Isn’t his photo amazing? You couldn’t recreate it if you tried.
This photo was obviously taken at a baseball game, so there was no doubt lots of cameras around, but it got me to thinking how much of our lives nowadays are recorded because of how readily available storage has become.
As storage space becomes more and more cheap, will there come a point in time where almost no point of our lives won’t be recorded. Today, using some simple technology and the storage capacity you probably own already, you could record every conversations you have for a week.
In twenty years from now will people be recording everything they hear, say and see, a la Justin.TV, simply because they don’t want to miss recording a golden moment? How will this impact people’s memories of moment? Will memories be more poignant and important because of that?
When I was 19, I spent six months living in the US as a snowboard instructor. This was before the days when digital cameras were affordable, so I had a simple Kodak film camera. It was brilliant, I could easily put it in my pocket and take photos of my pathetic attempts at freestyle snowboarding, the parties I went to and the beautiful sites I saw. In the six months I was there, I got my way through four 24 shot films. That is 96 photographs, some people, Simone McDermid I am looking at you, post that many from a night out with friends.
When I got back to Australia from my US trip and developed my photos I dutifully wrote on the back of them, threw out the badly shots ones and put the good ones into a photo album. I still look at that album. The memories are still so very real. The moments I remember. Perhaps that is because I didn’t spend many of those moments behind a camera lens, maybe because our mind only needs a few pointers to make us remember? I am not sure.
I recently spent three months travelling through Central Asia and China. I took a considerable number of photos, sometimes 200 a day, which I edited down and posted on Flickr. The time spent behind the lens on this trip compared with my trip to America would have been 100 fold or more even though it was only half as long. The recent trip is still vivid in my memory, but I wonder how it will compare down the track.
Will the sheer number of photographic memories of the trip help me better remember the trip to America with hardly any evidence? I am not sure. What do you think?
HT – Masami Kito for alerting me via Posterous to this image.
(I found this image on Chris Rutz’s Posterous)
The graph above is a stat that I use a lot to show the scale of the digital opportunity in Asia vs the markets organisations typically think of when it comes to digital.
This graph is all the more powerful however, when you consider that less than 20% of Asia currently has access to the internet. Growth of internet, most likely accessed via the mobile phone, will be phenomenal over the next five years in Asia.
It is getting a little bit old now, but this presentation that includes data from an MTV study of youth consumption of the internet in Asia is very worthwhile reading and a nice complement to the graph above if you’re interested in understanding more about internet habits in Asia.
Forrester has updated its social media ladder, part of its ongoing Technographics research series, to include the new group Conversationalists.
According to Forrester, commenting on North American only data:
They’re one-third of the online population. They’re 56% female. If you imagine that they’re just youngsters, you’re wrong: 70% are 30 or older. Their household incomes are about $2,100 above the average online consumer, but their level of engagement is sky-high.
Forrester released its latest APAC region report this month – focussed this time on India. The report does not include the conversationalist group, but I expect we will see this appearing in reports moving forward.
The Forrester Technographics report and particularly the social media ladder is an invaluable tool for providing an overview of the different ways people engage with content online and I use it a lot during client education, especially because it has such rich APAC region data.
If presenting this one thing to remember is that the groups are not mutually exclusive – i.e. a person can be a member of more than one group. I also find it handy to work my way up the ladder taking the audience on a journey of increasing engagement groups.
UPDATE
I came across the graph below after publishing this post. It is an interesting graph that shows movement between the different groups on the social media ladder over a period of three years. Again this is US only data:
There is also this handy tool, that will give you the split of groups by country and age group.
The Huffington Post has published a story on Australian Work Habits, which surprise surprise finds that we are actually all quite hard working.
It is a good read, but what I am most chuffed about is the fact that the Huffington Post is linking to a post on this here blog.
No doubt the link is automatically generated, but it is exciting for my egotistic nature no less.
However, the more important thing to learn from this example is the importance of managing your business or personal reputation online. It is vital that reputation managers today are taking notice of what is being posted and shared online about their brands and products – no matter how small or insignificant the site may seem. You never quite know when one of the world’s biggest blogs could link to one of the world’s smallest blogs and bring a lot of traffic to something previously unknown.
If you or your PR people are not currently monitoring your brands online I suggest you do so immediately. If you get push back from your manager or finance people send them to this post – it may just change their mind.
Adidas has produced a fantastic video to launch its new Star Wars line – due in stores in Jan.
