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.

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.

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.

A story on Thursday by Jackie Range and Scott Patterson in the Wall Street Journal, quoted the company in a statement sent by email as saying, “`The audits were conducted by Pricewaterhouse in accordance with applicable auditing standards and were supported by appropriate audit evidence.’ It said it is cooperating with regulators.”

Clearly that statement does not square with the massive, multiyear fraud Satyam’s CEO has admitted to. PCW’s job was to prevent such a fraud, and the investigation will bring its shortcomings to light. PCW will probably be sued. That’s what happens when auditors don’t do their job. Regardless, its highest priority now should be to save what is most valuable — its brand – by demonstrating it has integrity and can be trusted.

The steps to do that are basic crisis communications 101:
•    Apologize for what is clearly a shortcoming on PCW’s part, particularly to the Satyam shareholders
•    Reassure it’s own customers and the public that it will identify the problem quickly and fix it
•    Ask for help from peers and regulators in the process
•    Relentlessly (daily) report on the progress of this investigation until no one wants to listen anymore

While everyone agrees that this is the way to handle crisis communications, few companies can see their way past the organizational panic a scandal like this causes, to do so. Satyam has appropriately been called the Indian Enron; it will be interesting to see what parallels can also be drawn between the communications “strategies” of the auditors who failed to detect these frauds. In the 2001 Enron scandal it was Arthur Andersen that was doing the seal talking.

Do the Right Thing

Enron announced that the SEC was investigating its accounting practices on Oct. 22, 2001. On Nov. 29 the SEC announced it would begin investigating Arthur Andersen. According to a search on BusinessWire and PR Newswire (the Arthur Andersen site is no more) it wasn’t until Nov. 30, more than a month after the scandal was public, that Andersen issued a public statement.

That release simply said that Deloitte & Touche would expand the scope of its peer review (accounting firms doing routine, voluntary reviews of other accounting firms), which had been going on for eight months, to include other offices, including Houston (Enron’s headquarters).

“In light of recent developments, we believe that extending the peer review to include work done in other offices, including Houston, and other procedures that Deloitte & Touche deems appropriate and necessary is the right thing to do,” CEO Joseph Berardino said in the release.

Issues are Broad and Complex

That bold declaration of leadership was followed on Dec. 4 by a joint release from the Big Five accounting firms — Andersen, KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young – that is as desperate, obtuse and evasive as any I’ve ever read. The first three paragraphs:

“As with other business failures, the collapse of Enron has drawn attention to the accounting profession, our role in America’s financial markets and our public responsibilities.  We recognize that a strong, diligent, and effective profession is a critically important component of the financial reporting system and fundamental to maintaining investor confidence in our capital markets. We take our responsibility seriously.

The issues are broad and complex.  When businesses fail and public confidence wanes, all involved in the capital markets have a responsibility to actively seek to understand the core problems and pursue meaningful solutions. We encourage other market participants to engage in self-scrutiny and take significant steps.

Working together, our five firms are committing our attention and resources to evaluate and chart a course to address issues important to investors. We are also committed to future action based on insights gained from current events.”

When you have to emphatically say “We take our responsibility seriously” in the first paragraph, it’s a good sign that your actions probably aren’t supporting that claim. If PCW has the stomach to take the PR hit up front, level with the public and find the problems that caused the Satyam meltdown, it could save itself and discover that the press release can be a company’s best friend in a crisis.