Last week we debuted an infographic on the SOPA blackout, showing how the internet has become a powerful tool for activism. But the spread of social media also has its risks. Those same sites that we use to connect to family, friends and our community can also compromise sensitive information. According to Carnegie Mellon researchers, information listed on social media may be enough to guess a social security number, the key to identity theft. And with mobile banking apps, more and more people are logging sensitive information from their smart phones. Add confusing Terms of Service agreements into the mix (they take an average of 10 minutes each to read!), and it’s easy to see why online privacy can feel mystifying.

The following infographic helps explain some of the biggest issues in web safety and gives tips on how to keep yourself protected, from passwords to privacy policies. With a few steps, you can be confident that you control what you share online.

see graph  http://frugaldad.com/norton/

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Based in Portland, Oregon, Wrenn produces eye-catching undergarments printed with unusual objects (read: rust). Named Psyche, after the Greek word for butterfly, the 2012 collection channels the “delicate and metamorphic elegance of the butterfly” with ethereal, rust-printed silk lingerie. Take a look:

© Blueglair

© Blueglair

As I reported back in 2010, when I first discovered this unusual lingerie, Wrenn hand dyes fabrics, including silk chiffon, stretch chiffon and organic bamboo, with rust and copper objects to create patterns and colors, from apricot and lilac to copper and cream. Wrenn also uses Shibori, a Japanese dyeing technique, to add dimension to fabrics.

© Blueglair

© Blueglair

Stand-out pieces from the collection include silk chiffon robes with appealing rust-printed fabrics; the Ana Negligee with vintage lace; and the Nymph Gown, which makes an easy transition from daywear to bedroom wear.

© Blueglair

© Blueglair

When it comes to taking the trusty lingerie home, it isn’t so easy to find. If you’re in Los Angeles, California, it can be picked up at Coco de Mer. Those based in the UK, can visit Glamorous Amorous. The rest of us contact R.A.W. Textiles directly, here.

Read more: http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-fashion/butterflies-inspire-rio-wrenns-rust-printed-lingerie-collection.html

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Ethical Corporation and Useful Social Media have jointly announced the 17 leading brands who will join a two day New York summit next March. The debate will focus on future corporate efforts to preserve reputation and lead crisis response.

The importance of reputation management has become increasingly evident. Taco Bell, Blackberry and Mattel are amongst many others who have experienced damage to their reputation this year.Rapid changes in technology and social media have pushed companies to revaluate the way they engage with key stakeholders.Social media has created vulnerability to brand reputation and as Burson-Marsteller found in a US survey, 95% of chief executives believed corporate reputation plays an important role in the achievement of business goals. Yet only 19% had a formal system in place to assess their corporate reputation. The importance of corporate reputation management is beyond doubt, though few companies appear equipped to deal with it.

Based on this discrepancy, Ethical Corporation and Useful Social Media have brought together key leaders in the space to discuss best practice and future strategy with their corporate peers..

Founder and Chairman of Ethical Corporation, Toby Webb stated;

“Reputation growth, preservation and crisis management are a vitally important, yet constantly moving target for business today. I’m delighted we are hosting this conference with our sister company UsefulSocialMedia. At the conference we’ll be debating, at a very senior level, exactly how companies can protect their good names, and improve their relationships with key stakeholders”.

Senior Vice-Presidents of Communications Strategy from companies like Southwest Airlines,Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Caesars Entertainment, Alcoa, AIG, Virgin Atlantic, P&G are all scheduled to speak.

Over the two days, discussions will centre on topics likehow to effectively engage with stakeholders during a crisis, adapting to reputation vulnerability, building corporate relations with customers, employees, NGO’s etc., overcoming reputational risks and preserving reputation locally and globally.

For more information about the conference next March 5-6 New York visit events.ethicalcorp.com/reputation

Join the conversation on Linked in: http://linkd.in/reputationandcrisis

For more information contact: Hayley Dunn Ethical Corporation & Useful Social Media +44-207-375-7236 hayley.dunn@usefulsocialmedia.com

SOURCE Ethical Corporation

Copyright (C) 2012 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Read More: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/southwest-airlines-verizon-ge-dr-pepper-snapple-group-caesars-entertainment-aig-and-virgin-atlantic-to-debate-global-crisis-and-reputation-management-in-new-york-2012-01-09

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We often think of brands as something corporations, products and cattle have. The word “brand” makes us think of Nike, BMW, Merrill Lynch or even the Intel “chime”. A brand is the reputation and legacy of the company. The brand sets an expectation of an experience of doing business with them. When we brand, we create a promise, in the mind of our consumer or audience, to which they can hold us accountable.

Branding is about setting an emotional connection with a target audience. If I buy BMW, I believe I will feel powerful, successful and confident. If I do business with Merrill Lynch, I believe my investments will be safe and I will be cared for as a client.

That promise, or brand, directly affects the experience and the expectation I have of working with a company… and with an individual. Yes! People have brands, too. We call these “personal brands” and they are a big factor in deciding to work with a person at a company.  Our personal brand is the reputation we have earned, over time, through our behavior and interactions with people who perceive our value. How someone perceives you directly impacts whether they want to work with you, refer business to you, or trust you with their investments, for instance.

How can a personal brand and a corporate brand work together?
Oftentimes, professionals don’t work for companies where their name is on the door. They are employees within a larger firm, which has been crafted and branded by someone else.

In choosing to work at that firm, the professional likely considered several aspects – compensation program, resources, career growth and reputation of the company in a specific market. For many professionals, being aligned personally with the values of the firm is critical. Others don’t pay much attention to the mission statement and vision, just the track record. Either way, by working for that company, they are aligning their personal values and credibility with the credibility and values of the company, even without knowing it.

What happens when someone’s personal values fall out of alignment with the company’s reputation?
We see this happen when either the employee’s values conflict in principal with the company, or when the company values fall short of delivering on promises made to the market place. In either case, a fracture has occurred.

For the company who recognizes that a representative is not living up to the expectations it seeks to build with clients, this person’s rogue behavior can severely impact the company’s reputation and integrity in the marketplace. One person in conflict can have grave impact to the vision and mission of a company if, for instance, they take their displeasure into the social media space. This not only offers risk and impact to the brand, but liability to the business if confidential information is shared. Beyond the legal risk, companies feel the threat to their value in with clients if an employee’s values conflict with their own – it is often obvious to others that the employee is not aligned, and cannot authentically deliver the service, quality and integrity the company stands for if they do not believe in the brand.

Likewise, professionals are directly impacted when the reputation, integrity and credibility of the company brand shatters. As we have seen recently particularly in financial services, as the big firms, banks, institutions and agencies come under scrutiny for questionable practices, it is only natural that the professionals waving the company flag feel the pressure to their individual reputation.

What can an individual do if the company reputation gets hit?
In today’s skeptical business climate, clients are looking for greater meaning, transparency and sincerity from the companies they choose to work with. Taking a proactive approach and ensuring your frontline teams carry a consistent response and message is important work being done by marketing teams faced with these corporate challenges.

On the individual side, it is critical that the professional stays consistent and true to his or her personal brand, despite the company image. The values that led them to want to join the company and the work they have done while employed should remain the focus. It is not the individual’s place to try to repair the integrity of the company, except through his or her ethical individual actions and the protocol issued by senior management.

That said, it is hard not to feel betrayed and confused when the brand you believed in feels disloyal. Clients and investors will often seek “the truth” and ask for personal insight, rather than what the press release said. This is a challenge! At the end of the day, it is the integrity and credibility of the individual contributor who can make the mission and statement of the company come to life. When I do business with Bank of America, for instance, I am not doing business with an institution, I am working with Joe, my sales representative.

In closing
I remember when I was asked to come and address the business development team at a large, global bank. They asked me to speak on the power of individual branding alongside the corporate brand.

What I noticed immediately was how they all addressed solutions and offers with “we.” “We can provide a custom business approach to meet your needs…” “We have been in business for 200 years….”  “We have a solid credit rating…” There was no individual, personal connection.

In our work together, I emphasized that the power of the corporate brand was obviously a big credibility hook – without having the international reputation the company had, their clients would surely not be as forthcoming.

But beyond that, what made their clients buy, were the individual relationships they had with the person sitting across the desk. That was the deeper relationship, that’s where I experienced the trust and credibility. That’s where the “promise” came to life.

Read more: http://unleashingyourbrand.com/?p=556

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What does 2012 have in store for giving, especially the impact-driven approach to it we call “philanthrocapitalism”? Having peered into our philanthrocrystal ball, we see giving becoming more dangerous, more controversial, and more political, among other things, as philanthrocapitalists find themselves at the centre of some of the year’s biggest news stories.

Here are our 10 predictions for the coming year:

1. Greater scrutiny of the 1 percent. The role of the rich in setting the political agenda is going to be one of the big stories in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in November. Philanthrocapitalists hungry for impact are increasingly looking to get leverage by influencing government policy, and this election will set the policy agenda for the next four years at a time when America (and, along with it, the world) faces some tough choices. We have been here before, of course, with George Soros’ support for the “Move On” campaign in 2004, which was ultimately unsuccessful in unseating the incumbent president, George W. Bush. The influence of the Koch brothers on the right is already on the media’s radar, but there are plenty more to be discovered. Expect donors of the left and the right to pitch in to this contest using political donations and philanthropic giving to support policy thinking on issues like budget priorities and health care and school reform. Is this philanthropy or plutocracy? We will all be talking about that this year.

2. Nation building is back. Politics will also be a big theme of philanthropy around the world, which may bring with it genuine danger for those involved. From the nations involved in the Arab Spring to Vladimir Putin’s (for now) Russia, and maybe even North Korea, philanthropists are going to be getting involved far more than in recent years in supporting civic movements and even political movements in countries where there is a real opportunity to change the political balance, hopefully in a more democratic and just direction. As the year-end crackdown on various American-backed nonprofits by Egypt’s military government should remind everyone involved, those threatened by this philanthropy are unilkely to take foreign interference in their countries lying down.

3. Crunch time for Muslim philanthropy. On a related point, 2012 is going to be a year of decision for Muslim philanthropists. There is a huge opportunity for them to strengthen civil society in the Arab Spring countries and work with the emerging entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs there. Pakistan and Afghanistan are both in need of high-impact philanthropy. Yet with the honorable exception of the Aga Khan Foundation, too much of the giving from Muslim donors, including by some of the multi-billion-dollar foundations set up by the rulers of Gulf countries and their leading businesses, is still focused on traditional welfare and charity rather than social change. Yet change seems likely to happen with or without them, and if they do not help it along, it may well be at the expense of the Muslim wealthy. Perhaps this is an area where Turkey’s emerging philanthrocapitalists will show a lead to the rest of the Muslim world.

4. Occupy philanthropy. One of the big questions of the year will be whether the global Occupy movement will evolve from a necessary voice of protest into an effective force for change. There is an opportunity, and we believe an obligation, for philanthrocapitalists to help reform capitalism, so that it genuinely works in the interest of the population as a whole, not just a small subset of it. Andrew Carnegie understood the vulnerability of capitalism to the perception of it being inherently unfair; it is time today’s successful capitalists did so, too. The gradually increasing pack of CEOs who get it, such as Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Paul Polman of Unilever, and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin, have a huge opportunity to set the agenda for their peers, as long as they back up their words with serious action.

5. Steve Jobs, philanthropist. After spending his life being fairly dismissive of philanthropy, the late co-founder of Apple is likely to be one of the most prominent additions to the mega-giving scene in 2012. His widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, has long been involved in giving, having founded an organisation to get students from poor backgrounds into college, participating in the Clinton Global Initiative and Global Philanthropy Forum, and visiting Africa on a trip for philanthropists led by Ben Affleck. Now that she controls her late husband’s fortune, expect her to start putting it to good use.

We can also look forward to some weird and wacky philanthropy from new donors from the social media generation. The Facebook IPO is going to make a lot of people very rich and, since its founder Mark Zuckerberg has already signed up to the Giving Pledge, we are hopeful that the new cohort of wealthy will turn to philanthropy as a priority. The most entertaining philanthropist of 2011 was Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who famously/notoriously offered $100,000 grants to get people to drop out of college and start a business, as well as supporting efforts to create new floating countries in international waters (“sea steading”) and launching a science fund closed to university academics, a large proportion of the people we normally think of as scientists. Plenty of people think Thiel is nuts, which is great. Too much philanthropy today talks about risk-taking without being willing to court controversy. Expect the donors of the social network generation to have no such fears.

6. Celanthropy’s new stars. Ben Affleck will become more prominent on the Hollywood philanthropy scene, though probably still lagging behind the likes of Brangelina, George Clooney, and Matt Damon. The celanthropist to watch, though, will be Lady Gaga, who we expect to take a big step forward in her giving, probably with a cause dear to the hearts of her “Little Monsters” (as she calls her young fans). Another celanthropist worth watching will be Ashton Kutcher, to see if he can recover as a force for good following a messy divorce and some unfortunate tweeting in 2011. Despite his and other bad celebrity experiences, the use of Twitter and other social media in philanthropy will continue to increase — which should mean even more celebrity mishaps this year.

Some giving dynasties will also move more clearly into the limelight. Will Chelsea Clinton, as well as championing social causes in her new TV job, take a bigger role at the Clinton Global Initiative? Expect greater interest to be taken in Barbara Bush, daughter of George W., and her health care nonprofit, Global Health Corps. And now that he is focusing on philanthropy, expect some bold initiatives from Howard Bufffett, grandson of Warren Buffett. Also watch out for the House of Windsor, as Britain’s Brangelina, Wills ‘n’ Kate, make a serious effort to build a celanthropic brand, hopefully learning from the ability of Princess Diana to draw attention to an issue and the underrated skills of Prince Charles as a social entrepreneur.

7. Deep impact. This will be a big year for “impact investing,” which explicitly seeks both financial and social/environmental returns. So far, there has been much more talk than action, but the time has come for the money to back the ideas. The Omidyar Network has already taken a lead, but some other big philanthrocapitalists will join it this year. Enter the Gates Foundation?

8. The great extinction. Alas, it is going to be a tough year for many nonprofits. We are braced for more scandals about inspiring narratives unsupported by facts, along the lines of the 2011 Greg Mortenson exposé. The pain of government spending cuts will be felt widely, both directly, as many nonprofits rely on money from government, and indirectly, as cuts to government services will lead to greater demand pressure on non-government alternatives. We think that many nonprofits will be faced with serious shrinkage and, in many cases, extinction. Our hope is that smart donors will grasp the nettle and try to manage this culling process, encouraging mergers wherever possible, so that the best of the nonprofit sector is preserved or, better still, made stronger.

9. Philanthrocapitalism the Chinese way. There was some schadenfreude when the Gates-Buffett visit to China in 2010 failed to drum up new signatories to their Giving Pledge, although that was not the immediate goal of their mission. We expect philanthrocapitalism to become an increasingly important force in China in 2012, though it will have a distinctive local flavor. Instead of traditional, American-style, foundation-oriented philanthropy, we expect a wave of stories about corporates playing a key role in solving social and environmental problems through a version of “social investment.” China is now hitting a difficult stage of economic development when it needs to manage its use of natural resources, stop competing on low labor costs alone, start tackling potential drags on its competitiveness, such as its rapidly aging population, and deal with rising expectations among the populations. All of this requires a wave of innovation, which China’s philanthrocapitalists are well placed to lead.

10. Some good news. We are hopeful for some big breakthroughs that will prove that philanthrocapitalism works. Will some of the few remaining countries still hit by polio announce that they are free of the disease? Will the death toll from malaria plunge even further and faster? We think so, and that as it does, it will validate the “posse” approach to solving the world’s problems at the heart of philanthrocapitalism. Expect more new posse partnerships to be announced, similar to the Malaria No More campaign led by Ray Chambers, which has galvanized a powerful coalition of the willing. This is a time of growing scepticism about the effectiveness of government, international aid, and even of giving. Yet clear evidence of results may start to change the mood and persuade a growing number of people that philanthrocapitalism is worth the risk.

Matthew Bishop and Michael Green are co-authors of Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World. Bishop is New York Bureau Chief of The Economist; Green is an independent writer and consultant.

Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-bishop/philanthrocapitalism_b_1179952.html?ref=impact

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Personality must shine through in design-led rooms: Starwood’s vice-president of marketing for EMEA Steven Taylor explains why the design-led Aloft hotel chain is aiming to revolutionise the mid-market sector.

Marketing Week (MW): Starwood Hotels opened its first UK property under its Aloft brand at London Excel at the end of October 2011, but given the global economic slowdown, is this a good time to be rolling out a new brand internationally?

Steven Taylor (ST): We are focusing on the emergence of the younger Generation Y [the late teens to mid-20s age group] and the global middle class. The majority of the world’s population is in the middle class and we try not to get distracted by short-term cycles.

MW: What challenges does the sector face?

ST: We regard challenges as opportunities and try not to focus on the economic situation. One incredibly important theme is localism. For instance, we have launched a programme around Chinese visitors called Starwood Personalised Travel in global ‘gateway’ cities like London.

It offers things that matter most to the Chinese guest, including in-room kettles, slippers and translated welcome materials. Restaurant menus will also be made available in Chinese and feature favourites like congee [a rice soup]. You have to make sure you have the elements integrated into the hotel experience that makes customers feel valued.

Brands are no longer a stamp of reliability, they have to have personality.

MW: Can you explain the Aloft proposition and who it is targeting?

ST: Aloft is similar to [upmarket] sister brand W in that it created its own category within the sector – the design-led segment. Aloft is doing the same in the mid-market.

The mid-market targets business travellers, but Aloft is different because it takes a modern, urban influence, is design-led and targets Generation Y. Aloft targets the digital-savvy younger generation.

MW: Where in the world do you expect growth to come from?

ST: Ten years ago, we relied on the US and now it’s the Middle East that’s growing along with China and India. We are expecting 500 million Chinese travellers to emerge.

MW: Why is it important to have a presence in the UK?

ST: The UK is one of the most important outbound markets and we are very interested in growing all of our brands with a footprint here. London Excel [where the first Aloft hotel has opened] has strong forward bookings and is in a fantastic location – it’s 10 minutes from the O2 and the London Olympic park. We are interested in growing across the UK in markets such as Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester.

MW: What are the main marketing channels for Aloft?

ST: Because of who we are targeting we cannot rely on traditional media. Digital media makes up 90% of the marketing budget. Social media has removed the ‘mask’ from our business. With traditional media, you could push messages, but with social media, the hotel experience is very much fed back to consumers who are making their decisions. For instance, we engage people via our own branded websites and have launched a comments and reviews section. We also encourage every general manager to get involved with Tripadvisor.

MW: How is the social media strategy executed?

ST: Because we are targeting a younger generation, content creation is very important, which is why we have integrated music very heavily into our marketing campaign. Our 50 Days of Music campaign gave emerging artists the opportunity to play in 50 Aloft hotels globally.

