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Can PR get past spinnage?

January 21, 2008 in Future, News, problems | 3 comments

That’s a question I raise and answer in the affirmative with What open code developers can teach PR, over at Linux Journal, following up on this post from several days ago. Some key points:

  Focusing on influence alone suggests that PR is just looking to expand the spin business from old media to new, and from old targets to new ones. There are other corners of the prism, other angles to come at the problems and opportunities in around conversation and relationship...
  To me the best of blogging isn’t measured by influence, popularity, traffic or the money that measurement of those bring in the from advertising. In fact, I’m not sure what makes blogging good is measurable at all. That’s because what makes makes blogging good is nothing more than being interesting, useful or both...
  What makes a snowball roll is not influence. It’s participation. Barns are not raised by neighbors in thrall of “A-list” farmers. They are raised by people who know how to build barns, and who know and work with the farmer who needs the barn. Which brings me to why I’m bringing this up here in Linux Journal.
  Software development has been going through a huge and important change over the last fifteen years, during which the bulk of it has moved out of the corporate sphere and into the social one. Today there are over 500,000 open source code bases, and that doesn’t even count ones that are essentially open but not happening inside SourceForge or other familiar venues. Those code bases have grown around use value rather than sale value — a critical distinction that Eric S. Raymond described eloquently in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
  Most or all of those half-million development efforts are the code equivalents of barns. Some are raised by single developers. Others are raised by groups. Few are happening exclusively inside companies…
  Looking for whom to influence, and how to measure that, is at best necessary but insufficient to the larger purposes of contribution and usefulness. And the hard part with both is that you can’t just measure them with money.

Hope it helps.

Doing the Big Thing

January 19, 2008 in News, problems | 10 comments

With Time Warner Cable does the right thing, David Isenberg breaks ranks with fellow net neutrality advocates by lauding Time Warner Cable’s “plan to charge more when you send or receive more Internet data”. David explains,

  If the problem is, indeed, congestion, or the related problem that a few “bandwidth hogs” are using more than their share of the network’s capacity, tiered pricing is a simple, straightforward solution.

In this statement David not far off Adam Thierer at The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog, in his post Broadband metering experiment in the works in Texas.

They’re coming from different angles, but I see light in their converging tunnels.

David:

  If you must manage congestion, then doing it explicitly is, at very least, honest. It is better than doing it (a) covertly or (b) indirectly, by injecting artificial interrupts and (c) denying you’re doing it — like Comcast currently does...
  Let’s remember that getting an offer like this right is an iterative process. We should help TWC, not kill them. As long as they don’t discriminate on the basis of specific applications or devices or app providers, and provided they don’t charge grossly unfair amounts for video levels of traffic usage, and provided they continue to upgrade their network as technology improves, what they’re doing is a good thing.

Adam:

  I already can hear Mike at TechDirt pounding away at his keyboard to post his next “bandwidth scarcity myth” essay! But even if he is right that current pipes aren’t as constrained as some fear, I don’t see why it would hurt to allow metering experiments to play out in the marketplace.
  Then again, if Mike is wrong, and we see more of a capacity crunch in coming months and years because of growing traffic burdens, then metering might offer a constructive solution. Mike is always talking about the need for companies to consider innovative new business models to complex marketplace challenges. I think metering certainly counts as one. Of course, ongoing network upgrades and expansion is also part of the answer, as Mike and others suggest. But I don’t think it’s the only part of the answer. Network expansion requires significant ongoing investment and a steady revenue stream to pay for it. So where is that money going to come from? Is it written in stone that the we have some sort of God-given right to flat rate pricing forever more? More importantly, is flat-rate really the fairest way to price access for light users? I appreciate all the old grannies out there who are essentially cross-subsidizing my bandwidth usage every time I download massive HD movies on my Xbox 360, but is that really fair to them?

The key phrase is “steady revenue stream”. Should that come only from usage? And the “triple play” of TV, internet and telephone service? True, that’s all the mainstream knows or cares about today, but how much is their knowledge blindered by limited offerings from the carriers?

I’m lucky to have Verizon’s FiOS (fiber to the home) service here, but I’d probably pay more than I’m already paying if Verizon allowed me to scale back the massive bandwidth allocated to live television (all of which I’m not watching, nearly all the time), and scale up my business here at home. But right now the pricing for home business service is prohibitively high, and not based on any obvious costs I can see. What does it cost to provide a few IP addresses? Or to provide symmetrical bandwidth? Or to unblock Port 80 so I can run a server? Hey, I’d be glad to pay based on bit traffic, whether it’s metered or not, provided I have the opportunity to run a server at all. Verizon’s (and every carrier’s) high prices for business use is an ancient telco habit that continues to prevent more business than it allows. I’d like to see Adam and other (commendably) pro-business bloggers step up and challenge their friends at the telcos and cablecos to think more creatively about what they can do to help business happen where the big bandwidth is actually there to deploy.

My own fave suggestion is for the carriers to take advantage of their existing real estate to provide offsite storage and web services that either compete with or complement Amazon’s EC2 and S3. I wrote about that almost a year ago. But maybe now the time is a bit more right.

Scarcity may or may not be a myth, but abundance is both inevitable and highly leveragable.

So the carriers face a fundamental choice. They can contribute to a tide that lifts all boats, including their own — and get all kinds of both incumbent and first-mover advantages from that. Or they can continue to play the same scarcity games that they’ve been playing for decades, and find themselves drowning in the oceans others will create instead.

There are ways to move from the latter to the former, I believe. But I also believe the former has a future that goes a lot farther than the latter.