The videos includes semi-subtle close ups of the shoes, Adidas ambassadors Beckham and Snoop and an awesome remix of the Imperial March. Check it out above.
Holiday Inn in the UK is offering is offering a human bed warming service.
According to an article on Wired:
The Holiday Inn, which operates over 4,000 hotels worldwide, will offer a “human bed-warming service” for the next week to help keep guests stay warm inside, whilst it gets colder outside. This literally involves employees laying in your bed for five minutes before you get in.
I think it is Frank that does the PR for Holiday Inn, but it is not listed on its website. Let me know who did this if you know.
In my mind this is a clever stunt that no doubt has generated a tonne of coverage for them.
As with everything like this, it seems so simple when it has been done, but it is far from simple coming up with something like this.
A clever idea no doubt, but would you let a hotel emplyee warm your bed for you? Maybe it depends on how good looking they are?
Teqnolog has prepared a whole heap of charts tracking the number of Tweets individuals and organisations are making across the globe. Within the charts it was interesting to see the ABC right up there in the top Twitter organisations globally.
Of course numbers of Tweets don’t mean much and don’t suggest conversation or engagement, but interesting in my mind none the less.
I doubt very much that the ABC is the world’s most productive news organisation – i.e. only four other news organisations create more stories than the ABC. As such this suggests they are pushing heavy into this territory more so than other organisations.
But on the other hand this stat tells us nothing about the value of the messages being tweeted or the way the ABC is using the medium to engage with its audience.
The ABC has a handy list of its Twitter accounts, but reviewing the majority of these the follwing counts are much lower than the follower counts and most push rather than converse. There are of course exceptions and ones that do provide conversation, but these appear to be in the minority.
Personally I have not really engaged with the ABC Tweets (but that may be my failure?) unlike I have with othe rmedia people like Renai LeMay (ZDNet Australia) and Jack Schofield (Guardian) who mix their tweets that drive to stories with conversation, opinion and true engagement.
What do you think? Have you engaged with the ABC online? Is the organisation using it effectively?
HT to Trevor Young who directed me to the Teqnoblog post.
Today I found out why zippers have a YKK on them. The YKK stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha (say that five times fast). In 1934 Tadao Yoshida founded Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha (translated Yoshida Industries Limited). This company is now the worlds foremost zipper manufacturer, making about 90% of all zippers in over 206 facilities in 52 countries. In fact, they not only make the zippers, they also make the machines that make the zippers; no word on if they make the machines that make the parts that make up the machines that make the zippers.
Their largest factory in Georgia makes over 7 million zippers per day.
In any event, Mr. Yoshida’s company zipped to number one by practicing the “Cycle of Goodness”, as he called it. Namely, “No one prospers unless he renders benefit to others.” Using this principle, he endeavored to create the best zippers out there that would hold up over long periods of time in the end product. This in turn would benefit both the manufacturers who used his zippers and the end customer and because of these things benefit his company with higher repeat and referral sales, thus completing the “Cycle of Goodness” *zen moment*
So next time you’re zipping up, take a moment to remember Mr. Yoshida; also, if you’re going commando, careful with Captain Winky on the zip up. I can’t stress that enough.
Sources:
I have always wondered about this and have many times considered YKK one of my favourite brands for its ubiquity and utter dominance of its market.
Thanks Masami for this! 
A nice little PR stunt here for no pants day – an initiative organised by a group called Improv Everywhere. The group claims its mission is to cause ’scenes of chaos and joy in public places’ according to The Daily Mail.
I never fail to be amazed at the media’s desire to run a story that includes visuals of people nude/semi nude or even hinting at nude. Not that I think the journalists are idiots – you only have to look at what stories are most clicked to see that us readers love anything to do with sex, nudity etc.
For example check out what are the top five read stories on smh.com.au at the time of posting:
1. MP dumped after teenage sex scandal
2. Sex murder trial: MP’s niece ‘horrified’ by what she’s done
3. Woman drives home with body lodged in windscreen: police
4. Sydney’s night of the knife: one charged
5. Doctor struck off for prescribing drugs without seeing man
40% of the most read stories and the top two include the word sex.
Nothing earth shattering here obviously, but when planning your next PR stunt don’t forget the power of sex and the appeal of the nude form. Us media consumers, journalists and bloggers (hey it prompted this post) all love a little bit of titillation.
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My lifestream