However, a brand cannot just say it has a passion for music – it has to be credible in the space and we felt that we should focus on emerging artists.

We engage through Facebook and other media channels. We have nearly 58,000 social media fans on Facebook. Video is also an important aspect of hospitality marketing; at any event we hold, we have video integrated into our plans.

However, we are careful not to create a ‘social graveyard’ of the kind that I see in a variety of industries where brands start up social media and Facebook pages but then don’t invest the resources in content creators.

MW: What specific approach did you take to promoting the arrival of Aloft in the UK?

ST: We collaborated with people innovating on the cutting edge of other industries like mixologists and a collective of free runners. We got them to perform around the hotel and videoed them. We also worked with music collective Urban Nerds and a street art company called Monorex. We are not just collaborating from a marketing perspective but enhancing the hotel experience.

MW: The Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) loyalty programme is regarded as an exemplary CRM programme. How do you keep it fresh?

ST: We use the programme to better understand the needs of our frequent travellers, to enhance and personalise their stay. When people stay a certain number of times, they receive benefits such as upgrades.

SPG is focused on driving value beyond the travel cycle – we have the SPG Moments programme that can be used to meet celebrities, for example, enjoy a golf challenge with [Scottish golfer] Sam Torrance or get a backstage pass to meet Rihanna at her O2 gigs.

A lot of loyalty programmes focus on transactions, while we focus on experiences. We regularly communicate with members about certain elements of the programme and have an iPhone app, Facebook page and Twitter feed. Travellers of all generations expect to stay connected with brands at all times through a means that suits them. It’s up to us as a loyalty programme to embrace the new channels.

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It’s a bigger part of your business’s assets than ever before. You can’t afford to let it be endangered.

Three decades ago as much as 95% of the average corporation’s value consisted of tangible assets, according to a report by Thomson Reuters and Interbrand. Today 75% of that average corporation’s value is intangible.

In other words, a business’s most valuable asset is its good name, its brand and reputation. In a recent survey released jointly by the World Economic Forum and the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm, three-fifths of chief executives said they believed corporate brand and reputation represented more than 40% of their company’s market capitalization.

That value is the organization’s brand reputational value. Strong brand reputational value equals greater profits.

A company’s brand reputational value has four basic elements: expectations, perceptions, business relationships and unique intellectual property assets. Improved quality in each of those areas increases financial value for the organization. For instance, a company with a reputation for quality and safety can charge more for the same product than their competitors because customers put a price premium on quality products and services that give them positive experiences. Companies with strong brands can retain employees better, too. A recent study suggests that 80% of employees between the ages of 18 and 30 will leave a company if they believe it has a weak brand or no association with ethics.

In 2009′s business climate there are four main avenues by which you can quickly lose your company’s brand reputational value. They are:

1. The Internet and social media. Any ethical or compliance failure, even an isolated and apparently minor one, can be instantly broadcast all over the world. Only a few years ago experts were saying you needed a top-notch public-relations capability to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle. Today 24

For example, last year three KFC employees took pictures of themselves taking a bubble bath in a sink at the store they worked at. The news was picked up by traditional news media, and videos of the news reports as well as the photos themselves spread virally among video-sharing Web sites and other social media. On YouTube alone, those videos were watched by more than a million people worldwide. The incident was of course very embarrassing to KFC and harmful to the company’s brand. Yet it didn’t even happen at a restaurant owned by KFC but at a franchise.

2. Subcontracting and outsourcing. True or false: In June 2009 Continental Airlines ( CAL – news – people ) stranded passengers on a small plane outside Minneapolis for six hours overnight when it could have allowed the passengers off the plane and into the terminal.

False. The company operating the flight was actually ExpressJet ( XJT – news – people ), an independent partner of Continental’s. ExpressJet licenses the Continental name to fly shorter, regional flights. ExpressJet was identified in many news stories, but Continental was the name in the headlines and in short television reports, and it absorbed the biggest loss of brand reputational value. It also ran into regulatory trouble, as the Transportation Department conducted a review of both ExpressJet and Continental and ultimately fined them both, along with a subsidiary of Northwest Airlines ( NWA – news – people ).

A customer, partner or contractor may be the guilty party in violating ethical standards, but they don’t always receive the worst of the brand reputational value damage

3. Regulatory. Litigation over ethics and compliance violations has been on the increase, and it will continue to increase. The Obama administration and other governments around the world are ratcheting up investigations and enforcement actions. Recent billion-dollar fines and settlements paid by Siemens ( SI – news – people ) and Pfizer ( PFE – news – people ), as well as many other less publicized fines, are testaments to this increased regulatory activity.

4. Employees. According to The Network, Inc., which runs the ethics hotline tnwinc.com, employees commit fraud more often during tough economic times. The company reports that of all the complaint calls it gets, the portion that were fraud-related whistle-blower calls rose from 14% in the first quarter of 2007 to 21% two years later. Thanks to a weakened employer-employee social contract and recent rulings finding that whistle-blowers can share in the proceeds from penalty payments, workers have more incentive than ever to become whistle-blowers. A company can get entangled in costly, brand-damaging legal action even when the employee engaged in ethical misconduct isn’t senior management.

The cost of a compliance or ethics failure goes well beyond legal fees, court judgments, fines and penalties. It spills over into leadership distraction and turnover, forced alteration of a working profit model and heightened scrutiny in the future. With hard assets, such as plants and factories, companies typically spend 12.5% to 15% of their value annually protecting, maintaining and insuring them. But many companies don’t invest that way in their intangible assets, despite the rapid growth of their economic importance.

Companies must treat their brand reputational value like any other asset. They should manage it just the way they manage real property and equipment. Here are five steps to take:

1. Invest in the three to five areas that will be most profitable. There are at least nine major areas in which ethics problems can hurt a business: markets and customers; strategy; product and service; design, brand and quality control; intellectual property and knowledge management; leadership; workforce; sub-cost-of-goods-sold expenses; risk management; and procurement. Determine which three to five of those represent the greatest business potential and risk for your organization. Is using an ethical culture to attract and retain superior employee talent a preeminent concern? Emphasizing lower risk and higher product safety so you can sell your product or service at a higher price?

2. Invest for the long term. Improving ethics in business for profitable gain is not a quarterly or one-year undertaking. Management needs to have at least a five-year plan and must try to foresee demographic and economic trends that can affect that plan. Ethical investments, just like investments in manufacturing facilities, can easily take five years to materially pay off.

3. Maintain an open communications structure. To protect a company’s brand and reputation, information has to be able to flow immediately to a sufficiently high level of the organization. One way to guarantee this is by having a consistently open line of contact between an ethics officer and senior management. If you don’t have a communication structure that allows concerns to become known, then build one.

4. Insure against individual idiocy and the ill-educated. It only takes the improper actions of one employee, one remote office or one outside agent representing the company to significantly damage your brand. Smart companies recognize and focus on the individual, always asking who exactly they’re hiring as an employee and whether they’ve done enough checking and testing of the person. Also, they know whether they are making sure their requirements concerning expected behavior reach every individual.

5. Insure against outside institutional incompetence. Apply all the same expectations for your company’s compliance, ethics and control standards to your vendors and partners as well. Not only must you exercise due diligence on entering into a relationship, but you also need to continually verify, at least for the top 10% of your supply chain, that your compliance and ethics controls are implemented and working.

Make sure you do all of these things. You cannot afford to lose your brand reputational value.

Alexander F. Brigham is executive director of the Ethisphere Institute. Stefan Linssen is editor in chief of the Ethisphere Institute.

Read more: http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/01/brand-reputation-value-leadership-managing-ethisphere.html

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The Challenge: Pfaff Automotive Partners excels at selling Porsches. And Audis.  And Volkswagens. And Toyotas. And more recently, McLarens. In fact, over the last 47 years, Pfaff has grown into a leading Ontario-based automotive dealer with 12 locations that include its services group: Pfaff Leasing, Pfaff Autoworks and Pfaff Tuning. But auto dealers face a dilemma when it comes to branding and marketing.

“The manufacturers have strong co-op programs that encourage you to advertise and they reimburse you as long as you follow their advertising guidelines,” says Christopher Pfaff, the company’s president and CEO. “Their intent is obviously to make sure the integrity of the advertising is good for their brand, which I understand, but it ends up with you being very vanilla and it doesn’t allow you to present your own strong brand. Our challenge is to try to stand out as an Audi dealer or a Porsche dealer and what makes us a little bit different from the rest.”

The approach:  While still participating in the car manufacturers’ co-op programs and promoting the various brands it sells, Pfaff Automotive invests in building strong awareness of the Pfaff brand in the communities it serves. “We want people to think of Pfaff first as opposed to thinking of the brand we’re selling first. That way, we can build longer term relationships with them. At the same time, we don’t forget that a part of our responsibility is building the automobile brands we represent. We’re selling two brands — the care and service you receive from Pfaff as well as the car brand. The Pfaff brand is making your Porsche or Audi even better.”

Implementation: Through its creative advertising, Pfaff focuses on its commitment to helping customers “find their drive,” which is the company’s tagline. It highlights that regardless of which band a customer purchases, the Pfaff brand is behind it, with its service, trustworthiness and long-term relationships. Additionally, the company has invested a lot of time and effort into building those relationships not just with customers but also with potential customers. This approach started with H.J. Pfaff, the company’s founder—and Mr. Pfaff’s father—who was an avid equestrian. “He really built relationships with the equestrian community and that worked out very well, and then the mid-1980s, we started with the racing community.  That went far for us.”

In fact, events marketing has been key for the company, which is always looking for new ways to reach out to people and groups who could potentially be attracted to their products.  Last September, for example, Pfaff hosted a special ladies-only track day.

“We invited women who had an affiliation with Holt Renfrew and introduced them to driving these high-performing cars on a race track with an instructor,” says Mr. Pfaff. “That helped us let them know a little about who we are.”

The payoff:  Having a strong brand and a reputation for excellence has helped Pfaff continue to grow year after year with a loyal following of customers. Even though Pfaff’s dealerships are all in Ontario, it attracts customers from as far away as PEI. But having a strong brand has also opened up new opportunities. About a year ago, when McLaren Automotive, the high-performance sports car company renowned for its Formula One technology, decided to expand from its tiny niche market into a wider international one, it looked for crème de la crème dealerships across the globe. Only 35 dealers made the cut and only one of them was in Canada. And that dealer was Pfaff.

Read original: http://business.financialpost.com/2011/12/30/putting-your-brand-first/

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Jovani Gaytan, 10, listens as his mother, Maria Gaytan, left, and teacher, Georgina Garcia, talk inside his grandmother’s home in the Valverde neighborhood on Thursday, December 8, 2011. (Lindsay Pierce, YourHub)

The visit is one of dozens that Ms. Garcia and Ms. Possiel are making as part of the parent-teacher home visit program now in its [second] year at Valverde. Parents are our most important partners, and the parent-teacher home visit program is one of the best ways we have to strengthen the connection between our parents, our teachers, and our schools. Click here for a story on the home visit program.

Teachers across the district have embraced the home visit program (which was pioneered in Denver by teachers at Fairview Elementary School), and this year, we have expanded the Parent Teacher Home Visit Program from 5 to 23 schools. In the first two months of the school year, teachers in these schools made more than 1500 home visits, sitting down with parents and guardians to discuss the hopes and dreams they have for their children and strengthening connections with their child’s teachers. We hope to significantly expand the home visit program again next year.

The impact these visits are having on our teachers, students and parents has been tremendous.

“Transformational. It’s bigger than what we think it is,” Ms. Garcia said to me on the way over to Jovani’s house.

“It has not only changed the way I teach, but it has changed the way I approach people,” Ms. Possiel told me. “The home visits have really helped me….Everyone has their own challenges, and as a teacher, it’s important for me to understand where my students and parents are coming from.”

For Jovani’s mom Maria, the visit meant a lot. She took time off from one of her two jobs for the visit, and she noted that it was the first time one of her children’s teachers had come to visit her at her at home. She relished the opportunity to talk about her hopes and dreams for Jovani, and Jovani was very proud to have his teacher come visit him at home. When asked for her thoughts on Jovani’s class, Maria stressed to Ms. Garcia how much she appreciated that she pushed Jovani to reach his full potential. “He may not thank you now, but I will,” she said, “and, I know he will thank you later.”

Visiting with Jovani, who is a fifth-grade-student at Valverde Elementary School. (Lindsay Pierce, YourHub)

The visits very intentionally are “no paper, no pencil” – the point is for the teachers and parents to talk and to connect. Parents inviting teachers into their home to spend time with their family is a powerful outreach to the school and shows just how much they value their child’s education. The visits also help empower parents to work together as academic partners with the teachers for the success of our students.

For some of our parents, they may not feel completely comfortable visiting the school to meet teachers or check in on their child’s learning, especially if there are language barriers. The home visits break down the barriers to forge a strong partnership to support the child’s education.

Valverde teacher Janel Possiel couldn’t have summed it up better: “It’s a simple model that we can replicate. It’s about our students’ hopes and dreams….It’s about getting to know that family so they feel safe and invited to get engaged and to get involved in their students’ education.”

And the eventual goal is captured beautifully by what Jovani in one of his school essays: “I believe in myself. When I feel good about myself I know that I can accomplish anything. Life isn’t easy, but when I believe in myself, it isn’t that hard,” he writes.

To our students, I say simply, “I believe in you, too.”

And, to our many teachers in the district who are spearheading the home-visit model, I want to say, simply: Thank you. The time you are devoting to setting a strong foundation of parent involvement with our students is helping bring them closer to achieving the hopes and dreams that Jovani’s mom talked so passionately about.

And, to the entire DPS community, I would like to wish all of you a joyous holiday season with your families and loved ones.

Best,
Tom

For more information, contact the Communication Office at (720) 423-3152 or e-mail us at communications_office@dpsk12.org. Join us on Facebook and Twitter!

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With a name that will immediately disappear to the bottom every Google search, the I’m Watch is a Smart Watch that looks like somebody shrank a cellphone and put it on their wrist. In fact, it looks more like the current, impossible-to-use iPod Nano in a wrist-strap case, and has the touch-screen to match.

The I’m tethers itself to your phone via Bluetooth, from where it draws its lifeblood. Caller ID, speakerphone (calling Dick Tracy!) and music are all streamed from the phone, and controlled on the curved 1.5-inch, 240 x 240 TFT screen.

Inside, the watch runs a modded version of Android 1.6 and comes with 64MB RAM and 4GB storage. The battery is good for three hours on speakerphone, and will stretch for a couple of days if you don’t use the thing. I’m is claimed to work with pretty much any phone, beginning with the iPhone and Android at launch, and adding Windows 7 and BlackBerry later

The I’m, from an Italian company of the same name, will ship in January. It starts at €300 ($410) and goes up from there with titanium and jewel-encrusted versions. You can pre-order now for half that price, but given that we’ve never seen anything from these guys before, it might be worth waiting until they’re really, really ready.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/im-smart-watch-looks-curiously-familiar/

LAPTOP’s team of editors and writers will be on the ground starting January 7th all the way through the 13th, bringing you the very latest mobile news live from the show floor. You’ll see hands-on product videos, keynote coverage, and insightful analysis right from the show floor (and beyond).

So what’s in store for CES 2012? Here are our top 7 trends to watch.

Windows 8: Hurry Up and Wait

Given that Steve Ballmer will once again kick off CES with an opening keynote, it shouldn’t be any surprise that he will trumpet the benefits of Windows 8 and the progress being made on the platform. We’ve already test-driven the sleek software using the Developer Preview on both a tablet and a laptop. And most recently, Microsoft showed off the new Windows Store, where Windows 8 users will be able to download apps.

So what’s left? Ballmer will hopefully provide more details about the launch of the public beta of the OS—planned for late February—as well as show off some exciting hardware. The challenge: keeping the excitement going all the way to the end of the year—and convincing us that the software makes just as much sense for notebooks as it does slates. This will also be Microsoft’s last hurrah at CES, as the company announced plans to pull out of the show starting in 2013.

Ultrabooks Get Bigger… and Cheaper

Rumors are swirling that Apple is readying a 15-inch MacBook Air, so you can bet that Windows notebook makers will make a pre-emptive strike at CES. We expect to see ultra-thin laptops that meet Intel’s definition of Ultrabook—less than 0.8 inches thick, fast boot and resume times—but that also stretch screen sizes beyond 13 inches. At the same time, vendors will look to undercut Apple by making their wares more affordable.

By back-to-school time, starting prices will likely sink to $699. The Ultrabook trend isn’t just for consumers, either. We expect to see at least one model tailored for the business crowd, joining the HP Folio. Also look for Intel to provide more info on its Ivy Bridge processors, which should supercharge Ultrabooks later in the year.

Ice Cream Sandwich Tablets Galore

Now that smartphone shoppers have gotten a taste of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it’s time for tablets to get in on the action. The software certainly looks more polished and should make multitasking easier, but it’s not clear to us yet what advantages the new OS will have for larger-screen devices. Thus far, the only hot-selling Android tablet is the Kindle Fire, which runs an older flavor of Google’s software and uses a completely different interface, so Google and its partners certainly have their work cut out.

In fact, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt recently told an Italian newspaper, “In the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality.” So what does that make the stuff coming out at CES? Crap?

Nokia + Windows Phone = Relevance?

With market share at a measly 2 percent (according to NPD), Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 platform isn’t exactly setting the world on fire. But Nokia hopes to turn things around with a big push in the U.S starting in 2012. The company has scheduled a press conference for January 9th, at which many expect Nokia to unveil a variant of the Lumia 800 with 4G LTE capability. AT&T is expected to be the carrier, but it’s certainly possible that Verizon could be in the mix.

We generally liked the latest OS in our Windows Phone 7.5 review, and Microsoft’s marketplace stocks plenty of quality apps. But the hardware hasn’t really excited us. For Nokia and Microsoft, it’s put up or shut up time.

Wearable Tech Gets Smarter

According to reports, Apple is working on a bendable iPod and other wearable devices that would communicate with an iPhone. And Google has a pair of smart glasses in the pipeline that would display information on a built-in screen.In the meantime, plenty of companies are hoping to make wearable tech sexy, including the Italy-based i’m Watch. The device looks awfully similar to the iPod nano but runs Android and comes with a watchband.

WIMM is yet another company marking an Android-powered timepiece. The WIMM One has a less-sexy design, but lets you read RSS feeds on your wrist and comes with “micro apps.” The wearable tech trend also extends to fitness gadgets such as the MotoActv and Jawbone Up, so we fully anticipate similar devices to debut at CES.

Car Apps Take Over

You know it’s going to be a big show for car tech when the head of Mercedes Benz and the president of Ford are both giving keynotes at CES 2012. After all, shoppers are more psyched about apps inside their vehicles than the number of cup holders. Dr. Dieter Zetsche of Mercedez Benz will outline his “vision on the interplay between automotive innovation and the digital realm.” The brand will look to catch up in the app race and is expected to show off integration with Google’s Street View in its new vehicles, among other services.

