Living in Color

Guy Kawasaki's blog, How To Change The World (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/), pointed me to a couple of articles at Edelman, a global PR firm (http://www.edelman.com) I thought you might find interesting. More about the articles later. I was fascinated with Edelman's concept, Living In Color. Here's how they describe it on their website:

"At Edelman, what we do inside our offices is only half the story. 'Living in Color' is the other half. Living in Color is part of the Edelman culture, an aspiration for every one of our employees to be curious about the world around them, to explore the world outside their cubes and offices, to immerse themselves in the arts, culture, politics, literature, charitable organizations and/or wherever else their passions and interests may take them.

Edelman believes that its staff's personal growth and professional growth are intertwined. In keeping with that belief, Edelman has committed itself to aiding its employees' efforts to 'Live In Color'.

What does 'Living In Color' mean?

It means leading a culturally rich and rewarding life outside of work. It means spending time with family. It means giving back to your community. It means taking the time to learn about the world around you and your place in it.

While Living In Color can mean a lot of things, perhaps one Edelman's employees provided the best interpretation when she wrote:

'Living In Color Means...
...reading one or two (or three) newspapers every day. It's developing an ever growing interest for the place you live in, the world you live in. It's watching the news. It's expanding into new interests, opening doors. Living In Color is not "what you do after work" - it's what you do with your life. It never stops. It's agreeing to work for a pro-bono client, and helping another team - or office - with a project, so you can get exposed to things outside your area of comfort. It's understanding how what you do fits into the bigger picture. It's becoming an active, joyful participant in whatever you think is worth your time. If you are a contributor to making this office a better place beyond your account work, you're living in color. If you vote, you're living in color. If you volunteer, you're living in color. If you spend yourself in a worthy cause, you're living in color.

Living in Color doesn't "take time." It's how you fill the time you have. It's realizing you're part of something bigger than you.

If you think living in color is expensive, or something you can't afford, you're missing the point. Living in color is like living. It's yours. It's free.' " Isn't that fantastic?

Now the articles . . . First is:

Five Digital Communications Trends You Should Know

In Edelman’s latest white paper, Steve Rubel, Director of Digital Insights, highlights five of the more compelling digital trends to watch for in 2009, that impact how you effectively engage audiences online:

• Satisfaction Guaranteed - Customer care and PR blend as consumers use social media to demand service
  
• Media Reforestation - The media’s reinvention as it transitions to digital
  
• Less is the New More - As information overload takes its toll, friends are helping to filter
  
• Corporate All-Stars – How workers are building their personal brands, yet offering employers a new way to market
  
• The Power of Pull - The benefits of creating content that people discover through search
  

Read the article at www.edelman.com/image/insights/content/EdelmanDigitalTrends0109.pdf

The second article is:

The Social Pulpit - The Change Brought By Barack Obama’s Success

Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory by converting everyday people into engaged and empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online video. By combining social media and micro-targeting in the manner that it did, the campaign revealed force multipliers that are already being adopted as part of a new communications model. This examines the tactics of this revolutionary campaign and what it means for communicators in a new era of public engagement. How will your business be affected?

Full article: www.edelman.com/image/insights/content/Social%20Pulpit%20-%20Barack%20Obamas%20Social%20Media%20Toolkit%201.09.pdf

Understanding Our Current Financial Mess - The End Of Wall Street's Boom

Michael Lewis, author of Panic, has written an article that clearly gives the complex details of how we got into our current financial mess. The article has many quotes of some of the players with language that is pretty rough. Here's how the article starts:

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance . . .

To read the entire article go to: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom