The Train to Boston
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 03/21/2009 - 10:12It is 4:45 in the New Haven train station. The long wooden benches are empty except for two homeless men at the far end of the station and a young woman talking on her cell phone and waiting for a train in the middle of the station. A woman comes in and uses an ATM. Three people arrive to get train tickets. Other than that the cavernous space with its decorous ceiling and limestone walls feels more like a quiet library than a train station.
I look up at the departures board. The train to Boston should be arriving shortly on Track 1. If I had driven to Boston, I could have slept for another hour and a half before leaving home. The traffic is not likely to be bad on an early Saturday morning and I could probably find parking easily enough. However, I did not relish an early morning drive or trying to find my way around the streets of Boston.
Inside the train it is dark and quiet. There are the muffled sounds of passengers snoring, with any luck, I too, will join them in this nether land of partial sleep on a moving train.
I twist and turn as I try to get comfortable. Dream like images pass through my mind. At moments, I glimpse out the window to see a large moon lit field covered with frost. Later, red morning sun rises over Long Island sound. I see a sign for Mystic. I hear an announcement about Providence and then Route 128.
Now it is light and I have managed to get two hours of travelers sleep. The landscape continues to flash by. I see two geese sitting quietly on another frost covered field and then some sea gulls in a pond.
Soon, I will be at a conference in Boston. I have copies of the first presenters slides and I will view them, and see if I can gather any good thoughts before the conference.
#FollowFriday CT Edition
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/20/2009 - 17:15@sheilamc7 @jcnork @guiliag @khynes2000 @fehynes @ct94dem @lonseidman @tessa_da_twit @jrj08 @swilmarth
It has been a busy week. Friday is almost over and I’m just getting to my #FollowFriday post. This week, I figured I list a few people from Connecticut that I enjoy following. There are actually probably three or four different groups of people that I follow from Connecticut. These are people that I’ve met mostly through activism of one sort or another.
@sheilamc7 is the chair of our local board of education. It is great to see a board of ed chair on Twitter. @jcnork is a person that lives the next town over that I met through Twitter. We’ve had coffee together and some good online discussions. He turned me on to a good ice cream shop in a neighboring town.
I actually haven’t met @guiliag yet. I was introduced to her by @jcnork and she has had some great comments. I look forward to checking out a Mexican restaurant that she recommended recently.
@khynes2000 and @fehynes are my wife and youngest daughter. They are both fairly political. My middle daughter is off in college in Virginia, so I left her out of this list. She deserves a special blog post of her own.
I’ve written about @ct94dem before. That’s State Representative Gary Holder-Winfield. He’s doing great stuff with social media and state government and he is well worth the follow.
I think I first met @lonseidman back in 2004. We were both at the Democratic National Convention in Boston that year. He has always done great stuff with social media and is well worth the follow. I don’t remember when I first met @swilmarth, but we’ve often crossed paths and I really like what he does with social media and especially education and politics. @tessa_da_twit and @jrj08 don’t tweet as often. They keep there messages protected. However, if you are friends of them, you should follow them.
So, that’s it for this week’s #FollowFriday. Hopefully I’ll have another good batch next week.
Obama’s Victory Garden: Watermelons and Clotheslines at the Whitehouse
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/20/2009 - 10:28When the world gives you lemons, make lemonade and if the Mayor of Los Alamitos sends out an email entitled ‘No Easter Egg Hunt At The White House This Year’ with a pictures of a watermelon patch in front of the Whitehouse, maybe the best thing to do is to plant a garden. After all, Candide decided that the best thing to do despite Pangloss’ insistence that all turns out for the best, was to tend his own garden.
So, it was great news to hear that The First Family would be growing a garden at the Whitehouse. Yes, I hope they have watermelons. The report says they will have peppers, spinach and arugula. They will even have two beehives. Here, my mind wanders to W. B. Yeat’s poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
I doubt there will be much for solitude in the Whitehouse Victory Garden, but I do hope that it will be another place where peace finds a foothold.
A person that Kim went to college with shared the link to the Washington Post story via Facebook. Kim shared the link and I shared the link. A long discussion ensued on my page about it. Alexander Lee, Executive Director of Project Laundry List suggested maybe they will erect a clothesline as well. It is something those of us in the ‘Right to Dry’ community have long been advocating for.
Two other friends, not acquainted with Project Laundry list discussed whether Mr. Lee’s comments were snarky, eco-sensitive or borderline racist. Mr. Lee stepped in and explained his role with Project Laundry List and hopefully got a few more people to think about other simple things we can do in our life to make our world better, like using a clothesline.
Another friend mentioned Crockett’s Victory Garden. This was a gardening show on PBS back in the 70s that started in response to a tough economy and concerns about foreign oil back then. She mentioned that there is a person trying to bring back Crockett’s Victory Garden.
It was all like a discussion over the back fence. Word spread from one person to another as new ideas were shared. We need more of that back fence sense of community, even for those times that we can only get it via Facebook.
Yes, maybe I’ll sound a bit like the pundits interpreting Chauncey Gardiner in ‘Being There’, but all of this, I believe, illustrates why Obama’s Victory Garden is so important. It is a profound signal about what the President values, what he believes we as a nation should value, and what can help our country address the problems we face.
Instead of going shopping as a means of trying to deal with our problems, we need to role up our shirtsleeves and work together. We need to champion sustainable local agriculture, good food, and the simple things of life. We need to tackle our problems inch by inch and row by row.
With that, perhaps the best way to end this blog post is with the lyrics from a favorite song of mine,
Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
#DigiDay Recap, Part 1
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 10:51Last Thursday, executives interested in marketing and advertising in mobile and social media gathered at the W Hotel in New York City for a conference called DigiDay. The first half of the day focused on Mobile marketing and advertising and the second on marketing and advertising in Social Media.
The day started with a conference sponsored by ChaCha. ChaCha is a service where you can text any question and receive a response from one of 55,000 ChaCha guides. These guides, many of whom are work at home moms or college students, have an active community for finding ways to quickly answer any question that might come in. The answers are supposed to reflect information on the web, as opposed to their own personal opinions.
When you text a message to ChaCha, you receive a text message back which includes an advertisement. These advertisements can be targeted by location or topic. Currently, location targeting is done at the area code level. It has been used by over four million people and their surveys get over a twenty percent response rate. Currently, they are receiving over ten million questions a month.
It seems like a great service so I thought I would give it a try. While no registration is necessary, on their website, you can register your email address and phone number. I registered my email address and verified it successfully. However, I never received my verification code on my cellphone.
I thought this would provide an interesting question, and I sent a text message to ChaCha asking why I hadn’t gotten my verification code. The response was unhelpful, simply saying that I didn’t need to use the verification code to ask questions. I replied, acknowledging that it wasn’t required but that I wanted to anyway, and asking how to get it. The second response was as useless as the first.
On Saturday afternoon, while I explored the Hebron Maple Festival, I noticed a car with the State Representative license plates for Assembly District 55. I sent a text message to find out who the State Rep for the district was, and was informed that it is Rep. Pam Sawyer. The message included her phone number and an advertisement for H&R Block. So, currently ChaCha is batting .333 for useful answers. I’ll probably keep using it from time to time.
However, I was also disappointed to receive a text message at the same time informing me that I had used 3 of 5 questions during a 48 hour period and that I could only ask 2 more questions over the next 18 hours. Considering that one of the questions was an attempt to get an answer for the previous question that they failed to answer adequately, and even that answer was not adequate, I was disappointed. Have you used ChaCha? How well has it worked for you? If you haven’t, you can text to their short code, 242242.
After the breakfast, the first panel was “The Mobile Marketer Roundtable: The Elephant in the Room: The Economy:“ Personally, I’m a bit tired of all the gloom and doom discussions about the economy. Yes, the economy sucks. However, there are still lots of people doing lots of interesting things. Tell me something I don’t know.
Fortunately, June Bower, VP of Marketing for Cisco-WebEx did tell me something interesting I didn’t know. There is a WebX app for the iPhone. Over 70,000 copies have been downloaded already and WebX will be coming to other smartphones soon. Another interesting idea from this panel was the cellphone as sales assistant. Someone is going to come up with an easy way for a user of a mobile device to find something he is looking for in a store. That will be a cool app.
There were discussions about ‘click to consume’ and the closest people have come up with so far have been buying ringtones, wallpapers and games. None of these are all that compelling, but they have been lucrative.
The biggest hurdle that members of the panel saw to mobile devices playing a bigger role was getting marketers to understand the role of mobile as part of their 360 marketing.
A final thought from this panel was that to television people, a mobile device looks like a small TV. To computer people, it looks like a small computer. More and more, simple telephony is playing a smaller and smaller part of mobile market.
This was brought home in the next panel, The State of Mobile Media by the Numbers, when Julia Resnick, VP Mobile Media Products for The Nielsen Company spoke about their research. The iPhone is drastically changing the data usage of mobile users and Android and Blackberry Storm are also making data a much larger part of the mobile platform. The other interesting tidbit that she revealed was that the average age for children getting their first cellphone is now 9.7 years. They also revealed that the average teenage sends 2300 text messages a month. That works out to around 75 text messages every day. I guess I’m not that heavy a texter after all.
The following panel, Keynote Panel: The Mobile Platform Implosion, spent time looking at appropriate metrics for mobile usage. Nothing particularly memorable came out of that panel except for the observation that cookies on mobile devices are a problematic stop gap measure. More interesting was a rant about metrics about how each decade has had it’s own ad science, but then about 2005, all that ad science went out the window simply for measurement without a lot of consideration of what was being measured and why.
It was an interesting observation. If you know what you are measuring and why you are measuring it, then you can determine if you are reaching your goals. Yet many people do not seem to have a clear idea of what they are measuring or why they are measuring it.
After this panel, a spokesperson for a company called Mojiva got up and made a sales pitch. It wasn’t all that compelling. What was compelling was the discussion afterwards. During the Q&A, he was asked about Twitter. He dismissed Twitter as diarrhea of people spending too much time online and having no mobile implications. The large community of participants at the channel who were having a great discussion about the conference on Twitter were merciless. They spoke about it as an epic fail, a credibility failure, a debacle, a shame, and some suggested that it is sometimes it is just better to get off the stage.