Ford pioneered in-car tech with its Sync system, and the company’s AppLink technology lets users leverage select smartphone apps. We can’t wait to see what comes next. In fact, we’ll have two people from LAPTOP dedicated to this category alone at CES.

Smartphones Jump to Quad Core

First came the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet, but the next frontier for Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip is smartphones. Nvidia is hosting a press conference on January 9th, where we expect the company to show off what its chip can do inside handsets. Some expect HTC to be among the first to put Tegra 3 inside a handset, but we just don’t know yet who will be among the first partners.

So what’s the big deal about quad core? Mostly graphics performance, but Nvidia says its CPU is more efficient and uses less power. We didn’t observe any battery life gains on ASUS’ new tablet, but we have higher hopes for the first batch of superphones. And Nvidia is not alone. We’ll be meeting with Qualcomm to see a demo of its new Snapdragon S4 chip.

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This story is contributed by a member of the Treasure Coast community and is neither endorsed nor affiliated with TCPalm.com

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With a stagnant economy, advertisers are applying pressure to radio stations to cut rates, offer better placement and drive better results. Ignore these requests at your peril.

When your account execs relay client demands, provide them with ammunition to assist with client retention. Fail to act, and one of your radio competitors — or another medium — may provide solutions and win your clients away.

iStockphoto/muharrem öner

Dropping rates may be the most time-efficient tourniquet but it is rarely your best choice for creating value for clients. Let’s explore other ways to give clients more bang for their buck.

Get creative

One surefire approach to better results is to ensure your clients are airing effective creative. Account executives and sales managers too often accept whatever a client delivers, whether proposed copy or finished production.

You don’t need a killer creative services director in-house; it’s never been easier to outsource spot creative to experienced specialists. Many small production houses are being run by talented, formerly well-paid creative services directors who lost jobs due to consolidation or downsizing in our industry.

I am happy to recommend a few or ask others to do so. Before you sign such a deal, ask for radio station and advertiser references and for links to spots you can hear. Step two in improving your client’s creative is more difficult but not impossible: Read or play the finished product to a small sample of the intended audience.

You can do this entirely online, if you like, by posting one or several spots, then asking your recruited panel to write down what they remember from the commercials.

You finally will have to admit something that, deep down, you know. Messages often are not clearly communicated in many of your spots. Entertainment or emotive factors also can make a significant difference.

After you’ve got your effective creative wrapped up, make sure you are scheduling spots properly with high frequency over shorter spans of days. Rather than airing 50 spots over 10 days, run all of them over five days; this will most certainly increase the recall needed to drive action.

Local celebrity endorsements for products, services and activities can garner a higher level of attention for clients. Sure, there are talent fees involved, but if you can provide a sought-after celeb to voice a spot and/or show up at an event, clients often will jump at the chance. You’ll have to go beyond your on-air pool of talent. Every city has highly recognizable athletes or other glamorous personalities, many of whom are game to earn extra money and enjoy the limelight.

Do you ever look at your logs to see where spots are placed in stop-sets? Here’s a shocker: More listeners will hear the first commercial played than the sixth one played in a stop-set.

This begs myriad questions. Are your clients getting a fair shake? Should you occasionally stack the deck in somebody’s favor if a renewal based on results is on the line? Do clients with the best creative deserve to go first? Should you charge a premium for this position?

I’m not sure there are correct answers, but these questions sure can create an interesting discussion at your next sales meeting.

Know your assets

You may have to play the “added value” game to keep clients happy.

Make an asset list for easy reference. Here’s a short one to get you started: Sponsorship billboards for news, sports, traffic, concert updates and other features; website section sponsorships mentioned on-air; banner ads; pre-roll on video, contests on-air and online; Facebook and Twitter plugs or endorsements; contextually embedded links from your site to a client site; naming rights for your studio, van, morning show or events. (Send me more ideas and I’ll share them with other readers.)

Although many clients may ask you to cut rates, your response must be market-based. If competitors are holding rate and your sellout rate is fair, there is no reason to acquiesce.

Instead, assure them you can make their investment provide a greater return by utilizing several or all of the assets outlined above.

In some cases, it may be feasible for you to offer a few special clients the opportunity to trade out a portion of their schedule for services or goods that you really may be able utilize. For example, you may need to shred 10 years of documents and just happen to have a client who sells that service. You then take part of their next schedule half cash/half trade.

While there is never a one-size-fits-all solution for clients, I can’t help myself in delivering a mantra I learned from my first GM many moons ago: “Great ratings solve many problems.”

Mark Lapidus is president of Lapidus Media. Contact him at marklapidus@verizon.net.

Read more: http://www.radioworld.com/article/give-clients-more-for-their-money/50868

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Inside Thirteen recently spoke with New Jersey-based filmmaker Bill Jersey, co-director and producer of American Masters’ upcoming documentary, Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter.

The film, which is narrated by James Franco,  explores the lives of the iconic couple, whose innovative work continues to influence the design world to this day. Here, Jersey discusses his inspiration for the film and the Eames’ lasting impact on American culture.

Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter premieres Monday, December 19 at 10 p.m. on THIRTEEN.

Inside Thirteen: What inspired you to make this film?

Bill Jersey: [Co-director and producer] Jason Cohn. Jason fell in love with Eames’ movies, of all things, and when he bought his new house with his wife in Berkeley, he had Eames furniture. All I knew about Eames was that I was in Minneapolis with my then girlfriend and now wife, and she said, “Oh, my friend has an Eames chair.” I said, you live in Minneapolis, my children live in San Francisco, and I live in New York. What am I going to do with a chair?” I sat in an Eames lounger, and within five seconds, I said, “I’ll take it!” I didn’t think about what it would cost, how I would get it anywhere — I loved it. I’ve sat in it every day in my house and my office for the last 30 years.

Also, Jason did a lot of research, and I realized that the Eames, as Charles was of course fond of reminding people, were not just designers of chairs. Their philosophy, their way of being in the world and their excitement about everything — that excitement was infectious. To me, that’s what the film is about. It’s creating excitement around them, as they created excitement around their world. They inspired all kinds of people. A financial magazine in Norway that had one of the biggest circulations did a review of one of the Eames’ exhibits, and people said, “What in the world is a financial magazine doing with the Eames’ show?” But that was what was so exciting about them, they touched every world, and the film touches every world.

So that’s why I did the film…in the beginning it was, “Why not?” but then at the end, why? Because it’s so rich, so varied, and so much fun. Someone told me, “This is not your typical PBS show.” Well, I think that they were not your typical people, so if we made an atypical show, it’s because we had atypical people to make a film about.

IT: What kind of person did you have to be to work for the Eames?

BJ: Well, first I think you had to be fairly thick-skinned. Charles was not an easy person to work with. A friend of mine, Bill Couturié, a very well known filmmaker — his first job was with Charles. He went out on shoots and was scared to death that Charles would hate everything he shot, but he actually liked one out of nine. And Bill said, “Boy, did I feel good!” But then Charles added, “Well, one in nine is good; if I’d have shot it, nine out of nine would have been good.” He was a very tough task masker, in spite of his charm and dimpled chin. But obviously, as my favorite character in the film Jeannie Oppenwall said, “Well, I was exploited, but I was exploited by a proper master.” And as she said, you’d be really stupid if you didn’t exploit the relationship.

IT: What do you think the Eames’ greatest contribution was to American culture and design?

BJ: For me, it’s personal — they produced something that when you sat in it, you wanted to buy it — that’s a major contribution. Like Charles says in the film, they felt like they were the hosts, and the hosts had to prepare their guests something they would like. I think that attitude, and also the attitude that the designer’s job was not to be clever, or creative, or original — it was not to be an “artist” and certainly not a genius. The job of the designer is to satisfy a problem.

When Charles did the “Mathematica” exhibit for IBM, as creative as it was, it was an attempt to get people to understand what a computer could do and that it wasn’t a dangerous monster that would transform their lives into a number. So, I think it was attitude and a design sense. You still have people talking about Eames era. And there is so much knock-off Eames stuff; you know the difference. It saddens me that when you go into airports today, instead of seeing the Eames stadium seating, which is wonderful and attractive, there are cheap versions. You feel like, why did they do that? Why do farmers take a tomato that tastes delicious and redesign it so it ships and doesn’t taste like anything? But I do think it’s coming back. I think most people like it because it’s comfortable and attractive.  To me, that’s their greatest contribution, saying, “You know, what we should be about as designers is making something that works, and works better and with more beauty than ever before.” I think that’s why Steve Jobs was such a success. That’s why The New York Times connected Eames to Jobs — both of them set out to solve a problem. They weren’t about trying to create something pretty; they were about trying to do something that people needed done. But, once they accomplished that, they wanted to make it attractive.

IT: What did it mean for the Eames’ career and reputation at the time to be selected to put together such high-profile international projects like “Glimpses of the USA,” representing the U.S. to the Soviets in Moscow, and the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair?

BJ: “Glimpses of the USA” made their career soar, as well it should have. Charles’ greatest interest was in ideas. “Glimpses of the USA” was not to show off; I think he just loved doing what he did. When he did the do-nothing machine, for instance, that was just because he liked to play. This was a guy who never grew up — he was never ashamed of what he did.

I think “Glimpses of the USA” was their biggest impact. They were lovers — with one another, with the world, and with their work. And that came through, so that it wasn’t just information well told (which it was). It was a kind of a love affair with America that Charles had that made him a good propagandist, because he really believed that this was a good country for him and for the rest of us. I think the inspiration derived from the enthusiasm and the commitment, as well as from any mechanics of design.  So while the chairs changed their careers as designers, “Glimpses of the USA” changed their public roles as filmmakers and communicators.

IT: Do you think the disparity between Charles and Ray’s positions in the company, at least in their public roles, was a product of the time, or was it because of their personalities?

Charles and Ray Eames. Photo courtesy of Herman Miller.

BJ: It was a product of the times; it was a product of Ray’s acceptance of that role of the times. Not every woman accepted that ‘stand behind the man’ role. Many others stepped out from behind and said, “I’m not going to stay behind that guy because I’m the one that’s doing it.” But at the time, the man was up front and you just accepted it…there was a certain level of comfort in that for her I suspect, but I don’t know. But she wasn’t shy in relation to the world. We never really got that in the film, but a number of people talked about that. She’d go to New York City and she’d walk down the street, and she would see everything — she would see the crack in sidewalk that had a great shape, she would see a little flower that wasn’t normally a flower. Everything attracted her, which of course terrified people when she was driving a car because she would even do that while driving! She’d look to her left and say, “Oh did you see that?” And the others in the car would say, “No we didn’t, and we don’t want you to!”

IT: Are there any misconceptions about the Eames that you hope this film will clear up?

BJ: Yes — the misconception that they were chair designers. Charles was a superstar; he was handsome, charismatic, famous. One of our delights was that moment where we looked at that letter Ray wrote to Charles in France where she revealed that she and some other people worked on and made some changes to the chair’s design. That was the kind of unarguable evidence of her contribution. As we look back, lots of people say, “Oh, Ray did this, Ray did that.” My hope is that people will see them as complex human beings and see the complex relationship that they had.

IT: You’ve produced many documentaries for public television, including for WNET in the past. What has attracted you to PBS as a venue for your films?

BJ: Many reasons. The shows I did for network television in the 1960s were similar to the shows I did with PBS. But 1960 was a very different world in television. There were four stations – three commercial networks, and PBS. Shows I did for network television at the time were part of The DuPont Show of the Week in 1960. The FCC was very aggressive in insisting that the networks provide information instead of just entertainment, so that The DuPont Show of the Week said, “Okay, we’ll do 13 dramas and seven documentaries.” And they couldn’t care less what we did! So it gave us the liberty to do whatever kind of film we wanted. That’s where I got my first Emmy in 1963. So it was a very different world then, and you could get attention doing network television; in a limited way, but a significant way. Whereas now, if you want to take a serious subject and make a sincere work that has nuances in it and doesn’t get cut up in five pieces so that you have to restart every ten minutes, there’s no place but PBS. Ken Burns said it well — he could’ve gone to commercial television, but there’s no reason to!

I did a two-part series for Fox on the Mob, but that’s all they want to do! All they [commercial networks] want to do is the Mob, sex and violence. Who wants to do a show on a guy who designed chairs and made pictures?  Only PBS, and only American Masters. We felt that this was the place we could really address substance rather than just surface. Where you could really engage in the pursuit of light rather than just heat. I don’t know where else you go besides PBS.

see original http://www.thirteen.org/insidethirteen/2011/12/14/charles-ray-eames-the-architect-and-the-painter-a-qa-with-filmmaker-bill-jersey/

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written by Jon Henley

Fergus McMullen … ‘People want quality, and they want to have a taste’. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

With the eager step of a man who’s just turned 40 and found his purpose in life, Paul Walker strides in his wellies across the flagstones of the 14th-century Union Inn in Denbury, south Devon, and orders two pints of Denbury Dreamer.

We sip carefully, appreciatively. It’s a fine beer: smooth malt flavours, a lovely light floral hop finish, not a hint of bitterness. A treat. Paul closes his eyes, nods, allows himself a brief smile of intense satisfaction. “I made that,” he says.

He probably deserves his moment of contentment. He’s been up since before six, won’t finish till seven, and will almost certainly have to nip back at least once during the evening. It’s hard work, being a microbrewer, and there was a time two summers ago, a few months after he’d started, when he really thought the whole thing was about to go under.

But this summer Hunter’s Brewery, just up the road from Denbury in Ipplepen, is selling between 60 and 100 nine-gallon barrels of real ale every week to 200-plus pubs across the south-west. Capacity is set to increase sixfold within months. Paul and his wife Eline haven’t yet drawn a salary from it. But the day’s not far off.

Hunter’s is part of a remarkable early 21st-century flowering of traditional British ale. Helped by an increasingly enthusiastic public and a handy excise duty relief that effectively halves your tax bill as long as you make no more than about 3,000 barrels a year (thank you, Gordon Brown), some 50 new small breweries are expected to open around the country this year.

There are now, in fact, more breweries in Britain than at any time since the end of the second world war: well over 800, against half that number, of all sizes, less than a decade ago, and a mere 140 in 1970. And we clearly like what they’re brewing: sales of “live”, cask-conditioned ales, which ferment a second time in the barrel, have surged by 25% over the past five years.

What makes this more striking is that overall, our national drink is in seemingly irreversible decline. The UK beer market, still dominated by the big keg lagers such as Carling and Foster’s – which, for the sake of shelf life, get filtered or pasteurised after brewing to kill off the yeast, then are injected with CO₂ in an effort to give them back some semblance of life – shrank by 7% last year. And we’re losing 25 pubs a week.

Real ale, though, is undergoing a spirited revival. One clue as to why comes in the slogan emblazoned on a T-shirt sported by a cheery, bearded and large-bellied man at the Great British Beer Festival at the Earls Court exhibition centre this month. “What’s the matter, Lagerboy,” it demanded, “afraid you might taste something?”

Real ale, says Mike Benner, CEO of Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale (whose T-shirt, by the way, that wasn’t), has flavour. “The technology’s improved massively, and there’s been a huge leap in quality,” he says. “And real ale is obviously part of a whole broader trend in food and drink for authenticity, tradition, localism, provenance. But, ultimately, it’s about the sheer variety of styles, and the richness of the flavours.”

Brewers these days are experimenting with new styles and reviving old ones, long forgotten: smooth, highly hopped best and premium bitters; potent pale ales and India pale ales; dark, sweet, chocolatey porters, an 18th-century favourite; rounder, softer milds, which died a dismal death in the 60s but are now bouncing back; heavy, grainy, creamy stouts; fruity, refreshing, pale amber golden ales, a newcomer designed to tempt the dreaded Lagerboy.

The small scale of the new breed of brewery gives flexibility, so they can produce short runs of seasonal or special occasion and bespoke ales (Hunter’s brews its Denbury Dreamer, for example, solely for the Union Inn). And many of them are now available in bottles, where they’ll continue to gently ferment until you crack them open at home.

“The common perception of real ale used to be that it was just bitter – what grandad drank, the preserve of men in thick woolly jumpers,” says Brenner. “It’s just not true any more. There are flavours of every kind, for every palate, and people are really getting it: 40% more are trying ale than were five years ago. When you think, only 10 years ago people were saying this would never be more than a niche product. This is a real renaissance.”

Against all the odds, real ale is a happening industry. A convention-challenging new generation of brewer typified by the likes of 20-somethings Martin Dickie and Jamie Watt of the phenomenally successful BrewDog in Aberdeenshire, sport shaved heads and porkpie hats and raise finance by flogging shares to Joe Public in operations they call Equity for Punks. According to Camra, 17% more 18-to 24-year-olds drank real ale last year than in 2010.

Downstairs at Earls Court, queuing at bars for beers with names such as Elsie Mo, Alley Cat, Black Adder, Chopper Fuel; Hedgemonkey, Full Whack, Mad Monk and Praetorian Porter, the crowd seems to back this up. “Beer’s every bit as rewarding and complex as wine, but no one’s dared say it until now,” says Jeanette James, 26, a marketing executive from Putney, south-west London. “There are really delicate, elegant flavours out there now. I don’t drink a lot of it, but I really, really appreciate what I do.”

Alex Lester, 23, from Solihull, and a serious connoisseur, was filling in notes on a tasting card. “You should call them craft ales, not real ales,” he says. “That’s the level they’ve reached. The characters are all so distinct. Some you’d drink right through a serious session, some you’d savour by the glass, like with a particular kind of meal. Ale’s pretty cool.”

The big retailers have certainly got it: Sainsbury’s is organising a Great British Beer Hunt that will see 16 new British ales, selected in regional heats, battle it out from early September for a permanent place on the shelves in some 300 stores. “We’re seeing 7% year-on-year growth in premium bottled beers,” says Oliver Chadwick-Healey, its beer buyer. “This is a real phenomenon, driven by choice and quality.”

The world’s number three drink (after water and tea) has come on quite a journey since 3400BC, which is when the earliest barley beer to have been chemically confirmed was brewed, in the Zagros mountains of Iraq. By the late Middle Ages beer was being brewed all over northern Europe, including in monasteries whose monks should probably have known better.

In England, it’s thought, we once drank around 65 gallons of it each a year, with every meal; having been boiled, it was a fair bit safer than plain water. (Wine-soaked southern Europeans never really understood. Regardless of whether it was made from oats, barley or wheat, beer “harms the head and the stomach, causes bad breath and ruins the teeth, and fills the stomach with bad fumes,” wrote the 13th-century Italian medic Aldobrandino of Siena. “But it does have the property of facilitating urination and makes one’s flesh white and smooth.”)

