Old Spice guy

The first quip comes from an extremely entertaining presentation by Josh Millrod, Digital Strategist at Wieden+Kennedy, and Jason Clement, Director of Emerging Platforms at the same company. The two fellows have worked on the social media and online digital campaigns for Nokia, Nike, ESPN,  ABC Entertainment and, more memorably, the highly viral Old Spice campaign.

Among the interesting insights from these two highly personable and successful creatives: Scale is not always achieved by creating something that appeals to the largest number of people — “You can’t socialize with a million people: that’s broadcasting.”

Instead, successful social media campaigns focus on one person’s story. For instance, the guy who said he was out of Wheat Thins, a relatively obscure brand. The company decided to send a whole pallet of Wheat Thins, which ignited the Web. The lesson: you can interact with just one person and have a conversation started.

(This idea finds an echo in something Tim Maleeny, Ogilvy North America’s head of planning, said earlier: “360-degree marketing is a myth — the key is to find the 10 or 20 degrees that work.” )

In the case of the Old Spice ads, the Wieden + Kennedy team spent two full days filming individualized commercials, and was also savvy enough to attract the attention of true-blue geeks by timestamping on Reddit.

Asked by a member of the audience about the strategy to adopt with an “unsexy” brand like Rogaine, the duo said: “Your brand is sexy by definition. Sex is probably the reason why guys use Rogaine. Old Spice is not a sexy brand, it was handed to us – but we were able to turn that around by making it about experience, about being a man.”

Another interesting BRITE insight comes from Luke Williams, a fellow at frog design and professor of innovation at NYU Stern, who wrote a book titled: “DISRUPT: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business.”

His focus is on looking for what’s really unexpected, against what’s predictably deemed disruptive. He zeroed in on the “magical aspect” of the iPad – it’s easy to get caught up in the expectation, to call it the Jesus Tablet. According to Williams, a lot of brand building around tech has been pretty predictable. “Now with even more features!!” – this is the same way we market toothpaste, by multiplying features or choices. What happens when everyone does that? Nobody stands out.

Williams posits that this obsessive focus on technology limits our vision. There’s a real revolution going on in consumer behavior, which is staggering in many respects. Think about it: the sound quality of mp3 files is poorer than CDs, camera phones take much lower-resolution images than film, and web streamed videos have poorer quality than DVDs. This is all very counter- intuitive.

When consumer behavior changes, your brand thinking has to go with it. Look at your brand and mix in up in untraditional ways, and you get things like Tivo, Red Bull, the Saw horror movie franchise, the success of a company that sells intentionally mismatched socks – all these companies have broken free of what’s taken for granted.

Finally, Mike Steib, director of video ads at Google,  shared some nuggets of wisdom:

1. Video content has exploded over the past generation, the only thing people do less of now is sleeping.

2. Not all Internet content is good, but the public is extremely good at finding good content.

3. Recall effectiveness of advertising in mobile is better than recall effectiveness in the Internet.

4. Major emerging ad sources:

–  Mobile advertising very big in search. When a Google search user switches to a smartphone, the number of searches rises 50 percent or more.

– Ads in apps in their free versions (when you pay for the apps, of course the ads disappear)

– Mobile video: m.youtube.com (the mobile version of Youtube) is the largest video site in existence.

flickr photo by wisdomlight

Turns out, quite a bit!  The confab provided a really striking contrast between the people, agencies and companies that seemed to “get it” and those that were still stuck in PowerPoint presentations.

Here are a few thoughts/notes I typed when I was not being mesmerized by speakers.  Lots of interesting tweets can be found at #Briteconf — but if reading tweets were easy, nobody would bother to read blogs.

“Audience First: How Marketers Can Meet the Challenge of the New Media World”

Antonio Lucio, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Visa Inc., said his company had boosted its investment in social media from 12 percent to 36 percent in 2 1/2 years – and the figure’s quickly heading towards 40 percent.

Key Quote: “We had to destroy the digital marketing department. We had to build the level of education of the marketing department, and of our senior managers, so they could help us.” — This to me is crucial. This is a question that has haunted me ever since the digital media revolution started in the news industry 12 or 13 years ago. To my dismay, I would notice time and time again that only the youngest or the brightest had any clue as to how this was going to REALLY transform the old media universe. I remember working on a Flash animated map back in 1999, and trying to explain to a managing editor why trying something so sophisticated (which it was, at the time) was important.

