Flack's Revenge

Catching up on things: Social Searching & Graphing Tools, etc.

It has been a nice couple of weeks, relatively quiet at work and the long weekends rounded out the year and softened the impact of launching into 2009.  I used my days off as an opportunity to relax, spend time with family and friends, and catch up on reading.

My oldest daughter, who turned 16 in December and wasted no time in getting her driver's permit (I mean literally no time, we went to DMV on her birthday) used her school recess and my availability to get in more than her fair share of driving practice with dad (that is my domain as the wife gets anxious in the car).  I looked in the mirror this morning, and it might be my imagination but I think I have a few more gray hairs as a result of this.

I also took a refreshing break from blogging and Twitter. I did do quite a bit of reading about social media however - there is no other way to keep pace (let alone push the envelope) than to stay informed and see what works best.

The following are a few articles I ran across, found helpful, and want to share:

The Online Marketing Blog had a great post on social search tools.  Links for the sites referenced provide an excellent addendum to my post on conquering info sprawl.

See: Delver, WhosTalkin?, Samepoint, socialmention, serph and OneRiot.

Mashable had a great article How to 2008: How to Do Almost Anything with Social Media.  You can forgive them for overreaching a bit - e.g., it doesn't tell me how to walk my dog or prepare my taxes with social media, but otherwise is a great collection of "how to" articles.

The compilation led me to a number of gems, e.g. one article outlines a tool called TwitterFriends that analyzes your Twitter social network, provides all kinds of useful metrics, and actually generates a Twitter social graph.

Mine looks anemic (not taking away anything from the few connections I do show).  I guess I need to get to work on building my Twitter network.

Another discussed a tool called Twollow, which automates the process following people who tweet key words that you specify (up to five terms are allowed for free).

The Changing World of Content and What this Means for PR

The NY Times had a great article, written by Virgina Heffernan, about the changing world of media.  It explains how growing media choices and ways of consuming media are having a profound impact on the ways content gets done.  So journalists and writers need to reconsider their story lines, as do the owners of  publishing vehicles.

In PR we tend to sometimes get myopic and focus on the issues most obviously affecting us without looking at the big picture.  It was interesting for me to consider the impact of these changes on the intermediaries we seek to communicate with and through (true, social media allows anyone to be a publisher, but until or unless we all become A list bloggers, we will seek to get our messages heard through others).

The following excerpt from the article is aimed at journalists, but the message could just as easily apply to PR:

The journalist Jeff Jarvis has lately blamed his peers for not apprehending better the changes to our profession wrought by digital technology. The writer Ron Rosenbaum has responded that the best journalists were too busy working to philosophize: they were reporting, writing and editing. Both are right. For 10 years, journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can blame anyone in any profession, midcareer and set in her ways, for avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly leads or opening her sources to readers?

Virginia Heffernan goes on to pose a provocative question and explain what this means:

Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution?

Sounds an awful lot like the "medium is the message" idea pioneered by Marshall McLuhan way back when.

She uses an example to make the point:

The fact that articles live in digital form and no longer, primarily, on paper, frees them from certain constraints that seem absolutely normal to old-media people and archaic if not just stupid to everyone else...

When advertisers become content providers, magazines lose ads and finally drop off newsstands. With no newsstands and no covers, there is no need for cover lines; with no cover lines, the story no longer has to be written in the cover-line-justifying way.

She concludes with some advice (again, without many changes the words could apply directly to PR):

People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter .... Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been missing.

PR as a profession need to be cognizant of these trends and adapt accordingly.

More media choices and the rising importance of digital distribution does not just mean more places to pitch and get coverage - it means a fundamental re-evaluation of how we communicate, the stories we tell and what we expect to get out of it.

Economic Crisis for Dummies

Since the recession has pretty much settled in (can someone please tell me why it took the government a year to officially declare that we have been in a recession?) I guess we might as well get used to the fact we are probably going to be in this for some time.

It is hard to know what to think, precious few called this before it hit so why are we to believe that the prognosticators have it right now?

Anyway, if you haven't already, now would be a good time to dig in and get a better understanding of what actually happened.   I saw two great articles that really helped me in my understanding.

The first was in Portfolio, entitled simply The End, by Michael Lewis, star author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball.

He picks up where he left off in the book Liar's Poker, an excellent read about a newbie's experience (namely his own) at Salomon Bros. on Wall Street in the late 80s.

In that book he predicted the demise of Wall Street, and positions recent developments as the logical book end to earlier crises.  In short, Wall Street's way of doing business - of producing nothing of actual value and vastly overpaying its people - is now really, finally done and over with.   The accompanying picture, shown here is pretty wrenching and depressing (I know a lot of people who spent their careers on the Street).

Lewis is a great story teller and he makes this all actually very interesting and edge-of-the-seat gripping, as well as understandable.   He relates the experiences of some of those who saw this coming, and describes the roles of the instigators.   I won't give away too much of the ending, except to say that there is a climactic showdown in which ex-Salomon Bros. head John Gutfreund - the Wall Street Lion whose career Lewis effectively destroyed with Liar's Poker - agrees to sit down and have lunch with Lewis.

The second article, Debt Watchdogs: Tamed or Caught Napping, ran in the NY Times last week.  It answered a big question for me.  Namely, the investment banks' (and now, auto manufacturers') efforts to get government help have thrust them into the klieg lights.   Meanwhile, quietly skulking in the shadows has been the credit rating agencies.   Where were they in all this?   Wasn't it their ethical and legal obligation to send up a flare about the toxic debt that they rated?   The Times article takes an in-depth look at the role of these companies in the mess, and in particular drills down on the conflicts of interest and drive to profitability that no doubt were a factor.

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.

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.

Zen and the Art of Tech PR

The Book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig was in the news recently because of new book (Zen and Now, by Mark Richardson) that revisited it.  I think there is also a documentary in the works.

Seeing these headlines made me remember the book, a great read that I first came across many years ago.  Part road trip and part spiritual journey, the semi fictional book recounts the story of a father and young son as they traverse the country on a motorcycle.  It is also part mind trip: an intriguing parallel plot brings the author from lucidity, to philosophical genius, to madness and back again.

In a number of asides throughout, Pirsig associates Zen philosophy with the otherwise mundane world of motorcycle maintenance (after all, he has to keep the machine fine tuned and running during the trip) to teach important lessons about life.

The book must have made an impression because I still think about it some thirty years later.  And I also think about the important lessons it can teach PR teams about the mastering the inner game of PR: the importance of quality, and of having the right mindset, tools and attitude.

Please see the excerpts below, and my notes on the relevance for PR:

In one passage, Pirsig explains how a repair shop did a hack job on his bike:

Why did they butcher it so?  These were not people running away from technology... these were the technologists themselves...  They sat down to do a job and performed it like chimpanzees.  Nothing personal in it... And I tried to think back into the shop, that nightmare place... to try to remember the cause.

The radio was a clue.  You can't really think hard about what you are doing and listen to the radio at the same time.  Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling... Their speed was another clue.   They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them.   More money that way.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions.  They were hard to explain.  Good natured, friendly, easygoing - and uninvolved.  They were like spectators... There was no identification with the job.  Whenever their 8 hours were in you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work.... They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.

Are your PR teams engaged?  Do they really care about their work, pride themselves in their craft, want to learn and improve and proudly carry the badge of the profession?

In another passage, the author describes the importance of enthusiasm:

I lke the word "gumption" because it is so homely and so forlorn and so out of style...  I also like it because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality.  He gets filled with gumption.  The Greeks called it enthousiasmos... which means literally "filled with Theos" or God, or Quality... A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things.  He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes.

If you're going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool.  If you haven't got that, you might as gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won't do you any good.

The same can be said for PR.

