Author: fxshaw

Yesterday, I had a great run, the best in probably 7 months. Of course, that’s an easy bar to jump over, since about 7 months ago I encountered knee problems and basically went back to zero on the running meter. At the time, I began to work back from my big old orthotics and running shoes to something with less structure. Amazing my friends and family who know me to be a bit of a radical shift person (as in, they fully expected me to emerge barefoot for my next run), I chose to do this in moderation, and lo and behold shifted from orthotics to no orthotics, from heavily padded shoes to lighter shoes in a very slow process. Today, I’m running in what are called “trainers,” shoes that have very little structure and very little support. I also have racing flats, which are basically soles you glue to your feet on the way out the door. This has shifted my running style from heel strike to mid-foot strike, and look! Research comes out today that appears to validate less stress on the knees w/ this approach.

I am wrong so often it is nice to get validation in this case.

I don’t know which part of this fake log advertising story today amused me the most. Was it the near obligatory mention of marketing via mommy blogs? Because that is pretty cutting edge stuff.

To promote a new product, Stax, the company sent samples to dozens of blogs for women, most of them aimed at mothers. Unlike its cylindrical logs, Duraflame’s new Stax logs are wedge-shaped to resemble split firewood. Along with writing reviews, bloggers promoted Stax to their readers through giveaways sponsored by Duraflame, which provided coupons for three-packs of Stax that normally sell for $9.99.

I am sure the subsequent blog w/ the words “chemically smell”  ends up in the “win” column on evaluation of the campaign. Or maybe it was it the gross generalization of their target audience?

“While fire logs may be lit by the man of the house, women tend to be the purchase agents,” said Mendy Aul, vice president and general manager of the fire logs division at the Jarden Corporation, which owns Pine Mountain.

Just as a rule of thumb, publically pitching something by referencing the “man of the house” is a bad idea…talk about dated language. Maybe it was the big leap from product to human connection, in a way that degrades the value prop for the product?

On the Pine Mountain Web site, Ms. LoVerde describes logs in terms usually reserved for products like bath crystals.
“When we are overwhelmed we cut out the people who could help us the most — our family and friends,” Ms. LoVerde writes. “Take the time to build a fire. Then pause, breathe in, and connect with someone important to you.”

I mean, after all, the reason Stax and its ilk will sell is exactly because they don’t require taking time to build a fire. Here is my pitch:

Stax! More funny than the comics! And yet another reason newspapers are dead! No need for paper to start the fire!

There has been a fair amount written about one of the big challenges of the increasingly on demand, roll your own media consumption would we’ve entered into. I’ve talked previously about avoiding information ghettos, and today’s NYT Magazine has a very good article that looks at what happens when world’s collide – in this case, when the founder of Little Green Footballs decided that he should repudiate much of what had been on the site previously.

As I look at my own media consumption, what strikes me is that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for me to find accidental media – stories or articles or photos or video of things that I’m not really looking for. In my car, i still listen to NPR, but as often I’m listening to new music on my ZuneHD. At home, I get the magazines and newspapers I subscribe to, but they are thinner than once they were. Online, i read the RSS fees that I’ve tagged, see the twitter updates of people I follow, read books that I’ve downloaded on my Kindle, see the web sites I’ve bookmarked and follow the links that I think I’m interested in. My “found media” quotient has dropped sharply – little time in bookstores, fewer new publications to look at, and so on. At one point, the wonder of blogs and RSS and then Facebook and Twitter was the promise of exactly this – more accidental media. And for a time, this was true. But the signal to noise ratio for any new medium can get pretty high pretty quickly; Anil Dash touched on this when writing about the Suggested User List; as did Jeff Sandquist. My experience is similar, as the numbers go up (and I’m not anywhere near the same league as either of the folks I mention above), my ability to actually do anything with what I see flowing through degrades steadily.

