Will.

Be.

Mine.

In the hard-fought smartphone war pitting my wife and her iPhone 3GS against me and my BlackBerry Bold, I'm left standing alone. The kids have long since abandoned me for Anne and her fancy apps. I'm left with the weak, "but it types way better" argument.

But not anymore.

Check out these pics, courtesy of Engadget:

Touchscreen!?! And a keyboard! Cool-looking but with BlackBerry business-class power! Whoooahhhhh. Life is good.

My wireless contract is almost up and I'm due for an upgrade. I won't be able to sleep tonight. These leaked pictures of the new BlackBerry 9800, a.k.a. "The Slider", with an all-new OS too, are just what I need. No word yet when it will be released or what its real name will be but don't worry, I'll be first in line.

Soon we'll see who the kids love most, won't we Anne.

I'm even willing to pay -- a little -- to keep my friends happy. After all, they're important to me. I love podcasts so much that I don't listen to the radio anymore, even in the car, where I now plug my iPod into my car's sound system. I'm like everyone else in this digital world: I want choice and I want it right now -- whether it's a sermon from an obscure pastor in Australia, a funky sports roundtable discussion, or political jokes on NPR.

But nothing is free and I've been worrying that content owners would pull the plug on my podcasts unless they started making back some coin.

In fact, last year I even emailed one of my favourites, Prime Time Sports with Bob McCown, and told them I'd be okay if they started inserting one 30-second ad per half-hour. It wouldn't be worth it for people to fish their iPods out of their pockets to scroll past the ad and it would add an incentive for the station posting the podcast-version of the radio show.

Alas, nothing.

Until now.

I just got back from a walk with The-Best-Border-Collie-Ever. I was listening to a new friend, Political Gabfest, featuring journalists from Slate.com. Midway through the half-hour show, the host broke from the banter and started an awkward, two-minute advertorial for their sponsor, audible.com. During the advertorial, one of the panelists, Emily Bazelon, gave a warm review of a book she'd listened to from the sponsor.

Whew. I'm glad that someone is figuring out how to make these podcasts pay.

But yikes, I'm not sure who I feel about the columnists shilling so obviously for an advertiser. Why couldn't they just have inserted a good old fashioned 30-second ad?

I guess I still like to see journalists at least pretending that there is a wall between the advertising and editorial departments.

It's almost like we've got to figure out new rules with these new media. What's kosher and what isn't? Do the same guidelines that have ruled in the print journalism world hold in the digital realm? Should we demand the same level of editorial integrity from podcast broadcasters as we do from the folks on NPR or CBC?

I don't know. All I know is that at least one of my podcast friends is a little bit safer from the accountant's axe.

We went head to head recently typing the famous opening line to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again." The rule was you weren't done until you'd typed the lines perfectly. I thumbed it on my BB.  Anne did the same on her iPhone. Then we switched -- I took her iPhone and gave her my BlackBerry.

Both times, the person on the BlackBerry typed 30 per cent faster than the person using the iPhone, even when using the unfamiliar device.

Now believe me, I love Anne's iPhone. It's a beautiful, powerful smartphone with a sweet interface and more apps than you could use in a lifetime. But for typing, it bites. Trying to hit the right key is frustrating and slow.

Anne is a very annoying iPhone owner. "Oh, does your phone not have an app for that?" she'll say sweetly. "Mine does." But in a moment of honesty, she admitted that the majority of the time she uses her iPhone as a phone or for email.

New iPhone 4G unveiled today. Still no keyboard.

I could write a long list of beefs I have with my BlackBerry -- like the fact that I'm so adept at doing a hard reboot by removing the battery that I bet I could do it blindfolded. Or the lack of apps. Or should we talk about the small screen?

But for keeping my inbox clean and moving projects along while I'm out of the office, give me my BlackBerry any day.

My wife Anne (twitter.com/AnneDouglasComm) and I were presenting about social media at a conference for lawncare professionals and golf course superintendents yesterday afternoon. There were a lot of questions about Twitter so I fired up Tweetdeck on my Mac, which was projected on to a huge screen behind us. I wanted to show how you can see the most-discussed topics on Twitter in real-time.

At around 2:30 p.m., Gordon Lightfoot's name was huge on the cloud. He's a Canadian icon in the folk/rock world. I clicked on his name and saw a tweet that he'd died. With the whole audience watching, I clicked the URL that someone had posted and was directed to the National Post, a national newspaper in Canada, which was reporting that he died.

I turned to the audience and said something like, "you can't always trust what you read on Twitter but if the mainstream media confirms something, you know it's true."

HA!

Minutes later, a seminar attendee with a laptop piped up, "he's not dead!" People madly clicked around on their laptops and BlackBerry's. It turns out he can still wiggle his toes. The National Post bit on a wild rumour, possibly started after a media interview with old-time rocker Ronnie Hawkins.

