Category: Archive

The NYT reports out about the increased use of PR by Hollywood to flog movies and TV shows, esp. as the reach of traditional advertising declines. I’m always glad to see increased use of PR, especially when it reinforces the overall value compared to cost. And far be it from me to play down the power of PR, but I have to say the article over-reached in one or two areas.

First:

Paramount Pictures did not buy a single billboard to promote “Paranormal Activity,” its recent horror film. The studio also saved tens of millions of dollars by forgoing a national television campaign. Instead, Paramount depended on its publicity arm to fan interest on blogs and in traditional media. The flack attack worked: the film, made for just $10,000, has sold $104 million in tickets.

Hey, great stuff…but I have to say if the movie had sucked, all the great PR or ads in the world wouldn’t have worked. Remember “Snakes on a Plane?” I thought so….

Second:

Disney recently went so far as to develop a computer program to help it determine how much monetary value was coming from such publicity efforts. It can quickly plug in data — “Access Hollywood” had a 30-second interview with a star of “The Middle,” a new ABC comedy — and the program spits out what that same 30 seconds would cost to buy.

Seriously. Ad equivalency is a MISERABLE way to measure PR results. And it boggle the mind that Disney had to create a “computer program” to tell them how much an ad cost.

But some good nuggets as well. For example, PR is leading in social media, and that is recognized – the same skills that are helpful in dealing with “traditional” media work pretty well in online and social media as well. Go PR! Second, the value of creative stunts gets the recognition it deserves…great visuals and fun (and relevant) ways of demonstrating those have always been a staple of great PR, and I think a 48 foot tall ice sculpture of Scrat meets that criteria!

Strangely enough, in the EXACT same issue of the paper, a look at what the banking industry is doing to try and counter the scads of bad press and resentment they’re encountering. Lots of standard stuff, say you’re sorry, give more to charity and so on, but near the end of the piece, the real issue comes out, IMHO:

Show you create real products that benefit people.
The crisis revealed what some people had long suspected: that quite a lot of the whiz-bang financial engineering that Wall Street relied on for profits was worthless.
According to Richard Edelman, a leading New York public relations executive, one of the best things Wall Street could do now is clearly “explain how you make your money and why your business model makes sense for a stakeholder society.”
If they can demonstrate in vivid terms the real role they play in the economy — by helping companies borrow money to grow and create jobs, for example — they might also justify their profits and pay.
Says Travis Larson of Financial Dynamics in Washington: “It is clear how sports stars are judged, and everyone knows how Bill Gates makes his money because you can see the software. Investment banks need a new metric for success.”

As I’ve said before, making profits with no similar creation of value outside of the profit is an issue for the banking industry. Not addressing that in a clear and concise way means that the “PR problem” is really a business problem.

November 10 for me is about two things. It is the birthday of the Marine Corps, a celebration not to be missed. So tomorrow morning I’ll wake up, drag my body out of bed at 0545 and hit the road for a run. I’ll sing the Marines Hymn, hum some jodies to myself and think about those who serve. Tomorrow in Seattle it will be raining, which is a bonus—rain on a run is like a remembrance of baptism by fire (pardon the metaphor mix.) It’s also my departed Dad’s birthday, so at the end of the day I’ll gather with my family, make a martini (dirty), raise the glass and toast my pop, who for some reason chose the Army over the Marines, and who always drank his martinis as gibsons (blech). No cake cut, no reading of the birthday message, but I’ll take my traditions the way the world delivers them to me, and find solace in the rain in the morning and the olive at night.

Much has been written about Paul Carr’s post from earlier today re: the Ft. Hood shootings. Mathew Ingram has a thing or two to say as well. The main point in some of the after commenting is that Carr’s post is overly broad about blaming “citizen journalism” in a way that is not fair; I agree w/ this concern. But what is also missing in the aftermath are some things that I consider to be right on point:

• What is the line between observing and recording tragedy and taking action?
• When it is simply inappropriate to be commenting at all (aka, a hospital or in the military?)
• Where and when does the concept of individual or group privacy trump the immediate need to “report?”

Over on Ignorance plus Curiosity, is an interesting comment:

Take Kitty Genovese in 1964. Bystanders did nothing about the screaming altercation that ended in her rape and murder. Would Genovese have been any more or less dead if the bystanders had been avid Twitter users?

The general “findings” from the Genovese case is that when people feel that there are more people than them observing an incident of any  kind, they lose the immediate desire to act. So in the twitter age, the risk is that we all become those people who stood by and didn’t call and didn’t help, because we all feel that the world is watching. This is scary.

Right now, the pendulum has swung too far. There are times when it is not appropriate to over share. If you are in the military, if you work in healthcare, if you are a teacher, a priest, a rabbi, etc., don’t tweet about everything. If you are at company event that is not open to the public, don’t tweet. If you can act and help or tweet and observe, please act. If it is not yours to share, please don’t.

