North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversees hypersonic missile test
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Friday, January 14, 2022
On January 12, North Korean state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun reported a Tuesday hypersonic missile launch attended by leader Kim Jong-un and high-ranking politicians Jo Yong Won and Kim Yo-jong. This was the third missile North Korea (DPRK) launched this year. It flew for 1,000 kilometers (621 mi) before hitting sea, state media claimed.
“The Juche weapon representing the power of the DPRK” and of “superior maneuverability” was test-fired for “final verification of overall technical specifications”, according to state media. In an email sent to Al Jazeera, professor Leif-Eric Easley at Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea said “[the] so-called hypersonic weapon is not technologically ready”. South Korean military authorities at first downplayed the missile, but later said it showed “improvement”, the Yonhap News Agency reported.
Earlier this year, North Korea conducted two missile tests: one last Wednesday, and a second one on Monday, which were confirmed by both South Korea and the Japanese coast guard. The first launch was a winter resilience test, state media claimed. North Korea tested their first hypersonic missile, Hwasong-8, on September 28. Ankit Panda, a defence expert from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said last Wednesday’s missile was not a Hwasong-8, but a new model unveiled at an October weapons exhibition in Pyongyang, North Korea. After the September test, Panda called Hwasong-8 a “significant milestone” in comments to the BBC.
On Monday, the United Nations (UN) missions of Albania, France, the Republic of Ireland, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States jointly called for dialogue and denounced the first test. The US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield called it “a significant threat to regional stability”. On Tuesday, South Korean president Moon Jae-in said the tests worry him ahead of the country’s coming presidential election scheduled for March.
Hypersonic missiles are faster and can evade radar detection longer than regular ballistic missiles, the BBC explained.
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4 Ways to Increase Social Media Reach and Engagement
If you’re like 44% of people worldwide, you’ve been spending more time on social media during the pandemic. Whether you’re catching up on the latest news on Twitter or chatting with family on Facebook, social media has allowed us to stay connected.
But as a small business owner, are you spending more time on social media being empathetic?
While sometimes confused with sympathy, which is feeling compassion for someone else, empathy means putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes.
By empathizing with your customers, you can better serve them.
Here’s the Merriam Webster definition of empathy: “the action of (or capacity for) understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”
It’s important to take an empathetic approach in all of your marketing materials, from your website copy to your social media strategy.
Because social media offers such a great way to interact with a large audience, you should be willing to put in the time and effort to ensure your communications are not only engaging, but empathetic to what people are going through.
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READ: The Importance of Empathy-Based Marketing
As we move forward from COVID-19, empathy-based marketing isn’t just the right thing to do, your customers now expect it.
Many studies done during the pandemic are showing people want brands to be more empathetic and aware of the long-term impact it will have on their lives.
Hopefully, you communicated authentically and empathetically with your customers during this time, and you’re going to have to continue to do so! Here are 3 ways to use empathetic content marketing…
Read more.
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According to the Braze Brand Humanity Index research, around 65% of people were more loyal to brands they felt a human connection with.
So to help you get—and stay connected—with your customers, here are four ways a small business owner can build a social media presence with more empathetic content marketing.
1. Create an empathy map.
This can be a good first step to put you deeper into the mind of your customer. Originally a tool used in the design and agile development worlds, empathy mapping provides a deeper understanding of your customer. It’s usually split into four quadrants: says, thinks, does and feels.
- With your target customer’s persona in the middle, you begin to brainstorm questions, like:
- Why do you need my product?
- How does using my product make you feel/think/do/say?
- What are some stressors/fears in your life?
- How does my product help you reach your goals?
Write out your customer’s thoughts the way you think he or she would express. Their needs, wants, desires, hopes, fears, goals and dreams will start to be more clear, and you’ll be able to build a social media presence using messaging that resonates with your followers.
2. Tap into your customers’ emotions.
I’m not talking about playing on their fears to sell your products, but rather, thinking about how your product makes them feel.
Here’s a way that a brand helped ease their smallest customers’ fears. Philips invented a miniature version of a CAT scanner called the ‘KittenScanner,’ which doctors use to educate kids about the MRI process and put them at ease. Children can try it out with toy animals, taking the focus off of their procedure and onto fun.
It was created back in 2004, but it still gets mentioned on social media, in videos and in health journals as a way to reduce the need for sedation. How could you position your brand in a helpful, stress-reducing way for your customers?
3. Use social listening to your advantage.
Social listening is all about monitoring your communication channels for brand and competitor mentions, and certain keywords and comments.
As you “listen” to your followers this way, you can gain valuable insights into what they like, don’t like, want and need from you. You may see a tweet on Twitter from a happy customer who loved your product. Or, you may see a comment from someone who wasn’t impressed with how long it took customer service to respond to a complaint.
With social listening, you not only get information on how your small business is performing, you also get the opportunity to provide better customer service and tweak a process or product that isn’t working.
4. Inspire customers to take action.
Showing your customers you believe in them is an ideal way to increase social media reach and engagement. Think about the product or service you offer to your customers. How could you get them to use it to add value to their life and/or entertain them?
For example, Home Depot encouraged their customers to grow a living salad bowl with an infographic they shared on social channels. While there is minimal branding on this infographic, it still reinforces Home Depot’s marketing strategy of the things that are possible with their products.
No matter how you’re using empathy-based marketing to increase social media reach and engagement, remember your branding. For example, if your brand voice is “fun, upbeat and confident,” using humour might be the best way to engage your audience.
If it’s “down-to-earth, considerate and approachable,” a more heartfelt, emotional message could be the way to most effectively speak to your customers.
And don’t forget to create a social media marketing plan to save time and money!
