Connecting With Strangers

May 7, 2009

I’ve been haunted by the term, “stranger network,” which I came across in the transcript of a recent PRSA digital conference. Tom Smith, Founder and Director at Trendstream, a digital consulting firm based in London, was the author of the a presentation he gave called “How Did We Come to Trust Strangers?” The audio of his talk is located at http://bit.ly/x1i67 . His remarks led to an “a ha” that I’d like to share. In his new perspective on the world:

1) We trust total and complete strangers
2) Strangers drive our knowledge, ideas and decisions Read more

Domino’s Pizza — a Classic Failure in Crisis Communications

April 16, 2009

This morning’s newspapers were filled with stories about two Domino’s Pizza employees videotaping a prank in which they do pretty disgusting things to a pizza they were preparing for delivery.  They put the video up on YouTube and the rest is history.  The viral community swiftly carried the story to a world-wide audience eager to spread the dirty word about Domino’s.  Too late, the company realized that the traditional response — send out a press release and hope for the best wasn’t going to work.   This is the lesson they learned. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

• Blog Tags

  annual report Blog brand Brand advocates Branding Business Communication CEO Change Communication Communication channel communications Communications Strategy Crisis Communications culture of communication employee communication Employee Communications Employee Engagement Employee Recognition Employees as Brand Advocates Google IBM internal communication internal communications jeannette paladino Jeff Simpkins Key Messages Letter writing Mashable Media Interviews Motivation Nonverbal communication Passion Personal branding Planning Problems public relations Social Media Social Media Strategy Thank You Notes training Trust Twitter viral community Write Speak Sell Writing