Dear hotel industry: The time for free hotel-wide WiFi has come

It was around 11 p.m. when I arrived at the Delta Hotel in Regina, Saskatchewan. It had been a long day: a full-day workshop in Saskatoon followed by the trip to Regina. By car, it’s only about a 2-1/2-hour drive. But I was flying Air Canada, which required a connection in Calgary, so I was tired and a bit cranky when I got to the hotel.

But I brightened up considerably when I saw this sign on the hotel’s front desk:

I was so happy to see this, in fact, that I shared it Instagram picture, which prompted a few notes from folks, notably this one from Kim Bratanata, a communicator with SWIFT in Belgium:

For someone looking at hotel… Read More »

Is your site optimized for pinning?

The proliferation of Pinterest-like sites tells me that Pinterest has tapped into something basic, a desire to share images more easily and with more focused purpose than the traditional photo-sharing sites. Since Pinterest has become the social service du jour, a number of other sites that duplicate the fundamental idea—collections of large easy-to-share images—have sprung up.

I’m regularly directed to Gentlemint, described as “Pinterest for men,” despite the fact that a growing number of men now have a Pinterest presence. Chill is a video bookmarking site that lets you create pinboard-like views of the videos you want to share; a… Read More »

Simplicity, integration continue to drive Facebook’s success

Mark Zuckerberg made a critical point during today’s announcement at Facebook headquarters—a point that was glossed over in most of the subsequent (and concurrent) discussions.

The announcement introduced three features: group chat, modifications to the design for chat, and video chat. The demonstration of the video chat feature focused on simplicity. Want to initiate a video chat with a friend? From the chat tab or your friend’s profile page, just click “Call.” If you’re the recipient of your very first Facebook video call, you don’t need to download or install anything. Just accepting the call installs the plugin.

Skype CEO Tony… Read More »

Limiting bandwidth: Penny-wise and megabit foolish

Join me in the wayback machine. We’ll set the dial for 1980, the height of production of printed internal communications. There were magazines, newsletters, magapapers, newspapers. These communiques were produced by the corporation, business units, departments and teams. Memos flew through mailrooms and fax machines and photocopiers spewed a landfill’s worth of material.

Paper isn’t cheap—and it wasn’t cheap in 1980—but as the demand for paper-based communication increased, never did anybody put a halt to it, arguing that cost reduction efforts would require the company to reduce its use of paper. Even as recycling efforts began… Read More »

Cognician puts an inventive spin on repurposing blog content

This blog features a creative Commons license that lets anybody do anything they like with the content published here, as long as proper attribution is given and it’s used for non-commercial purposes. I have agreements with a couple organizations to republish posts (including Ragan Communications and Social Media Today). Basically, what all this means is that the same content appears in multiple places. This is fine for increased exposure, and I’m happy if my words help bring traffic to another site. But despite the fact that the Creative Commons license allows anyone to slice, dice, mix and mash my posts however they like, I still… Read More »

Are you ready to incorporate QR codes into your communications?

The surge in smartphone ownership seems to be supporting a parallel rise in the use of QR tags. Marketers, advertisers and communicators should start incorporating tags into their planning now. The cost is minimal and the benefits could be huge.

A week or so ago I was shopping for a TV stand, that piece of furniture that supports a flat-panel television and the various devices (cable box, DVR, gaming console, DVD player, etc.) that stream content to the TV. At Best Buy, the small cards that displayed the price also featured QR codes. Using a free app called BeeTagg on my Android phone, I was able to scan the codess and get more… Read More »

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