This might be a good to watch that “words matter” speech of Obama, where he responded to the accusation that he was all about “just words.”
Social Media
Meghan the Blogger
Blogs and politics are a strange decoction. They have become the campaign tool du jour. But done right, and from the right angle (pun not intended!) they do give us slices of candidate that the media (liberal, bellicose or otherwise) don’t don’t have time to cover. But apart form pundit blogs, journalist blogs and campaign blogs a daughter blog can strike a different note. At Meghan McCain’s blog, you get to see what the dad looks like doing voice-overs.
You also get to see people carrying the portable podium, looking jet lagged, the tete-a-tete with Joe the Plumber, this election’s everyman, and even this other Joe.
Eventually, blogs work because they give an inside view, not whetted by legal and PR. Not fed through the talking points machine.
YouTube as your briefing room – State Department shows how
Hey, whoever said the government was slow to adopt and risk averse? Take a look at what the State Department is doing, as an extension of what has been going on at DipNote for the past year.
They asked people for video questions and responded to it via video, in a briefing room at YouTube.
Sean McCormack takes your questions!
McCormack makes some excellent points in his post last Friday, saying this Briefing 2.0 strategy was not done for the expected reasons –to bypass the mainstream media:
“insisting on a 20th century world behind the walls of the State Department while the watching a 21st century world develop outside the walls is not a sustainable posture…”
I’ve never, in all my years of travel, considered connecting with diplomats and state department officials except from the other side of a piece of glass two inches thick. Who knows, it might be possible to ‘friend’ them one of these days on a social network.
In many of our organizations, we may think ourselves more user friendly and accessible than a government office, but we have our two-inch thick firewalls. It’s called standard business practice. The officers on the frontlines of our online press rooms do not take questions. They are there to tell us things, not respond. When they put things down in print, to give us a bit of insight, it comes in the form of a boilerplate, at the bottom of a press release. Certainly not a blog post. Dipnote shames the business world into becoming more accessible.
Quotes for the week ending 1 November, 2008
“Whassup?”
The catchphrase once used by Anheuser-Busch for Budweiser in 1999, now used in a parody, to promote senator Obama. The original concept, and the parody were created by Charles Stone III. The license for the slogan expired three years ago.
“Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain’s saddle than his association with George Bush.”
George Will, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post.
“Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operational tool.”
From a draft of a US Army report about the threat of mobile and web technologies.
“… the general level of snarkiness & excoriation.”
Scott Monty, of Ford, in an interview dine by Jason Baer, using Twitter, talking of one component of social media that bugs him.
“Trust in journalism has been leaking like air out from a punctured balloon.”
Brooke Gladstone, speaking about undercover journalism, in On The Media, 17 October 2008
“It’s very sad to see our publication go. It was a very good product.”
Christina Leonard, editor of bizAZ magazine, that will cease publication in November.
“Allow me to take a minute to get on my soapbox and say that the general state of writing in the professional world is deplorable.”
Bob Lutz, vice chairman of global product development for General Motors, at teh PRSA conference this week.
“Talk Radio is wrong. Obama is no socialist.”
Robert Robb, columnist at the Arizona Republic, on how people confuse redistributionist tax policies with socialism.
“in the end, someone must foot the bill …it’s time students realize the need for taking personal (and financial) responsibility for ASU’s path to continues success…”
Editorial in student newspaper of the Arizona State University, on the possibility of college-specific fees being introduced.
Do we trust journalists?
I spoke to someone whom I thought might be interested in a Media Training session today. His reaction was “I don’t talk to the media. Nothing good ever comes out of it!”
Wow!
I was slightly taken aback, even though I have heard something like this before. (No, it was not Sarah Palin.) In fact, I have a mailer on my wall that announces “Don’t talk to the media…” On the reverse, is the line “until you talk to Gerard Braud.” Gerard is an IABC member I met earlier this year, who conducts this kind of thing, and his point is that you could tell an honest story, stripped of spin, and still have a great media experience.
Which brings me to the whole point of this. A survey of journalists just out (Bulldog Reporter/Techgroup International) on media relations practices. It’s an excellent insight into how journos think, what they do to connect (or avoid) PR spin, and how they stay on top of stories using social media. Among the findings:
- Only 29% of journalists read 5 blogs or more to keep up with their beat. The positive side of this is that 75% read one blog or more. One year ago, about 26% read 5 or more blogs.
- RSS usage us low (58.4% don’t use it), journalists abhor phone calls from PR people, and those not familiar with their media outlet.
