A pop-up advert from Classmates.com shows that we sit in with Arkansas (is that pronounced like ‘R-Kansas’?) and Illinois (is that pronounced like ‘Ill-in-noise’?) and Connecticut (pronounced ‘Connect-eye-cut’?). You liddle bewdy!

Personally, I’m wondering exactly where Jefferson High, Lincoln High and JFK High are located; any Adelaidians want to guess which suburbs?

Seriously…
If you are going to try database marketing on a mass scale, like classmates.com is doing, for goodness sake conduct even some preliminary research!

[...and the US wonders why the world seems to always laugh at its expense and hate it so much. Personally, I love the people, but hate its cultural imperialism and sheer geographic and historical stupidity. How can you expect us to take you [as a country, not directed at any individuals] seriously?)

Each month the BetterComms team produces a glossy, must-buy hard copy newsletter filled with the latest ideas and case studies on the business use of social media tools and strategy.

In addition, we produce an audio cd containing an interview with one of our industry’s Social Media gurus. You can pop the cd in your car or burn it to your computer and mp3 player.

In this month’s issue:

• hear Joe Jaffe give definitive reasons why Twitter should be in the toolkit of every communicator 
• discover our Top 4 social media tips for companies
• and don’t forget this: uncover the must-know info about why companies and you should microblog (’Twitter’) 
• find out why CSR is not just a TLA but something every company should be involved in but so few actually are 
• hold on to your hat! Discover the complete Web2.0 directory… and no, it’s not Google!
• read about a fabulous new free e-book on Social Media Authority by world-famous Web2.0 marketer Jack Humphrey
• plus: how to write health messages that actually achieve behaviour change
• and here’s the kicker: find out what the terms Web1.0, Web2.0 and Web3.0 might actually mean!

To subscribe and receive your own copy of this exciting new addition to our Social Media arsenal, just flip over to this page and register your details.

Once you subscribe you will receive in the post the newsletter and an audio cd interview each and every month (no holidays for us!).

Happy reading and listening!

IllumAlliance expresses our personal deepest sorrows for the tragic loss of life in Mianzhu and Beinchuan, PRC. Please all Board Members, Associates, Goodwill Ambassadors and Associates Humanitarian Project Members of IllumAlliance join together with your expressions of sympathy.

All letters, emails and expressions of sympathies will be forwarded to Wang Zhengyao, director of disaster relief Ministry Of Civil Affairs.
Thank you in advance for your anticipated responses.

Rob Cipriano

Our prayers are indeed with those whose lives have been lost, those whose lives have been turned upside down, and those who have felt helpless and devastated by the earthquake.

1. Kathy Oleszczuk on FB sent me this Pixar video. As she says,

Pixar so totally ROCK! Here is yet another great little movie along the lines of “For the Birds” and “Geri’s game” …
“Lifted”

2. Meg Tsiamis and I are having a fabulous discussion about statistics and ranking systems over in FB — just wanted to let her know publicly that I really appreciate her taking the time to discuss this issue.

3. Jared Madden contacted me; he’s a part-time lecturer in Visual Communications and also the CEO of Emersive. He’s gaining some traction on Tune-Out, a new way of looking at the music industry Vs consumer debate (hopefully with ‘real’ conversation going on, rather than just ranting and rhetoric). Let’s hope Tune-Out achieves its goals!

—————

Right — back to the packing!

More posting soon, promise! (The Meg/Stats discussion on FB has occupied a lot of my time, in a very positive way!)

We’ve all seen impressions of Michael Jackson’s dancing before, but what makes this performance any different to the rest?

Keep watching… WOW!

Hat tip to Tania Alexander for this clip. Oh, and if you want to watch a video that has more than its share of ‘truth’ in it, might I suggest the amusing ballad where a man offers to spend the night lovin’ his womman… {grin}. Thanks to Raymund de la Cruz for the facebook forward.

A little known secret amongst the BusComm community is that the REAL brains behind the rather wonderful Inside PR podcast, Terry Fallis, has just won $10k as a humour author.

We ALL knew he had to have a sense of humour to work with the ‘dark side’ (aka Dr. Jones) but now his genius is finally being recognised.

Says the Globe and Mail,

A debut novel, self-published by its author after he couldn’t interest an agent or a Canadian publisher, has won the $10,000 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

Toronto’s Terry Fallis, who is president of the well-known public-relations firm Thornley Fallis, received the medal and cheque yesterday for The Best Laid Plans at a luncheon in Orillia, Ont., the hometown of Sunshine Sketches creator Stephen Leacock and 100 kilometres north of Toronto.

In an interview, the 48-year-old rookie writer described winning Canada’s most prestigious annual prize for a humorous book as “a head-on collision of shock and joy.” Previously, “it was not even on my radar screen to be nominated,” he said, and when he was, “I was pretty close to having an aneurysm.”

