All you sucka sci blog networks better REALIZE you play for second place

Bora launched his blog network at Scientific American.  He took his time, did it right.

Don't get me wrong - I love the writing at Wired Science, ScienceBlogs.com, Discover, Scientopia, Guardian Science Blogs, Nature Network, PLoS Blogs, and so on - but Bora was really smart about this. He saw the growth in the niche, looked at what was working best, saw what could improve, and just plain NAILED IT:

Another thing I was particularly interested in was to find bloggers who in some way connect the “Two Cultures” as described by C.P.Snow. Some connect science to history, philosophy, sociology or ethics. Many are very interested in science education, communication and outreach. Some make connections between science and popular culture, music, art, illustration, photography, cartoons/comic strips, poetry, literature, books, movies, TV, video, etc. Several produce such cross-discipline and cross-cultural material themselves – at least two are musicians, two are professional photographers, several produce videos, two are professional artists, a couple are authors of multiple books, some produce their own blog illustrations. But there are also commonalities – they all have strong knowledge of their topic, they strictly adhere to the standards of scientific evidence, they are all very strong writers, and they are all enthusiastic to share their work with a broader audience. 

When I put together this group, with such diverse interests and styles, it was not surprising to discover that, without really having to try hard to make it so, they also display diversity in many other areas: geography, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, personal/professional/scientific background and more. This is something that is important for science, and is important in the science blogging world.

This is brilliant for two big reasons: first, diversity is a source of enormous strength in science and pretty much everything else.  It's the right thing to do.  Second because it makes science immediately relevant to people with diverse interests - music, art, history, pop-culture, sports, education, and so on - the network has the capacity to grow its readership much more than other science blog networks.

My initial reaction is that SciAm's emergence with a large, smart roster may thin the herd of networks a little bit. I notice some writers have left their networks to join SciAm's, and since there are only so many blog posts you can read in a day, readers will go for the quality content first.

I may flesh this thinking out a bit more but here's one prediction/caution for those writing for another network. If you start to get several emails from your editors or managers providing "guidelines" on how to write in ways that generate more traffic like throwing celebrity references in the titles or providing more posts with repetitive phrases, your network is following an unsustainable strategy.  Your editors care more about Google search terms than you.  They want your words but not necessarily your thoughts.  The first network to do this will probably be the first one to go.

UPDATE: PZ Myers is already declaring ScienceBlogs.com "dead" and hinting that he's leaving.  Pharyngula is basically half of SEED/SB's traffic and I notice that the new SciAm network has at least a couple of SB peeps on it. I'm guessing the folks at National Geographic aren't pleased.  Leave it to an evolutionary biologist to tell us what happens when something doesn't adapt to a changing environment...

BlogHer Recap: More Studies Needed

I'm a solitary learner

The obvious top story of BlogHer '10 focused squarely on a charming ten-year-old boy and his aunt and their rather eventful commute and their fundraiser.  And the most frequently used word I heard to describe the conference was "overwhelming" - so many people, so many vendors, so many parties, so much stuff.

I didn't really have much to do with any of that - though I did enjoy catching up with a few people. Instead, I spent my time introducing bloggers to Dr. Angie McQuaig from University of Phoenix (my client) and we discussed the importance of learning styles. And it was actually pretty cool.

As I mentioned earlier, people learn in different ways - some by listening, some by doing, some by reading, and so on.  University of Phoenix is looking at ways to provide material that fits best with the way the individual student learns.  There is a lot of research out there on learning styles - there are several different methods and the field is constantly evolving.  We used a tool that lists seven learning styles - visual, aural, verbal, physical, logical, social, and solitary.  I found a quick explanation of each style here:

• Visual (spatial). You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.
• Aural (auditory-musical). You prefer using sound and music.
• Verbal (linguistic). You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.
• Physical (kinesthetic). You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.
• Logical (mathematical). You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.
• Social (interpersonal). You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
• Solitary (intrapersonal). You prefer to work alone and use self-study.

You can actually have more than one dominant learning style.  I'm a solitary learner but I'm also a verbal learner and a social learner.  Bloggers took a short quiz and learned their own learning style and got some information on it.  For fun, we also aggregated and displayed the quiz results in real time - and that's when Dr. McQuaig noticed something interesting. 

Dr. McQuaig told me that the most common learning style is visual.  This shouldn't come as a big surprise. Aural and physical learning styles are the next most common.  But look at how the BlogHer folks did:

The visual learning style was actually the least common of the bloggers who took the quiz. The most common learning style for these bloggers was verbal - and it was no contest.  Verbal learners were followed by social learners and solitary learners. (The percentages work out to more than 100 because again, a person can have more than one learning style.)

Now, this is by no means a scientific survey, and Dr. McQuaig would be the first person to say that.  Researchers would go on about things like selection bias and so on, and they'd be right.  There's no way we could say this quiz represents all bloggers.  There's no way we could say it represents all women bloggers.  We couldn't even say this represents all women bloggers who attend blogging conferences.   But we got enough people to take the quiz that I do think we may have stumbled on to a rather interesting research idea.  

If someone could demonstrate a significant difference in the learning styles of bloggers or even a particular type of blogger, it would certainly have an impact on people in my line of work.  If I'm designing a blogger outreach campaign, I want the material I use to be as accessible as possible to the people I'm trying to reach.  If they're verbal learners, for example, I'm more likely to use tools that allow bloggers to both see and hear words, and make use of acronyms.    And it's not just bloggers vs. the general population - if say, mom bloggers are verbal learners while science bloggers are logical learners and political bloggers are visual learners, the tactics I employ may vary for each.

Just a thought.

The Yachts

This has been one of my favorite poems for quite some time. Sadly, it seems all too fitting.

	William Carlos Williams - The Yachts
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

The Yachts

contend in a sea which the land partly encloses

shielding them from the too-heavy blows

of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses

tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows

to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly.

Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute

brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails

they glide to the wind tossing green water

from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls

ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing,

making fast as they turn, lean far over and having

caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark.

In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by

lesser and greater crafts which, sycophant, lumbering

and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare

as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace

of all that in the mind is fleckless, free and

naturally to be desired. Now the sea whoch holds them

is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as of feeling

for some slightest flaw but fails completely.

Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts

move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they

are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too

well made, the slip through, though they take in canvas.

Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows

Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.

It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair

until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind;

the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies

lost to the world bearing what they can not hold. Broken,

beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up

they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising

in waves skill as the skillful yachts pass over.

ummm... so what's up with Utah?

I don't usually take this space for political rants, and I don't think this will be all that mean - but I just have to ask a question.

Seriously, what is going on in Utah politics?

Let me see if I get this right - the majority leader of the Utah House of Representatives told everyone that 25 years ago he got naked in a hot tub with a 15-year-old female employee of his. He was 28 and married. But seriously, they were just naked in the hot tub as a "spur of the moment thing" and that was it. Then in 2002, when this guy was running for Congress, the girl resurfaces and he pays her $150,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It's not hush money, he says, but something to "help her heal." And he says he treated it like any other event in his life. He's coming forward now because that woman is starting to call reporters.

He says all this, and then members of the Utah legislature give him a standing ovation and hug him.

This is a couple of months after the majority leader of the Utah Senate resigned after his arrest for DUI. Reportedly this guy's father was killed by a drunk driver.

And don't forget, this is the legislature where one guy insists "climate change" is actually a conspiracy to control population, and another guy thinks they should cut the 12th grade to save money. Or he did until people called him nuts, now he just wants to make it optional, maybe, or something.

I suppose we've all done some really stupid things and said some really stupid things. But seriously, have most people done or said things that stupid? And rise to the ranks of Majority Leader of a state legislature?

Is it me?

The Contributions Cloud

It's well established I have a thing for text clouds (and wordle) - particularly in a political context. Cloud generators are neat tools - but if you know how to apply those tools you can generate some interesting questions. I first learned about the idea on Americablog, when I saw a cloud of a State Of the Union Address. Since then I've used cloud generators to compare speeches between different political figures, and even to compare groups of bloggers in different online communities.

But what if you could use a cloud generator to measure influence - not only in a specific conversation, but in a series of political decisions? If you believe that political contributions have some semblance of influence on a politician, and you believe that the more one contributes the more influence one has, a cloud generator might be an interesting tool. I decided to give it a try. Again, I should stress that I use clouds to generate and guide questions, not necessarily conclusions. Here's what I did:

1) I went to opensecrets.org to get the "top 20" campaign contributors for the most recent campaign cycle available for my two Senators - Richard Burr and Kay Hagan. (I'm not trying to make a political statement. Readers may recall I used them as examples in my idea for C-SPAN.)

2) I went to wordle and for every $1000 donated I entered the name of the contributor in the text box. I removed spaces from the names of donors to make sure it showed up as a single word. So if "Guy Smiley" contributed $10,000 to Senator Hagan, I would have entered "GuySmiley" 10 times.