Whatever its properties, beer is indisputably Britain’s national drink. Its character has changed over the years. Hopped beer – hops add the more savoury, floral notes to the caramel and toffee tones of the toasted barley of the malt – was imported from the Netherlands from around 1400. Thermometers and hydrometers were improving quality and consistency by the 1700s, when London breweries bearing names such as Whitbread and Truman were between them selling a staggering million barrels of porter a year.

The 19th century saw the development in Burton-on-Trent of a revolutionary light, well-hopped beer – pale ale, from which bitter was eventually born – that proved spectacularly popular with the Victorians: at one stage, a quarter of all the ale produced in Britain was brewed in Burton, largely because its water, rich in gypsum, imparted a particular, much appreciated quality. (Burton’s pre-eminence only ended only when someone worked out how to replicate the chemical composition of the water, a process still known as Burtonisation).

By the time the second world war was over, though, beer was in a pretty sorry state. “The quality was awful,” says Fergus McMullen, whose family have been brewing beer in Hertford since 1827. “They just couldn’t get the ingredients. People were fed up with cloudy pints, they desperately wanted consistency. So that’s what led to artificial carbonisation”. The dreaded Watney’s Red Barrel, first trialled in Britain in 1936, was ubiquitous by the 60s.

Camra was launched in the early 70s, at the height of the Watney’s Red peril, as the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale: “A bit hard to pronounce after four pints,” says Benner. McMullen’s, though, “stuck to our guns”, and now, still family-owned, brews some 9,000 barrels a year of a range that includes its trademark Original AK, a lighter, brighter cask ale “that appeals to lager drinkers”, and the “seriously grown-up” Stronghart, a 7%-strength (most beers are in the 4-6% range) dark ale described by those who know about these things as “liquid Christmas pudding”. The company also owns 134 pubs across the northern Home Counties, which helps.

Fergus, the great-great-great- great-grandson of the company founder, admits to feeling a certain responsibility to his forebears in his efforts to brew the very best real ale he can. He’s convinced the recent revival has been driven by “quality at the point of sale. People are more discerning; they want quality, and they’re prepared to have a taste. It’s all about the cask in the pub.”

He’s sanguine, though, about pub closures, the subject of an ongoing Camra campaign: “Look, bad pubs, non-viable pubs, should close. “They’re unfair on the tenant, unfair on the brewery, unfair on the locals. Good pubs, well-run pubs, in the right place – they’re thriving. We’ve got one, in the middle of a housing estate in Ware, no food, but by God it serves its community and it’s doing brilliantly. We really invest a lot in pubs we think are viable; helping hard-working young entrepreneurs make them work.”

The process of making beer may be relatively simple – add hot water to ground malted barley; extract the resulting sweet liquid or wort; add hops and boil for a bit; add yeast and ferment for a bit; condition in the cask – but the brewing business isn’t always easy.

McMullen’s has in its time survived more than one crisis (one early family member flatly refused to pay crippling death duties and took his case to court, fighting the Inland Revenue long enough and hard enough to be able to save the money to pay them, thereby saving the company from the otherwise certain fate of absorption into some anonymous conglomerate).

Down in Devon, Paul Walker, a former high-flying global pharmaceuticals sales executive who decided to do something else the day he came back from holiday to find 500 emails in his inbox, had to close his six-month-old business down in summer 2009 when the ale suddenly turned cloudy. His initial £50,000 investment more than quadrupled as, with the aid of friends, neighbours, eBay and a very patient bank manager, he all but rebuilt the brewery to get things right.

“I read a lot of books and went on a couple of courses,” he says, “but my real training came from when things were going wrong. That’s how you learn.” Walking round Hunter’s Brewery – essentially two sheds filled with stainless steel on a Devon farm – he explains the factors that will affect the character of an ale: the variety of barley, and how it’s malted (the longer you toast the grain, the darker, smokier, more chocolatey the brew will be); the variety of hops, and when (and how often) you add them; the temperature of the mash and the fermentation; the timings.

Sometimes, though, the best discoveries come by accident. “We were brewing Hunter’s Gold,” Walker recalls, “a lovely, full-bodied golden ale. And we had a bit of a party at the brewery that night. So I came back the next day, and found we hadn’t put enough hopped wort in the fermenter: it was only half full. It had fermented all right, but it wasn’t Hunter’s Gold.”

What Walker had accidentally made was a potent 8% brew with strong malt flavours, a good floral finish, a surprisingly fresh taste and – let’s be honest about this – a kick like a mule. The kind of beer, as Fergus McMullen likes to say, “that you’re probably better off drinking after you’ve mown the lawn, rather than before”. Like McMullen’s Stronghart, Hunter’s Full Bore has just made it through to the finals of the Great British Beer Hunt.

Winning would be a very big deal for both breweries. Sainsbury’s, as Chadwick-Healy points out, sells 87 pints of beer a second. The vast majority of that, obviously, is mass-volume, pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap lager (far too cheap, incidentally, for the likes of Mike Benner, who blames much of the predicament of the British pub on the fact that big supermarkets sell some beers “six, seven, even 10 times cheaper than you can get them in a pub, against maybe twice as cheap when I was young. If you can get it for 50p in the supermarket, you’re going to struggle, frankly, to pay £3 for it in a pub.”)

That argument has never really applied to real ales, which have not traditionally been widely available in supermarkets and for which customers are plainly prepared to pay a proper price. Now, though, fast-growing demand for beers that would scare the pants off a Lagerboy is beginning to change the situation. True, not many supermarkets sell much bottle-conditioned ale, which, with its sediment of yeast, must be handled and poured with care, and is the only kind of bottled beer that purists consider real ale.

But volume is steadily rising. Hunter’s Full Bore, for one, is unashamedly bottle-conditioned. And growing numbers of brewers – including McMullen’s – now sell filtered and bottled versions of their ales that may not be “live”, but taste a hell of lot more real than a can of Tennent’s. Walker readily admits there’s “a lot more profit” in bottles than casks, and Chadwick-Healy reckons off-trade or retail sales of traditional British ales will probably exceed on-trade (pubs) within the next couple of years. The beer revolution, Lagerboy, has only just begun.

link to original http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/29/britons-rediscover-taste-for-beer

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Flickr/ryantron

Want to be more productive and get your focus back? There are no secret tricks here… do one thing at a time. Stop multitasking—it’s just another form of distraction.

Easier said than done, I know.

Recently I sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task, so I thought he’d be a good person to ask.

Here are his tips for staying productive:

1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women).
3. Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
4. Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.
6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day.
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.

Read more: http://www.inc.com/ilya-pozin/7-things-highly-productive-people-do.html

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Written by Mary Rosenbaum

With all the hype surrounding social media, it’s easy to take your eye off the ball of what really drives your business. But as an entrepreneur or small business owner, your top two areas of focus should be your reputation and your brand. It takes a great deal of time to build a strong reputation and very little time to destroy it.

Your brand is made up of more than your products and services. It includes the interaction you have with your customers and echoes your values. Your brand is a reflection of you.

Every experience your customers have becomes a memory with a story attached. Your brand is only as strong as the type of stories people tell. Customers tend to spread stories about two things: what really upsets us, or what makes us really happy.

This past summer I had to do some work on my house and hired several small businesses and service providers to do the job. On a scale of one to 10, none of them would receive a score higher than six, and several fell well below five. Would I recommend them to others? Not in good conscience. Are there stories based on these experiences that I pass along that are less than flattering? Yes.

So what did they do wrong? Here’s the bottom line: The experience of working with them was so unpleasant that it became memorable in a negative way. So in spite of the fact that they ultimately completed the work, the word-of-mouth buzz about my experience was not positive.

But we can learn from their mistakes.

Here are my suggestions for actions you can take to help you maintain a strong brand and a stellar reputation when providing services to customers:

1. Manage expectations and eliminate negative surprises. If you are hired by a client and find yourself over budget, unable to deliver either on time or what is expected, tell the client as quickly as possible.

By managing expectations and keeping them in the loop, you involve them in the process and are able to ask for their input and make them partners in your success.

2. Tell the truth. Once you lose your credibility, customers will never trust you again. Delivering bad news is difficult, but if you are caught in a lie, you risk losing a lot more than if you told the truth.

3. Communicate regularly. Providing clients with regular progress reports affords you more opportunities for developing stronger relationships with them. Returning phone calls in a timely fashion is a give–especially if you have something negative to report. Remember, no news is always worse than bad news.

4. Under promise and over deliver. When pitching your services, make sure your proposals are realistic and the results are attainable. Failing to deliver on a promise because of poorly thought out and researched proposals will not help you build strong and lasting relationships with your customers.

5. Price your work fairly – for them and for you. Ensure that your pricing is in line with your experience and their budgets. This will eliminate feelings of resentment on all sides.

If you communicate and collaborate with integrity and honesty you will feel better about dealing with your customers and they will have a better experience working with you.

Mistakes happen, issues occur, and circumstances change. Unless you take ownership and step up to accept responsibility your brand will diminish in the eyes of those who work with you and your company. And you can bet on it – they will spread the word.

Mary Rosenbaum is a Master Certified Personal Branding Strategist and Career Coach with over 25 years experience as an entrepreneur and career professional and 10 years in business and finance. Mary is a dynamic and passionate coach whose talent is empowering entrepreneurs and careerists to perform at their peak by gaining clarity and more effectively communicating and leveraging their value proposition. For more insight into her work visit her website at http://yourcareerbydesign.com

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Is it possible?

Last week I decided to try to buy only US made products.  It has made me look at my purchasing habits differently.  I skipped the Tecate in favor of a local beer.  Then I was stuck.  It is almost impossible to eat out at a restaurant and eat all US grown.  After dinner while getting gas, again…  Fortunately my truck takes E85. Then later in the evening I went to buy a t-shirt – everything at the store was made in Egypt, Malaysia, Vietnam and China.

I was thinking, why would I buy t-shirt to support other countries when our economy is struggling?

I vow to try and buy as close to my house as possible for a year.

We’ll see what happens, but I am sure I will buy less consumer goods and they will probably be much higher quality – not a bad thing.

How long could you go?

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Writers’ Group member Deb Thornton is a a research analyst with the Mount Pleasant-based Public Interest Institute.

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(Norwalk, CT) – GUINNESS & Co. is proud to announce its nationwide launch of GUINNESS® Black Lager this September. This new beer perfectly combines the refreshing taste of lager with the unique character and flavor of GUINNESS and marks an exciting new addition to the GUINNESS family.
The Guinness Master Brewers have used the finest lager hops, yeast and traditional cold brewing methods, with their signature roasted barley, to create a truly original black lager with a deliciously distinctive flavor .

“With Guinness Black Lager we really wanted to build on all the elements that people love about Guinness. We take immense pride in the quality of our product and ensured that we built on the Guinness legacy when creating this distinctive and refreshing lager. I have no doubt that Guinness and lager fans alike will enjoy this unique tasting new lager,” said Guinness Master Brewer Fergal Murray.

The refreshing and flavorful taste is locked in by the bespoke amber Guinness bottle. The contemporary packaging design combines premium, detailed silver and blue color with hallmark symbols of Guinness’ brewing provenance and heritage. The lager should be chilled and enjoyed responsibly straight from the bottle.

“The U.S. beer market is evolving and we believe this is the right time to introduce a lager to meet consumers’ needs,” said Doug Campbell, Brand Director, GUINNESS. “GUINNESS® Black Lager will appeal to a range of drinkers; those who want a refreshing tasting beer with real character, and our loyal GUINNESS consumers, who want a variety of unique experiences from GUINNESS and a refreshing taste profile for certain occasions.”

Available in 11.2oz bottles (4.5% ABV) at a price comparable to other Premium Imports, GUINNESS Black Lager is now being launched across on and off-premise outlets nationwide and will be supported by television, radio and online advertising, sampling and point of sale materials.

As always, whether enjoying new GUINNESS® Black Lager at a bar with friends, at a restaurant with a meal or at home in front of the game, GUINNESS encourages all consumers to drink responsibly.

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krista lariviere

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http://www.coolbrands.uk.com/

COLUMBIA, Md. – Virgin Mobile FreeFest, the music festival bookended by a crushing week of rain and the 10th anniversary of 9/11, marched merrily on at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Saturday.

The fest entered its sixth year (third as a free event) with all the fixings that only mogul Richard Branson could bring. About 50,000 fans enjoyed a diverse lineup that ranged from indie-pop band Bombay Bicycle Club and high-energy electronica artist Deadmau5 to rapper Big Sean, rocker Patti Smith and headliner Cee Lo Green.

“Virgin is always about what’s new and upcoming — we want the next big thing,” says Ron Faris, director of brand marketing for Virgin Mobile. “We don’t book based on ‘box office,’ but buzz. The festival is very social this year, we monitored the chatter on Facebook and Twitter to find out what people were listening to. We have buzzworthy fans, so we honor buzzworthy bands.”

Your host: Richard Branson stopped by the festivities on his way back from Jamaica, where he was setting up the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship. “I’m just back from Jamaica, and only just got here, so I feel like a bit of a rock star myself,” he says. “I’m a little out of touch with the music that’s popular now, but I make sure that I surround myself with great people who know more than I do.” The Virgin empire began with just one artist in 1970, Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame (the spooky music from 1973′s The Exorcist).

“I always just picked artists that I liked. It’s that simple,” he says. “I signed Genesis, Rolling Stones, Peter Gabriel, just because I took a listen.”

While he didn’t have a hand in picking the artists performing this year, he did take in some tunes from one of the early acts, indie-rock outfit Okkervil River, which brought good old rock ‘n’ roll to the main stage with Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe.

Lots of buzz: After a week of rain, the skies were clear and the air was buzzing with excitement — and bees. An alarming number of them zipped around faces, food vendors and drinks, crawling inside condiment dispensers and drink straws. But by far the biggest buzz of the day was created by a mouse. That is, Deadmau5. “For the under-30 fans, Deadmau5 is the biggest crossover act,” says Faris. “It’s great to see him getting the recognition.”

A smattering of fans took their Deadmau5 love a little further by bringing in their own mouse masks and wearing the stifling contraptions all day.

Dance forest: This year, the electronic music area was the place to be. “We know that electronica is becoming a lot more recognized, so we moved the dance forest to a more central location, made it bigger this year,” Faris says. That was a wise decision. By the time DJ Porter Robinson took to the decks at 1:45 p.m., the forest was packed with frenzied fans dancing with total abandon. Scantily clad teens and college-age kids rolled in the dirt and rubbed themselves against small trees and each other — a scene both horrifying and fascinating to watch. Some fans wore neon war paint on their faces, others wore American flag T-shirts, and others sported clashing neon ensembles. Some carried homemade contraptions to wave around, like a multicolored feather duster on a broomstick or a cardboard robot perched on a stick.

Words of wisdom: A note to future festgoers: Go early. Some of the best acts hit the stage in the first few hours of the day, and this year was no exception. Bombay Bicycle Club brought its infectious fusion of thoughtful indie-pop and folk to a small but enthusiastic group of fans on the main stage. With jangly, lighthearted songs like Lights Out, Words Gone and Ivy & Gold and the breathless pace of rolling, rollicking Evening/Morning, these British newcomers have made a promising start in the USA. “This is our first time in America,” says frontman Jack Steadman.

Backstage, Steadman made an interesting observation of American audiences. “Americans don’t care what people think,” he says. “They dance in circles. It’s really cute.”

Two Door Cinema Club: Based on the number of fans wearing the band’s T-shirts, this indie-rock outfit was one of the day’s hottest acts. The lively group inspired the audience to dance jigs during happy-go-lucky hit Something Good Can Work.

Sexyspins: It’s not just rock stars that can ooze sex appeal. DJs can, too. British DJ Calvin Harris’ tall, slim frame glided from turntable to turntable, raising the energy with a dizzying blend of pop, big beats and house. Later in the day, James Murphy, famous for his turn with LCD Soundsystem, spun for the crowds. He kicked off his set with electrofunk and disco, while the backdrop monitors displayed Warhol-esque images of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara in triplicate, boogieing to the beat.

Patti Smith gets political, ofcourse: As dancers grooved along with Murphy and Che, Patti Smith, wearing a torn white T-shirt and scraggly braids in her hair, ruled the rock roost over on the pavilion stage. The punk legend, whose stage was adorned with a Vietnamese Communist flag and a reggae flag, played a powerful, passionate set with classics like Free Money, Ghost Dance, Land and Because the Night. “We are alive, our life, our blood, our freedom, which we will not let anyone take away under any pretense!” she cried out, before launching into Ghost Dance.

She acknowledged the 10th anniversary of 9/11, drawing cheers from the crowd when she talked about remembering “two buildings, the Iraqi invasion, U.S. soldiers.” She also got plenty of boos: “Remember Johnny Walker Lindh (the American citizen who joined the Taliban), who is rotting in jail because he’s a scapegoat of the Bush administration.” She also dedicated a moving rendition of Pissing In A River to Amy Winehouse, and then launched into an emotional Because the Night. “People have the power! Don’t forget to use your voice,” she roared toward the end of her set.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals burn bright: The Vermont-based rock outfit opened its set with the rock-your-face-off Ah Mary, proving Steadman’s thesis: Americans don’t hold anything back. After slowing it down a bit in Goodbye Kiss and Apologies, Potter and the Nocturnals went full-speed ahead in Oasis and Stop the Bus, ending both songs with enraged jam sessions that showcased Potter’s talented and unabashedly sexy voice and stage presence.

Cut Copy’s crowning glory: As an Australian flag waved in the crowd, the Aussie electronic group hit drums and tapped cowbells. After playing new track Corner of the Sky, singer Dan Whitford asked the crowd, “Are you warmed up yet? Let’s dance!” And so the audience bobbed as Cut Copy messed with guitars and percussion instruments.

TV on the Radio returns: It’s just been a little more than four months since bass player Gerard Smith died of lung cancer at age 34, but the indie rockers were enthusiastic for their 70-minute set, which featured fan favorites Staring at the Sun and Wolf Like Me. The set was a fine balance of bombastic tunes like Halfway Home and sizzling builds like Will Do.

Cee Lo keeps it simple: The craziest thing about Cee Lo Green’s set was that he wasn’t dressed all crazy (but he did sing Crazy). His hot all-female band helped navigate Green through his solo singles, old Gnarls Barkley songs and some covers, including an unexpected Rock the Casbah. Green served as his own hype man, telling the crowd to “Say yeah!”

The Black Keys round out the night: The duo had no trouble filling the pavilion tent with people and music. After playing what seemed like a full set and saying goodnight, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney poured their guts into I Got Mine, with drummer Carney attacking his kit with vengeance. The group left — and then made a surprise encore appearance. Chants of “Black Keys, Black Keys” corresponded with the group’s LED-lit band name before the two ended with Your Touch and the stage was flooded with light.

Closing the night: Canadian electronic/house producer Deadmau5 didn’t disappoint. His light show was accessorized with a glowing Ferris wheel and a Mau5head, which featured samples from Elton John’s Tiny Dancer. Deadmau5′s cube —which many have learned can be best viewed atop a pair of shoulders — showed streaming words and geometric shapes as Deadmau5 kept mixing for the longest set of the day.

