Gearheads: The Sterling Communications Blog

Gas Pains?

The pain we all feel at the pump will pack a harder punch, yet again, as we fill up for our holiday-weekend travels. Gas prices have hit a new record high, just in time for the July 4 weekend, one of the nation’s busiest travel times. With California boasting the second highest gas prices in the nation (good thing we are 7th-greenest metropolitan city in the U.S., otherwise we may all be broke), some of us may be reconsidering our Independence Day plans. Perhaps the low-key, backyard burgers sound a bit more appealing this year?

Unfortunately, skyrocketing gas prices don’t only effect holiday or weekend travel; for most, the real cost-culprit is day-to-day commuting. The good news is that Bay Area companies are offering alternatives to help ease employees’ growing financial strain, while also being more environmentally conscious. Many are offering telecommuting options, allowing employees to work from home. 

Security concerns have made some hesitant to make the move to telecommuting, but several companies offer technology to ensure secure remote access, such as our client Juniper Networks. Employees can now be green while saving green.

Product Reviews in Hostile Territory

Running a successful reviews program can make or break a product. That's clear, but the many considerations involved in a review program (How to position the product against competitors? How many devices to send out and to whom? How to best target traditional reviewers and enthusiasts? Etc., etc.) can lead to many sleepless nights for PR people and product managers. 

Amongst the biggest challenges is determining how to engage with a reviewer that you know will ding a product. While the first instinct might be to exclude the reviewer from the program entirely, it can be a wiser choice to enter into hostile territory with a specific plan of action. By directly addressing a reviewer’s concerns it’s possible to gain a little ground and thus push a negative review towards one that is more balanced.

A few weeks ago Pure Digital released the Flip Mino to largely positive reviews. A good roundup of the initial reviews is posted on Engadget. The main point-of-concern/debate among reviewers were the benefits or drawbacks of the new Li-ion battery that replaced AA batteries in the previous version of the Flip. While overall, people liked the device, Michael Arrington did not.

Bezos commits to mending Twitter's broken wings

I know we Sterlingers have all been complaining and hoping for a solution to the scalability issues of Twitter. The point is that we seem to be tweeting these very sentiments -- as are renowned bloggers, reporters and analysts. Surely this is a social media platform worth saving!

Jeff Bezos seems to think so, as noted by Stephen Baker in BusinessWeek, who just covered the latest commitment of capital to help support the highly popular but floundering service. While most users seem content to bewail the monotonous outages, Twitter-enthusiast Bezos (slightly more famous for founding small e-Com Amazon.com) and Spark Capital think the microblogging site is important enough to throw an undisclosed amount of money at the "stressed-out" Twitter-folk. Apparently, Bezos thinks Twitter necessitates a wholesale architecture overhaul -- "piece-by-piece" -- that will likely take months. No quick fix here! Ugh. Fortunately for Twitter, no replacement service has been developed to supplant it. Unfortunately for us, we've only just begun to use and benefit from Twitter, so what do we do in the interim amidst outage after outage? As many of us have already figured out, Facebook, FriendFeed and Summize are tangible workarounds, but the hope remains for Twitter to get a new lease on life.

How social networking saved New Orleans - Network World

Here's a great story from Network World about how social networking can effect real change and literally save cities. This one hits home for me as it's all about my second favorite city in the world - New Orleans - and how its citizens used social networking apps to re-build their lives. Enjoy!

SEO: The Ultimate Cover-Up

We've all seen how bad press can effect a client's reputation. You can't make that press disappear completely, so what's the best way to cover it up? Mark Hopkins provides a good example of how Miley Cyrus is using SEO tactics and social media to shape her reputation after having scandalous photos published on the Internet.

Though Mark doesn't attribute the success of her PR campaign to SEO, his quick scan of Google News proves the effectiveness of the tactic. By pushing out recent positive news on Miley's "Dance Battles," they've been able to remove the bad press from the front page of Google News. 

Is SEO changing the face of crisis communication?

Has the social media backlash begun?

Jonathan Fields talks about how the constant need of the connected to document every facet of their lives not only takes them out of the moment, but can spoil the moment for others. Our own Lisa Hawes blogged about the same thing recently.

Fields asks:

When we tweet everything we are experiencing in a conversation, concert or gathering of likeminded people, does the very activity of tweeting somehow take away from our ability to enjoy the bigger activity? Does it diminish our ability to be fully present in a way that lessens the power, the value, the enduring impact of the live experience? Does it stop the core conversation about which we’re reporting from going to the next level? Does it place documenting over experiencing?

TV=Peanuts?

When I was growing up, our TV repairman was named Paul. Is anybody on a first-name basis with a TV repairman these days? Does that job still exist in the USA, land of planned obsolescence and disposable everything?

I was thinking about this because, I confess, I’m among the approximately 20M “over-the-air dependent” households that still receive TV programs via analog signals, i.e., an old-fashioned rabbit ears antenna. (There are an additional estimated 20M households who are cable or satellite subscribers, but also maintain analog sets.). Orson Welles compared television to peanuts: He hated them both, but couldn’t control his appetite for either. I control mine by controlling my access. I’ve never felt the need to sign up for Comcast, as I figure I spend too much time in front of the TV as it is — and especially when cable prices have risen 77 percent since 1996.

What to do on a cloudy Saturday in Seattle

I know, "cloudy Saturday in Seattle" is like saying "sunny day in the Sahara." The adjectives are sort of pointless. So instead of going to the annual Solstice Parade this past Saturday, I participated in PodCamp Seattle. Eric Weaver, the organizer, said the focus of this year's gathering was more on the basics of social media for people who are still trying to get their feet wet. The actual attendees spanned the range from serious enthusiasts and practitioners to people who hadn't yet written their first blog post. A few observations:

The Battle of the Sound Bites?

What's being billed as the Obama-McCain Twitter Debate (despite the fact that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama will be composing the tweets) is scheduled to start tonight. Should be interesting to hear what each camp has to say on the technology front, though I fear the 140 character limit will make it more of a quotable sound bite contest than an in-depth discussion of issues and positions. Hope that using Twitter isn't just a gimmick. We shall see.

Get social at PodCamp Seattle

Calling all Seattlites!

Got Saturday plans yet? If not, you should check out PodCamp Seattle, taking place at UW tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The free event, aimed at new media enthusiasts, marketers, PR and advertising people and technologists, will focus on new online social tools such as blogging, podcasting, video blogging, Twitter, wikis, etc., and is open to people of all social media skill levels.

Need another reason to attend? How's this: Sterling's very own Kevin Pedraja will be speaking about "Communications in an Always-On World" and how new social media technologies are changing the way that we work. You can catch him at 1:30 p.m. in Room 302 in the Communications Building.

Should be a great opportunity to learn and network with fellow social media gurus (or gurus-in-training)! Interested? Register here.