3) I messed with the fonts and layout and stuff to get a cloud that looked spiffy.

Some caveats - Senator Hagan was "in cycle," and Senator Burr wasn't - so Senator Hagan raised a ton more money. Also, here's the disclaimer from Open Secrets:

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2009 - 2010 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

So let's get to it. Here's the "Contributions Cloud" for Senator Burr:

And here's the cloud for Senator Hagan:

At first blush it looks like Senator Burr got his campaign cash from mostly corporate sources while Senator Hagan got hers from, well, Act Blue and Emily's list. (those basically indistinguishable dots in Senator Hagan's cloud are mostly labor unions and a few progressive PAC's.)

Again, Senator Burr wasn't in cycle and wasn't doing a lot of aggressive fundraising, so I'm not sure it's fair to jump to a bunch of conclusions for him. It may make more sense to do this with House candidates, who are always in cycle. But I do think Senator Hagan's cloud is rather telling - The amount of money she raised from individuals online absolutely dwarfs everything else. Technically, ActBlue is a Political Action Committee - but essentially it's an online portal used by progressive Americans to donate to political candidates at virtually every level.

Do the people who contribute money to candidates through Act Blue speak with one voice? Hard to say, though there's no doubt they skew left. But the most important question that comes to my mind is this: Are the Democrats now this dependent on the online channel for campaign finance?

Discuss... ;)

Those crazy college kids today

Will very soon be looking at choices for things like mutual funds and life insurance.

How do you plan to reach them?



A tremendous piece from Dr. Michael Wesch.

Traveling this week so posting may be light. But I'll be back at it soon.

Bloggers are Entrepreneurs

And that's how you should treat them.

I've been ridiculously swamped lately but I had the opportunity to meet several bloggers last week for work. I'll let the bloggers speak for themselves on what they thought of the visit. But as I had more network-y type discussions with them, I kept coming back to the thought I had years ago - bloggers, particularly many online moms, are amazingly entrepreneurial.

I saw this report in the Washington Post that discussed about the breadth of women-owned private businesses. I suppose entrepreneurship among women is to be expected - it's fairly common among any group that has experienced bias in the workplace. But while I hesitate to define any group beyond the terms the group uses to self-identify, if I could find a common thread among all the bloggers I met last week it was entrepreneurship. All but one either owned her own business or collaborated with other bloggers in a business venture. The remaining blogger, an academic, also showed many of the characteristics of an entrepreneur - leadership, creativity, passion and drive.

I don't know about all bloggers, but I know many started writing online because they needed to strike out on their own. They were independent thinkers. They value their own time and intellect. And they have no tolerance for crap. As next-gen PR flacks like me want to engage bloggers and others who communicate online, I think it makes sense to think of bloggers perhaps a bit less as beat reporters and perhaps a bit more as entrepreneurs who are looking to engage in something worth their time.

The Stimulus Discussion: Anything But Stimulating

Some Republicans think they've found the issue that will finally damage President Obama politically. They're arguing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - known by most as the "Economic Stimulus Package" - hasn't worked. It strikes me as a potentially damaging accusation - if it's true.

I've been following stories in the mainstream media about investments from the stimulus bill. There's been some very good reporting in the Atlanta Journal Constitution by Kristi E. Swartz, a business reporter who has covered media and technology. I asked Ms. Swartz via Twitter direct message if she thought the stimulus bill has had an impact there. Her response: "Frankly I think it's too early to tell." This isn't a surprising response. It makes a great deal of sense to me.

Some Republicans are saying already, however, that the verdict is in and the stimulus bill is a flop. Of course, some GOP stalwarts have gotten a little carried away with their claims, but I think at least one argument from a Republican Congressman merits some attention:



In the social media world, the White House responded quickly to criticism via a blog post from OMB Director Orzag (himself a blogger when he was at GAO).

But has the discussion resonated at all online?

Let's compare online discussions (at least in blogs) about the stimulus package to, say, climate change:

Climate change is a much more popular topic online - two or three times more popular.

OK, but that's all blogs, and climate change is a global issue while the stimulus package is purely a US issue. What if we just look at the people you'd expect to be all over this - the top US political blogs on each side of the ideological spectrum?

I borrowed a page from the Virtual Vantage Points playbook (since I wrote the page I don't think they'll mind) and combined the feeds of six top US-based conservative political blogs and did the same with six of their liberal counterparts. I then ran both feeds through the cloud generator at Wordle to see how prominent the discussion about the stimulus package was.

Here's a graphical depiction of the current discussion from Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Red State, Free Republic, Powerline and Instapundit:

And here's what they're talking about today the Huffington Post (political feed), Daily Kos (front page), Eschaton, Talking Points Memo, MyDD, and Americablog:

Of course these aren't the only bloggers but they're representative of the more popular ones.

Notice what word you DON'T see there? At all?

It seems the messaging the GOP is pushing about the stimulus isn't stimulating discussions online, at least not yet.

Knowing Where To Look - And Who To Know

I've been having a series of discussions with colleagues and others about getting the most accurate and complete assessment of an issues-based online conversation. This isn't the same thing as a keyword search for a product name or a company name, and it isn't the same as categorizing blog posts as "positive," "negative" or "neutral." It's about revealing the layers of nuance in a multi-faceted issue that can't break along the lines of "for" or "against."

Let's say you're a company executive with an interest in what the federal government may change in the regulation of health care. No one opposes "reform," but everyone has a different idea of what "reform" means. For example, there are those who oppose a "public option" in the health care debate but don't use those words. Most of those who support a "public option" don't agree on the details. For doctors, the idea of reform centers around how and what a "payer" (i.e., an insurance company or the government) compensates a doctor for particular services. For consumers, the concept of "reimbursement" is essentially absent from the discussion - it centers on how much you pay an insurance company and what you have to pay for after that.

Go to Google and type in "health care reform" and you get 19,600,000 results, plus a list of sponsored links that provide language that has probably been so focus-grouped that all the meaning has been filtered out of it. Further, the "top results" provide a lot of positional rhetoric but not a lot of analysis or projection.

Go to uber-human-search engine Mahalo and type in "health care reform" and Mahalo asks you a question - "Is 'health care reform' a person, place, thing, event, how to, or other?" Of course, you could argue that "health care reform" is "other," but how helpful is that? And by the way, who likes having their question answered with a question?

Now realize that the people actually making the decisions about America's health care system have never seen about 19,599,800 of the 19,600,000 of the search results you found at Google. Further, references to the most important discussions these people have had about health care - if you can find them on the Internet at all - are very likely buried between search results 15 and 16 million. They're not in the newspaper, they're not on tv or radio.

The most critical discussions are taking place in closed rooms among participants who don't want to be watched. I don't mean that in the conspiracy-theory, crypto-clearance, oh-my-God-they're-plotting-to-take-over-your-body way. I mean that many of the sensitive and complicated discussions about health care (and many other issues) require a quiet and deliberative environment.

There's a difference between "quiet" and "secret," however. These are not secret discussions; in fact, most of the details are available to anyone who wants to know them. It's just that there aren't many people with the education, experience and patience to pay attention to them - or even realize that's what they're looking at. There's an even smaller subset of people in that group who know how to translate health-policy-speak into plain English. And an even smaller subset of those who operate online.

If we apply the measures most commonly used in the social media world, most of these people aren't "influential" at all - if they write a blog or appear online, not many people read it or link to it. They write pieces that aren't optimized for search engines. Many barely show up on the radar. But they wield enormous influence in the areas that truly matter. They walk in the same circles as those who make the decisions that affect everyone. Sometimes they ARE the people who make the decisions.

So to me, this is where social media search must evolve. We need to move from keywords and hashtags to PEOPLE. Google and Technorati and all the shiny "dashboard" tools PR firms build that just look at Google and Technorati only take you so far. I need to do the simple keyword search, sure. But if I want the real picture, I have to find the people who really know, who have really read up on this, who influence the process and the outcome of a given issue. I have to know them ahead of time.

It's very difficult to automate that. It's easier to find people who truly know where to look.

Where WOMMA Has It Wrong

I got a note yesterday from a friend in the PR business asking my take on the FTC's proposed guidance on "sponsored conversation" online. I got a similar question from another PR pro at my social media presentation last week. Essentially the Federal Trade Commission is considering imposing penalties on bloggers and/or advertisers who make false or misleading claims about products online.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has been very active in the rulemaking process here, and that's a good thing. I think they're spot on when they insist that bloggers and/or marketers and advertisers fully disclose any financial arrangement related to a blog post or a product review. I also think that people (no matter where they work) should be held accountable if they knowingly make false or misleading statements that have a financial impact. WOMMA's comments to the FTC are based on their ethical code, which is generally sound.

