Author: fxshaw

Full obit from the NYT. I wouldn’t say I agreed with him all the time on things politics, but boy did he understand the impact of language, and on this he and I totally agreed, only he was much better than I even dream of being. Words can and have set the world alight, helped politicians rise to power and helped others fall into darkness. Safire got that, and spend a large part of his life both *participating* and *teaching* the art. The Sunday NYT Mag will not be the same without him.

I also read and enjoyed his book examining what he called the first dissident. What I learned – morality calls for us to oppose unjust authority and to always seek accountability and reckoning for those with power. Good lessons still today.

David Carr is a good reason to get up on Monday a.m. In his latest column, he takes a hard look at the inverse correlation between big media deals, growth for growth’s sake and the destruction of value. Via a new book by Jonathon Knee, he also captures the key tenets of media mogulhood and why they are wrong:

“The four pillars of media conventional wisdom have not changed: First, growth at all costs; second, content is king; third, the answer to all problems is to expand globally; and finally, that by embracing convergence and the Internet, they will be able to solve all their problems,” Mr. Knee said.

The piece that really jumped out at me was the assertion that the search for bottom line profits by buying up/merging with businesses not core that “seemed” to have better bottom lines tended to go badly over time, but were rewarded w/ plaudits and applause at the time, as Carr notes, often by those carrying the notebooks, while slow but steady growth fueled by internal resources tends to be overlooked. Sort of sounds like this was what got many banks into trouble, eh? 

The NYT today has a great case study of how a campaign for Dawn dish soap came to be, and what the results/implications were. It’s an important one to read because it shows great linkage between traditional media (there is a story in the NYT), storytelling (some great color/story arc), social media engagement and cause marketing. Short version:

• Turns out Dawn soap works great to suds off oily animals.
• Main competitor Palmolive “owned” gentle.
• Somewhat belatedly P&G started donating product to a bird rescue organization.
• Now running ads/social media support for the organization.

Why is this a great campaign? First, because it clearly supports a desired brand attribute. Doing good is great; for corporations doing good and helping a brand is event better, and Dawn has done both here. Second, it applies emotional impact to a product that many people don’t really have much time to think of, aka dish soap (side note: I’ve always been mildly fascinated by the ability to make those ginormous bubbles and have actually determined that Dove is significantly better at this than other soaps. P&G….are you listening?). Third, the campaign is supported by a campaign that drives engagement (facebook page that offers opportunity to volunteer). Finally, the brand was okay w/ the fact that they’d be exposing themselves to criticism on other fronts by doing this, and felt this was a tolerable risk (the article and some posters complain that P&G tests products on animals).

So, this is a nicely done effort. It will be interesting to see how the success is measured in the social media space. As of the article posting, the FB page had “more than 14,000” fans. Is this good? My sense is it’s okay – but not great for a campaign that is advertising on TV…it’s a statistical rounding error compared to the number of users for the product.

Good work, P&G.

Yet another alleged death on the internet. Alas, poor embargo, we knew you well. Latest w/ the dirk to the chest is Mike Arrington at TC. I’ve written about this topic ad nauseum (which translates into man the spell checker does not like this word), and it’s worth repeating again – there is a place for embargoes, they are used too often, and they aren’t dead. Three times they make sense:

1. Complicated news. If the news announcement is either super technical or very complicated, embargoes make sense because it allows for more in-depth briefings, q/a, etc. Other option is a press conference, which does not really optimize for good questions.
2. Limited spokesperson availability. It often happens that we will only have one or two people available for interviews. In this case, it makes sense to do an embargo because it lengthens the amount of time to do briefings and levels the playing field a bit — you don’t always want to just optimize for the wire services, for example.
3. Demos. If you want to actually *show* the product, it sometimes means getting on a plane and visiting people, often on both coasts. In this case, you don’t want to leave one city, have a story appear and deal with unhappy reporters in the second city who feel they’ve been penalized by geographic distance.

All of us caught in the embargo chaos, as MIke puts it, will survive. As will the tool.

The NYT has a good cautionary tale about modern celebrity today, focused on the life of some pretty big U.S. college football players. The story looks at the challenges these players face in an era where every cell phone has a camera and every photo rapidly makes its way online. The key graf for me:

“The latest stuff with the cellphones and digital devices has erased the boundaries between public and private,” Michael Oriard, an Oregon State professor who has written three books about the culture of college football, said in a telephone interview. “It’s an enormous jump, as it’s not just ESPN or Fox cameras, but it’s everyone with a cellphone.”

