You'd think sending out breaking-news email blasts wouldn't be brain surgery for a newspaper. But sometimes at The Advocate in Baton Rouge, La., everything is brain surgery, and there are no brain surgeons on staff. And no one there plays one on TV, either.
Thus, this unintentionally hilarious Advocate news alert from three days ago. A highly amused high-school classmate posted this on Facebook. That's The Advocate, not so good journalistically a lot of the time, but usually a pretty good reason to shake your head and chuckle.
OK, this isn't safe for work. Or your little kids. But come to think of it, neither is life. Anyway, watch the brilliant video that came out of a social experiment by the British poverty charity, The Pilion Trust, to see whether people really do care about the poor. Turns out they do. Which sets the charity up to deliver the advertising kill shot. Just watch.
Apparently, the government shutdown has dried up all funding for education. But if you're going to have an epic geographical fail, you'd just as well put it on Facebook. Especially if you're the chief meteorologist for a local Fox affiliate in Florida. Which we all know is somewhere between Cuba and Egypt. Rare is the government that is smarter than the people who put it in power.In other words, to quote Dr. Zachary Smith, "We're doomed! We're doomed! We're all going to die!"
If your university is going to do a social-media campaign to create a little buzz and enhance the ol' profile, you just as well have a little fun with it. YOLO!
Wait a sec . . . I'm not sure I used "YOLO" (You Only Live Once) correctly. What University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman is doing here isn't dumb at all. (See the YouTube video. Ol' Harv has a point on that particular catchphrase.) What's a delightful surprise in these UN-L videos is this: The chancellor, 71, is a funny, funny guy. Not only in front of the camera, but as a writer, too. He rewrote everything that the ad agency and university marketing staff put before him, and if it says it in the Omaha World-Herald, it must be so. Or good enough for newspaper work.
The “Perls of Knowledge” spots have been tweeted and re-tweeted and re-re-tweeted. The ad campaign has gotten a mountain of free publicity, courtesy of media outlets from Sioux City to San Francisco and from Columbus, Ind., all the way to China.
The jury is out on whether “Perls of Knowledge” will result in more students for UNL — Perlman, when he's not fighting zombies, has vowed to get UNL's current enrollment of 24,207 to a nice round 30,000 in the next four years.
But what seems clear is this: For $40,000, a tiny fraction of the university's marketing budget, UNL has gotten the kind of publicity that most wannabe Carly Raes — and most universities — would kill a whole zombie army for.
“It worked because of (Perlman's) really bitey sarcasm,” says Dan Kohler, UNL's senior assistant director for digital marketing and the aforementioned 27-year-old. “The tone actually speaks well to a younger generation ... and it's packaged in a way that takes a traditional brand and throws it into this very nontraditional environment.”
I figured I would pull back the curtain on “Perls of Knowledge” and learn that the chancellor was just a glorified prop in this digital marketing strategy, a willing and able participant in an experiment hatched and run by people younger than I am.
But the real story is stranger: Perlman himself came up with the general idea. He enlisted allies, including Amber Hunter, UNL's admissions director, and Kohler.
“He had been paying more attention to pop culture, spending more time with the admissions office — we're one of the youngest offices on campus — and asking a lot of questions,” Hunter says. “A lot of this comes from him just trying to understand how we could share something all over the country.”
They brought in Archrival, a Lincoln marketing firm that cultivates an edgy reputation.
Archrival employees and UNL's five-person digital marketing staff together wrote the video's scripts. And then Perlman took those scripts with him on a long, long flight to China. When he came home, he had rewritten every last one.
On taping day, Perlman nailed most of the scripts with one or two takes.
“He's a pretty funny guy,” admits Clint! Runge, Archrival's creative marketing director and a man with a “!” purposefully embedded in his first name.
THE CHANCELLOR, as I said, is a funny guy. Dryly hilarious, even. Almost as funny as putting an exclamation point behind your first name. YOLO!
In this social-media age, disturbed threat-makers and hostage-takers post their own running Facebook updates on their ongoing police standoffs. Now it's happened three times within a month. Thursday, it was a 23-year-old man updating his Facebook friends on the progress of his heavily armed freak-out, and on Sept. 21, a guy about the same age was explaining how he "cant take it no more im done bro" as he held a businessman hostage in a Pittsburgh office building.
