Boomerang

These days the only thing that gets between me and the dozens of blogs I peruse each day is my thin framed glasses. I consider social media the main focus of my work life, and it wasn’t until my recent visit to Brazil with some friends that I realized blogs and social networks are an integral part of my personal life as well.

Before leaving for my dream trip, my “travel planner” and dear friend told me countless travel tips and personal stories she read on various travel blogs. In Rio de Janeiro, we met some wonderful people who appeared to be close buddies, but we learned that they met just a few days prior through social networking sites while looking for travel companions. What a great way to have some new friends to hang out with upon arrival.

As our trip came to a close, eight of us exchanged contact information and promised to “MySpace” each other once we returned home. In addition to email addresses, we shared personal web pages, IM screen names, and the URLs to shared photo sites where we agreed to upload the evidence from our crazy time at Carnival. Of course there will be a filtered set of photos for the family and coworkers - don’t want to have any of those online persona issues.

Now that we are all back in our respective countries, I’m interested to see how our in-person friendships translate to cyberspace relationships. We started the trip using social networks to find information and people, and now we return to those same networks in an effort to maintain our connections. We’ve come full circle using social media - just like a Boomerang to Brazil and back again!

Lately I’ve been hearing myself say “Hang in there!” an awful lot. It’s what I said to a client who recently started a new job and managed a $43M acquisition in her first week. It’s what I said to an employee who is overloaded with client work because she is that good and in high demand. It’s what I said to my nanny who has a full week of taking care of not only the baby, but also my 5-year-old while his school takes winter break.

While it’s meant to be hopeful and empathetic, I realized that it’s actually the opposite. Not only does “Hang in there!” sounds defeatist – like you’re already Ziggy hanging from the rope with no options but to let go or be stranded there forever – but it also offers no real help. You might as well say “suck it up!”President Bush, for example, has essentially been telling the world to “hang in there” and continue to fight an unjustified war. AT&T clearly expects its customers to “hang in there” while it goes through yet another convoluted branding exercise.

The more impressive way to handle a “hang in there” situation is the JetBlue approach of facing the problem head on, apologizing for circumstances beyond its control, and offering a solution at the same time. JetBlue CEO David Neeleman’s apology letter not only reflects the true JetBlue brand of “bringing humanity back to air travel,” it requires nothing – no more suffering but also no more complaining – from customers.

Saying “hang in there” is an avoidance tactic for me, and one that I now promise to avoid.

There’s no denying that Wikipedia has become the most popular encyclopedia on the web, with a collection of facts on almost every subject in the world. The site has generated over 6 million articles in more than 250 languages – truly a global phenomenon. Not bad for a site that just celebrated its 6th birthday, employs fewer than 10 people, and relies on an army of volunteers to produce content. That’s the power of Wikipedia’s “wiki” format – anyone who creates an account on the site can contribute and edit existing pages on any topic. However, a recent scandal has placed Wikipedia in the spotlight of scrutiny regarding its stance on contributors to the site.

Last month, it was discovered that Microsoft paid a blogger to edit a Wikipedia entry. Microsoft claims it didn’t want to edit the content directly, so it brought in a third party to provide “balance.” This has raised serious questions regarding the ethics of the site and what restrictions, if any, can be placed on author contributions. Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press asks “why is it so bad to pay someone to write something on Wikipedia?” After all, isn’t it about providing deep knowledge on a subject, regardless of payment?

In the past, Wikipedia has blocked PR agencies from making contributions due to presumed bias. That’s absurd. What Wikipedia needs is more authors, not less! Truth be told, mass participation is surprisingly low on the site. Eric Goldman points out that 72% of all articles on the site have been written by less than 1% of Wikipedia users. That’s not much of a democracy in terms of content created, if you ask me.

I hope that if anything comes from the Microsoft debacle, it’s that scads of people will flock to Wikipedia and post content for the first time. Just make sure content is unbiased and has validity, folks. If not, Wikidumper is waiting in the wings. Billed as the “official appreciation page for the best of Wikipedia rejects,” Wikidumper may just take your entry and show the world how ridiculous it really is – like this one about chickenology. (If you’re curious about official Wikipedia guidelines, read the “Neutral Point of View” article. )

 Green is everywhere. Even for the most eager and committed of us, it’s hard to keep up with the information, research, controversy, and opinions that are coming at us like water from a fire hose.

Last night, at the peak of exhaustion from caring for two sick kids, a long day’s work and a spontaneous dinner party, my husband asked, “What happens if we just don’t do green?”

(WHAT?!?! Not do green? Who are you? Are you on drugs? Don’t you care about our children? Are you the devil?)

Somewhat like suggesting that saving money is a bad idea, “not doing green” is not an option in this day and age. It doesn’t mean that I am immediately trading in my car, for example, but it does mean I won’t buy a new car that isn’t a hybrid. I can’t guarantee I’ll reduce the length of my showers, but I am exploring how to convert to solar. And that’s only in my personal time…

Happy Valentine’s Day!  In the spirit of this amorous occasion, I thought I’d post about a timely viral campaign by Herbal Essences, at dumpcupid.com. The site features a video of a scantily clad, rather portly cupid walking around the streets of a big city, lamenting about how set-ups often end poorly. The message of the campaign is “When you’ve got luscious hair, who needs cupid?” 