Read More. http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/story/2011-09-11/virgin-freefest/50361826/1

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Image via Wikipedia

With the brand firmly rooted in Pop Culture, Fred Perry once again shows its style by showcasing some of the hottest emerging bands to come out of the UK in their Subculture Series. The series is a collection of intimate performances shot at the Dot-To-Dot Festival that features some of the hottest new names in British music including The Joy Formidable, NME Awards Nominee for “best new band” Hurts, Morning Parade and much more. The Subculture Series have been featured by tastemakers who are in the know such as NME, Artrocker, Mojo and as seen in Vogue!

During the upcoming months, Fred Perry will be presenting the Subculture Series as well as national premiere and exclusives to the US that will introduce some new talent along with artists who are already loved here such as …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, We Are Scientists and The Naked and Famous.

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By: Elinor Mills 

STANFORD, Calif.–Life was so simple before the Internet came along.

We could live our lives in relative obscurity, renting porn at the video store, checking out books on VD at the library, and consorting with all sorts of miscreants at dive bars, or worse, Celine Dion concerts.

Now, our moves, thoughts, transactions, and romantic tendencies are out on the Internet for everyone to see. You’re in a silly costume at a party in a Facebook photo when you called in sick from work. Now you are captured on Google Maps Street View climbing over a neighbor’s fence. And then there was that Web search you did with the keywords “torture” and “kittens.”

Where does it stop? Should it stop? Do we even care?

“A total surveillance is not only inevitable and irreversible, but also irresistible,” Jeff Jonas, distinguished engineer and chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, said during a panel on surveillance at a Legal Futures Conference here on Saturday.

For example, imagine how convenient it would be to have RFID chips embedded in sunglasses so you could find them easily, Jonas said.

Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, acknowledged that she finds the location-based technology in her iPhone very convenient when she’s trying to avoid traffic congestion. But she doesn’t want the government to be able to use that technology to track her down.

The fact that all sorts of data about each of us is being gathered and is archived, searchable, and can be compiled to create profiles about each of us is what makes digital privacy intrusions so much scarier than pre-Internet life, she said.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, warned of “privacy chernobyls,” which he described as “new threats to privacy that have the potential to transform society in troubling ways.”

Examples are Facebook revealing more about its members than they care to have revealed and tracking their purchases without consent, as well as AOL inadvertently exposing search terms of 650,000 people in 2006. “That was one of the most invasive offenses against privacy I can imagine,” Rosen said.

During the question-and-answer session, an audience member made some interesting points. First, there don’t seem to be the economic incentives to do surveillance in the offline world as there are in the online world. Second, many people seem to be more worried about privacy breaches that expose embarrassing things about them than they are about things like location-based data that enable geographically related ads.

The perspective is different in other countries, Rosen said. Americans are, in general, concerned with preventing terrorism, while Europeans are concerned with protecting their individual privacy, he said. For example, the French will bare their breasts but not their salaries and mortgages, and the reverse is true in the U.S. “My fear is that the cultural differences will make thoughtful regulation difficult,” Rosen said.

Government regulation is necessary to ensure that consumers’ privacy is adequately protected online, Granick and Rosen said. Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School, said the Fourth Amendment can be applied to the online world in a way that balances individual rights with law enforcement needs.

Eben Moglen, executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke up from the audience and urged people to protect their privacy themselves using technology. Laser pointers can thwart video cameras, and strong public key encryption technology can protect communications, he said.

“Facebook should be a bunch of free Web apps on everybody’s personal server,” Moglen said. “You have to stop thinking that the law is the stronger form of social control than the technology.”

However, encryption use isn’t widespread and won’t be anytime soon, Granick pointed out. “It has to be easy enough, distributed enough that people will use it, whether or not they care about the issue.”

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9889255-7.html#ixzz1Y3BswGDb

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Beal spoke on the topic of online reputation management at the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo in San Francisco. (The next SES conference in the U.S. will be in Chicago, Nov. 14-18). Beal shared the following tips during his session, and I’ve included a few additional tips and tricks I’ve learned in my SEO and social media consulting. (While many of these tips mention Google, they usually apply to Bing and other search engines as well.)

10 Online Reputation Management Tips

1. Optimize important pages on your site with your company’s name.

Without forcing it, try to optimize several pages on your site with your most important search phrase: your company name, Beal advises. Mention your company name on pages that describe your products or services, for instance. Make sure you have a page optimized with the name of your CEO or other top officials as well.

Here’s why: Google is likely to see your site as the ultimate authority on your company, and authoritativeness is an important signal Google uses when ranking content. With proper keyword optimization, your content will therefore surface to the top of search results. On the flip side, with proper optimization you’ll have a better chance of pushing down less-positive content that mentions your company by name.

Usually on About Us or other pages, a company (or an individual) will refer to its name first and on later references, use “we” and “us.” A better strategy is to optimize the text with your company’s name (without overdoing it), said Beal.

2. Use anchor text to boost positive content about you on other sites.

Anchor text is a hyperlinked word or phrase such as SEO Tips that, when clicked, whisks you away to another Web page. The search engines use anchor text as a signal to determine the relevancy of the page being linked to.

For example, if a lot of pages on various sites point to the home page of your San Francisco career counseling website, those links will help your home page rank highly for the phrase San Francisco career counseling .

Beal recommends putting the power of anchor text to work for your own site as a preventive reputation management measure. Let’s say your business name is Smith and Jones. A well-known blogger gives your business some love in a recent post. Super. Write about the blogger’s positive mention on your own site with an anchor text link to that blog post. You’d write something like: “This cool blogger just gave Smith and Jones some love on his site; check it out,” with the phrase Smith and Jones hyperlinked to the favorable blog post.

3. Strip personalization out of your search results.

When you perform a Google query, Google is serving you results based on what it knows about you: your location, the content that people in your social network have shared, and so on. In other words, what you see is unlikely to be exactly identical to what a potential customer might see when Googling you. To minimize the effects of personalization, go to Google.com and perform your keyword search. On the first page of results, go to the URL in your browser’s address bar. At the very end of the URL, type the following:

&pws=0

That simple string of characters will remove most (but probably not all) personalization. By the way, that’s a zero at the end of the string, not an O.

4. Audit your search results every month.

Google your company name once a month, Beal suggests. And even though the vast majority of search engine users don’t look past the first page of results, that’s exactly what you should do. Keep an eye out for any content on the second or third page of results that might be negative content, because that content might work its way to the first page. Consider keeping a record of what you find in a spreadsheet, with columns for the URL, page title, status of the page (do you own it, control it, or have some influence over it?), and the sentiment (is it positive, negative or neutral?)

5. Find something negative? Contact the creator of the content.

If you do spot something negative on the horizon, or on the first page, contact the blogger, reviewer or other person who created the negative content. See what you can do to switch their sentiment to positive. If it’s a no go, leave a comment (if that’s an option) explaining your side of the story and the efforts you’ve taken to satisfy the customer. Always be humble and respectful; sounding arrogant or defensive will only underscore the negative content you’re trying to counteract.

6. Put your other domains to use.

When you bought your company’s .com domain name, did you also buy its .info, .net, and .org domain names? If so, consider creating new sites to use those domains (rather than just redirecting them to your .com landing page). This will help you populate the top search results with more content you control, because search engines place a lot of weight on words in URLs.

For instance, if your business does charitable work, build a small site (a page or two or maybe a blog) highlighting that work, Beal advises. Use your .org domain for this site. You should also consider buying additional URLs with your company name in them, such as yourcompanynamecareers.com, for a page that’s all about working for your company.

7. Don’t forget subdomains.

“Subdomains rock,” says Beal. “The search engines treat them as separate entities that share the authority of your top-level domain.” So if you have a page about a particular product, you might use a URL that follows this formula: productname.yourcompanyname.com.

But don’t overdo it. If you have more than three subdomains, Google may not consider them when ranking for your company name, Beal adds. Excessive subdomains might also be reported to the search engine as spam, triggering a manual review that can result in getting penalized in the rankings. The rule of thumb: Make sure all content on your subdomains serves a purpose, can legitimately stand alone, and are not duplicates of content you’ve published elsewhere.

8. Blogging platforms are useful, too.

If you need to create new content in a hurry to potentially push down negative content, set up a blog on WordPress.com, Blogger.com, or other easy-to-use blog platforms. Make sure to put your company name in the URL, so that it reads yourcompanyname.wordpress.com or yourcompanyname.blogspot.com, for WordPress.com and Blogger, respectively.

Blogger.com, which Google owns, may give you a slight edge in the search results, Beal says. “I’ve created a Blogger.com blog for a CEO who wanted to test blogging, and within 20 minutes, the blog ranked in the top results for the CEO’s name,” he adds.

9. Optimize your social media channels.

Your Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube profiles as well as your Facebook Page should be optimized with your company name. If your Facebook Page has at least 25 fans, you can change its URL to a custom URL that contains your company name, Beal says.

You can also create a customized LinkedIn URL. And, as mentioned earlier, make sure to talk about yourself or your company name in the third person on LinkedIn; it can help push your LinkedIn profile up in Google search results for your name.

10. Pay attention to the Wikipedia page about your company.

Wikipedia entries about companies almost always rank highly. To see how it works in action, just Google the names of a few well-known companies. In most cases, you won’t have to look further than the first five search results to find its Wikipedia entry.

Wikipedia entries are tricky because anyone can edit them; that’s the whole concept behind Wikipedia. So if your company doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, you shouldn’t automatically create one.

For starters, creating your own page violates the “neutral point of view” spirit of Wikipedia. Worse, someone could come along later and post unflattering information about your company on its Wikipedia page. As long as that information is backed by a credible online source, such as a newspaper article, there’s nothing you can do about it. (Sure, you could edit it out, but now you’re really playing with fire; Wikipedians don’t take kindly to such tactics.)

If you decide to create a Wikipedia entry about your company, do so carefully. Ask a neutral, established Wikipedia editor to write it. Make sure it’s written in a neutral point of view. Pay attention to Wikipedia’s notability requirement: Clearly explain why your company is noteworthy and back it up with credible online sources.

Online Reputation Wrap Up

There are plenty of other things you can do to protect your online reputation management: set up a Flickr account optimized with your company name, ask your business partners to post an optimized profile about your company on their site, and so on.

The important point to remember is that the top 10 Google results can change from day to day, if not hour to hour. Take the necessary measures now to make sure you own or influence as much of those top 10 results as you can while keeping an eye out on the second and third page results.

James A. Martin is an SEO and social media consultant and blogger. You can follow him on Twitter.

link to original http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/news/article.php/11520_3939141_2/Online-Reputation-Management-Top-10-Tips-for-Small-Business.htm

Written by Michael Griffen

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
Follow Michael Griffin on Twitter.

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Rarely is the Colombian city of Cartagena mentioned without reference to its rich Spanish colonial history. Most of the hotels in town make as much as they can of this heritage, and the architecture it left behind. And so, in its way, does the Tcherassi Hotel + Spa — but anyone expecting a pure nostalgia trip is likely to be surprised by what they find. Not disappointed, mind — the house’s old colonial bones are still very much in place, but the owner, fashion designer Silvia Tcherassi, has made some pretty unmissable additions.

It’s rare to find a hotel whose period detailing and contemporary finishes manage to coexist in such harmony. Perhaps the key is that it’s not exactly subtle — the unfinished brick and stone walls are unapologetically rough, while the fabrics and finishes are flamboyantly luxe. And it probably helps to work with such a small canvas; with just seven rooms and suites there’s no space for Ms. Tcherassi to repeat herself.

The fact that the restaurant seats more guests than the hotel sleeps ought to give you an idea of what sort of place this is — the upper floor, where the guest rooms are, may be quiet and intimate, but the Tcherassi isn’t shy of a bit of attention. And it’ll get plenty of it — there’s nothing like it anywhere else in Cartagena, that’s for sure.

Tcherassi Hotel + Spa

Calle del Sargento Mayor, No 6-21, Cartagena , Colombia

see tablet hotel  site – http://www.tablethotels.com/Tcherassi-Hotel-Spa/Cartagena-Hotels-Colombia/109551

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Cricketer Chris Cairns has taken legal action after claiming to have been defamed by comments posted on Twitter. Photograph: Matthew Lewis/Getty Images

The growth of social networking sites has seen the number of defamation cases involving online content more than double in the 12 months to June, new research has found.

The number of reported defamation court cases in the UK in which the subject was allegedly defamed on blogs or on social media jumped from seven to 16 in the year to May 31 2011, according to research from legal information specialists Sweet & Maxwell.

Some of the 16 cases have been settled, the research indicates and only one arose from an online story produced by a newspaper publisher. This was the successful action brought against Express Newspapers in July last year for a 2009 online article in which untrue allegations of support for Hamas and terrorism by the charity Interpal were made.

None of the cases – which include the case being brought by New Zealand cricketer Chris Cairns over comments posed on Twitter by former Indian Premier League (IPL) commissioner Lalit Modi in the high court – involve established media companies.

Barrister and media specialist at Addleshaw Goddard LLP, Korieh Duodu, said the increase was due to the rise of blogging and social networking sites where material is not being checked.

“So much material on the internet is now written by non-professionals without any of the fact-checking that should take place within traditional media organisations,” Duodu said.

Duodu, co-author of the latest edition of Defamation: Law, Procedure and Practice, added: “Social media tools have over a billion users worldwide and are growing rapidly in popularity. Nevertheless, they can present a huge problem for individuals and corporates trying to protect their reputations from harmful user-generated content.

“There is certainly a need for greater accountability of the providers of user-generated content; a need to tighten the regulatory framework within which they operate.”

The research also reveals a big drop in reported defamation cases involving celebrities, down 59% from 22 in 2009/10 to just nine in 2010/11. It appears that celebrities are increasingly relying on privacy law to prevent potentially damaging stories from even being published.

“With injunctions becoming ever more popular in recent years, many celebrities are now utilising them to prevent stories gaining wider traction in the media,” said Duodu.

“The increased use of anonymity orders in privacy claims has enabled well-known individuals to prevent anything being published at all. This will in some cases prevent the need for the individual to sue for libel after the event.”

In addition, the research reveals that more businesses are now suing for defamation in order to protect their reputation, with an increase from five cases in 2009/10, to 16 cases in 2010/11.

With businesses under increasing financial pressure, many are increasingly using litigation in order to protect their reputation.

There was a small overall increase in reported defamation cases in the last year, up 4% to 86 compared with 83 cases the year before.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.

See original story  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/26/defamation-cases-twitter-blogs

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Book: Icons of Men’s Style by Josh Sims

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Before

After

Studying the challenges of urban life in the world’s most high profile cities is a serious endeavor, too often taken-on in the ivory towers of academia, far removed from the communities that these exercises are meant to improve.

But a new, innovative mobile ‘laboratory’ is bringing this dialogue to the street level, first in New York City, where it is providing an invaluable platform for interaction and discussion between citizens, design and planning professionals, educators, and administrators on the theme of Confronting Comfort, which explores how a city can be more responsive to people’s needs.

See more from the first BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City

It’s one part think-tank, one part community centre, one part public forum, launched by two of the world’s most recognizable and credible brands and cultural benefactors, BMW and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, who hope that the information gathered and lessons learned at the lab will eventually benefit cities across the globe.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab covers a lot of ground. Berlin and Mumbai are the next stops on the lab’s nine-city world tour, with subsequent destinations to be determined. The incredible facility itself is a study in innovative architecture, designed by Japanese firm Atelier Bow Wow as a completely self-contained, collapsible environment that can be shipped anywhere in the world and reassembled. But more ambitious than its itinerary, is the lab’s planned program in each of its destinations.

In just over 10 weeks in New York’s East Village, the space will host over 100 free events, ‘designed to spark curiosity and interaction’. Everything from public discussions on ‘finding the balance between notions of individual and collective comfort’ to public talks by leading architects, innovators and entrepreneurs to ‘Urbanology‘ a live role-play game that enlists locals as catalysts for change in education, housing and health care institutions to meet the specific needs of their communities. The breadth and depth of the program is impressive, and available in it’s entirety on the BMW Guggenheim Lab website, and will be covered on its dedicated blog and on major social networks as the laboratory travels around the world.

Somehow the entire schedule works perfectly within Atelier Bow Wow’s elegant metal box, which occupies a narrow, block-through parcel and a beautiful public garden space along bustling Houston Street. Sharing the site is a decidedly less innovative, though welcome wooden structure, where beloved Brooklyn restaurant Roberta’s serves the lab’s visitors their famous fare — and without the schlep to Bushwick.

See original article http://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/bmw-guggenheim-lab-new-york/5391

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Facebook is simplifying privacy controls for posts.

Didn’t mean for your boss to see a picture of you on the beach that day you called in sick? Maybe you hadn’t meant for the police to know you were mobilizing your friends to join a public protest? Had you bargained on your high school principal seeing Facebook photographs that they considered so risqué they kicked you off the cheerleading squad?

Sharing online, as social media enthusiasts are learning, can have all sorts of unintended consequences offline.

Now Facebook says it wants to help you get a better grip on what you share. On Tuesday the company revealed changes to its privacy settings that it says are designed to more clearly show who knows what about your life on the Internet. The changes will take effect Thursday.

Every time you post a picture, update your status or add any other content to your Facebook page, you will be able to more easily specify who can see it: friends, everyone on the Internet, or a customized group. These will be indicated by icons that replace the current, more complicated padlock menu.

What is now called “everyone” in those settings will instead be called “public.” Facebook executives say they want to dispel any doubts about what the setting means. If you click “public,” that means anyone who is online can see it, including perfect strangers – or, worse, parents, prospective employers and your ex-wife’s divorce lawyers.

Similar settings will now appear next to other material you have posted, like your work history or photo albums, so you will no longer need to click to pages full of privacy options to change them.

Chris Cox, vice president for product at Facebook, put it this way: “We want to make this stuff unmistakably clear.”

No doubt the company also wants to diminish the possibility of legislation, investigation or litigation stemming from complicated or confusing privacy settings. And with mounting competition from other social networking sites, namely Google+, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications to different sets of friends and acquaintances, Facebook is also keen to keep its customers’ trust.

“Your profile should feel like your home on the Web,” the company said in a blog post. “You should never feel like stuff appears there that you don’t want, and you shouldn’t ever wonder who can see anything that shows up there.”

That includes tagged pictures. The site will now let you approve every picture in which you are tagged before it appears on your profile page. No longer will an unflattering or compromising photograph of you show up there without your consent, though the publisher of the photograph can still post it on his or her own page.

The changes point to some of the company’s growing pains, in which mass appeal can sometimes be a bit of a liability. Facebook is used today by 750 million people all over the world, with varying degrees of knowledge about what it means to have a life online. Company officials say they hope the latest changes will demystify privacy settings and ensure that Facebook users are never “surprised,” as Mr. Cox put it, by what others can see about them.

