October 2008 Archive

You’ve probably seen this already, but the Christian Science Monitor will start dropping its printed version starting next year:

"In 2009, the Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily print edition with its website; the 100 year-old news organization will also offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions."

As Editor John Yemma says in a video accompanying the article, "The print model of journalism is broken." While Gutenburg may be rolling in his grave, the Monitor will try to hang on to their print audience on weekends, while switching the rest of the paper over to daily emails and online news only.

Is this a harbinger for the downfall of print media as we know it?

Monitor Managing Publisher Jonathan Wells, doesn’t think it’s time to entirely abandon print products. If anything, I think this gravitation to more of an online journalism will have to be watched closely to make sure the same quality of reporting is maintained. It seems that this move will shift coverage more to a portal model, and hopefully that doesn’t diminish opportunities for companies to get their messages out there effectively and usefully.

Readers, do any of you believe that print journalism will still exist in ten years?

**UPDATE 1 (10/30)**

NYT: Mourning Old Media’s Decline

Great quote and article from David Carr: "Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it." Click through for over 200 comments.

"Left brain…let’s see now, that’s the creative, quirky part of the brain where dreams come from, right," I asked when I was offered the opportunity to contribute to this blog.

A quick wiki search showed that no, no it’s not.

And as this blog’s logo clearly confirms, it’s the "dull, analytic, blah blah" part of the brain that only a robot would want to read about.

Looking at the analytics for this blog, our readers might as well be robots. The faceless "unique visitors" executing "pageviews" are just numbers without express opinions on our topics of choice, right?

Imagine my surprise this past weekend, when I found that several of my friends and family (who are not robots) independently mentioned that they read Left Brain. Their qualitative, sentient feedback encouraged me to explore what lies between what statistics say and what reality is.

What statistics say is one-sided. They do a good job at showing us quantitative properties (numbers), but a terrible job of qualitative ones (opinions).

For example, the top-ranked blog on Technorati is Huffington Post . But that only tells you that HuffPo has a lot of links to it, and that it’s focused on "breaking news and opinion." You may be tempted to send your client there based on its reach alone, but without taking a dive into the site, you won’t see the political motivation, post tone, and commenter vitriol commonly associated with the site.

This real life view of web statistics is imperative for formulating online corporate reputation strategies, and it’s something we work hard at conveying to Ruder Finn clients.

This is not true of everyone offering web advice out there. I’ve heard clients complain about other agencies sending them data-dump lists of every blog under the sun without a value-added proposal that goes beyond the stats.

This is hard to do. It requires at least one of the following:
- Painstaking research
- Longstanding relationships

These are valuable commodities in the web advice world, and can speak to how
businesses adopt new technology and new means of communication. Only a "deep dive" understanding of your field of interest will be able to drive digital decision making.

I think this might be why I’m drawn to human-powered services that go beyond statistics to assure me what I’m hearing makes sense.

For example:

- Hoovers provides editor-selected competitor lists for company descriptions
- Comments on New York Times stories can be highlighted by editors or readers

These gems of online human input are invaluable.

These and many other services remind us that the Internet is not just one big algorithm out to get us. The human element stands to gain online as people start to look beyond the statistics and crowdsourcing that now often dominate what we consume.

Are you a sentient being reading this blog? Make yourself known in the comments!

Do you use an RSS reader? No?

Fear not!

Last week, Left Brain explored what it takes for trends to go mainstream.

RSS is one of those trends.

For you new media novices, RSS is like a personalized, modern day magazine rack. A modern day paper boy. Here’s a great video that breaks it down very simply:

Facebookers will recognize RSS feeds as being similar to the News Feed feature on your homepage. It prevents you from having to visit every friend’s page every day in search of the latest gossip. In a similar way, RSS delivers all your news to one place, so you don’t have to go hunting all around for it.

A few years back, RSS was a mysterious technology, requiring special software and a knack for finding worthwhile subscriptions, most of which were very niche-focused. Now, the orange button is omnipresent online and makes simplified updates just a click away. According to recent Forrester reasearch on RSS, 11% of US adults online use RSS (and 12% don’t know if they do!). That means all you media addicts out there can stop visiting 100 websites every morning.

You don’t have to go to Gawker, Gawker will come to you.

Far and away the simplest RSS tool I’ve used is Google Reader. Its Outlook’y/Gmail’y feel is a safe harbor for many pros and novices alike. It allows you to share, save, and analyze your reading habits. It’ll even make recommendations of blogs you might find interesting based on your reading list.

Outlook also has a built in RSS reader, but I’ve found it cumbersome and slow.

Where does one find feeds? Almost anywhere. This blog has one listed to the right. Most news sites and blogs have them too:
- NYT
- WSJ
- FT
- Economist
- Gawker
- Mashable

For power users, you can go beyond the standard feeds, and set up personalized ones. Search Google News for your client, click on the RSS button, and have news piped straight to your reader live. Here’s one for Ruder Finn:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=ruder+finn&ie=UTF-8&nolr=1&output=rss

Looking for a $10-50 million apartment in Gramercy? Search for it on Craigslist, click the RSS feed generated at the bottom of the page, and get live updates:
http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/rea/mnh?query=&minAsk=10000000&maxAsk=50000000&bedrooms=&neighborhood=132&format=rss

This use of RSS greatly simplifies tracking corporate reputation as well, and allows for the lightning-quick response mechanisms needed to take full advantage of the online conversation.

Not only is syndication an important technology for collecting information, but it’s just as important for sending information out. As more outlets come available for content consumption, companies will need look to look a broader distribution channels to ensure that they engage all their target audiences. RSS should be a no-brainer add to any corporate website that is even occasionally updated.

What’s in your RSS reader?

**UPDATE 1**
For BlackBerry addicts, I would strongly recommend checking out a terrific little program called Viigo: http://getviigo.com/beta. Not only is it a RSS reader for your BlackBerry, it can also sync with Google Reader and others to make sure you get all your news wherever you are (unless you’re on vacation, hopefully).

**UPDATE 2**
Is RSS just too much for you, you Average Joe Sixpack you? Lucky for you, there are sites out there that do all the legwork for you. They’re called aggregators, and they typically feature news from the top websites you would include in your RSS reader anyway. My favorites include:

• Alltop (top news sites summarized by category)
• Mahalo (human-powered search and live news update)
• Daily Beast (Tina Brown’s new daily news summary featuring original content and content from the likes of NYT and New Yorker)
• CEO Daily (all the top-tier CEO news and video you could want)

These aggregators also typically offer a daily email summary, to save you a trip to the page.

HP’s news CMO Michael Mendenhall has recently been talking smart on digital networks and managing corporate reputation online. Very progressive talk, especially at an advertising conference. My favorite quote from the AdAge story:

"Who are the real journalists anymore? Deadlines are dead and cycles are 24/7," Mr. Mendenhall said. "You can’t afford a mistake or missed opportunities. Today’s gaffes become tomorrow’s attack ads."

And there’s a short video of Mendenhall on digital trends as well.

This should be very scary news for advertisers. The new digital paradigm means companies will decreasingly able to simply cram advertising down our throats, and will rather have to engage in authentic conversations with their audiences to move the needle on reputation. Corporations looking to manage their reputations will have to build reputations not with ad dollars alone, but through real engagement. That puts a lot of power in the consumer’s hands, and can leave corporations helpless.

Hopefully, this will lead to more transparency and truthfulness in the way we receive corporate messaging, lending to a more authentic means of communications. Of course, this would forecast many a sleepless night for CMOs who are accustomed to micro-managing their companies’ reputations.

Have you changed your opinion of a company based on Web 2.0 communications coming from corporate messengers or from rogue, "unstructured influencers?"

Left Brain often looks at emerging digital trends, but we should really be looking not just at the cutting edge, but also at what it takes for that edge to turn into a ledge, a platform, and a full blown mania. Tipping Point 2.0, if you will.

Most CEOs should already have the Gladwellian mavens working out what’s not just hip/trendy, but useful/profitable. These are very early adopters, who, as a library friend of mine pointed out, "often have to deal with bugs when a site is in beta. Essentially they’re helping test the software."

But these are "just" those who are "intense gatherers of information and impressions, and so are often the first to pick up on new or nascent trends." (via Wikipedia) How do they build large communities that can change the ways we communicate and do business?

As communicators, when can we say something has converted to mainstream, and is worthy of consideration as a corporate communications tool?

Digital trendsetters like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki are by no means mainstream, and as such, would be poor gauges for telling when something has come of mainstream legitimacy age.