The divide between the “Get-It” and “Don’t Get-It” kept widening even as the social media revolution came to a head. I still shudder when I remember that many people in upper management in the media industry were still wondering if Facebook was just a fad, in 2009!

Social media has changed consumer behavior – cityville reached 100 mln users in less than 40 days

Lucio also emphasized the basic shift that has happened with social media: the move from a “Yell and Sell” model (a.k.a the Funnel) to an “Army of Advocates” (the “Loyalty Loop”). “Sharing is the new giving.”

Therefore, media plans must integrate paid/owned/shared media.  Participation is the new consumption, recommendation is the new advertising.

The next presenter, Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights, Edelman Digital, presented “11 digital trends to watch in 2011.”

1. Attentionomics—advertisers will realize the value of attention, and not just reach and impressions, in driving conversations. It’s a qualitative shift.

2. Curation – it’s all about those who can separate art from junk.

– Identify under-served niches and meet them,

– frame up issues and discussions, editorialize

– make curation collaborative and social

3. Developer engagement – developers drive innovation across all key platforms. mktg leaders will begin working with these stakeholders to scale their digital programs and surface area. If you build an ecosystem, you will work with developers and you must make your assets available to them. Build APIs and cultivate a rich developer network

4. Transmedia storytelling. We love stories, we crave them. Technology constantly advances the art of storytelling and creates new expectations. It also helps marketers connect. We must recognize that narratives is no longer a whole, no beginning or end. We must help audience connect the dots.

5. Tought leadership – Companies have to have credible expert voices who can propagate new ideas. People crave experts. There has been a devaluation of the notion of “friend,” and people don’t know 20 percent of their Facebook friends. But expertise remains very powerful.

6. Integration: Social media is compartmentalized in marketing or advertising in most companies. But you must integrate into a more holistic communication. To put it more simply: “Social media should not be 100 percent of one person, but 1 percent of 100 people.”

7. Ubiquitous social consumption: We will connect wherever, whenever – mobile solutions reign. “Immaculate Palace”-type websites are not that important. The tablet space will be a tremendous battle. “Optimize for mobility, not just mobile.”

8. Location, location, Facebook – facebook is well positioned to take over local. Think in terms of: “Local/ social/ photo/ mobile”

9. Social media schizophrenia: Social overload will become something more and more average users will experience. Let people self-select, maximize the dominant platforms and do them well, don’t get overextended. Keep it simple and convenient.

10. Google strikes back! Google and social are oxymorons — but they are going to make social incredibly social.

11. Viva la social website – it is still important to bring social functionality back into the website. Incorporate social data from connections, friends; design for function and form.

Other great tidbits from Rubel:

– Facebook have an incredible amount of data. “They are like the old Soviet Union, they have a social graph that foursquare simply can’t touch.” They will start making money from data services.

– You can’t build suspense with video. Most people drop off watching video after 90 seconds online.

The session ended with one of the most puzzling media decisions I have ever witnessed:  Neve Savage, Netflix’s VP of Consumer Marketing, made a presentation on ”Building the Netflix Brand” —  which was labeled off the record!? Pretty inexplicable.

Google Books for Mobile

And yet — in the four weeks since I got the app, I’ve torn through:

– Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Valley of Fear,” first read when I was 11 years old, and still hauntingly menacing in its grim depiction of a Pennsylvania mining town of the 1840s;

– Agatha Christie’s “The Secret Adversary,” absolutely delightful spy novel set in the aftermath of World War I and featuring Tony and Tuppence Beresford, an intrepid detecting duo whom Dame Agatha should have featured in more of her novels;

– “Wuthering Heights” — first read when I was 13 and living in Morocco, then again during my freshman year in France — whose length and complexity didn’t suffer at all from the format.

That is on top of my paper book reading, which has included David Rakoff’s “Half Empty”  and Stacy Pershall’s “Loud in the House of Myself.”

I also downloaded the OverDrive Media Console in order to read Adobe ePUB books borrowed from the public library. That has worked out pretty well too, since I have read:  ”Freakonomics 2″ and “Living Oprah,” a hilarious memoir of a woman trying to live a full year according to O’s life precepts and, in so doing, delivers a very thoughtful critique of the TV self-help industry.

I am currently reading:

– “The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army” by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe, an erudite and wonderfully entertaining examination of the careers and philosophies of Gens. Pete Chiarelli,  John Abizaid, George Casey and David Petraeus;

and

– “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which I first read in French when I was a kid.

I absolutely love the freedom and convenience of having a book right on my phone, without even having to open a separate device. Do I wish the screen were bigger? All the time. I have been known to stare at other people’s 4-inch phones just to see how much more comfortable the reading experience would be.

But it appears that the small screen doesn’t matter THAT MUCH. I may be venturing way outside my pay grade, but it may just be that the kind of “deep reading,” that trance-like state so perfectly described in Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” allows the reader to be less perturbed by material circumstances such as a smaller-than-ideal screen size.

I have no idea of the potentially far-reaching consequences of my new addiction on my eyesight or my overall reading habits. I notice that reading an LCD screen in bed is almost impossible for me, and I am more careful than ever to rest my eyes after a reading spell.

I know my next reading device will be a tablet (with an LCD screen capable of very low-intensity display) or an e-ink reader with 3G connectivity that would be capable of reading ePUB books, for a change (yes, I’m looking at you, Kindle).

Oxfam and CauseShift joined forces last night during

Haitians await emergency supplies

“Why Not?: Humanitarian Crisis and Media” — a meeting aimed at coming up with innovative and contrarian recommendations to resolve this dilemma.

Humanitarian action and media are the two areas I have been trying to bridge in my career, most notably during my stints at the United nations, but I also tend to approach this type of pow-wow with a reporter’s customary sense of skepticism against feel-good back rubs.

To my complete surprise, I came away energized and impressed by the format of the meeting. Instead of a simple succession of speakers,  this particular gathering also asked participants to huddle in smaller groups for ultra-quick (20 minutes?) brainstorming sessions, with a presentation to the whole audience at the end. To my uninformed eye, this type of format could be successfully applied to a number of other meetings that are time-constrained yet aim to reach some sort of concrete result.

The lineup:

Brian Reich (Moderator) – SVP and Global Editor, Edelman Digital ; Ayesha Khanna – Principal, Hybrid Reality Institute ; Kathleen Hessert – CEO BuzzMgr & Sports Media Challenge ; Sree Sreenivasan - Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; and Stephen Cassidy – Chief of Internet, Broadcast & Image Section, Unicef.

The main point of the Q&A: Technology needs filtering and curating in order to prompt effective action. Engineering power might very well be the most important commodity in a humanitarian situation.

Ayesha Khanna: We are moving from information age to hybrid age; we are not just using gadgets but we are moving into real a technology age. Right now we are still dependent on people responding to things, and the result is a lot of slacktivism.  The future will hinge on the Internet’s ability to overlay response to each other and give a set of clear directions.

Take the devastating Pakistani floods of 2010, she said: instead of crying on our Facebook pages, we must use technology in a much more integrated fashion, and we should be able to guide people on what to do if they want to help.

Khanna expressed a lot of my own preoccupations and prescriptions regarding Internet activism. In order for sentiment and emotions to result in concrete action and measurable change, there is an essential need to filter and curate the myriad bits of information darting around the Internet.

Khanna suggests that companies donate engineering brainpower instead of random gifts or money. Columbia University’s Sree Sreenivasan emphasized the “heroic” role that can be played by the curating journalist, taking NPR’s Andy Carvin as an example.  Clarity and accuracy can become the most precious currency in an emergency.

Another important point is that the wide availability of technology doesn’t mean that technology is being used to its full potential — “Penetration rate is not a problem in these countries,” said Khanna.  Again, what’s more important is the digital crunching and filtering.

Having covered business and technology for four years in South Korea, a country that prides itself on being one of the most wired in the world, yet where public debate often follows extremely narrow boundaries, I have always been wary of unit sales and bandwidth statistics. Millions of people can have smartphones, but if there is not also a concurrent effort to make those machines MEANINGFUL, it is difficult to expect any deep societal change.

Does that mean that “classically trained” journalists like yours truly would still have a job to do in the bright shiny future of social media? I sure hope so. There seems to be a standard attitude, pretty widespread in NGO circles, that dismisses “mainstream” media outright. I dare to believe that there is a middle ground, and that NGOs will, under the new constraints brought about by the rise of social media, come to understand the importance of trusting old-school media’s filtering and curating skills.

