Feeding the Zombies Social Media

Did you know that searching on Google for Social site for zombies has 23 million hits.
Sadly, vampires only have 5.9 million and werewolves 3.1 million.
No point in looking up social sites for Monsters, that's Lady Gaga's domain. 

How the times have changed? Just imagine what Bela, Boris or Lon would think.

When did people start caring more about zombies?

Could it be it happened when people started realizing their world could very well be from The Matrix? Or maybe there is just something extraordinary about zombies?

Zombies are cool then, so what does that mean to social sites?

Let's look at this for a few minutes:

Zombies seem to always head to the um, food. They must all share a primal instinct to follow the  herd, perfect for social sites and the minions that follow them.

Zombies eat out, often, and they let everyone know about it, loudly. They must post to a dozen social sites at least. Have you seen how these, ah people, er things, congregate.

Zombies have no brains, that is why they seek yours and mine. Which works for social sites, they are consumers...not creators. Can't create without any brains now can you?

Zombies never sleep, although they evidently do get weak, just like us when they have not eaten for a while. Perfect for that all consuming, must know everything going on in the world attitude some people perform on social sites.

Zombies don't care about the new Apple device or Android or Google app, they are laser focused on what they want and need. Brains, food, blood, whatever it is, so you technology folks may miss out, but almost everything else has evidently millions of eyeballs sockets to feed advertising.

Zombies are very hard to kill, or so I am told, which means they keep coming back for more, half a torso, no arms, whatever it is, they never give up. Just like marketers.

The moral of the story is don't be a zombie, be creative, be a creator, not a consumer.

Happy Halloween to all you zombie hunters and social enthusiasts.

(sorry for the font color, thought it would be appropriate)

The Power of 30: It Takes 30 Days and 30 People

As part of being a Redbooks Thought Leader my first post for the IBM Social Business Insight blog is live today.

These posts which are posted to this site come from many different perspectives, not just mine. Posts are about becoming more social, internally or externally, leveraging the tools you have now or could have (IBM Solutions) but also guides that will hopefully help those in need of some help in just getting their heads around the Social space.

Here is just a snippet, please go read the rest at the IBM site.

Did you ever wonder how many man-hours and people it took for NASA to design the Apollo Lunar Orbit Rendezvous Module?

It took "more than one million man-hours of some 700 outstanding scientists, engineers, and researchers". (link)

In case you were wondering, "four thousand IBM employees, most of them from the company’s Federal Systems Division, built the computers and wrote many of the complex software programs that launched the Apollo missions and guided them safely to Earth." (Read more about IBM and the moon missions).

Why bring this up? Because not only did some of those efforts eventually trickle down to everyday systems, think about how much faster, one would hope, it could be done today. For example, SpaceX took 10 years to get to space properly and now they have the ability to return the US astronauts to space and the International Space Station.

Email is not the Pony Express and Ignorance Never Goes Away

An article which was really a marketing lecture from the CEO of Hootsuite struck numerous chords across the web. Some argued he was right, many said he was just being arrogant, others felt he was purely pushing his own agenda/solution. And yes, I recognize the fact this only provides more awareness to him.

In the comments to the post another HootSuite employee tried to explain it from the end user perspective. Not sure he did any better at an explanation than his boss.

Normally I would just leave a comment, as I did, about the virtues of Lotus Notes and how his issues have been previously thought of and dealt with over the last 10+ years in one way or another.

But this provided insights which should be taught in school.

It's not his fault, funny how the evasion of accountability over the last few years has grown exponentially. Ryan points out they grew from 20 people to over 200 in a short amount of time. Having watched similar things happen to businesses across the IT spectrum this is not a rare occurrence.

However, as with many businesses, how you grow your business and how you grow your internal processes do not always correspond. "Everyone knows how to use email" is incorrect. Everyone knows how to send and receive email, beyond that the percentage of knowledge workers have about managing their time and inbox dwindles fast.

Maybe they do not have a CIO/CTO or VP of IT but surely someone "owns" their infrastructure and should have provided a path of tools and solutions to meet the growth and expected functionality. Perhaps they didn't have the time from the explosive growth.

Time spent on webmail is a vague term, is that browser mail or mobile phone mail? Why use email when you can send 50 status updates or tweets? Persistent chat rooms do help in this case, has he tried IBM Sametime? Maybe their Conversations app will help as well, but it is not unique nor an advancement.

Stop emailing attachments. Yes this was a Holy Grail which, again, Lotus Notes has had the ability to send a document link for a file which is in a database, or just on a file server almost from day one...over 20 years ago. IBM Quickr first started with offloading your attachments to a set web accessible site and integrated it into the R8 Lotus Notes code stream in 2007. With IBM Connections you can leave your files in there and just share the links to others inside outside your firewall.

Version controls have existed in various degrees for years within Domino databases and you could even go to openntf.org which hosts free and open licensed templates which usually solve most people's needs and no heavy coding.

Make it sound like Twitter, oh, we needed something to just do X and we built it, you will all love it. No. That is not how life works. First you let others use it and then afterwards you can say whatever floats your boat.

In the meanwhile I am a happy Lotus Notes user of nearly 20 years, even though I have worked on numerous email systems and variations through the years, because it lets me get my work done in ways nothing else has even come close to offerring.

If you do not believe it, ask me for a demo. Everything Ryan discussed he could not do, I and millions of others do every day.

Lotus Notes Traveler Unable to Update on my Android

Saw this message on my server console when my phone called homne ot get the update, which is was prompted to do by the device.

HTTP JVM: Invalid redirectURL parameter from client user - ignoring since this could be an XSS attack.
 

So aside from the obvious, that I am not a hacker, could my phone be hacked? Don't think so, but it could be a browser issue on Android perhaps?

Anyone have some input, let me know. In the meanwhile copied the file to a download site and installed it so phone is up to date, but wonder why only Android has this not the iPhone users.