Context & Continuity

WSJ, 3.29.10: Nestlé Takes a Beating on Social-Media Sites

Well, now the worm turns.  Nestlé hasn't been a worldwide corporate hero for, oh, a couple of decades.  Between baby formula, candy bars, deforestation of the rain forests,

Here's from the WSJ: 

Greenpeace, which is coordinating the protest, says Nestlé hasn't done enough, and is continuing to buy the disputed firm's oil in blended batches sold by third-party suppliers.

Nestlé says it is pressuring its providers to scrutinize their supply chains to keep that from happening, but it has had trouble making itself heard above the din. The difficulty with social media, says Ms. Backes, is "to show that we are listening, which we obviously are, while not getting involved in a shouting match."

Activist groups have long used Web sites, grass-roots email campaigns and videos to publicize their causes. But the attack on Nestlé is part of a new wave of digitally savvy protests, marketing experts say.

"This is the place where major corporations are very vulnerable," says Daniel Kessler, press officer at Greenpeace.

[more]

I'm fascinated, by the use of social media as attack media, probably because someday I'll be I have figure out how to defend a company that's under attack. 

Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2009: How multitasking leads to ignorance

I heard about multitasking a long time ago, in the context of computing.  But then more and more people talk about how they multitasking.  Well, I'm surely not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I knew that people who claimed they could multitask had no idea what they were talking about. 

There is a wonderful article in the Winter 2010 issue of Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine, about the danger of multitasking.  In a article called Busy Signal, by Andrew Olendzki, he approaches the topic from a Buddhist perspective.  Here are some excerpt:

When the Buddha says, "I know of now single thing ore conducive to great harm than an unrestrained mind," 
When the mind tries to do several things at once, it does not do any of them every well. 
This is an empirical act proven by numerous experiments, and it is easy to test out for yourself:  try texting a message while catching the latest baseball scorese on the radio and discussing some recent relationship difficulty with your partner. 

Meanwhile, peace is accessible .  This, too, is an empirically demonstrable fact:  try turning off the radio, the phone, the computer, and the TV;  sit comfortable, in a quiet place, relaxing the body and mind; mindfully breathe in, mindfully breathe out, and abandon -- just for now -- any thought or response the tends to disperse and divide your awareness. 

[more]

NYTimes, 3.30.10: Fluttering Feet, and Now Fingers That Tweet

And so we reach and new "spin" on the Tweeter-sphere.  According to the NYTimes,  According to the Times, ballet dancers are tweeting about their careers and experiences.   For me, this raises a couple of interesting questions:

1.    Let's say that a percussionist in the rear of the SF Symphony decided to make comments about his fellow players and, perhaps even Michael Tilson Thomas.  What would you do about that?

2.  On the other hand, this is a rare and fascinating to engaging the audience.

3.    On the third hand, if I was the PR-guy for the artistic company engaged in Twitter, I would absolutely stop every negative comment, find people who consistently post positive and then watch them like a hawk.  Hey, it isn't a brilliant strategy, but I'm not writing about anything too complicated.

By the way, read this tweet post about Peter Martins:  "I've heard the voice of God nd he is and angry God with a Danish accent who doesn't like my acting."  I think I found the first nomination to have their texting privileges taken away from them.  

And one more thing, I get the whole idea about the internet finding censorship and routing around it.  I'm just believe a best effort and conveying the message that harsh criticize probably isn't good for one's career.  It simply lacks and esprit d;corps. 

NYTimes, 3.22.10: Take $787 Billion. Now Show Where It’s Going.

Tufte has been a hero of mine for quite some time and has been done tremendous work for decades on exploring the the world of clear graphics and "chartjunk" (his term) for decades.  The NYTimes caught up with him yesterday and caught up with what he's been up to (a lot).  He's helping the Federal Government help communicate what they're upto with their website recovery.gov.  

Rather than define himself on the conservative-liberal political continuum, Mr. Tufte, a professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale, said that he longed for cause-and-effect reasoning to take hold in Washington.

“Political practice today too often skips right by evidence,” he said by e-mail. “When I listen to True Believers (left or right) talk about the problems that governments are seeking to solve, I keep muttering to myself, ‘How boring, it’s more complicated than that.’ And those who best know that it’s more complicated than that are public servants.”   [more]

I can highly recommend all of his books, but his first one,

What You Should Have Read in this Sunday's NYTimes.

Texts Without Context

Michiko Kakutani has written an amazing summary of how the internet has changed culture.  Highly recommended.

