Best Practices

Call to Citizen Journalists: video your vote for PBS

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

One more great use of social media. A citizen Journalism effort by PBS and YouTube to keep things transparent.

It’s called VideoYourVote. There are some ground rules to follow. With most cameras making it dead easy to capture video, it could be the most recorded election in history. The age of the Digital Election Monitor is here. It’s not going to completely remove fraud, but more lenses, more eyes and more exposure could be a new way –minus the Big Brother feeling– to make it a cleaner process. Also a more representative event not percolated through the big filter of the traditional news networks.

Here’s David Broncacio explain why you should Video Your Vote.

Link outside the box: Killing ‘stickiness’ one more time

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People used to terrified about outbound links. I once worked for a company, that shall remain unnamed, whose marketing manager insisted that we should not link stories from a newsletter to destinations outside the company. She loved the ‘sticky’ concept so bad, I could’ve cried!

So I was happy to hear that there are bigger names who have written (even this week) the obituary for stickiness. Brian Steller, writing for the New York Times, describes a trend in newsrooms that are suddenly engaging in ‘link journalism‘ –a newly minted term for something we have been practicing for years, to substantiate, acknowledge and cross-reference a story. It’s a big editorial and mental shift for some –like my sticky manager — because it displays a sense of confidence to let readers come and go as they please.

Radio beats video in explaining financial crisis

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Want to see the financial crisis deconstructed by a different breed of pundits than those we are subject to on TV?

A Harvard University panel discussion is available as a video feed at the Harvard site. It’s all about this “slow motion train wreck.”

But if you really want feel the heartbeat of the crisis (and not have someone fling around terms like “leverage” and “swaps” without some explanation) then I highly recommend listening to Ira Glass on This American Life, esp his second big take on the financial meltdown.

Part One, “The Giant Pool of Money,” was scary enough. This was before the Feds decided to invest in bank stocks, and the G8 finance ministers meeting last week.

Part Two, “Another frightening show about the economy,” was true to its title.

This is radio at its best. Glass does much more than capture and edit together the sound bytes of experts. He gives you a sense of the fear and contradictory thoughts running through people in the eye of the storm.

At one point, he asks one John Zuker whom we consumers should be upset with. There’s dead air and Glass says “that’s a long pause, John?” Zuker, apologizes but Glass lets him take his time; you know he’s left the pause in there to give us listeners an idea of how complicated the problem is, how scary it is when so-called experts don’t have pat answers to what ails our financial system. The layman’s explanation of credit default swaps, and something called ‘netting‘ make you wonder where our leaders were when these modern weapons of mass destruction were created.

Compared to similar analytical takes on CNN or Fox, the urgent pace and mesmerizing whirl of distracting graphics, split-screens, fast cuts, crawlers and props, radio beats TV to a punch in getting to the granular level of a crisis.

Even this well-done time-line by the New York Times, fails to get the bigger sweep of history. It begins in 2001, but misses a big one: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999.

In times like this, TV has become the Circus Maximus providing entertainment for the lazy. Radio delivers the story, the backstory and the analysis. Great work, Ira!

Video diaries to be used in Afghanistan

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With so much ‘video’ coming from terrorists who know only too well the media would give them airtime, it always made me wonder if there was not third way to counter this.

The first way would be to ignore them or prohibit their rebroadcast, which would be impossible considering the ability to self-broadcast, anyway.

The second way was the pathetic approach taken by the government, post 9-11, which was essentially a PR and advertising approach, creating happy-people video vignettes. Called Shared Values, and headed by much-respected ad veteran Charlotte Beers, the $11 million campaign was a failure, and an embarrassment. The videos were not inherently bad, but they came from the wrong source: The State Department! (Under the banner of an organization called the “”Council of American Muslims for Understanding.”)

Trying to solve “they hate us” with a Madison Avenue push tactic, that pretended to be a grassroots organization? Anyone could have seen why this was so wrong.

