Author: Angelo Fernando

Strategic Planning – telling “stories” about the future

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In the age of GPS, who needs a road map? In the age of short term bumps and market shifts, why even bother with the long view?

Strategic planning is not so much about looking down the road and plotting your next move, but using the long perspective to sharpen the tools we use today to get there. That “road” won’t be the same by the time you arrive at the intersection, but you would know what to make of the resurfaced terrain.

We think about this all the time, here at the Decision Theater. We call it Scenario Planning, which is slightly more complex than strategic planning. Why? Because it involves systems thinking, and gives you (the client) a look at different what-if scenarios that help refine the one plan you eventually settle for.

I recently came across Dennis McDonald’s A short definition of strategic planning that took into consideration social media.

But the best definition of scenario planning I have seen comes from the World Economic Forum, which says thus:

“Scenarios are stories about the future. They are not attempts to predict the future; rather, they aim to sketch the boundaries of the plausible.”

Road maps, both the folded street versions and business kinds, are not always inspiring. Scenarios have inbuilt stories that people could relate to.

Quotes of the week ending 8 March, 2008

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“Obamicans.” “McCainicrats”

Former White House chief of staff Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, about needeing to watch Republicans who back Barack Obama and Democrats who like John McCain, respectively.

“So, I think they have to spin this as best they can, but the reality is still the reality.”

David Axelrod, chief strategist for the Obama campaign, on Clinton’s win in Ohio and Texas this Tuesday.

“We are all living in the middle of a paradigm shift.”

Andrew Leckey, Director of the National Center for Business Journalism, on the role of journalists, at a workshop in Phoenix, Arizona.

“it’s no doubt true that many PR & advertising agencies don’t, in fact, ‘get it’ yet … But it is also true that many clients don’t get it yet, either.“

Todd Defren, PR Squared, commenting on the fact that marketers want to put social media into the bucket of metrics and campaigns.

“We can also look forward to flexible screens, holographic projection and LED wallpaper that allows any flat surface to function as a display.”

Bill Thompson, on the technology of teaching.

“In the end advertising isn’t about the click.”

Mike Leo, CEO of Operative, in Businessweek, on the slowdown in Google’s advertising’s pay-per-performance model.

“Haven’t you people learned the art of pretending that you know what you’re doing?”

Cathy Taylor, on why ad agencies (some of whom occasionally blog) are not walking the talk about social media.

“A message is one-way communication and a conversation is not. Rather, a conversation is like verbal tennis where words and ideas bounce back and forth between both parties.”

Andrea Goulet, commenting on the book Now is gone.

Storytelling formulas at business writing workshop

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Aren’t we all storytellers! Business communicators and PR people aren’t the only ones with stories to tell. At a weekly management meeting I often hear a response to a complicated question that goes: “Ok, so here’s the story…” Or take reports. The most interesting executive summaries I have read have a beginning-middle-end format, and one more element –the cliff-hanger to get you to read the rest of the 15-page document. (Conversely, the most boring ones have bullet points and stats. The do the job, but they don’t light a fire.)

And my point is? Yesterday I attended a workshop by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. It was on “High intensity business coverage” and dealt with the finer points of finding, crafting and publishing business stories. Terrific speakers, with amazing takeaways for writers, a very good cross section of attendees, including some the storytellers a.k.a. journalists I am familiar with from The Arizona Republic.

In one session, writing coach Dick Weiss talked about the ingredients of an A1 story: Action, narrative, dialog, passion, character, theme. But what stuck in my mind are two other elements he recommended –tension and quirkiness. Weiss has another nugget: “Start where the readers start” because it addresses their values, and the what’s-in-it-for-me question.

Storytelling isn’t a new skill. If you’re a parent you’re probably a master at it. Every night I need to invent a story for my daughter at bedtime and one day she gave me the ideal recipe: “Could you make it a little scary, but give it a happy ending?” From then on, storytelling has been a breeze. Sprinkle tension, bring about a resolution, fade to black… Since yesterday, I’m working on the quirkiness thing.

Obama, and the iPhone generation

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Will a poster be influence the choice of the next president of the United States?

You can sense the cult-like passion these days for Brand Obama. The icon, the metaphor, the human equivalent of the iPhone for a lot of young voters.

The icon status is not accidental. Not that is contrived, either. Take this famous Shepard Fairey poster that’s showing up on the campaign –as you see here on a story about the energized voters at UT Austin. It was created by Mr. Fairey who was not involved with the Obama campaign.

It tells you something about the role of user-generated content that’s matured at a perfect time. Before the mother of all cult brands, the iPhone, was released, Apple fans raced to create designs of what they believed the iconic brand would look like.

Once upon a time presidents and prime ministers were more or less positioned and branded by ad agencies and PR strategists. The famous “Labor isn’t working” poster by Saatchi & Saatchi for Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. This year in the US elections, the branding -if you could still call it that– is in the hands of the people.

Sure, the Clinton and Obama campaigns pays big money for ridiculous he-said-she-said ads. But what’s remembered, talked about, spread virally (the “I have a crush on Obama” and “Yes we can” videos) have been created and launched by citizen campaigners on their own dime.

