Now while part of me is afraid of what RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology can do, a majority of me is excited. This, RFID, is the future, not augmented reality. It has all the buzz words of today such as traceability, social, public/personals personas, e-commerce and mobility. As a digital communicator, this is what I am looking forward to. Depending how early developers and marketers harness these RFID tools, it won’t be an invasion of privacy, but rather something completely intuitive and captivating.

Like the Internet and social media has affected all aspects of daily life, I believe RFID will begin to do the same. As of now the possibilities that RFID can contribute to communications, marketing and PR are so unfathomable, it might as well be labeled as sci-fi. So I’ll keep on dreaming.

Here is a video what a single swipe of an encoded RFID card can do.

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.

Discuss.

image source: Ti.Mo’s flickr

This past week, Chicago’s Public Radio’’s This American Life’s program revolved around bullies, and 2 teenage boys in the UK’s plans to blow up their school were foiled; and in the previous months news programs reported ad nauseum about school bullying. I don’t say it doesn’t exist. But at the same time, it’s not news.

As main stream media continues to sensationalize common day occurrences/horrors, and social media makes it easier to get every Tom, Dick and Harry’s opinion out to the world, the little things that were usually swept under the rug, or dealt with behind closed doors are now out in the open and have become entertainment.

In high school, I kept a blog. When my feelings were hurt, I posted about it. When there were new photos, I posted them. I created events and poetry and they were all found on my Xanga page. The difference was that only my friends really had an interest to see what was going on in my life. And every once in awhile, I would post something that could cause either drama or a riff among friends, but it was a big splash in my small social life pond. But now, the social networks are more tightly bound. I tweet it, it goes to my followers and it is also posted onto my Facebook, where a whole new variety of people have access to it, including classmates, teachers and parents.  As a result, I constantly have to keep in mind what I want people to know about me.

Back in 2004, comments would come from the people I talked to every day, now “likes” and @replies pop up from people I haven’t even seen since 2004.  I run a casual PR program just for me, thinking about the audience and the message. And that got me thinking. Now is the time that an educational program (that goes beyond the retro-active “you shouldn’t have done that”) should be instated. When someone complains on their Facebook about getting a wedgy, they should be prepared how easy that wedgy-giver can see that and realize their impact and continue with their actions.

Image source: tigronx254’s Flickr

I’m a Gen-Yer. And although I love it, I don’t always love the advertisements geared to me. Think about it. Advertising and messaging all pushes us to buy the non-estentials.

Since this is my first year living on my own in a real apartment, where I have to use cash instead of a student I.D. to buy food. My wants and needs are changing. Just a few months ago, it was clothes shopping all the way, now it’s grocery shopping. And I’m not the only one in this shift.

I now care about saving money some what. I care about what I buy. I care about what’s left in my bank account.

Now while I am among the 72% of those under 34 have printed or downloaded a coupon, money saving isn’t my primary reason on buying products. I have no problem spending the extra dollar or two to buy a brand I am familiar with. That’s right, in my world, brand loyalty comes first. In fact, the numbers are 37% of 18- to 29-year-olds buy based on brand.

While advertisers, marketers and PR are people are struggling to figure out how to see to my generation, I can tell you this… we buy household products too, and we aren’t all moms.

Stat sources: AdAge
Photo source:

Posted via web from saratara’s posterous

Those characters stayed in character. Big Mike is known for loving food. Morgan is known  for being a goofball and cheesy in a lot of his delivery. When Heroes made a product placement drop last season for Verizon, it didn’t blend.

So televised product placement…

In my opinion, if product placement goes unnoticed, then it is unsuccessful. Product placement almost every time receives an eye-roll. But Subway’s placement was successful, it was uninterruptive, yet noticeable and the eye-roll was a slightly smaller eye-roll.

Advertisers take note. Bad product placement gives the company a bad note. Since we are trained to spot an advertising effort from a mile away, product placement will never go unnoticed. The best you can do is make it the least interruptive and somewhat transparent.

All in all, product placement isn’t dead yet.

The blue glow was either from their iPods or their built-in or independent GPSes or the video screens on the back of seats or hanging from the roofs. It got me thinking, technology is not only everywhere, but welcomed into spaces, such as cars, where at first thoughts, would be a unnecessary addition.

Basically, SCREENS ARE EVERYWHERE. If they aren’t everywhere yet, they will be.

Now while television/movie screens in vans aren’t new (I believe they became almost common place in the early 2000’s), GPS screens are. As a user of a tab-browser and an automatic multi-tasker like so many of the X, Y and Z gens are becoming, maybe adding screens in cars was only a matter of time and is really less dangerous now than if implemented without the expectations of multi-tasking in other settings.

My face was lit with the blue glow back in the ’90s. When it was bed time and lights were out, I turned on my GameBoy to play a few more levels of Tetris or Pokemon Red. But all these devices I’ve listed so far are portable.

But the blue glow is making its way in other places that are unexpected such as the Kindle, potentially replacing the future of book shelves (and as of now, I don’t see it happening in the next decade). Or how about Verizon Hub? You may have seen the commercials where a parent communicates with their child or a husband gives his wife an alternate traffic route all from their kitchens? Verizon is calling it “The Home Phone Reinvented.”

