22 December 2008

the weather outside is frightful

seriously, it's REALLY cold.

I'm going to step away from the blog for a while but I will return in 2009. If you haven't yet, I hope you'll resolve to teach a child to read in 2009 and take the pledge at the Hooked on Phonics website. (They're a client and they're really nice people.) They will donate a learn-to-read system to First Book, a cool non-profit that has given more than 60 million new books to at-risk kids since 1992.

Best wishes to all for a joyous holiday, and a peaceful and prosperous new year.

18 December 2008

Using Twitter to Overcome Media Bias

Egad, another post about Twitter.

Well, not really. This is really an example of how informed and active people use social media channels to address perceived inaccuracies.

Everyone in the communications business should take a look at Tim "Ecopolitologist" Hurst's piece over at Red Green and Blue:
On Tuesday afternoon, as I was working on another piece about president-elect Barack Obama tapping Colorado Senator Ken Salazar for Interior Secretary—this time about how Salazar’s appointment to Interior won’t leave his successor much time to win over Colorado voters—I heard Jeff Brady report on National Public Radio that environmentalists were fuming over the Salazar appointment.
Except that they weren't. And Tim knew it.

Tim was kind enough to let me interview him a while back. He's a green wonk and one of the first places I go for environmental policy news and information. Tim wrote up a blog post analyzing the announcement and here's some of what he had to say:
Salazar’s knowledge and experience with public lands and water policy stretch back to his thirty years as a farmer and the eleven he spent practicing environmental and water law in a private practice... Salazar’s support for clean energy has also been well established. Renewable energy advocates are well aware of Salazar’s work to help pass extensions of the renewable energy production and investment tax credits; as well as his his leadership in getting the small-wind tax credit passed and signed into law.
An intellectually honest assessment of environmentalists' reaction to President-elect Obama's selection of Senator Ken Salazar to be Interior Secretary would conclude it has been largely if not completely positive. But according to Tim, that's not what NPR would have you believe.

One of the biggest myths in politics is "the media has a liberal bias." It doesn't. The media doesn't have a conservative bias either. The media has a negative bias. It likes to push controversy. Conflict makes a good story. Very few people will be fascinated by headlines that read "Fire Exinguished Promptly, Limited Damage." Instead, I'd expect a headline more like "Questions Raised About Fire's Cause" or something like that - inventing or hyping controversy where there really isn't much.

In this situation a group of environmentalists signed on to a letter supporting someone else for the position - but this doesn't mean those environmentalists would be opposed to anyone else.

So one of the first things Tim did was hit the social networks like Twitter to find what leaders in environmentalism were saying about the selection. Within minutes he had environmental leaders pinging him back. Tim also collected the statements of leading mainstream environmental groups on the selection and noticed they were all positive. So I found it interesting that Tim had this to say:
Now, I follow @NPRPolitics on Twitter and I know they follow me back, but I really don’t know if they caught any of this exchange, but the next time I heard Brady’s report on NPR, he said something like “many environmentalists are fuming,” and the third time I heard the report it was something along the lines of “some environmentalists are fuming.”
No clue if NPR actually hedged its report based on Tim's quick and thorough work. But the social channel proves, once again, that the media isn't lecturing us anymore.

15 December 2008

Note to Self: Never Promote Arm Girdles to Feminists.

So late last week I and a couple of my colleagues in the social media world got an email from a prominent blogger - she was forwarding a series of emails from a PR pro pitching a new product.

If you read this blogger for even a week, you know immediately that this blogger is progressive in her thinking, clearly a feminist, and the mother of young daughters.

The PR pitch's opening-line grabber - "What might you have in common with Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy?"

I may be a guy, but I can tell you I'd love to have a lot in common with these two people -brains, ambition, a strong work ethic, charisma and a commitment to helping people. Those people would certainly appeal to a progressive, feminist mom. It turns out, however, that this wasn't exactly what the pitch was going for:



That's right, jiggly arms. Someone is pitching arm girdles to feminist moms, just in time for the holidays. I'm not linking to the company because I don't want to drive their traffic, but you can see the company name above.

