The room features 6 big monitors with 5 seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards – also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom build with partners including Radian6 and IBM. Below are a few of the visualizations that we got to check out in an interview last week:

 

 

 

This monitor is a visualization of tweets that are relevant to Gatorade; the company is tracking terms relating to its brand, including competitors, as well as its athletes and sports nutrition-related topics.

 

 

 

This monitor measures blog conversations across a variety of topics and shows how hot those conversations are across the blogosphere. The company also runs detailed sentiment analysis around key topics and product and campaign launches.

Check out the video on Mashable to see exactly what the other four monitors do. The room does look a little like mission control for a space flight – or like the dark room lined with monitors in every movie set in a casino. 

The goal: every time you type – or perhaps even utter – the word “Gatorade” near a computer, or mention one of its sponsors or taglines, that instance is captured, processed and analyzed.

As government communicators, we don’t have the budget. But shouldn’t we use our own tools, and free tools on the Web, to do what we can? Our programs, our installations, our publications, are brands. And we aren’t selling electrolyte-laced sugar water.

Read Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center.

Two days of hell, nine men of valor, originally uploaded by Army.mil.

This looked like a weak photo to include in a photo set — then I realized the photo was not the point.
Technically, it’s almost perfect – pleasing outdoor sun, well-exposed shadows*, no one caught with a goofy expression, nice telephoto compression. I would have liked to see more of the Soldier on the left. And the caption, “Two days of hell, nine men of valor,” leaves you scratching your head until you study the cutline. Things add up to nine in the last sentence, and it’s not explicit. And, since it is a ceremony shot, you really don’t know what the guys did unless you read the cutline.
And then you realize the point is not the photo, but the story behind it. No action shot exists (as far as I know). Everyone involved was far too busy with a trigger (or a radio) to worry about a shutter button.
So we’re left with a photo of the award ceremony – one missing a third of the honorees. So to do them honor one takes the best picture one can, because to let a story go without some kind of illustration would consign it to the back page.
An editor would rather see action than a ceremony, but in the end the photographer and editor made the right choice – to call attention to nine heroes through the best photo one could take. I like it better every minute.

Soldiers of Company B, 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), stand in formation following a valor award ceremony in which two received the Bronze Star Medal with “V” device and four received the Army Commendation Medal with “V” device. Three other Soldiers also earned the Bronze Star for valor.

Story here: Two days of hell, nine men of valor”

*updated with the correct term.

Later…

Former CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre doesn’t blame his former status on economy but on new media realities. No bitterness. “Great run.” Prefered to spend money on conversation than depth.

Tom Curley, CEO,AP. challenge for communication pros (such as AP) is to get paid. The organization hired anthropologists to study how people consume news. Found out second but no answer on the money question. AP is going to Google to demand payment and rights protection (something like RIAA demanding digital rights management). Probably will be as successful as other industries’ attempts. Good quote: “We’re concerned about weaponized information.”

Secretary Geren gets the best quote of the day: “If you let the secret service determine how the President spends his time, the president would never get out of the basement of the White House. … We accept risk in every decision we make.”

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Read it at Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

Part of it also is the work involved. Feedback must be monitored, both on your site (security, accuracy, privacy, policy) and off (probably more important). 

All this leads to a lesson learned on monitoring and handling feedback on outside sites. Since your author is running out of lunch time I’ll keep it short: check out the experience of a furniture company that turned around a string of negative comments by being polite and factual.

How Should Your Company Handle Negative Blog Comments? | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

For the time-constrained, here is the moral of the story.

1 – If someone is leaving negative comments about your company, respond.

2 – Be thankful and polite. Nothing escalates a negative comment into a full-bore flamewar faster than an ‘Oh yeah?!?’ reply from the company.

3 – If commenters are jumping to the wrong conclusion about your company, kindly correct them with the proper information.

4 – Thank them for their feedback, and encourage them to provide more. Leave your email address so they can contact you off the blog, if they choose.

I’ll update with images and links

Link: ROFASIX – CAV Guy!.

When the news reported that Al-Qaeda had used two retarded women to carry suicide vests into crowded marketplace in Iraq and remotely detonated the explosives, many assumed it was because the supply of "foreign fighters" was drying up. Perhaps. But this cartoon asks a simple question – "If One Man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, what does it mean when you utilize those with diminished mental capacities?"

Link: Military Blog: The Best of the Military Blogosphere.

(Mileditors isn’t there …)