Enter the user-generated concept, from the government. Make that the British government. It’s a plan that has not yet been approved, but it involves getting NGO’s to hand out mobile phones to ordinary people in Afghanistan to create video diaries. The idea is to “deny the Taliban of a monopoly on this space” –meaning to counter hate-ridden, user-generated propaganda videos with other stories from the country. Given that this borders on citizen journalism, it has a better chance in the credibility department. Let’s just hope they don’t put an ad agency head in charge of this social media program!

Sidebar: This approach is not new. It borrows from similar experiments such as The Border film project, using disposable cameras given to people –migrants and Minutemen– on both sides of the fence in the US and Mexico.

I will be keeping tabs on this project, for sure.

Bracing for hard times. How could Communicators help?

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

Communicators, marketers, media folks and anyone in related industries reading this blog: I may an incurable optimist, and focus on a lot of positive strategies. But it’s time to return our seats to an upright position and prepare fora bumpy ride.

But it’s going to be a long, hard slog –to borrow a phrase from the good folks who brought us to this precipice. And it’s time for us communicators to start banding together, to find ways to use networks and tools like these to help each other out. Why do I say this?

  • Just this week I heard of two experienced colleagues still looking for work; I don’t envy being in that spot at this time.
  • The US treasury secretary is still warning of dire times, more bank failures etc.
  • Advertising budgets are evaporating. Have been, even before the crash.
  • One newspaper here in Arizona, the East Valley Tribune is cutting back circulation (and jobs). In some local areas it will be down to four days a week next year.
  • “”We’re in this together and we’ll come through this together” says President Bush. Translated: Please help us!
  • The cut back on business trips will mean trade events will lose attendees, airlines will get hit, etc

How could communicators be of help?

I get a lot of requests and helpful suggestions via social networks. For now it has been those needing insights on vendors, job openings and recommendations, pricing and marketing tactics.

I wish IABC, PRSA, the AMA and other associations will use this time as a way to deliver more value to members. Heck, even to non-members who would be potential members down the road. PRSA ran a very good piece on the role of the Communicator in an unfolding crisis. It’s still about communicating.

My short list of what we could do:

  1. Make an even bigger case for putting an end to spin. It may not seem like a huge thing at the time to call a modest improvement  “a revolution in…” but when companies fail, or fail to deliver, people’s jobs and lives are affected. We communicators are therefore culpable.
  2. Educate people on the value of social media in letting the sunlight in. Not every CEO could blog, but when we make our intranets and wikis and podcasts more blog-like, that transparency virus creeps into everything.
  3. Empower the bottom-up movement. I am a big fan of media training, but not for the typical reasons (of staying on message etc). I want to see those who are not confident with speaking to the media have the ability to convey the rich nuances of the organizations. I had a very bad experience with a bank recently that illustrates why it is dangerous and counter-productive to throw employees under the bus.

Jeremiah Owyang had some great tips on the questions we need to be asking at this time of doom and gloom.

Big picture thinking, why is it so hard?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I was at a meeting yesterday morning where the discussion soon turned to how easy it is to look at a report or a set of charts and come to a ‘small picture’ conclusion.

We create models –the mathematical, 2D and 3D kind– here at the Decision Theater for clients that project out 20 or 30 years. But even as ‘big’ as this is in the big picture scheme of things, people easily run off with slices of this information just because it suits their agenda or world view. Water scarcity, a big picture scenario, doesn’t look so bad if you make certain small picture assumptions.

To come at this from a completely different angle,  Al Ries put it bluntly saying “No computer is as smart as a human being with a holistic point of view.” Ries, a marketing expert, was talking about “holism” and applying the need for holistic marketing thinking.

He asks why mathematicians and scientists “who developed the art and science of risk management” built models that could “comb through complicated mortgage portfolios to analyze everything,” and still been so off the mark. (A number that involves 7 and 11 zeroes, to wit!)

The answer, of course, is that they looked at risk up close, but not from a holistic, interconnected perspective.

