Congo-refugee-camp
As an iPhone user and lover of all things gadgety, I was concerned when I received an email from the ‘Raise Hope for Congo’ site alerting me that there’s a chance the gadgets I own may have played a piece in fuelling the awful war taking place out there.
Essentially the issue here is that product suppliers to the major electronic companies may be sourcing their parts from corrupt groups in the rebel held areas of the Congo region (a region rich in the ‘3 T’s – Tin, Tungsten and Tantalum). These three minerals are used in batteries, vibrator parts (for your phone….) and other elements.
Some stats:
- Tin – used as a solder on circuit boards inside cell phones and laptops. 70% of the world’s tin is used as solder, and 5-10% of tin ore comes from eastern Congo.
- Tantalum – used to store electricity in iPods, digital cameras, and cell phones. 70% of the world’s tantalum is used in electronic products, and 15% comes from Congo.
- Tungsten – used to make your cell phone or Blackberry vibrate. Tungsten is a growing source of income for armed groups in Congo.
So what’s the point you’re probably asking. The point is, it’s good to hold these electronic giants to account and ask them about this. Raise Hope for Congo suggests sending a polite mail to those companies, asking them to make sure and to provide details of the concrete steps being taken to guarantee such minerals are being sourced from legitimate suppliers.
Play your part to help – read more on how you can make a difference by sending a simple e- mail or letter here.
Thank you to Julien Harneis for use of the above photo.
Matt wrote this on 22.01.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Democracy, Ethics, Interesting, Social media box
Here’s an email I received from a client working in the Comms team of a FTSE 100 company:
“Our wikipedia site is very, very old and out of date and generally needs a complete overhaul. We’re getting pressure from up high to do whatever we can to get it updated quickly and accurately however as I’m a novice I don’t want to go headfirst into editing it when I don’t know what I’m doing
Our internet people have some grand (and quite frankly expensive) proposals from one of our digital agencies to manage and edit the site on our behalf but these will be long to implement and they don’t have budget secured at the moment to progress.”
Yikes! Glad she emailed us before wading in.
Firstly, it’s dangerous to think of it as YOUR Wikipedia entry. It belongs to the community, and you’re not in control. Anything you change can be reverted by someone else at the click of a button. It’s also against Wikipedia guidelines to edit your own entry and you can whip up a storm of negative publicity if you break these guidelines. Because of this, it’s dangerous for you (or someone on your behalf) to “manage and edit it.”
But that doesn’t mean you can’t influence what’s on the page, especially if it’s out of date or inaccurate. Here are the guidelines that I gave the client for safe corporate Wikipedia tinkerage:
- Don’t edit the page itself
- Do create a Wikipedia account and dive into the Discussion page
- Be completely transparent about who you are and that you want to work within the Wikipedia guidelines
- Do point out any factual inaccuracies
- Remember that Wikipedia pages must be written from a neutral, objective point of view and not like an advertisement or marketing material
- Suggest changes and additions on the discussion page
- Back up any suggested changes with links to third party references like online newspaper articles wherever possible
- Wait and see how the community responds
- You might find that others make the changes on your behalf or that they would support you if you wanted to make the changes yourself
I’d be interested to know if anyone else has any other top corporate Wikipedia tips or experiences to share in the comments.
Tom wrote this on 14.01.09 – 7 comments
It's filed in the Social media box
As you might or might not be aware we try to run NixonMcInnes a little bit differently from other companies, believing in the following set of core democratic principles:
Transparency/openness:
Open seats for employees to attend board meetings; open book accounting (financial information including salaries made public); decisions made in the open; distaste for secrets.
Individual freedom:
Very flexible working arrangements; no dress code; self-management.
Decentralisation:
Individuals and groups empowered to set goals and make decisions without formal authority; lack of hierarchy.
Accountability:
Individuals take responsibility for their actions and are held to account by their peers; a culture of giving and receiving feedback.
Participation:
Voting on important company decisions and issues that affect individuals; everyone has a voice.
As Tom has admitted we’re not nearly there yet but we are all firmly committed to the attempt. Although there are many benefits to this kind of working culture, there are also challenges – if there is no ‘them and us’ then ‘they’ can’t be to blame – so who can fix anything that’s wrong? Only ‘us’! The onus is very much on us all to make an individual effort and take personal responsibility for the success of our company. But in return we can expect a very human response to any individual problems we may encounter – as I am currently discovering.
