Flack's Revenge

PR Golden Turkey Awards 2009

That's right, it is that time of year again.   This time last year I had a hankering for some golden fried turkey.   Now, for Thanksgiving I think I'll get me one of those big juicy turkey drumsticks - the ones you see people wielding at the theme parks, Fred Flinstone style.

The drumstick represents the cudgel of ineffective PR and image crafting, and as such is an apt symbol for this year's PR Golden Turkey Awards.

Read on, and as always please feel free to volunteer additional choices.

A Great Step for Mankind, a Fall for Irony

Yea, I voted for him, and it was wonderful that we will have a Black president.   But there is nothing, I mean nothing funny about Barack.   Add to this sad state of global economic affairs and you have some once again predicting the death of Irony (see NY Times piece Irony is Dead. Again.)

The Death of Stasis

Part and parcel with Obama's victory was the end of Stasis.  Now, Change rules.

I once heard someone say in a speech "the only one who likes change is a baby."

I am not a baby.  I am a middle-aged white guy.  I like my couch.  I like my remote.  I like my TV.  Too much change or other tomfoolery makes me crusty (crustier than my usual crusty self, anyway).

Negative Campaigning and Fear Tactics

The beautiful, truly wonderful thing about Obama's victory is that it showed that leadership and inspiration trump fear and negative campaign tactics: the ones  embraced by the right (first Lee Atwater, as I described in my post The Dark Prince of PR, and later his protege Karl Rove) and co opted by the left (Hillary used fear in her "3 am call" campaign ad).

Right Wing Talk Show Hosts

McCain was not their darling - the Hannitys, Limbaughs and Mark Levins of this world.   Sure, the talk radio and cable TV talking heads can be entertaining and draw large ratings.   But what conclusion can we draw from this year's election other than that the Greek Chorus of the right are out of step with mainstream America?

The State of California and Arnold

They have had a pretty bad run, first almost running out of money, than the requisite natural and man made disasters, and finally Prop 8.

The Sate of Nebraska and Parenthood

It sounded like a great idea - let new parents who can't handle the stresses of attending to baby's needs and would otherwise do something horrific give up their infants to the state of Nebraska.  One small problem, they did not specify an age cutoff, and people promptly (and in droves) dropped off their surly teens.

The State of Alaska and Sarah Palin

So who knew that we had such ambivalent feelings about the 49th state to join our union?  I don't know if Alaska tarnished Sarah Palin's image, or vice versa, but all we heard during the campaign were jokes about crystal meth capitols, moose hunting and shooting wolves from helicopters. 

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Trend Discovery Tools in Tech PR

Last week's topics focused on tech trend discovery.   In this post I will highlight a few sites that can help in the process.  Nothing I have previewed provided a silver bullet in terms of being able to automatically identify up-and-comers (at least, not to my satisfaction), but all can be useful in providing a better understanding of hot technology topics, words and phrases, and can help in exercises related to product positioning, for example.

 

BlogPulse

 

BlogPulse let's you graphically chart occurrences of search terms and compare the popularity of various labels.  This can help when you are comparing and contrasting differentword combinations.

 

You can vary the time horizon and compare up to three terms at once.  It makes for a spiffy chart for your presentations, as you can adjust labels for the terms and other aspects of the appearance of the graph.   The graph is interactive - you can drill down on a peak to view the related stories, and thus see for example if a spike in the occurrence of a term corresponds to related news of the day.

 

The downside is that it does not automatically identify terms that are rising importance; you need to specify search terms.

 

Google Insights for Search 

 

Launched earlier this year, Google Insights for Search builds on the earlier work of Google Trends.   It lets you pick from a predefined list of search categories and compare terms that you specify within these categories based on time horizon or geography.  If you don't specify search words it will show you the most popular searches within the category, and those that are rising in importance relative to others.

 

I gave it a try using some of the search terms from my previous post, and also generally looked at the area of enterprise tech, to see if the ones rising in importance bore any resemblance to the human-picked top trends (see Dueling Tech Predictions). 