In my AMPLiFY! Business Academy, we’ve been exploring the Empathy-based marketing model in-depth. It’s a monthly training program designed to help you navigate these murky waters on how to best market your business. Come and join us for only $1 for the next 45 days and receive solid marketing strategies that will get you through this crisis.
To your business success,Susan Friesen
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eBay removes Canadian town’s listing of sperm whale carcass
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Thursday, May 8, 2014
Citing violations of its policy regarding “Marine mammal items”, eBay terminated an online listing on Monday by the town of Cape St. George, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, for a 40 ft (12 m) sperm whale carcass reportedly beached upon its shores about a week prior.
With an initial asking price of 99 cents, bidding for the carcass reportedly rose to C$238.03 within 15 bids. Reports variously state the final price of the whale, prior to the removal of the listing from the auction site on Monday at about 2:30pm, was C$2,025 or C$2,075. Listed in eBay’s “really weird” category, the carcass was considered by eBay to be an example of “items made from marine mammals regardless of when the product was made”, which are prohibited as per site rules.
Following a council meeting on Sunday in the town of 950 residents, Cape St. George’s mayor, Peter Fenwick, put the whale up on the auction site in a bid to have it removed from the town’s premises, citing a lack of cooperation from provincial and federal government officials on the matter. “It’s your problem, you solve it”, Fenwick recounted to The Globe and Mail (TGaM) as the response he received from them. Apart from eBay, Kijiji was also suggested as another avenue by which to sell the carcass.
Fenwick told CTV News, several years prior another sperm whale measuring 15 ft was beached in the area, but disappeared without incident, an act Fenwick attributed to be the work of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “This time”, he remarked, “the authorities have told us that it’s our whale, it’s our responsibility to get rid of it.”
On putting the carcass for sale, Fenwick remarked, “We knew we had to do something with it and this seemed to be the least expensive way of disposing of it.” In a news release, Fenwick highlighted a possible use for the carcass, particularly its bones. “The 40 foot sperm whale will make a spectacular exhibit once the fat and muscle is removed, and the town is asking museums and other organizations that could use a whale skeleton to contact the town for further details.”
On retaining the whale himself, Fenwick stated, “As a town we would dearly love to keep the whale and put it on exhibit in the town but the cost of such a venture would be hard to justify.” Fenwick told TGaM the whale was “in half decent shape”. “This one looks like it died very recently and hasn’t decomposed much”, which Fenwick suggested elsewhere was due to the whale’s present location, partially submerged in near-freezing water. However, Fenwick noted its close proximity to a residential area, saying homeowners who lived there were “very interested in seeing the whale gone.”
eBay was not the only organization who barred the sale from taking place. “We also got threatened by the federal department of the environment, and told to pull the ad off or they would prosecute us”, said Fenwick on the opposition he said he received from Environment Canada, which viewed the sale as contravening a federal act designed to protect endangered species. “I received a call from the federal department of the environment saying that you’re not allowed to sell any parts of sperm whales, even if they’re dead.” he added. “So I said, ‘Oh that’s very good, I’m glad to hear that, now can you send somebody over here to get rid of it for us?'” Fenwick’s request was met with a negative response from Environment Canada.
“They’ve got to sort it out somehow. The uncertainty means it just sort of sits there and rots.” Once decomposition sets in, Fenwick remarked the carcass would become a “real nuisance”. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a whale that’s been rotting on the beach for a couple of months — actually sometimes you can’t see it for the clouds of flies around it — but you can smell it for about a mile”, he added.
On finding alternate means to dispose of the carcass, Wayne Ledwell, a member of Newfoundland’s Whale Release and Strandings, suggested the whale be towed out to a remote area. “They need to do that right away, when they come in and they’re fresh,” said Ledwell. “No one wants to go touch them … everything becomes gooey and slippery and you can’t stand up on the whale and it gets on your boots and you can’t get the smell off and then you go home and the dog rolls in it and you get it in your kitchen and you curse the whales, and you curse the government and … it becomes a mess.” Fenwick said they’d considered the idea, enlisting a local fisherman who, however, judged his engine too small for the job.
Previously, blue whale carcasses washed ashore in the towns of Trout River and Rocky Harbour, located about 150 km further north, and were taken by Royal Ontario Museum for preservation of the skeletons. Fenwick suggested the sperm whale carcass in his town might also meet a similar fate, as the sperm whale’s status as the largest toothed whale might prove to be a drawing attraction for such a facility.
Regarding what he plans to do next with the carcass, Fenwick said “If we’re not allowed to sell it, we’re willing to drop our 99 cent price down to a zero.” He said he hoped some eBay bidder stays interested in the whale. “We’ll be glad to talk to them about giving them the whale. We’re hoping that’s not illegal.” He also said he hoped the publicity from the town’s predicament, which garnered national attention, and its unusual means of finding a solution, would draw in someone interested in taking the whale off his hands at their own expense.
Should the whale fall under new ownership, Fenwick advised it be moved away from the town to a beach devoid of people, and the blubber left as food for seagulls, insects, and other predators. He estimated “It’ll probably take a year or so to get down to the skeleton.” As monetary gain was reportedly not what the town cared about, Fenwick was willing to offer the carcass for free, though one report noted money raised from the listing could have gone towards the building of a skate park.
The listing on eBay, as put up by Fenwick, read:
| This 40 foot sperm whale rolled up on the beach last week. The actual seller is the town of Cape St. George which is responsible for disposing of it before it starts to decay. Once the fat and flesh is removed you have a spectacular 40 foot skeleton of the largest toothed whale in the world, great for museums and other attractions. To prevent it rotting in the town it can be towed to isolated beaches on the Port au Port Peninsula to allow the seagulls and other birds to remove the flesh. Call 709-644-2290 or 709-649-7070 for more details.
Please note the successful bidder will have to remove the whale within 30 days |