There's one part of their ethical code (pdf) that poses a serious problem, however:

We stand against marketing practices whereby the consumer is paid cash by the manufacturer, supplier, or one of their representatives to make recommendations, reviews, or endorsements.

WOMMA certainly wants bloggers to review products - online product reviews are very valuable. They will certainly continue to ask bloggers to review products. They just think it's unethical to pay bloggers for them. I think this is because another model exists, one with which marketing & PR types are comfortable - traditional journalism outlets where an employee of a publication draws a salary as a "reviewer" and doesn't take compensation from companies. (Of course, that publication takes ad revenue, but that's another story.)

But here's the thing - BLOGGERS ARE NOT JOURNALISTS, no matter how inconvenient that is for marketing people. They aren't compensated for their time by a third party. They've spent their time and resources building a following as a personal publisher (hat tip to Bicycle Mark for that term) and now WOMMA wants the value associated with that following and the credibility of the blogger to help market a product. In exchange for that item of value, WOMMA is prepared to give - what, exactly?

I see the issue in three hypothetical discussions between a PR/marketing person and a blogger. First, the conversation as it typically exists today:

PR guy: Hey, love your blog. I noticed a lot of people read it. I'd like you to take this product and tell your readers what you think about it.

Blogger: Thanks, this is somewhat interesting but I'm not inclined to give you a free ad on my blog, and my time is worth something too.

PR guy: OK, if your time is worth x and you spend y time, here's xy. Just disclose this payment, please.

Blogger: Cool. I'm on it. Send me the stuff.

Now here's the conversation under WOMMA's code of ethics:

PR guy: Hey, love your blog. I noticed a lot of people read it. I'd like you to take this product and tell your readers what you think about it.

Blogger: Thanks, this is somewhat interesting but I'm not inclined to give you a free ad on my blog, and my time is worth something too.

PR guy: Sorry, paying you to review this product violates my code of ethics.

Blogger: But you had no problem asking me to provide you a service for free. That's some code of ethics you have there.

Of course, that means we'll be seeing a lot more of this conversation:

PR guy: Hey, love your blog. I noticed a lot of people read it. I'd like you to take this product and tell your readers what you think about it.

Blogger: Go away.

Most bloggers are not journalists, but many are entrepreneurs (often women entrepreneurs), and I think this is something the FTC must consider as they develop guidance on this issue. They have a right and an obligation to protect consumers from false or misleading statements that influence commerce, regardless of the forum. But because they're FTC, they should recognize that online personal publishing technology has brought about a new self-proprietor business model that doesn't really resemble a traditional trade or consumer publication - the "review blogger." FTC should consider the restraint of trade issues that threaten a new generation of technology-inspired entrepreneurs - bloggers.

Online moms don't have a trade organization fighting for their rights at the FTC. Marketing companies do. The FTC is right to insist on disclosure and accountability. Here's hoping the FTC looks out for the small, often mom-based business and entrepreneur as well.

Priorities

Yesterday, the University of Kentucky fired Billie Gillispie, its basketball coach. His "memorandum of understanding" - both sides never actually completed a long-term contract - essentially says he's now due $6 million. Of course, UK is now saying they'll try to pay less than that.

Even if the "fair" settlement and separation agreement pays him half of that, Billie Gillispie will basically be Kentucky's highest-paid state employee this year.

His job description: NOT coaching the UK basketball team.

The state's higher education budget has experienced some rather significant cuts in the past couple of years. UK employees have been asked to do more with less, as have other state employees.

I realize Gallispie's buyout will probably be funded mostly or completely with "private" money - but I think this encapsulates the problem with our priorities here.

Further, I don't think you'd see this kind of media circus and incessant chatter from everywhere if UK were replacing its provost.

Bonuses, Bailouts, Social Media and Anger

President Obama's communications people are making the argument that the AIG bonuses issue is an obsession for the Beltway chattering class but little more than a distraction for the rest of us. So just for kicks, I went over to Blogpulse to track mentions of "AIG" in the blogosphere over the past six months - as well as mentions of AIG and "bailout" together and AIG and "bonuses" together. Here's what I saw:



Not surprisingly, online chatter about AIG spiked when news broke about the company's "retention bonuses." The smaller blue spikes coincide generally with news about more taxpayer dollars going to bail out the company, as the yellow lines tend to show. But since the blogosphere tends to extend beyond Washington DC, I'm thinking it's a fairly major topic of discussion these days. Nearly one percent of all blog posts Blogpulse monitors mentioned AIG on a single day.

Looking at the chart it's easy to assume, though perhaps not conclude, that people are not necessarily angry about AIG getting bailed out, but they're angry about AIG getting bailed out and AIG employees making large sums of money in the process.

But there's more to it than that. To me, the anger is so strong because people feel this information has been intentionally hidden for so long, and because people don't feel they have any ability to correct a mindnumbingly obvious problem. And more importantly, developments in both mainstream and social media over the past few years have given people the expectation of more access and control.

The development of the 24-hour news cycle by cable networks such as CNN conditioned consumers to expect news as it happened. As other networks and news outlets were forced to compete, consumers were literally inundated with information. They remain so to this day.

As social media technologies developed and matured, consumers began to share their own voices and created a new set of expectations. Consumers often want news to fit their own world view, so they go to the outlets that suit their ideology or interests. They helped shape the news by providing faster and more powerful feedback. Finally, consumers started reporting the news themselves - we hear about earthquakes and terrorist attacks via twitter before any news network can even get the sattelite truck in place.

These developments have created a cultural shift and have altered our expectations for information. While it's never really been acceptable to cover up injustice, it's easy to argue the frustration is amplified today.

This cultural shift remains at odds with some of America's most venerable and powerful institutions. Wall Street, certainly. Many corporate board rooms. The halls of Congress. And yes, at times, the traditional media.

The AIG situation is just the latest example. Look at the relatively slow pace information has been released and the questions that remain unanswered - who are the 11 people who received "retention bonuses" but are no longer with the company? Who negotiated the bonus agreements? Who rejected the Senate provisions capping executive pay in the bailout legislation?

To be fair, I think it's understandable at times to want to resist providing this kind of information. But this isn't one of those times, and there's been a profound cultural disconnect between the Washington-Wall Street axis and the rest of the country - and that disconnect has played itself out through social media channels.

Bloggers call you out when you call a cap of $500,000 on annual executive pay "draconian." Or when you call struggling homeowners "losers." Or when you ask for only half of the bonuses back. People see the hypocrisy of railing against "socialist" healthcare or insisting on "merit pay" for people like schoolteachers - all while threatening armageddon if trillions in public funds aren't handed over to banks without strings, and then given away in annual bonuses for an underperforming derivatives trader worth more than a schoolteacher will see in several lifetimes.

But what really sets people off is when you try to hide it or, when discovered, spin it. Some advice: bottom line, the public is going to find this out eventually. Don't prolong the agony - come clean, say you're sorry, and show how you won't do it again. Subpoena-driven drip, drip, drip stories like this one will kill you. Further, don't insist that the people who caused the problem are the only people who can fix it. It's just not true.

In my career in politics and communications, I've heard the same refrain from corporate execs, lobbyists, and politicians more times than I can count - "it's not our ideas or our actions that are the problem - we're just not explaining them very well."

In this case, actually, the people understand you just fine. The solutions are obvious. That's why they're so mad.

How social media covers cerebral beltway speeches

I've been giving some thought to how social media could play a much stronger role in international affairs and global finance. (Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what you were thinking about too.)

Then I learn Ben Bernanke gave a talk on Tuesday morning to the Council on Foreign Relations.

I'm surprised at how small the initial response in the social media world was to the speech. Granted, there wasn't much in terms of groundbreaking news, but this is one of those moments when thoughtful, serious people can and should give global finance issues the airing they deserve.

So what did I find? The mainstream media - yes, that organization I essentially buried for the last two days - led the coverage. But there was one major exception - Dan Drezner live-blogged the event at his new FP blog. He essentially took quotes from the speech and gave a few thoughts on the Q&A session. It's worth a look.

I found it interesting that both CFR and the Fed haven't done more to make this information more accessible via social media channels. CFR only made Bernanke's remarks available as a pdf document and not html. The Federal Reserve's website did publish the text for all to see without downloading. Neither site gave the option of bookmarking or sharing the remarks or asked for comment.

Since I'm addicted to wordle, Here's the "speech cloud" for Bernanke at CFR:



The first bit of analysis I saw - not much more than a quote, but it's the context more than the content here - came from a Wall Street Journal blog post. I also saw quick responses from BBC ("Worst Crisis Since 1930's"), the New York Times and Associated Press ("Bernanke Says Regulatory Overhaul Needed").

I did catch some twitter chatter. It's interesting to see which news outlets are using Twitter (in multiple languages to just push content out like an RSS feed, and who's actually using Twitter to comment:

• Nieuwslijstnl: Bernanke: meer internationale financiële regels (BNR Nieuwsradio) http://www.nieuwslijst.nl/t/13138 10 minutes ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• VanessaAlvarez1: Bernanke: :We may see a recovery of the economy as early as this year", depends on the banks 10 minutes ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• RTLZ: RTLZ Nieuws: Bernanke: meer internationale financiële regulering, herstel in 2009?: Regeringen werel.. http://tinyurl.com/bhno7w (expand)
  10 minutes ago from twitterfeed · Reply · View Tweet
• cajunmaverick: Wait, did I hear Bernanke say we need to get rid of mark-to-market accounting? #tcot 11 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• Indexhirek: Gazdaság: Bernanke: Meglepő, milyen mély a válság: Az amerikai jegybank elnöke szerint akkor érhet vég.. http://tinyurl.com/dmkf57 (expand)
  11 minutes ago from twitterfeed · Reply · View Tweet
• ftuseconomy: Bernanke urges regulatory overhaul http://tinyurl.com/cp3qqm (expand) 12 minutes ago from twitterfeed · Reply · View Tweet

• itzpapalotl: I know it's probably just me, but Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke is kinda hot. 17 minutes ago from twhirl · Reply · View Tweet
  
  
• capitalbeat: Bernanke Says More Study on "Mark to Market" Would Be "Useful" http://tinyurl.com/bdgmh3 (expand) 18 minutes ago from twitterfeed · Reply · View Tweet
• syafiza: Bernanke: Reform before rebound: U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke says economic recovery hinges on sta.. http://tinyurl.com/cf3ylu (expand)
  18 minutes ago from twitterfeed · Reply · View Tweet
• thebodybreaks: Worst crisis since 1930s says Fed: US Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke says the world is suffering from the wo.. http://tinyurl.com/cmm4ac (expand)

Let me stress that I do NOT necessarily share the above expressed opinions, especially @itzpapalotl.

The Mom-O-Sphere Goes Corporate and Cultures Clash

I've been watching with interest some of the discussions taking place in the Mom-o-sphere. (hey, it's my job.)

Specifically, I'm interested in a couple of posts from Kristen Chase and Liz Gumbinner - you may have heard of them as the co-founders of Cool Mom Picks. In a very real sense, they represent an important case study in next-gen online entrepreneurship.

In addition to CMP, Kristen and Liz have built strong online platforms (i.e., personal blogs) that have attracted a significant readership - and in doing so, they've gained the attention of marketing and PR firms. No surprise there. Further, beyond the raw numbers of unique visitors and inbound links, the above-average flacks will see the value that Kristen and Liz demonstrate as credible and influential members of an important community. I still remember Liz essentially shutting up an executive from the Conference Board who questioned the validity of social media metrics with a single line - "how do you measure the value of placing a can of Diet Coke in George Clooney's hand?"

(WARNING: I'm gonna get all PR-speak for a second. I'm even gonna use pictures. Don't worry, though - we'll get through this.)

However, I think Kristen and Liz (and dozens of other online moms) are frustrated right now because they thrive in a multi-directional communications environment that depends on transparency and encourages people to participate in multiple community discussions. (You know, SOCIAL media. It's SOCIAL.) The environment they and other online moms have entered - the world where you get paid essentially for what you do and what you write - is still largely transactional and one-way, tends to be more opaque, and emphasizes hitting a very specific demographic and staying there. To me, the old PR/marketing world looks like this:

THE OLD LECTURE



So a company's message gets shaped and filtered through media to an audience, who simply receives it and acts accordingly. Companies and their PR firms simply expect bloggers to serve as one of those intermediate media outlets in the middle. It's much easier for them, because they've done this forever and really aren't interested in doing it differently because that would cost time and money. But then there's...

THE NEW CONVERSATION



Today's reality simply shows that companies are just one player in a larger group discussion. Yes, the traditional media is there and they still wield disproportionate influence on opinion and behavior. But in this world, everybody talks and (hopefully) everybody listens. I could put any number of communities up here and even more arrows, but I hope you get the picture.

(OK, I got that out of my system. It's ridiculous, I know.)

Call it whatever you want - new media rules vs. old media rules, the people who "get it" vs. the people who don't, or even good vs. evil - the bottom line is the two worlds operate on different terms and it's an enormous struggle to find a situation where both companies and bloggers are completely comfortable.

