I Said, OK

Today was my last day as head of strategy and client services at Deep Focus. It was a relatively short stay, although it felt much longer than 7.5 months. I feel very fortunate to have spent time working with the agency’s founder and CEO, Ian Schafer. Ian’s looked at as a big brain in the [...]

Teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time. But trusting that they’re gonna come through with their parts. And, that’s what we do really well. — Steve Jobs, D8 Conference, 2010

Kevin Rose’s blog post about the latest Apple TV rumours had me asking if I’d buy it for $99. I’m sure the iOS platform, apps, sharing, etc., are interesting, but would it really make sense to add that to my home entertainment mix. I guess, for $99 you might as well give it a go [...]

Earlier this week I participated on panel about Social Media at an offsite for senior executive at one of the world’s largest media companies. It was an extremely interesting session and particularly interesting to be on the panel with Dennis Crowley of Foursquare and Jordan Glazier of Eventful.

The last question that was asked was: tell us what we don’t know. What’s coming around the corner? What’s the future?

I got a kick out of Sandy’s headline. I’m as far from Social Star as possible, so it was extremely humbling to be interviewed by Sandy for her blog.

1. All That You Can’t Leave Behind, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, No Line on the Horizon 2. Texting 3. JetBlue 4. iPod, iTunes, iPhone and my switch to OS X 5. Starwood Preferred Guest 6. House 7. President Obama 8. San Francisco and New York City 9. Streaming video 10. The Acela 11. [...]

1. Gowalla (Gowalla has an Android app now! It’s pretty good but seems to be a few steps behind their iPhone app in features. Scratch that, it’s pretty damn good now.) 2. Amtrak 3. Smugmug 4. Flickr 5. NBC Local 6. Starwood 7. Delicious 8. Zipcar 9. Instapaper 10. Fandango (I’ve heard that this is on [...]

I said Goodbye to my AT&T iPhone the day the Droid was released. It’s not because I don’t like the iPhone or think that the Droid is a better device, it’s simply because AT&T’s service is unacceptably poor and I refuse to be an AT&T customer any longer.

I’ve been toying with sharing my thoughts on the Droid for awhile and have even drafted an extensive post about it, but I realized that there’s been so much written about it already that it likely doesn’t add much to the conversation. Instead, I’m going to share my favorite Android apps–it is after all what makes the device useful.

In an earlier post I talked about how there’s a huge opportunity for agencies and social media marketers with Tier 2 brands. I cited United and the Guitar-gate incident as an example and talked about why I don’t think it’s enough to move United into real action.

Illustrating my point, here’s a great example that I came across today of a Tier 2 brand, Southwest, that’s taking full advantage of the Social Web and coming at United competitively: SOUTHWEST LUVS GUITARS (AND CONTESTS)!

So, it appears that Seth, AT&T’s blogger guy, works for its PR agency Fleishman Hillard (sorry, but I think he comes off like a douche in the video). The question was posed on Twitter by Todd Defren about whether AT&T should have disclosed that Seth works for FH.

From a consumer’s point of view, that’s not really the point. For all intents and purposes Seth works for AT&T. By putting him out there as the mouth piece of AT&T, he is AT&T, so to speak. Sure, he’s a ‘blogger’ but do we expect anything impartial from he if he works for AT&T or its PR agency? I think Todd’s question in some ways has more to do with the flaws (and insecurities) of the PR industry more than what matters to customers

The more important point to me is that AT&T is still missing the real opportunity. All they’ve done is more of the same, just a different wrapper. A different channel for the same old message and business practices.