DISQUS

Looks absolutely wonderful! I wish I'd known about it, would surely have wanted to come. Let me know next time. Cheers to all, great photos!:-)

Chel, I'm so sorry you didn't get in this time, but your attitude is amazing and inspiring. Hopefully you will, and sooner than 3-5 yrs. I wonder if they would be available in Canada or another country? After seeing Michael Moore's film,"Sicko," yours is another example of the frustrations and unfair things about the U.S. healthcare system.

Shirley, you are very brave to stop by and tell us about your situation. I'm sending you and Chel the very best thoughts that you will both get access to this new technology ASAP. Hugs to both of you.:-)

Cathryn

Robert, I really like your new design, and the FriendFeed widget is great. I've thought about putting FriendFeed on my blogs (I have Tumblr, Twitter, and other feeds on them now), so I think you're setting a good example by doing it. I also appreciate the links to your calendars and other main socnets.

Selling out? Aw, come on—since when is good design and a well thought-out UI selling out? That's always appropriate—it's attitude, not aesthetics. Your community verifies your integrity.

I agree with much that has been said here, and I think Albert Maruggi and SethE have illuminated the main causes for this kind of mistake. Too often, start-ups and small-to-medium size companies want to cut corners and use their existing staff or worse, an inexperienced intern, to do their social media outreach, whether or not these people have any significant training in PR or involvement in social media. The C-suite execs or middle managers put pressure on them to produce quickly because they have not done serious marketing and public relations planning before or along with their product/services development.

Seasoned PR consultants get calls like this all too often, from harried marketing directors who are way behind in planning a strategy and kicking off an effective PR outreach program. Suddenly they realize that they also need to be involved in social media and community building to effectively reach their market niches; but they haven't given themselves or their overwhelmed direct reports adequate time to become involved in a real conversation with the targeted media contacts, especially bloggers. It also means they aren't up to speed on content, topics, guidelines and other essentials before they make the pitch. Usually they have no clue about what a social media release is, or what should be included in a social newsroom on their web site. I can tell you that I have turned down projects like this many times, which only makes their timeline shorter.

Much of this is about managing teams or departments effectively within a company, so that marketing and public relations departments are included in the product or services development cycle at the earliest possible point, and communication is timely and effective between departments. That way, the timeline for effective PR and social media outreach is not always on crunch mode, and appropriate staff or consultants have enough time to engage in the community and develop relationships before pitching.

While not excusing the mistakes by any means, I'm attempting to stick up for overwhelmed staff here, as well as independent consultants, and explain why I think these mistakes occur. Hopefully, as companies, trade associations and nonprofit organizations become wiser about social media and community building, these mistakes will happen less frequently. As more people get involved in social media in their personal lives, hopefully that experience will trickle over to their business lives as well. A social community lives 24 hours a day, not just during traditional work hours.

Christopher, I love your last sentence (above):

"If anything, hope underestimates our capacity for change."

Yes! Have a good holiday weekend, Chel. Enjoy yourself and relax in the moment.:-)

Chel, I know this is really hard, and it's tempting to give up hope so you won't be even more disappointed. But you have thought this through carefully, and it does sound like you have to take it a step at a time. Well, you have a lot of friends hoping along with you, so you're not alone—don't give up. Persistence is what gets us anything, and the word "patience" seems to be part of "persistence." I'm sending hugs and ongoing cheers of support—keep hanging in there. A lot will change in hearing implants over the next few years, and you stand a good chance of getting them eventually. Keep the faith. :-)

Chel, your post is very moving, and from our phone conversations, I would not have known you had any hearing loss. You are very brave, and you give hope to other people who are waiting and hoping for anything. My best thoughts, cheers and prayers are with you for this to work out.

It's always hard to understand why death comes to those who give the world so much, especially if we consider them to be still young. Robert, I am sorry to hear about Tom LeVine and Russell Shaw, and I hope there are some treatments that will be successful for Tom. It was also a terrible shock and loss when Marc Orchant passed away. As Francine said, I think we all have to do our best in the time we have, not knowing how long that will be. It points out the necessity of living true to one's self and being as much of a positive force in the world as possible. My best wishes to all concerned.

I think the point is that this and other incidents have started a discussion that Facebook ought to pay attentiion to, if they want to sustain their leadership position. If they don't listen to and respect their customers, it won't pay off for them in the long run, even if they get a short-term bump from the negative publicity (and unfortunately, negative publicity has still gotten them more users in the past). In the longer term, they'll need ongoing customer good will, though. Being "right," on their terms, without listening to customer feedback and frustrations, is not a sustainable strategy.

Cathryn/Creative Sage(tm)

Robert, I support you in your dealings with Facebook, especially after all the positive PR you've given them. Your situation is a *beacon* (pun intended) for all of us, and it's good to find out about dataportability.org. In addition to the data portability issue and their 5000 friends limit, the annoying FB apps that require you to spam your friends in order to add them, and their limit on no. of groups you can join, it took Facebook customer service staff a week to reply to me recently when my profile would not load. There are other people with the same problem who are still waiting for a response. When I got one, it was two sentences telling me what I already knew, that my profile wasn't working and they were fixing it—with no date by which I could expect it to be available to me, and no explanation. When it finally loaded again, FB had removed one or two of my apps.

Facebook clearly does not think our data belongs to us. I have also been locked out of being able to log in to my MySpace account for over six months and have not been able to delete it either, with no response from MySpace "customer service," so it's just hanging there for eternity, a frozen MySpace account. I once wrote about how Facebook was so much better than MySpace, but I won't any more, until Facebook changes its ownership policies. Robert, I hope your experience, and your friends' lobbying for you via other social networks, blogs, Seesmic, etc., will open up a new discussion on this issue with Faceook—but will they listen and change anything? That question remains to be answered.