There truly is such a thing as the serendipitous piece of information, accidentally found while actually looking for something else, which fires the mind and the imagination. I read a great profile on Neil Gaiman in the current issue of the New Yorker this weekend. He described the genesis of what became “Stardust” thusly:

In 1991, an issue of “Sandman” became the first comic to win the World Fantasy Award for best short story. The awards ceremony was held in Tucson. After winning, Gaiman went to a party in the desert to celebrate, and happened to see a shooting star. Watching it fall, he says, “I just did that thing where you’re following a chain of thought, and you go, That looked like it was really near. What if I went and it wasn’t a meteorite but it was actually like a big diamond or something? Wouldn’t that be cool? And I thought, What if it was a person? And then suddenly it was like a little chain of dominoes.” He went to Charles Vess, the artist who had illustrated the award-winning issue of “Sandman,” and told him the idea. That became “Stardust,” a nineteenth-century-style fairy tale that was first a four-part miniseries for Vertigo, with illustrations by Vess, and then a novel for William Morrow, and finally—after the model Claudia Schiffer read it and implored her husband, the director Matthew Vaughn, to make it—a movie starring Claire Danes and Michelle Pfeiffer.

“Following a chain of thought.” Huh. Unimpeded by texts or phone calls or emails. There is something to be said for this – maybe I actually will have to work/plan to find my accidental media. I’m on the hunt!

James Fallows, who somehow finds time to write, speak, blog, and otherwise be a very thoughtful guy (and who thus shames me into my first blog post in a while), has a good post up looking at some examples of exemplary journalism/reporting. He calls out four stories in particular:

– “Bail Burden” special on NPR
– “The Listener,” by the Atlantic
– A news-analysis piece by Alec MacGillis in the Washington Post
– “System Failure,” by Christopher Hayes in the Nation

If ever there was an argument that long form, thoughtful writing is needed more than ever, this is it, and it really serves as a reminder that we equally need quick twitch what’s happening twitter/fb/yammer reports as well as longer, sometimes controversial (in a deep way) pieces that say what does it mean.

Scary post by Dave on the relative impermanence of writing (and thus thinking) that lives primarily on the web. He notes:

Fact is, most of the writing we’re doing now, no matter what tools we use, will disappear, probably a lot sooner than you think. 

I’m a very technical person, and I’ve been aware of this issue starting from the first day I wrote an essay that was published on the web. I’ve been doing things to protect my writing. Yet, if I were to for whatever reason, stop tending my web presence, the whole thing would disappear within 30 to 60 days. One or two billing cycles before the hosting services cut off service. And then no more than a year before the domains expire and become porn sites or whatever.

Yow. Like so many others, I have just lived w/ the assumption that search engines and mass storage capability will make it easy to find, well, everything. Turns out that is not the case. But in trying to think positive, there is a lot of stuff on twitter that could and should be rapidly consigned to the dustbin of history. I’m just saying.

Having a Kindle means it’s a lot easier to look back at the year and see what I read (aside from the scads of newspapers, magazines, memos, white papers, blogs and whatnot I see on a daily/weekly/monthly basis). FWIW, here is my year of reading in review. First up, what I read to my daughter:

· The Hobbit
· The first four books in the Harry Potter series
· All five Prydain novels
· Three chapters of the fifth Harry Potter book

Plus assorted Just So stories, and other books that fell close to hand. The first few HP books were pretty easy, these later ones are getting LONG and sort of grim. We took a break in the middle of the year to do some other reading, and are now looking to finish the series. The deal is we can only watch the movies after we finish the books, which means we are falling behind!

For me, I started w/ the goal of 2 books per month. I end the year with about 18 done, plus probably one or two more I read in real form and not on the Kindle while traveling and which made zero impact on me.  It’s safe to say that I read more because of the Kindle than I would’ve without (mostly because of ease of use). I will keep the same goal for 2010! Suggestions welcome….