This pitch is utterly crap-tacular on multiple levels. I think I should probably leave it to Joanne "PunditMom" Bamberger, who also received the pitch (she wasn't the one who forwarded it to me), to explain the sort of message this sends to young girls. And kudos to Susan Getgood (who got the forwarded email along with me) for breaking down the ethical shortcuts taken here, like invoking celebrity names and pictures even though they haven't endorsed the product. When Susan calls you a scumbag, believe me, you've earned it. I took a look at the picture of Caroline Kennedy (she looks pretty damn good in this picture if you ask me) and noticed that they lifted the picture from a story about her butterfly tatoo, not her non-existent arm flab, from the Huffington Post.

My beef with the pitch is it assumes social media is simply "online media relations" where you blanket the world with your pitch. Maybe there are people who think this product is a good idea. But it's clear that had this PR pro done even a little bit of vetting, if this person took even a few minutes to understand the community involved, the flack would know this was a huge mistake.

But it gets worse. The blogger who passed this on to me also sent me her response to the PR pro who pitched her, and that PR person's response back.

The flack basically said that nobody was questioning the accomplishments of Caroline Kennedy or Oprah Winfrey, but the product was still important - and hey, Oprah's friend said last week that Oprah was worried about her weight. Further, in another show of disrespect to the blogger, the flack also mentioned a couple of other placements the company scored - the Rachael Ray show and the NY Post.

Seriously.

This flack is not suggesting Caroline Kennedy or Oprah Winfrey are insecure or insignificant - just that they should wear arm girdles. And maybe you should too - if you read the NY Post, you might know that.

Happy holidays.

11 December 2008

Best Blog EVAH - Health Disparities Blog at Case Western Reserve University

I found David Porter on Twitter one day and noticed he made a lot of comments about health disparities - something my wife studies in earnest. Turns out he's a Research Project Associate and webmaster for Case Western Reserve University's Case Center for Reducing Health Disparities.

And he puts together an impressive blog.

It's not overwhelming or too shiny; it doesn't suck up bandwidth by throwing a bunch of widgets or huge graphics on the page. It does use some of the basic social media tools that you'd look for in a blog - a really strong delicious links page (you'll notice the blog depends rather heavily on it), some aggregator tools, an RSS feed. You can find some multimedia content (podcasts) in the sidebar and a small but adequate blogroll.

The best thing about this blog is the technology doesn't get in the way of the content. This is a strong example of social media supporting a positioning strategy - it collects some of the best thinking on health disparities and presents it in an accessible way, placing it under the "brand" of Case Western Reserve University. CWRU doesn't necessarily have the reputation of an Ivy League school or a huge land grant school, but tools like this help establish its credibility in a very important - and arguably undervalued - niche. I now know one of the best places to go for information about health disparities is Case Western Reserve University, and journalists looking for a source or notable quotable can go there as well.

My wife mentioned she'd like to see more there on rural health disparities, and I'm hopeful that can be remedied...

David's Green Picks of the Week

Yeah, I like this - it helps me fulfill my dream of someday becoming a full-fledged green blogger.

Officials vow air near schools will be tested for toxics, USA Today. I ranted earlier this week about how corporate journalism is dying out, so I thought it was important to provide an example of mainstream media doing a great job. It turns out the government hasn't checked air quality near schools, so USA Today went ahead and did it themselves. USA Today deserves HUGE kudos for their work here, doing the hard work of investigative reporting on an issue that should be important to all of us, and it's clear they've achieved some results. Check out the entire special report here.

Company hires prison inmates to build solar modules, Clean Technica. Well, I suppose that's one way to reduce the cost of building solar energy facilities.

Green spending on the rise
, Monolog. I hadn't seen this blog before - from an Italian private investor. Found the link in the Friend Feed environment room. The post cites a study from Panel Intelligence, a Cambridge, MA-based market research firm, that suggests (at least to me) green investments may be a significant path to investing our way out of recession. And it's a sure sign that green business is NOT a fad. I think the study is available at the side as a pdf.

