twitter never end?

The lunatic fringe meets social media

Hat tip to Vincent Maher for this article on his blog. Seems a Standard Bank customer with an axe to grind has created an account on Twitter with the intention of embarrassing and exposing them.

The lesson here is that in it’s essence on-line social media is brilliant, but as with all things in life it can take a few to ruin it for many.

Also, consider visiting sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Zoopy and booking your brand name.

YouTube Viral does it again

What do you do if you fly United Airlines, watch you guitar being treated roughly by baggage handling staff, alert flight attendants who do nothing about it, and upon arrival at your destination, discover that your guitar is broken, and United Airlines refuse to compensate?

The answer:

Write a song about it, get over 4 million people to watch it, and when United Airlines agree to do something, tell them to donate to charity.

Very cool.

Song can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo.

Social websites – public versus private data

I read an interesting article by the analyst Jeremiah Owyang on his expected “awkwardness” for Facebook over the next few years.

It seems the key point is over the nature of public and private data, and Twitter has really turned this on its head with its public and fresh data stream, as opposed to Facebook’s traditionally private data stream.

The trend now seems to be moving towards data that is public – this increases it’s eyeball count, which effects sign up, publicity, advertising, marketing etc.

Now what really interested me was security – how safe is it to publically broadcast your teeth brushing or your enjoyment of a movie on Twitter? Pretty safe. And status updates and pictures on Facebook? Fairly safe.

But on The Grid, where their model revolves around geographically placing your position and your media, making this data public is going to be a hard sell. It has legal and ethical issues, so this will be a challenge for them in the light of the “public data” trend of social media websites.