Intel’s Rock Star Campaign

Great new campaign from Intel. The campaign features prominent Intel employees, though in this video it’s not really Ajay Bhatt (co-inventor of the USB), but an actor playing him. Apparently walking into a room was a little more acting thatn this Intel Fellow could muster .

 

Protecting Your Privacy on Facebook

I just came across this post on Inside Facebook on how one can protect their privacy on Facebook. I’ve always been amazed at people that put their birthday on their Facebook page as that is one of the three keys that can be used to steal your identity (the other two being your social security number and mother’s maiden name).

Take a look when you have some time.

Twitter is Down for Maintenance

What will all the social media folks do? Pick up the phone? Send an e-mail? Or worse yet, get up and walk over to see their colleague to talk live? Will they speak in 140-character sentences?

It’s NOT Christmas Yet…

Something is bothering me this Christmas season. It’s that it’s not yet the Christmas season. It’s the Thanksgiving season!!!!!!

With all the diversity of my workplace and neighborhood, I’ve had to learn to call the entire stretch from late October to the New Years’ day the ‘holiday’ season. That’s ok, because I know what I celebrate and I wouldn’t think of saying happy birthday to someone because it’s my birthday. So, in the same way it feels a bit odd to say Merry Christmas to my Jewish friends, just as it would be odd for them to say Happy Hanukkah to me. So, for this post, MY holiday example will not be Festivas, the secular holiday where individuals air their grievances from the past year. My example will be Christmas.

What’s really bothering me is that our culture seems to be blatantly jumping to the Christmas season and completely ignoring Thanksgiving. It may be that the economy is down and all the retailers know that very few people sit around the turkey opening their Thanksgiving gifts (that will be next year’s consumerism ploy).

So, everyone is jumping to Christmas. I don’t like it. Just as I think it’s wrong to discuss your next vacation while you’re still on the current vacation, or discuss your next meal while eating your current meal, we shouldn’t be playing up Christmas when we haven’t yet celebrated the next holiday, Thanksgiving. I also think it’s a bit of a reflection of our culture. We’re less inclined to be thankful, grateful for what we have. We can’t wait to get more stuff. We don’t want to reflect on how our country was formed. We’d rather get stuff.

This weekend, I ran to the grocery store to pick up a few things. While walking through the green, yellow and orange peppers  in the produce section at HEB, I heard “Santa Claus is coming to town.” (Hope that song doesn’t stick in your mind now.) I have to tell you, while I liked the upbeat nature of the music and perhaps it tempted me into spending more than usual, its not right. Tonight, the kids and I watched an episode of Good Eats before reading time and some of the advertisements (which I normally mute) had snowflakes and sleigh bells ringing. Everyone knows that imagery has nothing to do with turkeys, stuffing or the Dallas Cowboys versus the Washington Redskins! I actually yelled at the television. I’ve become one of those dads.

And today at work, I went to Google’s homepage to search for something and “Google” has Christmas lights hanging from the G to the E. Is this really true?

My, what is this world coming to. We’re living in a new neighborhood this year and you can be sure I’ll be keeping a close eye on my neighbors and noting who puts up Christmas lights first.

What about you? Have you seen Christmas come earlier this year that in year’s past? Have you seen anyone advertising pre-Christmas specials? Anyone driving around with Christmas wreaths on their cars? Any Santa hats at the office yet?

I Love My Coffee

On Monday of this week I stopped drinking coffee. It was at the prompting of a Twitter contact, @davidberlind, and I said I would do it for five days, see how I felt, if I slept any better (couldn’t really get any better), if I had withdrawals symptoms and then would re-evaluate if I continued. (Pause, while I take a long drink of my rich cup of coffee with just a bit of half-and-half).

Ok, I’m back. Late last week, I commented on Twitter that I was enjoying my first cup of coffee for the day, it was a beautiful cool morning in Austin and I was looking forward to the day. (Another drink, be right back.) Well, David, someone I used to work with pretty regularly when I was in my company’s product communications team, said he no longer drank coffee, he sleeps much better, and now drinks nothing but green herbal, caffeine-free tea. (Sorry, one more drink.)

Well, after a few back and forth tweets with him, I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to see how my body would react to five days without the dark, flavorful, creamy stuff, hold on, I have to have another drink.

