Author Archive
Interview with Emmett Buell Jr., co-author of Attack Politics
Every election we hear endless analysis about who is going negative and who’s being pulled into the mud, as if there was some courtly golden age when politicians would not spew invective to gain any advantage. Attack Politics, by Dr. Emmett Buell Jr. and Lee Sigelman, confirms that, yes, presidential politics is nasty. But, in analyzing 17,000 campaign statements extracted from nearly 11,000 news items in the New York Times since 1960, they find that presidential campaigns have actually gotten a bit more civil. Buell counts the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon campaign as the most acrimonious and believes that Obama’s campaign might have been the least negative.
Buell also takes issue with the entire idea of “negative campaigning” as a pejorative term, saying that there’s really no way for a candidate to take on substantive issues or differentiate himself from an opponent without attacking their record and 
hitting potentially personal issues like ethics and judgement. What might be most surprising is that while the front runner is generally less negative than the candidates that are trailing, there are few strategic rules that seem to hold up race to race. If there’s a formula or a tried-and-true playbook, it hasn’t been found.
I asked Dr. Buell to talk about the book because campaigns are the most dynamic, high-stakes communication exercise their is. Buell and Sigelman go through the communications strategy/positioning/messaging of each presidential campaign since 1960, showing what worked and what didn’t, backing up their conclusions with a wealth of details from historical accounts, poll data and from their own research in the NYT. It’s a great read for anyone who works in communication and at one time or another has had to weigh the risks and benefits of “going negative.
Futurity Editor Jenny Leonard on Filling the Journalism Void
As newspaper and magazine newsrooms clear out, people who depended on getting coverage from those reporters are searching for alternatives. One option is to simply hire the reporters themselves. The Los Angeles Kings hockey team has hired former Los Angeles Daily News reporter Rich Hammond, and Major League Baseball has hired a reporter to cover every team for MLB.com (see NYT story).
Another approach is to create your own publication. That’s what 40 research universities in the U.S. (Stanford, Princeton, U of M) have done. Frustrated by the lack of science coverage, they are collaborating on an online publication called Futurity. Since March Futurity has published over 500 stories covering health, medicine, science, design, earth, the environment, culture and society.
Many of the articles are based on peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals, so the PR departments basically just have to translate the scientific jargon into language everyone can understand. Futurity only publishes papers that will be relevant to a general audience with an interest in science, so there is no slogging through inside-baseball science. The writing is sharp, very accessible, and not so different from what you would read in a typical newspaper.
Jenny Leonard, a writer/editor with the University of Rochester’s communications department is Futurity’s editor. She said that concerns about how PR people can provide “fair and balanced” coverage miss the point of Futurity.
“Futurity was not designed to be a replacement for science reporting by journalists,” said Leonard. “Most of the universities involved would rather turn the clock back and have science reporting flourishing and independent reporters covering their stories. Futurity was conceived not as a replacement for journalism, but as a way for universities to react to the current void.”
Tech and biotech companies are facing a similar situation as technology and science trades lose reporters and the remaining print editions continue to thin. Companies will soon have little choice but to create their own media. And once the trades are online I think the playing field between “corporate journalism” and the journalism we see in trades will level considerably in terms of its ability to pull readers. PR, marcom, online community, social media and customer reference functions will merge and companies will have to find that line between promoting their own products and producing credible content that people will read.
Podcast interview guide:
0:48 — Q: How did Futurity get started?.
2:22 – Q: How many visitors to site?
3:45 – Q: How do you provide “fair and balanced” coverage?
5:30 – Q: What are guidelines for publishing criticism of any of these papers?
7:09 – Q: Are the researchers joining in the online conversation?
8:18 – Q: How many stories have you produced?
9:08 – Q: What has the reaction been from reporters and are you getting more press pickup?
DotSpots’ Farhad Mohit on Pervasive Wikis, Google’s SideWiki and Information Militias
I ran across DotSpots in Jerimiah Owyang’s blog yesterday, which was about SideWiki, a google tool that essentially puts a wiki in a side column on every website if you choose to opt in. Call it a pervasive wiki. Someone mentioned that DotSpots did the same thing. I called up DotSpot founder and CEO Farhad Mohit to see if that was true, to find out what he thought of SideWiki and whether complete transparency on the web – everyone being able to comment on everything, everywhere – was a good thing.
Mohit, who founded Bizrate and Shopzilla, said his business is focused on journalism, whereas SideWiki is focused on the larger web community.
“Our focus will be to enhance the news, their [Google’s] focus will be to enhance all websites. We are already discussing possible ways of sending our data into them and getting their data into us. I think we’re both mutually supportive of each other.”
The DotSpots semantic annotation system allows anyone to attach text, photos or video to any meme (block of text) and to have that annotation instantly distributed to all relevant blocks of text across the Internet. According to Mohit this will bring the “wisdom of crowds” to journalism and help level the playing field between professional reporters and citizen journalists.