Other great tidbits from the meeting:

– Sree Sreenivasan, on how the media can structure the information differently and go beyond telling the basic story:  We already have journalists who are doing things differently. There’s a tremendous interest in social justice. The current crisis of journalism is part of the story. In the way we are teaching, Sree said, we must teach them how to think about the origin of some of these problems, think on longer term basis.
Two trends are noteworthy: journalists who specialize and take a deep dive in politics, science, arts, business; and digital journalism.

Sree also noted the increasing role that each institution can play. CFR.org has basically transformed itself into a news organization.

– Kathleen Hessert, who works with athletes on their humanitarian commitments: for athletes to be really effective in their commitments, they have to show continuity in their intent. Peyton Manning,who has been working with the same charity since high school, is an example. In practice, celebrities can become the biggest clogs on resources because everything stops when they get involved. She has seen egregious examples of ineffectiveness in the form of  dog booties or Suzanne Sommers Tighmasters (TM) sent to Haiti, or down jackets sent to Indonesia.

Hessert says she has been appalled at the politics during humanitarian responses.  Experience does not equate expertise. We need to educate people, we need to teach them best practices in social media, and to teach the public how to communicate more efficiently so that we can respond.

For more Tweets on the event, check out:  http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23crisismedia

“Everyone should understand what programming is” — strong wake-up call from writer and media critic Douglas Rushcoff, who was the centerpiece of a spirited and inspiring debate Friday morning at the New York Social Media Week. Rushcoff, who just published “Program Or Be Programmed“,  was interviewed by TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, with frequent interjections by Internet investor and entrepreneur Josh Harris.

Asked from the get-go whether his book offered an overly depressing vision of today’s corporate-driven Internet, Rushcoff went straight to the point: “My book is a bummer only if someone decides to remain a little digital peasant who will let others run the Internet.”

Readers, he said, must decide that they have ability to make intelligent choices, that all this technology is not impenetrable. The question is not “What is technology doing to us?”  – the right question is: “What can WE can do?”

Among Rushcoff’s most salient points:

– Evolution is not something that happens, it’s something in which we can actively participate, instead of passing value to advertisers who are running the net.

– People believe they are the customers of Facebook, when in fact Facebook’s real customers are the companies that mine the data and force people to “sell” their friends or themselves.

– Facebook is turning into a utility. What’s so fascinating about corrugated cardboard? When Facebook works, it will become the net again. That’s what happened to AOL.

– When you learn programming in high school these days,  you are learning how to use the various software of Microsoft Office. Everyone should understand what programming is, that it exists. It’s like learning to drive a car: once you learn to drive, you can drive any car. That principle should apply for programming.

While energizing, Rushcoff’s reasoning has several obvious faults.

First off, I think the  simile between programming and driving cars is not correct. A more appropriate comparison would be with REPAIRING cars — instead of simply operating a vehicle or a software, programming or repairing would involve a level of focus and a learning process: two elements that go beyond the simple use a  tool.

Secondly, as much as the idea of “learning to programming” is seductive, that simple verb covers a Mall of America’s worth of  platforms, languages, variants and applications. I remember the outstanding presentation done by the Girl Develop IT group last November, during which at least 20 different languages and platforms were discussed. Just the other day, a discussion on the best programming languages turned into a parade of names like C, Java, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, Scala, Erlang, Haskell….

How is an outsider supposed to understand the nuances between these languages, especially when even good professional programmers can hope to master only a few of them? How is a person with a full-time job supposed to acquire this knowledge?

This digital divide, to my eyes, is not even a matter of economic means — I know plenty of people who have great, non-programming jobs, and could definitely afford the cost of learning these languages… only if they had 20 more hours a week of free time at their disposal. Not going to happen.

My uncharacteristically middle-of-the-road position is that “Learning to Program” covers way too vast a territory, one that covers dozens of complex languages. But that doesn’t mean we non-programmers should shelve all idea of getting at least a glimpse at what’s happening on that symbolic “other side.” I have grown impressed by the apparently increasing number of grassroots efforts to help people learn languages. Aside from Girl Develop It, I could cite Ruby Nuby, which teaches, well, Ruby, for free.  But those opportunities are still too few and far between, and I for one would love to be part of a more systematic effort to learn programming. We Should All Be TRYING to Learn Programming.