The Blue Glow in your home is taking on a new place. Instead of broadcasting from your TV, or radiating from your cell phone, or pulsating from the home or mobile computer, it’s planted right there on your kitchen counter top. While I might not be their target audience, (due to not having a place to live after graduation yet) I want one. I think it’s cool. And I have to say Verizon made me think it’s cool. The Hub was actually shown on Gossip Girl, one of my favorite teen drama shows just 2 weeks ago.

So overall a few things I’ve realized about this glow:

Don’t count out the telecommunication field. They are doing some pretty exciting stuff. Things that I would love to work on.

Are the implementation of screens for entertainment, communication, and/or another purpose? Or does it not matter anymore? Like most successful tools of the web, will screen technologies, whether it’s touch or otherwise, be left up to the consumer?

Is portability possibly taking a back seat? The Hub, from what I gathered, is put as a pretty much stationary dock. Now while it looked like most communications were moving to be portable and small, maybe there is a small and slow reversal?

Where will the next source of the blue glow come from and why? Looking at the Hub, I can’t say where the next screen will pop up. If there is a purpose, a screen will be there eventually.

Image Sources:mdumlao98’s Flickr, Colourful Life 別”再”叫我阿姐 , 叫我Teresa’s Flickr, Engadgent/a>

I use twitter, I like twitter, and like many early adopters of twitter, I’m getting wary of the  “new twitter landscape”. I know it makes me sound snobby, but at the same time, I am. My issues with twitter aren’t about the people who tweet about every moment in their lives, because those people have always been there and will always be there. It’s the new comers who just want to make noise to show that they’re there.

Nowadays, I feel like that being on twitter is like automatically earning a boyscout badge, but instead of knowing how to make a fire, you just have to have an email address. Now, not everyone who is new falls into this category, but there are a bunch that do. With that said, I’ll probably twitter about this post.

On the bright side, I look forward to using Twitter and it’s “addicts” to market in incredibly innovative ways!

For those who were never “cool” enough to be a part of the optional site (unlike the socially mandatory Facebook), or you who skipped the heavily spammed and widegitized mess all together; “Top 8″ were the profiles that were linked directly from your site to a chosen 8 friends. (There were originally 8 spaces, which switched to other larger amounts.)

Top 8 was something that made or broke friendships. There were countless parodies on the gravity of putting someone in or taking someone out of a Top 8 slot. It was the equivalent of earning street cred, digitally. In fact, who and what was in your top 8 defined who you were.

But now “Top 8″ and “Myspace Me” are things of the past. They’ve been put in a metaphorical shoe box and filled away into a dark closet. We’ve traded “Top 8″ for links on LinkedIn, or  a more strange notion of digital “friending” on Facebook or a even more disturbing term of “following” someone (via Twitter). At least Top 8 was something unique to the site, not adding a new meaning to an existing word.

But only 4 years ago, Top 8 slots were a prize to win on celebrity myspace pages. Top 8 slots were something to fight, bite, cry and vie for. Now, it’s an ironic term to refer to an ancient notion only left for the digital savvy to say, to be, well, savvy.

And while everything has a shelf-life, some catch phrases make a reappearance. And when they do, it says something great and nostalgic about their birth place. But how exactly do they die? Born online, die online and buried in an ironic cemetery, then?

Could the “ironic” and “vintage” usage of a site’s lingo mean it’s old and buried and no longer relevant and current? And in this day, age and digital space, once you lose current status, what’s left?

Image sources: Mtoz’s Flickr, Mynicespace.com, Photobucket,

From there, I found digital PR and have been as happy as a clam since then. But since reading Seth Godin’s blog post “The difference between PR and publicity,” I put some more thought behind why I chose PR and why I stuck with it.

Think about it, when you are 18, you have to choose a school and soon after choose a major. And you don’t really get the full picture of what this major entails until the 3^rd or 4^th class. And all these lessons are being taught along side of the life lessons involving moving away from home, being independent, and all of that other coming of age stuff. I know, l know, life’s soo hard, blah blah blah.

Basically, PR from my basic pre-college understanding of it four years ago was building a story of someone or something, being able to mold something out of nothing, making something worthy of true attention all through communicating through various mediums and connecting to people that otherwise would be disconnected. That is what I thought it was. I thought it was both protecting and promoting reputations through communications.

Now, in retrospect, it’s obvious that digital PR was my end game, but at the time I just became frustrated. Class after class, we wrote fictional press releases and backgrounders in a systematic way.  Some stories were told, but those stories have been told.

Godin’s post differentiates between publicity and PR and sometimes that line is blurred without a second thought. In class, publicity was what I learned, in my internships and general interests, stories and PR is what I yearned and ultimately learned.

Twitter, especially in its stage as being mainstreamingly new, is reverting PR professionals back to being publicity hungry. Creating company Twitter accounts that just spews out links is annoying and wrong. Twitter can be a great storytelling tool. Except, each page is 140 characters long. As a heads up, I have a feeling I’m going to be ranting and raving on Twitter a lot more in the near future, so brace yourselves.

Image Source: Druss101’s Flickr