- Interestingly, newspapers are still a key source of news for them (so will all those newspapers-are-dead promoters stop making it seem worse than it is?), and a large number of them are big on Electronic News Kits.
So if you don’t want to share the same oxygen as journalists, at least try to make it easy to let them suck in your RSS feed from a distance. And that’s not just your from press releases, and your ‘about us’ page, but from your white papers, interviews, podcasts, blogs & thought pieces (same thing, huh?). We may not trust them, but we could trust them to do their ground work if we give them less puff pieces.
Hey, I can afford to say this because I wear two hats. I communicate with the media on behalf of whom I represent, but I also interview companies for my freelance writing.
McCain’s campaign, a lesson in why consistency matters
I get that the ‘maverick’ label allows you to stand on any side you please.
Except that when you craft a campaign, standing for different things at different times has the makings of a communications disaster. Especially now, when it’s possible to juxtapose them.
Take these two positions. These are statements to the press, not something the press distorts.
- “I agree with Bush far more than he disagree …
- “There’s a long list of areas that we were in disagreement on …”
It’s like a brand manager placing ads for product X in different newspapers positioning it as a luxury item in one market and a discount product in another, hoping that no one sees both.
Unfortunately we do.
Copyright, catchphrases and change
It’s not a Budweiser ad, but it riffs on that ‘Whassup‘ phrase in a twisted way.
But humor apart, it is a great example of resurrecting an expired concept, skirting copyright, and making a statement.
In tough times job seekers need to expand job description
One more follow up to my post about what communicators could do during these tough economic times.
Annie Waite at Melcrum has an excellent post on how to look for interim positions during the downturn. The key seems to be flexibility.
I used to put it another way: that old line “It’s not on my job description” is an attitude that we need to expel. You can’t blame people who started checking all the boxes on their job description, just to get a great performance review. But in doing this, we box ourselves into our jobs, not realizing that over a few months that job has changed.
While doing a good job of communicating how good we are in what we do, we should not unwittingly communicate how unwilling we are to do something different, daring, unexpected. It’s easy to communicate you are an out-of-the-box type of person without using that tired expression. Here are a few simple ways:
- Read something new. Completely outside your sphere of interest. Ask someone with that expertise to clarify what it says. It will stretch your mind, and make you more accessible should the need arise.
- Try something different every month. It could be a tactic, a piece of software, or sit in a meeting you might normally avoid. If you’re not sure what’s possible, check Managing The Gray, an excellent way to stimulate your marketing ideas. CC Chapman’s podcast is like a Red Bull for your mind.
- Get feedback. It’s tough for someone who thinks he/she is an expert to ask others to give some honest feedback, but asking for feedback communicates that you are willing to learn.
- Hang out with some really ‘weird’ people. I say this in a good way. Don’t just socialize with people like yourself. Try attending a Podcamp (there’s one this weekend in Phoenix). Have lunch with a journalist or a geek. It’s amazing what you will learn in 15 minutes! I met some retirees over coffee this morning at Einsteins, and was introduced to The Black Swan, and epistemology!
Forget MP3, here comes MP6
The lowly MP3 music format was quietly replaced by MP4. But this week, there’s news that a Chinese company has introduced the world’s first MP6.
The company is AIGO. We haven’t heard much of it here in the US. but we soon will. The device that plays the new format is the eMusicPlayer, using a wireless “reading-point pen.”
What’s interesting is how it blends the technology with a publishing concept. Aigo will publish a ‘music magazine’ periodically, with about 200 to 300 songs. The pen is then used like a mouse, to point and select the music from the magazine.
I could see audio book publishers, and podcast aggregators putting this to great use. Of course any music player that can download a file wirelessly has a big advantage.
Would you let an intern run an event?
For all the talk of the bottom-up communications and letting go of the command-and-control buttons, not many organizations would want to let a newbie run the show. It’s too risky, they’ll tell you.
I could afford to talk. We let students take controls –literally — at the Decision Theater. Student workers and interns aren’t here to handle the low-end stuff. They take control of the visualizations in the control booth, they also do presentations, and even work on back-end, in coding and creative.
So this post by an intern, on the Southwest Airlines blog, Nuts About Southwest, illustrated it better I’ve ever seen. Ray Buffington is a PR intern. He created a PR event without a manager second guessing him, even though she “was available to tap into.”
Would you let an intern loose on your PR? or is your PR department such a fiefdom that no one without a communication degree is allowed near? Let alone let an intern take charge of the message.
I have been tracking Nuts for a while now, and they never cease to surprise. Great work!
Hoipolloireport 
