Social and Environmental Responsibility

It's discussed everywhere these days - Social Responsibility/Environmental responsibility; and its many applications - corporate responsibility, sustainable future, work-life balance, environmental development, investigative analysis, our future, 50 year plan, corporate social responsibility... CHANGE We all recognise it's needed, but: How is it going to affect your bottom line if you don't do it...

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15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world. This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

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Hyper-Local Hero

Ten years ago, Rob Curley was covering city hall for the Topeka daily paper. Now he's lighting up the entire industry. How a "nerd from Kansas" discovered the web, and hit the big time. On a Saturday afternoon in August, Rob Curley is holed up in a video-production studio in Naples, Florida, with a couple of sleep-deprived colleagues. Between yawns and sodas, they're editing high-school football footage that's scheduled to air tonight on the Web (and on iPods and PlayStation Portables), as well as on local cable. These are only preseason games, but this being football country and all, Curley, the head of new media at the Naples Daily News, wants PrepZone Playbook, his team's newest creation, to rock. Pulsing music, action-packed highlights, slick animation--the works. So he keeps nitpicking. When a reporter appears on-screen, unnamed, to offer postgame analysis, Curley interrupts: "Okay, we have to say who that is right away." The rest, though, looks "fricking awesome, like something on ESPN!"

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Network effects; youth vs adults; reshaping publics

Social media is not new. Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman's walls. Even in the realm of the Internet, some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we've watched the development of new genres of social media - MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc. Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in some cases collaborate or play. In tech circles, social media has replaced the earlier fave "social software." Academics still tend to prefer terms like "computer-mediated communication" or "computer-supported cooperative work" to describe the practices that emerge from these tools and the old school academics might even categorize these tools as "group-work" tools. Social media is driven by another buzzword: "user-generated content" or content that is contributed by participants rather than editors. But for the last few years, everyone's been abuzz with the idea of "social media." Right now, those who want VC backing need to bake the "social" into any Web 2.0 app they create. There are many new genres of social media that have gained traction here: blogs, wikis, media-sharing sites, social network sites, social bookmarking, virtual worlds, microblogging sites, etc. These tools are part of a broader notion of "Web2.0." Yet-another-buzzword, Web 2.0 means different things to different people.

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Negotiation for Music, Art and Sciences

Tuning the voice of an acoustic grand piano is the process of ensuring that the pitch of each key on the piano creates the intended sound of a musical note, such as A, B flat or C sharp. Tuning the voice of an effective leader or negotiator is the process of developing and maintaining the five keys or components of emotional intelligence which are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation and empathy and relationship management. Toning the voice of an acoustic grand piano is the process of adjusting, through softening or hardening, the striking action of the hammers against the strings in order to fully utilize the dynamic range of the entire piano keyboard. Toning the voice of an effective leader or negotiator is developing the ability to recognize the personal and cultural differences among people, and recalibrating our tune or voice as a leader or negotiator, to effectively create a meaningful connection with each distinct person or audience.

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