Are we overlooking deeper historical forces in our haste to label everything? Are journalists imposing an incorrect narrative on these events? Such were the questions asked during a bracing debate (“Egypt, Activism and The Role of Social Media”), which benefited from near-perfect timing: That very morning, at around 11 am, official word had finally come that Hosni Mubarak was resigning as president. The debate itself started just minutes after President Obama’s historically astute statement tracing the feat of the Egyptian people all the way back to India and Indonesia’s struggle for independence after WWII — references that are likely to resonate in the formerly non-aligned country that was Egypt.

On the podium/in the arena:

Parvez Sharma @ParvezSharma : Award winning filmmaker (A Jihad For Love) and writer

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @shihabeldin : Producer/Co-Host, Al-Jazeera English

Glynnis MacNicol  @GlynnMacN: Editor of Business Insider’s The Wire

Peter Feld @PeterFeld : Freelance writer, web content strategist

The power of social media was underscored from the get-go, when panelists were asked where they were when they heard about Mubarak’s resignation. Three out of the four panelists were online at the time. The lone exception, Sharma, was still connected, since he was on the telephone with a friend in Cairo who apparently has a knack for historical perspective (“We are the world’s oldest civilization, and we just had the world’s most civilized revolution”).

Al-Jazeera’s Ahmed Shihab-Eldin pointed at social media’s increasingly instrumental role since the beginning of the unrest in Tunisia in late December. “Images kept coming across Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Arabic sites. The tweets came through at an incredible rate,” finally forcing mainstream Western media to pay attention to what was happening.  He also noted the importance of the “Live in Egypt” initiative which allowed Egyptians, abruptly cut off from the Internet by government decree, to tweet via telephone, with volunteers transcribing their oral accounts into tweets.

Novelist Parvez Sharma was quick to find fault with such a heroic depiction of social media’s role. About 40 percent of Egypt’s 80 million people live below the poverty line, he said, and most phones in that country are not smartphones. Only a small minority of people have the financial and technical ability to tweet — probably fewer than 200. Class divisions in Egypt are pretty enormous, and a rich kid from the poshest neighborhoods is not going to tweet at a garbage collector to come to Tahrir Square.

It is therefore condescending to diminish what is an incredibly popular revolution into a “Facebook event” or a “Twitter event,” said Sharma. Of course, Facebook has been very important and social media was an important aspect of the event, but to call it Revolution 2.0 is a stretch.

Shihab-Eldin: “I don’t think it matters what we call it.”

Sharma: “I think it does. This is the way it will be called for posterity.” Also, social media’s role in Egypt could accelerate clampdowns elsewhere in the middle east. This happened in Iran in 2009. All the self-congratulatory stuff could backfire.

Peter Feld : “The biggest concern is that social media at times becomes a bubble.”  Sometimes, looking at your twitter screen, you can get the impression that you see the whole universe.

Shihab-Eldin: Still, to say social media didn’t play a central role is to overlook reality.

As a diplomat’s child who grew up in resolutely non-democratic countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Morocco and Tunisia in the 1970s and 1980s, I would tend to share Sharma’s deep distrust of the freedoms secured only by a small political or economic elite. Talk of “emancipated” and “westernized” elite Muslim women in poorer countries usually leave me unconvinced. Obviously, the freedoms and choices granted to the lower or lower-middle class are much more representative of the real conditions on the ground.

Still, in the case of Egypt — and without knowing anything about the reality on the ground — I tend to share the point Glynnis McNicol made during the debate:  the number of Twitter users in Egypt may have been small, but they were reaching millions and millions OUTSIDE the country.  Thanks to social media, which gave immediacy to events happening thousands of miles away, the U.S. media paid daily attention to the crisis, the American public paid attention.

I also share Peter Feld’s concerns and hopes regarding the aftermath of Mubarak’s departure. As the pace of events inevitably slows down while the Egyptian nations rebuilds its constitution and prepares for democracy, the media’s focus is likely to go away from Egypt. Social media has a great role to play thanks to its ability to connect far-flung people. Lots of the people who tweeted during the Egyptian revolution now have followers on Twitter, and when they tweet again we will still be following. That’s the great quality of social media.

The podium at the SWM-Financial news event (Photo: Business Wire)

Although not surprising, the serious lack of female representation on some of Social Media Week’s major panels was disturbing and should serve as a wake-up call of sorts.  I admit I only attended a minuscule fraction of what SWM-NY had to offer, but what I saw was not encouraging.