A few things:

1. What a blow to the National Post brand. Twitter is buzzing and won't let the newspaper forget that it contributed to the story, even though it has taken it's original piece down off the website and is pretending it wasn't leading the "Lightfoot is Dead!" charge.
2. This shows the lightning-fast ability of Twitter and social media to wrestle with rumours and news and determine fact or fiction. It's the ultimate in crowd sourcing where you can have a swarm of people attack a piece of information and rip it apart and spread the truth.
3. Some are saying the Post should have left its original story up with a big mea culpa. I'm not so sure but I think they should have kept their part of the story in subsequent posts.
4. It was old-school journalism that cracked this open -- someone picked up a phone and called Lightfoot's publicist.

I couldn't have asked for a better real-time case study in the opportunities and challenges with social media. Thank you Gordon Lightfoot!

Secondly, I need to be honest. I don't trust Microsoft. Being the overwhelming market share leader in PC software has allowed them to release inferior products. I can just see this phone saving its most horrific crashes for my most important phone calls.

That said, this new smarthphone OS looks interesting. I like how they've grouped applications into something like folders. The "desktop" space on my wife's iPhone or my son's iTouch is very busy. It's hard to find what you're looking for in the mess of applications. This OS looks more organized.

Other cool ideas:

• Every phone must have an FM radio and four points of touch on the screen
• There will be a special Bing (search) button which will allow one-touch access to one of the more common tasks, not to mention the fact that it will instantly boost the number of Bing users
• Real-time updates from Facebook, email, voicemail and, one would think, Twitter
• Most recent contacts stay at the top of the list
• Nice redesign of the typical user interface. I like the big, blocky type. It also looks like they've grouped like-applications.
• The People Hub where all my friends' feeds, from Facebook, Twitter, etc., will be grouped in one place

The wild card is the hardware. Microsoft says they're going to be careful which suppliers install Windows Phone 7 on which hardware. We'll have to wait and see.

Nice blog. Well done. The more I learn about the Apple plan, the more I’ve come to understand that the devices are designed to do one thing – put a toll booth on the web.

There are experts out there that praise the Apple strategy and suggest all others will have to fall in line or get blown away. It does appear Apple has learned the downside to trying to be proprietary and keep user fees/their per-user revenue high – they now see the opposite as the way to go – get the devices out there, open the app and programming opps, make it cheap and easy for partners and the masses to jump onboard and micro-monetize out the ying-yang.

MP3 players and files were around long before iPod, but the device and software monetized it big time. Iphone inadvertantly discovered the micro-payment model via the world of apps (Apple thought they would own all of the app development and sales, but hit a bonanza when they opened it up). Now the iPad – it won’t do all that we were expecting, but I think it will monetize book, movie, tv and video consumption in a way the desktop, iPhone, iPod could not achieve. Do I have this right  - it seems so obvious.

But we won't be buying an iPad. Why would we want a giant iPod Touch, which is all the iPad seems to be?

Steve Jobs and Apple missed an opportunity to invent a whole new category -- to take a bunch of my family's must-have tech appliances and smush them into one über tool.

Here are three ideas the bright minds at Apple can wrestle with before they release iPad 2.0.

1. A jot-and-jog deskmate

When an impromptu meeting gets called, I frequently grab a pad of paper in case I need to jot something down and my BlackBerry in case I need to check through old emails to jog my memory. Neither tool serves its purpose well. I lose the paper and my BB is an imperfect device. I have my emails sorted into folders on my laptop and I find it frustrating not being able to access my filing system without carting around my laptop. But it feels like overkill to unplug my MacBook Pro from my second screen and lug it into my boss' office for a five minute briefing.

It would be cool if I had an iPad that would sync automatically with my MacBook Pro via Bluetooth. My main files and email would be twinned just by setting it down on my desk near my laptop. I'd simply swipe my iPad off my desk and have a handy security blanket. The smaller screen and lack of keyboard would make it impractical as a regular work device but for meetings it could be dandy. Of course I'd need full versions of Word and Entourage. Don't give me cloud computing either -- I want loaded, fast software.

1. Solve my multiple phone problem

My wife and I are much more reachable on our mobiles. Nothing is more frustrating than grabbing our antiquated land-line phone and hearing the beep-beep-beep of voice mail and realizing people have been waiting for days for a call-back.

But I'm not ready to give up our land line yet. I want a home phone that is a multipurpose machine.Our kids are too young to have mobile phones and I still feel like we need a central, family number.

It seems like the iPad could somehow solve this problem. I could see myself carrying it around the house anyway, since it's loaded with apps that I'd want to plug into frequently.

The next generation iPad could have a wifi phone capability. When my wife's iPhone logs on to the same wifi network, it could transfer her calls to the iPad automatically. Same with my BlackBerry. It could forward the calls from my mobile number to our home number so we wouldn't chew up cell phone minutes.

I see holes in my idea already but I bet a day-long brainstorming session between some smart Apple designers could spit out some wild ideas that could change voice communication in the home forever.

3. One-handed QWERTY keyboard

In one promotional picture from Apple, I saw a guy holding an iPad with his left hand while he typed on a QWERTY keyboard with his right. It seemed awkward.

