Recently in Communication Category

Despite the waves of jetlag that ocassionally threaten to leave me faceplanted on a table, I'm having fun here in San Antonio.

As is the case in all conferences, the true value is always in the people you meet,rather than the conference itself, and I've been having a blast hanging out with some irreverently like-minded people from down-under - Adrian Copley (Copley Communications), Anna Kominik (Ideas Shop) and Amanda Boland Curran (Acid), - who are a lot of fun, as well as being smart and experienced comms professionals. What's especially pleasing is that they're switched on to the way that social media is changing and cascading through the communications sector - and not in a lemming-like follow the herd way, but with an appreciation of how social tools can benefit an organisation if handled properly.

A few margaritas have been drunk, and lots of interesting conversations have been had. Their english isn't bad, and I've been pleased that we've been able to communicate pretty well, only occasionally needing to resort to sign language to get the message across ;-)

I'm in San Antonio for the next few days, attending the IABC Leadership Institute Conference, thanks to the IABC UK. As the new IABC UK webmaster I'm mainly here to meet with the IABC web team and discuss some exciting work they've been carrying out to provide some templates to chapter sites to create up to date websites based on Wordpress. Looking forward to seeing what they've done, and also to revamping the existing IABC UK site.

I've also been roped in (obligatory cattle and cowboys reference, seeing that I'm Texas) to a panel this afternoon organised by the San Antonio chapter, talking about International Communications Trends. Needless to say, I'm going to spend my bits talking about social media!

Looking forward to an interesting few days, as well as seeing a bit of San Antonio, a town I visited for the first and only time 20 years ago.

ok...i tried to resist but have failed. twitter is fun.

[tags]twitter, socialnetworks, im, txt, social, web20, web2.0[/tags]

Well, there's been a lot of talk about the fake Wal-mart blog over the last couple of days - and Edelman is the number two search term right now on Technorati. Originally I just added this story to my del.icio.us stream, as below:

MediaPost Publications - Pro-Wal-Mart Travel Blog Screeches To A Halt - 10/12/2006

• edelman help wal-mart launch a fake blog, without disclosing that it's a fake blog. Considering how brutal the likes of Rubel have been with other companies (Dell), this is a real faux-pas

(tags: edelman fake blogs)

but I felt there were a couple more things to say about this.

I am surprised that Edelman and Steve Rubel haven't responded yet - I am sure that if it were another agency / company who were responsible, Steve Rubel would have been all over this. Constantin Basturea is also surprised:

So far Edelman has failed to respond in any way to the accusations that it's behind the Wal-Marting… blog — which is quite perplexing.

I'm particularly interested in hearing what Jason Calacanis thinks about this, especially given his recent attempts to get PayPerPost to act in a way that he feels is more ethical and disclosure-driven. I'm thinking there isn't much difference between the two situations...if disclosure and censure is required in one instance, then disclosure and censure is required in the other (possibly even more so, as Edelman and Rubel supposedly 'get' the blogosphere).

[tags]edelman, rubel, disclosure, fake, splog, walmart, wal-mart, transparency, dishonesty, micropersuasion, ethics[/tags]

I'm running a workshop this Friday morning in Barcelona on how technology - social media - can transform internal communications. All part of a conference being put on by the BlackBrooke Institute - "The Missing Links of Internal Communication". Should be fun. [tags]internal comms, internal, conference, blackbrooke, barcelona[/tags]

I'm watching John Seely Brown's plenary address at the 2006 Collaborative Technologies Conference, which is a wide ranging and fascinating talk on ways and forms of collaboration. Lots of good stuff and plenty of blog activity around this and the other talks - but in many ways echoing (in a good way) what is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom in our brave new world...mashups, Second Life, "honouring the emergent", etc. Something that did make me think though, was his description of how an Asian apparel company (Li & Fung) has a large number of suppliers (10,000+) that it has organised into loosely coupled supply and innovation networks where knowledge, practice and process are shared between companies. Hmm...now the way I've generally thinking about collaboration, sharing, security, etc, has been fairly simplistic: there are essentially 2 situations - you're inside a firewall, or you're on the outside. Most available tools focus on the external world (technorati, del.icio.us, etc). Some companies are starting to think about replicating these tools and services within organisations (an external service probably cannot subscribe to, tag or bookmark internal content). But how do we facilitate sharing and collaboration across a number of different companies ? The partners don't have access each other's internal space, and using an external service reduces their ability to reuse internal content (unless they want to copy it to an external service, and then keep it up to date - yuck). It also maybe implies a need to agree on a common set of tools (good luck !) - and suddenly they're not very loosely coupled anymore. So, is there (or will there be) a need for something like a reverse proxy architecture that allows proxying of interesting internal content (feeds, web content, web service calls) to authorised external services ? Or am I making up solutions to problems that don't exist ? Or, even worse, am I misunderstanding something ? [tags]ctc2006, collaboration, internal, external, collaboration, proxy[/tags]