Hot, Flat and … intolerant (and why it’s going to change)

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Yesterday we had a book discussion on Thomas Friedman‘s Hot, Flat and Crowded.  There was a good cross section of people, and I truly enjoyed the student perspective on the key things Friedman diagnoses as the problems in the US (isolationism, infrastructure and nation building) we need to fix.

What timing! This was first of 4 sessions here at the Decision Theater, a place where we look at alternative  scenarios and sustainable futures.

The dominant metaphor in the book is the US consulate in Istanbul that was built so secure, it’s a place where “birds don’t fly.”

Having covered the technology space for awhile, this isolationist metaphor seems at odds with what’s going on in the US with regard to collaboration and connectivity. We build open source platforms for business, gaming, virtual worlds and education. We invented wikis and blogs and send the opposite message outside our borders. Obviously we are not singing from the same song sheet, –as this T-shirt at a rally reflects. (Guess who’s rally that might be?)

As we saw last night, hot, flat and intolerant is a losing proposition.

Don’t vote for these guys

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As I made my short list of whom to vote for in my district & county, I struck out a few people for the simple reason that they have come off so negative. I get it. Negative ads move the needle a bit, but not where I come from.

There were a few other marketing-related reasons as well why I thought they don’t need to be in charge of things.

  • They use some very, very old, unverified databases – I get mailers to three versions of my name. I have two words for them: database cleansing.
  • They present half-truths (as verified here) that assume the voter is dumb, and that we only get our information from their 9″ x 6″ flyers.
  • They kill a lot of trees to get their message (fiscal conservativism, responsible stewards yada yada).
  • They use the same format, same size, possibly the same print company. Did they not get the memo: one size fits nobody? The guy who sent us hand-addressed “letters” from his wife? Oh, come on!
  • They have no clue about variable-data printing. If they need to ask what this is, their campaign staff don’t need my tax money.

Meghan the Blogger

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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

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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.

Public Relations not a game

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

This is a follow up to my post last week (“do we trust journalists?”) and how important it is to understand what they want.

I frequently come across the argument that while PR people like to be proactive about pitching stories, they don’t do a good job of targeting, and even responding. It’s often a cat-and-mouse game.

Alec Klein, professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern wrote a thought-provoking piece this week on the PR game, and his experience as a journalist when trying to get the gatekeepers to be forthright. He talks of how, “when PR people essentially stonewall a reporter, all they are doing is forcing the reporter to find other ways to learn what is going on.”

Last Friday, after the Media Relations training session, I asked one of the attendees her reactions, one big take away was that reporters are not the enemy:  “We have to understand that they are just doing their job, and we could always find ways to help them improve their story,” she said. As long as you you how to talk to the media, you can turn what seems like an inquisition, into a dialogue. Bottom line: It’s not a game. Even if it seems like one, both sides need to win.

Sidebar: Speaking of which, this may be slightly academic, but in case you are interested, the Institute for Public Relations has a very good exploration on Ethics and Public Relations. It delves back into Plato’s Dialogues, truth and advocacy in the modern age.

(A shorter version of this appears in ValleyPRBlog)

Quotes for the week ending 1 November, 2008

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“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?

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

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

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

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.

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.