Honda Insight – Let It Shine from Honda on Vimeo.
As Rodger Bridges said today ‘page takeover is the new microsite’ and at least this Honda ad doesn’t break the nav. Click here for the full effect.
Click to watch…
In the current economic climate it goes without saying that most small businesses have been feeling their share of the pain. Of course, depending on which particular sector of an industry your company has the most experience in also determines the number of times the dice will roll in your favor; some industries thrive throughout downturns others suffer as their clients suffer – hard and fast decisions have to be made almost weekly to keep a company on course. Nemo is thriving but we had to make a course correction.
Unfortunately, this week, Nemo had to make a very hard decision to lay off 9 of our employees; 9 very smart, gifted and intelligent workers, who through no fault of their own find themselves suddenly without a job. People are the backbone of every company so it goes without saying that their loss is also Nemo’s loss.
In the end we are all human and of course like every company should we care about our laid off employees welfare. To help them we decided to turn first to the power of the community and social media by using our Twitter account. By noon on the day of the lay offs I sent out a message [or tweet] to the community explaining the cuts, but more importantly letting companies know that if they needed these skilled workers they could get in touch directly with me or Nemo. It worked.
I was blown away at how fast the response to my tweet was. Obviously in such a tight-knit community there was an outpouring of goodwill and good lucks etc but, most importantly, more than five companies and/or individual business owners reached out to us for info about our released staff. The result was that some of the Nemo alumni were in job interviews as soon as the next day. Obviously good news all around and it’s worth pointing out the power of Twitter and reaching out to your supportive community online.
Our message on Twitter.
And a typical response and re-Tweet.
When the Nemo alumni land new jobs, and if they are willing to have me share the details, I will post them up here.
Follow us on Twitter: @NemoHQ
This year’s SXSWi Conference in Austin Texas can only be hailed as a success. I’m unable to distill all the great information that I gleaned into one post so I will spread it out in posts here over the next few days. This year’s speakers included Chris Anderson, Guy Kawasaki and Clay Shirky to name a few. It was Shirky who left me with the most memorable quote of the week – “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…” He was defending internet use against the charge that it was destroying the book publishing and newspaper businesses. The best panels were the ones that included people whose thinking arrived at similar positions – the internet isn’t destroying anything it is merely the great leveler, perhaps the greatest in history.
Austin Kleon, an Austin, TX based illustrator captured the first panel of day one at the conference. This image sums up how I felt at the end of each day of panels…..
Pic by Luc Legay.
So here’s another twist for those of you who still think of Twitter as a waste of time or just simply frivolous. Jay Rosen [on Twitter @jayrosen_nyu,] a journalism professor and new media analyst at New York University has coined the phrase Mindcasting for the way he interacts with the 550 people he follows on Twitter.
In the LA Times today he had this to say – “Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained. This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find, 15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own. I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”
It’s worth pointing out that if you are using Twitter solely on the Twitter web page the notion of Mindcasting is difficult compared to if you were to use TweetDeck, an Adobe Air-based app that allows you to group, filter and manage your tweets.
Feel free to follow me @pampelmoose and Nemo @NemoHQ