“We need to offer fine granularity in order to be a universally usable tool,” he added. With the new changes, “it’s more visual and prominent who the audience is.”

Indeed, company officials say feedback from users suggested that pictures work better than words. So now, icons help you select who can see what. “Public” is represented by a globe; “friends” by a pair of heads.

Whether users will find the changes more inviting or simpler remains to be seen -– as does whether they will opt to be more or less private. Facebook declined to share statistics on its users’ current privacy settings.

See original story http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/facebook-aims-to-simplify-privacy-settings/

Related articles

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• What Facebook’s New Privacy Settings Mean For You (blogs.wsj.com)
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• Facebook’s Updated Privacy Settings (beast4romtheeast.wordpress.com)

Monocle is fresh-faced, spruced up and ready for the new term with (its) back-to-school September issue. Our network of writers, illustrators and photographers brings you the innovators, designers and businesses in the world of education and beyond, and we find out what’s top of the class, in everything from school architecture to text-book publishing.

http://www.monocle.com/46_Promo/

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A BBC crowd-sourcing survey into the state of mobile Britain suggests that 3G has some way to go before it offers comprehensive coverage across the UK.

Despite operator claims of 90% or more 3G coverage, there are still many notspots, including in major towns and cities, according to the map.

Those testers able to receive a data connection only got a 3G signal 75% of the time.

For nearly a quarter of the time they had to rely on older 2G technology.

2G typically offers around one tenth the speed of 3G “mobile broadband”.

Mobile coverage has become a huge issue as people rely increasingly on their smartphones to surf the web and send email as well as making phone calls.

Last month the BBC invited people to download an app that would collate the 3G coverage their Android handsets were getting.

The experiment aimed to offer a snapshot of coverage.

Industry first

44,600 volunteers took part, providing testing firm Epitiro with some 1.7 million hours worth of data from around the UK.

“The BBC has undertaken a crowd-sourcing survey that is well beyond any scale seen by the mobile industry in this country or any other,” said Gavin John, chief executive of Epitiro.

“Over 44,000 volunteers from the Shetland Islands to the Isles of Scilly participated with 42 million locations tested from every county in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.”

“For the first time consumers have the means to see 3G coverage precisely where they live, work and travel,” he added.

Operators too were broadly pleased by the initiative.

O2 said it “welcomed the crowd sourcing experiment”, but added that more detail – for example signal quality – would have been useful.

“The issue of coverage is no longer about covering the land mass to meet a percentage target, but about depth and quality of experience,” said an O2 spokesman.

“The results don’t show the ‘experience’ on each network – for example, speed or the ability to hold a connection. Simply having coverage does not guarantee a good service.”

Everything Everywhere – the parent company of Orange and T-Mobile – said it “was a step in the right direction” for offering consumers transparent information about coverage.

“It is a little too early to tell how much it tallies with our own maps or how we would use the information,” said James Hattam, director of service management at Everything Everywhere.

Three was concerned that the picture painted by the map was driven as much by the number of people from each operator taking part as by actual coverage.

“Three has the UK’s largest 3G network, but as a newer operator with fewer customers, is necessarily less well represented on this map at a local level,” said Phil Sheppard, director of network strategy at Three UK.

No service

Analysis Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent

If our 3G survey has shown anything it’s this – for many thousands of people the quality of their mobile phone signal is of great importance and they are thirsty for more information.

What’s striking is that while overall coverage is pretty good, it’s still far more patchy than the maps provided by the mobile operators would suggest.

My own experience this week shows that in the centre of a major city, on a major inter-city rail route, in a village in rural Oxfordshire, you cannot rely on getting a good 3G signal.

We know the mobile networks – and Ofcom – will be studying the map with interest. With the 4G auction coming up next year, the challenge for the mobile industry and the regulator is to show that they can improve speeds across the network while ensuring that those people who are in notspots now are not left even further behind in the future

The results suggest that the performance of different operators varies enormously from region to region.

Windsor Holden, an analyst with Juniper Research, homed in on West Sussex.

“There are substantial differences in Chichester where, for example, O2 has poor coverage to the west while Vodafone has issues in the east,” said Mr Holden.

“There is probably a correlation to their base station configurations. When these networks were rolled out there was not the attention paid to planning and so networks aren’t as efficient as they should be.”

The map underlines the need for people signing up to mobile broadband to research coverage in their local area, according to Michael Phillips of Broadbandchoices.co.uk.

He warned that the quality of 3G data services across the UK still varied widely.

“Mobile broadband swings between where fixed broadband was from 1998 to 2003, but many people are expecting the same speeds for their smartphones as they get at home,” he said.

“The reality is that 3G is a good service in major cities but it is failing to deliver on trains and in the countryside.”

Among the worst places for mobile coverage are the UK’s road and rail networks.

“A whole stretch of the A3 has little or no coverage and there are substantial blackspots when people are travelling,” said Juniper Research’s Windsor Holden.

“Mobile’s key advantage is that you should be able to use it anytime and anywhere and that is not the case at the moment. There is no reason why coverage could not be improved in these areas,” he said.

See original story http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14574816?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

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• BBC crowdsourced mobile map: A bit quirky, but useful (go.theregister.com)
• Action urged on mobile notspots (bbc.co.uk)
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Written by Matthew Sparkes

Practical and sustainable, it’s an ideal material for frames, but bamboo may take a while to become the next big thing

Racing bike made from bamboo by Craig Calfee. Photograph: PR

The panda jokes are now a long way from my mind. I’m standing astride a bike crafted from an armful of bamboo cane, about to push out into rush-hour traffic.

As a material for a bicycle frame, it makes more sense than it sounds. In Asian countries it’s often used as scaffolding, and even to reinforce concrete, so it’s certainly strong. But the important part is that it’s also incredibly springy.

Next time you’re on your bike, find somewhere away from traffic and look down at your frame when you set off. Most people don’t realise that bikes are not rigid, they warp and bend slightly when you ride them. The largest of my bikes flexes so much when I corner hard that I can actually feel it distort underneath me.

As well as such practicality, bamboo offers sustainability – so long as it’s done right. Some bamboo production is far from green, causing biodiversity problems and creating toxic dioxins from treatment with chlorine.

The cane used here, though, is reportedly grown responsibly in Taiwan’s Yushan national park, and hand-picked before being shipped to bike manufacturer Calfee’s California headquarters. It’s also smoked and heat treated, rather than chemically hardened.

There are definite environmental benefits to using bamboo as a raw material: it grows extremely quickly, requires minimal pesticides and water and is a prolific producer of oxygen.

So, why not build bikes from it, rather than more energy-intensive steel or carbon?

Well, people have. In fact, look up English patent number 8274, filed in 1894, and you’ll see that it’s far from a new idea. It’s just never taken off.

Craig Calfee intends to change all that. He was one of the early pioneers of carbon fibre bikes, and he’s been experimenting with bamboo since 2005. He now builds high-end bamboo racing, mountain and cargo bikes, and is working on bringing cheap and simple utility bikes to Africa. Because of the climate there, the raw material grows well, and local people could be trained to produce the frames themselves.

It’s one of Calfee’s racing bikes I’m riding today, all £3,000 of it (available in the UK via Eco Age). Worryingly, it’s incredibly light and looks fragile, but it does come with a 10-year guarantee.

So, what does it feel like to ride?

When you played with a bamboo cane as a child, and swished it through the air, it felt like energy incarnate. That’s a little how this bike feels to ride.

When I first sprint off, nothing happens for a split second, just like when you swish that bamboo cane. Then, almost before you’ve noticed, it springs ahead as though it has more energy than you’ve put in. It rivals carbon, steel, anything I’ve ridden.

It’s also comfortable. But not like a big, heavy commuter bike with large, bouncy tires. It just soaks up the bumps, with no lolling around.

The incredible part of this bike is that this feel comes from something that grows naturally – technically, it’s a grass. It’s simply harvested and crafted in a workshop. It’s not a hi-tech carbon fibre bike which has been moulded, layered, glued, baked and finished. Even the joints are made of natural hemp.

But will it become the next big material for bike builders? In the developing world it makes perfect sense, but it will be a big task to oust carbon fibre in the west. It took almost a decade for riders to trust that material, and bamboo somehow feels even more alien than that did. Maybe everyone should have a test-ride on Calfee’s bike.

See story http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/22/bamboo-bike

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The shaky economy and sickly housing market have prompted some parents to engage in risky financial behavior: raiding their retirement savings to pay their children’s college tuition.

“Because of the loss of home equity and the tighter credit market, families are eyeing their retirement funds for other uses,” says Kent Allison, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ financial education practice. But that, say financial planners, is not a good move because:

•There are a number of ways to fund a college education, such as loans, scholarships and financial aid. Saving for retirement should be a bigger priority.

•There are potential penalties for tapping a 401(k) retirement plan. You are subject to income tax and a 10% early-withdrawal penalty if you withdraw money from the plan before you are 59½. And halting 401(k) contributions means losing the tax benefits and company match.

Yet last year the number of parents who withdrew or took a loan from their 401(k) plans more than doubled, to 7.4% from 3.4% in 2009, according to a recent Sallie Mae and Gallup study.

“It is a shocking statistic,” says Sarah Ducich, senior vice president of public policy at Sallie Mae, the USA’s leading provider of student loans.

People are willing to go to extreme measures because they value a college education so highly, Ducich says. Among parents who are planning for their children’s college, 24% say that they tap their retirement accounts. And that doesn’t reflect people who reduce or halt retirement contributions. “Saving for college can occupy more of your life than retirement,” she says. “But you are digging yourself in a hole.”

Tough decisions

Last October, Randy Nelms and his wife, Leigh Anne, stopped putting money into his 401(k) plan, partly because of college tuition bills for their sons, Mitchell, 19, who will be a sophomore, and Jordan, 17, who just graduated from high school. “You do have to make some decisions,” says Nelms, who lives in Franklin, Tenn. “And for the moment, you might unplug your 401(k).”

Families don’t all say that they will raid their retirement savings, but many say that they will have to delay retirement to pay for college, says Eric Greenberg, director of Greenberg Educational Group in New York City.

Cameron and Jodi Beattie, who live near St. Louis, have a daughter, 8, and son, 3, and say they already have had long discussions about how they will pay for college and retirement. Because they waited until later in life to have children, they can’t afford both — especially after watching their home’s value plunge and big losses in stocks drain their retirement savings. The couple say they don’t know what their future will be like or if they can rely on Social Security. “We have saved some money for college, but we had to stop and put it towards retirement,” says Cameron, 43, a construction company project manager. “We will be in our late 50s when our kids are in college. We hope things turn around and that we will be able to help with college.”

The home used to be a piggy bank, but the collapse of the housing market changed that: People with no home equity to tap can’t get home equity loans to pay for college, and without that option, many families are eyeing their retirement savings, Allison says.

Parents are often willing to put their children’s needs before their own. “If you look at human behavior, they are going to address the issue of concern that is most immediate,” says Jean Setzfand, financial security director at AARP.

Ken White, and his wife, Joy Carlson, who live near Cincinnati, are both 56 and have a daughter who is a high school senior and a son who is a freshman. Over the years, the parents have focused on funding their retirement plans instead of a college fund. But they plan to pay for at least half of college. “There is no way I want to burden my kids when they graduate,” White says. “Instead of taking money out of the 401(k) plan, we’ll probably be forced to put less money in.”

Even parents who stashed money in a 529 plan or savings account when their kids were young may not be able to handle the cost of college.

Rising costs

The total annual cost to attend a public four-year college in 2010 averaged about $16,000, the College Board says, up 6.1% from 2009. A private non-profit four-year college averaged about $37,000, up 4.3% from 2009. “Colleges have increased tuition and room and board much faster than the actual inflation rate,” says Nelms, 52, who works for Farm Bureau Insurance of Tennessee. “I don’t know if you can save enough for it.”

Parents don’t want to saddle their children with debt. But retirement savings should be a last resort, if used at all, Setzfand says. A big reason is students have many ways to borrow money, and retirees don’t. “There will be more opportunities to get through college than there are loans to live on in retirement,” says Cameron Beattie.

Tapping retirement savings is too often a knee-jerk reaction, as parents don’t take time to consider all of their options, Greenberg says. On top of college loans and a variety of merit scholarships and grants, there are other alternatives. High school graduates can take a year off to work and save money before going to college, he says, as long as it can help them save money and make them stand out in the application process.

Some parents may decide that their child should spend the first two years at a lower-cost college and then transfer to a higher-cost school. “My concern is that it is not an easy way to start college,” Greenberg says. “The transfer process has become increasingly competitive.”

Parents may have to use several different options. Nelms is stopping his 401(k) contributions to help pay for college, and both his sons will spend summers working full time. And both will receive the Tennessee Hope Scholarship, as well as student loans and the tuition-assistance program that Nelms gets from his employer.

Nelms hopes to resume contributing to his 401(k) this summer. Because he is 52 and wife Leigh Anne is 51, they know that they also have to focus on their golden years. “With 75 million Baby Boomers heading towards retirement, we all have a concern of, ‘Will we have enough to live on and enjoy the retirement years?’” he says.

See original article http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/retirement/story/2011-08-22/Paying-for-your-kids-college-vs-your-own-retirement/50095428/1

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Written by By Ken Doctor

We’ve seen lots of consternation over numbers recently. Take Groupon’s foggy (more opaque than fuzzy) math now being dissected by the SEC. Dissatisfied with all the usual metrics-for-investors the business world has produced, it decided to create its own: ”adjusted consolidated segment operating income,” or adjusted CSOI.

The excellent WSJ piece, by Shayndi Raice and Nick Wingfield, lays it out well, though it’s a pinch-yourself, “Is-this-The-Onion?” kind of story. As one portfolio manager said, ”In essence, Groupon is asking investors to look at their profit before any expenses.”

In June, we read the Triumph of Charts over commonsense, with the Huffington Post surpassing The New York Times in unique visitors and the UK’s Mail Online now the second most-read site in the galaxy. I remember the good old days when it was hard to put up a chart on the web. Now, it’s so easy, anyone and everyone is doing it. Too often, it’s form before facts of consequence. Too often, charts feed delicious, SEO’able headlines that drive incredible traffic…that put some sites high up on the charts. It’s quite a circle, though lacking virtue.

Others (check out Steve Myers’ smart Poynter piece) have pointed out fallacies in the NYT/HuffPo comparisons. Let’s add to them with a look at the newsonomics of ARPU, or average revenue per unique visitor. It’s a great benchmarking metric, long used by telcos and in the cable TV industry, and one being increasingly used, though not publicly, in the digital news industry. In addition, it’s a revealing number when we look at such players as HuffPo, the Daily Mail, and NYTimes.com.

ARPU basically says: Don’t tell me how many customers you have; tell me how much money you are making on each of them. While it’s not the only number anyone wants to use to run a digital business, it’s a big piece of the puzzle — especially as we compare like companies to each other.

Let’s look at the ARPU of traffic. I’ve used full-year 2010 data, the cleanest available, and extrapolated where necessary.

For NYTimes.com, I’m estimating digital ad revenues of $170M in 2010. That’s 80 percent of total reported digital revenues for the Times News Media group overall. The Times represents just under 70 percent of total company revenues, and, clearly, the Times itself is driving more digital revenue, proportionally, than the smaller papers in the company. So 80 percent should be close.

In December 2010, comScore reported 48 million global uniques for the Times. So each unique would be worth $3.54 for the Times for the year. (Of course, uniques vary by month, and domestic uniques — 32 million or so — are worth more than non-domestic.)

For the same month, comScore reported 31 million global uniques for the Huffington Post. Most 2010 revenue estimates for HuffPo come in at about $30 million. So, in 2010, each HuffPo unique would be worth 96 cents.

Let’s take two supposed competitors in the UK, both in the news business, both selling advertising but attracting quite different audiences.

The Guardian took in £37.5 million in digital revenue in 2010. Using the December ABCe number of 39 million uniques, each unique was worth about £.96, or $1.53 at today’s exchange rates.

For the Mail, I extrapolate, from its reports, about £16 million in digital revenue for last year. Using the March (aligning with its reporting period) ABCe unique number of 66 million, I figure each unique visitor is worth about £.24, or 38 American cents to the Mail.

If close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.

Why the differential? Reasons run a wide course. Take your pick from:

• “Premium” brands get higher rates than non-premium ones.
• Legacy sales forces are better at leveraging bigger buys than newer sales forces.
• Advertisers believe they get better results from the Times and the Guardian.
• The Guardian and The New York Times are driving more pageviews per unique visitor than the Huffington Post and Mail Online — both of which may have mastered search engine optimization and search engine marketing to tilt the unique numbers in their favor. The more pageviews, the more chance for monetization, and, thus, more revenue. Fly-bys are a huge part of everyone’s traffic (probably 60-70 percent of New York Times and Guardian traffic); they may be an even huger part of HuffPo’s and Mail Online’s.

(As another comparison to our news calculations, it’s intriguing to run the numbers for Groupon and Twitter. Twitter has about 139 million uniques (May, 2011) and maybe revenues of $150 million this year, or $1.07 ARPU. Groupon, with $460 million in U.S. revenue in 2010, estimated by Techcrunch, and about 10.7 million unique visitors in December, would have an ARPU of $42.90. That’s off the charts — and why it has attracted its valuation, despite its “profits” accounting.)

Whatever deeper analysis will show, the ad revenue numbers are real. Would you rather have the Times’ $170 million in digital revenues or HuffPo’s $30 million? (I know Tim Armstrong’s answer, and you AOL shareholders can sit down now.) Of course, it’s true, HuffPo/AOL traffic may continue to ramp up (or not), on a much-smaller cost base. It’s also true that the Times, still profitable, owns a huge brand equity — now being leveraged in digital circulation money as well — and has lots of upside, as it is challenged by its own legacy cost burdens.

Whatever kind of battle this is, it’s not a battle of equals, and it’s not a battle that can be understood by charting unique visitors.

Unique visitors are a great dumb count. As I’ve noted, it’s as if in the print world we counted the everyday subscriber — consuming 5 hours a month of a news publication — the same as someone who, standing on a Midtown corner on a windy day, happened to catch a sheet of flying newsprint as she held up her hand to hail a cab. Hardly equal, yet that’s what unique counts level.

Unique counts play to the wonder of Google search and, now, by Facebook and Twitter touts, but they are increasingly meaningless in a world that still seems to operate on a single currency: currency. Expect the bounce rates (hit one page and then leave the site) of the fly-bys only to increase in our new age of ubiquity, with mobile devices providing everywhere-and-anywhere access. It is hard not to run into big brands: Add to the Times, the HuffPo, the Guardian, and Mail Online such top-of-Google sites as Examiner.com and eHow.

Counting unique visitors — increasingly — is like counting air.