That line – erasing the line between public and private – is the important point. It applies equally to the disappearance of the bounds between work persona and home persona as well – the idea that anyone can maintain a rigid line between the way they are perceived in a work environment and in other forms of social media in their off hours is no longer real. We can all moan about that, but the die is cast, and the sooner people realize that, the better.

Wow, today’s NYT business section had three stories that together created first order whiplash regarding the state of the media industry. First, and by far the best done/most authoritative view, is this story about BusinessWeek. In a nutshell, things are grim for the venerable publication. Lost $41m last year, website traffic is up by mostly by gimmicks like slide shows, not a ton of interest, etc. On the positive side, they’re doing good work, they have a clear mission and outlets like The Economist have shown it can be done. Next up, a heartwarming story of a political journalist who made the leap from journalism to the corporate world, only to become sad and despondent and to arrive at events looking like he was under a black cloud. Now he’s back into covering politics again for a newspaper, and his usual sense of good cheer has returned. Finally, a look at how the shift to online advertising is helping mom and pop bloggers turn a buck and make a go of it. So on one page, the struggles of the old, a return to the fight and the triumph of the new.

Of course, the picture is considerably more nuanced. The bloggers at Sugar Media (and their backers) make considerably less money than the ink stained wretches at what remains of BW, thus partly the huge losses suffered by the pub. Second, although I read the blog article several times, nowhere did I see a reference to numbers that spelled out profit and loss, just a note that online ads in general were up. Well, okay then – I will hazard a guess that there is not much in terms of real money coming through just yet, or they’d be trumpeting it to high heaven. Finally, the column about getting back to journalism? It illuminates a near universal truth – do what you love.

Anyone wondering about the power of the media to shape actions just needs to read this NYT story about why kids don’t walk to school. It’s chock full of anecdotes about parents and various school/city officials doing silly things (calling 911 when a 10 year old is walking home alone; not letting a 7 year old walk 6 houses home from school, etc.) Ugh.

But here are some facts, also in the story:

In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. In many low-income neighborhoods, children have no choice but to walk. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Experts say the transition has not only contributed to the rise in pollution, traffic congestion and childhood obesity, but has also hampered children’s ability to navigate the world.
In a study of San Francisco Bay Area parents who drove children ages 10 to 14 to school, published this summer in the Journal of the American Planning Association, half would not allow them to walk without supervision, and 30 percent said fear of strangers governed their decision.

Fear of strangers, and specifically that a stranger would kidnap their child. This fear is driven by the nonstop/national and international coverage that occurs in any stranger abduction, and is perpetuated by TV shows and movies of the same theme. Facts just can’t win out. And the fact is (buried deep in the story) that 115 children are abducted by strangers a year, which is 115 too many. But basic math shows that in 2007 there were about 6 million kids (defined as under age 15) in the United States. There are about 1,000 people struck by lightning in the U.S. in an average year. 250,000 children are injured in auto accidents.

It’s been said we bad at math as a society. This story sure bears that out, and also shows very clearly how the media we consume drives very specific behavior change, over time. Heck, if not wanting kids to walk to school had been an outcome of a specific plan, we’d be using this as a case study for years!

After a bit of an injury bout, I’m working to get back on the running trail. I was hurt, I felt better, I ran too much, I got hurt again. So now I’m on the slow and steady path, and have enlisted my pooch as a running companion. Since she’s not run before, she can’t run too far, and while I can, I shouldn’t. And since she’s new to this, she’s trying to find the stride between slow and fast, and so am I. She’s a young dog, and well, you get the point.  But the last two runs I’ve strapped on my polar watch, to measure my heart rate and distance and time. I know I’m not going far and I’m not going fast, but I want to measure what I do so I have a baseline and a sense of where to go next – measurement is knowledge. And it’s the holy grail for PR as well – and one which always spurs great debate. But everyone agrees, at least in our industry, that it’s important, even if we disagree about exactly how to do it.

So it was a bit of a shock that I read this story about measuring schools and teachers in the NYT today. Key grafs:

“We’ve always said that we need to be able to understand where teachers are successful and learn from that,” the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said in an interview last week. “Nobody thinks you can boil down teacher effectiveness to a single criteria, and we also should not ignore student performance as an important criteria.”

Last year, the State Legislature passed a law prohibiting using student test data as a factor in tenure decisions, at the urging of teachers’ unions. And in a deal with the United Federation of Teachers, the city agreed not to make the results public.