Old coal mines adapted to generate geothermal energy, Inhabitat. There's been a lot about coal in the media lately, both pro and con, but I thought this seemed like a nice twist on things. It's by no means a large-scale solution - the facility powers 350 homes and businesses - but again it's the kind of innovative thinking we need to see on a much larger scale.

09 December 2008

Creative Destruction in the Media

Word of the Tribune Company bankruptcy moved fast through my social network, though most weren't surprised by it. I also heard McClatchy was trying to sell off the Miami Herald and closing some regional bureaus.

The other piece of news that moved almost as quickly was that online-only publications were now eligible for the Pulitzer Prize.

Combine that with an ever-increasing number of times that corporate media gets scooped by people using Twitter and I think you're seeing more each day how the people who stick to the old model of delivering news are dying out.

Today we call it "disruptive technology," which I guess sounds a bit better than the term Josef Schumpeter popularized, "creative destruction." While consumers will have many more options to get their news and information, we are definitely going to see fewer newspapers in the near future.

To me the whole thing is more than a bit Darwinian. The Tribune Company would certainly have lasted longer in a better economy. But the simple truth is the corporate media won't survive for long under its current business model.

Corporate media isn't failing simply because there are more choices - they're failing because those choices are competing effectively in terms of accuracy, speed and quality. The journalists who continually rail against social media users with the "they're not journalists" cry and the talk about ethics and standards need to look at how the public views journalists these days. Not the worst, but definitely not the best, and negative attitudes toward journalists have inched up over the last couple of years.

The bottom line: while journalists work relentlessly to be accurate, they make mistakes like the rest of us. There is still plenty of "advocacy journalism" where bias rules or where facts are taken out of context. And as a PR guy who has done his share of crisis communications work, I've found that many journalists don't like it much when the spotlight is shined back on them.

I'm not sure some in the media realize how much trust they surrendered when they failed to be a true check on power in the buildup to the war in Iraq. And I'm not sure they realize how much more trust they surrender when they present "news" in pre-packaged ideological niche formats like the shows you see on Fox and MSNBC. They prompt people to search out information for themselves.

That may be great for consumers; it's not so nice if you're running, say, the Trib.

08 December 2008

Sigh.

Earlier this year I wrote a rant about how the Commonwealth of Kentucky was cutting education funding for the second time in a few months to cover a budget shortfall - and higher education leaders were actually applauding the move as an act of political courage by the legislature.

Now we're looking at yet another cut in education, which the State Education Commissioner calls "devastating."

Once again, Kentucky's answer to an economic downturn is to make its future workforce less able to hold the high-skill, high-wage jobs the state needs to build its way out.

Waiter? Check, please.

05 December 2008

David's Green Picks of the Week

Consider this my homage to Preston Koerner at Jetson Green. (He's cool.)

Since energy and environment issues have always been an interest of mine, and since my work has increasingly focused on sustainability issues, I'm trying out a new feature for this blog - just a few links to the blog posts that catch my eye on the topic. I might introduce some commentary as well.

New Energy Find: Osmotic Energy
from Maria Energia. I've been a fan of this blog for a while because Maria Surma Manka is smart, assertive and upbeat. This is a cool techie idea - don't know if it will ever get to the point where it makes power inexpensively but it represents the kind of thinking we need.

Hot Question: How Big Should Solar Get?
from WSJ Environmental Capital. Hot Answer: much, much bigger. We're not close to meeting our potential. I agree that you have to be mindful of the footprint, but I also think innovation in solar cells will help us draw more power from less space. More efficient solar cells can be used on factory rooftops, utilizing the "barren space" mentioned in this piece.

Nuclear, Wind, Coal, Gas and Oil Footprints from NEI Nuclear Notes. I found this link in the WSJ post above. A rather illustrative piece, demonstrating some of the important issues we don't often discuss when considering the diverse energy portfolio. I must acknowledge that the footprints for solar and wind energy currently represent a sort of "inconvenient truth" for advocates of each, but the good news is we haven't come close to maximizing the efficiency in those technologies. Investment is a good thing.

