No-one would ever accuse me of being a member of the Apple chorus. I like dials, whistles and options - even if they don’t perform as promised - so I tend towards WIntel products.

But Apple knows how to drive design in support of its products. And how to keep its engineers from drowning users in details, tweaks and goddamn cascading menus.

Just take a look at the guidance it provides for developers working on the iPhone, like Principles and Guidelines for Creating Great iPhone Content:

As you design the flow of your content and its user interface, follow these guidelines to build in simplicity and ease of use:

• Make it obvious how to use your content.
• Avoid clutter, unused blank space, and busy backgrounds.
• Minimize required user input.
• Express essential information succinctly.
• Provide a fingertip-sized target area for all links and controls.
• Avoid unnecessary interactivity.

Other insights, which seem unintelligible to many other companies, come from a different document Design for Your Users:

“… If you’re designing an iPhone web application, it’s appropriate to go further in defining your audience and ask yourself what traits might set your users apart from all other iPhone users.

Are they business people, teenagers, or retirees? Will they use your application at the end of every day, every time they check their email, or whenever they have a few extra moments? The more accurately you define your audience, the more accurate are your decisions about the look, feel, and functionality of your user interface.

For example, if your application helps business people keep track of their billing time, your user interface should focus on making it easy to enter times and rates, without asking for a lot of details that aren’t central to the task. In addition, you might choose a subtle color palette that appears professional and is pleasant to look at several times a day …”

Sure, the Apple kingdom is a dictatorship, but Steve Jobs knows how to keep the engineers in line.
h/t to basement.org

While I’m on a publishing bent, I think I’ll resurrect something I first prepared in the fall of 2005: Incorporating Blogs into the Marketing Mix (.pdf)

The examples are a little stale, but the rationale underlying this 10 page booklet still makes sense.

“… Viewed single-mindedly, blogs are an entryway to an active conversation about your products, your pricing, your retail outlets, or your brand. Bloggers are dissecting your hiring policies, your new store placement, your holiday specials and the nutritional content of your new sandwich.

Bloggers’ll turn on you like a hungry ‘gator

Marketers, however, have to approach this group carefully. Following in the path lit by the Cluetrain Manifesto, bloggers and their readers value transparency, honesty, two-way conversation and above-board behaviour. Any attempt to illicitly manufacture buzz, if discovered, can provoke a maelstrom of negative chatter – which can eventually generate enough interest to be picked up by more mainstream outlets. They aren’t your usual consumer: they won’t be herded, and they won’t eat everything you feed them …”

Well, I’ve finished work on it. A handy little guide for exploring the world of social media and building support for social media in a large organization.

I think the advice in this 23 page guide to secretly implementing social media in organizations could be equally useful for any government employee looking to try out new technologies - I’m pretty certain on that point, since I’m a government employee in real life.

You can find the guide at this link, and please feel free to share it with your friends, colleagues and bosses.

Here’s an excerpt, from the introduction:

How do you do it? How do you bring a spirit of innovation and experimentation to the communications shop of a large organization?

I’ve worked in a large organization – the government – for the last ten years. You can find bright, creative and resourceful people around every corner, in every department.

During the course of their careers, many of these people have thought of a move that could improve their work or their environment.

From experience, we all know that small changes in process or presentation are easily won. After all, it’s just another line on an approval sheet, or a tweak on the website.

Large organizations can also be convinced to launch a large-scale overhaul of their systems – whether it’s a supply chain, assembly process or online order system.

But it’s a real pain to get them to rethink their relationship with humans outside the security fence. After all, our customer service reps seem to be doing a good job, right? That sales force really does have a handle on the needs of the community, doesn’t it?

In speaking to hundreds of workers and managers for large organizations (government and private sector), I’ve been asked the same questions, over and over:

• How do you convince your boss to even experiment with social media?
• Doesn’t it mean a lot of extra work?
• Isn’t this sort of stuff blocked by our organizational policies?

This Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organizations is meant to help you answer some of those questions.

Technorati Tags: guide to social media, instruction, dummies guide, introduction, organizations, government

I had a chance to speak to a passel of Canadian government communicators about social media yesterday, and I promised them I would post a number of useful links to help them work around implementing social media in their workplaces.

So here goes:

• How the Social Web Came to Be, Part 1 and Part 2 and a linear time line in pdf
• Social Media Marketing vs. Social Marketing, via the Church of the Customer blog
• Network of Public Sector Communicators - a New Zealand blog written by a govt type
• 26 free tools to monitor buzz and online conversation. This is a must read, folks!
• Blog search tools: Google, Technorati, Blogpulse, IceRocket, Bloglines,
• E-government and Web 2.0, from Cisco.
• Introduction to Twitter (via KDPaine and Jeremiah)
• Big Brands and Facebook, a Forrester presentation
• the Three Types of Government Blogger, by me
• Four Tenets of the Community Manager, by Jeremiah, and even more detail and advice from Jake McKee

I’ve obviously missed a lot of resources, and I encourage my readers to mention more in the comments, so I can pass them along to the more disadvantaged.

Taking up the challenge from UGA’s Karen Miller Russell that “PR bloggers would write about topic x,” I submit my guide to Office Politics 101

1. Read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. TWICE.

2. Never annoy the assistants in the office. They can make your life unbearable.

3. Identify the five essential office characters:

• • Knows Where the Bodies are Buried
  • Boss’ Right Hand
  • The Office Klinger (aka scrounger, thief, fixer)
  • He Who Knows Everything (aka corporate memory)
  • Everybody’s Social Butterfly

4. Acronyms are not your friend. Not when you don’t understand them, and not when you throw them around trying to look intelligent.

5. Read up on learning styles. The way a person collects, interprets and processes information affects how they behave in a conversation with you, how they interact with others in meetings, and how quickly and violently they will try to shoot down and bury your cool new idea.

6. Figure out the conversation nodes in the office. Where do people hang out and exchange information? The office kitchen? Starbucks down the street? Twenty years ago, your best bet of learning the latest corporate rumour was by hanging out with the senior executives as they had a smoke on the sidewalk.\

7. You have not explained your idea well enough. Whether you’re twenty or forty, you’re the new person in the office. You need to make reference to the past ideas, experiments, and failures of your new colleagues if you expect them to engage and understand what you’re trying to sell.

8. Always dress for the job you would like to have, not the job you have now. In some offices, that means kicks and jeans. Personally, I’ve just laid out a lot of money on suits.

9. Manage your online social networks and your offline social networks discretely. Facebook and other social networks have a place in the office, in my opinion. And I’m not upset if you take some time to organize your weekend while sitting at your desk. But I don’t need to know the details of your personal life - either by you speaking to loudly in the office, or by posting inappropriate pictures. (Hey. If the first thing you did at work was “friend” your new boss, then don’t complain when I notice the pictures.)
10. Share credit more than blame. Nothing says you’re a high performer more than being able to deliver high quality work - and convince others to help you do it. If you spend all your time complaining about how others are keeping you from doing well - then you’re the problem.

11. Speak to people. Email and IM can only get you so far.

Technorati Tags: office politics, office conflict, new job

Finally. A primer to blogging that combines authoritative voices, a number of international perspectives, practical advice for setting up and publicizing your blog, and a realistic overview of the legal and political challenges faced by bloggers in many parts of the world.

Reporters without borders’ Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents.

Any community activist reading this handbook, as well as the excellent Communications Toolkit�a guide to navigating communications for the nonprofit world from Cause Communications, and GreenMedia Toolshed’s online public relations/marketing tip sheets, will be well-prepared to launch a virtual and physical campaign.

When planning your communications activities, “don’t treat blogs like stepchildren” - that’s the best takeaway from a primer to blogging and wikis for catalogers in Direct magazine.

Tom Murphy has pointed to an interesting article on the PR challenges faced by US beef producers, now that a case of BSE has been discovered.

In June 2003, The Toronto Star’s entertainment critic drew an amusing, but insightful, comparison between the recent outbreaks of BSE, West Nile and SARS and Steven Spielberg’s thriller Jaws:

The first death is swift, savage and out of the blue. Public officials blame it on a fluke. They predict a speedy and inexpensive resolution. When more deaths occur, the officials shift to denial and damage control. They’re concerned about bad publicity, how it will hurt tourism and trade. The menace
suddenly halts and the officials rejoice: “Everything will soon be back to normal,” they say. Then the deaths start happening again …

Sound familiar? The above, in a nutshell, is how the SARS epidemic has progressed in its three-month Toronto rampage. Parallels can be drawn with the mad cow and West Nile diseases.

It also sounds a lot like a classic Hollywood thriller: Jaws. And we can learn something from it …

Don’t assume it’s an easily solved problem: The SARS, mad cow and West Nile crises all started with single cases, and in each instance, officials laboured to ease public fears of a mass outbreak. … Good intentions, perhaps, but as in the case of the Amity shark, pretending there’s a quick fix can prove fatal.

Don’t put salesmanship ahead of safety: “I was acting in the town’s best interests,” said Amity Mayor Vaughan, sounding an awful lot like the politicians who have fiddled while Toronto burned … Politicians need to do more to solve the long-term health care crisis in Ontario than simply pose for photo ops eating Chinese food and steak dinners.

Don’t be cheap: Sea salt Quint demands $10,000 to hook the killer shark, and Amity officials flinch and hedge. “You gotta make up your minds,” he tells them. “Do you wanna stay alive and ante up, or do you want to play it cheap and be on welfare the whole winter?” … Going cheap on health care has made coping with epidemics all the more difficult.

Don’t assume it’s over: As angry nurses told the Star, Toronto’s second major SARS outbreak can be blamed on senior health officials and politicians who refused to accept the possibility of resurgence by the disease. So eager were the suits to get back to business as usual, they refused to acknowledge that a second shark was silently waiting.

Get ready for the big one: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Chief Brody tells Quint when he first sees how large the great white shark really is. Good advice for the next big disease to come our way, say Ebola or anthrax. We might look back and think of SARS, mad cow and West Nile as small threats. A bigger health care boat may well be needed.

The UK held an extensive enquiry into the BSE outbreak in the ’90s. The Food Standards Agency, which was created as result, summarized the enquiry’s findings as:

� There was too much secrecy
� There was too much unjustified reassurance
� The Government needs to be more open with the public
� It is important to acknowledge and deal with uncertainty

Startling similarities, eh?