Speaking of shiny new objects, people camped out to catch a glimpse of, and vote with their pocketbooks for the iPhone. That same crowd –young people –seems all too eager to stand in line to vote for another “advanced communication device.”

Do you create a data cloud?

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

I often refer to ‘social media resume‘ as a collection of online and offline activities we all engage in because of what we do, how we work, whom we link to, what we publish, and what conversations we have using social media.

The concept of the data cloud captures some of this, because we are talking of a reputation system that we deliberately create (in ‘about us’ pages, social networks, Wikipedia entries etc) or accidentally inherit (others linking to us, search engine spiders indexing us etc) based on digital information. These bits of data can be tagged and indexed to create a cloud.

There’s a very good discussion of this in a post by lexicographer Orin Hargraves, at the Visual Thesaurus. If you haven’t already come across this brilliant interactive thesaurus, I highly recommend it –yes it works in the form of a data cloud! It’s not free, but for under twenty bucks, fully worth it.

Hargraves goes on to say that we should think of the data cloud “as something other than a pretty, fluffy white thing that scuds across the horizon on a summer afternoon. The data cloud is home to a lot of curious things: bots, spiders, crawlers, gophers, and other critters that work tirelessly by night and day, sifting, indexing, collecting, comparing, and no doubt, drawing conclusions.”

The cloud does not just happen. We build it, color it, reshape it every time we interact socially in our analog and digital worlds. Like our resumes, we “put things into it and take things out of it” as we move ahead in life. Could we manage our cloud better? Definitely. Just as we would unsubscribe to data coming at us, “de-friending” people from our Facebook pages, we could and should clean up our data cloud periodically, because ultimately this is what our resumes will include. No bullet points, no overblown adjectives, no references, but an interactive data stream.

Just like a visual thesaurus.

Anne Thompson on the environment

/ Angelo Fernando / 4 Comments

I am a huge fan of NBC Nightly News, as you may tell from my many references to Brian William’s different approach to the anchor’s role.

So it was great to meet Anne Thompson last week, as she covered ASU on her new environment beat. What’s an environmental beat? It’s intersting how until about six months ago, there were only three pillars to this category: Going Green, Climate Change, and Al Gore.

Anne does not frame it in the limited ‘climate change’ box as so many conveniently do, and was excited to hear how sustainability (the fourth part in this category) is such a hot (or is it cool?) major here. She was not interested in the hit-and-run questions that, say, Fox would go after (You know: “New at six, why some college students are not recycling their plastic bottles and pizza boxes…“) but the deep ones about what it means to a desert state, and what kind of new “scientists” are coming through the system to meet the sustainability challenges.

Appropriately, some of the interviews were at the Decision Theater, not just a backdrop to the topic, but a place where we confront these issues, as part of the Global Institute of Sustainability.

Stay tuned!

Quotes for the week ending 29 Feb, 2008

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“The whole 19th-century model of scarce distribution and abundant attention has been flipped on its head.”

Tony Quinn, in OMMA, on why we should change our behaviors, not our messages in a web 2.0 world.

“The right successor to the DVD is not Blu-ray or anything else. It’s the web.”

The Economist, 23 February 2008.

“The issue is no longer whether or not social media should be used. That genie is out of the bottle …The stress point has now moved to how the enterprise will use social media..”

Shel Israel, on there being two camps in social media. Camp #1 tends to ruin it for everyone else. It is run by marketing people who use social media simply for brand awareness.

“The authority factor over-weights (sic) poor writing skills”

ProBlogger Daniel Scocco, one of the top 100 blogs on Technorati, answering the question if poor writing skills overshadow good content.

“This election year, anyone can be a Henry.”

Lee Gomes, in The Wall Street Journal, on how a reader called Henry, commenting on the ABC News web site, thought to be a staffer at a presidential campaign, turned out to be a high school teacher.

IABC Phoenix – Social Media Presentation

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blogtitle.jpgIf you attended the Writers’ Group workshop on social media and blogging, here is the presentation. Thank you to the IABC, and Suzanne McCormick, for inviting me to speak.

I realize we sped through a lot of material, so please feel to contact me if you have any follow up questions.

Incidentally, if you are interested, my colleague Dan Wool spoke about the same topic on Wednesday at the PRSA luncheon. Dan has a wonderful perspective of social media. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the RSS feed of ValleyPRBlog.

Social network for decison makers

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

It’s YASN –Yet Another Social Network. It’s called Kluster.

But this one caught my interest not only because it’s in the realm of decision making, but because it’s more about productivity and collaboration, and less about befriending people.

Besides sounding flaky (“What is our business model? don’t worry we are not like the others… we actually have one, we promise.”) they have thought the process through with “phases” (that are deliverables,) “sparks,” (solutions and ideas) and “amps” which refine the imperfect sparks. The network has its own currency, measured (or rather awarded) in “watts.”

Will Kluster be a lot different from, say, Innocentive, the “open innovation” community? Today is a defining moment, since Kluster is officially launching the company at the TED conference.