 

As you may recall, the example I cited in my last post was solid state storage - a category that many industry watchers feel has legs because falling chip prices and rising storage capacities are making it increasingly practical to use SSDs in place of traditional disk drives and thus take advantage of faster performance.  

 

I decided to start out generally; I picked the category of Storage to see if SSD would make the list.  Although the Top Searches in the left column below make sense, the rising searches do not appear to me to match terms that I know are increasingly being buzzed about in storage (with the exception of iSCSI SAN). 

 

 

Looking at Enterprise Technology below, again the Top Searches column seems to make sense and map to familiar terms, but in Rising Searches as you can see below I got what would appear to be spurious search terms like "Toad for Oracle"

 

Finally, in the Storage category I entered three terms that I know are popular: deduplication, iSCSI and SSD to compare them.

 

You see the terms charted on a graph, almost like BlogPulse, and can also cycle through them one at a time to see the regional breakouts for each, and also related search terms.  You can also get a graph of these terms compared with the baseline category search term, Storage in this case.

 

Additional Sites

 

I looked in vain to see if technology prediction markets can help.  As I previously blogged, prediction markets tap into the wisdom of crowds and let people place bets on certain outcomes, like technologies that will break through.   There are some sites that do this (e.g., Popular Science has one), but none seem to go wide and deep into tech (Yahoo had a technology futures market at one time but they discontinued the effort).

 

It seems to me that Wikipedia is the most logical place to chart emerging technologies and trends. Many people come here first to better understand new things.   A buzz index of rising Wikipedia search terms would be extremely helpful.  And a listing of newly added entries could provide help here as well.   As reported on Read/Write Web,  the WikiRage search engine can give some insight into Wikipedia trends by showing editing activity.

 

Finally, it seemed to me that social news sites like Digg and TechMeme might be good places to look to spot trends.   Of course, there is the TechMeme leaderboard, which I have blogged about. This reports on the sources most frequently posted to TechMeme.

 

Digg Labs has some tools that are absolutely mesmerizing.   They show buzz happening in real time, and displays rising chatter on topics via some pretty cool, animated visual effects.

 

Journos will Flack for Food

The WSJ had an article yesterday (Ex-MSNBC Chief Taps Journalists as Consultants) about former MSNBC rising star Dan Abrams' new media strategy firm that he is launching to help business executives with PR.   According to the article:

The firm's chief selling point will be a network of media insiders whose advice is available in exchange for an hourly fee.  Mr. Abrams has assembled a roster of "thousands" of such professionals, he said, with the aid of former Huffington Post media writer Rachel Sklar.  The firm has already signed its first client...

Let's see, thousands of professionals and one client.  I don't have my calculator handy, but it sounds like they are on the road to profitability.  Actually, this points to one of the more novel and compelling aspects of the model.  The new firm will apparently not need to fund a large and expensive payroll but will engage these professionals just in time, as needed for projects.

It goes on to say:

Amid the economic downturn, many journalists have lost jobs at high-profile broadcast networks, newspapers and magazines, as well as at a host of local news organizations.  Abrams Research aims to take advantage of these circumstances, providing work for the under- or unemployed, as well as access for its clients to veteran journalists.

There has been a saying in the tech industry: be careful of trashing the competition to loudly because you may one day wind up working for them.   I am sure there must be some pithy observation about karma in here somewhere.   We don't compete with journos but are sometimes looked down upon by them.  It is kind of ironic that many are flocking to join our ranks, particularly since the employment outlook is not so rosy on this side either.

Anyway, I would not want to discourage anyone who wants to join the wonderful field of PR.  And it is great to have someone as high profile as Dan Abrams - someone who has always impressed me as being smart and ambitious - make a play here.  I applaud any effort to innovate in the field of PR.

Who knows, he could be onto something and I wish him luck.

Trend Surfing and Discovery in Tech PR

It is a common question.  You are doing some planning with the client.  The client would like to know what trends are in play and expected to be hot for next year.  What are some of the topics and technologies that are growing in importance? 