ARPU itself is just a beginning at better counting. Some will say it’s too general, the “A” as in average, just too broad to be useful. So companies can segment it, especially as they value core customers — say, the RPU of readers who read 50 pages a month compared to those who don’t.

Consider, in addition, how ARPU can be stretched and fine-tuned: mobile ARPU, smartphone ARPU, iPad ARPU, video-consuming visitor ARPU. Into the future, as each digital reader is offered an array of niche (sports, travel, health) products, increasing the ARPU of core readers becomes even more important. Much easier to upsell a customer, in any trade, than get a new one.

In addition, increasing ARPU is a better investment, says Scout Analytics’ Matt Shanahan, than either increasing sales volume or decreasing sales expense.

Some execs told me that ARPU is getting more important in the age of paid reader digital access, as, this week, Time Inc. ratifies that new age with its all-access provisioning for all 21 of its consumer magazine titles. While eCPM (the effective cost-per-thousand rate publishers get for their advertising, taking into account sponsorships and several sales types) is the preferred metric for ad efficiency, the emerging ARPU number can combine both how much a unique visitor provides in subscription (or pay per view, day, week) revenue and how much advertising revenue, on average, that unique enables.

Bonus question of 2011: What does the cross-platform (weekend print/daily digital, for instance) ARPU look like?

This isn’t an idea that’s alien to the legacy newspaper and magazine business — we’d have to combine a few legacy numbers to get an Average Revenue Per Print Subscriber number — but the twists and turns, and added data, of the digital business give ARPU and its offspring increasing relevance.

It is all coming down to the same two revenue sources — circulation and advertising — just moved to the new digital business, gradually. (Lee Enterprises this week accepted Journalism Online’s advice and is up-charging print subscribers as it rolls out six tests.) As everyone toys with reader pricing, bundling, and add-ons, add up circulation and advertising, and we’ve got those increasingly familiar economics of transition.

Image by Thiophene_Guy used under a Creative Commons license.

See original article http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-newsonomics-of-arpu/

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Content has always been considered a loss-leader among publishers. However, in the glory days of print, advertising and circulation revenue easily paid for long-form, in-depth content of limited frequency.

That’s not the case in the digital age, in which digital advertising, for the most part, isn’t enough to cover the expense of a constant stream of original content.  The $315 million sale of The Huffington Post proved that free digital content can make money (as long as you don’t pay a large number of the people generating that content).

Earlier this year, Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget offered a peek at his financials, revealing that the company made a profit (of $2,127) but would sink back into the red thanks to aggressive investment.

Blodget didn’t reveal what he’s paying to generate content, but says, “We didn’t make that profit because we’re a sweatshop, by the way.” He claimed a 25-person newsroom (which is larger than many magazines which are generating far more than Business Insider’s then-revenue total of $4 million).

Paid digital content has proven to work in select markets (The Financial Times reported a 34 percent increase in digital subscriptions to 230,000, while registered users increased 49 percent to 3.7 million in the first half of 2011) but requires a significant investment, one many publishers can’t (or won’t) make.

Striking a Balance Between Original, Aggregated and Curated Content

Picking up outside content isn’t just smart, it’s a necessity. Aggregation and curation are a part of just about every publisher’s digital strategy, and the names get cuter every week, from “discovery content” to “link journalism.”

Licensing deals abound while firms such as Outbrain and YellowBrix specialize in “discovery content,”—automatically pulling content from other Web sources. Yahoo plans to launch a new content and advertising network and is trying to convince publishers to install Yahoo software on their pages in order to deliver tailored content to readers. Publish2 offers free content from sites such as ProPublica and DailyFinance.com, which is routed into appropriate categories (general news, financial and business, etc.).

The question is to what extent a publisher should balance original content with aggregated content. After being shuttered by Nielsen, storied trade publication Editor & Publisher seemed to find new life last year when it was purchased by boating publisher Duncan McIntosh Inc. However, last October, Duncan McIntosh fired the existing editorial staff and implemented a strategy focused on aggregating news stories, rather than creating original content. Under Nielsen, there were six full-time editors producing a magazine and two weekly newsletters. Under Duncan McIntosh, E&P has two full-time editors and two edit staff members dividing their time between several publications.

Others walk a line between original products and aggregated content. In July, Access Intelligence (owner of FOLIO: publisher Red 7 Media) acquired Cynopsis Media, which produces daily and weekly e-letters for the television, digital media, kids marketing and sports media markets, with nearly 150,000 subscribers in 53 countries. As an aggregator, Cynopsis will complement paid products serving specific markets, such as AI’s CableFAX. “This is very much like the FierceMarkets model,” says AI CEO Don Pazour. “It features aggregated content, no HTML and ads are text. The main product has 57,000 opt-in requests with high open rates. We were surprised at how well the aggregation and curation model performs from an advertising standpoint. It fits our market and it’s nicely profitable.”

On the enthusiast side, Premier Media’s PremierGuitar launched GuitarSquid, a site and newsletter targeting younger, more casual guitarists than its usual audience by primarily offering aggregated content. Since its January launch, GuitarSquid has seen steady growth to 109,614 unique visits in June.

Ultimately, GuitarSquid will reach a larger audience than PremierGuitar, which varies 600,000 to 900,000 uniques per month, according to CEO Peter Sprague, who says GuitarSquid will generate about $500,000 in revenue this year. “For what we thought was a content aggregation site, the engagement level is much higher than we expected,” he says.

However, Premier Media is also investing in its original editorial products—and seeing a pay-off. Two years ago, PremierGuitar had three editors, today there are seven (GuitarSquid has three dedicated editors). Premier Media turned its first profit last fall and expects a 30 percent increase this year.

“I’m an ex-Wall Street Journal reporter and I believe in the primacy of content,” says Sprague. “In the absence of content, you have nothing. Print has gone up 20 percent per year, and our digital audience has virtually doubled every year. We believe in the free content model, which everyone else these days thinks is crazy.”

At an MPA Digital Technology conference in June, panelists that included Matt Robson, SEO specialist at Hearst Magazines, seemed to disagree on the role of original content versus aggregation, particularly in light of Google’s algorithm changes earlier this year that were intended to reward original content while downplaying so-called “content farms.”

“Some feel that aggregated content will be penalized. In many cases, the best results will be pages that are unique content. I feel the more important balance is what portion of content is central to the brand, and what portion of content is ‘demand-driven,’” Robson told FOLIO:. “Mainstream publishers could do a much better job in increasing the amount of content that they offer that is specifically going after existing demand. Speaking for myself, it is not my understanding that major publishers are seriously answering this question. Traditional publishers are reluctant to change their brands to be more demand-driven, with less focus on exclusive content and more focus on meeting search demand.”

For a company to rely on aggregated content it would have to have superior technology or means of content discovery, according to Robson. “Even sites that are cookie-cutter still will pay for cheap original content to be able to build site-wide link equity,” he says. “Re-writing content can be the best of both worlds. Original, quality content is always a factor. The question is what ratio the company can get away with. This depends on the demand for their exclusive content and how well they present their non-exclusive media.”

For fast-changing, competitive news and trendy lifestyle content markets, aggregation may not be the best way to get a new visitor, according to Robson. “Aggregation is the most cost-effective way to retain visitors, since most companies don’t have the budget to produce quality new content on a daily basis,” he adds. “For well-defined markets that have consistent demand like celebrity photos, shopping resources, do-it-yourself media and (some) niche markets, you can get away with a lot of cookie-cutter content.”

From UGC To “Influencers”

The early promise of “user generated content” hasn’t exactly been fulfilled but many publishers are working to recruit “influencers”—notables within their markets who can draw attention through their existing channels.

Implication and execution of these terms varies with each publication. Indie magazine Utne Reader recently installed an Alt Wire feed into its website, which pulls linked stories from influencers’ Twitter feeds to aggregate a socially built content channel. Influencers are chosen by edit staff, and include those featured in past “Visionary” issues of Utne Reader, as well as honorees from Utne’s Independent Press Award. Editor-in-chief David Schimke says that since its launch in June, Alt Wire has not been measured for its traffic, but gauged for its workability.

Alt Wire, built by Sociative Inc., is organized by seven content categories and “influenced” by 30 contributors’ feeds in each sector. Of Alt Wire’s ultimate purpose, Schimke says, “First, it will be a feed that we will feature prominently on the homepage. It won’t be the only feed there, but I can see it as a central news feed because it updates so constantly. We have six or seven people to put out the magazine, and we can’t always update the blogs in each category. As editors, since this information is coming from folks we would follow ordinarily, it gives us excellent leads on great stories that we can follow up on or feature in the magazine.”

Enthusiast publisher Future US is set to launch a search for 300 “super users” for its Maximum Tech and Maximum PC properties. Culled from Twitter and Facebook, prospective super users will be asked to fill out a survey (including a brief essay question) detailing their qualifications for the job. After appropriate candidates are identified, Jon Phillips, editorial director of the Tech Group at Future US, says, “We’ll be soliciting them for ideas, reader columns, real time feedback on content…it could be a matter of, ’Which headline do you like better?’” Super users will also be asked to provide product reviews for Future’s Web properties.

Phillips says super users are comped for their participation with badges for their Facebook pages, the ability to upload personal photos to Future’s Facebook pages, coupons and exclusive discounts on products that may interest them.

Benefits for publishers enlisting this kind of audience participation are abundant: original content, user feedback and loads of promotion through third-party social networks for magazines and their advertisers.

At the Yale Publishing Conference held in New Haven, CT last month, Glamour editor-in-chief Cynthia Leive spoke of the magazine’s “Young and Posh” blogger network as a great success in terms of driving traffic to Glamour’s website. She also shared that while a few bloggers receive small compensation for their work, the majority remain unpaid for their contributions.

Content and SEO?

Successful content today is about being found. For Robson, the best use of publishers’ brands and content would be to continue to promote their featured content through high-value links, but also engage their audience in a real-time basis through use of newsmongering, curation, linking out, aggregation and content partnerships.

“Many traditional publishers have a clunky experience in terms of retaining users on their site through recommended links,” says Robson. “For publishers in this situation, it is more feasible to multiply their engagement per-user than it is to scale their traffic.”

For pure SEO first-time visits, magazines can look into their site structure and make their articles good “linkbait” by using top lists, which are easily skimmed, according to Robson. “The important thing is to make the most of each new visitor gained by SEO through engaging content suggestions and getting the reader to become a subscriber to a specialty newsletter. Monetization of the initial SEO visit to a lifetime value is going to be a result of offering engaging content and having a compelling reason for readers to return often and subscribe to direct marketing promotion channels.”

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The majority of those surveyed agree that the ultimate impact of the Dodd-Frank Act will be increased oversight, reduced earnings, and a less attractive capital market environment. Likewise, about 75% of directors and general counsel do not anticipate the act will be perceived positively in the future.

“The findings from our 2011 survey reveal that directors and general counsel feel strongly about the potential ramifications of the increased regulation and share some key concerns,” said Neal Hochberg, senior managing director and leader of the Forensic and Litigation Consulting practice at FTI Consulting. “The potential impact of the Dodd-Frank Act is top of mind with these professionals, with many of them weighing the risks that this will add to companies as the act takes effect.”

With regard to the areas respondents find most challenging, the survey reports that directors’ main worries are operational risk (50%), data security (46%), and reputation management (43%). Likewise, data security is a top concern among general counsel (51%), trailing only e-discovery for litigation and investigation (56%) and management of outside legal fees (54%).

“There are a myriad of issues that companies are facing in the current regulatory environment, and the weight of these concerns only appears to be escalating among directors and general counsel,” Hochberg said. “Many of the key issues have seen a marked increase in the number of respondents who view them as a concern compared with previous years. The number of directors who see operational risks as their biggest threat jumped substantially from last year, and, similarly, many more general counsel anticipate the looming risk of e-discovery compared with 2007.”

Directors reveal that they also are worried about their personal liability. As a result of 2008′s economic meltdown and subsequent bailout, some governance experts have predicted the legal and regulatory community may double up efforts to hold directors accountable for serious violations or neglect of duties. Should these prognostications prove true, more than half of those surveyed indicate they would expect an exodus of qualified directors.

Meanwhile, the majority (69%) of general counsel see regulatory compliance as the function adding the most workload to the internal legal department over the next 12 months, which is a significant increase from 2009, when only 37% of general counsel surveyed indicated the same.

For additional findings or to download a PDF version of the complete report on the Corporate Board Member/FTI Consulting 2011 Legal Study, please visit www.boardmember.com or www.fticonsulting.com .

About FTI Consulting — FTI Consulting, Inc. is a global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance enterprise value in an increasingly complex legal, regulatory, and economic environment. With more than 3,700 employees located in 22 countries, FTI Consulting professionals work closely with clients to anticipate, illuminate, and overcome complex business challenges in areas such as investigations, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory issues, reputation management, and restructuring. The company generated $1.4 billion in revenues during fiscal year 2010. More information can be found at www.fticonsulting.com .

About Corporate Board Member — Corporate Board Member, an NYSE Euronext Company, is the leading information and education resource for senior officers and directors of publicly traded corporations, large private companies, and Global 1000 firms. The quarterly publication, Corporate Board Member magazine, provides readers with decision-making tools to deal with the strategic and corporate governance challenges confronting their boards. Corporate Board Member further extends its governance leadership through an online resource center, conferences, roundtables, and timely research. The magazine maintains the most comprehensive, up-to-date database of directors and officers serving on boards of publicly traded companies listed with NYSE Euronext and The NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. stock exchanges. www.boardmember.com

SOURCE: Corporate Board Member

See press release http://www.marketwatch.com/story/corporate-board-memberfti-consulting-survey-finds-companies-grappling-with-governance-issues-and-rising-risk-2011-08-23?reflink=MW_news_stmp

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The new law or bill already has been approved by the Assembly in Sacramento. A.B. 152′s author is Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes from San Fernando Valley. This week Fuentes will visit the Senate Appropriations Committee. Will the bill pass into law? If so, A.B. 152 will help the local farmers harvest their vegetables and fruits. Without this type of help, the food would rot in the fields.

The goal is to get the local surplus produce trucked to food banks. The law would give financial assistance to the farmers. Otherwise, the local farmers would not be able to afford to move the surplus produce to the food banks and similar places where the food is given away to local people in need.

At least we know that so far the bill has passed through the assembly with no votes against it. All were in favor of the A.B. 152. The next step is to get the bill approved and signed into a law. How it would work is to provide a 10 percent tax credit to farmers for the cost of fresh produce donated to food banks. Then the food banks would give the food free to Sacramento’s hungry population who could not otherwise afford the fruits and vegetables. Think of the alternative. Without the incentive, the food rots in the field anyway.

For further information, check out the website of the California Association of Food Banks. If you live in Sacramento, you’ll soon find out that the entire state of California still does not have an emergency food-assistance program as do 38 other states. See more statistics on this topic in the August 11, 2011 Sacramento News and Review article by Hugh Biggar, “Take it to the (food) bank – News – Local Stories.” So what you do have are little organizations that feed the needy such as the food banks in Sacramento. You also have a few churches that give food donations from their pantry to the hungry, and what’s increasing is the concept of churches growing produce on their land and giving it away free, but that’s just catching on and only if the church owns enough land to grow seasonally.

And with the high unemployment rate in Sacramento, the existing food banks are trying to meet the heavy demand of so many people asking for free food, for example, hungry families where the parents are looking for work, the working poor who can’t afford enough food, or suddenly homeless, the foreclosed unemployed, and others who are part of the new poor of Sacramento. If you’re researching statistics on Sacramento’s new poor, some resources include the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, (Food and Nutrition), and the California Association of Food Banks.

Also check out the statistics of how many people in Sacramento receive free food help from food banks. It’s at least 50,000 according to the August 11, 2011 Sacramento News and Review article by Hugh Biggar, “Take it to the (food) bank – News – Local Stories.” This article also contains interviews and statistics on Sacramento and Yolo counties regarding how many families get food assistance from the food banks such as fresh produce and processed foods.

One of the biggest problems poor families have when they go to food banks is that the donations tend to be ready-to-eat processed foods in nonperishable cans and packages. And this type of food wouldn’t be as healthy as food that has not been processed by cooking, such as fresh fruit and vegetables. Instead of getting free handouts of white flour, white sugar, white rice, white bread, and cans of vegetables cooked with a lot of added salt or fruit swimming in sugary syrups, it would be a lot healthier to have fresh vegetables and fruits.

The only worry is that with so many poor families who couldn’t afford fresh produce and don’t have the yard to grow their own, or the season is wrong, may not be familiar with fresh fruit and produce. How many times did people pass up broccoli, for example because they didn’t know what to do with it? You’d be surprised to see how many fresh vegetables, when available, such as broccoli or similar vegetables are dumped in parking lots near food banks because the people just aren’t familiar with preparing fresh produce, since it’s usually expensive.

What they are familiar with are the less healthy handouts of chips, canned foods, and packaged cereals. So there has to be some bridge or transitional way to let the hungry know that fresh produce will be coming and show people how to prepare the foods–for example, a salad of chopped kale and carrots with diced raw yellow squash in a lemon juice dressing. Otherwise, what would a lot of the poor do with a bunch of kale, spinach, and broccoli? They’d be familiar with chips, popcorn, soda, eggs, cheese, and dehydrated potatoes or burgers. So somebody needs to show people not used to fresh produce various affordable ways to make it tasty.

Sacramento Church Grows Organic Produce to Give Free to the Poor

Pass the word to your local house of worship to grow produce in the yard and give it away free to the poor. Are you in need of free vegetables and fruit? If the weather permits, about a thousand pounds of organic fresh vegetables will go directly out into the community by the end of this produce-growing season. In Sacramento, the LifePointe Church of the Nazarene on Q Street and Rio Linda Boulevard is growing organic vegetables and fruit in its yard to give free food to the poor by donating the produce to people in need.

The church is planning to donate the food to the needy through the local food closet and also by handing it out on the streets. Check out the July 15, 2011 Sacramento Bee article by Whitney Mountain, “In Rio Linda, a community garden blossoms to feed the needy.” Eating more organic produce given to you at no cost is one more way to curb obesity in Sacramento.

The exercise in planting the food may be good for you. And eating more vegetables and fruits instead of starchy fillers also may help to curb obesity. But you don’t have to plant the food or weed the garden to eat. The produce will be given away.

Planting organic produce in more church back yards would be doing good deeds and acts of kindness for Sacramento’s hungry. In June, 2011, the church teamed up with self-taught organic gardening buff James Bridges to plant a community garden that the church has been working toward for several years.

Sacramento’s Five Community Gardens

This is one way to distribute healthier foods to people and to fight obesity in children. Have volunteers do the planting and harvesting in the neighborhood’s local churches and other houses of worship. If you look at community gardens in Sacramento not affiliated with houses of worship, you’ll see about five community gardens so far with a total of 11 gardens to be planted by the year’s end. For further information, check out the website of the Sacramento Parks and Recreation Community Garden. See, City of Sacramento Community Gardens.

