Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

This is one of the more popular topics in the blogsphere these days. Tends to peak with every election and then dies down. Now, as a PR pro, anytime I talk about media bias or point out acts of sloppy journalism – which are generally far exceeded by acts of sloppy PR – I’m pretty quickly dismissed, heckled, or ridiculed. In this respect, Bloggers are quickly becoming my people (OK – not really, but you get the point).

Pressthink got me on this train of thought, focusing on Chris Satullo’s, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, story on bloggers… Cries of ‘media bias’ hide sloppy thinking (Philadelphia Inquirer, Sep. 26, 2004).

Rather’s mistake was sad, but no watershed. This aging anchor is no more the embodiment of journalism than Paris Hilton is a typical farm girl. Mainstream media is a term so loose as to disqualify any assertions that follow it. Let’s, by all means, discuss how journalism falls short. Let’s explore how it can flourish in media new and old. But let’s see the screaming about media bias for what it is: at best sloppy thinking, at worst Orwellian poison.

But spare me the chatter about bias. Of course the media is biased. Get over it. Journalists, bloggers, and even PR pros should revel in it.

Media conglomerates are not a synonym for journalism. They employ some journalists, and many who only pretend to be. They enable the craft, but also inhibit and cheapen it.

The great journalists rise above the fray. They report. The product might be biased, doesn’t mean all journalists are. And this is where PressThink’s manifesto is right on. We need to rise above media and fully comprehend the importance of Press.

Satullo is right ~

Journalism, done right, buoys democracy; hence its place in the First Amendment.

This point is going to play out in the blogsphere. I wonder how many executives are not blogging because they lack the rights to speak freely and pursue absolute transparency? In fact, any enthusiasm they might have for speaking openly is being restricted by new legislation.

Andrew Gordon in PR Week hit on this in a story regarding Siebel –

SAN MATEO, CA: Siebel Systems is defending itself on First Amendment grounds against a charge of violating Regulation Fair Disclosure – claiming it violates companies’ rights to free speech.

The enterprise-software maker raised the defense in its mid-September motion to dismiss a charge brought in June by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Regulation FD works an unprecedented and remarkably sweeping infringement of corporate speech,” the Chronicle quotes the motion as stating.

Other PR Pros seem to think this would set a dangerous precedent by allowing companies to hide behind the First Amendment. I think the reverse is true. There is less chance of anyone hiding today than at any other point in the history of business. Hide where? Transparency is the new watchword and the requirement of any legislator should be to foster it by encouraging free speech, not limiting it… So to steal and reframe from Satullo:-

Business, done right, buoys democracy; hence free speech for executives should have an equal place in the First Amendment. Or, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

If you’ve bought a book on Amazon you’ve probably glanced at the review by Amazonistas. If you’ve bought from the eBayistas you’ve no doubt scanned their ranking. This real-time definition of reputation by the customer will eventually become one of the dominant drivers of sales for us all. The convergence of reputation management and eCommerce is inevitable.

Lee Gomes explores this in his Monday column in the WSJ – sorry, subscribers only – but it’s worth every cent… seems the economists have drawn a link between not only reputation and the ability of a seller to sell, but also the price they can command…

But not only is reputation important, Prof. Cabral found, but it affects the prices sellers can charge and the amount of merchandise they can move.

Len and I had an interesting exchange on my thoughts on Triangulation. Here is a slightly edited chunk from our banter…

I live in the birthplace of the American space program. Yesterday I watched the X-prize winning flight of SpaceShipOne on the computer streamed from space.com while every local station broadcast irrelevancies of pop culture (eg, Regis and Kelly interviewing the main guy from a Bravo show). To wit, the major news broadcast networks have become entertainment driven by ad revenues. History in real time comes to us over the Internet. Having grown up watching every flight from Mercury to the latest Soyuz flights, this is a bit disappointing.

Blogs aren’t news. But news isn’t news either these days. The two most prominent victims of the web revolution have been scholarship and now journalism. As we keep looking for more novel ways to shred the natch, the web looks more like the atmosphere: ubiquitous but a very thin layer.

My tenet is that anything can be news so long as it is expedient and viewed as such by the ‘viewer’. This is the distinction between news as a product (big media) and content, information, and diatribe. Blogs can contain news but they aren’t solely a news vehicle. What is really disappointing – and I Len makes this point well – is that reporting of news that doesn’t fit with the mainstream news product or economics is increasingly being left to professional amateurs – and sometimes professional journalists who are using their own product. Which might be a good thing. A really good thing.

That’s classic Boltzman entropy; information is addressable or isn’t.  Information isn’t knowledge. Triangulation is a good way to put it. The abdication of responsibility by the networks, and the intensely localized and indiscriminate blogging has made the ability to discriminate priceless and personal.   It’s been repeated so many times as to be almost noise now, but the problem isn’t choosing but how choices are chosen. We now have networks like Fox that select and tailor to a particular political point of view, and a dammed narrow one, yet the distribution power is such that it becomes the chooser of choices.