Cathryn

Robert Scoble, you have proven once again what a mensch you are—not only do you write about the World Economic Forum, you also write about how to improve the world with peas...in other words, about our own Twitter and Facebook friend, Susan Reynolds, her fight against breast cancer, and how her Twitter friends are helping support her. Thank you, Robert, for seeing the humanity in technology in your own original way...and congratulations on your seven years of blogging. Keep blogging, we need your voice for humanity on the Web more than ever.

Cathryn Hrudicka/Creative Sage(tm)

I must say, I'm in agreement with Laura Fitton, as well as you, Chris. I am so sick and tired of women's breasts being shown everywhere as tantalizing sexual objects, and then Facebook had the nerve to ban photos of mothers using their breasts to feed children, their intended purpose. I had hoped I would not have to go through this many decades of my life without that attitude changing, and yet it seems to have gotten worse on the internet. I am also disgusted when I think of younger generations of women and girls still having to deal with this hypocrisy on a daily basis.

Tonight, I signed the MoveOn.org Facebook privacy petition. There is a Facebook privacy group protesting their privacy practices, which also affects their ad choices. I posted the group page, and I hope more people will sign it. We have a lot of power as Facebook users, because there are so many of us. We can demand fairness and our rights to privacy. Let's do it.

All of the above, and a very creative, more open culture. More artists per square foot, too, and a diverse population. Front edge thinking, political activism, a joie de vivre attitude mixed with can-do. I hope San Francisco can continue to live up to "the City that Knows How" motto.:-)

Who made up these rules anyway? I think I've broken all of them. I had one friend of several years unfollow me the other day. She wrote a gracious direct msg. saying she still loved me, but my tweets were clogging up her page, and she would continue to be connected to me on other social networks. At least she was thoughtful enough to tell me why she was unfollowing me. (I would not expect that from someone who was not an actual offline friend as well.) I love the spontaneous use of Twitter for group discussions and the "replies" function. Let's keep pushing the envelope.:-)

~Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer, Creative Sage(tm)

Robert,

Thank you for this blog post. I've been feeling discouraged and somewhat mystified why some bloggers have latched on to Ron Paul when all three front-running Democratic candidates and Dennis Kucinich have presented credible, point-by-point strategies on the key issues of our time. I could not vote for a candidate whose main focus is on fiscal policies, to the exclusion of other issues that will, in the long run, turn out to be much more vital to our entire survival (such as global warming, healthcare and education), equal justice for all (such as women's right to choose and Gay rights), the issues that really mean much more to the thriving of our country in the future, as well as the present. I feel confident the business community will continue to take care of financial priorities, and all of the Democratic candidates want to see the business community continue to thrive—but a short-sighted focus only on fiscal conerns is what got us the Bush-Cheney disaster in the first place. Let's learn from that awful lesson, please! Mr. Paul simply does not represent equality and justice for all citizens (including women and Gay people), so for that reason alone, I could not vote for him. The rights of all of our fellow citizens is more important—and should always be—than what on the surface may sound like a viable fiscal stance, but in reality isn't, if you really take a hard look at it.

~Cathryn Hrudicka/Creative Sage(tm)

Yes, I've been having problems with Firefox freezing a lot lately. I'm usually running it on a MacBook Pro and often have 20+ tabs open at a time, which may be the crux of the problem. When I only have a few tabs open, it doesn't freeze as often. Also, I tend to be on a lot of sites with video and streaming audio, which adds to the frequency of the freeze. As a backup, I run Safari, which usually works well—I wish it had the same easy tab system and extensions that Firefox has, in which case I would use Safari as my primary browser.

~Cathyrn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer
Creative Sage(tm)

Chris,

I'm exploring these very questions right now, doing research not only for two of my blogs (http://CreativeSage.wordpress.com and: http://CathrynHrudicka.wordpress.com), but I've also suggested we do this as a kind of demographic and psychodemographic study, and marketing/biz dev study, as a Social Media Club project. I have been a project lead many times and will be glad to discuss the scope and requirements with you, or in any case, collaborate. Please email, call or Skype me if you want to discuss further: sage at CreativeSage.com. Skype: CreativeSage

~Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer
Creative Sage™/Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates

Hi Robert,

I agree with your comments on Facebook, having gone through this frustrating problem a number of times now when trying to add contacts. It seems that it would not be too difficult for them to tweak it just a little and add one or two questions:

- Is this person a business contact? (And then just let you add instead of asking where you met them)

- Did you "meet" this person online? (For Facebook's marketing info, they might ask where, but I would rather not have to answer that question.)

I think it's likely they'll make these changes eventually, hopefully sooner. BTW, I hope you'll add me as a "friend" on Facebook, since we have actually met in person now. :-)

On Ning, you have the option of creating a private group and having the separate option of adding friends who are not in that specific group (or not). You can create private groups on Facebook, but the whole contact thing needs to be easier, like Ning's is now.

Thanks for bringing this to Facebook's attention.

Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer
Creative Sage

Hi Chris,

This is really fun, a great creativity exercise as well as a way to make a family essay or memoir, or a business memoir. I've done teamwork exercises like this, using digital cameras or polaroids, as well as video, where a team goes out and shoots images they discuss together that illustrate or are a metaphor for an issue they are working on, connected to innovation. Cool!

I'm housesitting this weekend and do not have my video cam with me, unfortunately, but I'll do this another weekend with my peeps!

Cheers,

Cathryn Hrudicka
Chief Imagination Officer
Creative Sage™/Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates