Brindle Media

Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

The Frugal Dad blog recently posted this infographic which traces the development of technologies which have disrupted culture, society, or our daily lives. What do you see here that’s directly impacted your life?

Source: FrugalDad

Staying focused is tough especially when you’re a home-based entrepreneur. I never realized how ADHD I was until I left the corporate office world where I had specific work hours , a defined job description and a list of specified daily tasks and responsibilities. Working solo, developing a business from scratch and being based at home leaves everything wide open and undefined. It’s wonderful, exciting and overwhelming. This blog by “Hello, My Name Is Scott” Ginsberg offers some useful advise:

http://www.hellomynameisblog.com/2011/02/how-to-focus-your-face-off.html

Adam Singer writes a digital marketing and PR blog called “Future Buzz”. Although his blog seems targeted at people in the Millenials and GenX’ers, it does contain advice that can be useful to entrepreneurial Boomers. For instance:
http://thefuturebuzz.com/2011/02/22/paid-promotional-tactics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheFutureBuzz+(The+Future+Buzz)

Boomer Authority is a web-based social network for Baby Boomers. The organization has a website named Boomer StrataGEMS which provides useful information like this:
http://www.boomerstratagems.net/2011/02/how-marketers-can-use-mobile-technology.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+Boomerstratagems+(Boomer|StrataGEMS™)&utm_co

Check them out and let me know what you think about these ideas. I’d also be interested to learn what types of information would be of most interest to you!

Saturday’s assassination attempt of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords which claimed six lives has some pointing an accusing finger at radio and cable TV hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, claiming they had a role in the incident by provoking an unstable person. But INSIDE RADIO reports that the talkers are pushing back, calling it an unfair attack on conservative hosts.



What do you think?

Update: 1/12/11

To alert people to this blog, I posted links on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. My experience is that my postings on Twitter never receive responses and are rarely retweeted but I view using it as a connection device to be a learning experience. On both Linkedin and Facebook, I don’t know if people actually link to this site to read the entire blog but they usually post their responses on those sites.

Not surprisingly, the responses tended to fall along party lines. Those folks whose politics tend toward the “progressive/liberal” camp seem to believe that the rhetoric heard on talk radio and cable TV in some way influenced the Tuscon tragedy. Those whose politics are more “conservative” seem to believe that liberals are trying to use the tragedy to impose restrictions on their First Amendment rights of free speech. Unfortunately, South Caroline Representative, James Clyburn (a Democrat) is fanning that particular flame by championing a return of the Fairness Doctrine. I’ve written previously about how anachronistic, outdated and absurd that notion is considering 21st Century communications technology.

In any case, the debate on this topic has certainly been lively. Although I have concerns about what sometimes seems like the irresponsible use of inflammatory rhetoric to manipulate audience reaction and ratings, my sense is that it wasn’t much of a factor in the case of the shootings in Arizona. I was especially impressed with these reactions from columnist David Brooks and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/opinion/11brooks.html?_r=1&ref=davidbrooks

href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com’>The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Arizona Shootings Reaction www.thedailyshow.com

Polls show that 60% of Americans don’t believe that political rhetoric caused Jared Loughner’s assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords. Nevertheless, it seems to me that those who dismiss the impact of inflammatory rhetoric are making a mistake. Research shows that humans, even those of us who relieve that we are reasonable and rational, react emotionally and then rationalize to reinforce their beliefs.

In times of economic instability like we’ve been experiencing for the past decade in the United States, fear, insecurity and distrust become more prevalent as what Seth Godin likes to call our lizard brain takes control. Couple with that the ability that we have with the internet, various cable TV and social media to filter the information we receive. Now, we can choose to avoid all that inconvenient information which doesn’t reinforce our beliefs.

I can recall watching coverage of the 2008 Presidential campaign when a woman in John McCain’s audience started ranting about how Obama was evil and wanted to destroy America. The woman looked like an average grandmother but she was regurgitating this rhetoric and McCain looked stunned and embarrassed. He felt it necessary to reassure her that Barack Obama was a good person and an honorable man, not something that this woman or his supporters wanted to hear.