Of the five events that I found most interesting, three had no female speaker at all, while the two others had managed to find one specimen each (one of whom was scarcely heard, being remotely connected from Sweden through a Web link).  Judging by the composition of the audience, there ARE plenty of women who are interested, but they are probably not VISIBLE enough to be easily included in those panels. (I have the non-female-inclusive list at end of this post. I also know that a number of other panels had female majorities.)

To anyone who’s been attending new media/technology/social media events, this situation is not new, but it needs to be noted every time it happens.

The onus is even heavier on an event like Social Media Week, whose very core rests on the implicit endorsement of social participation and citizen media. How can these topics be discussed when so few women are available to express their opinion?

The history of women’s entry and participation in the media industry is a story of resilience in the face of condescension, skepticism and ridicule. It is also the product of women overcoming their own doubts regarding their competence.

My own career in the media business started pretty inauspiciously in 1990 in the printing room of a tiny regional newspaper in France where I was often the lone female intern on that floor (and incidentally the only non-Caucasian one too). Only with time, experience and practice did I manage to gain enough confidence in myself. There is little reason why women should have to walk through the same professional gauntlet in the seemingly more egalitarian digital age — but the danger is there, and it needs to be faced.

There is no finger to point, just awareness to be had. This is why I can’t stop praising grassroots initiatives such as Girl Develop IT (http://girldevelopit.com/) which encourages women to get into programming.

List of speakers: (women’s names and titles have been bolded)

Social media and financial news:

Faciliator Howard Lindzon, Founder and CEO of StockTwits

Jaime Punishill, Global Head Wealth Online at Thomson Reuters

Robert Harles, Global Head of Social Media at Bloomberg LP

Herb Greenberg, Senior Stock Commentator at CNBC

Cardiff Garcia, Reporter, FT Alphaville

Paul La Monica, Assistant Managing Editor, CNNMoney

Addressing the new rules of the media landscape:

Ben Popper, Tech/Media Editor for The New York Observer (Moderator)

Mark Patricof, Managing Partner of media investment bank MESA Global

Max Robins, Vice President & Executive Director, The Paley Center

Michael Yavonditte, CEO of Hashable

Michael Silberman, General Manager, Digital Media at New York Media

Program or Be Programmed:

Doug Rushkoff (author, “Program or be Programmed”), Erick Schonfeld (Co-Editor of TechCrunch) and Josh Harris (founder of Jupiter Research and Pseudo.com).
Social Media around the world:

Moderator: Freddie Laker, Head of Digital Strategy – Asia, SapientNitro

Katarina Graffman,Owner & CEO of Inculture, Stockholm, Sweden

Justin Barkhuizen, Ex-Director of Social Media, MediaCom

Mark Leong, Digital Strategist, RAPP, Tokyo, Japan

Zarul Shekhar, SapientNitro + TV Producer/Anchor Delhi, India, Manager of Digital Media

Mehdi Lamloum, Digital Planner, OgilvyOne, Tunisia

Social Media and Egypt:

Glynnis MacNicol : Editor of Business Insider’s The Wire

Peter Feld : Freelance writer, web content strategist

Parvez Sharma : Award winning filmmaker (A Jihad For Love) and writer

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin : Producer/Co-Host, Al-Jazeera English

I attended a panel on financial news and social media hosted by the Financial Times and Stocktwits (the juxtaposition of those two media names, unthinkable only 24 months ago, is proof enough of the amazing horizontal realignment precipitated by Twitter).

The panel, “News Dissemination in a Social Finance World,” hosted in what used to be the former luncheon room of the New York Stock Exchange, featured Jaime Punishill, Global Head Wealth Online at ThomsonReuters, Robert Harles, Global Head of Social Media at Bloomberg, Herb Greenberg, Senior Stock Commentator at CNBC, Cardiff Garcia, Reporter, FT Alphaville , and Paul La Monica, Assistant Managing Editor, CNNMoney.  The discussion was moderated, with great wit and insight, by Howard Lindzon of Stocktwits.

Remarks, devoid of any attempt at editing:

1. Where would financial reporting be without Twitter?

For 3 out of these 5 representatives of major financial news outlets, Twitter is the first thing they read every morning.

According by tweeted comments (#smwft), other members of the audience concurred that they got their financial info primarily from Tweets — from individuals, as opposed to mainstream media organizations.

