Do you have an unsung hero in your company/network that *really* deserves a gong ?!

http://bit.ly/OObdY

#ITsuperstar

Viva Las Vegas and   IBM Information on Demand Conference !

“IT Superstar of the Year”

We’re sure you know lots of IT professionals whose great work goes unrecognized. It’s time every one of them knows they’re appreciated !

Imagine your friend or colleague opening their morning email today and finding out that they are the “IT Superstar of the Year”.

Fill in the form below and we’ll send a fun, personalized video to each email address you enter. We’ll also send a copy of the video to you, so you can share it with friends and colleagues.

Go here to start the recognition :

It’s time to call IT pros up from the basement, and give them the credit they deserve !

This is serious…. Bloggers who refuse to reveal disclosure of gifts or payments from companies reviewing their products/services moving forward will be subject to $11,000 fines per instance. This is part of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s revised guidelines entitled FTC Guide Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

My guidance to my IBM colleagues remains, and as per our IBM Social Computing Guidelines : We are encouraging  a genuine word of mouth campaign vs a sponsored conversation approach.

The two most important conditions that I would recommend to follow   when using sponsored conversation are

1) sponsorship transparency
and
2) blogger authenticity

Sponsorship transparency means that both the marketer and the blogger must make it absolutely clear to the reader community that they are reading paid content – such as  Google Adwords “Sponsored Links.” Blogger authenticity means that the blogger should have complete freedom to write in their own voice. As long as those conditions of transparency and authenticity are met then sponsored conversation can be a powerful tool  right alongside our PR  efforts. However, blogger outreach with genuine word of mouth is far more impactful  than sponsored conversation. We still need to creatively activate the conversation. Blogging is not a chore that we must / can  lead or direct. Teaming up with the PR team on our blogging outreach programme  is a must, and this more than ever.

Some key points of this announcement :

New guidelines argues that any post of a blogger who receives “cash or in-kind payment to review a product” should be considered an endorsement
·    Because these posts are now officially considered endorsements, bloggers who receive freebies must now disclose this fact on their site.
·    Bloggers who fail to disclose they have received freebies when they write about a product can now be fined up to $11,000 per post.
·    While the FTC will obviously have a hard time enforcing these regulations, there can be no doubt that marketers regularly approach independent bloggers (and especially mommy bloggers) with freebies.
·    While bloggers who are involved in these schemes often tend to say that they would have reviewed the product anyway or that their reviews are often critical, there can be little doubt that payments and freebies influence these stories.
·    These new rules and rather large fines should bring some bloggers and marketers into line, though others will surely continue to push the ethical boundaries.
·    And blogging Payola is unlikely to go away completely because of these new rules.
·    The new rules also take on celebrity endorsements. If celebrities endorse a product and make false or unsubstantiated claims, or don’t disclose ‘material connections’ between themselves and the advertisers in ads and outside the context of the ads (talk shows, social media, etc.), these celebrities can be held liable under the FTC Act.

#full disclosure #blogging #ftc

According to the official Google blog, 100,000 invitations to Google’s most hotly-anticipated new service, Google Wave, went out yesterday. Wave is being touted as a communication tool that reimagines the way email should work.

So, who’s getting invited to use this next-generation communication tool? Well, it helps if you signed up early for an invitation and wrote the Wave team a message offering to give feedback. If you’re a developer who’s been using the developer preview of Wave, you might also get an invitation, and some are going out to paying customers of Google Apps.

Meanwhile, and as turbotodd explained in his blog, IBM Lotus has been gaining ground on the collaboration front through the delivery and adoption of real products our customers can use today

I love the waves … but from the sea, don’t you ?! #lotusknows

Apparently, and not surprisingly, many consumers have lost faith in some brands during the current economic downturn. Yet, the Interbrand 2009  study found two brands are still going strong and evoke strong trust and value in the minds of consumers, namely :  Coca-Cola and IBM.

Remember, a brand is a collection of experiences and associations connected with a service, a person or any other entity–it’s not just an image or an ad campaign. So this means, the associations that consumers think of in terms of IBM are very positive. For our partners, this is great news. When you co-market and co-sell with IBM you are associating your brand with off one the worlds most valuable brands. The IBM brand is trusted by customers and seen as one that delivers on its promise.

Some highlights of the study: Consumers lost trust in brands this year as the recession deepened, according to an industry report, although longtime staples Coca-Cola and IBM retained their spots as the world’s two most valuable brands. This is the first time the combined value of the world’s top 100 brands as ranked by Interbrand, a branding agency, has fallen in the 10 years Interbrand has assessed them.

The environment — a recession the likes of which the world hasn’t seen for decades — has eaten away at people’s trust in specific brands. Despite these economic conditions, the IBM brand remains strong as one that consumers can rely upon.

IBM is developing a new search tool which it claims will offer a better way to search online for photos and videos than current methods used by Google.
The new tool, called SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval) indexes and analyses “low-level descriptors”, or attributes such as colour, layout, shape and sounds, in photos and videos.
The technology then compares those descriptors to other existing photos to help identify what’s in the picture.

Traditional search technologies typically sift through images based on text tags assigned to the photos.
SAPIR uses peer-to-peer technology, so there’s no central point of failure, the company said.

The technology could produce applications that might let someone take a picture of an item and discover stores that sell the item. Or doctors might be able to use it to assist with diagnoses, IBM said.

SAPIR was created by researchers from IBM in Israel; Max-Planck Institute in Germany; Eurix, the Institute of Information and Science and Technology and the University of Padua in Italy; Xerox in France; Masarvkova University in Czech Republic; Telefonica’s research arm in Spain; and Norway’s Telenor.
Ari Fishkind said the researchers are still tweaking the technology and it will be “some time” before it’s turned into a product.

IBM’s New Global CIO Study is out.

More than 2,500 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) were interviewed on the subject of :  Leveraging analytics to gain competitive advantage and improve business decision-making is now the top priority for CIOs.

More than four out of five (83 percent) survey respondents identified business intelligence and analytics — the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights — as the way they will enhance their organizations’ competitiveness.

The Global CIO Study 2009 is the largest face-to-face survey of CIOs ever conducted.

This year’s study, titled “The New Voice of the CIO,” represents the insights and visions of CIOs from 78 countries, 19 industries, and organizations of every size, and it reinforces the increasingly strategic role that CIOs are playing as visionary leaders and drives of innovation and financial growth.

With an increased focus on data analytics, the survey also revealed that data reliability and security have emerged as increasingly urgent concerns, with 71 percent of CIOs planning to make additional investments in risk management and compliance.

Other key findings :

• CIOs are continuing on the path to dramatically lower energy costs, with 78 percent undergoing or planning virtualization projects
• 76 percent of CIOs anticipate building a strongly centralized infrastructure in the next five years.

Published by the IBM Institute for Business Value, this year’s CIO Study included more than 2,500 face-to-face interviews, conducted over four months from January to April 2009. In addition to the detailed personal feedback, IBM also incorporated financial metrics and detailed statistical analysis into the findings.

The report also highlights a number of recommendations from strategic business actions and use of key technologies that IBM has identified that CIOs can implement, based on CIO feedback from the study.

The full 2009 CIO Study and interviews about the study are available at www.ibm.com/ciostudy.

First ever Lotus Knows IdeaJam  was held from August 19 to August 22. The jam was designed as a unique opportunity to hear the thoughts of Lotus users and learn from their experiences. The Jam had more than 4,700 unique visitors from 73 countries who contributed over 950 new ideas, 2,200 comments and 20,000 votes. They are keeping the Lotus Knows IdeaJam available until September 12 so you can read the comments from the community.

As the momentum around this continues to build, they are asking for contributions to the ‘Video Blitz’. The Blitz is designed to showcase the broad capabilities of Lotus technology in short, entertaining video clips, and you are invited to participate: “It’s an opportunity for you to create a video that visually demonstrates how end users know Lotus. Take any approach you think best conveys your message. Be as creative as you like, but you’ll need to do it all in 1 to 3 minutes and your submission must be in .WMV video format.

You can upload your submission to www.doyouknowlotus.com ” (more info there also).

There is also a new podcast in the Taking Notes series Lotus Knows Jamming with Industry Innovators. “Alistair Rennie and Kevin Cavanaugh discuss the IdeaJam, the Lotus Knows campaign, IBM’s Smarter Planet agenda and what’s on the horizon from Lotus. It is available on on iTunes or on the Taking Notes Podcast web site.”

After nearly 2 weeks in South Africa, where we discovered the Garden Route and the Wine route as well as Cape Town, it is difficult to get back on track with normal life… We had a fantastic time and the kids just simply loved it – walking with Elephants, cuddle with baby lions, cheetahs, been with crocodiles, birds, monkeys, snakes… and here is a huge one … a safari of 2 days in Addo Park. A magic trip…. that we are not going to forget…