The reaction from my followers on Twitter was very funny. Most people said, no, don’t do it. You’ll have headaches, you won’t like it, and suggested I would be unbearable to be around. These claims were not my experience. Yes, I did have moments where I felt an incredible sereneness, not really tired but more of incredible calm to my demeanor. I never got headaches and actually my sleeping got worse but that may been tied to my back being sore for some reason. (Last drink, I promise.)

So, this morning, I awoke at 5:30am, no alarm, ready to go to the kitchen, make a pot of coffee, open up the Bible for a long-overdue quiet time, and begin my day. Upon reflection on the past five days, here are my top reasons why I love coffee.

Why I Will Not Break Up With Mr. Mrs. Coffee Again

1. He She looks so good in my cup, even better than on the coffee commercials on TV (Don’t they make coffee look like it will solve all your problems?)
2. He She is an integral part of the grown-up culture (coffee-break; hey, let’s grab a cup of coffee; my third place; I need my car to have those spills just like in my parent’s Buick Roadmaster, and the Lincoln Towncar before that.)
3. The contrast of him her against my white coffee cup is very artsy.
4. We have a kitchen full of accessories to accompany our coffee lifestyle (a coffee maker, a coffee grinder, an espresso machine, cream and sugar dispensers, coffee cups, travel cups, re-usable coffee filters, on and on and on.)
5. My grandfather, Erick, was the first person to teach me how to drink coffee when I was just little, with lots of cream and sugar and a day-old Swedish roll dunked in it. I would be turning my back on my culture if I ever stop drinking my friend again.

I have to go. My wife is now up with her cup of coffee and my cup is empty. What do you like about coffee?

Making Pizza Dough

Though I don’t give you the actual recipe, my wife taped a portion of me making my sister’s pizza dough for some friends recently. If you’d like the recipe, drop me a note.

Click here to watch the HD video using the Kodak Zi6 tiny little video camera. Don’t mind the acting.

Portable Hard Drives

Saw this video (courtesy of Dave Farmer on Facebook) from Popular Mechanics on the ruggedness of portable hard drives. No implied endorsement here, simply showing you the video. I may have to get one of these.

I Am a Digital Nomad, Really?

Today, we launched Digitalnomads.com, in conjunction with the launch of new Latitude commercial laptops and Dell Precision mobile workstations. As part of the launch, I crafted a post on what the whole concept of ‘digital nomads’ meant.

As I wrote it, and as I viewed videos of people who had millions of frequent flyer miles, I thought about what it was that made me a digital nomad. What I decided was that perhaps my story of moving from a desk-based knowledge worker to one that was nomadic, moving from space to space with my laptop the center of my workspace, would resonate with an even larger percent of our readers than the guy who suggests you keep a blanket over your head while flying internationally. I’m not saying he’s not right, but would what he said really resonate with my peers? So, hopefully in the coming weeks and months, I’ll begin to write about the benefits of going completely mobile. What are the challenges? What are the benefits? How do I collaborate with my colleagues.

Stay tuned.

China’ First Blogger

Many of you who know my wife and me, know of our love for China – our precious daughter, Christina, is Chinese. It is because of our love of the country, its respect for it’s elderly, its strong family bonds, cultural flavor and wonderful food that I pause every time I come across an article or blog post related to the country.

@Shelisrael on Twitter this evening tweeted a link to an article that is based on an interview of an individual who is considered China’s first blogger and first appeared in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. The article is entitled “China’s first blogger on the Chinese blogosphere.”

Isaac Mao, who recently spoke at the Guardian’s Future of Journalism Conference, discusses “his six years of blogging in the P.R.C., touching on the topics of personal publishing in China, censorship, his experience getting ‘harmonized,’ the interaction between social media and mainstream media, Google’s missteps in China, online fame, privacy issues and the overall impact blogging is having on Chinese people and Chinese society at large.”

It’s a fascinating read – give it a read when you have a moment.

Cool Site of the Connected Age

My day-job gives me the opportunity to play with social media stuff, learn of new tools and blog about what I’ve learned. Our Chief Marketing Officer recently gave me the challenge of learning Jott and blogging on it as an example of the types of services that are available and are built on servers and storage that my company provides. My previous post here was me playing around with the service. Here’s the post as it appeared in it’s entirety on our internal Marketing blog.

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If you watched the video-based CliffsNotes version of Mark’s presentation (this linked to an internal presentation not available to you) on The Connected Era last week, he spoke on five aspects of how our lives and our industry are changing. One of the points he made was that increasingly we have access to everything online in real time. His example of a service that enables that was jott.com.