· The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman – one of my favorite authors, just love his imagination
· Holy The Firm, Annie Dillard
· Reading Judas, Elaine Pagels
· What The Gospels Meant, Garry Wills (read all three of these during Lent)
· The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, Rory Stewart – great storyteller about things we all should care about
· White Boy Shuffle, Paul Beatty – read as part of scotch club. Started like a freight train, ended with a whimper.
· The Last Watch (Watch, Book 4), Sergei Lukyanenko – I liked the first one best, but the entire series is pretty good.
· Once a Runner: A Novel, John L. Parker – best descriptor of running I’ve ever seen. My heart was pounding during the final race.
· The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (Year’s Best Science Fiction) – read halfway through the year – not great. Too many stories with interested venue and zero plot or character development.
· The Memory of Running, Ron McLarty – Another scotch club book. Didn’t finish. Two thirds of the way through and I still didn’t care about/like the main character.
· Born to Run, Christopher McGougall – why I gave up my running shoes and my job
· Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles – another scotch club book I didn’t finish. More scotch!
· Dear Undercover Economist: Priceless Advice on Money, Work, Sex, Kids, and Life’s Other Challenges, Tim Harford – light read, funny.
· Stardust, Neil Gaiman – just had to re-read
· The Magicians, Lev Grossman – very good book by Lev.
· SuperFreakonomics, Steven Levitt – not anywhere near as good as the first one.
· Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link – good collection of stories.
· The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection – still not great. See earlier entry on plotting and charactors
· The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, Marcus Buckingham
· Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman – still love the author.

The WSJ reports this morning that Simon & Schuster and Hachette are going to delay the release of their top selling new books.

“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. “We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”

Wow, it is hard to imagine a more clear repetition of bad business decisions and lessons not learned from others in the media industry. The genie can’t go back in the bottle, it simply doesn’t work. For a contrary view:

“In the Internet age you don’t enjoy the same degree of control,” said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, LLC, an online media measurement company in Beverly Hills, Calif. “You can’t create artificial scarcity by withholding content in one form and making it available later.”

The fundamental question is pretty simple, if you think long term, are digital readers better for the industry overall? As in, over time will volume go up compared to print only sales? It certainly seems the answer is yes, which means the publishers are making short term profit decisions that will kill them over time. And seriously, seeing a publisher moan about protecting authors is a hoot as the guy from Hachette does here, “I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.” Almost as good as the music industry talking about how they are “protecting” bands. Sheesh.

The “new” business week has a pretty funny article focused on some of the perils of social media, cleverly titled “Beware Social Media Snake Oil.” Key grafs:

Yet the buzz around social media has led many companies to buy these systems before they’re ready to put them to work. Jennifer Okimoto, associate partner at IBM Global Business Services, says many corporations took the plunge into social media and now are sitting on loads of uninstalled software. “I’m working with a company that has made huge investments” in social software, she says on a phone call from Switzerland. Yet only a small number of employees at the company use it. A Forrester Research (FORR) study shows that despite buzz around Enterprise 2.0, less than 15% of the knowledge workforce makes use of internal blogs, wikis, and other collaborative tools. “E-mail is still dominant,” says Ted Schadler, author of the report.

And then:

Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment. A Twittering employee, for example, might develop trust or goodwill among customers but have trouble putting a number on it. “There is this default assumption that return on investment is the correct measure for everything,” says Susan Etlinger, senior vice-president at Horn Group, a San Francisco consultancy. “Everything needs to monetize within 12 weeks, so we can understand that we’re successful. But frequently the thing they’re measuring is misleading.”

Some years back, I wrote about the concept of losing the idea. I said:

Why is it so damaging to lose the idea in the face of its current incarnation? Because some ideas take multiple instantiations to succeed, and if we summarily disregard the idea because of a flawed example, we run the risk of missing a huge opportunity.

So with that, a couple of points.

1. Social media is an evolution of communication, not a revolution. Social media experts today will look much the same as desktop publishing experts looked like in the past – aka not relevant.

2. ROI matters. Maybe not over a 12 week period, but if you can’t quantify value over time, don’t bother billing by the hour.

