Blended Technologies, Missed Calls and The Pope Tweets

Even though this has been going on for a while, I’d like to address the issue of blended technologies in this blog, or multimedia presentation of information and content. Also, I’d like to talk about the “missed call” as the new normal and the fact that the Pope has a Twitter account — do you?

1) The Missed Call

I wanted to say that I think that the “missed call” is the new voice mail message. Have you noticed that? Or are you doing that? Are you calling friends who are not picking up and just hanging up with the notion that they will see you called and just call you back?

“Hey, I saw you called!”

I know I am doing it, but only with personal calls.  It should be interesting to see when and how this migrates over to business calls.

2) Blended Technologies

Have you also noticed that many media are “micro-switching” their focus to different media to increase their brand loyalty? If you listen to BBC Radio you will always hear them ask you to leave a comment on their Facebook page or to a #hashtag on their Twitter feed.

Additionally, if there are interviews that are more “visual” in nature you may find them offering a video feed or photos of the person or thing that they are featuring.

None of this is too surprising. I love listening to Krista Tippet’s radio show “On Being.” She inevitably does an interview that is longer than her show time, and so puts the rest of it up online as a downloaded podcast. Jon Stewart drives his audience to his website when he appears to be having a “good interview.”  He always makes it look like a spontaneous moment saying, “this is a great discussion, do you mind staying longer and we’ll put the rest of this up on our website?” Apparently, this is a ruse because the inside scoop on the Daily Show is that everything is scripted. Stewart is the master of the rehearsed impromptu.

So where is this all going? NPR this morning reported that there is a new phenomenon being closely watched by television executives: and that is tweeting while watching television.

A number of celebrities have taken to live-tweeting while their pre-taped shows air — including Survivor host Jeff Probst, Mark Cuban on ABC's "Shark Tank," and Anthony Bourdain on Travel Channel's "No Reservations."

"As the White House searches for a breakthrough in budget negotiations, President Obama is turning to Twitter and Facebook and good old fashioned email. The president today urged ordinary Americans to contact lawmakers any way they can. The goal - to pressure congressional Republicans to make a deal, as NPR's Scott Horsley reported."1

This is funny because as I listened to the segment I thought about how I message and Tweet with my friend, Melissa, while watching "Modern Family" — even though she is 100 miles away.

This is making all the television exec's sit upright in their seats, so much so that they are encouraging their writing staff to make their scripts more interactive by including #hastag references in their storylines.

3) Speaking of Twitter, the Pope is Tweeting

Yep, Pope Benedict is going to be tweeting soon.  His Holiness will be posting as @Pontifex. And he has several Twitter personas, depending upon the language he is tweeting in. We are supposed to be seeing the Tweets mid-December, just in time for an abbreviated Christmas message, which will probably tell us to go to his website for the longer version or the podcast.

Notes

1 http://www.npr.org/2012/11/28/166104878/obama-uses-twitter-to-ramp-up-fiscal-cliff-pressure