Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Interesting read from the NYT.

Knowing that you can always call for help in an emergency makes people feel safer. But they also tether people more closely and constantly to others, and in recent months a growing number of experts have identified and begun to study a distinct downside in that: cellphone use may be making us less autonomous and less capable of solving problems on our own, even when the answers are right in front of us.

Replace cell phones with email and you’ve got the same challenge. The more people are connecting the less self reliant they are becoming. While I agree that the best decisions are made through a set of dialogues total connectivity shouldn’t be used as an excuse for accountable decision making by the individual…

Awhile back I gave a keynote at a PR event downunder on how the combined effects of legislation, heightened responsibility and the web were stripping communicators and corporations bare. Part of the thesis was inspired by Don Tapscott’s great read, The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business.

His new transparency portal is live. The thesis is straightforward – transparency is triggering profound changes across the corporate world. Firms that embrace transparency will thrive, and those that ignore or oppose it will suffer.

Transparency is far more than the obligation to disclose basic financial information. People and institutions that interact with firms are gaining unprecedented access to all sorts of information about corporate behavior, operations, and performance. Armed with new tools to find information about matters that affect their interests, stakeholders scrutinize the firm as never before. The corporation is becoming naked.

Corporations that are open in response to these pressures perform better. Rather than something to be feared, transparency is becoming central to their success. The best firms have clear leadership practices that others can adopt. They understand that investments in good governance and transparency deliver significant payoffs: engaged relationships, better quality and cost management, more innovation, and improved overall business performance. They build transparency and integrity into their business strategy, products and services, brand and reputation, technology plans, and corporate character.

And that is great news. We’ve done a few interesting things at Sun. First, the depth of information we provide at earnings is unlike many of our peers. Second, we’re also ensuring the behaviors we require are understood through Fiduciary Bootcamps. Third, we’re opening our doors, virtually, through blogs. And, we’re one of the sponsors of Don’s project. Jonathan Schwartz also has in interesting piece on the site.

That’s why, in our view, real corporate transparency means going beyond financial statements. It even means going beyond the walls of the company and into the minds of the men and women who are Sun. It means learning what they’re doing, saying and thinking about the firm, its products, it community and its future. To enable access to some of our most personal thoughts, Sun encourages employees to participate in publicly-accessible blogs.Blogs bring investors, developers, partners, customers and others who are interested in the soul of this corporation, onto the desktops and into laptops of the folks who make Sun run. No holds barred. Sun blogs let us engage in public discussions about everything from products-in-process and corporate strategy to the prospects-for-world-peace.

Some interesting pointers from Chip Scanlan @ Poytner (ok – couldn’t resist that)… on creating a great speech and more tid-bits on PBS…

Lucy Morgan, the Pulitzer Prize winning Tallahassee Bureau Chief for the St. Petersburg Times, divides the speech story assignment into four basic steps:

1. Look for the news. “If the governor or whoever is proposing something new, that’s likely to become the lede … We also look at other content and perhaps how it figures into what the person has done in the past.”

2. Check the facts. “You’d be surprised how many people are wrong about something — sometimes it’s as minor as quoting the Bible when the Bible didn’t say that!”

3. Gauge the response. “Was the audience asleep or really into it? And where possible we ask them what they liked or disliked — sometimes they hear things we didn’t realize were there.”

4. Performance Review. “We also look at delivery — the gimmicks used to attract attention. Many politicians today use a gimmick that was probably pioneered by Reagan — having a person in the audience who is an example of something he’s talking about.”

On 1). This is critical. Look for the headline. And on 3) if you are a speechwriter you should be facing the same direction as the speaker. It’s the only way you will be able to tell what is working and what isn’t. I can’t tell you how many times I see the speechwriter in the audience staring gleefully at the presenter while the audience is, well, snoring…

My earlier exchange with Stephen Shankland got me thinking about how we triangulate news.

Once upon a time a single news story from a single news source would influence audiences in a profound way. Media relations pros obsessed over the big hit in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal – we argued for hours over who would lead with a story. Sometimes this lead was negotiated as an exclusive. Other times as an advance. Inevitably, outlets targeting narrow audiences (Slashdot for developers, for instance) ranked way down the priority list. They were dealt with but normally after the news broke elsewhere. And normally in anything but a timely fashion. Inevitably this resulted in calls from extremely pissed off journalists.

To some extent SOX and other forces have dealt to this phenomenon. But news aggregators and bloggers are a more powerful force in the transformation of news delivery. They’re turning the business of news – and the business of public relations – on its head.

