Internet Thinking

One of our client sites was recently hacked to promote pharmaceuticals – the so-called “pharma hack”.

The Internet is forcing its way into the mother of parliaments with both sides in the UK proposing to require parliamentary debates on epetitions which gain more than a certain number of signatures.

Accountability and transparency means that most government agencies are fastidious (at least in theory) at recording as much as they can of interactions between them and the public. Ideally you will have detailed and accurate records which are readily available to the client citizen. So social networking sites pose a particular challenge.

We’re big fans of open government at Internet Thinking, but I don’t think we’d advise any of our clients to go as far as they have in open.alabama.gov.

Australia ranks fourth in the world for business Internet service after USA, Japan and Singapore, but before Hong Kong, England, Canada and Korea according to a survey by serviced office providers Servcorp.

A long time ago, in a far off inner city suburb, I used to run a boutique (read small) advertising agency. We were constantly advising our clients on how to measure and analyse the responsiveness of their direct marketing efforts – as all good agencies should. Absolute, irrefutable return on investment was and still is the holy grail but actually achieving that is harder than you may think.

Being a Twitter newbie I am still going from “what is the big fuss” to “I would rather die than not have Twitter” (which is apparently my eventual fate ever since setting up my account). So it was fascinating yesterday to see that as the Liberal Party went into meltdown, Twitter was ahead of even the online news services presumably because the same journos that send news back to the …
Read more…

One of the paranoid, or perhaps not so paranoid, conspiracy theories doing the rounds is that the US Republicans manipulated election results through the use of Diebold voting machines. I say “not so paranoid” because while I don’t accuse Diebold of committing any fraud, one of the problems with such voting machines is that they lack adequate auditing procedures.

If your job was relating your clients to the public you’d think that you’d be all over the newest uses of the Internet. Some of my recent experience suggests not. Like every other industry, Public Relations professionals are resistant, or even oblivious to, the way the Internet radically alters how you can and should spread your message. This article isn’t about those PR professionals.