There are a lot of great aspects to this campaign. The videos are pretty funny - one shows Cupid being chased by an angry woman shouting “He was married!”; another shows him rapping about the pitfalls of cupidom. Visitors to the site can create customized e-cards resembling magnetic poetry, or play M.A.S.H. They can even submit their own love stories (good or bad) to be posted on the site.

This is a great example of a company getting its message across in a creative and fun way. Herbal Essences understands its customer base, appeals to their spirit, and lets them spread the message. Our only criticism is that the site takes a long time to load - much too long. Let’s face it, viral messengers (people who forward these videos) are fickle and don’t have a lot of time especially when viewing them at work. We say, “More bandwidth please!” but keep the love coming.

If you’ve been around more than a random seven years in marketing and have worked with big companies, you’ve heard ‘em all say, “Oh we can’t do that! It’s like turning the Queen Mary! It’ll take forever. No, it’s impossible.”

Yet, in our very own spectacular San Francisco Bay, they turned the Queen Mary - the Queen Mary 2.0 that is. Beautifully did she turn, with a navigational margin for error of less than 70 feet and just 28 feet worth of clearance under the Golden Gate Bridge. (And if you don’t know our Bay, it’s grounded many vanity toys of far less consequence.)

So I grabbed my camera and headed to the bay to see it for myself (photo above). Cuz frankly, I am super sick of hearing that cliché.

But Captain Tom Miller, for whom docking the ship was “the challenge of a lifetime,” modestly said that while she was big and heavy, “she’s a good ship and maneuvers well with all the latest technology.”

Isn’t that like the best companies in the world? They might have started out like the original Queen Mary, near impossible to turn, but they reinvent themselves using new technology, often a modest, new captain, and hopefully end up as light on their feet as our new grande dame the QM2.

So the next time I stare down a bunch of nay sayers whether they’re in start up chaos or orderly corporate sterility, I will channel the spirit of Cap’n Tom. Because yo’… I know that dame can turn.

BSB (before second baby) I lived, in retrospect, an idyllic life. I worked from 7:30 to 7:30 – a short day for many of my clients – went home to a home-cooked (by my husband) meal, talked with my articulate and well-behaved 4 year old son, watched some TV or read a book and went to sleep.

Around month eight of my second pregnancy I panicked, realizing that maybe having another kid wasn’t such a great idea after all. My son slept in our bed, perpendicularly, with his head in my back and his feet in my husband’s face, for exactly three years and 49 weeks. It was only a combination of bribery and the fortuitous arrival of a cold that required codeine that got him sleeping through the night in his own bed. Why put myself through all that again? But, as they say, you can’t be sort of pregnant so along came my (lovely, adorable, brilliant) daughter.

Now it’s ASB (after second baby) and I am back at work as the Managing Director of Cohn & Wolfe’s San Francisco office. I am living parallel lives, both a new type of idyllic in their own ways. By the time I leave the house in the morning I’ve lived an entire day; by the time I head home from work I am buzzing with the thrill of it all – cool technologies, shifts in the media, clients that want to do interesting programs, new opportunities around sustainable marketing.

If all goes as planned, my two lives will get blended very soon.

A friend recently told me that during the interview process he does a quick “MySpace background check” on potential employees. Apparently, using that not-so-secret online identity for information gathering is a growing phenomenon. This public accessibility to online identity has some people thinking twice about how they portray themselves in social networks and for good reason.

Developing online personas and profiles prompt a new kind of self reflection where we must choose who we want to be in an explicit way. What is the best way to project oneself onto the screen in a virtual community? In the online world, each word, each photo, and each comment left from a “connection,” says something about who we are or who we’re not. The flexibility and power provided by the ability to create this “second self,” is the underlying issue for fears about online safety, questions about who is a reputable information source, and perhaps most importantly, concerns about how projective media is transforming human psychology.

Thanks to everyone who now participates in the online world in some way or another. We have artists, writers, educators, and experts sharing their stories and experiences with the world. Social media tools like blogs, tags, and widgets help us understand our cyber neighbors better.

As we all know, the web is an interconnected force that evolves daily. Messages move at the speed of light. Online networks can build very quickly. Written words live on the Internet forever. So how do we maintain balance and harmony when speaking to the entire planet? Rules, my friend, rules. Nobody knows that better than Tom Foremski, who has launched a new blog called New Rules Communication. As Tom puts it, “There are new rules emerging that will become the basis for best practices in communicating ideas in what is becoming a conversational, social media world. We don’t yet know what the new rules will be, we know some of them but there are lots more to discover –and that’s what’s exciting because we all get to participate in creating the new rules.”

While people are connecting like crazy every which way, some folks are helping to establish more order to this online ecosystem. Foremski is one of those people with a mission to provide common sense and standards among communicators. We applaud him for his efforts and take full pleasure in being a major sponsor of New Rules Communication. So we thought it was only fitting to pull together our own rules to live by in this social media world. Therefore, the Boomerang Blog offers its rules for “active listening” to start 2007 off right. As we see it, the online “playing field” will undoubtedly change but good rules will still apply.