As I blogged yesterday, having an awareness of emerging trends can be important in helping to shape PR tactics and content such as pitches and messaging.  Looking beyond the world of PR, it is important to understand what is up-and-coming to make sure your business stays on the leading edge and is ready to deal with emerging competitive threats or take advantage of opportunities.

In response to the above question, most PR teams would do any number of things.  They'd mine editorial calendars to see what their core publication targets plan to cover.  They'd chat with their PR colleagues.  The pros are well read and constantly looking for trends that seem to be gaining steam.  The more ambitious (or better funded) programs do formal surveys, taking their cues from so-called domain experts - people who work in these industries, and report on them and analyze them. 

All of the above can be hit or miss, and there are good reasons for this.  None of us have a crystal ball and it is impossible to predict with certainty what will be invented next or which of the nascent trends or technologies that are already out there will gain a head of steam and possibly even cross the chasm to mainstream acceptance.

Now that much chatter and content winds up online, one would hope that there is a more automated way to at least determine the topics that are increasingly being buzzed about.  It is an interesting search and indexing problem, and you would think that it would be solved by now. 

Unless I am missing something, it has not been solved, and there are some good reasons for this.  In general, search engines are designed to interpret a search query and then provide results pages of the most likely Web page matches based on your query and its index.

They are simply not designed to wade through the corpus (Wikipedia definition) that is the Web and flag new words or phrases associated with up-and-coming technologies and trends.  Trying to adapt search and content management technologies for such a purpose would be no small task.

(For more about the challenges of mining text and tracking words, see the WSJ piece Making Every Word Count).

Looking at the world of storage networking, for example, such a system would need to know that SSD = solid state drives.  It would need to parse each word in a sentence and "understand" the difference between the exact same word combinations in two different sentences:

"Solid state drives are replacing disk drives at an astonishing rate" and " Technologies that are solid state drive power, size and cost savings when vacuum tubes are replaced with chips."

In other, words they'd need to understand that "drives" in the first sentence is a noun and part of a phrase and hot trend.  In the second sentence, the same word is a verb.

Ideally, such a system would be able to cluster similar concepts such as solid state drives, NAND flash storage, chip-based storage, etc.

As you can see it is no easy task.   This shows the limits of machine intelligence when compared with human intelligence.   The AI tools are just not there yet.

Buzz tracking Sites and Indexes

They say that search engines are the ultimate database of intentions.  By exploring the index you can see who is concerned about Flu symptoms, correlate this data and hence get an early warning about regions where the flu may well be breaking out (see NY Times story Aches, A Sneeze, a Google Search).

By exploring search records you can see who is looking for good places to bury bodies and ways to kill people (or themselves), as has been made famous in news headlines, TV reports and crime shows.

According to the above NY Times article:

Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a "collective intelligence" that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

So why not use these search tools and buzz indexes to get a glimpse of what new technologies people are looking at for their data centers, for example?

Said another way, if you can use Google to get early warning of Flu outbreaks, why not use it to track spontaneous outbreaks of newfangled jargon?

In the case of Google Flu Trends, they simply have hard wired the system to track a few pretty predictable search phrases: flu symptoms, influenza, muscle aches etc.

Looking beyond the world of flu symptoms, in most cases search engine buzz indexes report on the most popular terms people are searching on.  By virtue of how they work and people search, they are weighted in favor of already popular items that people are trying to learn about or buy.  They don't in most cases report on terms that are rising in relation to other searches.

There are exceptions and I will be writing more on this later this week.

Trend Surfing for Fun and Profit

In the fast-paced world of tech PR, it is important to be able to track trends.  Understanding the important trends in fields that relate to your employer or client can help in a number of ways.  This may seem pretty obvious, then again there are many in our field who just flog news and products without really understanding the shifting winds of the spaces they're in.

First, trends can help drive issues campaigns.  This is a way to present your story within the context of major trends.  Putting a trend first is a softer approach than leading with "this is why we are a great company with a great product."  It is a door opener, because people you are approaching who you hope will take an interest ostensibly are the same ones who care about what is happening in a given market, and the trends that are shaping it.

Further, an understanding of the hot trends can help with thought leadership activities such as pursuing speaking opportunities and writing articles.  Most show organizers and magazines that take articles want those to be based on relevant trends and topics.