So Liz gets frustrated when she sees other moms who don't necessarily assert their position in the new communications environment, or worse, disclose that they're getting compensated for what they publish. And Kristen gets frustrated when the organizers of a marketing conference choose to introduce her with a "dramatic reading" of one of her sassier posts - positioning her as the "prominent mom" that transactional marketers value - and not with a rundown of her entrepreneurial endeavors or her expertise. That's more than a "personal branding" issue - it's a reflection of conflicting corporate cultures.

And they both get demonstrably upset when PR flacks treat them as they'd treat any other media outlet, only with less attention to detail.

I can say that some of us in the PR/social media world are struggling with the same issues that Kristen and Liz are. As they try to explain the new reality to flacks, we're trying to do the same to some of our clients, and even some of our colleagues.

Moving forward, I see three options:

• the moms (and everyone else) do everything they can to accomodate the institutional flackitude, since PR firms have the money and the stuff they want;
• the PR/marketing world moves to accomodate bloggers and other social media mavens; or
  
• the two groups meet somewhere in the middle.

This is typically where the "meet in the middle" option presents itself as the moderate and essentially preferable model, but I tend to lean toward the flacks accomodating the bloggers. The larger communications environment continues to evolve toward the social media model. Even mainstream media is starting to adopt social media tools, even if they're not yet completely embracing the concept of multi-directional communication - so we should try to get ahead of it . The cost of publishing high-quality multimedia continues to decline, giving more people a voice and the ability to persuade larger groups of people. Finally, I've found that the more you can accomodate people where they are, on their terms, the more success you have. If someone wants to try to accomodate me, that's great - but I can't and shouldn't expect it.

Talking Points Don't Always Cross Cultures Well

Back in November 2007 Craig Fuller said something on Virtual Vantage Points that sticks with me to this day. Our social media team was built on a community-centric philosophy - we identify opinion leaders in online communities and help clients build relationships with them - so we've always paid close attention to what was discussed in specific communities.

Craig took a look at the "community clouds" of the day - essentially we blended the rss feeds of the most authoritative blogs in well-defined online communities and pushed the blended feeds through a text cloud generator - and noticed that none of the communities were discussing the same things. Each of the communities we tracked at the time had different top-ranked keywords. You'd expect a difference in, say, personal finance bloggers and military bloggers, but you'd at least expect liberals and conservatives to be discussing the same issues, albeit from different perspectives.

Not really. The point is online communities, even to this day, remain somewhat isolated from one another. The reason this isolation exists is fairly simple - it's really just a reflection of the isolation that exists in the offline world as well.

We're seeing an important exception of sorts to this play out in a political context today. Two completely separate communities are essentially saying the same thing, for essentially the same reasons. But both communities remain as isolated from one another as ever. Not surprisingly, one is having measured success in policy debates while the other is struggling and seeing its reputation savaged. The nature of each community is such that they can say almost exactly the same thing and watch their message get received in completely different ways.

I'm talking about entrepreneurs who sell handmade toys - you know, the entrepreneurial moms - and bankers.

You may not be aware of the fairly robust debate that took place over the implementation of the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act, which would have imposed fairly rigorous testing standards for toys and other products. The goal was to keep things like phthalates and lead out of toys - makes sense to me.

However, the people who make these toys and other products aren't usually millionaires. We're talking about home-based businesses or single-workshop outfits run by people who do what they can, when they can, because they love it. And we're talking about very slim profit margins.

Testing for this stuff is kinda complicated and expensive. The independent, sole-proprietor types - most of whom, by the way, don't even use materials with phthalates or lead to make their products - can't afford to do all the testing the law requires. For small business owners, this law sounds nice at first but it's downright draconian. It's a door-closer. The New York Post had this to say in defense of the small-business crowd:

Dozens of small, family-owned New York businesses, already struggling, will shut down and/or lay off their workers. The city could lose a quarter to a half of its 8,000 garment-industry jobs within weeks.

So the mom-trepreneurs got active in the social media channel and encouraged these small business owners (and their customers) to contact their Members of Congress to figure out a fix. And it worked. The Consumer Product Safety Commission delayed implementation of the new rules for a year so they could work out a plan to help small businesses comply.

Now we come to bankers. We're all aware that President Obama has imposed a compensation cap on the top executives of financial services companies that are accepting TARP II bailout funds. The cap is set at $500,000 annually. The reaction from some in the banking industry?

“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”

So we have people in two communities making basically the same argument - that burdensome government regulation is draconian for business people facing hard times.

Do you think one community has more credibility than the other?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.