I’ve been on an intentional hiatus the last week or so (yes, it was also Chinese New Year here in Singapore so it’s been busy with public holidays and visiting and all that), but also to take some down time to think.
Something that I keep thinking about (partially influenced by Seth Godin’s Linchpin) is wondering who matters.
Why do we chase digital business from the huge corporations who say they want digital but time and time again the end result is “go peddle your social media stuff somewhere else” and buy a TV ad.
Because the big organisations look better on a company portfolio than the mom and pop shop who really does want to embrace digital and probably will pay you less?
Why do we spend hours on decks and creative for an audience that isn’t receptive?
Aren’t they the equivalent of your whining customers that we always tell ourselves (or our clients) to sacrifice and go after those who love you, your business, your service instead?
Earlier tonight, about ten bloggers were invited to a Linksys event at the Hyatt to check out their newest product, the Media Hub. At first glance, the Media Hub sounds like a normal external hard drive, but it does have certain differences. For one, users can access items stored on the Media Hub remotely anywhere in the world and can be synced up with all your devices to keep files and media in one centralised space.
The Review
As an average home user, I was a little skeptical of the need to buy a relatively expensive external hard drive just to be able to access it remotely. I asked why I’d pay money, when Dropbox and Hordit are free, and got the relatively satisfying answer that not everyone knows how to sync their items up in the “cloud”, and it can be more intuitive to have everything on one single drive. Given the recent issues with helping my mum get all her data into one external hard disk, I can certainly see how this is an advantage.
Personally, between my family of four at home, we easily have 10 or more drives that each contain pictures and videos, and it would be ideal to be able to sync all our drives centrally, and then be able to access that at any time.
The Communications Challenge
The challenge for Linksys is to convince the average, non-tech savvy consumer, that this is not an overpriced external hard drive, and that it can make data storage and portability more intuitive than before. I could certainly see the benefit of such a system when I have a spokesperson explaining it to me and demonstrating the capabilities face to face, but for the average consumer passing it by on a shelf, $499 for 500GB can seem steep, especially since you can get 1.5TB for $300+ these days.
While the positioning seems to be geared to the normal consumer, I think there’s potential in the small business market too. I’m part of a media club in school dealing with TV and radio, and the capability to sync all our databases and then access them remotely, securely and wirelessly would be a huge plus. I suspect there are many other student clubs and small business that would similarly benefit.
Social Media Communications
There were a few things I really liked about the approach to this event.
Firstly, the bloggers had their own session, and mainstream media had their own session in another part of the day. This meant we could ask questions that were more important to our personal niches, instead of catering to the cookie cutter mass media questions.
Secondly, the press release had links to Facebook fan pages (Digital Cribs) as well as their forum page and even the Media Hub video on YouTube.
[edit: Wordpress is giving me issues while I'm trying to embed the video, so check it out here]
Finally, the press release had suggested tags for us bloggers at the bottom and a cd with the hi-res product pictures, which I found to be very useful to me. As a result I have the tags, the pictures and the video used one way or another in this blog entry.
I think it would be a fair assessment to say the Media Hub is a pretty good effort for a version 1.0 launch. There are features that I personally will be looking forward to like multi-user access (for club usage) and a HDMI cable for direct hookup to my TV.
Note: There is seemingly a subscription required for the remote access. The fee is not announced at the time of this blog post.
When Prof. Michael and I were discussing what to include into the Digital Media class this term, one thing I thought we should make compulsory is Twitter. Even though it had its downtime in 2008, I think the service definitely has potential, and so this week, it’s almost all about everyone’s favourite (or “favourite”) microblogging tool, Twitter.
If you’re lazy, Steve Spalding has the Essential Twitter Guide ready for you, which is a collection of the best Twitter-related posts and guides around the web.
Steven Hodson is doing his Twitter and Friendfeed spring cleaning, and he points to Twitter Karma as a way of discovering who’s a mutual follower, who’s just following you, or if you’re just following them. One sneaky trick that some people use is to follow you, wait a couple of days to see if you follow them, and then unfollow you so that they can artificially inflate their follower number. This helps safeguard against that.
Finally, the one non-Twitter related link for the week, is the question “What’s A Community Worth?” over at Social Voice. It’s a fairly long article, but the real world examples/case studies of how community can be beneficial to an organisation.
Earlier in the year, in Digital Media class, Andre’s group discussed how Twitter could be used as a real-time crisis tool in campuses and/or work places, exactly in situations like a fire where you can send out one tweet and it hits all students via their cell phones. I suppose now that’s only restricted to the US.
This is not meant to be yet another Twitter-bashing post, but instead I just want to highlight how clear it is to me that Twitter never thought about the implications of including all these bells and whistles early on, and since the Twitter Fail events earlier this year, it looks like things are only getting worse, not better.
At the crux of it, things would have been better if Twitter had never introduced SMS worldwide, but slowly rolled it out if and when they were sure it was financially feasible. Once people are used to a service and you take it away, they feel shortchanged.
Personally, I’m not sure what to feel about Twitter these days. On one hand I’m beginning to feel I’ve missed it after being away for a few months, and I’m beginning to re-discover a sense of community on it.
On the other, Twitter is still by no means stable and news like this that suggests a lack of business sensibility behind them (and recent purchase and shut down of I Want Sandy) just makes me feel unsure in investing time and attention on Twitter.
I want to know if you’re still using Twitter and in what way? If you’re out of the US, has the lack of SMS-capabilities annoyed you, or is it something you can live with?
I’ve been on an intentional hiatus the last week or so (yes, it was also Chinese New Year here in Singapore so it’s been busy with public holidays and visiting and all that), but also to take some down time to think.
