Dear Blackberry, I'm Leaving You

Dear Blackberry....

We've been together since 1997. I remember when you were just a cute little pager. I never realized how much you were going to change my life. You were there when no one else was. We grew up like teenagers together. Remember, the first time I typed GTG. TTYL8R? And then the blueberry. OMG. You were so big and you talked! You always changed and grew with me. Let's face it, you were a bit of an addiction for me.

I never even looked at other smart phone options even when that gorgeous iphone was announced with all those geeks drooling over it.

I've been there all along and gave you all my love, affection, attention and support.

But then the issues started. I don't know if i can pinpoint exactly when it happened. The bickering. The discontent. Maybe you got insecure and thought i was going to look at other smartphones. Maybe you thought I wanted you to be prettier - or - change who you were inside. That wasn't true. The truth is, the reason i loved you wasn't because of fancy design - it was because you always met my needs, even when I didn't know what those needs were. You evolved and I evolved with you.

But then you got distracted. When I started to become more mobile and use browsers more, it's like you didn't care. You were mad at me or something. You let all the wireless carriers put their own dumb applications and browsers on the phone. But worse, then you started to tell me what i wanted.

"You don't want to mix your business life with your personal life"
"Photos aren't important to how you do business every day"
"You shouldn't be browsing so much, get back to work"

I kept telling you that things had changed with me. I kept seeing us grow apart and tried to talk to you about it. But the truth is, you didn't want to hear what I had to say. I talked to people at headoffice. I tweeted my frustration. I talked to my wireless carrier. I even got my friends who know both of us to try. But it's like you got stubborn and insecure and most importantly,

YOU JUST STOPPED LISTENING

So this letter is to tell you that I'm leaving you.

I'm sorry to kick you while you're down. I have at least a couple years with this new iphone 4. Maybe in that time, you can figure out what happened and change your ways and then we can talk again.

I want you to know that you were my first smartphone love and always will be. I really wish you well.

Love,


Leigh

The Robot Army Doesn't "Get" The Youth

Shitharperdid released a great little video today talking about the Robot Army Vs. Young Voters.



They make the point that these pollsters rely heavily on calling land lines.

Guy 1: Landlines? You mean people unaware of the sea or sailing?
Guy 2: No. Those are land lovers.
Guy 3: Right. So...What's a landline?

It's hard to argue their logic. And it begs the question, are we in the middle of a complete revolution when it comes to assessing the pulse of citizens?

At the same time, we know that only a small majority of people are the ones actually posting. Listening can have it's own issues because the most vocal do not necessarily represent the mass majority. Case and point, if you only took your assessment of the last Toronto Mayoral election based on my Twitter feed you would have been shocked when Rob Ford won.

For the next time around i can think of a bunch of monitoring and research solutions but for now, the one thing i'm pretty sure of and can agree with our video friends with on, those polls we are seeing in traditional media channels are not representing the scary votes and opinions of Canada's Youth.

People Love Cool Sh*t

One of the great things about what i do is that i get to be involved with many Social projects that involve research and listening. While i think it is probably stating the obvious, I think it's amazing how much positive sentiment can be created for Brands if they just do cool sh*t.

Maybe it's an iphone app.
Maybe you've done a customer service innovation worth talking about.
Maybe you just have something original to say or something creative we haven't thought about.

Regardless what it is, if it's cool we will care and your brand will be the receptors of our appreciation for it.

BLOGPOST with Links

I have this fine old blog page I'm now going to use to publish news links on Meta. 

CSIS alleges India organized support for Poilievre’s 2022 Conservative leadership bid

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/b073e0fe7dbfa542f3a3d33ef63f688ecc14c5c33424fb72e2317614920bf826/7BEEVI52FZFOBLMVTFWB3DFPUA/

Happy Birthday Twitter

Rachel our community manager at It's Time To Shout had posted a note this morning:

It really struck me. There are a lot of really annoying things about Twitter.

BUT

I don't know another technology platform that has been so fundamental in helping connect weak networks in such an incredible way. For our project It's Time To Shout, it has allowed us to connect with women, families and communities who have been dramatically impacted by Ovarian Cancer. The stories posted to our site, the emails that we get that are private thank yous for the work that we are doing. The ablity for us to bring such an important message to women out there everywhere.



Twitter has been a big part of our success. So today, Twitters Birthday, we want to say thank you thank you thank you Twitter and may you continue to grow and help us change the world for the better.

Digital Isn't Riding A Wave - It's About Sea Change

I get asked to write a lot of digital strategies. My response to the query is always the same:

"Well, if you understand that digital is now everything, then I'm fine to write a digital strategy"

They always look at me funny and agree regardless and only afterwards really understand what i meant. As we go through the process, they consistently say things like:

" this isn't about digital, it's about a way of thinking across our entire business"
"your talking about completely redoing our marketing plans"
"we now have to stop looking at our marketing from a media channel perspective and start looking at it from a customer/solution perspective"
"you aren't looking at how to take our mass media brand online, your actually evolving it so it can encompass an overall brand experience!" (well ok they never say that exactly but they say they now "get" what i was talking about regarding expanding brand)

This isn't about digital. It isn't about looking at how big Agencies look at the latest wave because it's our most current obsession as this blog post talks about near the end.

It's about reinventing our businesses and our brands to respond to the deep cultural shifts that have been changing the way brands and customers interact since the advent of the commercial web.

The Agencies and startup newcos that get it ISN'T A WAVE BUT A SEA CHANGE are the ones who are going to be able to become cornerstones partners to the Brands they work with verses interchangable creative executors who judge the value of what they do by a series of shiny awards.

The Feedreader Continuum

When the New York Times implied that blogging was dead, Mathew disagreed. He instead rightly pointed out that it has evolved to a continuum of publishing. In his words:

What’s really happening, as Toni Schneider of Automattic — the corporate parent of the WordPress publishing platform (see disclosure below) — noted in the NYT piece, is that what blogging represented even four or five years ago has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing.

It was interesting because Scott asked me yesterday if i had any new blogs that I love for creative brain food. My reply to him was that I've started to use Paper.li as my content aggregator. I subscribe to many Twitter key word Paper.li's as well as a few nicely curated newspapers on subject matters that I find interesting.

The challenge of sifting through the gazillions of links, blogs and general smart user generated content is only becoming a harder daily mountain to climb and I'm always looking for newer better ways to solve that particular problem.

So would i say that the feedreader is dead? Well if we consider a feedreader as Bloglines or Google Reader then it kinda is from my perspective. But if we see feedreaders as a "continuum of aggregation" models then I say we've only just begun.