Okay then. Test, measure and don’t tell…wow. And here’s the other quote, which I really hope was taken out of context:

Ms. Pierre, for example, said that she worried about how the reports would affect morale and decided that she would tell teachers they could see the reports if they wanted. Most of those who did, she said, were among the higher teachers.
“I really didn’t see the purpose, because it wasn’t very clear what they were supposed to take away, and they might have had questions I would have not been able to answer,” she said. “I didn’t want them to be distracted in the middle of the year.”

My POV is that people want to know where they stand and how they are doing, because pretty much everyone wants to improve. And morale is killed, not helped, but withholding this kind of information.

David Carr writes about the voices from the edge today in his column, keying on the fake school speech debate. Two key grafs:

But that was before the consumer Web took hold, before Fox News, before MSNBC, before a media ecosystem blossomed that amplified every debate into a frantic broadcast scrum. Conservatives, we should note, seem far better at the rather unwelcome task of being the party of opposition, with a very efficient apparatus that can seize on issues, both real and imagined, and turn up the volume and the heat right with it. (During the school dust-up, a commentator on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show said the president was building a cult of personality analogous to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il.)

and then later:

That is not how the media works, however, in an environment that prizes engagement and conflict. The long town-hall process over health care, for example, has given ordinary citizens a voice but it has also produced hundreds of video clips of angry, scared Americans. For every aging secretary who can’t afford prescriptions, there is a small business owner who wants less government in their life, not more. Tropes like “death panels” may lack substance, but they make for pretty compelling viewing day after day.
In part, the outrage and hyperbole work because the mainstream media, insecure about their own status in an atomizing world, play into the tyranny of split-screen coverage where almost any claim — no matter how outlandish — becomes one side in “an interesting debate.” When not listening to talking heads, the traditional news outlets go to great efforts to get a microphone on vox populi. If the people, even if it is some unknown number, are hopping mad, we don’t want to be the last to tell you about it.

I’ve bolded the section above that’s most relevant – I think David is right and that much of what we are seeing here represents a failure of the mainstream media. Jim Fallows made a similar point, noting how unusual it was to see the mainstream media call a claim false, not matter how often it was proven false:

Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, whose previous reporting about the health-care debate has been noted (in different ways) here and here, has a very strong story today about Elizabeth McCaughey and her role in these discussions.
Why this matters: the story straightforwardly does something that goes against the nature of mainstream coverage. It notes the influence that Ms. McCaughey’s claims have had on public discussion, while also flatly saying that those claims are often false. It’s worth recognizing what a step this is for the Times, prefigured in this story from three weeks ago. The natural reflex of mainstream publications is to finesse such disagreements with the “some critics claim…” approach. It seems more “objective,” and it certainly is safer for the reporter and the news organization. And when we are talking about differences of opinion, judgment, or political creed, of course that’s exactly the right approach to take. (“Is the Administration’s approach to Iran likely to work? Some critics claim…”) But there is a such a thing as plain misstatement of fact, and it is good when the press can point it out.

Carr’s column is worth reading as well because it talks about the struggles that the current US administration is having getting its story out into a merged media marketplace. A couple of key things that would likely help:

• Message discipline
• Speed of response
• Direct communication

Those work for all of us, btw….

Words matter.

I’ve written about this before. I get up every morning and go to work and know that quality of communications makes a difference. History is filled with simple words and phrases that define epochs, mark turning points in history and dramatically shift perceptions. “and yet it  moves” (attributed to Galileo) is remembered as the point at which science began to trump religion. “Have you no decency, sir?” marked the end of the McCarthy era. Of course there are millions of examples, big and small, where great communication, great rhetoric, great soundbites had huge impact. (politics is especially filled with these, some of which in retrospect tipped elections).

This comes to mind because, as is often the wont, there is currently wailing and gnashing of teeth re: the younger generation, this time on how twitter and texting is destroying the ability to communicate. Clive Thompson has a worthwhile counterpoint. The point that leaped out at me (bold mine):

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

And that is a welcome reminder. Words have an effect on the world, they have power that we often tend to forget or dismiss. There is even a nursery rhyme that suggests maybe words don’t hurt…one that you can believe I have not shared with any of my kids!  I prefer this one instead, a bit harder to say in full but much truer to the world (full citation here):

True, This! —
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! — itself a nothing! —
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Cæsars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! — Take away the sword —
States can be saved without it!

Over the last five years or so, there has been a ton written and blogged about the death of one thing or another, journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, book writing. Those of us in the communications industry – all of us, journalists, writers, analysts, advertising execs, bloggers, PR people – sometimes need reminding that despite the obituaries written for us, the rule of language continues apace.