Politicians, however, may be the new bellwethers of the "mainstreamlining" of digital trends. The last two elections have seen an explosion in the use of web-based communications tools, and subsequently Web 2.0 tools.

In 2004, we watched the meteoric rise of the Howard Dean campaign, being one of the first to be based largely online. We also saw it implode as his charisma failed to convert small-time online donors into voters. Maybe this was because he was too early of an adopter of digital trends.

Obama’s Web 2.0 campaign has relied heavily on Web 1.0 tools that have now gone mainstream (website, blog, online donations). It remains to be seen whether his campaign will be able to convert the polling numbers into reality.

Most businesses have adopted Web 1.0 tools like websites, blogs, and intranets, but it will be interesting to see which ones hop on the Web 2.0 bandwagon of social networks and microblogging and whatever the next big thing will bring.

A major factor driving this will be whether these networks are adopted by meaningful communities. On Yammer (billed as Twitter for enterprise), so far just me and my colleague Noah are on board for Ruder Finn. That will only be a useful network if others start using it. Without the audiences that businesses want to reach on Twitter, it will fail like so many lolcats captions.

A tech enthusiast friend of mine recently said:

"There are so many new things to explore in the Web 2.0 world that I like to wait until I see there is a solid following. Bugs do not bother me as much as a lack of a substantial community. The only time I’m an early adapter is when I think something is going to really going to change the way we do things on the web."

What technology have you adopted recently? Has a company ever communicated with you effectively online?

What kind of "digital trends blogger" posts on the presidential debates two whole days after they happen?

Well, me, for one. Despite the tons of tools out there for posting immediately after an event occurs, I’ve neglected getting this post up for two reasons:

• The debates were boring
• Information overload

I’ll start with information overload. This is a topic that this blog will cover in depth in the coming months, particularly as the presidential campaigns approach their peaks of glory (or shame).

It’s the paradox of the "information age" that has mostly been incredibly empowering. But some of us are starting to reach a near-maximum level of data absorption to the point where it could be just too much. Recently, my wife joined Facebook after stalwartishly holding out for years, only to delete her account after ten minutes of being barraged with friend requests and photo tags.

Corporations can react similarly to Web 2.0 and raw information. Rare is the executive who would want access to an unfettered stream of Internet opinions about themselves. Not only is there the problem of having unqualified opinions being given equal weight as experts and professional, it’s literally TMI. In the corporate eye, this deluge of information can be seen as irrelevant and overly time consuming.

This trend of increasing the sheer amount of information available online is what makes things like the presidential debates particularly painful to watch.

Despite some of the most dramatic economic news in history, the candidates managed to stay fairly boring. But news outlets and blogs still need to fill space, and can exacerbate how mundane our news can get. CSPAN’s "hyper-live" debate hub does a wonderful job of doing that.

The site features:

• Live video
• Live video parsing
• Live twitter feed
• Live blog feed
• Live transcript
• Live keywords

It’s actually quite a wonderful resource despite the lack of interestingness of its content.

So, to prove my mettle as a digital trends blogger writing from a business perspective, I’m using CSPAN’s tools to examine what little was said in Nashville that would be relevant this blog.

I expect a lot more from both McCain and Obama from Hofstra next week.

(Hey CSPAN, this blog didn’t like the iframes in the embed code…so we’re just sharing the links)

Video 1:
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/vidLink.php?b=1223430464&e=1223430581&n=2

This video features an interesting question from Tom Brokaw to John McCain on how alternative energy innovation should take place, invoking HP-like imagery of Silicon Valley bootstrappers. Unfortunately, the response devolves into finger-pointing on energy bills.

Here’s the transcript:

Brokaw: Should we fund a Manhattan-like project that develops a nuclear bomb to deal with global energy and alternative energy or should we fund 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?

McCain: I think pure research and development investment on the part of the United States government is certainly appropriate. I think once it gets into productive stages, that we ought to, obviously, turn it over to the private sector.

By the way, my friends, I know you grow a little weary with this back-and-forth. It was an energy bill on the floor of the Senate loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies, and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney.

You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one. You know who voted against it? Me. I have fought time after time against these pork barrel — these bills that come to the floor and they have all kinds of goodies and all kinds of things in them for everybody and they buy off the votes.

I vote against them, my friends. I vote against them. But the point is, also, on oil drilling, oil drilling offshore now is vital so that we can bridge the gap. We can bridge the gap between imported oil, which is a national security issue, as well as any other, and it will reduce the price of a barrel of oil, because when people know there’s a greater supply, then the cost of that will go down.

That’s fundamental economics. We’ve got to drill offshore, my friends, and we’ve got to do it now, and we can do it.

And as far as nuclear power is concerned, again, look at the record. Sen. Obama has approved storage and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.

And I’ll stop, Tom, and you didn’t even wave. Thanks.

Video 2:

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/vidLink.php?b=1223428120&e=1223428184&n=2

This video features a small clip that caught my ear during the debates. The question was on who McCain would appoint to Treasury Secretary. The answer seemed very odd:
Would have to be somebody who immediately Americans identify with, immediately say, we can trust that individual.

I like Meg Whitman [former CEO of eBay and current McCain campaign adviser], she knows what it’s like to be out there in the marketplace. She knows how to create jobs. Meg Whitman was CEO of a company that started with 12 people and is now 1.3 million people in America make their living off eBay. Maybe somebody here has done a little business with them.

Do you think an auction house CEO would make a good shepherd of the US economy?

Let’s hope the next debates shed more light on the candidates’ take on technology.

**UPDATE 1 (10/14)**

WIRED magaine’s take on Obama vs. McCain on tech issues including: Broadband, H1B issues, Investment in green tech, Net neutrality, Spectrum.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/obama-v-mccain.html

According to WIRED, McCain wins on visas, they tie on spectrum, and Obama wins the rest.

**UPDATE 2 (10/15)**

MIT Technology review on Barack Obama’s use of social networking:

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/2122

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Self-flacking goes against every PR bone in my body. But that hasn’t stopped me from blasting my friends with a link to this blog (leftbrain), feeding it to Twitter (@rfdarius), and putting it in my signature (nor did it stop my co-blogger Yan from self-promoting his recent MOVE! article).

If the whole point of PR is to get unbiased third parties to sing your praises, what good does it do to shill for yourself? You’ll always be biased towards yourself and thus less believable. This has been compounded by the advent of microblogging and Facebook statuses, where many people a have grossly expanded sense of self-importance, further diminishing their credibility and draw.

But Web 2.0 tools have also expanded the number of basic outlets for promoting oneself that could be considered acceptable and even necessary. Here’s a short, categorized list:

• Necessary: Sometimes you need to respond directly to your audiences, especially in times of crisis. Politicians and CEOs come to mind, although their self-promotion is often unnecessary and under quite shameful circumstances. As WIRED put it:"self-promotion is an art form. Do it poorly, and you risk coming across as a narcissistic boor. Do it well, and it can lead to the presidency."
• Acceptable: Often, your means (or necessary means for a - necessary means) will prevent you from being able to get the word out about something you’re doing via traditional channels. In this case, Web 2.0 has been incredibly empowering. For example, musicians have been given the ability to promote themselves for free through MySpace. Same goes for photographers on Flickr.
• Routine: Announcing your own presence via email and setting up feeds should be routine. Adding your blog to Technorati and asking for blogroll love from fellow bloggers are all things that should automatically be done when establishing an online presence.
• Less than Classy: This is self-promotion you have to pay for. It can be acceptable, but not entirely organic. Maybe something like those Sprint commercials where CEO Dan Hesse talks about the wireless revolution. While he’s not using PR to get his message out, he’s also (probably?) not getting paid to do that commercial.
• Shameless: And then there are the ones that can make you sick. Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Howard Stern, David Blaine, self-help book authors…they all promote themselves at the expense of others with questionable benefit or meaning
• Nefarious: Even worse than shameless. Self-promotion can be unethical and border on illegal. Remember when Sony got caught editing rival Wikis, or Fox, or when Edeleman’s fake Wal-Mart blog was exposed?

Where do PR and corporate blogs fit into this? Well, it depends on the blog. Some are very self-serving. Others are more engaging. In the end content is always king. And that’s where PR comes into play. The level of shamelessness will often depend on the tone and method of delivery. PR professionals spend their days working out those nuances (albeit sometimes unsuccessfully), and can find the appropriate channels for getting your messages out.

Who’s your favorite (or least favorite) self-promoter? Or your favorite elf promoter for that matter?