Just after Christmas my husband was offered a place on a four week residential course to train as a chef – he’s staying in the beautiful Devon countryside, in a top notch B&B, fulfilling a lifelong dream. I’m working full time and also taking on all the childcare responsibilities that he usually does. I’m very happy for him. No really, I am.
I made the decision that this is manageable and told everyone that I would be in the office each day til 2.30 so I could do the school run and then would pick things up again in the evening after the kids bedtime. I had no complicated approval process to go through, no bartering of holidays or hours here and there, in fact I didn’t even ask. This is only possible because I am fully and personally responsible for managing my workload – and empowered to do so by the culture in which we work.
Alexander Kjerulf, AKA the Chief Happiness Officer, wrote that
Happy companies naturally embrace … flexibility. In happy companies there is enough trust between managers and employees that the flexibility will be used to make people happy at work, and not to make them work more.
I don’t know about you, but working at a happy company certainly sounds like something we should all aspire to – and I’m glad that here at NM Towers we’re trying to set up the kind of conditions in which happiness can flourish.
—
kudos to Flickr user StinkiePinkie for the pic
Jenni wrote this on – 2 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, NixonMcInnes box
The Web is ever evolving. Technology, trends and methods never stand still, and as such, we at NixonMcInnes like to tinker with our website all the time. Just before Christmas, we took a moment to add some Microformats to our site.
What are Microformats?
As you may know, webpages have a structure that is defined using a markup language — typically HTML. This tells the web browser about the structure of our page and what each bit of content in the web page is for: whether it’s a heading, link or list, for example.
Microformats are patterns that use existing markup standards to describe certain parts of our content in even finer detail. These patterns help make our information machine-readable, which in turn makes it more useful.
Take the address of our office as an example.
On screen you might see the following:
NixonMcInnes
21–22 Old Steine
Brighton BN1 1EL
As a human being, it’s fairly easy to use our judgement and interpret this as an address, based on our experience of how addresses are typically formatted. However, to our browser, this is just a paragraph of text and nothing more.
We can’t provide any more specific information than that, just by using HTML tags, but we are able to specify that this is an address using a Microformat called hCard.
hCard is a Microformat developed for contact details. By using a specific markup pattern, you are able to convey that the text is an address, and what each part of the address represents (like a street address or Post Code).
It is up to you how much information you wish to include for the contact. The only piece of information that is required is a name, so you are not forced to add any information that you do not already have or are not willing to publish on your site.
How is this useful?
As mentioned earlier, using Microformats makes your information machine-readable, and if it is machine-readable, software can gather and use it.
I use an add-on for the Firefox browser called Operator, which lets me know if there is any Microformatted data in the web page I am browsing. If it finds contact details marked up with hCard, for example, it gives me several options for what to do with the data. I could instantly find the address of a restaurant on a mapping site, for example, or I could export a contact to my address book, which would then sync to my phone. Very handy!
There are many other Microformats besides hCard. There is hCalendar for marking up dates and events, XFN to represent relationships between people, geo for geographical co-ordinates, hReview for marking up reviews and hRecipe for recipes, among many others.
Not only can Microformats provide some useful short-cuts for individuals, but search engines are beginning to index them, as well. Having our information marked up in such detail means that it can be easily recognised by the search engines, and added to catalogues of contact details, events, reviews and so on, making it easier for web users to find what they are looking for, and for us to get our useful, accurate, up-to-date information out to the wide World.
We have added hCard to our Contact Us page, and to our individual profile pages. If you fancy seeing Microformats in action, give Operator an install and see what you can do with them.
Barry wrote this on 12.01.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Social networks, Web technology box
I’m Max and I’ve just joined the team here at NixonMcInnes, taking over on Producer duties from Louise, who’s currently somewhere in Australia (or so I’m told by my new colleagues through gritted teeth).
I’ll be helping to deliver the usual high standard of creative solutions for our clients and engaging experiences for their audiences.
As well as having worked in the social media space I’m an active participant, which I think is pretty important if you’re going to build valuable relationships that stick.