Other news products used by the panel: WSJ.com, Mashable, briefing.com, Breaking Views (this last one from the TR representative), CNN, FT.

Herb Greenberg was an outlier in that he usually goes to NYT/WSJ, then Twitter. Today, he checked Twitter first & saw the AOL news.

This is dizzying — the hierarchy of financial news sources has been upended by the rise of one extremely simple and universally accessible Web tool.

2. In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that online sources were never really at play while I was managing business news for FoxNews.com from 2001 to 2006 — that dark, barbaric time when people didn’t even use Facebook, or during my time in Korea, which was right before Twitter became mainstream in that country.

Said Paul LaMonica, journalists who are willing to embrace social media as a medium can develop new sources and be quite successful.

3.  Exponentially easier access means new responsibilities, the panelists emphasized. Curation of the information — vetting bloggers, filtering credible sources — is becoming more and more critical.

So what’s next? How do media companies act on these evolutions? I assume everyone is trying to come up with a sustainable protocol in order to filter and vet reliable Twitter sources. But what are the criteria? Someone tweeted that anyone with half a brain would quickly realize which sources are reliable and which ones are not. But not everyone has that kind of time or patience. It still falls on media outlets, traditional or otherwise, to do this filtering job.

“Some of the most venerable-yet-defunct brands in corporate American history—including such once-vibrant household names as Braniff, Collier’s, Shearson and American Brands—will be up for grabs next month in an unique auction to be held in New York City.”

We are talking names like Victrola, Braniff, Handi-Wrap, BOAC, Intelligent Electronics, Allied Signal, Infoseek, Control Data (yes, the venerable Control Data!), General Instrument, Pacific Brands, Cosmetics Plus, Phar-Mor, Rx Place, Sterling Drug, Shearson, Girard Bank and HBOS.

Says the Crain’s article, New York-based private investment company Racebook will individually auction off a portfolio of 150 now-unused brands on Dec. 8 at the Waldorf Astoria.

Growing up in France with an interest in American economics, I would read many of these names on a regular basis in the International Herald Tribune and imagine myself covering these then-Titans of industry. Later, when I started working in the US in the mid-1990s, these brands were still alive and competitive.  It’s hard not to feel a great deal of regret and awe at the fact that names are all that is left of these once-mighty companies.

While the debates have been generally instructive and each country’s declarations brief  (credit goes to Joseph Deiss, President of the 65th session of the General Assembly), the best part of the meetings are clearly when delegations take leave of their usual decorum to attack each other.This happened during a two-day debate on the Security Council, with the delegate from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea concluding his statement with this choice morsel:

“When permanent membership was to be enlarged, said the representative, countries – like Japan – which continued to “avoid admitting, apologizing and liquidating of past crimes” and resorted to “distorting and beautifying its past history of aggression”, should never be allowed to be a permanent member of the Security Council.”

Japan asked for a right of reply.

“Taking the floor in exercise of the right of reply, the representative of Japan said his delegation was compelled to state that it could not accept the allegations made by the representative of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea regarding its history and current standing.  (…) Regarding the “unfortunate” comments about Japan’s past, his delegation could not accept such statements as those made by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea during today’s debate.  Japan had devoted itself for more than 65 years to the principles of democracy and human rights, among others.

North Korea replied to the reply:

“Responding, the representative of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stated that Japan was the only county in the world that had not apologized for its past crimes against humanity.  During wartime, it had killed one million Koreans, forced many into hard labour, and committed various other crimes.  Moreover, facts about Japan’s history continued to be “widely distorted”.

Japan, take 2:

“Again taking the floor, Japan’s representative said his country should be considered for Security Council membership based on its ability to contribute to the protection of international peace and security, and not on “false allegations” such as the ones made by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

North Korea, take 2:

“The representative of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea the declared that countries that committed such heinous crimes “would once again commit those crimes”, and therefore Japan should not be considered for a permanent seat on the Security Council.”

Japan, final take:

“Responding, the representative of Japan said his delegation could not accept the baseless statements made by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, using “unseemly expressions and vulgar language.” It was unfortunate that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had chosen to use the current debate as an opportunity to attack Japan in such a way.”

North Korea, last shot:

“Taking the floor for a last time, the representative of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea reiterated that crimes committed by countries did not “disappear” until they were fully settled.”