Ideally, an understanding of the trends that are influencing a market segment come from real experience in that segment - whether it is your own experience, or from talking to people who work in the field and understand its nuances and dynamics.

Of course, you can get this indirectly by reading a lot.  I would never want to discourage being well read.  However the challenge with this approach is that it tends to be a day late and a dollar short.  You are getting your information through filters when you just rely on reading about what others think.  And widely covered trends can get to be tepid and not that interesting.  If the trend has legs, before long everyone will pile on and it will be harder to break through the noise and position your product or service relative to the trend (e.g. the current trend in green data centers and technologies).

Ideally, you want to be on the leading edge of a trend as it is getting some steam and people are starting to pick up their heads up and take note (i.e., somewhere between the Technology Trigger and Peak of Inflated Expectations on the Gartner Hype Cycle).

So what does someone with little experience in a given area do to get smart about emerging trends?   And how can industry veterans stay on top of trends to make sure they are not missing any important new ones?

Please stay tuned, I will be covering the topic over several posts this week.

What the Microblogging Explosion Means and Why Twitter is Addictive

I can't say I have mastered it, but I am warming up to Twitter, a technology that I had been skeptical about at first.   It really is pretty counterintuitive, the idea that we need more interruptions and noise, and that people might care about the 140 character pulses of our thoughts and lives; but there you have it, there is no denying the legs of microblogging phenomenon.

An article in this past Sunday's NY Times magazine by Clive Thompson - I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - does a good job of explaining the allure of microblogging  (and other feed technologies such as Facebook updates) and what this means in a broader context.

He described something called ambient awareness:

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye...

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives... This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. 

In terms of broader social context, Thompson writes:

You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book “Bowling Alone.”

One of the most interesting passages describes the Dunbar number - the maximum number of social relationships each of us can maintain.  The number has been pegged to be 150, confirmed by studies.  Yet social networking and microblogging technologies would seem to amplify our Dunbar numbers.  How can we support all of these relationships? 

Here the article gets really interesting as it explores close vs. weak ties, the former being made up of close friends and family.  Regarding weak ties, Thompson recalls his discussions with the people he says are most aggressively social online:

But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist...

Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out. Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question.

Thompson also explores what this means for our public images:

This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world. This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.

Dark Prince of PR

The movie Booogie Man, which chronicles, the life and times of Republican adviser and strategist Lee Atwater (Wikipedia definition) was on the Frontline TV show last night.  I had wanted to see the biopic during its short run in the theaters a few months back but did not get the chance to do so, so I am glad it was on TV; I watched it, and enjoyed it.   Hopefully the movie will run again, for those who did not get the chance to catch it this time around. 

It is a great movie about a fascinating and complex individual.  The title I believe is meant to be an ironic play on words about Atwater's love of scare tactics and music (he was an accomplished blues guitarist, and recorded and played with bluesmen such as B.B. King).

Atwater was not a PR guy in the traditional sense.  I do not believe he ever had those words in his job title, or worked for a PR agency.  But he did have a talent for media relations (or manipulation, as some might say), and did quite a bit of it as a consultant and campaign manager for a number of candidates.

Atwater died in 1991 of cancer, following much attention and notoriety about some of the campaigns he ran and  tactics he had used.  For example, he conceived the infamous Willie Horton campaign during the George H.W. Bush run of 1988.   Unsurprisingly, Atwater was a mentor to Karl Rove.

Atwater was brilliant at working the media and getting the stories he wanted out, sometimes surreptitiously, other times on record.  In the movie, some journos seemed to acknowledge that they had been used by Atwater, but strangely did not seem to harbor ill feelings about it.   Such was Atwater's charisma and likability.

He seemed to know what would make a good headline, even if the story only had a passing acquaintance with reality.  For example, in one early congressional campaign he spread the rumor that  opponent Tom Turnipseed had been "hooked up to jumper cables" as a teen, i.e. had received shock treatment.   Atwater apologized to Turnipseed for this episode before his death.