Having started out my web career creating content at AOL for big brands like Nokia, Philips, Volvo and Warner Bros, and since delivering projects spanning a number of channels, I hope I can bring expertise in both engaging content and the bigger strategic picture to our clients’ projects.
While I’ve worked with some pretty big brands, in the past few years I’ve also been working for a number of not-for-profit and public sector bodies, in particular those supporting young people – something I’ve found really fun and rewarding.
I’m really excited to have joined the team at NixonMcInnes and look forward to trying to fill the substantial shoes Louise left. Though I might stick some Febreze in them first.
Max St John wrote this on 08.01.09 – 3 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes, Social media box
A few of us here have been having a little debate about Facebook Connect after Will circulated a link to an article claiming that, three weeks after launch, 100,000 people have used the service to sign into participating sites such as Joost and Vimeo and suggestions were made to add this to a future version of this very website.
Er. What?
Let’s backtrack. Facebook Connect is a service that allows Facebook members to sign into other participating third-party websites using their Facebook ID; then actions taken on that site are displayed to their Facebook friends via their news feed – in effect turning the 3rd party site into a giant Facebook application.
Sounds lovely? Well yes, but it doesn’t come without niggles.
Firstly, it’s not open. As supporters of openness we should consider long and hard whether we want to introduce another closed ID system. I really wish OpenID sorted itself out in terms of user friendliness (and, in an ideal world, Facebook could use that). Facebook Connect very much reminds me of the closed-wall environments of AOL and Compuserve in the mid-1990s. I’m quite certain I, for one, don’t want to return to that era.
The problem with OpenID is that it is, arguably, complicated for the average Joe to implement with no clear value to them. Any (security unconscious) Joe with a Facebook account already would see the option and say, “Ooh, I’ve already got a Facebook login. Maybe I’ll use that.”
Which brings us onto point two: While there is no argument that Facebook Connect is a simpler experience from the user’s point of view, as Steve very rightly pointed out, Facebook Connect uses the dreaded “password antipattern” — it prompts users to log in from a third party site, therefore encouraging phishing. Yeah, that problem Twitter was having recently.
Here’s what you could have won
What Facebook should have done was implemented the login using the OAuth standard. OAuth is a 3rd party authorization pattern whereby the user authorises the third-party website on the first-party website itself. Moo.com has a very good example of this in action where it seamlessly integrates with your Flickr account. Dopplr does it too. Moo and Dopplr never ask for your Flickr username and password, they pass you over to the Flickr website first for authorisation.
My opinion? Facebook Connect probably will win out and gain a lot of users — initially — with an open standard winning further along the line. I also hope Facebook realise their phishing-endorsing ways and adopt a better method of authorisation very soon.
Early non-technically minded net users were happy to live in the simplified, “safer”, crusts-cut-off walled garden of AOL et al, but eventually learned that the real, open internet was a lot more fun.
Certainly, a decentralised, portable, ubiquitous web isn’t really such when your data is held in one place by one commercial organisation.
Trevor May wrote this on – 1 comment
It's filed in the Development, Social networks, User experience box
I’ve just been catching up on my pre-Christmas backlog of reading and listening matter and discovered this little gem on the last Penny Arcade podcast.
Apparently, before the launch of Tomb Raider Underworld, Eidos’ PR company decided to contact all UK press and ask them to not publish a review for three days after its launch if they intend to give it a score of less than 8/10 in an attempt to bump the game’s MetaCritic scores. Of course, it wasn’t long before word spread about — Gamespot UK’s Guy Cocker was the first to innocuously Twitter about it.
What’s more amusing is their obscure effort to cover it up. Or, rather, not. When contacted videogaming247, their PR company responded
“We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos … we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”
Uh. So that’s cool then. Obviously this intervention didn’t stop any reviews going ahead. Their PR firm’s director later added in an official response
“Barrington Harvey has been working hard to ensure the launch scores of Tomb Raider Underworld are in line with our internal review predictions over the launch weekend – but to suggest that we can in some way “silence” reviews of the game is slightly overstating our influence.”
Cool. So that’s all right then.
Trevor May wrote this on 06.01.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Buzz monitoring, Gaming, Mistakes box
