The Reynold’s Center for Business Journalism has an interesting video, featuring Teri Goudie, former ABC News journalist, on how to face the media.
It’s aimed at business journalists who are not comfortable being the interviewee, but some of the points raised could apply to to anyone in the hard glare of a TV camera.
Steve Rubel of Edelman, who inroduced himself as someone who “studies the digital landscape and makes sense of the hodge podge,” had an interesting way to introduce Digital Trends. “Here lies mass reach. 1704 to 2004” read a gravestone in one of his slides. The point? We’re in the middle of a massive movement fom mass to micro.
As expected, Rubel’s observations and predictions of where we are headed, makes us cheer and wince at the same time. I say that in a good way as someone who believes we need to be uncomfortable with the tools we use or plan to use, rather than stick within our comfort zone of newsletters and ‘ads.’ The discomfort zone means communicators need to spend more time with data –become ‘quants’ as he puts it — try things like Google trends, and widgets etc.
Alas, we are all control and content freaks, not geeks. We love to have meetings over fonts and color palettes, don’t we? The widgetized way to think of content and branding forces us to think of content in a micro formats.
The point I really liked was his concept of becoming ‘content curators’ –something he has written about before. Digital Curation may be a role we have to play to get our message through. Like museum curators and book editors, content curators would serve a valuable role for our micro audiences in separating the valuable from the junk. Even Brands could play a role in curation. Brand curators? Enough to make digital agencies cheer and slow-to-digital agencies wince.
Marriott CEO, J.W. Marriott told a shocked audience this morning that he never knew what a blog was when he started, but now finds it a way to listen to others, and communicate better with the thousands of employees and customers around 68 countries.
Marriott spoke at the opening session of the IABC International conference in New York, where he was named the 2008 Excel Award winner. Like a few CEOs today, he stumbled onto blogging thanks to his communications director, but now finds it “a cool way to tell stories.” His advice to other CEOs:
Obviously he was mildly grilled about the value of the blog. Alluding to the ROI of the blog he said it translated ino thousands of dollars in room sales. “I would recommend it to any CEO. It’s worth it,” he said.
There’s a neat web service for checking to see if your Press Release is full of #!*! or if it carries standard elements such as contact numbers, URL’s and keywords that match up with links.
It’s called Press Release Grader. A cut-and-paste site that grades your release instantly.
What I liked most about it was the visual rendering of a Word Cloud, which displays words larger if they are used more often etc. It also points to gobbledygook words –there were 7.
Since Apple’s iPhone 2.0 is all the rage this month, I used one of the first iPhone releases from January 2007 about ‘reinventing the phone.’ It got a grading of 44 out of 100, and had the readability level for a 3-year undergraduate.
You can see the report here.
I don’t think the value of this is to score high, or to gloat, but to get you to understand what you could be missing, or overdoing. What constitutes a perfect press release? No human or piece of software could tell you that. There are guidelines and must-haves that a ‘Grader’ like this will help you remember to use. But as my friend and author Linda VandeVrede reminds us, a press release should serve the one audience it is targeting: the media.
“It’s a push back from the sound-bite culture.”
“We have a steady, relentless snack-food diet of facts and ‘news briefs’ driven by the mistaken perception that fast is best and better in an RSS alert-enabled world. Unfortunately, with news happenings in constant motion, we never “have time” to “go back” and provide a deeper look for our news consumers.”
“A radical suggestion for the Social Media Release: don’t put any Social Media Releases out over the wires.”
“They’ll get half of it right. We’ll push them to getting all of it right.”
“The reality is that they’re tiptoeing in the gray zone between open and traditional media.”
“Nope. No fine print here my dear sirs and madams. HONEST. Everything that’s currently free is still free.”
“it’s a big red flag that the AP is now waving in the blogosphere.”
I head to the IABC International conference in New York that starts next week. Two things I can expect: To meet a lot of folk interested in social media, and to see see a lot of PowerPoint slides 🙂
But what has left an indelible mark on me is a series of videos created by Lee and Sachi LeFever and his wife at CommonCraft. This one, particularly on social media in plain English.
If you’re interested, CommonCraft says they offer licensed versions to ‘educators and influencers.’
As someone who writes about this stuff, attempting to demystify technology and clear the fog that hovers over technology, I think this work is pure genius.
Thanks (no thanks, really) to complex technology, organizations struggle with collaboration – still.
ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business talks about the challenges businesses face with collaborative technologies. Robert Sommer talks of the ‘tower of babble’ problems we still face.
Another major blur is taking place, as we hear more and more about bloggers and journalists walking in each others’ shoes. We are all passing through what I could best describe as a constant Professional Motion Blur: Marketing and Communication, PR and Advertising, Blogging and Media Relations, Digital Printing and Direct Marketing, Search and Marketing, Journalism and Blogging.
This story and this captures what’s happening as bloggers get to learn the rules of journalism, while ironically journalists are learning to play by the ‘rules’ of the blogosphere, and even learn to use Twitter. The Society of Professional Journalists is conducting a series of seminars in Chicago, Greensboro, and Los Angeles.
Are we muddying the professions? Some will say it’s the death of expertise. I just think we cannot afford to operate in our silos anymore. Faced with our multi-media, highly connected, multi-cultural audiences, we have no other option but to embrace the blur.
“Why would the internet lie?” says someone at the end of a failed attempt to ‘test’ if cellphones could produce enough energy to pop corn kernels.
They were responding to the hilarious video on YouTube that has all the hallmarks of being authentic –poor resolution, shaky camera. The unspoken hypothesis: cell phones could have the same effect as a microwave. And you hold it close to your head?
Not just hilarious, but a wicked -un-marketing speak for strategic- way to send a message without actually issuing a press release that cell phones may fry your brain. Not just wicked, but viral.
Some feel cheated. Some suggest it is sneaky “murketing.” Whaddya expect? This was on YouTube, not the Discovery Channel! “We knew they were fake, the only mysteries were the “how?” and the “why?”” said WIRED’s Charlie Sorrell -who later confirmed that the folks behind the fake popcorn were from By Cardo Systems, maker of bluetooth headsets for motorcycle riders.
So what does this tell us about marketing?
1. Viral marketing doesn’t follow the rules. Does the fact that it is a hoax (disproving the preposterous idea that cell phones are lethal microwaves) take away from the need for Cardo’s products? In the old brand world, the answer would have been yes, so please kill the idea. In a few days, by ignoring these rules Cardo will have the kind of word of mouth advertising many brands would die for.
2. Viral marketing takes risks. Cardo probably knew enough about comparisons that have been made between a bluetooth frequency and cell phones frequency -both operate on the same range as microwave ovens. Bluetooth is just a weaker transmitter.
3. Viral marketing energizes others. People were very anxious to debunk it, but had to upload their videos about it! To borrow a point Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff advocate in their book, Groundswell, the new rules mean you need to ‘energize the groundswell.’
The sad news today for journalism –and NBC –of Tim Russert’s death makes us appreciate the kind of journalists we so often take for granted. You could watch Tim, and see his genuine curiosity seep out of his eyes, and you could almost feel he was asking the question you would have if you were in the studio/oval office.
I didn’t realize he had been hosting Meet The Press for so long. That word, the ‘Press,’ has gone through many incarnations, but the type of reporting, analysis and perspective Russert brought to journalism never wavered. He never seemed happy with the glib, half-hearted or spun answer.(see how doesn’t get Clinton and Obama off the hook) which gave him the notion of being “tough.” But I like to think of him as being something else: honest to his audience.
Hoipolloireport 