The Worldwide Connection
Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on March 09th, 2010
In a random act of humour, Conan O’Brien decided to follow one of the 600,000 people that follow him on Twitter. The Chicago Tribune outlines the story very well.
Turns out, the person Conan chose to follow is Sarah Killen (@LovelyButton). She is in her late teens and is from Michigan. And about 15,000 of Conan’s followers began to follow Sarah. Sarah turned this opportunity into something very positive.
She tweeted about an upcoming breast cancer awareness walk, the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure, sending her new followers to a site where they could donate money to sponsor her upcoming walk. According…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on February 24th, 2010
I had a discussion with a client yesterday about the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. She is based in L.A. and the only coverage they get of the games is from NBC. NBC, for some reason, has chosen not to provide live coverage of the games. My client is in the same time zone as the games, she has a television in her office, she would have the competitions on if she could—but they aren’t live.
This is a conversation that we have had quite often recently in the AHA Creative Strategies office. AHA partner Paul Holman is a sports fan and…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on February 15th, 2010
The Harvard Business Review has a good article on how social media is impacting coverage of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, B.C. It’s worth a read.
Right now, Vancouver is in the world spotlight. We, at AHA, have an office in Vancouver and have been watching with interest on how the games are being covered by both traditional and social media.
How information is reported has changed drastically. While social media was in play during the Summer Games in Beijing, it’s now two years later and Vancouver is a much freer society than Beijing. Those who support the games—and those who don’t—now have…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on July 17th, 2009
I have been thinking about the new opportunities that will come with Google Wave. This certainly has created some great discussion here at AHA.
The description from Wikipedia is: Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. It is expected to be released later in 2009.
Google…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on May 20th, 2009
It seems the head of communications for the Vatican has embraced social media. In a news release issued yesterday by the Catholics Communications Network, Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, Director of the Holy See’s press office, encouraged communicators to meet the challenge of using the Internet to engage positively to further the Gospel message of the Church.
This followed Pope Benedict XVI’s call for the Church to speak to “the digital generation” – and from what we can tell, pretty much the only way to do that is through technology. Now, full disclosure – I am not Catholic and I am suspicious of…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on April 15th, 2009
There seems to be a new issue online every day. Over the weekend, there was the Amazon issue where it seemed the online bookseller had removed thousands of gay and lesbian themed books from their listings and search results. Social media guru B.L. Ochman has a very good post about this issue.
And then there is the Domino’s video that showed up on YouTube yesterday. The company quickly took it down. But you know that sneaky Internet…there is always another copy somewhere that gets put back up.
According to this piece in Advertising Age, Domino’s corporate headquarters was reacting cautiously to the kerfuffle about this disgusting…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on April 07th, 2009
TechCrunch has a very interesting article entitled “The Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers.” It’s well worth a read.
The article discusses how some large media organizations are accusing Google of “stealing” their copyrighted content. It also links to another TechCrunch post about the Associated Press declaring that it will now police the Web and “develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used.”
There is a huge challenge in trying to police the Internet and, while I am not a copyright expert, it seems to me that some of these large…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on March 02nd, 2009
I was watching the late news on Friday night and saw a story on the challenges that CTVglobemedia is facing. The Vancouver Sun has a good article on what the media giant is dealing with. Being a media junkie and a communicator, I have been watching the shift in the media for quite some time – but on Friday, it really hit me that the news business is in trouble and not just in Canada. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News closed its doors on Friday. According to many reports, including this one at Public Radio International, there are a lot of other print papers…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on February 13th, 2009
A Twestival took place yesterday in Vancouver. It is a strong example of the power of Twitter. More than 20,000 people from around the world came together to raise money for charity: water, a non-profit organization bringing clean drinking water to people in developing nations.
In one short month—with only volunteer effort—the global charity work is expected to raise $1 million for the 1.1 billion people in the world who cannot access clean drinking water. The event took place in more than 175 cities around the world.
This is a great example of using Twitter – the online world helped people to reach out…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on November 06th, 2008
An announcement just hit my inbox that Air Canada is the first Canadian carrier to offer inflight Internet access.
Check it out here. The news release was out in early Oct, but Air Canada just announced it in their newsletter.
I think this says something about our culture. We are truly a wireless, connected society now. Thanks to Air Canada, we can still bid on Ebay, blog, buy books from Amazon and send emails while flying the friendly skies.
I can remember back in the day when you could first place phone calls on an airplane – at an incredible cost per minute!…
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