It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.” [more]

W. Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft Project

As the Book Review’s photography editor, I often choose pictures for the brief art feature that appears on the page with our Fiction or Nonfiction Chronicle. Usually it’s a pleasurable undertaking. As we prepared the issue of March 21, however, the necessity of choosing only one lone photograph to illustrate “The Jazz Loft Project” — Sam Stephenson’s account of the amazingly rich and original body of work accumulated by the photographer W. Eugene Smith between 1957 and 1965 — was somewhat difficult. [more]
 
And I can also recommend the radio series produced by the fabulous Sara Fishko and accompanies the book. [more]

Just Give Him 5 Sentences, Not ‘War and Peace’

My thinking was: I’m a natural leader, so I’m going to study what’s hard and mathematical like finance and operations research, not the touchy-feely stuff that would be easy.

When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people. The warm, fuzzy stuff is hard. The quantitative stuff is easy — you either don’t do much of this as a manager or you have people working for you to do it.  [more]

Acid Test

Lattin’s book can be viewed partly as a prequel to Wolfe’s. By the time the Merry Pranksters took their show on the road, the West Coast’s anarchic aggression had pretty much rolled over what the relatively disciplined East Coasters had tried to bottle, label and dispense with care. After Harvard, Leary and Alpert had decamped to an estate in Millbrook, N.Y., continuing their efforts to tap into higher consciousness in a controlled setting. When Ken Kesey’s Pranksters showed up, as Wolfe tells it, they encountered “one big piece of uptight constipation.” [more]

' The Whore’s Secret

 Some stories need to be told in a whisper. “Blooms of Darkness,” the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld’s majestic and humane new novel, takes place in an unnamed Ukrainian city during World War II. As the Germans begin liquidating the city’s Jewish population, Julia, a pharmacist whose husband has already been sent to a labor camp, smuggles her 11-year-old son, Hugo, out of the ghetto. Their journey through the sewer pipes leads them to a house on the outskirts of town, where Julia entrusts Hugo to the care of an old friend, Mariana, before taking flight herself. Mariana, as Hugo will discover, is a prostitute, while the house — known simply as “the Residence” — is a brothel catering to the Nazi occupiers. [more]  A million years ago, when I worked for the fabulous Lois Shapiro, זיכרונה לברכה  I did some work on Appelfeld's book, Tzili: The Story of a Life.  

Dostoyevsky and Me

At the conference, they all meet up with Babel’s disgruntled 74-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Nathalie, whose voice is “fathomless, sepulchral, with heavy French r’s.” “I cannot hear, I cannot see, I cannot walk,” Nathalie complains, adding darkly, “Everyone thinks I am always drunk.” Later, taking the micro­phone at a panel on biography, Nathalie announces, “I am confused.” And again: “I am confused.” At the panel’s concluding dinner, she rails, “Is it true that you despise me?” Sotto voce (one hopes), a dinner guest remarks to the conference’s organizer, “I hear that Slavic department enrollments are declining in the United States.” “Oh, do you?” the organizer responds. “Well, you’re probably right.”  [more]

Prison, Day 1

“O'K., are you ready?” I nodded. “Well, say goodbye. It could be a while until he can visit.” She took a symbolic step away from us, I guess to give us privacy. I hurled myself into Larry’s arms, holding on as tight as I could. I had no idea when I would see him again, or what would happen to me in the next 15 months.  [more]

The Optimist’s Blogger

Curbed’s open derision can certainly infuriate the city’s developers and brokers. But none of them will say an unkind word about Steele. In part that’s surely because he wields a certain amount of power: after what you just read, would you buy a unit in Palazzo Grey? But it’s also because Curbed appeals to so many audiences: real-estate daydreamers; neighborhood residents who mourn the loss of local news in other venues; and industry professionals for whom Curbed is essential reading and, for top brokerages like Corcoran, Stribling and Prudential Douglas Elliman, an advertising venue. Above all, Curbed has become a buyer’s tip sheet.  [more]

Rethinking Sex Offender Laws for Youth Texting

In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come.  But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook. [more]

Good News?

From today's NYTimes, this headline caught my eye:  Most Online News Readers use 5 Sites or Fewer, Study Says.   The story is a brief report on a new Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. 

This paragraph interested me: 

In the Pew survey, just 7 percent of people said they would be willing to pay for access to any news site. And even among the people who are most loyal to a single site, only 19 percent said they would pay, rather than seek free news somewhere else.

I'm interested in the idea about the proposition of asking people whether they're willing to pay for something they're getting for free.  But the other thing that interested me was something that didn't appear in the online version of the story: 

But 57 percent of the audience relies on just two to five sites.  The findings parallel studies that say that people with hundreds of television channels tend to stick to a relative handful.

This is a  link to the Pew Study.   

There are a lot of different angles on this story that interest me.

People with hundreds of television channels tend to watch only a handful, which riles me because I can't buy my Comcast al a carte.  

How does the USA compare to the UK where some people read three or more newspapers a day.

Isn't is a good thing that people are getting news from more different sources.  When I think about myself, an how I have such a limited news diet of just the the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.   (Okay, and more than a few blog, lots of radio, and just a few television shows.

David Strom: Pay Attention.

I try to pay attention to the smartest people in the room.  And David Strom has been the smartest guy in the IT room for quite some time.  He's made a post today about using laptops on airplanes that will make you think twice about updating that .ppt on the way to the meeting.

The problem is that most people get lost in the wonderfulness of the Web and tend to forget that their seatmates can watch every move, see every keystroke (it doesn’t take much to follow along, especially at the speed that many people type), and collect all sorts of information. By the end of one flight I was on, I had Larry (not his real name) the HP sales rep’s Amazon account, read several of his emails, got to see his new sales presentations that HP corporate sales office had sent him, figured out that he was a recent hire as he was checking HP’s Intranet to understand some corporate travel policies, found out who his clients that he had just visited were, and more.

Now, I wasn’t really paying that much attention. I was tired, and just wanted to be left by myself for the trip. And I think we exchanged maybe ten words between us all told. But if I really wanted to do some damage, I could be all over Larry’s accounts by now (he had some nice taste from what I could see he was looking for on Amazon, too).

[more]

My Estimation of Brandis Withers....

Following the players: FTP’s traveling ‘Guildenstern’ amuses

by Kayla Dos Santos

March 12, 2010

Clever stage direction and stellar acting made the Free Play Theatre Cooperative’s production “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” an enjoyable experience. However, Tom Stoppard’s uneven and muddled script left the audience feeling dissatisfied.

....

Unfortunately, the play faltered when, at turns, it became serious. This was not from poor acting, but from the script’s abrupt shifts in tone. The main characters would be laughing one minute and hyperventilating from grief and fear the next. There seemed to be no real transitions, thus creating the issue that the audience did not know whether to empathize with their grief or to laugh at it.

The play also suffered from attempting to juggle too many themes: death, reality, fate, the acting experience—all set against the backdrop of “Hamlet.” While separately the themes were interesting and led to enlightening philosophical discussions between the main characters, especially concerning the nature of and acceptance of death, taken all together the themes were a confusing mess.

[more]

Soldier , Mr. Stoppard.   Soldier on.  I wouldn't let Ms Dos Santos cause you to be dispiritied

Strategy and Business: Five Gates to Innovation

This article starts off a bit slow]but then an interesting opinion  on innovation.

,As the Gorilla project raced toward its last stage gate, it soaked up more and more resources at Corning; as a result, other projects had to be pared away. Keeping business units motivated in the face of cutbacks is one of the toughest challenges in managing innovation. Corning’s response is to maintain the backlog of development efforts as live but unstaffed and to avoid laying off researchers in favor of moving them to ongoing development programs. “If there is an absence of pull in the marketplace, a fundamental flaw in the technology, or if the investment is unaffordable, the project manager is responsible for bringing that information forward,” CTO Miller says. “He’ll do that if he feels safe that if we shut it down, his people are going someplace else within the company. Otherwise, self-preservation kicks in.

[more]

McKinsey Quarterly: The Internet of Things.

I've been involved in hooking up things like light bulbs, refrigerators, HVAC, security, etc. to the internet ever since Ken Oshman came up with the bright idea for a company called, Echelon.  (That would turn the dial back to a breath-taking 1989, dear.) 

Anyhow, the McKinsey Quarterly has now had sufficient time to ruminate on the topic and brings their thoughts forward to us. 

Here are some of their pearls of wisdom:

But the predictable pathways of information are changing: the physical world itself is becoming a type of information system. In what’s called the Internet of Things, sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects—from roadways to pacemakers—are linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet. These networks churn out huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis. When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly. What’s revolutionary in all this is that these physical information systems are now beginning to be deployed, and some of them even work largely without human intervention.

...

The widespread adoption of the Internet of Things will take time, but the time line is advancing thanks to improvements in underlying technologies. Advances in wireless networking technology and the greater standardization of communications protocols make it possible to collect data from these sensors almost anywhere at any time. Ever-smaller silicon chips for this purpose are gaining new capabilities, while costs, following the pattern of Moore’s Law, are falling. Massive increases in storage and computing power, some of it available via cloud computing, make number crunching possible at very large scale and at declining cost.

....

Companies can begin taking steps now to position themselves for these changes by using the new technologies to optimize business processes in which traditional approaches have not brought satisfactory returns. Energy consumption efficiency and process optimization are good early targets. Experiments with the emerging technologies should be conducted in development labs and in small-scale pilot trials, and established companies can seek partnerships with innovative technology suppliers creating Internet-of-Things capabilities for target industries.

[more]

Recovery.

I've been thinking about this word lately for two reasons:  first, reality TV is chock-a-block with shows about people going into 'recovery' for numerous reasons and this has led to a society with recovery on the mind.  In fact on one of the recent network morning shows, a woman advocating pre-emptive recovery was interviewed. 

Of course the second reason, the word 'recovery' is being bandied about regarding our economy.  And, just the other day, Mr. Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup and probably one of the smartest people in any room, told a Congregational committee that he believed his industry needed more regulation -- eventhough he believed that his own company was well in hand.  

And suddenly these two definitions of Recovery collapsed in my mind.  Now, I don't know that much about twelve-step programs, but as I re-call one of the first steps in recovery is admitting one is out of control.  --So now I'm wondering if we will be able to move beyond this addmition of lack of control and move on the the second, third and subsequent steps in our twelve step program.

Which brings me to another point, one that literally caused me to tear up over my morning coffee and newspapers.  Specifically, it was a report about education in the U.S. and where various states and the Distric of Columbia rank.  And that made me think of values.  And that made me think about the people in this country who can't get healthcare.  And then that made me think about the fearless sons and daughters we're sending to rick their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.  --And that made me think about Values again.  

And I found myself wondering, out loud, where are our values?  What have we done to walk so far away from values that so many of us believe in personally but collectively,  They vanish like the fog in my neck of the words as the sun climbs towards its zenith. 

In my tradition, we would say it is a shandra that our government, the institution that's supposed to be in our service is such a disservice to so many and a stumbling block. 

The Agency of the Future: Be Still My Heart

I refuse to go into much detail on this as I having a paying client to serve, but I must bring this article to your attention, if for nothing else to cause you distress or amusement.  Your choice.

Ms. Jodi Harris, who we can tell from her picture, is not some wizened much less long time experienced observer of the Public Relation scene, reports on a speech by Bryan Weiner, CEO of 360i made at something called the IAB Ecosystem conference held last week in Carlsbad, Calif.  Her reporting includes the following:

"It's time to leave the pessimism behind. This represents an unprecedented opportunity for agencies to become indispensable marketing partners," said Weiner...

Not to be too catty, but I've always believed deeply in my heart that pessimism was Very Counter Productive for agency life.  

If marketers want to radically impact change in the marketing ecosystem, it starts with how you allocate dollars.

Well, that's Painfully Obvious for some of us who have toiled in the Public Relations fields for almost any length of time. 

Think about how your property can serve as a conduit for deeper interactions between brands and consumers.

I'm just going to leave this nugget from Ms. Harris in the file marked "cryptic."

Here's a real good one:

Yet the fact remains: Advertising is about getting consumers to be product and service advocates. To be able to do that today, agencies need to find innovative solutions, and do so at reasonable prices.

I double dare you to walk into the cube of anyone responsible for spending precious corporate dollars on advertising to support this idea.  I have met and worked with the folks, some from our most highly esteemed companies and can honest report to you that advertising is about selling more stuff to more people.  Nevertheless, as a Public Relations guy, I'm happy for anyone to take a shot at Advertising.

As Weiner sees it, the model for the agency of the future doesn't exist yet, but marketers can help create it in their own environments by focusing all their efforts toward meeting client needs.

Well, that's probably why the speech is about the Agency of the (wait for it) ...Future.

Again, I apologize in advance for taking such a cheap shot at this reporter and the story.  I'm an almost old and certainly crusty PR guy who has seen how the business works (and doesn't work) and I become annoyed when people who obviously have know idea what they're talking about blow some of their bloviation in my direction. 

[link to story]

That's all for now except to wish you a great weekend.