Another woman waiting in line to enter a McCain/Palin rally told an interviewer that Obama was a socialist who wanted to destroy the country and that he wasn’t an American citizen. She was very matter-of-fact as if these were proven facts rather than unsubstantiated rumors spread through the internet.

Albany Times Union editor, Rex Smith makes some cogent observations in this recent editorial:
http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Words-the-first-step-to-civility-959442.php

Those of us who’ve worked professionally in media know how easy it is to manipulate an audience. It can be a source of childish delight to watch your audience jump through hoops at your whim but it’s also important to take responsibility for your actions and for the results of those actions whether or not they are intended.

Words have consequences.

In September, I wrote about about a customer service problem I experienced with my local Home Depot. Since Brindle Media’s services include marketing, branding and customer service, I thought it would be useful and fair to the Home Depot organization to to share my experience and post this follow-up.

A brief overview: Due to negligence on the part of the plumbing subcontractor that installed a water heater which I’d purchased at Home Depot in late July, our laundry room was flooded. The plumber paid for an emergency crew to dry out the laundry room and installed some dry wall which had to be removed but refused to take responsibility for restoring the room to its original state. The plumbing company then proceeded to turn the victim into a victimizer and accused me of trying to rip them off. That whole process took us to mid-September. When I complained to the local Home Depot who had hired the subcontractor for installation, their position was that I needed to negotiate directly with the subcontractor. This is where social media and customer service entered the picture.

After blogging about the problem on September 14th, I Twittered about the blog and hash-tagged Home Depot. Within minutes of that tweet, I was contacted by Michael at Home Depot’s customer care center in Atlanta who then connected me with Stephanie in the company’s Customer Care Social Media department. Within 48 hours, I was connected with Sedgwick Claims Management and on October 22nd received a check to cover the cost restoring our laundry and family rooms to a semblance of their pre-accident state.

As a customer, I was very satisfied with my treatment by Michael and Stephanie on behalf of Home Depot and by Tammy at Sedwick CMS. The good news is that the situation was resolved. The bad news is that the resolution took three months. It was interesting and disturbing that no one on the regional or local level at Home Depot ever bothered to follow up.

So the lesson here is that when you encounter a customer service problem with a national retail chain, social media tools like Twitter and Facebook can provide you the leverage that you need to get the attention of the customer service department and help resolve a problem using a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach.

Hopefully, you won’t ever find yourself in a situation where you’ll need to employ this advice !

My First Video Podcast

Last weekend, I was one of more than 300 people who attended Podcamp Boston 4 at the University of Massachusetts campus near the John F. Kennedy Library along Dorchester Bay.

The original Podcamps were specifically focused on the creation of audio and video podcasts but these events have evolved to encompass a wider range of new media tools. For a Baby Boomer
like me, all this youthful energy, intelligence and enthusiasm can be daunting but I also find this collection of people sharing their insights and knowledge to be inspiring and invigorating.

Of course,like any even of this type, Podcamp Boston had it’s share of interesting characters…

And there was some nice scenery, too…

One of the challenges I heard presented over the weekend was to describe your purpose in two “tweets” or less. If you’re new to Twitter, a “tweet” consists of 140 characters including the spaces between words. Here’s what I came up with:

Buzz4Boomers’ goal is to help Baby Boomer adults adapt to today’s rapid changes in information flow and media options by sharing the knowledge and insights I learn from people I meet in new media and experiences I encounter.

By my count, that’s 230 characters, 50 under the maximum allotted 280 tweets.

One piece of advice which I heard frequently at Podcamp Boston was that the most important thing a person can do when they’re planning to create a podcast is to just do it. So I decided to take their advice and create my first video podcast using my Flip Ultra camcorder. You can tell that my camera work needs a lot more practice but in the New Media spirit of “authenticity”, here’s the first Buzz4Boomers video podcast:

http://buzz4boomers.blip.tv/

Well, the way I see it things can only improve.