The movie War Room, which chronicled the Clinton campaign of '92 inspired me.  If Clinton, James Carville etc. championed wars rooms and rapid response PR tactics, Atwater was credited (or blamed) for opposition research, rumor mongering, and working the media (OK, I am sure political operatives from both sides sometimes do these things).

Political PR tends to be super intense and mercenary, these guys take no prisoners.   It makes tech PR look quaint by comparison. 

But even those in other fields of PR can learn things - the good and the bad - from movies like Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, The War Room, and the recently updated Return of the War Room (all IMDB links).

Obama Champions the New PR

David Carr has a great story in the NY times today (Obama's Personal Linked In) about how the Obama campaign's use of social networking technology helped him efficiently and cost effectively rally his supporters and raise money.   According to the article:

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new.  Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine, and then McCain and the Republicans

I have talked about social networking as the new contact management for PR.   Clearly, the Obama campaign was in agreement with this idea.   Now he has a database of millions of supporters who have opted in to receive communications from him.

As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern...

The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks...

The article likens Obama to an upstart business beating the 800 lb. gorillas at their own gain:

“When you think about it, a campaign is a start-up business...  it was like he was going up against Google and Yahoo. And he won.” [This, according to Ranjit Mathoda, a lawyer and money manager who blogs at Mathoda.com].

But isn't the converse also true?  Can't brands create movements and rally  enthusiasts, early adopters and forge a direct dialog with customers and prospective customers via social networking technology? 

Research on Students' Political Views Points to Power of PR

Many take it for granted that the liberal mindsets found amongst university educators influence the political views of students.

As reported in the NY Times this week (Professors' Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not), several recent studies refute this and indirectly point to the power of PR and social networks.  As written in the piece:

An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students... but a handful of new studies have found such worries to be overwrought.  Three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views of students....  The notion that students are induced to move left is a "fantasy," said Jeremy Mayer.

Jeremy Mayer is one of the authors of the book Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities.

"Parents and family are the most important influence," followed by the news media and peers, he said.  "Professors are among the least influential."

The report points to the power of media and peer groups in shaping views, and at least indirectly would seem to validate the power of PR to do the same, since PR seeks to communicate with and through these channels.

A New Mood in Tech PR

I have hesitated to write this because I think a lot of what is going on in the economy and business climate is due to a contagion of panic and fear.  I don't want to add to this via a post that acknowledges certain realities, but do want to provide advice that I hope some will find useful.

The realities that I am talking about are that the mood of the day feels an awful lot like the post-911 period and the dot com meltdown.

Although the stresses to the tech sector in terms the realities of cash flow and profits may be more imagined (or anticipated) than real, here and now, the net effect is the same.   Companies - both vendors and their customers - are being conservative in their spending and VCs are asking their portfolio companies to make cash last longer while pulling back on investments in new ventures. 

There was lots of buzz and panic in the tech community in the wake of a report from Sequoia (see Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell on GigaOm). 

PR people and agencies are not powerless in all this, and, as I have been blogging, there is no better time to prove our value and deliver solid results and ROI.  At the same time, we need to adjust our strategies, themes and messages to fit the mood of the day in the tech sector.

Soft benefits are out and hard ones in, in terms of cost savings or the ability increase the top line.  Happy talk about cool features, and next generation breakthroughs just do not cut it now.   People are less interested in bold vision and more interested in bottom line results.

So take a good hard look at your key messages and campaign themes and adjust them accordingly, otherwise you will sound out of step with the tenor of the times and will just get mocked or ignored.

In particular I am thinking about the social media and enterprise 2.0 spaces.  Some of the coverage has started to turn negative.   There is a  Crash 2.0 meme that has been brewing.  

I personally feel that there is great potential in the technology, and it is not just a distraction to IT departments as some articles would have you believe.  Social technologies are changing the way that we communicate.   Just like the Internet forced a sea change in how companies and people work and do business, the new social Web has similar potential and thus will be ignored at the peril of those who do so.

Just the same, we are advising clients in these spaces that now is a great time to shift from talk about cool features to documented, real results and returns from the technology.