Category Archives: Brands

GSummit 2013 Scavenger Hunt

One of the highlights of GSummit 2013 in San Francisco was the cityHUNT scavenger hunt on April 16. Teams were given a couple of pages of instructions, cameras, and two hours to run all over SF finding things, convincing strangers to help, and generally causing genial mayhem. Our team Satha Kotiya (Scavenging Tiger [Sri Lankan]) blitzed the event, earning 980 points, with awesome teamwork.

Team name
Team Satha Kotiya (Scavenging Tiger in Sri Lankan)
Taking candy from a baby
Dreaming
Theft
Breakdancing
Tweeting
Performing with a street performer
Riding a stranger’s bike
OG style with foreign currency
Serenading a stranger
Sports gear with a stranger
Pulling a boat out of the ground
Under water
The Sims
Crushed by water
Butterfly
Gabe lookalike and team
Using a stranger’s kitchen
Popping out from a heart
Statue clone
Blue eyes?
Captain Morgan with strangers
Zuck?!
Earthquake
Harlem Shuffle
Gamify with a stranger
All badges, all the time
Hidden talent
Jail
Drag
Mannequin clone
Aerial high five

Adobe silent about unequal global pricing

I commented in Technology Spectator about Adobe’s silence about unequal global prices in the wake of negative social media comments from consumers.

Aaaadobe, wo-oes…

Excerpt: “…[T]here’s one major difference that separates Adobe’s social media strategy in Australia from other local companies – they choose not to engage with criticism. Particularly criticism revolving around the company’s price points.” [...]

For Sean Rintel, social media commentator and strategic communications lecturer at University of Queensland, its not. He says the “crisis communication handbook” says to do the opposite.

“The whole point of crisis communication, is to regain control of the agenda,” Rintel says.

Read more at:

Polites, H. (2012, August 08). Behind Adobe’s pricing silence. Technology Spectator (Online).

Related:

Rintel, S. (2011, November 4). Do privacy settings work in the age of online reputation management? The Conversation (Online).

Put a Pin(terest) in it

Australian Gift Guide interviewed me about Pinterest.

Excerpt:

“Dr Sean Rintel, lecturer in strategic communications at the University of Queensland, says the site’s popularity stems from our basic instincts. [...] “Lots of people collect images of fashion; they clip magazines and put them into various sorts of things like that, so this is just a new version of that kind of collecting behaviour. “The big benefit is that you can share this stuff with other people and so if you’ve got a need to share your collection with other people—either just because you’re interested in sharing it or you want people to look at it and give you some sort of suggestion—that’s when Pinterest becomes really useful.”

The Copyright Issue

“If you’re a business you’ve got to be sure you own the rights or have rights to whatever images you want to put up, so if you own a store you need to take your own photos or you need to check if your suppliers are giving you images you can use royalty free or for a small fee with their permission, because otherwise you might be in a difficult position copyright wise.”

Read the full article at:

Galvin, R. (2012, July). Put a pin in it. Australian Gift Guide, pp 44-45. (PDF)

Related articles:

Rintel, S. (2012, March 22). A new way to share – why Pinterest isn’t just another social network. The Conversation (Online).

The Evolution of Fail Pets Part 2

In November last year UX Magazine published my article on The Evolution of Fail Pets such as Twitter’s Fail Whale.

Fred Wenzel, a Mozilla employee who I found to have coined the term (and has a gallery of Fail Pets), read the piece recently and picked up an error that I had made.

I attributed the cute “sad brick” (below) that appears when Flash crashes in Firefox to Adobe.

Source: crunchyroll.com

However, as Fred says, that was a misattribution:

Attentive readers may also notice that Mozilla’s strategy of (rightly) attributing Adobe Flash’s crashes with Flash itself by putting a “sad brick” in place worked formidably: Rintel (just like most users, I am sure) assumes this message comes from Adobe, not Mozilla.

As this image of an Adobe Flash plugin crash in Chrome shows, browser developers choose how to display errors for plugins. Google has gone with the more traditional puzzle-piece.

Source: crunchyroll.com

I should have noted that although the Firefox error message states that the Adobe Flash plugin had crashed, there was no Adobe logo on the error page, which would have been likely if it was an Adobe-designed error.

So, Mozilla is deliberately attributing failure to the company, but has chosen its own whimsical way of doing so. In my article, I call the “sad brick” as well as Google’s “sad puzzle piece”  an evolution of the original Fail Pet idea because instead of an attributable brand mascot (such as the Fail Whale), this does a more generic sad face. Beyond Mozilla and Google, many other companies are jumping on this low-key and less brand attributable whimsy: Microsoft’s new BSOD emoticon and Apple’s sad iCloud especially.

Source: uxmagazine

Source: uxmagazine

Read the full original article @

Rintel, S. (2011, November 2). The Evolution of Fail Pets: Strategic Whimsy and Brand Awareness in Error Messages. UX Magazine.

These ideas were also followed up by The Voice Project: Why error messages matter – and why not everyone thinks they are funny.

Mindshare is king: Facebook is down but far from out

 The Conversation published my article on why market nervousness about the troubled Facebook IPO is unwarranted.

I argue that while no company is immune to failure, the current market nervousness over Facebook is unwarranted. Facebook still has as strong a lock on the concept of sharing as Google does on the concept of search. I cover three issues: The mishandled IPO, the relative infancy of the mobile space, and the monetisation of the social graph.

Read the full article @

Rintel, S. (2012, May 31). Mindshare is still Facebook’s biggest asset. The Conversation (Online).

Also syndicated in:

Rintel, S. (2012, June 1). Underestimating Facebook’s potential. Technology Spectator (Online).

 Rintel, S. (2012, May 31). Mindshare is still Facebook’s biggest asset. Leading Company (Online).

Related: