my 2 cents

Rules of Thumb

A book review...

A few months ago, Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company Magazine, sent a copy of his new book "Rules of Thumb."  Since I read and enjoy the magazine, I agreed to give Webber's book a try.

I finally got around to reading it on a recent business trip and then on the beach on vacation.  It's an easy read.  Alan is a good storyteller.  Stories, well-told, insightful and thought-provoking, are what fills this book and make it enjoyable.

Sub-titled "52 Truths for Winning in Business Without Losing Yourself," the book is collection of brief stories and anecdotes that illustrate 52 rules -- one for each week of the year.  Webber says he spent several years jotting down insights and "rules" on index cards and finally culled them down to 52.

.............................................................................
        A random sampling of the 52 Rules:
            Rule #13: Learn to take "no" as a question.
            Rule #22: Learn to see the world through the eyes of your customer.
            Rule #23: Keep two lists -- What keeps you up at night, and what gets you up in
                            the morning?
            Rule #32: Content isn't king.  Context is king.
            Rule #36: Managing your emotional flow is more important than managing your
                            cashflow.
            Rule #51: Take your work seruiously. Yourself, not so much.
............................................................................           
 
What I like about this book is that it's not a "win at any cost" type of text.  It doesn't present hard & fast things you must do in order to succeed.  Instead, it's a delightful and interesting group of stories that illustrate Webber's points.  It includes real-life examples of how kindness, consideration and empathy, combined with the more traditional "success" attributes like persistance, motivation, innovation, etc. can make you a good manager, leader and a success in business.

What's key, Webber shows, is how important it is to stay true to yourself and your core values.  It's not necessarily about having the most money or the biggest company.  It's more about making a living, yes, but also meeting challenges, attaining goals and, along the way, having fun and doing good.

I won't go into details of the 52 rules here, since I won't do them justice in a few sentences.  I'll just say, it's worth a read.  You'll see for yourself.

"Rules of Thumb" by Alan M. Webber
2009, Harper Collins.  $24.99 US  ($16.49 on Amazon)

I thought so...

When Twitter seemed to explode on the scene a year ago, I took a look, just to see what all the hype was about.  After a few days, I thought to myself, "Either it's a wasteland of inane chatter, or maybe I just don't get it."

A few months later, after seeing several of my blogging friends spending less time blogging and more time on Twitter, I figured I ought to give it another try.  Some bloggers who I follow and respect were all but calling Twitter the next best thing since sliced bread... or since, well, blogging.

I started following a bunch of people,including some journalists I know or would like to know.  I installed Tweetdeck on my computers.  I updated my Twitter profile.  I was ready to go.

What happened?  Even more inane chatter, except now from even more sources.  Some of the journalists I decided to follow, hoping to perhaps get insight into stories they're working on or info they'd like to receive from a p.r. person, seemed to be writing more about what bar or restaurant they're at or what they had for dessert.  And some of my blogger friends, who write with insight about marketing and social media issues, are tweeting about movies they saw or providing a running dialogue (or monologue) on what they're watching on TV. at the moment.

Enough!  Please.

I'm not saying Twitter is bad or a waste.  It doesn't do much for me, personally or businesswise...at least at the moment.  I still check Twitter a couple of times a day.  Tweets have pointed me to some interesting posts and articles.  But I have to wade through so much chatter to find the good stuff.  There's just not enough time.  I complained about it to one friend, who simply told me to unfollow them if I didn't like the chatter.

A study ,mentioned in this week's Mediaweek, said 58% of Twitter account holders rarely or never send or receive tweets.  Twenty percent do several times a month; 11 percent several times a week, seven percent every day or nearly every day, and only two percent are doing it several times a day.  Those are the people with thousands of tweets logged and often thousands of followers. That two percent may be the ones jamming Tweetdom with so much clutter.

So I feel a bit redeemed when I read results of a study that found more than 40% of Twitter tweets are "babble." (Not my word. That's how it was reported online by BBC News.)

Market research firm Pear Analytics looked at the Twitter stream every 30 minutes for six hours a day over the course of a week.  They took 2,000 messages at random and categorized them into six groups:

      News

      Spam

      Self-promotion

      Pointless babble

      Conversational

      Messages having pass-along value

Pointless babble took first place, accounting for 40.5% of the messages analyzed.  Conversational accounted for 37.5%.  Those with pass-along value were 8.7%.  Self-promotion and spam were 5.9 and 3.8 percent respectively.

Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, was quoted saying, "It will be interesting to see if Twitter takes a heavier role in news, or (will it) continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else."

I hope it will change over time. More marketers are experimenting with Twitter, and I know there are some serious and helpful dialogues going on.  It just seems, now at least, that they're few and far between.

In the meanwhile, I'll keep trying.  And I'll probably keep complaining, too.  So bear with me, you heavy tweeters.

Where's the sense?

Gannett this week told some 270 of its newsroom and ad sales employees at The Journal News, its daily serving New York's northern suburbs in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties, that their jobs were being eliminated and they'd have to apply for new jobs. 

When staffers went to seek their old jobs back, they found different job descriptions not always matching what they'd been doing up to this point.  They had till today to apply for their "new" jobs.

In the process, about 70 jobs will be cut -- 20+ in ad sales and about 50 in the newsroom.

Two things bother me about this process...

First, what kind of way is this to treat loyal employees?  Certainly, there's no easy way to lay people off.  But to put them through a game where they have to, on paper, reinvent themselves.  It's just not fair and it's not right.

I would, instead, suggest management hold a series of meetings before the announcement and explain what they are looking for in their employees and how it differs from what's been expected of them up to this point.  The changes in the news business are impacting everyone in newsrooms.  Management can't put out a decent paper without reporters and editors, unless it's going to be all pickup from the wire services.  So instead of playing this terrible game, why not work with your employees to help them adapt to what you need from them in this new news marketplace.  Reporting and writing stories  -- yes.  Writing and frequently updating blogs and online content -- yes.  But management should help them figure out how they're going to do it.  It should be a team effort.

Second... The Journal News has long positioned itself as THE local news source for the northern suburbs.  But back some 20 or so years ago, when Gannett bought what was then the Macy Westchester chain, it was several truly local papers that each had news bureaus in the cities they covered, with reporters dedicated to covering school, civic and police and other LOCAL news.  The papers shared common lifestyle, business and sports sections, as well as common national and world news pages.  But the local pages really were local.  And people bought the papers.

Gradually, once Gannett took over, "local" faded.  Local bureaus were combined and eventually shuttered, with everything pretty much coming out of the White Plains headquarters. Ultimately, the 7 or 8 local papers were merged into one masthead -- The Journal News.  Regional editions are printed, but there is pitifully little truly local coverage.

I wonder how the paper plans to maintain what local coverage it now has after it has dropped more than 20 reporters.  Local reporters I've spoken with at the paper all tell me how pressed they've been to cover local news.  A reporter who covers schools, for instance, has been covering five districts himself -- trying to attend school board meetings in 4 or 5 towns, trying to keep in touch with school superintendents, PTA and other civic leaders in 5 districts -- some with 9,000 or 10,000 students each.  It just can't be done - certainly not well.  Many important stories have been missed, which shortchanges -- or even hurts -- the local readers.

So where is the sense in cutting staff that will have to lead to less local news coverage?  If readers in Westchester want world, national and regional news, they have one of the best papers in the nation readily available -- The New York Times.  With less local coverage, Gannett will eventually have fewer readers...leading to less local advertising.

Does this make sense to you?  It certainly doesn't to me.

Journalism...Information vs. stories

Joe Mandese, editor of MediaPost, has been covering advertising, marketing and media for at least 20 years -- maybe more.  I've known Joe since his days at Advertising Age.

Joe has a great opinion piece up at MediaPost that takes a look at how the changes in the media are impacting journalism.

Joe writes:
One of the casualties of the shifts taking place in the media economy may be the kind of journalism that has transformed and influenced Western Civilization for the past century or so.  Big journalism organizations that depended upon an abundant and free-flowing print and TV advertising marketplace appears to be collapsing, or at the very least, trading 'analog dollars for digital pennies.'  They are the organizations that...have been referred to as the Fourth Estate - the one that was necessary to counterbalance the religious, industrial and government estates that would otherwise rule a corrupt and unlighted world.

Joe recalls the journalistic ideals of the Watergate era that drew him to journalism, and reminds of how those ideals have been tarnished over the past 30 years by faulty reporting, careless editing and outright plagiarism that's hit institutions as mighty and revered as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Trib in Chicago.

Changes like the 24-hour news cycle, thanks first, to CNN and then news online, coupled with recession-forced cutbacks in the newsroom, and you see a formula for journalistic disaster.  Pressure to get information out immediately, without the extra set of editors' eyes has hurt the reliability of even the best news organizations.

Joe talks about the onslaught of so-called citizen journalists who, thanks to the internet, have instant and widespread platforms.  Bloggers, Twitterers... more often than not, people with no journalistic training and often without much writing ability, are becoming primary sources of news and information. 

He ends his piece by saying, "Don't get me wrong, I believe that professional journalism is important and does make a difference.  But I also believe that new communication and publishing technologies are also enabling people to make their own difference.  I just hope we can co-exist."

Joe, I think you may be too humble by downplaying the importance of professional journalism.  While pros and citizen journalists will have to co-exist, we can't afford to let new media and new technologies push the real journalists aside.  While the pros aren't perfect and make mistakes and sometimes let their personal bias slip in, they generally keep our view of news honest and accurate.

Bloggers (and I'm one, obviously) and Twitterers are hit or miss when it comes to accuracy, integrity and honesty.  Look at the sellouts among the Mommybloggers who've brought down the wrath and controlling rulings of the Federal Trade Commission. I don't think we can afford to rely on "hit or miss" sources of important news and information, Joe Mandese's modesty aside.

Good journalists know how to gather information, filter out what's wrong or slanted or just plain fluff, and give it to us in a logical way so we can understand it.  Part of good journalism is telling a story.

Vin Crosbie, an adjunct professor at The Newhouse School at Syracuse University, writing on ClickZ today, has a disturbing piece he calls "Death of the Story."  He says "the foundation for any news organization in this millenium should be live, interactive databases of utilitarian information."  Provide the raw information first, before the story about it, he says.

He quotes the editor of the BBC's journalism training publication, who writes:

"The web is enabling our former audiences to come to their news in their ways at their times.  Our old image of gripping them with our stories is no more.

The story is dead."
 
What a horrible thought!  From our earliest years, we take in information and learn things that are told to us as stories.  It's been proven that it's easier to remember things if they are part of a story, rather than simple random bits of information.  How boring if no stories.

News is a series of events, often linked together as part of bigger and more interesting or meaningful stories. (Information:  Two U.S. soldiers were killed today in Afghanistan.  Story:  Two U.S. soldiers were killed today when they were caught in an attack by Taliban forces.  The soldiers were part of a patrol searching for.... etc.)

I think we still need real journalists to get the information, sift through it for us and put it into a form that we can easily look at, with the most important details at the top and the smaller or background stuff farther down.  Most of us don't have time to do our own reporting or our own sifting through all the information.  It's good to know the details are there, somewhere online, if we want or need them.  But I still want the pros to go through it and weed out the needless or useless stuff. 

Otherwise, it would be like trying to sort out real information from all the waste on Twitter. 

Hey Joe, I know you don't Twitter.  But please keep working as a journalist so I don't have to go there.

The magic demos

We all know how advertisers seem to crave the magic demographics -- people between the ages of 18 - 49.  That's what's most sought after by TV advertisers.  That's what the networks tout to marketers -- how many people in the 18-49 age category they reach.  The rest of us are just "bonus" viewers.

Maybe that made sense 20 - 30 years ago, but as so many of the boomers have moved well past the top edge of the magic demos, we're still spending money (current recession notwihstanding).  College has been paid for, the kids have moved out and are (hopefully) self-sufficient.  Except for those who were raped by Madoff, we've put money away for retirement.  So now, we spend chunks of our income on ourselves -- new furniture to replace the tired stuff that the kids wrecked over the years, nice vacations for just the two of us, maybe a new car that's selfishly indulgent, like a sports car or convertible rather than a family-friendly SUV or station wagon. 

The boomers have money to spend and we're spending it.  And yes, we buy Coke and shop at WalMart.  Ok, maybe we don't frequent McDonald's or The Gap, but we're out there shopping.

Craig Ferguson, host of CBS' Late Late Show following David Letterman, has, in my opinion, the best monologues of the late night crew.  His recent rant about advertising's magic demographics is hilarious, but it's also right on target.  He makes a lot of sense.

