The media and twitterverse has been abuzz with the news that Dick Costolo has replaced Evan Williams as Twitter’s new head honcho. Most of the coverage has focused on Costolo’s operations acumen and, specifically, if his leadership will cause those pesky API-problem or traffic-overload messages to go away. Everyone has missed one of Costolo’s greatest assets, communications. He is a …more
I’ve got the Twitter religion. I’ve experienced its power in the form of crowd sourcing, research and new connections. But Twitter is not a platform for storytelling. Mark Drapeau who pens the blog Cheeky Fresh makes this very point in Microstorytelling Overkill and the Conundrum of the Exciting Event (must be nice to not have …more
It’s standard practice for journalists to put a “face” on a crisis. It’s called humanizing the story. Which brings me back to the Toyota debacle which I addressed yesterday in the post “Open Letter to Toyota Customers Hits Pothole.” As you would expect, the reporters crafting follow-on stories to the Toyota crisis are indeed striving …more
I have to give credit to BusinessWeek’s Executive Editor John Byrne. He got the engagement religion and has never wavered in prostelyzing the message. While the BusinessWeek pages — both print and the digital variety — serve as the pulpit for most of Byrne’s communications beyond the BW corridors, he penned a op-ed for The Christian Science …more
There’s something about the shadow of business that causes people to actually strive for a rigid and vanilla tone in their communications. That’s why the following automated note from Twitter (forgot my password) caught my attention: Hey there. Can’t remember your password, huh? It happens to the best of us. Please open this …more
