Proof, as Robert French says, that you CAN get a fun job in social media…

Emily, a graduate prodigy of Robert’s at Auburn University, is on a 100-day road trip with two other girls guys(!), blogging and vlogging their way around. Watch out for YouTube success — here comes another Amanda Congdon, perhaps?

Technorati : emily melton, pr, robert french, sec

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In today’s vidblog:

• Rubel appears on Rocketboom — mandatory watching for anyone interested on where this social media ‘thang’ is heading
• Kami Huyse (again?!) points us to For Immediate Release — no, not them, another lot, talking about ethics and rotten wood
• Allan Jenkins on the importance of employee communications over at themediapod.net
• Teenage boy stupidity - how not to be a stunt man in The Matrix
• After a thousand requests: How this vidblog is put together — with incredibly expensive wizardry and several bottles of Grange Hermitage. Actually, no. More like old washing up bottles and sticky-back plastic (Blue Peter viewers of a certain age will smile wryly).

Enjoy!

Technorati : allan jenkins, deakin university, employee communication, ethics, for immediate release, internal communication, kami huyse, pr, rocketboom, ross monaghan, steve rubel, stunts, teenage boys, teenagers, themediapod

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A friend recently asked why I concentrate so much effort on putting pictures on my blog posts.

It is because, if done right, a picture can add an additional layer of nuance (and here and here) to the post. Which reminded me of that old saying that a picture paints a thousand words.

Which is why I am now showing you two of the funniest trompe l’oeil paintings I have seen in ages — and thanks to Bruce Macky at the Adelaide Bookshelf for them.

And no, I’m not looking to be sent hundreds of funny images…

Technorati : adelaide, bruce macky, dymocks, images, nuance, trompe l’oeil, wikipedia

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[Scene in a hospital]

Dr Jenkins: “Well, Hopkins, looks like that leg’s just going to have to come off!”

Hopkins: “Whaa….??”

Dr Jenkins: “Nurse! Hand me that bonesaw!”

Hopkins: “Whaa….??”

Dr Jenkins (humming): “Your ankle bone connected to your leg bone… your leg bone connected to your knee bone…your knee bone…”*

Hopkins: “Whaa….??”

Clearly, Patient Hopkins, while getting a great product (the ability to get legless on Friday nights in half the time), is getting poor service. Otherwise, he’d stop saying “Whaa…?”

Yes, our topic this week is the importance of communication in the service industry. Hopkins draws on a case study & Jenkins pulls Management and Marketing of Services from his shelf to show he’s down with the issue.

Comments poured in after last week’s show. Donna PepsiCola gave her views on fee setting. Karin Hoegh, whose blog name has been ripped off by MSM, also commented.

Lee and Allan have a few more views on fee setting and proposals, with Lee recommending Robert Cialdini’s Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion.

* Dem Dry Bones is an old gospel song Allan used to hear.

All that and so much more in Chat #15.

We welcome your comments! Agree with us? Disagree? Drop your comments on this post, or send a Waxmail to ‘comments at commscafe dot com’.

Download [10mb] and take a 22 minute coffee break with Lee and Allan. And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to catch every sparkling discussion as we pass the coffee pot around. And if you are an iTunes user, you can find our podcast on the iTunes Music Store (for free, of course!).

(And I’m glad Allan’s back to writing the show notes - he cracks me up!)

Let’s tag this baby!

Technorati : Allan Jenkins, Cialdini, Cottam, Donna Papacosta, Donna PepsiCola, Karin Hoegh, Lee Hopkins, Mudie, communication, services

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I‘ve been using the current beta of Outlook 2007 (which irregularly won’t send emails and crashes …grrrr) and subscribed to the cafe’s and this blog’s feeds using its inbuilt rss feedcatcher. I set it, but forgot to regularly check it.

I’ve just noticed that it downloads any attachments — so I have been downloading and saving into Outlook all the podcasts and vidblogs I’ve created. Cool!

Which means I can stop using GreatNews (which doesn’t link to the vidblog file but does to the podcasts) and just use Outlook. But I really love the ‘newspaper’ reading style of GreatNews so can’t see myself ditching it anytime soon. Plus GreatNews allows me to blog directly into Zoundry, my blog editor of choice.

But this is one feature to watch if you don’t want to end up with multiple copies of chunky files on your system — I use Juice (formerly known as ‘iPodder‘) to retrieve podcasts and vidcasts; also using Outlook makes for rapidly-filled hard drives!

I wonder how much ‘bloat’ Outlook adds… that is, if I use Outlook to capture those vidblogs and podcast files, does it substantially blow out my .pst file, taking up more hard drive space than if I didn’t use Outlook but used iPodder?

Technorati : outlook 2007, rss

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As part of my ongoing partnership with Ross Monaghan at Deakin Uni for his PR students, I am recording a series of interviews with business communicators on aspects of ‘internal’ or ‘employee’ communications.

I recently recorded an interview with Allan Jenkins and, like my interview with Stuart Symons from Santos, I believe it to be a ‘must listen to’ interview for any student of communication.

Links to items mentioned in the interview with Allan:

• Cluetrain
• IABC

More details over at themediapod.net blog…

And what is the one tool that I would hate to do without when conducting this series of interviews? Skylook. Amazing tool — you should buy it and support the developers.

Next interview in the series? The Divine Donna PepsiCola…

Technorati : allan jenkins, cluetrain, deakin university, employee communication, iabc, ross monaghan, skylook, themediapod

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Stephen Dubner over on the Freakonomics blog has a cracker of a post about hoaxes, which I love so much I’ll repost it in full here.

… then you have to admit that this one is pretty good: sending a piece of bogus research material to a biographer whom you happen to hate. In this case, the biographer is A.N. Wilson, who was writing a book about the poet John Betjeman. Wilson made use of the bogus letter, only to discover too late that the letter was fake-and that if you took the first letter of each sentence and added them one to the next, they would spell out this lovely message: “A.N. Wilson is a shit.”

This reminds me of my first job in journalism, as an editorial assistant at New York magazine. Once or twice a week, it was my job to stay late to look over the closing page proofs to make sure there were no errors that the story editors, copy editors, or production editors had missed. The most important thing was to make sure that the “drop caps” (i.e., the jumbo capital letters that begin each new section of a magazine article) didn’t inadvertently spell out something offensive. If I recall correctly, there was once an article about breast cancer whose drop caps were T, I, T, and S.

Brilliant!!

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In today’s vidblog:

• Robert Scoble points off to a dog-friendly printing company, Printing for Less, that wins his ‘Favourite Company’ award
• Allan Jenkins’s blog is mentioned in the Your Code of Ethics blog as a model for other bloggers
• Podcasting News have a picture of Toshiba’s possible iPod-killer ‘Zune’
• Donna Tocci on the importance of getting the right press kit into the right hands
• The Divine Heidi M lends yet more weight to the ‘Apple Loves Purchasers, Hates Dealing With Them’ meme
• Dan York points out yet more clueless PR pitches — name names, Dan!!

It turns out that if you receive this post by email you will also have a link to the Flash video file, but if you use GreatNews as your RSS feed reader (as I and a great many others do), you won’t. “Go figgure” as our North American cousins might say…

Technorati : allan jenkins, apple laptop battery, dan york, donna tocci, ethics blog, heidi miller, podcasting news, press kits, printing for less, robert scoble, think lab, zune

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