Don’t be surprised to find out that Tearah Moore is in some trouble with the military – what she did was wrong. And this is not an example of companies or institutions “punishing” fearless bloggers and social media participants in an attempt to compel silence – it is the the pendulum swinging back to center in a much more appropriate way.

It doesn’t get much more meta than this. Dan Lyons, real reporter for real old news weekly Newsweek but blogging as the person pretending to be the real CEO of apple, but with a nudge nudge wink wink to all those in the know, today writes a piece that could have been in CJR or some other real media publication looking at the relative merits and demerits of the way two news outlets have covered Zynga. You can read it here. I have no objection to his thrust – that TechCrunch did a significantly better job than the NYT in covering the story. So stipulated. But here is where Dan is missed a key point:

What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere “aggregators” and the “real journalism” gets done at places like the Times.

Um, Dan? TechCrunch is a news organization, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t paying attention. Ditto for GigaOm, for Engadget, Gizmodo and so on. Real reporters, doing real news. However you want to define it.

What’s changed is not the journalism, it’s the underlying business model. There will be plenty of journalism in the future. But it will look at the business and staffing level more like TC than NYT.

Thought provoking post by James Fallows looking at the Fort Hood shootings through the lens of what he’s seen as a journalist over time, and from the lens of how much of what is said to fill the immediate void turns out to be wrong. As he notes:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”?

And then:

The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.

Previous research has shown that even when presented with evidence, people tend to remember and believe as true the first set of things they hear about an event or incident. Over time, as media has evolved to deliver news (and increasingly opinion) at faster and faster rates the risk is that we live in separate worlds where we’ve lost common connection with whatever might be true. It’s easy to point fingers at the media and say “stop,” but the reality is that the world is moving faster, and we all have to develop better skills at parsing what is true. And why not….the talking heads should stop until they know what they are talking about. 

Over in Slate, Daniel Gross cries caution on the death of newspapers, using some of the existing data out there and comparing to other industries. Of course I think he is right….things are not as bad as they appear, and there is always a contrary point of view that should be considered. As he says:

At some point in the future, newspapers may disappear. But count me in the later rather than sooner camp. And I can’t help but think that many newspaper-doomsayers are conflating hope with analysis. According to many of the digerati, newspapers and other printed matter that people pay for through clunky old distribution systems (the mail, kids on bicycles, vans) can never make money and are bound to fail, while publications distributed online for free are destined to rule the world. (Of course, I could be guilty of the same impulse. I have feet in both worlds and could no more choose between print and the Web than I could choose between my two children.) But I also think this might be a case of making too much of a few numbers and ignoring some important ones.
First of all, there’s nothing ipso facto shocking about a decline in patronage of 10 percent in six months. Many political blogs and cable news shows have seen their audiences fall by much more than 10 percent since the feverish fall of 2008. And advertising at plenty of online publications has fallen by a similar amount. In case anybody has forgotten, we’ve had a deep, long recession, a huge spike in unemployment, and a credit crunch. Consumers have cut back sharply on all sorts of expenditures. There are plenty of members of what I call the 40 percent club: businesses, many tethered to finance and credit, that have seen sales plummet by nearly one-half. These include automobiles, homes, luxury apparel, and diamonds. Many other components of consumer discretionary spending—hotels, restaurants, air travel—have fallen off significantly. Do we draw a line from trends over the last few years and declare that in 15 years there will be only a handful of hotels? I’m not sure why we would expect consumption of a purely discretionary item that costs a few hundred dollars per year not to fall in the type of macroeconomic climate we’ve had.

One final note is that there is a human tendency to generalize from the personal. Because *I*  get all my next via a computer terminal and always connected smart devices, that is the way that *everyone* will soon get their news. I see this a ton currently among the digeratti….because I use Twitter, it will rule the world, because I use Foursquare it must be a trend, etc. I even had a reporter say that “everyone” had an iPhone. Hey, lots of people use iPhones, but lots is a far cry from everyone. There is no doubt that the business of print media is under huge stress, there is no doubt that the future of the medium is cloudy at best, but as Gross notes well, sometimes a comparison is apt:

In fact, in some regards, print-online hybrids like newspapers and magazines have outperformed online-only publications. The Web operations of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal aren’t exactly slouches when it comes to selling online ads. And as poorly as the stock of the New York Times has performed over the past decade, most people would have preferred owning it to the stock of Salon.com, or TheStreet.com.

Ah yes. Capitalism at work. 

The current issue of Wired has a must read story about about the campaign to make people fear immunization, and what it means for society. It’s a sobering story, and hits on some things that bug me a ton – notably the idea that journalists need to cover both “sides” of a debate, regardless of how fact free one of the “sides” is; the way that people often confuse “fact” w/ “strongly held opinion” and the gradual death of appreciation for the scientific method. And as we head full steam into flu season, the topic couldn’t be more relevant.

