The Daily Lark

Luntz is one of the best wordsmiths and thinkers on framing in America. Terrific piece in Businessweek on using language during the recession to communicate more effectively with employees and customers.
Focusing on “impact” also makes a listener pay attention. This one word causes people to assume they will see a measurable difference. People want results. [...]

Here’s The Economist on bloggers going wrong.
On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a [...]

How to change people’s attitudes… “This study shows that great persuasion sometimes occurs when people don’t expect it. This means that you should always be selling—you may persuade people when you least expect it. This is also a good argument for the potential power of tools such as Twitter and blogs.”
Art of note taking in [...]

While in a jet-lagged slumber I was catching up on Jeff Jarvis’ blog and stumbled onto Spot – a way of driving publicly supported news… This is a very cool idea…
This might be an abhorrent pollution of the idea but I wonder what would happen if they opened this up to PR professionals to [...]

Richard Edelman has some great thoughts on the four attributes of public engagement. Well worth a read if you are in the communications field.

First, it is democratic and decentralized. Like Dell’s IdeaStorm…
Second, it aims to inform the conversation. (Which is different than engineering stories).
Third, it calls for engagement with influencers of all stripes.
Fourth, it suggests [...]

Following Larry Ellison’s jab against Cloud Computing, Tim posts a good counter-punch…
So when Larry Ellison says that cloud computing and open source won’t produce many hugely profitable companies, he’s right, but only if you look at the pure software layer. This is a lot like saying that the PC wouldn’t produce many hugely profitable companies, [...]

For all you Kiwis, take a look at NZ Onscreen. Some great video including this one of Hone Tuwhare… Will be great when they get more content up.

This is very cool… mainly because the team has been working so hard on social media. Thanks to all the team for their hard work and passion for the conversation.

Dell, Inc., the 2008 SNCR Brand of the Year. The Brand of the Year is awarded to the organization that made the most significant advances in [...]

Gartner’s worst case for 2009 IT budgets isn’t so bad… The upshot:

Gartner had expected budgets to grow 3.3 percent in 2009.
Now the most likely case is IT budget growth of 2.3 percent to 0 percent;
The worst case is that IT budgets will be down 2.5 percent.

If you’re in the middle of the US Election you probably aren’t too aware that New Zealand is also about to stage it’s election. The National party (think Republican) is taking a real run at Labor (think Democrat).
Was interesting to read these comments from two of NZ’s tech leaders on National’s policies… real worry if [...]