If he can get a few thousand citizen journalists, activists and bloggers to contribute, DotSpots will have enough content to sell Dotspot to media outlets as a social media news service, said Mohit. DotSpots gives traditional media a plug-and-play way to incorporate social media into their stories, according to Mohit.
“CNN ended up handling a lot of its Iran election coverage by pointing a camera at a twitter feed. Obviously they are not equipped to handle what is happening here [in social media]. They are worried that people are leaving their site to go to other places on the web for information. Why not just enable a system like DotSpots to bring in information militias to populate your stories?”
There is no solid business model yet, but Mohit said if adoption takes off that he is confident something will emerge. The value for news outlets is people staying longer on the pages and therefor more engaged with advertising
DotSpots' Farhad Mohit on Wikis, Google's Sidewiki and the Future of News [22:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadPodcast interview with Paul Chaney, author of The Digital Handshake
The world of social media can be a bit daunting. Every day new applications and companies are launched and others fade into obscurity. Jargon is coined, buzzwords and acronyms are applied liberally. In the face of all this, Paul Chaney’s new book, The Digital Handshake, serves as a kind of field guide for the uninitiated.
While he breaks down the the reasons social media is eclipsing mass media in marketing and PR, most of the book is structured as a social media how-to lesson. Chaney walks the reader through seven social media tools (blogging, social networks, online communities, twitter, video, podcasting, social media news release and other odds and ends). The book goes over the major applications in each category, the pros and cons of each product, a huge help if you are trying to figure out which of the hundreds of vendors you should try for your business.
Finally, Chaney walks you through how a social media strategy could be implemented for an actual company. Chaney is a clear, concise writer who keeps the emphasis on practical instruction rather than the big picture, which will be a huge help to many. Chaney is Internet marketing director for Bizzuka, a Web design, content management and online marketing company based in Lafayette, LA. His site is thesocialmediahandyman.com
Podcast interview with Bill Wasik, author of “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture”
Bill Wasik’s new book “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture” perfectly diagnoses the creeping Information Age anxiety of anyone who is trying to keep up with the online culture/news churn. Now that we can all produce our own newspaper/radio/TV, we begin to view the world as editors and producers, which is to say, ultimately as marketers, and that has changed the way we look at events and at ourselves.
“You monitor and you scheme and you promote, just like the hit-addled corporate culture has been teaching you for years. Because when your words or actions or art are available not only to your friends, but to potentially thousands or even millions of strangers, it changes how you act, what you say, how you see yourself. You become aware of yourself as a character on a stage, as a public figure with a meaning. You develop, that is, the media mind. You know exactly what you are doing.”
Wasik, a senior editor for Harper’s is a sharp, funny writer and the book is very entertaining. Wasik takes us through six viral experiments he performs that show the upside and downside of the global village. To get a taste of it, check out his recent NYT opinion piece or go to his blog at www.billwasik.com
Podcast interview with Pamela Shoemaker, author of Gatekeeping Theory
In her new book Gatekeeping Theory Pamela Shoemaker explains the journalistic gatekeeping process that ultimately decides what news runs and what doesn’t. Shoemaker shows how the process has, and has not, evolved since the first gatekeeping study in 1950. Shoemaker is the John Ben Snow Professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Shoemaker co-authored the book with Tim Vos, an assistant professor of Journalism Studies at the University of Missouri.
Podcast interview with Erik Qualman, author of “Socialnomics”
I recently had a chance to talk with Erik Qualman who has put together a great read called “Socialnomics” on how social media works and how businesses can use it. For companies that are trying to figure out what they should do to get involved in social media he suggests that they not let the perfect be the enemy of the good: simply put on foot in front of the other and start doing something. His advice is to first figure out where your audience is and how your brand is being perceived and then figure out how to create a relevant conversation. That may involve a lot of failure, according to Qualman.
For instance, about 3.7 million users a month use a TripAdvisor applications that enables them to put pins on a map of where they’ve been. While it looks like a no-brainer in retrospect, Qualman said TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer said you have to be prepared to fail a lot to get a winner.
“He said `You have no idea how many iterations we did, not related to that idea, that failed, but the key for us was the idea that speed wins, that we just have to keep doing rather than deliberating.
Podcast interview with Lindsay Zaltman, author of Marketing Metaphoria
Whether people are selling toasters or a national healthcare policy, the tried and true marketing method tends to be a laundry list of features and benefits, a logical, left-brained approach to persuasion. Linguistics guru George Lakoff showed how disastrous this approach has been for Democrats over the past 30 years in Don’t Think of an Elephant, the first popular look at the importance of metaphor in persuasive communication. The book details how Republicans have sidestepped the policy details and succeeded by instead focusing on the subconscious metaphorical “frames” that people hold in their minds on issues.