ON SEPT. 8 in Denver, one holed-up Facebook gunman even posted pictures of himself and his alleged partner in crime during the standoff.
Of course, then there was the Utah one in June and some others last year. To put this recent phenomenon in sociological terms . . . WTF, dude? I'm afraid to check how many folks have live tweeted their tactical staredowns with the men from SWAT. The latest standoff, the Washington meltdown with an firepower at hand, is reputed to have a shameless hussy at its root. Of course. And Levi Matthew Tucker (use of the middle name here is gratuitous -- if he had killed someone, it would be mandatory) apparently is a big fan of both guns and the tea party.
With that, we begin another episode of Tweets From the Tolerant, brought to you by the Internet . . . if you have nothing constructive to say, say it here!
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Suck my d*** chick filet- nazi chicken f***ing pricks
-- Roseanne Barr, flunked sex ed, biology (via Twitter)
anyone who eats S*** Fil-A deserves to get the cancer that is sure to come from eating antibiotic filled tortured chickens 4Christ
-- Roseanne Barr, humanitarian
off to grab a s*** fil-A sandwich on my way to worshipping Christ, supporting Aipac and war in Iran.
-- Roseanne Barr, ??????????????????
christian liars: i never wished cancer on you at all-jesus will punish u 4 ur deceit-I said processed foods cause cancer.
-- Roseanne Barr, angry theologian
I lost two brothers to cancer, Roseanne. What a truly heinous thing to say.
-- Jim Henson, OBVIOUSLY a hater
Retreading my tweet I realize that I used the wrong word-I shouldn't have used the word deserves
I shouldn't have used the word deserves in my tweet and I apologize
However, the valuation of Facebook may be moot. Because tech finance expert, Michael Wolff, presents a different doomsday scenario about Faceook in the MIT Technology Review - one where Facebook literally brings down the internet advertising model.
It all starts with the incredible growth necessary to keep Facebook stock price up, just as Aswath Damodoran assumes it must.
Woolf says that this will destabilize the ad market online, with negative results. He suggests . . .
“In its Herculean efforts to maintain its overall growth, Facebook will continue to lower its per-user revenues, which, given its vast inventory, will force the rest of the ad-driven Web to lower its costs. The low-level panic the owners of every mass-traffic website feel about the ever-downward movement of the cost of a thousand ad impressions (or CPM) is turning to dread, as some big sites observed as much as a 25 percent decrease in the last quarter, following Facebook’s own attempt to book more revenue.
You see where this is going. As Facebook gluts an already glutted market, the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else.”
After a year of resistance, it's about to become futile.
I'm going to get the new, "improved" Blogger interface whether I want it or not. In fact, I'm using it now.
And I hate it.
Perhaps "hate" is too weak a word. All right, I loathe it. Despise it.
It sucks.
OF COURSE, some things are easier -- allegedly -- with the new interface. Adding a video, for example. But not that much easier, and you get what you get. You can't change the size that way . . . see?
You can't customize the size of your photos, either. There's small, medium, large, extra large and original size. Before -- unless you were foolish enough to try to post to your blog from the Google Chrome web browser -- you could drag a corner of a picture and make the thing as large or small as you wanted.
If you'd like to try that with the new interface, dig into the HTML code, open up your calculator program and do the math. See the "TV set on acid" above? Did the math to get it that size.
I hate math -- even the easy stuff like that. Maybe I should invent a proportion wheel marked off in pixels.
Homogenization and standardization is the way of our postmodern, corporate world, though, isn't it? You know what? I resign. I quit. I refuse to be the idiot against whom everything must be "proofed."
If you want to be a cog -- or an idiot -- go ahead. Not me. I'm about this close to going off to live in a shack in the woods.
And this blog is now officially on life support . . . not that the world would come to an end if it did. Anyway, that's what I'm thinking. Your mileage may vary.
And not only because of the hypocrisy of it all will I not follow back @followmeback on the Twitters. I will not follow back @followmeback because I'm allergic to spam.
Biz prof smwhre was sayin smthin abt the prez bein a h8tr on cellphones & web intruding on clsrm.
Fnd articl here while surfin by. Chk it OUTTT!!!!!
