My New Course: Technology, Communication, and Culture

A new class that I've prepped for the summer. It is the first new class I've proposed and with the help of my chair, Dr. Amber Kinser (who I cannot thank enough for making sure this new faculty member knows what he's doing) this has been a pretty darn smooth process.

Now the only question will be if it 'makes.' If it makes, that would be the first step into getting into the Communication Department rotation. Here's hoping!

Thoughts on Twitterville by Shel Israel

Twitterville by Shel Israel

Good little book here. While there is much to learn, this is not a How-To book.

So I’ve only started using Twitter with abandon over the two weeks or so. Sure, I opened an account a few years ago, but was too busy working on my dissertation and then getting settled in at Mizzou to spend any time playing with it. At that point I saw no need to use it. After all, I was busy condensing my life. I closed my Yahoo account. I ended my relationship with MySpace. I figured Facebook and LinkedIn would be enough for me. I was wrong.

There’s something about Twitter that has captured my imagination. I cannot pinpoint it, but I like the ‘real-timeyness’ of it, as compared to FaceBook and LinkedIn. While all are communites of a sort, there’s a difference. LinkedIn I use for my professional persona, looking for places that might need my skills talents and abilities. It is business first. FaceBook no longer seems to be the small community it once was. It is akin to a megalopolis or megaregion: there’s a hugeness to it now. Twitter is somewhere in-between the two.

Perhaps that is why “Twitterville” as a name fits so well. It takes a village to raise a child and there are village idiots running around out looking for other village idiots. Twitter fits between the seriousness of the one endeavor and silliness of the second.  

Twitterville covers the history of Twitter. Yes. Ho-hum. More than that, it is a compilation loaded with stories, exemplars and parables. If narratives and stories are one of the most important ways we make sense of our world, than Israel does a great job of ‘making sense’ of Twitter, removing some of the ambiguity and equivocality. Karl E. Weick is just as applicable online as off.

He delves wonderfully into Twitter culture. That’s not an easy thing when looking at a village as broad and loosely connected as Twitter is. He shows clients or customers contacting businesses with complaints and bravos and how those businesses reacted. (Most of the time: FAST!)

He gives due warning about trolls and spammers and scammers and other undesirable PITAs you may come across and what to do about them.

There are tips for both organizational and personal branding scattered throughout the book. So, if you are someone longing to make yourself into a brand, there’s a lot here to discover and become motivated. And it's a heck of a good read too. That alone makes it a pleasure and makes it stand out amongst boring business books.


You could become the next Miss Destructo!

Will the New Revamped MySpace Succeed?

"Don't call it a comeback!"


They are about to relaunch a reinvented MySpace. 
Good for them. Will they succeed? I doubt it.
This is where technology and organizational communication come hand in hand.  Their brand is dead. Amazingly dead. Sure MySpace still lives on and it still has millions of users, but it has been surpassed by facebook. 


I always wonder about the number of users they provide. Here's why: Take my friend Sam for example. She has an account at MySpace, but she never uses it. She never bothered to close it is all. Sam is more of a Derridian Spectre or Trace than an actual Space. I will suppose that MySpace counts her as an active member since she has an active account. How many others, however, are a MySpace Trace? Once again I digress into philosophy.


MySpace suffers from an amalgamation of casual knowledge by consumers and associations that are clearly damaging. In other words, it had  “Negative Brand Equity.” NBE cannot be empirically evaluated thoroughly, although some hypotheticals can be applied. NBE is hard to overcome.

Take a look:

Eastern Airlines (Flew right into the ground...a couple times.)

Howard Johnson’s (a slow, slow death)

Jack-in-the-Box (expanded rapidly...food problems...now regional only)

Kinney Shoes (dead)

Polaroid (Relaunched....but hardly exciting)

Kodachrome (exists in name only...and the linked Simon & Garfunkel Tune)

Realistic (the old Radio Shack Brand)

Atari (The original!)

Pets.com

E.F. Hutton ("When E.F. Hutton Talks...")

Ted Airlines (The dead Ted page)

Gateway Computer (Acer ate you for lunch)

In one way or another each of these brands died. Many attempted relaunches. NBE, however, doomed them to failure. Once a brand loses is equity, word of mouth can kill it off and leave it for dead among the other brand carcasses. There are a few exceptions to this rule.


I'll name one: Apple. No need to rehash this amazing comeback.


So MySpace? Nah. I don't see it happening. It is in the ER an the Doctors are performing emergency surgery. Gallant effort or not, MySpace is going to flatline....eventually. 


The End.