Planting your own produce is very popular in Sacramento and growing, particularly among people who want fresh organic produce, can’t afford the supermarket prices, find some farmer’s markets aren’t organic, and need to eat healthier foods and to fight childhood obesity. Even school gardens are growing in popularity. In Sacramento county, in addition to what’s in the city, there are a total so far of 60 community gardens.

When some people don’t have cars, they may not be able to reach all 60 community gardens in the county. That’s why a community garden with shared produce is a good deed and growing in popularity for neighborhoods. It’s great to be able to get to a community garden by walking or public transportation.

A church or school’s first step in developing a community garden is to buy a plot of land. That takes fundraising. Sometimes churches can buy a plot of land next to the church. That’s what happened with LifePointe Church five years ago. Most churches will buy land to put in a play area for kids or to create a green lawn. But planting organic food is more useful and comes under the heading of doing a random act of kindness or good deed in the long run.

Most plots of land are just a bunch of weeds. It takes a lot of volunteers to come over and get rid of the weeds. But if the people are going to share the food when harvested, it’s a labor of practicality. For example, when you start a garden on a piece of land you first have to create rows where you’ll plant the produce in areas that are clear of weeds.

Anyone in the community, not just church members is welcome to join in and do the planting. The reward is that the fruits and vegetables that are produced in the garden will be bagged and made available to anyone who needs a supplement to their groceries.

An example would be those who need help to feed their families and who come to the food closet at the Rio Linda Community Methodist Church. The food also will be available to the homeless in the area. There’s even a bike trail that runs to the end of a road that’s right near LifePointe. You’re looking at a type of rural road here, not on a Sacramento transit bus or light rail stop. People drive down a rural road in Rio Linda. So for those who don’t ride bikes and don’t drive, but are hungry, how will these people get to the church’s garden?

That’s why more gardens need to be set up in Sacramento that grow food for the needy and that are on or easy walking distance from bus stops or light rail stops. For example, people who can’t ride bikes need to find places where they can get food when it is necessary to call upon the community gardens. Some food banks are on flat sidewalks near bus stops, such as the midtown food banks.

More community gardens are needed in areas such as midtown and downtown Sacramento and Arden Arcade where you have many seniors living on tiny social security incomes that must cover food, shelter, and clothing, and also families in need of finding affordable organic produce for the sake of health.

More schools in Sacramento need to grow community gardens that involve children and parents doing weeding, planting, and harvesting, which also helps families to exercise together and may aid in curbing childhood obesity. So will this bill, A.B. 152 pass as law? Or does Sacramento keep depending for food donations from houses of worship and similar surplus produce donors?

AnneHart is based in Sacramento, California, United States of America, and is Anchor for Allvoices

see original story http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/10017821-new-law-would-let-farmers-donate-surplus-produce-to-food-banks-instead-of-letting-it-rot-in-the-fields

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Polarn O. Pyret, where parents can outfit their children head-to-toe in certified organic cotton duds crafted at “green” factories, is opening a store at 428 Columbus Ave., near West 81st Street, in late September.

An Upper West Side outpost was a natural next step for the 35-year-old retailer, which started selling its clothes online in the United States in 2009, said Jennifer Athanason, president of Polarn O. Pyret USA.

The Stockholm-based company’s research showed that Upper West Siders were “very enthusiastic followers” of Polarn O. Pyret’s online store, and when executives scoped out the corner of Columbus Avenue and West 81st Street, they were pleased with the large number of strollers and families they spotted, Athanason said.

With plenty of “aware” consumers on the Upper West Side, the 1,850-square foot store, formerly a hair salon, should find a ready audience for products such as fleece vests made out of recycled plastic bottles, Athanason said.

Company officials also liked the proximity of the tourist friendly American Museum of Natural History, and that cycling store Bicycle Renaissance is right next door, because Polarn O. Pyret specializes in clothes for outdoor play, Athanason said.

Polarn O. Pyret, which means “buddy and the little guy” in Swedish, is known for its outerwear, which is designed to keep kids “warm, happy and dry” during a Swedish winter, Athanason said. The store will stock a full range of outdoorsy gear, from traditional products such as mitten clips, to full-on ski suits and Merino wool balaclavas.

Aside from outdoor-focused clothing, Polarn O. Pyret puts out eight fashion collections a year, all with an emphasis on functionality. Even the party dresses are machine washable.

“We want to make life easy, not only for our kids, but for the parents,” Athanason said. “That’s very much a Swedish aesthetic. Life shouldn’t be made more complicated by your clothes.”

About a third of each collection is unisex, which is meant to encourage customers to re-use and recycle clothes, Athanason said. “We don’t want to feed the culture of throw-away clothes,” Athanason said.

The Columbus Avenue store will be Polarn O. Pyret’s third U.S. location. It opened a Greenwich, Ct. outpost in 2010, and a TriBeCa store is slated to open this fall.

Polarn O. Pyret plans to support local schools and parent groups on the Upper West Side.

“We want to give back to the neighborhood,” Athanason said.

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Husband and wife sink savings into new brew pub

DENVER – If you brew it, they will come. That is what the owners of Denver’s newest craft brewery are saying. They opened their doors in July with little help from the banks and a lot of cushioning from private lenders.

“I’ve just always wanted to brew my own beer,” Brian O’Connell said. “I never thought it would happen this quickly, but people liked my idea, and the money appeared.”

The home brewer moved to Colorado in the middle of the recession. O’Connell found a job as a researcher, but his wife was not as lucky.

“It took months and months to find employment,” Khara O’Connell said. “So while I was searching, he was brewing beer in our garage and talking about the idea of opening our own brewery.”

That idea turned into a two-year research project for Brian. He studied the industry, practiced making different brews, tested samples with his neighbors and began pitching his plan to friends and family.

“And people said OK,” Brian said. “I guess I was convincing enough.”

After rounding up the money, the O’Connell’s quickly created a tap room and started brewing away.

The next hurdle they faced was finding thirsty customers.

“With well over 100 micro-breweries in Colorado, competition is steep.” Brian said. “But we are not worried.”

“I don’t feel like its competition,” Khara said. “Every brewery has been so welcoming. There are enough craft brewers out there for everyone.”

Renegade Brewing Company is located in the Santa Fe Arts district. It is only a brewery, no food is served. It does have a garage door in the front of the building that opens to food carts. Patrons can grab a dinner and bring it inside the brewery to wash it down with a cold beer.

Renegade Brewing Company will be open for First Friday celebrations. To learn more about the brewery visit www.renegadebrewing.com.

http://www.9news.com/news/article/211737/75/Husband-and-wife-sink-savings-into-new-brew-pub-

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Doesn’t that read more like the movement of teams in a college football poll?

Yet Forbes’ criteria didn’t seem to change: post-graduate success (30 percent), student satisfaction (27.5), debt (17.5), four-year graduation rate (17.5), and competitive awards (7.5).

Note that, other than awards, no measure, such as SAT scores, considers how smart one’s fellow students might be.

Confusing consumers even more is how much other ratings disagree. Last year, U.S. News ranked Penn tied for fifth with Stanford among “National Universities” and ahead of several other Ivies – Dartmouth, Brown and Cornell. Swarthmore was third among “National Liberal Arts Colleges.”

Or take the case of Drexel University. U.S. News ranked it a highly respectable No. 86, easily in the top half of national universities. Forbes ranks it at 583 – ahead of only 67 schools.

Penn State was No. 47 among national universities for U.S. News, 182 overall for Forbes.

Princeton Review, by the way, ranked Penn State No. 1 for “Everyone Plays Intramural Sports” and “Financial Aid Not So Great,” and in the Top 10 for “Best Career Services,” “Best College Newspaper,” “Happiest Students,” “Jock Schools,” “Lots of Beer,” “Party Schools,” “Students Pack the Stadiums,” “Best Health Services,” and “Best Athletic Facilities.”

For more information, go to www.forbes.com or www.princetonreview.com.

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The rocker peppered his show with what felt to White like “anti-big-ag ramblings.” After Thompson had heard enough, he got fed up and left.

Large-scale farming, after all, pays a lot of bills in Wisconsin and it’s a big player in state politics. White, now the executive director of the Kansas Corn Growers and Grain Sorghum Producers associations, stayed because he was enjoying the music by the Farm Aid board member.

“But,” White said, “it was awkward.”

Such is Farm Aid’s place among modern agriculture, where it is a promoter and a critic, a champion and a reformer.

More than a quarter century after the Willie Nelson-led organization sprung to life, Farm Aid comes to Kansas City, Kan., on Saturday as something smaller and less noticed than what it began. Farm Aid can certainly boast of plenty small wins — publicity coups and funding for a handful of rural outreach groups. And it’s always been a rebel force.

Yet the organization doesn’t even try to say it’s scored wins against the mammoth forces that have continued, without pause, to reduce the number of people farming in this country.

Farm Aid arrives in this breadbasket amid a different agriculture milieu than it saw at its birth in 1985. Farming was deep in crisis then. Interest rates were high and crop prices were low.

Today, interest rates are low and crop prices are high — and figure to stay high.

Meantime, consolidation of farms has only picked up pace. Fewer people work ever larger farms, a trend that dates nearly to the Homestead Act of 1862.

The country still has no consensus definition of where the family farm championed by Farm Aid ends and where the corporate farms it derides begins. Beyond a small but certainly growing class of foodies, Americans have simply turned their attention elsewhere.

“You can’t call what’s going on today in rural America a crisis,” said John Crabtree of the Center for Rural Affairs, a beneficiary of Farm Aid in Lyons, Neb.

Most farmers are making good money these days. Demand for agricultural commodities in places such as China and India has grown rapidly in the last five years.

“But we still,” he said, “have rural communities that are in decline.”

And that’s where Farm Aid sees its mission. Its solution is to promote a healthier bond between Americans, their food and the people who grow it. The result, it hopes, is a future for farmers who do something other than churn out tons of grain or warehouse livestock by the thousands. It begins promoting “homegrown” food at Livestrong Sporting Park from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday.

“People are demanding more local and family-grown food,” said Carolyn Mugar, Farm Aid’s executive director. “We’ve been part of that. We’ve embraced it and moved with it.”

By at least one telling, the idea of Farm Aid came on stage at Live Aid. Bob Dylan hoped aloud that the African famine relief concert might also generate some money “to pay the mortgages on some of the farms.”

Willie Nelson may have been at the peak of his popularity then as a country singer enjoyed by people who don’t necessarily care for country music. He was inspired not just to sing about tough times in rural places, but to launch something that might make a difference. He transformed Dylan’s thought into Farm Aid, hoping aloud at one point of raising $50 million that first year.

He was joined by Mellencamp, Neil Young and dozens more of the era’s most popular performers in a day-long concert/telethon at the University of Illinois football stadium. (Today, that triumvirate is all that remains from the original lineup, joined by Farm Aid board member Dave Matthews and a handful of lesser-known acts.)

The timing was right.

Just the year before, Hollywood produced two popular movies — “Country” with Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard and “The River” with Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek — that popularized the plight of small family farmers. In the real countryside, farms were going belly up at a rate of one every six minutes. A University of Missouri sociologist estimated the suicide rate among farmers to be 30 percent to 40 percent higher than the national rate.

Two in three Americans polled in 1985 thought the days of the family-owned farm were numbered. Half thought federal aid was too stingy. Today, Americans would rather cut farm subsidies than Social Security benefits to high-income seniors, programs for the poor or funding to states for roads and education.

The first concert came on a rainy September day. Joni Mitchell got irritated on stage when the crowd didn’t mellow out to her liking. A man got doused in the muck of an overturned portable toilet. One of two giant Farm Aid stage banners was stolen.

But for weeks leading up to the event and through the big weekend it figured prominently in the national news. The roughly $9 million it raised fell well short of the hopes Nelson had initially set. But before the first amplifier was plugged in, Farm Aid had reset its expectations and emphasized that the event was more about message than money.

No wonder. Over the history of Farm Aid’s 26 years, the total has yet to reach $40 million. Farm Aid now nets about $1.5 million a year, mostly off the annual concert.

Consider that number in the context of federal farm subsidies. The money raised by the Farm Aid over its entire existence wouldn’t pay the wheat subsidies alone in Kansas for two months last year. The take-home cash from Saturday’s concert would barely be enough to cover half the cost of the Wetlands Reserve Program in Missouri, the ninth largest farm subsidy program in that state.

Farm Aid would need to hold four concerts a week throughout the year just to keep pace with the money Washington sends to Texas cotton farmers.

The fact is, though, Farm Aid has never come close to its first year in either revenue or publicity. That has not daunted its advocates.

“They’re junkyard dogs,” executive director Mugar said of Nelson, Young and the rest. “They won’t let go of the bone.”

Still, she said the organization has moved from looking to rescue farmers in crisis to nudging consumers to support organic, free-range, other kinds of farming that stray from large-scale commodity producers that dominate the landscape. That, she said, means often challenging the status quo of farming and federal farm politics.

Among those backing Farm Aid is White Wave Foods Co., makers of organic and soy-based milk that describes its suppliers as “600 family farms.” Sponsoring Farm Aid concerts lifts the company’s profile and pitches its products to sympathetic consumers.

“We partner with (Farm Aid) because we share a lot of the same views,” said Molly Keveney, a spokeswoman for White Wave.

But consider that White Wave and its Silk and Horizon Organic milk brands became part of a larger food conglomerate when they were acquired by Dean Foods in the last decade.

It’s such large corporate food makers that beneficiaries of Farm Aid’s limited funds often rail against.

“We’re getting too close to a place where the entire food supply is in the hands of a couple of multinational corporations,” said Rhonda Perry, the program director at Patchwork Family Farms and the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, which has received money from Farm Aid since 1986. “That does not seem like a very safe way to plan to have sufficient food and the right kind of food.”

A spokesman for the American Farm Bureau Federation said “our perspective is different” from Farm Aid’s. While Farm Aid eagerly supports the development of niche or boutique types of food production, the country’s farm economy still trades mostly in large-scale commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, poultry and hogs.

“One group’s definition of Big Ag is another group’s definition of modern, family-based agriculture,” said Farm Bureau spokesman Mace Thornton.

People such as Jake Geiger are glad that Farm Aid is still putting up a fight. He gets choked up talking about the day shortly before Christmas in the 1980s when he got a letter from Willie Nelson and a check for $1,500 to be split among 15 farmers.

At the time, Geiger was deep in debt and in the midst of an 11-year fight to save his farm near Robinson, Kan. Like much of what Farm Aid has done over the years, that $1,500 wasn’t near enough to make a difference in saving a farm.

“But it showed that somebody cared. That meant a lot,” Geiger said. “It still matters now.”

———

(c) 2011, The Kansas City Star.

Visit The Star Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.kansascity.com.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/FARM-AID_5786134/FARM-AID_5786134/

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• Farm Aid adds “Hearts of Darkness” to concert lineup (August 13, 2011) (stillisstillmoving.com)

BLUE PHOENIX - Back in the dark ages of the internet (the Prodigy years, we’ll call it), nobody imagined that the rift between online and offline would ever close. Furthermore, people didn’t really imagine that their cyber-actions could have real-world consequences. The two were mutually exclusive.

Fast forward a couple decades(-ish) and we live in an age where a nasty comment on a forum can very realistically affect any company’s bottom-line. More tricky is that for businesses, word-of-mouth has become something that can now live on indefinitely, through reblogs, IMs, tweets and any number of other online communiques. Which is why news of Reputation.com raising a $41 million round of funding isn’t entirely alarming.

ConsumerAffairs’ James R. Hood writes: “Black hat SEO companies spam the search engines with questionable content and keywords while black hat reputation management companies flood the Web with fraudulent glowing reviews designed to mislead consumers.”

It’s a 21st century way of expressing word-of-mouth PR that’s been around for ages. A big difference is scale. If segments of angry consumers are speaking ill of a company, that company has a better chance of doing damage control if there’s a dedicated PR firm working around-the-clock to minimize the impact of angry sentiment.

Sometimes it’s also a matter of having a team on hand to correct otherwise inaccurate information being spread by customers. Hood also writes about a customer who felt defrauded after fees were assessed to her credit card — only to be admonished by another alleged customer and the company’s CEO for not reading the fine print.

But because company CEOs can’t be on damage-control duty 24/7, this is where firms like Reputation.com are making their bread and butter.

Although in light of the $41 million round of funding comes another interesting wrinkle: A product where consumers can store their personal data and charge advertisers to access it.

However, VentureBeat’s Meghan Kelly was wary about the process:

While the idea of having control over my data enough to monetize it is tempting, I think I’d want to know more about the back-end processes Reputation.com engages in. Here the details are frustratingly vague — especially for such a sensitive proposition…I was left with no details about how the company farms my data from the web, and slightly creeped out.

And when VentureBeat asked CEO Michael Fertik about Reputation.com’s ability to skew the web-truth, Fertik responded:

Google is pristine on its own, you have to believe that Google is perfect… Google is just a machine, it’s not God, it’s a machine.

Cross-published at the Blue Phoenix Network blog.

See original http://www.adotas.com/2011/07/the-big-boom-of-reputation-management/

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Do you consider employee communication a high priority? Studies show that companies with highly effective internal communication programs are more likely to provide a significant return to shareholders and are also more likely to have higher levels of employee engagement and lower employee turnover rates.

But, how do you begin?  Start at the top by assessing your senior management team – they set the tone for establishing organizational culture and cascading daily consistent messages to employees. Ask your employees what they think – do they feel communication is aligned with the mission, vision & culture of the organization?  Is it consistent?  Timely?  Facilitate focus groups to hone in on the common threads.  Once you have determined what the issues are – take a look at your budget to determine what sort of communication vehicles you can afford to implement.

Depending on the timing, location and sensitivity of the message there a number of vehicles from which to choose.  The Employee Handbook, Monthly Newsletters, Town Meetings and Social Media are all commonly used.  Choose your communication channels carefully.  Think about your audience and how to best communicate with them.  We tend to turn to e-mail first, but keep in mind that this is often the least effective way to get your message across.  When possible, face to face communication tends to be the most effective because we receive an immediate reaction, are able to clarify any confusion and people tend to listen more closely.

The key to a strong employee communication strategy is planning, followed by implementation and follow-up. Taking the time to communicate with your employees will help increase employee productivity, boost employee morale and ultimately improve the bottom line.

http://www.inc.com/nancy-mobley/employee-communications-is-more-than-just-talk_1.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+inc%2Fheadlines+%28Inc.com+Headlines%29

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• Scenes From a Company Cafeteria . . . (strategiclearner.wordpress.com)

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What is the legacy that a successful Olympic bid can leave? As a former Olympian, Jeff Olson understands the movement as well as anyone. He shares with us his vision for a successful Denver bid in 2022 and what it could mean for health and well being locally and globally.

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