Old Town New World CONFERENCE - Oct 23rd, 2009 - Old Town Rock Hill, SC

Dr. Scott McLeod’s presentation to the NEA Board of Directors. Washington, DC. December 12, 2009.

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At DevLearn 09, Mark Oehlert led several days of non-stop workshops on social learning. Here’s ten minutes on the topic of identity and authenticity.

This is the first of a series of videos I shot for display at Online Educa .

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Reading Adrant’s take on the recent tweet from PETA sent to Mommy Bloggers about baby elephants has some important points for all marketing professionals who want to use social media channels to market their product, service, brand or cause.

What PETA did wasn’t necessarily a horrific blunder but it did use an old model (broadcast) in a new medium (social). That was the big mistake here. Broadcast tactics, still an entirely viable strategy in the right media, don’t work well in social media.

It is important to know that social media is a conversation, not an advertising platform. Until Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other social sites have been around a little longer, there will be lots of mistakes. Hopefully we marketers can all learn from them.

But will it happen? I still get email blasts about things I could care less about, recorded telephone messages from candidates I won’t support, and junk mail in my driveway mail box. It’s only after government intervention with do not call lists, anti fax spam laws and opt out rules will we be free from the shouting. Not that I’m eager for gov’t control (shudder!)

My point is, don’t look at social media and say, “Free! Wow, let’s blast this out!” and then think you have an effective marketing program.

Actually, I think that rule goes no matter what the media. Consumers and business buyers alike are sick of being shouted at with one way communication.

Creative Commons Flickr photo courtesy: Dave77456 self portrait day 56 of the 365days project.

Yesterday, an anti-Drupal ad by Microsoft was spotted in the wild; see the image on the right. The news spread on Twitter like wildfire. I said this was “interesting”, not because Microsoft isn’t allowed to compete with Drupal but because Microsoft is also promoting Drupal. In fact, I was flattered by the idea that Microsoft considered Drupal worthy of competition. However, it left many of us confused about the fact that Microsoft decided to both partner with Drupal and compete against it.

For me, the interesting part is not whether Microsoft is allowed to compete or not — of course they are allowed to compete. What is interesting to me is the way Microsoft reacted. Within hours, Microsoft had noticed the small Twitter-tsunami, picked up the phone to talk about it, pulled down the ad and publicly apologized for confusing the Drupal community.

This means a lot. It is hard proof that social media like Twitter works, and that Microsoft can be great at listening and responding. It is proof that the web has changed to be more humanized, and that Microsoft understand how to build relationships online. By being transparent and human, and by publicly apologizing, they built some trust with the Drupal community (as reflected in the comments of Mark Brown’s blog post), and that might actually influence people’s experience with Microsoft. Plus it looks like, at least for now, Microsoft decided to promote Drupal rather than compete with it.

At the end of the day, this was the act of one Microsoft employee in India who was out of sync with the rest of Microsoft. This inevitably happens in big companies. All is good now.

Microsoft, famous for prosecuting infringements on its intellectual property, got some mud in the eye this week. Amid charges that its Juku micro-blogging service for China contained code and design elements stolen from Plurk.com, Microsoft issued a formal apology on Wednesday.

Microsoft said it “assumes responsibility for this situation” and would suspend “access to the Juku beta indefinitely.”

Microsoft said the Chinese vendor of the software has “acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.”

Respect for Intellectual Property

The statement emphasized that Microsoft insists its vendors strictly respect intellectual-property rights. “Our practice is to include strong language in our contract that clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe the intellectual-property rights of others. We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done.”

The company said it would “reach out” to Plurk “to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.” It also said Microsoft and MSN China would examine practices in acquiring application code from third-party vendors.

Plurk was less than content with the apology. Cofounder Alvin Woon said the company is likely to sue over the breach. “We are definitely looking at all possibilities on how to move forward in response to Microsoft’s recent statement,” Woon said. A “lawsuit is definitely one of the many options we have considered and will continue to look closely to.”

Crisis Management

A lawsuit may be unavoidable, but Microsoft likely requires its vendors to grant immunity from lawsuits, said Matt Rosoff, a vice president at Directions on Microsoft. The…

While not final, the proposal does give an indication of where the government is headed with broadband buildout.

Whilst at Online Educa last week a number of people queried the fact that Twitter was #1 on the Top 100 Tools for Learning.  0160; I explained how for many people Twitter was particularly important as a personal learning tool, and pointed them to the many examples of how learning professionals are using Twitter .  0160;

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Google is so quick to fire out similar solutions after a rival has, we’re beginning to wonder if this is some sort of game they just play for fun. Maybe they have a stockpile of them somewhere, labeled and ready to go? Who knows. What we do know is that less than a day after Facebook announced their linkup with Facebook Connect and Yahoo, Google busted out with a trendy integration of its own.

If you use Google’s Friend Connect site, you now have the option to log in with your Google or Twitter credentials. This means you can login to any of the nine million sites that utilize Friend Connect and, if you have a Twitter account, can tweet new memberships with friends, interesting content etc., with just a click. See here:

Facebook has made a name for itself, and has managed to touch almost every corner of the Web with the Facebook Connect feature. That level of success mixed with a company as large as Yahoo is certainly a recipe for a favorable outcome, but Google and Twitter are giant giants as well. What we’re seeing is a war for the Web, no doubt, but whose pool of power will reign supreme? It’s hard to say. 

Right now, the numbers tell us that the Facebook/Yahoo duo has the advantage, thanks to the social platform’s massive amount of users (somewhere around 350 million). But then again, Twitter’s simple mission took the Internet by storm, and is now so ubiquitous that it’s odd to think there are people and companies out there that haven’t signed up. 

In any event, the battle for the throne will be an interesting one to watch. 

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There’s an intriguing idea floating around the media: Microsoft wants to undercut Google so badly in Internet search that it might pay newspapers to withhold their content from Google. Just don’t count on that turning into a lucrative plan for newspapers. The unorthodox strategy faces stumbling blocks, starting with this one: Microsoft is unlikely to fund a Google boycott, according to three people familiar with Microsoft’s discussions with a variety of publishers. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are still in early stages.