Are you and your teams filled with "gumption"?  Are they pumped up and ready to enthusiastically take on the many challenges of the work?

Even the teams that are pumped up and engaged sometimes run into challenges.  Pirsig called them "gumption traps."

Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools.  Nothing's quite so demoralizing...

Do you have the best possible PR tools at hand?  Are your media lists well researched and thorough?  Are the client's key messages up-to-date?  Do you have the information tools you need?

He describes other gumption traps, and also gumption-filling: the art of getting re-energized when you are unmotivated or run into challenges.

Again, a great read, I highly recommend it.

Dueling Tech Predictions

'Tis the season of tech predictions for next year.  Right on cue, tech PR people roll out their trusty (if tired) prediction pitches: lists of what trends, technologies and products are expected to be hot, guided by the expertise (and often influenced by the product offerings) of clients.  Similarly, reporters, bloggers and analysts issue their forecasts.

I saw a bunch of these types of articles this week and thought I would do this roundup.

One of the articles I cited in my last post (the WSJ story IT Spending Seen Decelarating)  mentioned a Gartner report and quoted one of their analysts as follows:

Software as a service, or on-demand software, and virtualization technologies, which help companies reduce capital expenditures on IT projects, are likely to benefit

InfoWorld's Lisa Schmeier also focused on economic factors in her piece Recession Proof IT Jobs . She cited a report from recruitment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas that predicted strong demand for IT jobs related to the following technologies:

• Virtualization
• VoIP and wireless technologies
• Systems upgrade and maintenance
• Web 2.0 technologies (especially AJAX and Ruby on Rails skills)

On SYS-CON's AjaxWorld News Desk, James Hamilton cited Lisa's article in his piece Gartner's Top 10 List is Incorrect and Stupid (I thank my colleague Heather Lukens for pointing both of these out to me).  He predicts good things for the following:

• Virtualization
• Cloud computing
• SOA (in its reincarnation as Web Oriented Architecture)

James takes issue with Gartner's list:

Gartner's Top 10 list is incorrect and stupid to include "Enterprise Mashups" and "Social Software and Social Networking" among the top 10 technologies for 2009.

Are they talking about new recession priorities in IT departments of businesses or unemployed sexual predator priorities?

I can't imagine a single company today having a spare team of programmers sitting bored in a room with nothing better to do than implement a "social computing" module to their corporate website, or my favorite, "enterprise mashups" for their management team.

I am sure there are those who would argue that social technologies are providing real benefits for organizations and will continue to grow.

Jim Rapoza took a contrarian approach in the Emerging Technologies article: Tech Most Likely to be Ignored in 2009.

(This article offers a counterbalance to his earlier piece Technology in 2009 - you will need to register to get this - in which he predicts the following will be big in 2009:

• Cloud computing
• Next generation Web platforms
• Open mobile platforms
• Semantic search)

He writes:

While sexy and heavily hyped technologies [like social networking] get a lot of attention, they often aren't addressing a serious problem, especially for enterprises. Given the current economic situation, vendors should really be looking at innovating in the areas that companies have to spend on instead of shiny new toy technologies that most businesses will decide they can easily live without.

Jim goes on to explain why the following should not be ignored:

• Security (What we need is a Security 2.0 type of wave, a radical rethink of how companies protect their systems and data and stop the bad guys in their tracks)
• PC hardware (Some major company needs to scrap the entire motherboard, processor, memory and hard disk paradigm and get to work on the future of computing)
• Internet Infrastructure (... when was the last time there was an important and innovative new web server release? Or a massive change in the way servers do anything on the Web?)

Reading the Financial Tea Leaves in Tech PR

Browsing through the headlines in the WSJ and NYT today made my head spin.  It reminded me of  a book I read when I was a child called Fortunately, which described events in the day of a little boy that were alternately fortunate and unfortunate.

I am no economic whiz, and am not sure what the following news items really portend for the state
of tech PR spending.  But they do sound relevant, so I thought I would share them:

Unfortunately...