I had seen an article or two on the service but to be honest was a bit leery of signing up for yet another service – even a free one like jott. I was also a bit cautious of talking internally about using a Dell-issued cell phone for this sort of thing but quickly began to realize just how helpful this would be on my personal, family phone. I reached out to my internal network but wasn’t able to find a true jott guru, so I began using the service myself.

Here’s my story — give me a little grace as I’ve only been using it for a short time.

Someone sent me a link to a post by the folks at Duct Tape Marketing that said the following:  “There was a great movie years ago called Night Shift (1982). In it, Michael Keaton’s character carried around a mini tape recorder to capture his brilliant business ideas. One of my favorites was “Feed Mayonnaise to Tuna Fish” – something about making better tuna sandwiches – but I digress!”

The problem with this is that the device was tape-based, and would require him to listen to it and then transcribe it back to himself later.

Well, essentially, jott is like Michael Keaton’s tape recorder on steroids. You can use it to send yourself an e-mail message or reminder, add To-Do items to your action list, send a status update to your Twitter account, update a blog post (WordPress, Blogger etc.) or send a message to a group of individuals. If you’ve got a team of people you frequently work with, you can use it to send a message to them by simply dialing just one phone number.

If you go to lifehacker, a site that “provides tech tricks, tips and downloads for getting things done,” they’ve got a great overview of exactly what you can do with jott.

I came across one blog where a guy named Eddie Mikell used jott to blog his way across the United States with his wife. Very cool and the voice recognition capabilities are incredible.

To sign up for the free service, go to www.jott.com, fill out a couple of fields, enter your mobile phone number, call in to register your number and you’re ready to jott.

The folks at Jott.com have a blog where they give real-world examples of their service and you can also follow them on their Twitter account. You can also check out videos and other information on their community page.

Let us know if you’re a jott power user and how you’ve used the service at Dell or in your personal life. If you’ve found other Connected Age services that you think would be helpful to your marketing colleagues, add a comment below.

Insidedge Mindshare Conference

I was invited to participate in a conference focused on the art of internal communications with some old colleagues from Insidedge, experts in internal communications and the consultants who helped make my company’s cultural campaign real. It was an excellent opportunity to get away from the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ and share ideas and best practices with others. My former manager Bernie Charland (blog: Public Relations Rogue) and I were able to attend last year’s conference in New York and this year’s took place just three hours away in Dallas.

I learned quite a bit from the other attendees and realized that for all the frustrations I have, my current employer really has a lot of good things going on. We’re actively listening to employees about what they like and don’t like, just as my cohorts on the external side are actively listening to what our customers have to say. It’s refreshing to see how closely aligned we are on how we’re behaving on the external and internal fronts as in many companies, external leads and internal simply follows. In my case, internal is clearly leading the way.

Keith Burton and the entire Insidedge team has launched a blog called Intake, that will facilitate conversations specific to internal communications. Good luck, Keith and thank you for your letting me be part of Mindshare 2008 — it was excellent.

Twitter Overview

If you like the “status updates” feature of Facebook and are addicted to seeing what your friends are doing at each minute of the day, you’ll love Twitter. But, I’d like to suggest that Twitter is more than just a toy to track friends but can be a powerful tool for networking, for keeping in touch with friends all over the world and for certain aspects of one’s job. Tapping the simplicity again of the folks at The Commoncraft Show, I’ve pasted below a short vlog on how Twitter works. Think of it as an RSS feed of what your friends and colleagues, even some people you may not know personally, are doing throughout the day. Once you’ve signed up for Twitter, you can use a cool little desktop applet called Twhirl that allows you to have a window of tweets from all of your friends in front of you. If you want to follow me, my Twitter profile is bruceericatdell.

Have a look.

What Is a Blog, You Ask?

I’ve been fortunate that most of my family members understand exactly what I do in my job. In my current role, I look after all things digital to reach employees of the company I work for, which means I need to understand social tools like Facebook and Twitter. Over the past 18 months, we’ve rolled out nine different blogs to engage with and listen to employees so I thought I’d post a very simple YouTube video a colleague of mine on the external side showed me recently. It offers a simple explanation of how blogs have taken off and represent the democratization of content authoring. Take a look. (This video is courtesy of Lee and Sachi LeFever at www.commoncraft.com/show)