There comes a time when every company needs to upgrade its corporate image, so I engaged the services of my friends at Brandwave.

If you’re reading us via RSS you can check out the results here to see our spruced up blog and updated “about” page. Enjoy!

Sometimes it pays to make an educated guess. Last week I lined up Senator Stephen Conroy to join me as a guest on The Scoop this morning on the assumptions Labor would defeat the Liberals and that he would retain the Communications and ICT portfolio as the Rudd Government transitions into power.

Some of the biggest names in the Australian IT industry also accepted the invitation to join me on the panel for a special “Election Edition” which I recorded on the first working day after the weekend’s so-called “Ruddslide.” My other guests were TechnologyOne CEO Adrian Di Marco, AIIA CEO Sheryle Moon, ACS outgoing President Philip Argy and BRW’s technology editor Foad Fadaghi, one of the country’s most respected telecommunications reporters, and a regular on the show. That’s a lot of voices to give air time inside 30 minutes of recording time!

Naturally enough, we talked about Labor’s plans for broadband and my industry colleagues received a positive response from Senator Conroy on the vexed issue of why state and federal governments have persisted in keeping their communications and technology industry development portfolios separate. There’s a permalink available via Stephen’s pic below. Enjoy!

Steve Jobs’ famous Reality Distortion Field apparently struggles to include his lieutenants and PR people, according to this blog post by Fortune.

The post includes a video (below) that offers a telling insight into the way Apple’s PR troops handle the media. Ask the wrong question, and sorry folks, the interview’s over!

Of course, these sorts of situations have been happening for years. My own experience dealing with Apple has nearly always been positive, but it’s no secret that their PR people really live by the company’s “think different” motto. I recall the weeks it took to negotiate a series of exclusive interviews around the launch of Apple’s Xseries server boxes circa 2002 when I was at InfoWorld. In order to get the exclusive, questions had to be submitted in advance, our schedule was tightly controlled, they made their own recordings of what was said, we had to be careful of what we spoke about, and so on.

Here in Australia the PR distortion field includes various rules like “thou shalt not quote an Australian Apple executive” (my paraphrase). The PR folks themselves are good people and typically explain their perspective well, and on rare occasions will even give the media a sound bite from a “spokesperson.” The simple reality is they’re acting under orders from On High - and it’s a question of whether you want to keep your job.

What’s changed now, however, is that these backroom/off-record conversations can now easily be digested by everyone thanks to the wonders of social media like blogs and YouTube. And that, as the PR people are now all too aware, is a game-changer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44w-RYurbN4&rel=1]

(Fortune link, perhaps ironically, is courtesy of PR agency Dateline Media’s e-newsletter)

We media types spend so much time studying the Internet’s impact on the media business that sometimes you forget that the Internet is busy disrupting other traditional industries, or institutions.

Take Australia Post for example. I thought Mrs J was exaggerating when she told me there’s a good chance we’ll do most of our Christmas shopping at Australia Post this year. “They’ve got everything!” she exclaimed. Yeah, sure, whatever… Then she showed me the catalogue that had been stuffed in our letterbox. They really do sell everything. Kids toys, games, puzzles, tonnes of electronic stuff, and all those creative “what on earth will I get for Aunty Sue” type presents.

Australia Post’s problem is of course a very simple one. Why send snail mail when email is quicker and free (well, almost).  So when your core business is flat you do what any other business does - diversify. You can see the numbers on page 43 & 44 of Australia Post’s annual report here. To grossly simplify things, the organisation’s pacels and logistics and retail divisions are more profitable than the letters business. Ah, ya just gotta love the Net.

Yahoo! Mail is down, and there’s little explanation beyond admitting it’s their fault. I use both Gmail and Yahoo Mail (US), and it’s been a long time since either service was unavailable, so it’s kinda surprising…. And I was expecting the Yahoo! Mail Blog to have something more, but as of this moment, nope.

Update: Yahoo! Mail is back. I’m not sure how long it was off air, but presumably a few hours given the time I was away from it.

Asher Moses at the SMH has been writing a series of articles, such as this, and today’s piece on Facebook’s plans for world domination.

Like most things in social media, the Facebook story is part spin, part reality, and large doses of intrigue.  I don’t think anyone really expected the Facebook fad to last. After all, you could argue MySpace has already become yesterday’s social network. What’s interesting is the lesson that Facebook’s learning in a hurry is actually one that’s an age-old truism in the media business. You must always put the interests of your readers/audience/community before that of the advertisers. Yes, that’s an obvious statement, but the irony is that Facebook is a social media company. A central tenet of social media is involving your community in corporate decision making, or at least responding quickly when you upset them. Breaking the new and old media rules simultaneously is quite a feat!

So has Facebook has jumped the shark? The Facebook community is dangerously offside, while on the other hand the investment community appears unlikely to back away from demands the company turns a profit.

Meanwhile, there’s a lesson to be learnt in all this over at Second Life. I was also prepared to write off Second Life as yesterday’s social media fad, but the opposite appears to be the case. As I learnt from my chat with the ABC’s Lisa Romano, Mr Podcast himself TPN’s Cameron Reilly and The Project Factory’s Gary Hayes on The Scoop, the SL community has jumped by 9 million residents during the past 12 months. Oh, and it gets better. They’re apparently not all geeks, but 30+ high-income earners, many of whom spend real money on SL.

I’d suggest the lesson Mr Zuckerberg has to learn from Second Life is that Linden Lab knows it lives and dies based on the degree to which it keeps the residents happy. It’s called social media for a reason.