In my RSS reader the New York Times feed is followed by NPR. Then Dan Gillmor, Slashdot, C/Net, Tekrati and Pressthink – Mark Cuban and Tom Peters follow somewhere after that. I’ve got well over 100 feeds and generally step through them over my morning coffee – well before looking at the Google News NZ edition. Glancing at Google, my news sources range from Reuters and BBC News to The Pakistan Daily Times, The Malaysia Star, and National Geographic. I have a very unique ability to triangulate news.

But, the engines that underpin the news portals don’t necessarily reflect the logic or prominence of the media. Nor do the blogs. Blogs tend to be a useful source for triangulating breaking news – wired news. Google news tends to be a little more tired. Their utility is that I can triangulate news in a nanosecond.

As a result, the effectiveness of the leader and media selectivity for public relations practitioners is dead. You could work hard to negotiate the ‘positive’ exclusive with NewsWeek or Time, but if sitting right beneath the story in my RSS feed is a sneak preview from a geek at Gizmodo, the strategy starts to fall apart. And some of you are smart enough to know that a geek review at Gizmodo is as authoritative and credible as any mainstream journalist (most of the time and with the exception of Mossberg at the WSJ). And if they aren’t, I could quickly triangulate it anyway.

In fact, the blog is (arguably) quickly becoming a more credible source for ‘fresh news’. I’m really interested in the new Treo 650 (why they wouldn’t put Bluetooth in the Treo 600 is beyond me). I don’t look to mainstream tech rags or even the company’s web site. I look at Gizmodo where an early preview resides. A quality look in fact with a link over to treocentral. and suddenly I’m in not such a rush to own one.

While I haven’t seen any research that supports this, I suspect readers instantaneous ability to triangulate news places an even greater onus on media relations teams to get the news out to all the outlets relevant to their audiences in a fairer and more systematic way. If you look at the example above you will also see the need to manage a much deeper and more powerful ecosystem. Content isn’t buried in newsgroups any more, it’s on the web in living color.

Non traditional news sources are now need to be a key component of companies’ communications strategy. Not doing so in my mind reduces the credibility and impact of not just the news but also the company.

And as readers, we will look for diversity of opinion and reporting style. There couldn’t be a greater contrast than The Register and The Wall Street Journal but I value them equally as sources. And they are one tab, blog – and one RSS feed, away from my cursor. Media are coming under greater pressure to report accurately and with smarts. Dan Rather can’t hide from sloppy journalism. No one can.

New news channels call for new strategies. Effective communicators will increasingly look to instigate a direct dialogue with their audiences and communities outside of the press release or any particular media outlet.

Enter the blog. And as the blog spreads virally through the media food chain the reader can triangulate content, determining the credibility and importance of the news on their terms. News will become less engineered by public relations teams and much fresher.

A new information ecosystem is emerging with new critters altering the food-chain. And some will end up extinct.

Nice piece in Business 2.0 on blogging featuring our very own Jonathan and James.

Have Blog, Will Market
Business 2.0, 9/30/04; Thomas Mucha

Jonathan Schwartz is a blogging addict. He is also the president and chief
operating officer of Sun Microsystems (SUNW) — a company at the forefront
of a new marketing and communications trend that mixes blogging with
business. (For the rapidly shrinking minority who don’t know what I’m
talking about, a weblog — or blog — is a personal journal on the Web
that’s devoted to politics, science, product reviews, or just about anything
else you can imagine.) In his corporate blog, Schwartz, naturally, covers
the world of Sun. In his latest entry, which focuses on a trip he took last
week to Wall Street, he juxtaposes snippets of his Manhattan dinner
conversations with Sun’s recent work on “radical form factor compression.”

The Sun president’s Web writing style — open, honest, ever geeky — is a
hit. Schwartz’s blog reaches more than 100,000 readers per month, a number
that has grown exponentially during the blog’s three-month existence. “I’m
stunned by the breadth of it,” he says. Surprise aside, it’s easy to see why
a busy bigwig like Schwartz might take the time to operate what some view as
a nerdish hobby. “It is an efficient way for me to have a focused,
one-on-one conversation with thousands of people — shareholders, customers,
employees, and the digerati that circle this industry,” Schwartz explains.

The blogging COO is not alone, even at his own company. Sun’s chief
technology officer, James Gosling, runs his own blog too. So do the
company’s top marketing manager, chief technology evangelist, and hundreds
of other lowly Sun employees. Technorati, a San Francisco-based company that
studies traffic on the emerging “blogosphere,” reports that today there are
about 5,000 serious corporate blogs that, like Sun’s, have the backing and
at least some participation of senior management. The blogging trend itself
is pretty mind-boggling: Technorati tracks more than 4 million blogs and
says a new one is created every 5.8 seconds. And a study by the Pew Internet
and American Life Project found that more than 53 million people — 11
percent of all Internet users — have read or contributed to blogs. So it’s
no surprise that marketers want a piece of the action.