In clear and devastating prose, writer Amy Wallace sketches out the framework of the so-called immunization “debate” and lays bare the research that underpins the issue, using a profile of a researcher as her narrative lens. It’s good stuff, and a reminder that long form journalism, well done, illuminates better than just about anything else. The two paragraphs below, mid point through the story, really hit home:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

I’m not a scientist, but educated by the Jesuits as I was, I have a deep respect for facts and the scientific method. And no, facts are not immutable things, established facts can and do shift as new research is done, peer reviewed, put in the public sphere and debated. It’s this relentless questioning that has lifted us to the point we’re at today, with new wonders appearing seemingly by the minute, new solutions to old problems appearing often as fast. But science is hobbled by this simple thing – facts and “things known” still must be questioned. And this provides the crack that irrationality drives a wedge into every time, the idea that even scientists who strongly believe can’t every be true to science and say they are totally sure.

So when it comes time to debate, on any issue of significant import, facts will lose out. Because facts don’t offer hope, at least not easy hope.

Hype shows in two forms today in the NYT. And note well, I think there is a lot about social media and communications that is NOT hype….

First up, an unintentionally hilarious story about Foursquare, a social media site focused on location. The concept of which, btw, is really big and mark my words awareness of location will be something we all take for granted in the next five years. What made it hilarious? One graf:

So far, Foursquare has no revenue, and the company is still developing its business model. Mr. Crowley and Mr. Selvadurai say they are focusing on trying to build up the infrastructure, expand the user base and develop a database of locations.

As an aside,  I would also bet big money that there really aren’t 60,000 “users” of the service…there might be 60k people registered, but you might want to check in with Second Life to see how inflating user numbers work out.

Second, also in the NYT, a rehash on last week’s story about how twitter saves the world, or in this case, how it unmasked an attempted gag order. That twitter dude sure is busy, saving democracy, getting people out of jail, and I’ll bet even solving the balloon boy mystery. Now, while there is some hype here (you are telling me, Mr and Mrs. NYT, that if Twitter didn’t exist  the gag order would still be in place? Pls), it make a few good points. Specifically:

• Information knows no borders. The idea that any entity can order silence in one geography is patently absurd, over time.
• Group collaboration tools allow for very rapid spread of ideas/information.
• Corporations need to be way smarter about this trend, or risk ongoing embarrassment and brand damage.

I did like this graf:

There is a danger in overpraising a tool like Twitter at the expense of the words it amplifies — in essence, extolling the chisel rather than Michelangelo. But last week’s events show that a variety of Internet projects, including Twitter, are making it harder for the traditional gatekeepers to control of the flow of information.

I’ve made this point less eloquently before – tools are tools, not good or bad.

Over on TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld suggests it’s time to hide the noise. He is specifically talking about Twitter, of course, as the noise generator du jour. Looking back to what he wrote 18 month ago, he notes:

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know.

But while he’s on the right track, his solution misses. What he says next is:

What these services should strive to do instead is hide the noise, keep it simple.  Letting me sort through the stream by creating different groups and lists and columns of things and people I want to pay attention to is great, but it hardly solves the problem.  Finding that one great Tweet from @Loic or anyone else I follow shouldn’t be a game of Where’s Waldo.

Of course, the answer is not simply more, it is less. It’s somewhat odd in this world of more is always better, but maybe it’s time to consider that there are times when more is simply more, not better.

I’ve before referenced this snip from a poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.

From this I take this progression – data is central, it leads to facts, one step up the chain, then facts manipulated and considered become in the hands of smart people knowledge, and knowledge applied becomes wisdom, which is what we all seek. But the ability to sift and to seek for understanding, my question is this – are we in a place where more flow is better, or where we bury the needed facts in such a pile that our search for wisdom in hindered and not helped?

Put this way, perhaps the answer speaks aloud.

Via the LAT, a story about Google Wave. Which may be a very nice piece of technology, and apparently is poised to “transform journalism.” Hoo boy. Where to start.

First, phrases like “everyone is buzzing about how the collaborative Web tool will revolutionize how we do business, organize parties, manage projects with friends, cheat on homework and market brands” just don’t really apply to a product not yet in even a broad beta, and certainly don’t apply to “everyone” if you apply even a basic math look at US population. Second, and more pertinent are the ways the product will transform journalism. Let’s take a look:

1. Collaborative writing is too hard, it will fix this.

2. Recording and archiving interviews is too hard (halloo there, let me introduce you to OneNote!). It will fix this.

3. Doing conference calls is too hard. It will fix this.

4. Real time editing is hard. It will fix this.

5. Allowing people to watch you while you write is hard. It will fix this, though the upside escapes me.

6. Here’s my favorite, read it and weep:

Every once in a while, bloggers like to poll their readers on topics. But gathering a decent sample size takes a while.
Presumably — maybe once Google turns on compatibility with standard e-mail platforms — people will practically live inside of the Wave software. We could blast out a poll using Google’s Polly extension and instantly begin pulling in feedback.

Imagine that… “people will practically live inside of the Wave software” The mind simply boggles.