Blogs like web pages require selectivity.  The neighborhood effect kicks in. The web can make us goofy.  Who has time to read enough?  Who can afford not to?   The problem of very high rates of feedback is destabilization.

One of the things that consistently amazes me about blogging (other than the fact that people actually read my blog) is that people way smarter than me take the time to pen me thoughts and responses that are hugely educational and illuminating. Thanks!

For about, well, nine years now I’ve been working a book on messaging. The basic tenet has been that companies, organizations need to master the art of messaging, not just to attract attention and change minds but in order to effectively compete. And, that messaging – as lead by communicators will dwarf the spend and effort put into traditional brand processes.

The two current hot-points in messaging are framing and the challenge to the Universal Message. These two notions together are perhaps the most powerful combination in communications today. They underpin the most effective of messaging campaigns.

UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff has produced one of the best pieces on framing – essentially the art of using messaging as a competitive tool. Also see his interview on PBS.

Language always comes with what is called “framing.” Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like “revolt,” that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That’s a frame.

Parallel to this another movement has been hammering away at the need for a single message to underpin the brand. This notion has been the rainmaker for many a consulting firm who has delighted in pointing out to their clients (read victim) how many messages they have and thereby how messed-up they are. Let’s call this the plee for the Universal Message.

Recently a cat-fight broke out in Ad Age between the ‘positionistas’ and McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light. Larry said at an AdWatch conference he was abandoning the universal message concept in favor of a “brand journalism approach”. No more one message for all. Instead, brand journalism:

“…is a chronicle of the varied things that happen in our brand world, throughout our day, throughout the years. Our brand means different things to different people. It does not have one brand position. It is positioned differently in the minds of kids, teens, young adults, parents and seniors. It is positioned differently at breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, weekday, weekend, with kids or on a business trip.

“Brand Journalism allows us to be a witness to the multi-faceted aspects of a brand story. No one communication alone tells the whole brand story.

“Each communication provides a different insight into our brand. It all adds up to a McDonald’s journalistic brand chronicle.”

For me, this idea is an interesting one. Laura Ries thinks it’s pretty silly.

The notion that McDonald’s should abandon the positioning philosophy and instead adopt a brand journalism approach is lunacy. Brand journalism is just another name for an approach that has been tried and has failed many times before. It is the everybody trap. Brand journalism attempts to make a brand appeal to everybody by using many different brand messages.

Brands that try to appeal to everyone end up appealing to no one.

Now while I take her point, the notion Larry is getting at points to the need to infuse brands with meaningful messages and deeper storytelling. Most brand marketers get it wrong. There is clear evidence that a single message presented in an unrelenting integrated marketing campaign winds-up dull and boring. But that doesn’t mean message diversity (driven by audience diversity) replaces the need for a clear and decisive position.

So, where I do agree with Laura is that while every company has multiple audiences we need to prioritize them and speak more to one than any other. They are the audience that defines the brand. In McDonalds’s case, that’s kids (I think). But lets not confuse focusing the marketing effort with focusing the message.

This is a fascinating debate. In converging these two trains of thought – framing and universal messaging – you get at the tenets of effective communications:-

1. Messages must resonate with a single audience first and foremost. They must speak to someone. Everybody is nobody.

2. Messages must be dimensionalized through storytelling. One message can live in many stories, for many different audiences.

3. Messages are being used today to frame competitors as effectively as they are being used to frame brands. Simon Phipps recent blog looks at how Sun’s competitors have been doing this to us (the bad news). The good news – we’ve figured this out! Actually, we’ve been doing it better than most for a very long time.

4. Even for framing to work, it needs to be underpinned with deep storytelling. Even if that storytelling is, well, a story. You can compete with framing through storytelling.

5. Messages need to be part of the product experience – the experience that can only be had and held by an individual. I liked what Burger King’s ad agency was reported to have done with the doors on stores – they had them open either way and then marked the door the the brand message “have it your way”. Brand + experience + message. This is a little superficial but you get the point.

Maybe I’ll just blog the book… more to come…

The image in image is sorely neglected by most communicators. We tend to focus on the words, laungauge and story, often at the expense of the most powerful form of communication – visual. NYTs has a fascinating look at how image is being used by the two political contenders and a witty analysis of the two logos. Actually, it’s pretty damning:-

The American flag in the Kerry-Edwards logo is the biggest gaffe of all. Although it has the requisite 50 stars, there are five rows of 10 stars, rather than the correct arrangement of five rows of six stars and four rows of five stars. It looks like a mistake – not a stylized interpretation, like the flag in the Bush logo.