In his commencement speech Sunday at Virginia's Hampton University, President Obama suggested that social media and the devices on which they are accessed distract students from learning. The president does not hate your precious freedom to isolate yourself in a cocoon of music, videos and text messages. He just realizes that if students are going to realize their potential, they need to focus more on the classroom.
As a part-time professor, I agree with him. I have to fight students' natural desire to keep an eye on Facebook during class. (I may be a really bad teacher, but Bloomberg Businessweek ranked my Babson College Business department second in the country for teaching strategy to undergraduates.) According to academic . . . 96% of college . . . students . . . Facebook . . . YouTube. . . . hour a. . . .
The stories of the flooding to hit Nashville and the damages incurred have made headlines around the nation. On all the network newscasts there have been pictures and stories of what has happened to our city. Some authorities are calling it, "The flood of 500 years," or The flood of 1000 years," based on the likelihood of something like this happening. One of our dedicated listeners referred to it as, "Nashville's Hurricane Katrina."
The outporing of concern from friends and fans of WSM and the Grand Ole Opry has been overwhelming to all of us connected with each of these businesses. There have been, and there continues to be, a lot of prayers being held up for our city, its resdients, businesses, and all that have been affected by this flood.
The Grand Ole Opry has been mentioned frequently on television and in print and the damages that have happened.
Let me share with you something that I've said for the fifteen years I've been with WSM, that is more relevant now than ever. The Grand Ole Opry is not a place--the Grand Ole Opry is a show, and as the old saying goes, "The show must go on." As many know, the Grand Ole Opry is world's longest continuously running live radio show. What many people don't know is, the Grand Ole Opry is our Saturday show--only. The program that is on Friday nights--started in 1949 as the Friday Night Frolics at WSM Studio C, then became the Friday Night Opry upon moving to the Ryman Auditorium in 1964, is formatted like our Saturday show. Our seasonal Tuesday Night show is the Tuesday Night Opry, and our seasonal Thursday night program is Opry Country Classics. Nothing has happened to any . . . shows and they . . . to continue. . . .
You know how Millennials just have to share . . . and share . . . and share . . . and share, and it seems like they have no sense of privacy or discretion?
You know what I'm sayin', Bubbie?
I hate that.
And now the king of the Millennials, Mark Zuckerberg, is bringing that ethos to its fullest fruition on Facebook. And we Boomers -- who, to be fair, started this damn mess with our "letting it all hang out" -- apparently have to like it.
Or else.
SAYSThe New York Times:
For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations.
On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.
Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether.
Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.
“Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md.
Mr. Ament said he was so fed up with Facebook that he deleted his account this week after three years of using the service. “Every week there seems to be a new privacy update or change, and I just can’t keep up with it.”
Facebook said it did not think the security hole, which was open a few hours, would have a lasting impact on the company’s reputation.
“For a service that has grown as dramatically as we have grown, that now assists with more than 400 million people sharing billions of pieces of content with their friends and the institutions they care about, we think our track record for security and safety is unrivaled,” said Elliot Schrage, the company’s vice president for public policy. “Are we perfect? Of course not.”
Facebook is increasingly finding itself at the center of a tense discussion over privacy and how personal data is used by the Web sites that collect it, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University.
“It’s clear that we keep discovering new boundaries of privacy that are possible to push and just as quickly breached,” Mr. Katz said.
Social networking experts and analysts wonder whether Facebook is pushing the envelope in a way that could damage its standing over time. The privacy mishap on Wednesday, first reported by the blog TechCrunch, did not help matters.
“While this breach appears to be relatively small, it’s inopportunely timed,” said Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It threatens to undermine what Facebook hopes to achieve with its network over the next few years, because users have to ask whether it is a platform worthy of their trust.”
Over the last few months, Facebook has introduced changes that encourage users to make their photos and other information accessible to anyone on the Internet. Last month its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled plans to begin sharing users’ information with some outside Web sites, and Facebook began prompting users to link information in their profile pages, like their hobbies and hometowns, in a way that makes that information public.
That last change prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, to file a complaint on Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission.
“Facebook continues to manipulate the privacy settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users for a limited purpose and make it widely available for commercial purposes,” Marc Rotenberg, the group’s executive director, said in a letter to the commission.
DAMN PUNK KIDS. They learn all too well, then they start an Internet company that eats the world.
Before it "jumps the shark." That's another thing we Boomers started. Heh.