3. The story closes w/ one of my favorite mis-used words, this time using it properly. How many times a week do I hear that someone wants to “flush out” an idea? Lots. Hey – one “fleshes out” an idea. and as BBW (that’s bloomberg business week to you!) notes:

The best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media’s practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results. It may be the only way to convert the skeptics—and flush out the snake oil.

Indeed. Flush it out!

Disclosure for those who don’t know: I work for Microsoft. I’d write this post even if I didn’t, because it hits the sweet spot for my blog.

Some years back, as I was starting my blog, my second choice for title was “truth shoes,” taken from the oft quoted and possibly wrong Mark Twain quote: “A lie can make it around the world in the time it takes the truth to put its shoes on.” And when I’d use that quote, I’d then append – and that was before blogs and the era of 24/7 journalism.

In his column today, Ed Bott goes off on “journalists” in a way that would make Mark Twain proud, using the black screen of death story as a cautionary tale. You should for sure read his full post, but his lede sums it up completely:

I’ve spent the better part of the last 48 hours looking into the colossal fiasco that is the “Black Screen of Death” story. It’s a near-perfect case study in how Internet-driven tech journalism rewards sloppy reporting and how the echo chamber devalues getting the story right.

It is almost for certain sure that some people have experienced the black screen. It is almost equally for certain that this was not caused by a security update. Those are the facts as we know them now. But on Monday and Tuesday, the “facts” were something quite different – and today for a large majority of people those facts haven’t changed – the black screen is widespread, and it is caused by Microsoft. As Ed devastatingly chronicles, the world we are living in often rewards fast better than best, could be rather than is. And in general, first is what people remember, and it is easy to hide behind the shield of “objectivity:”

It’s he-said-she-said journalism at its finest. Security expert says Microsoft patches seem to cause fatal crashes, and Microsoft denies it! Who’s right? Hey, we’re just the press, we don’t know. You decide! In a refreshing bit of actual reporting buried deep in his story, ComputerWorld’s Gregg Keizer notes that a search of Microsoft’s support forums turns up only one thread on the subject in the entire month. Alas, he does nothing to help his readers draw the obvious conclusion from that data point.

I remember a conversation I had once with a reporter where I noted that if I followed the same standard being employed by him, I could write a story that says “Reporter Joe Smith has been accused of drug abuse and perjury but denies it,” and feel good about my ethics, since I was “reporting” both an allegation and a denial. This did not go over well.  Here is what Ed had to say on this point:

The idea that IDG was chasing a fast-moving story in real time is absurd. IDG publications weren’t chasing the story, they were leading it. As I noted, the original blog post was published on a Friday. No one noticed it until Monday morning, and IDG was the first one to report on it. An IDG editor could have tossed the story back for some basic fact-checking and reporting. If someone had exercised even a basic set of journalistic skills, this story might never have taken off. But someone decided that this sensationalist report was worth a lot of page views and hit the Publish button when it was half-baked.

There are a bunch of lessons here, for everyone. For communicators, it reinforces the imperative to be fast, be accurate, and have the ability to talk directly into the right channels. Of course, this is contingent upon actually having the facts – which can take some time. For reporters and bloggers, it means that power and responsibility are linked. You have embraced a standard that is high – live up to it. The beauty and terror of the web world in which we live is that authoritative voices can appear quickly – bear this in mind and wear the responsibility well. And readers/viewers/listeners – today we trust total strangers sometimes as much as we trust established voices. A bit of skepticism is in order. My dad used to say, “believe half of what you read and none of what you hear.” Maybe the old guy should’ve been a blogger….

David Carr in today’s NYT describes the creative destruction and potential rebirth of the media industry, capturing a sense of optimism that has been long missing from the media in general. I love it. It is time for the media – mainstream, old school, new, social, etc. to get off its knees and remember what it can be, and the role it can play in the world. And if the people who are in charge don’t have that sense of wonder and optimism and unbounded belief in the power of communications to change and shape the world, then it is time for them to go. Others will take their place, and likely do a different and perhaps better job. Destruction nearly always makes way for rebirth. And as Carr says:

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.
For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

That’s the spirit.