In Marketing Metaphoria, Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman show how appealing to people’s metaphorical understanding of the world applies equally to selling everything from cell phones to hearing aids. The father and son team (Gerald, a former HBS professsor and author of How Customers Think) explain the their method for working with marketing teams to find the metaphors that will best speak to their customer’s understanding of a product.
Most people learned the word “metaphor” in lit class and think of it, sometimes hazily, as a sophisticated literary device for writers. In fact, most people use five to six metaphors a minute in conversation, according to Zaltman, managing director of Olson Zaltman Associates, a marketing consultancy. Using a metaphor is simply thinking of one experience in terms of another. If you say, “I destroyed his argument,” you are using war as a metaphor for verbal argument.
Metaphors are how humans categorize, or frame our experiences and there are 16 metaphors that are universal across all cultures, according to Zaltman. The seven most common metaphors are Balance, Container, Connection, Control, Resource, Journey, Transformation.
One example is the metaphor of Balance, such as “I feel out of kilter,” or “I feel more centered after my vacation.” Zaltman says the Balance family of metaphors are likely derived from our shared experience of growing up and learning to do things like walk or drink from a cup without spilling. We later take this idea and apply it to things like our mental or emotional state.
For marketers, metaphors are a way to literally learn how customers think about a product and to build communication to accommodate their frame of mind. For instance, Zaltman found that people view diamonds through a Journey metaphor framework because they look at diamonds as kind of mile markers in life. A hearing aid company found that their customers found experienced their product through a Container frame, in terms of the product enabling them to escape the limits their hearing imposed on them.
This also works with B-to-B products. For instance, Cisco felt it was missing emotion in its brand. After working with Zaltman, they found they found was that there was an huge emotional response to the metaphor of Connection in their audience and that led to the company’s successful “Human Network” campaign, which is now three years old.
Lindsay Zaltman, co-author of Marketing Metaphoria
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Interview with Lindsay Zaltman, author of Marketing Metaphoria [25:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadThree finds: Shirky, Jenkins, Rubel
Several things I ran across today while looking for other things:
Clay Shirky’s March 13 piece on the end of newspapers, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” is the best analysis I’ve read about the decline of paper-based journalism. Shirky draws a parallel between the advent of the Internet and the printing press, noting that the printing press was followed by 200 years of chaos (the decline of the Catholic Church as the center of power until the Treaty of Westphalia). Nothing will save it; something will emerge; we don’t know what. A great read. For anyone who is knew to Shirky, his speech at TED awhile back about traditional institutional organization versus net-based collaboration is also a brilliant bit of thinking and a really well-crafted speech.
Ditto for Henry Jenkins‘ talk “Welcome to Convergence Culture: Consumer Participation and Branded Entertainment” (available through Stanford’s iTunes U under the Humanities Center icon, the fourth speech). Jenkins specialty is fan culture, particularly as it organizes on the web, but more broadly with all kinds of web-based participatory culture. It seems like a lot of his theories and approach should also apply to marketing well outside of entertainment.
Also discovered one of the best PR blogs I’ve found anywhere, Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion. He makes an interesting case for the end of the “destination web,” as social networking sites eclipse static sites in relevance, a case that Peter Kim also supports in a subsequent post.
Book review: Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte
Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, a new book on slide presentations by Nancy Duarte, shows us that our PowerPoints are on the whole ineffective and tedious because, 1) we don’t learn and apply the basics of design, and 2) we just don’t put enough work into our presentations. Duarte’s book is probably the best book out there to help you with the design part, offering the benefit of her 20 years in the business.
Duarte, who did Al Gore’s slides for “Inconvenient Truth,” starts with some basics about developing your ideas – work with paper and pencil to develop your ideas, and then use Post-It notes (they can only hold a single idea) to work out your slide flow. Once you know what you want to say, the challenge is to figure out how it should look graphically. Duarte spends a chapter on how to develop diagrams and gives dozens of examples of the six most common types (flow, structure, cluster, radiate, pictoral, dispay data), an incredibly handy reference guide. Similarly, the chapter on displaying your data on slides gives many practical rules of thumb (“Avoid decorating your data: ornamentation can detract from credibility.”) that will make a huge improvement in anyone’s slides.
The chapters on thinking like a designer, offer sophisticated design advice explained with clear, simple writing and many illustrations. The basics of presentation design (contrast, flow, hierarchy, unity, proximity, whitespace), rules for using background, color, text and image are all covered in just enough detail to give you the tools to significantly improve your presentations, but not overwhelm you.
Finally, Duarte explains frankly that better design requires more work to prepare and better presentation skills – if you don’t write everything out on the slide, you’re going to have to practice more.
Duarte’s book is beautiful and inspiring for anyone who wants to give better presentations; the writing is sharp and the impressive layout and graphic examples shows why she’s the one who does Al Gore’s slides.