Doug Haslam

I’m fond of the "just do it" school of social media. A lot of these tools are both pre-mainstream and cheap/free, so experimentation is a low risk venture. For that reason I try not to be too quick to criticize companies and people who don’t do it "correctly." Look at ABC News and their embrace [...]

I’m a big user of Twitter – as many of you know, since the main traffic driver for this blog is Twitter – but I have probably not blogged about it so much lately– I have mentioned it and surrounding issues a bit, sure, but not about why and how I use Twitter. I figured [...]

After reading Ike Pigott’s article on Media Bullseye, "It’s Nothing Personal," (http://mediabullseye.com/…onal.html), in which he mock-apologized for not following the too-many blogs in his feed reader, I asked myself- will RSS fail as a consumer application? It may. – RSS is too complicated to explain, even if it’s "really simple." Is it too much to [...]

I have been reading the Boston Globe’s series on Ted Kennedy and have a few thoughts: (http://www.boston.com/…ls/kennedy) – Flogging a book with a serial in the paper is old school. Still effective? – Did this sell papers in the way, say, Obama inaugural special editions did? Will we see more if it does? – The [...]

Taking part in Journchat Monday evening on Twitter (http://journchat.info/, http://twitter.com/journchat), one question came up that didn’t speak to PR people on the surface; did media hype make the economic situation worse? My answer is yes, "pack journalism" hypes any situation, including wars and perceptions of candidates, out of whack. But it does mean something to [...]

The discussion about the future of newspapers isn’t inside baseball anymore; it’s kitchen table discussion. As we all wonder what will happen to the dailies, and talk about the Detroit Free Press going to three-day delivery only and the Christian Science Monitor (a client) funneling print to a weekly, I think about how my habits [...]

Quick thought from listening to the great "Marketing Over Coffee" podcast (http://marketingovercoffee.com)/. Christopher Penn told of an older woman who said she doesn’t read blogs on her Kindle, but reads the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com). Wait, isn’t that a blog? Apparently not. Same goes for podcasts, e-newsletters and more. Not only is format not the first [...]