Headline from the New York Times:  Gadgetry Takes a Hit as Nervous Consumers Plan for Lean Holidays

Sounds bad for those of us doing PR in the CE sector.

Fortunately...

Profits are apparently on the rise at Intel.  Intel is supposed to be a bellwether of the tech sector.  Its health and pipeline of business mean good things for other companies in enterprise tech, and hence enterprise tech PR.

Unfortunately...

NY Times Headline:  Profits Rise, but Intel Chief Offers a Gloomy Outlook

Fortunately...

According to this story in the WSJ - IT Spending Seen Decelerating - (sounds like an "unfortunately" doesn't it?):

While spending on information technology is being curtailed by global financial turmoil, the IT industry won't see the dramatic reductions that accompanied the dot-com bust, research firm Gartner Inc. predicted.

Yippee!  Let's party like it's 1999.

Unfortunately...

The WSJ also had a story with this headline today:  Marketers Cut Back on Digital Media

This does not sound good for those of us focusing on social media, an area that many have considered to be a hot spot for growth.

Go figure.

Hail to Election Season

I don't do political PR, and this blog only dabbles in politics, yet as a PR person I must say I love campaign season.

Particularly when it comes to something as prominent as a presidential election, there is no better time to study communications strategies with the goal of learning about what works well and what doesn't. 

You can learn a lot about candidates by watching how they react to world events of the day, and by considering how they talk about their policies, campaign themes and how they communicate news and milestones.

On a second level, assuming you are behind the candidate, you want to be assured that he or she is savvy in terms of communicating and harnessing all available communications channels, as this will come in handy in governing and carrying out policies should the person win the election. (of course, the opposite applies too; as we have seen, sophisticated communications gambits can also be used to advance  ill-conceived policies  - see my post Stepford Wonks).

Finally, from a purely technical viewpoint - regardless of how you feel about the candidates and their policies - election season offers a good opportunity to watch a race and see how the candidates' moves effect media coverage and the polls - and to deconstruct all this so that you can learn and apply these lessons to your field of PR.

The media often helps by conveniently breaking things down, as much coverage these days focuses on tactics and the race rather than the so-called substance  (we can debate over whether this is a good or bad thing, but let's face it, it is a reality).

For example, just today the Washington Post had a great article about the Obama campaign's extensive use of online and mobile communications channels - see Obama's Wide Web.  And, just a few days ago, the NY Times covered the ups and downs of responding to smears on the campaign trail in the article How to Erase that Smea..., offering a lesson in reputation management.

Interesting Links

Getting behind in my blogging and reading, will have to do something about that!

So forgive the fact that I am referencing links that are not quite hot off the press.  They are still great links, and I am sure you will enjoy them if you haven't seen these pieces already. 

These, among other links, have been sitting in my Firefox browser for the past few weeks (a neat trick, you can set up Firefox to "remember" which sessions you had open in tabs when you close, so that they get instantly called up again the next time you start the browser - neat, except that it is a recipe for procrastination).  While we are on the subject, everyone who uses Firefox should upgrade to 3.0, it rocks.

Anyone who reads Flack's Revenge should know that poor PR writing is one of my pet peeves.   That is why the following caught my attention:

From the Riffs, Tiffs and What ifs Blog:  It's Complex to Write Simple These Days--but Hemingway's Rules of Writing can Still Work

This post opens with the perennial question: "Why Can't new PR and Marketing People Write?"

Steve Kayser writes about writing in the context of Hemingway's recommendations, and includes these tips amongst others:

1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short first paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English.
4. Be positive, not negative

A great read, and some excellent tips.

In the post I am not cut out for PR from the Getting Ink blog, Sally Whittle tells about her experiences as journalist-turned copywriter/PR person, and discusses (amongst other things) the rudeness she encountered from journalists in the process.

Not that we want or invite gratuitous trashing of journos, but it is becoming so commonplace to air peeves about PR people these days, it is nice to hear another perspective from someone who has experience on both sides.