The man is far too modest. Anyone who has ever listened to the sublime podcast that is Inside PR will know that it is the interaction of the TWO of them, Jones and Fallis, wherein the magic is created. Terry’s magic comes from his ability to step outside of what we immediately see, and to tap into what unconsciously resonates in us but we don’t know why.

And should anyone think I’m ‘dissing’ David Jones, far from it! The man has my sense of humour — black, dark, underground. He and I make ‘Addams Family Values’ [and here — one of my favourite movies) look like ‘Barbie Plats Her Hair 7‘…

Don’t you hate it when it starts to get personal?

Ok - so Meg Tsiamis a long time ago created the ‘Top 100 Australian Blogs Index’ (her naming, not mine).

As I have pointed out before, it is only ONE way of ranking websites, or blogs to be more specific, and therefore should perhaps be renamed ‘A Top 100…’

Let me state categorically here: I have no beef against Meg herself! This is not an attack against her.

By Meg’s own admission her ranking system is flawed, and so I again called into question whether her list, by way of unconsciously proclaiming itself to be definitive, should be renamed “A…”

To assist Meg in creating a list of any sort (as far as I know her’s was the first in Australia) I offered to not only let her spin her cunning webstats via a deeply flawed and, in 2008, I argue largely irrelevant, statistical engine called ‘Alexa’, but added a call to the other members of her list for them to let their subscriber and visitor statistics be known.

I have since, in response to her post, added my Technorati ranking and Technorati ‘Authority’ number (see my comments on her post).

I again point out that this is NOT a flag-waving exercise in willy-waving, as Snoskred (what a silly, childish name, doesn’t she have a real, human one, or is she too scared to publish it?*) suggests.

This is a call to find a robust, sensible way of ranking blogs, non-blog websites (remember those? Well, my Web1.0 ‘articles’ website still out-pulls my blog and generates more revenue), podcasts, vidcasts and the overall web presence of someone hailing from Australia.

The ethics problem

So here is where my ethics problem kicks in…

Meg took some material that was part of a conversation in Facebook and posted it on her blog.

Facebook is a ‘walled garden’ and whilst many of us have long expressed reservations about its restrictive terms and conditions (basically, you sign over all content you create to them and have to ask them if you can repurpose it outside of Facebook), as business communicators there is no doubting the fundamental shift that Facebook has created in the workplace/lifespace and therefore we need to recognise and be there in it.

Meg took material from inside Facebook and posted it outside of it. As I said on Meg’s blog, I truly don’t know what I would have done in that situation were I Meg, but I have a sneaking suspicion I wouldn’t have used it, but instead replied to the comment stream inside of Facebook itself.

I am very blessed to have a number of photographs of Danish doctors who have dined at BetterComms Towers on a number of occasions as part of a cultural acclimatisation programme; these photos graphically report a slide from complete sobriety to something less over a number of hours, courtesy of a selection of Adelaide Hills and New Zealand wines (Mrs BetterComms and I were trying to educate them in the finer distinctions of fine white wine, noblesse oblige).

I would no more consider posting these photos up on Facebook or Flickr without each person’s express permission than I would of rogering^ Lord Archer**

But Meg took something from one domain and posted it to another. As I said on Meg’s blog, my own jury is out on this one and I was prepared to let it go. But then it got personal.

Now it gets personal and childish

As Snoskred’s two comments (as I type this) relate:

Methinks someone is compensating for small body parts, Meg.

You’re more than welcome to start your own top 100, Lee.

Of course it is a given that any real top 100 would have your blog at number one. The rest of us are mere amateurs in comparison to you.

Meg, I speak for all of us on the top 100 list when I say that you should immediately fix the error of your ways and catapult Lee’s blog to the number one spot. Because he is clearly a blogging GOD. And your ego can be seen from the international space station - oh hang on, that might be the sun shining out of your…..

Oh sorry, did I type that out loud? Oops.

I have posted her fatuous comments here. Enough said.

I repeat: all I am trying to do is bring even more transparency into ranking systems that has me rated at 23 in one and 70-something (and sometimes nothing at all) in another. It’s bizarre, and perhaps speaks of the difficulties of measurement in a social media world.

I know that one of the many discussion points we enjoyed on a recent The Scoop podcast was this whole ‘KPI/ROI’ issue. Until the ‘Social Media-sphere’ itself grows up and offers a robust set of statistics, the corporate world will quite rightly look down upon it as a rabble.

We already piss off the mainstream media, why give Corporate Australia further reason to discount Social Media? And, purleeease, don’t give me the “we will show them, wait until we blog about this!” rhetoric… It might gain traction in the US with ‘mommy bloggers’ (a very powerful lobby), but we don’t have the numbers here, so spare yourself the angst.

