Memes to be discussed!

Reviewers should be payed? Yes or no? The first fine is a fact.

Andy Sernovitz's has made a post regarding a news topic: 

Social Media Safety Warning: NY State fines $300,000 for fake reviews. Learn to protect your brand.

His first point why this is good news is the following: "All ethical marketers know that we survive and thrive only through the trust and respect of our customers. Any effort to clean up the the bad actors is good for those of us who base our reputation and leadership on honesty and openness."

Andy continues with setting up guidelines for a company how to handle "getting" reviews, rule number 1: "Never pay for posts or reviews.  Do it even once, and you break the trust forever. Everyone will assume you pay for all reviews."

However Scott White (from BIG) cares to differ with not allowing companies to pay for reviews:

"Blog reviews are becoming a big business and have put a lot of bloggers to work. That’s a good thing."  Paying for reviews is "the biggest pile of crap I think I’ve ever heard and here’s why. Paying for someone to review your product or service has been going on since the beginning of capitalism. As long as the review is UNBIASED it’s kosher. Period. End of story. Bloggers are allowed to write whatever they want, good or bad."

However can a person be unbiased when he has received money? Lets take a look at the pharmacy business or any business. Doctors who were receiving gifts or incentives used to be common practice, but many companies have set up guidelines to limit this, due to the ethical issue. Business should be done fair, doctor practices should be untouched, a patient should receive the best medicine for him/her, not because a doctor just received a nice trip to the Bahama's from one manufacturer. 

Is it the same with writing reviews for companies/products? Are bloggers perhaps different and does the transparancy of the net create such an environment that I would still value a review if I knew some company paid that person to test the product. If that blogger has written many reviews for many different companies, yes perhaps, but still he could favor one company more than the other. But even when this person is not being paid he would still have preferences. 

Bloggers are allowed to write about anything they want of course, but should they be paid to be stimulated, the question perhaps is whether bloggers really need stimulation? Isn't it in the nature of the blogger to be stimulated by itself to share thoughts and discuss ideas. In this huge community of bloggers you can find somebody who is interested in your product. A company could contact the blogger to make him/her aware of products, but actually pay? 

If Bloggers receive money to review, they should mention that they received money to do the review. Would I still value his review if he wrote reviews only for this company? What's in it for me to believe him I would think? He receives an incentive, why should I be unbiased in believing him? 

Does paying reviewers kill the bloggers credibility? And therefor backfire on the paying company? 

Chriss his post:http://bit.ly/4msr1t

Andy's post: http://bit.ly/GYXuT

How will new communication effect our lives? And the future...

Don't you wonder how much the world will change in the next 3 years, 10 years and the unthinkable 20 years? 

http://bit.ly/wytUa

How will the world look like for the next generation, the children who are born now, most of them in India and China. Did you know how many college graduates graduated in 2006? In the US there were 1.3 million, in China 3.3 million, in India 3.1 million. How many of those 3.1 million Indian graduates speak english? An astonishing 100%. Who would have thought that it is predicted that in 10 years the number one English speaking country in the world will be...China!

The next generation of kids has a different live than ours, clearly! But who would have guessed that 70% of 4 year old kids in the US have already used a computer? That 21-year-olds have already sent/received 250,000 emails or instant messsages and 50% of them has created content on the web.

We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don't yet exists...in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet. To bring Einstein to the equation: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".  

More interesting points can be found in this clip: Did you know 2.0.

http://bit.ly/wytUa

How will our world look like in 5 years? Do we even wish to think about how much the world will have changed in 20 years, will we be ready or will we be unable to catch up?

Similar clip, but more visual and potentially impactfuller, however the pace is also faster that all the data can dazzle you... your choice!

Twitter, the buzzing of a mosquito?

Which channel do we use for which purpose? These days we have many available channels to communicate through. I will stick to the online channels to keep it within limits: email, twitter, blogs, corporate websites, social networks as Facebook, Hyves, Hi5, Myspace, business networks as Linkedin, Plaxo, "share-with-a-friend" as to send a clip from youtube to your friends as a must see clip, and more for sure.

In the "old" days there was like one rule for communication; any official document (or any document from a company) would go on a physical paper. That’s not even a solid rule anymore. Bills and information comes through on email and you can even cancel some subscriptions online, no real signature is required. If we use an analogy to create an image of when we use each channel could we describe it with the analogy of a mosquito?

Twitter could be seen as hearing the buzz of a mosquito, it gets your attention very brief and when the mosquito flies away you have lost the attraction (and irritation). Is Twitter really something more? Emailing, "share-with-a-friend" (in a sense also an email) and leaving a post on a blog is like a bite of a mosquito, it stays a bit longer in your point of view, until your inbox has reached the next 50 emails and its out of your first page or you have posted a new post. Oldest rule in the book; out of sight, out of mind (heart).  We would call the forwarding of an email and the tracking of a friend on Facebook the rash of the bite. The rash grows, as does the spreading of the email (and the funny/interesting contents). And when the itchy part of the bite gets scratched a lot the rash stays a lot longer, potentially growing into an infection! Would this be equal to the email who is really catching our attention and keeps being send on? 

What could be the cure to this infection and what makes us from keeping to send an email forward? And to link this to social networks; what drives us to keep checking our Facebook friends to see what they are up to?