The same goes for water, transportation, education, health. I like to tell people when presenting big picture concepts in the Drum, that even though we put things into nice buckets, we need to pay attention to the connections. Education planning involves transportation and urban growth –where would teachers live, how far will students travel, how many buses need to be in the school system?

Yes we do zoom in, move slider bars, tweak demand and supply. But we make sure people don’t undervalue the need to zoom out.

Dell’s green road trip bristling with social media

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Dell is no newbie to new media. I have been tracking them for more than two years, especially Lionel Menchaca’s parlay into social media with the hugely popular DirectToDell, its attention to the blogosphere, its presence in Second Life, the new Digital Nomads effort, and even the use of Twitter for marketing Dell Outlet,

So when I heard Dell’s latest social media effort, a 15-day, 15-city sustainability road trip with non-profit group Grist was headed to ASU and stopping right here at the Decision Theater, it sounded like a program worth writing about myself. On Friday, Todd Dwyer, Dell’s Environmental blogger, came by with Sarah van Schagen, an editor for Grist.

The reason for the visit was to look at ASU’s role in sustainability, with the School of Sustainability, and our work with the Global Institute of Sustainability.

The ReGeneration blog has some interesting features, steeped in social media. There is the grafitti wall, exploiting web 2.0 to get visitors to contribute to contribute ideas to the site. Videos are posted to Quik, and there’s a graffiti art contest with entries like the one on the left.

They have two posts, and two videos worth checking out.

The rest of the road trip is worth following, too!

Tipping points, “drill baby drill,” and journalism

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At the Sustainability Summit today, outside of the lofty discussions around  tipping points (are we there yet?), coalitions (enough tossing bombs at each other), and sustainability was the need for leadership.

As I speculated yesterday, there was an open call for those in the media to drive this train. To up the ante in a different way –explaining to consumers what the policy alternatives mean to them. To bring some clarity. Ah! Media leadership. Not exactly out of the ambit of an industry previously accused of ‘agenda setting.’

A telling quote from the session about the message we need to spread:

“Drill, baby drill” should include “change, baby change!”

Crowdsourcing a textbook, Wikinomics experiment in the making

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This is not the textbook approach to writing a textbook.  But then again, it’s a book on the topic of ‘Management through collaboration‘ so it would be a missed opportunity -dumb, almost– not to tap into the collaborative potential of social media.

Charles Wankel, calling himself ‘author and organizer’ describes this task as “a new authoring structure,” a 640-page book that will be “produced using an immense network of coauthors” –926 co-authors to be precise.

The web site, features a deep list of academics from all corners of the world (Botswana, Bangladesh, , Greece, India, Turkey, Slovak Republic etc)

It’s a social media experiment on a grand scale. The authors are supposed to contribute via an invitation-only wiki. They were sourced via LinkedIn. The book has an accompanying blog that for the moment, however, is not well updated. But it is indeed a demonstration of the principle of Wikinomics. The idea that mass collaboration will become the new normal, where ‘static, immovable, noneditable items will be anathema…”

Obama’s counter-smear machine

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Nothing beats a simple, well updated web site. And nothing beats a smear campaign than a counter-smear paint brush that fills in the details of a blurred picture created by smear artists.

The Obama campaign has found a great way of not just correcting the distortions about him, but to expose the names and history behind those who it claims are behind the smears.

Running off the main My.BarackOmama.com site, the Fight the Smears page is filled with the scurrilous emails, and sentences quoted out of context or distorted, with the correction or proof. No wonder he’s often called the Web 2.0 candidate, with a range of new media channels, including a well fed blog, Twittering and a text-message option for those who want to be the first to know his VP pick.

Web sites like AgainstObama.com (like AgainstHillary.com) crop up every few weeks, as do negative ads from McCain. But a YouTube video slam and a web site isn’t half as effective as the cumulative force of the web 2.0 counter smear machine –powered by facts.