Can the Internet Really Go Down — Everywhere?

By George

Apparently yes.

The vulnerability is scary. According to CNN.com, an anchor from a ship may have severed an undersea cable in the Mediterranean Sea and taken out Internet service in large regions of the Middle East and Asia (including China and India).

With so much information and critical services now Web-based – the cost of this outage will be in the billions. The United States has been spared from the outage (although the Web was in slow motion most of the morning).

But U.S. business have off-shored so much technical and customer support overseas that companies like IBM and Intel are still assessing the damage to their operations. It probably won’t be pretty.

Stay tuned to this story because it has greater ramifications than just the business losses and downtime. Government and business these days can barely function without the Internet (I think of our own operations at Racepoint Group – with a lot of our tools and many of our databases Web-based).

If an anchor can wipe out the Internet on two continents – the discussion falling out of this disaster will be centered on what will need to be done to fully protect and deliver the Web – while having reliable back up solutions in place.

 

Steroid Testing in the Workplace?

By Ben

As Roger Clemens showed everyone on 60 Minutes, steroids are a major issue in sports, and people will probably be fighting over acquisitions and testing for at least the next decade. In a brilliant move, Southwest Airlines decided to capitalize on the hot news topic, putting out a series of great commercials about “productivity enhancers”. Maybe this poor business man can have a sit-down interview with Mike Wallace next to declare his innocence.

OLPC Raises More Than $35 Million

By George

From November 12 through December 31, One Laptop Per Child ran a charitable campaign in North America called the Give One Get One.  It was simple.  Buy two of OLPC’s XO laptops (often called the $100 laptop) for $399 U.S. dollars and you get one; while the second is shipped to a child in a developing country.

The campaign is a case study on the effectiveness of public relations in building awareness, creating consumer demand and driving action.  OLPC is a non-profit organization and couldn’t afford a fancy advertising campaign to spread the word about G1G1.  So they turned to Racepoint Group.

We have been working with OLPC for more than a year — doing pro bono communications work.  But the G1G1 campaign was different.  The public relations campaign we created for G1G1 would be augmented by a small (but very creative) advertising campaign (publications and broadcasters agreed to run these ads and short videos as public service announcements).  But we were primarily on our own in building awareness and driving traffic to the G1G1 web site where consumers would be able to purchase the amazing XO laptops.

We had already done a remarkable job in media relations for OLPC — but now we were tasked with directly impacting sales.  We had to move beyond the core technology and business writers and focus on consumer press.  The goal of G1G1 was to reach consumers — directly.  There was the added difficulty that consumers could only buy the XO in one place — a web site built by OLPC.  Consumers wouldn’t be able to go to a store to look at, touch, or play with the XO.  In fact, we wouldn’t even be able to tell them exactly when they would receive their XOs.

A difficult challenge, indeed.

But our campaign generated thousands of articles and broadcasts — from a feature in People magazine to appearances on “Good Morning, America” and FOX-TV and hundreds of blog posts.  For the month of December — OLPC was everywhere.  The results speak for themselves.  OLPC sold more than 160,000 XO laptops and raised more than $35 million dollars.

Proof that when public relations is done right — it can create a powerful impact.