*********************************

* From Snoskred’s ‘About me’ page (and you have to scroll a long way down to find it):

So What Is Her Real Name?

Snoskred isn’t going to tell you that online. If you build a relationship with her and get to meet her someday, that is when you’d find out her real name. But believe me, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet

Give me strength!!

^ rogering = ‘to roger’ someone is to bugger them, thus the alas but still funny false myth about ‘Roger the Cabin Boy’ on Captain Pugwash.

** I was fortunate to bump into Lord Archer and engage in a long and delightful conversation about Lady Thatcher and the Thatcher Years. For good or ill, and despite the rhetoric, I do believe they were overarchingly good until they ran out of ideas+*+  They were a ground-breaking era, of which Lord Archer was a fundamentally significant part, and I am humbly blessed to have a signed copy of his latest novel, and which Mrs BetterComms won’t let me read because she knows I would not be able to put it down until fully read (I read the last Harry Potter in one sitting) and thus render me ‘useless and hopeless’ for two days, and she says I’ve got far too much work to do!).

+*+ Thatcher and her government ran out of ideas and repeatedly shot themselves in the foot over the ‘family values’ ticket, with ministers being uncovered as having illegitimate relationships, rumpy-pumpying with sex industry workers, elderly men procreating and creating disabled children from attractive young mistresses (there is a theory that it is NOT the female that creates the disability, but the old age of the male), and so on… unlike Howard in Australia, who was ousted from government not because he had run out of ideas but because the people were tired of his ‘Mother Knows Best’ style of leadership, plus the ‘myths’ of economic good governance’ were found to be just that — myths — and we came to suffer badly from his lack of investment in infrastructure and a rather troublesome and ever-growing inflation problem.

As the Rudd government has recently shown (by pinching his ideas and reclaiming them as their own), the Howard government still had good ideas but the people distrusted Howard; quite rightly so after the fiasco over the ‘Children Overboard’ and other quite ruthless political manoeuvrings.

Note for none Australians: we Aussies know all of these political references; do your own googling/wikipedianing on them…

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It shouldn’t make that much of a difference, but fyi I was subjected to a DoS attack —— heaven knows why —— one day on both sites.

Further to an earlier post where I expressed my frustration over technology no longer doing what it was supposed to do, and taking Donna’s, Clarence’s and Max’s point that these days nothing does what it is supposed to do, I have decided to drink myself under the table revert back to trusty and beloved fountain pens, quality pencils and paper.

I already own a gorgeous black leather A4 organiser, very expensive and very chic, but A4 is just way too big to lug around with me all the time. Looks great, but is far too heavy and cumbersome.

So I lashed out and spent $30 on a Day Timer organiser, then another $33 on a 6-hole punch (one retailer was going to charge me $100+ for one!) and settled back to enjoy organising my life into a shape far better than it recently has been.

But Outlook prints out calendars, GTD tasks and projects, contact details, etc., with incredibly ugly black borders around everything, even when you switch off the ’shaded’ option.

Yuck!

For those of who who haven’t been reading this blog for a few years, a good friend of mine, Douglas Arbuthnot Johnston, runs the superbly wondrous DIYPlanner.com site, a site built into an almost-shrine to the paper-based planner.

Doug’s original project, a set of personal organiser sheets you can print off at home, has spawned a whole community who have contributed ideas and layouts. It’s an incredible resource and if you have a paper-based planner and are looking for nicer-looking and far more practical resources with which to fill it, I cannot recommend the site highly enough.

But that aside, I am still stuck with the challenge of fitting three Day Timer sized pages into my organiser.

Print off a calendar, or anything, in Outlook onto A4 paper formatted for ‘Day-Timer Senior Pocket’ and you have space left over at the ends and side, plus there’s no option of adding in page markers so you can guillotine with confidence (now there’s an idea for an album, “Guillotining with Confidence”. I must discuss that one with my patent lawyer…).

And, of course, there’s still the pig-ugly black borders to contend with.

But deep within the musty recesses of my brain I remember seeing somewhere in my stationery collection a set of pre-perforated pages for paper organisers.

I’d actually brought them over from England with me when I moved back here in 1999, that’s how old they were. The packet was still unopened! Lovely Sara N. Dipity!

Perfect! They have pre-punched holes in the right places, the paper is lovely quality… Avery L7901R and of course they are no longer available in Australia. I just scoured Avery’s site here in Oz and no such product exists. Sigh.

Now all I have to do is figure out how I can bypass Outlook’s black template lines but add in faint borders to allow me to guillotine the A4 sheets correctly, and print out my calendar, tasks and contacts with a modicum of taste.

Any clues, anyone?