WesHanson.com

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More Than 140 Characters

Knowing how to use Twitter effectively to advance media and promotion goals has become a crucial skill. Naturally, there are a host of business and publications that seek to help you out, some charging up to $150 for the privilege. Now you can visit Twitter itself for its own best-practices blog. And it’s free. Called “Twitter Media,” the new blog has entries so far on choosing the right API (application programming interface), how to fight off Twitter cybersquatters and a look at tweeting from Haiti. Don’t worry, though, the entries are more informative and substantive than the 140 character-maximum of Twitter’s signature “Tweets.”

http://media.twitter.com/

To Print or Not

Changing office printers’ default font can save a large business, school, or institution thousands of dollars a year, according to a Dutch study.

Because of their different “weights” (thickness of stroke) fonts require different amounts of ink to print. Less ink usage means fewer cartridges needed. Century Gothic, for instance, uses about 30 percent less ink than Arial, according to Printer.com (as reported by AP). Because color printers draw on expensive color cartridges even when printing in black, you can save even more money by deliberately selecting black only when printing a one color (black) document from a color printer.

Logically enough, fonts with the word narrow or light in their names use less ink to print than those named bold or black. Forts with serifs (little lines at the ends of characters) also tend to be of lighter weight overall and thus less ink those without serifs (sans serif).

Here’s the thing, though: those fonts that use less ink are sometimes wider, meaning less type goes on the page and more paper has to be used, potentially, to print a document. So: good for ink usage and office budgets, bad for forests.

If you really want to save on ink – and paper – just don’t print at all.

Whither Flash?

Adobe added Flash to its design stable a few years back when it laid out a few billion for the Macromedia company. The movie-making product has delivered big time, revolutionizing the web (think YouTube and innumerable sites enhanced with moving graphics, like PubArts.com).

But there have always been grumbles about the Adobe powerhouse – chiefly, that it is a power hog and dominates computer CPUs.

Now the volume is turning up, as Apple’s newest hot gizmo, the iPad, will not support the software. Neither does the iPhone. Trouble for Adobe?

There are competitors to Flash. Called the H.264 standard and HTML5 video, these options are turning heads, including those at major content producers like The New York Times and Time Inc. that are choosing it to develop dynamic or moving content for the iPad (reported in Ars Technica, 4/3/10)

Re-encoding Flash videos won’t necessarily be easy or cheap, especially if one has hundreds or thousands of hours of content. The H.264 standard requires a license from MPEG LA to use, but Brightcove and other online video platforms can re-encode content for free.

One Man’s Meat

The same event can be nutritious P.R. for one organization and toxic to another.

Case in point: the Greenpeace assault on Nestle’s Facebook page, a barrage of comments designed to embarrass the global conglomerate into stopping its use of palm oil, which conservationists maintain leads to the destruction of Southeast Asian rainforests and their inhabitants. (The campaign created a widely viewed video of a man opening a Nestle Twix chocolate bar  and biting into a orangutan’s bloody severed finger.)

As a result of Greenpeace’s “brand-jacking,” Nestle went into “damage control” mode and promised to stop buying palm oil from Sinar Mas, the big Indonesian supplier of oil to Nestle.

It was  a moment of triumph for Greenpeace. “Facebook has become a hotbed for activism,” Greenpeace press officer Daniel Kessler told Joe Ciarallo of PRNewser, (4/5/10). “We have offices in 40 countries and many of our offices are participating in this campaign. Each has their own Facebook page.”

More is coming. As noted on PRNewser, a blog post on Greenpeace’s Web site states, “There’s no quick-PR-fix to get out of this one; Nestle is going to have to really clean up its supply chain.”  Kessler said, “They need to do supply chain analysis to make sure they’re not sourcing palm oil.

PRNewser also points out that Greenpeace now has a campaign to force change at Facebook itself. The activists want the social media site to use renewable energy to run its data centers. The new group on Facebook – “We want facebook to use 100% renewable energy” — has more than 200,000 members.

Social media isn’t just for personal frivolity or a new conduit for selling – it’s proving to be a powerful tool for passionate change seekers.  The world is changing, rapidly. Corporations and institutions had better get ready by putting in place rapid-response crisis management – before the next dust-up occurs.

A Whale of a Problem

The Hump, an upscale sushi hangout at the Santa Monica airport, recently got caught serving endangered sei whale. Facing jail time, huge fines, television cameras, and daily placard-wielding protesters, the owner tried to quell the tsunami of fury by emailing a series of apologetic announcements, the last one stating that the 12-year-old business would close for good.

But press releases, excellent tools though they may be, cannot alone bring closure.

The revelation couldn’t have had worse timing from the restaurant’s perspective – or better, for conservationists and humanists (and whales). Just before the bust, “The Cove” won the Academy Award for documenting the herding and bludgeoning of dolphins in Japan.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act wasn’t enough to keep the creature off The Hump’s menu – unless you consider “off menu” to be the trunk of a Mercedes, from which the meat was reportedly doled out to wealthy gourmands on the sly. The p.r. mea culpas only came after the restaurant was harpooned in a sting operation.

Facing the inevitable, The Hump acted with prudence. It accepted full responsibility for its sneaky venality and greed (without using those words unfortunately). The owner even promised (beyond the possible fines up to $200,000 and a year in prison for the chef) to make a “substantial contribution to one or more responsible organizations dedicated to the preservation of whales and other endangered species.”

One of those endangered entities would appear to be another restaurant called Typhoon. It’s located just downstairs from The Hump, also operating on a lease from the City of Santa Monica. And owned by the same person.