Archives for November 2011

Thanksgiving Message: Gratitude, Love & Blue Keys

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend." —Melody Beattie Even in tough times like these, we all can count our blessings on Thanksgiving. We can be thankful for our family, the accident of our birth in a nation with abundant food and water, and a roof over our head. We … [Read more...]

AP vs. Social Media: For Whom the Pepper Spray Tolls

Chilling video images surfaced online today showing a campus police officer at the University of California, Davis, calmly pepper spraying the faces of Occupy Wall Street protesters seated quietly in a line with their arms interlocked. The images, captured with cellphones by several onlookers, quickly spread virally across the Internet. As unsettling as the video images are, the keyword for me in the news event is onlookers plural. It reminded me of … [Read more...]

The Klout Fallacy from Its Marketing Manager Herself

I hit the Klout jackpot this week. No, my Klout score of 40 isn't suddenly up. Klout's Marketing Manager Megan Berry personally left an incredibly insightful comment on my blog. Her comment isn't gold to me because of the ego boost (O.K., maybe a little). It's gold because it plainly illustrates the fallacy of Klout's claim to be "the standard for influence." Here's how Berry summarized how Klout scores work: "1. Influence isn’t about you, it’s about your audience. … [Read more...]

Video Clip of the Month: Branding Prof Eats Klout Crow

A thought-provoking exchange in the comments on Danny Brown's marketing blog recently caught my eye, inspiring my pick for November 2011 video clip of the month. From Brown: "@RichBecker Sweet Lord, seriously, mate? A professor grades based on Klout? How screwed up is that? "You nailed it with the dehumanization of the online (and, to a degree, offline) populace, mate. By encouraging people to only connect with "influencers", as decreed by Klout and their screwy … [Read more...]