So, I’m at a restaurant for lunch at work and the bill comes and we’re given Bazooka Joe bubble gum.We all take a look at each other’s comics and someone’s comic is unintentionally (?) adult. Or we just have dirty minds. Since I have a blog, I scanned but and tried my best to clean it up since the wrapper it’s printed on is a bit transparent. Here’s a transcription of the comic:

Boy 1 (talking about baseball): Personally, I prefer playing in outfield. What about you Casey?

Casey: No contest! Shortstop all the way! What’s your favourite position, Mort?

Mort (a dog) in front of a baseball player lying on the ground face up with a baseball on his crotch: I’m going with “horizontal”.

Traditional media like newspapers, tv and radio stations are usually the last industry that come to mind when you think about social media.

At the Talk Is Cheap social media unconference for PR I attended on Nov 15^th, I sat in on a fantastic presentation given by David Fleet about the opposite using the California wildfires as a case study.

The basis of David’s presentation was what the government of California’s website severely lacked in providing their people the information they needed during the crisis as compared to what the media offered: mashed up social media tools to get useful information out quickly to, say, cell phones. Because these days, those annoying little tethers let you surf the web even when you’ve been evacuated.

David’s presentation made me realize that social media tools are perfect for a crisis plan regardless if you’re the government, a corporation or whatever. Just make sure there’s already a process in place so your team will know what to do when everyone’s hyper.

And the best part is you don’t need to rely in IT or worry about any infrastructure issues.

David’s presentation goes into detail about the whats and hows so if you ever get the chance, don’t miss it.

Quite unexpectedly, I received an invite to Seesmic. Being the social media strategist I am, I signed up and took a look around. It’s fantastic! And I immediately came up with an idea for a show.

You see, I have a few paintings that didn’t turn out as I had expected (really, really ugly). But I never threw them out and I certainly didn’t hang them up on the wall as a grim reminder. So my first show is me showing 2 pieces that I’m not pleased with. One of them is downright frightful! :)

Normally, you only show your best work (like here). A site like Seesmic seems perfect for asking for opinions (I hope the comments won’t be too harsh!). Especially what to do with things like rating ugly, ugly art :)

My video is called What to do with bad paintings which I’ll probably call Chuck or Up Chuck if I have any future shows (um, not that I have that much bad art).

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is facing uncertainty by politicans who are afraid of risk, according to this BBC News article. To tell you the truth, I’m not surprised.

In generally, people all over the world don’t like change and tend to quickly prevent themselves from seeing the value of a school lacking basic necessities using laptops to teach their students. After all, we’ve learned math and how to read and write back in the 20^th century without computers, right? And eating, clothing and school supplies is much more important than a computer, right?

I haven’t looked into exactly what students are learning with the laptops, but I’m pretty sure they are learning how to read, write and do math the old way first. Or at least the laptops come with reading games and such. You get the idea.

No matter what you do— proposing the idea of corporate blogging, allowing Facebook at work, whatever— there will always, always be the majority who fear the unknown. And they always need to be shown why they don’t need to be afraid and sometimes this needs to happen in small steps.

In this case, it’s the politicians and education ministers who are afraid of risk. Check out the BBC News article where it describes how Bill Gates and Intel are sulking over being beat to their game (5^th paragraph below the video). Vista vs. Linux. Intel vs. AMD.

The big picture is providing these children the opportunity to someday work in the global economy which is dependent on computers and the Internet. This gives them the opportunity to learn English, French, German, Mandarin, Cantonese and perhaps Hindi (unless of course everyone’s learning business English anyway) through software and online websites such as livemocha.com.

I’m wondering if proceeds from the OLPC (or all those help fight AIDS in Africa initiatives The Gap and all the celebrities keep talking about) could fund the school’s infrastructure such as solar and wind power, water, whatever. Remember, the Western economy is taking full advantage on capitalizing on developing nations. In Africa right now, mobile phones are used for communicating over the Internet instead of blowing salaries on an expensive computer. I’m pretty sure Microsoft or Intel or some other tech company has invested in wireless towers in these areas.

Anyway, imagine once the students start blogging! Or posting photos on Flickr or… drawing their own comics on their website?

Social media in corporations will eventually become normal sometime in the future. Until then, we have to learn how to ease their fears of allowing just anybody say bad things about them if they, say, launch a blog.

Online conversations about your company will happen with or without you. So relax and try to realize that participating in the blog, interacting with the comments posted by your readers/customers/employees is really just a big suggestion box or focus group.

Public decency

Sure, any negative comments are public (gasp!) but so are your professional replies to them. The world (whoever stumbles upon your blog and traditional media when something newsworthy/damaging happens) will see that your company is a company which listens to its customers, take actions to correct any mistakes it might have made and take suggestions on improving its products or services (IdeaStorm). Why wouldn’t you want that to be public?

Blogging, podcasting, whatever, no matter which format, getting into social media successfully requires participation. Should the need arise, don’t be afraid to dedicate someone to social media relations.

Richard Binhammer of Dell has such a position. I had the chance to hear him speak at a social media gathering here in Toronto called Third Tuesday. Richard talked about Dell’s positive experiences with participating directly with the blogosphere and how it turned around the customer service and product quality nightmare they were going through at the time (Direct2Dell).

Respond fast

Timely replies to posts and comments on your corporate or anybody else’s blog is crucial. You can’t waste a couple of days going through bureaucratic approvals and the legal department. The issue would have spiraled out of control by then when a simple reply from the blogger relations dude (or dudette) in a down-to-earth tone would save the day in minutes.

Richard mentioned that every time he posts a comment on a blog, even when it’s a negative post he’s replying to, the blogger is impressed of his action followed by a positive post. The message being propagated is Dell listens to what bloggers (read: customers) have to say and they can help improve their product/service. Take a look at IdeaStorm. As of this writing, “The Dell Community has contributed: 7942 ideas | promoted 556417 times | 55845 comments”.

Stay engaged

Richard also stresses to participate in positive posts as well. The way I see it, those are your fans (read: satisfied customers) who will vouch for you when a crisis hits. In other words, participating in social media is all about building relationships.

Dell blogs and stuff

It’s a no-brainer that Dell feels comfortable enough to launch an investor relations blog called DellShares. Great idea and about time a corporation had thought of being a little more transparent to their shareholders. Kudos to Dell! Also check out StudioDell which is full of videos and podcasts about using Dell products (or as they say,”the full Dell experience”).

Yes, I am building an army! An army of Peacekeepers to be exact. More like covert vigilantes. Did you know that the world is run by idiots who make more money than they know what to do with responsibly and cause so much nastiness in the world like sweat shops, fixed elections and illegal wars. I could go on.

You can see the first of my peacekeepers on mojizu.com. His name is Razer and he’s the leader, the brains behind the whole thing (you can read his bio here). Of course, the head always has to go first. Even if it is peacekeeping. Plus, I also haven’t finished working on the rest of the team. They will be posted to Mojizu as they are completed.

The scan above contains a bit of my initial sketches of him. His fully rendered final product is on the Mojizu site.

What is Mojizu? Think of it as a social media site for character designers professional and amateur alike. Except you get to pit your characters, or mojis as they are called on the website, head to head in a battle. You can also vote on your favs. Winners get their mojizu on a t-shirt and share in the profits.

What do you think of Razer’s design?