I'll let Ferguson speak for himself.  Click here...

Whad'ya think?

 

Is the P.R. business dying?

Over the past few months, I've seen several articles and blog posts proclaiming that the public relations business as we know it is obsolete and will whither away as social media become more prominent. About a month ago, a story in the Ragan p.r. newsletter opened with this statement:

Social media is redefining the way pros pitch stories and the field itself has an obvious choice: evolve or expire.

Will the public relations business die?  No.  In fact, there's more need for our services than ever.  We're not going anywhere -- we'll evolve, as we've done over the years when media themselves have evolved. 

Most experts agree that the field is at a crossroads, thanks to the immediacy of the internet, social media and email.  In many cases, mass pitches and mass, untargeted news release distribution no longer have the impact they did 20 years ago.  But many of the changes are not merely due to the rise of social media.  Much of the change has stemmed from the need to better allocate precious company resources, thus forcing p.r. people and those to whom they report to be more strategic and more targeted in their efforts.  It's simply smart business.

Way before social media, the public relations profession was being pushed -- internally and externally -- to perform the way other corporate functions have been doing for ages -- plans, with strategy, tactics, measurement, evaluation.  The days of "I don't care what the press says about me, as long as they something" are long gone, with perhaps only a few exceptions.

It seems that some of the predictors of doom might have a financial stake in seeing the p.r. industry change.  The CEO of SYS-CON Media, for instance, is quoted in the Ragan newsletter article, saying "70 percent of today's traditional p.r. firms will not survive, while the remaining 30 percent will need to reinvent themselves."  I looked up SYS-CON and found they're part of something called Ulitzer.com, which provides content for sites.  I've seen similar gloomy forecasts from companies that disseminate news releases supposedly customized for pickup in social media.

The bottom line is this:  Of course the public relations industry must change.  It's always changing.  When TV came on the scene, news releases were adapted for that medium, in the form of sponsored B-roll and video news releases (VNRs), pre-packaged news stories ready-to-use.  Many of us are using social media, as part of our own marketing efforts and also to reach out directly to media and the general public.  Many of the larger p.r. agencies have added social media "experts" to focus on that arena.  Others have formed alliances with people who have social media experience.  But we're not just sending out the old news releases as usual -- not all of us, anyway.

I've written here before about how p.r. people should be reaching out to bloggers and other new media journalists.  My position is: social media is still media.  The same basic rules for dealing with social media apply -- know your target and what they write about, pitch honestly and openly (and succinctly), don't pester with daily follow-up calls or emails, and provide information that's useful in a way they can use it.  For social media writers, that may include links.

But there's really no mystery to it.  A lot of it is just common sense.  Try to put yourself into the head of the person you're pitching and think -- what information would I want and how would I want to get it?  That same idea should apply whether you're going after a newspaper reporter, TV producer or a widely-followed blogger.

Blogger Brian Solis, quoted in the Ragan article, says, "As long as communications professionals want to learn and improve their craft, then we are poised for evolution."

Much of the discussion seems to be about press releases.  While many are proclaiming press releases dead, they still do have a function.  I think they will continue to be one of the tools p.r. people use, although they won't be as frequently mass-distributed.  But they will continue to provide key information and background about companies, products, services and issues from the point of view of the organizations providing those products and services or supporting those issues.  Bloggers and others communicating via social media will still look to them for information and will pick out bits and pieces of information they can use.

If anything, I'd say the future for the public relations industry is bright.  With more media of all forms providing information to the public, there will be greater need for professionals to help formulate the messages, navigate the crowded waters and find ways to get those messages out there.  And as reaction to events and issues becomes virtually instantaneous thanks to social media, there will be more need for experts to develop strategies and plans to manage issues and quickly hook into the stream of news and public reaction as it flows.

That's where experts come in -- those trained and experienced in understanding information and knowing how to communicate and respond in words people can understand.  That's the role the public relations industry can and should be filling as our world of media and information changes so quickly.

The public relations industry dying?  Hardly! 

 

Update 8/4/09   Today's New York Times reports on the Communications Industry Forecast by equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, predicting the p.r. industry will grow by 9.2 percent between 2008 through 2013.