The Public Wants Wind and Solar Even Though Initial Costs are Higher
from Environmental Law Prof Blog. I think Susan Smith may have just cut and paste the report from WPO, but I still found it interesting. I would have liked to have seen some commentary from her.

04 December 2008

Speech Clouds: Clinton vs. Palin

Senator Clinton and Governor Palin continue to dominate headlines, but nothing can really match the attention focused on them during the campaign. I think you see two very different clouds from two very different speeches from two very different people with very different priorities. Again from the "best speeches" post I wrote, here's a comparison of Senator Clinton's "concession" speech and endorsement of Presdient-elect Obama and Governor Palin's speech at the RNC, again, in text cloud form. Props again to Wordle.

03 December 2008

Speech Clouds: Race vs. Religion

Yesterday I compared the Obama victory speech and the McCain concession speech. Today I thought it might be interesting to "cloud" the speech Obama gave in Philadelphia on race issues, and compare it to the speech Governor Romney made on freedom of religion. You'll recall each was part of my "Best Speeches of the 2008 Campaign" post. Obama's race speech cloud is first. Tomorrow I'll compare Senator Clinton's concession with Governor Palin's RNC speech.

02 December 2008

Speech Clouds

My wife and I were talking about word clouds and my wife thought it would be cool if you compared President-elect Obama's victory speech with Senator McCain's concession speech.

I haven't done much with clouds lately so it sounded like a cool idea... see if you can tell which is which. Thanks, Wordle - enjoy.

01 December 2008

Social Media at work in Mumbai and How the Corporate Media Still Doesn't Get It

The corporate media is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, even as it lobs not-so-subtle criticisms at it. They continue to try to integrate social media tools without truly embracing their purported applications. In short, they forget the "social" in social media.

I noticed that the Boston Globe was sharing information about statewide Thanksgiving Day high school football games via twitter, and the Lexington Herald-Leader was live-tweeting Black Friday at a variety of retail chain stores in town. I'm sure other publications were as well, and this is kinda cute, but it's still mainly the one-way communication the mainstream media prefers to employ. They see twitter basically as an RSS feed, hoping to drive traffic to other sites. They remain largely uninterested in a conversation unless it's on their terms.

I was actually impressed with CNN's online coverage of the attacks in Mumbai, but basically because they just cut live to their Indian English-language "sister station," IBN. I still went first to BBC and Global Voices Online, which quickly set up a special coverage page.

Then I noticed a curious piece on CNN's website called "Tweeting the Terror." The Mumbai violence certainly wasn't the first time an emergency was broadcast by several people at once on Twitter, but it is the first time I've seen the suggestion that people shouldn't tweet and the oft-used "they're not journalists" screed from a dying media that keeps getting scooped:

However, as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.

For example, a rumor that the Indian government was asking tweeters to stop live updates to avoid compromising its security efforts was published and republished on the site.

This was seemingly given credence by at least one major news Web site, which posted the tweet on its live update.

It read simply: "Indian government asks for live Twitter updates from Mumbai to cease immediately. ALL LIVE UPDATES - PLEASE STOP TWEETING."

Then it was suggested via Twitter that terrorists were using the medium to gain information about what Indian security forces were doing, which led to numerous abusive postings urging the terrorists to "die, die, die, if you're reading this."

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, "I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

"During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured - ranging up to 1,000."

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

Actually, in my opinon it's not clear that Twitter is any less reliable than many if not most mainstream media sources. I counted several bits of information from mainstream channels during the crisis in Mumbai that turned out to be inaccurate. I also know that I learned - quite correctly - about a number of breaking stories via Twitter.

This tool has taken away one of corporate media's most important assets - the ability to report "breaking news" first - and they're having serious difficulties grappling with this. It's just the latest innovation that shows how corporate media will have to redesign their business model sooner rather than later.