Apple should invent a one-handed QWERTY keyboard. I'd make it a circle, like an old rotary phone. Maybe they could put the most-used letters at the top, outer edge and less-used letters in the inside of the circle or at the bottom. It would take up less screen real estate and would probably be faster for typing. You could toggle between the new one-handed keyboard and a standard QWERTY one.

I was waiting for something big out of Steve Jobs. I remember the gasps and cheers when Jobs unlocked the iPhone for the first time. There was no reason to gasp at the new iPad. But there's always 2.0.

Nonetheless, I still see the marketing value of Twitter. It helps clients engage with customers and it provides a channel in which to promote content.

But many businesses can't get their minds wrapped around how to fit Twitter into a corporate straight-jacket for three reasons:

1. Who's got enough time in their day to take on the task of tweeting enough to maintain credibility and to develop a following?
2. Does the corporation want individual employees developing a following of their own on Twitter -- only to take those eyeballs with them should they leave?
3. How can a Twitter experiment succeed without letting the person tweeting develop some personality? [see my previous post: B2B’s big hurdle: Developing a personality in social media]  It's tough to get someone to follow some lame Twitter feed where all they do is post links to dry-as-toast news releases.

Twitter might have come up with an answer. Twitter Contributors will flag which individual contributes a tweet to a corporate Twitter feed. It looks like it will be offered in a premium business package but I think it will be worth the investment.

This seems like an elegant way to answer some of the concerns businesses have about handing off the Twitter reins to staff. They could have a number of employees -- say a bunch of sales reps from a specific region -- contributing to one Twitter feed.

Say the feed is www.twitter.com/AcmeSouthwest. Each tweet from Bill the sales rep from the southwest region will have his name attached. Same with another rep from the region, Mary.

Followers would get the benefit of hearing a variety of voices and perspectives. Employees who are motivated to tweet could carry more of the Twitter load -- and see more of the upside. And employees would be able to develop some personality in a more controlled environment.

Stay tuned. Twitter Contributors hasn't been rolled out yet but it's coming soon.

]]> http://andrewdouglaspr.com/?feed=rss2&p=356 1 http://andrewdouglaspr.com/?p=328 http://andrewdouglaspr.com/?p=328#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:06:39 +0000 admin http://andrewdouglaspr.com/?p=328 Time Warner has unveiled it's prototype e-reader. It looks kind of like Amazon's Kindle, except more web-like. Users can poke around pages to activate video, sort pictures, create their own table of contents, and other neat stuff.

I suppose it's cool but man, it looks demanding on the reader. I might be old school but when it comes to magazines, I'm happy to place my valuable reading time in the hands of a good editor. I prefer letting them sort through all the week's news and choose the best tidbits for me to know. I have plenty of opportunity elsewhere in my life to pick and choose exactly which fruit I want to eat. When I buy a magazine, I like coming to a table with food prepared and the table set, ready for me to tuck in.

I wonder if I had one of these fancy tablets from Time Warner if I'd spend most of my time poking and proding the darn thing instead of reading. When I want a web experience, I'll fire up the web.

This is very un-techie of me to say but sometimes the best tools are ones that have limited capabilities. Take my three-year-old iPod Nano. By and large, Apple resisted the temptation to pimp it up with too many bells and whistles. I know you can get an iPod Touch with plenty of extras built in but for my purposes, which is mainly listening to podcasts during my walk home, the iPod Nano is perfect.

Magazines are simple. Sometimes simplicity is good.

Andy Kleinschmidt

The rules of successful social media engagement -- frequent updates, transparency, engagement with other users, personality -- don't mesh with corporate PR 1.0. Old-school PR is about futzing over news releases and trying to micromanage how every word in each key message is written and repeated. It's often about playing defense.

It's hard to enter into a rapid-fire, engaging conversation when you've got to steer every phrase through five levels of approvals.

Compare that to my favourite people on Twitter. They give me small glimpses into their personal lives. I don't want to know what breakfast cereal they ate but I do want to trust the individuals who feed me my news and to trust someone I need to know a little about them.

I've taken a short clip of an interview I did with Andy Kleinschmidt, an extension educator at Ohio State University Extension based in Van Wert County, Ohio. Kleinschmidt is right into social media. He's on Twitter, he blogs and he's on Facebook.

"People would like to connect not only with some good information but with an expert that they trust, someone they can put a face too," he says. "I have a picture on my blog but I think I have to go much more transparent, much more next level and really put myself out there in videos and that type of thing."

Interview with Andy Kleinschmidt (1:38)

Some organizations are starting to get it. Take the Ohio Farm Bureau. They have a corporate Twitter account but add the initials of the writer to tweets. And you can see a short bio of each person on their Twitter page (see picture below, right).

Don't think this doesn't apply to you if you're not in the agriculture industry. The same rules around social media apply everywhere.

Successful corporations will allow their front-line people to step out in social media. Sure there's risk but it's either that or become completely irrelevant.