Getting younger

January 18, 2008 in News, problems | 3 comments

Says here my “real” age (57) is three years less than my chronological one (60). If you take the test, notice how the calculated age at the bottom changes if you fool around and change your answers.

The surprising difference, at least in my case, is vitamin supplements. By adjusting those from none to large amounts, I can reduce my “real age” from 57 to 55.8 by taking the test’s maximum listed doses of Vitamin E, folic acid and vitamin C, and by having 10 or more servings per week of food made from tomato paste. I already consume the recommended quantities of breakfast and fish.

Interesting, but methinks the test-makers are selling vitamins.

When social media are neither

January 15, 2008 in Future, Ideas, problems, VRM | 12 comments

Simon Collister in The death of spin has been greatly exaggerated:

  This is leads us to a potentially dangerous situation where the public (and worse the media) thinking political parties are giving the people a voice, when in fact they disenfranchising them by paying lip-service to participatory democracy.
  If this happens then traditional, hard political power hardens at the centre while the public play with digital toys that keep them entertained but no closer to (argubly even further away from) democratic engagement.

Right on.

In that post Simon sources this post by Wendy McAuliffe in Liberate Media. Among other things she says,

  …at the end of the day, you can’t place an algorithm on the way people communicate.
  Politics is one subject in particular that is becoming harder and harder to ‘control’, with so many opinions and arguments being voiced across social media networks.
  Despite the changes in media as we know it, the ability to engage with audiences effectively, and understand what grabs attention, is still the realm of PR professionals.

Some thoughts.

First, amen to the algorithm point. That’s a great clue that will help with my third point, below.

Second, politics has always been about control. So, in a different way, has democracy. Substitute democracy for politics in Wendy’s second point and I’ll agree with it.

Third, the online world has both social media and social habitats. They are different, even when they overlap. Twitter is a social medium. Facebook is a social habitat. Twitter is a new breed of Web site/service that grew out of blogging. Facebook is a walled garden: a place you have to go to be social in the ways it facilitates and permits. In this respect Facebook is AOL 2.0. By calling both “social media” we blur distinctions that are necessary for making sense of highly varied progress (or movement in less positive directions) in the online world. We need a Linnean taxonomy here. And we don’t have one. Yet. For those so inclined, that’s an assignment.

Fourth, the “audience” isn’t any more. And nobody needs to get over that fact more than PR, which wouldn’t exist without the demand for spin. What we wrote about PR in The Cluetrain Manifesto is barely less true today than it was in 1999. If PR wishes to remain relevant in an environment where networked markets get smarter faster than those that would spin them, the profession needs to define and satisfy a market for something other than spin. Good luck with that.

Improved listening

January 12, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, News, problems | Permalink

If you want to see how podcasting is better than radio (or a better form of radio), and why it’s more important than making money (because, among other things, you may make more money because of it than with it), then dig marketing, bananas and more, a podcast, hosted by Johnnie Moore. It’s a conversation among people who are looking beyond advertsing to whatever comes next. If anything.

You probably already know what I think — which is a lot like what Dave thinks. No surprise there, but worth repeating because it’s good to have others agree with you, even if there’s only one of them. Which there aren’t in this case. (Though there still aren’t enough, or Dave and I would stop highlighting the absurd belief that everything needs a business model — and that the only one worth considering, if you must, is advertising.)

One reason that podcasting beats radio (until we help radio catch up with podcasting by adding the same feature) is demonstrated by Johnnie’s post, which contains a pile of handy time-stamped show notes. (Didn’t Jon Udell come up with a way of making those time stamps into URLs? Wuzzit somebody else? Hmm.. Let’s ask hoosgot.)

Via Hugh.

There’s no excuse

January 11, 2008 in problems, Travel | 8 comments

…for a website to be as unreliable as United’s.

Imagine running airplanes with the same level of reliability.

Safety at all costs

January 8, 2008 in News, problems, Travel | 3 comments

Mike Elgan says,

  The powers that be at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHSMA) have determined that batteries are a potential fire risk. As a result, you will no longer be allowed to bring spare batteries in your checked luggage.
  Batteries actually installed inside devices are OK, and most spare batteries in your carry-on are fine, too. But carry-on batteries are now governed by a complicated new set of rules.
  You can carry batteries with 8 grams of lithium or less in them in your carry on bags. They now, however, must be carried now in plastic bags. Cell phone, PDA and other gadget batteries, plus most laptop batteries, contain less than 8 grams of lithium.

I carry lots of batteries with me. Spare laptop batteries, rechargeables, and the usual disposable kind included. And I haven’t run across any trouble so far. But I haven’t flown since January 1, when Mike published this.

Gordon Haff unpacks the rules a bit more, saying,

 
  The “two-battery limit” applies only to lithium ion batteries with more than “8 grams of equivalent lithium content, (which) is approximately 100 watt-hours.” The Reader’s Digest version is that this limit roughly corresponds to the largest notebook batteries.
  In other words, this limit shouldn’t much affect most travelers because there’s no limit on typical camera, cell phone, toy, and notebook batteries. So what is affected? Things like external notebook and professional videographer batteries. (I suspect that independent videographers will be one of the groups this new rule could inconvenience.)
  One issue is that implementing the rule in the field is basically impossible, unless the screeners are just given some rule of thumb like “no limit on notebook batteries or anything smaller.”…
  Finally, I think it’s worth noting that–much fevered commentary aside–this is not some new inane security rule. It’s a response to lithium batteries being suspected as the cause in at least one cargo plane fire.

In practice, how will the TSA people know what the right size battery is? I guess we’ll see.

Anybody experience problems with this yet?

As it happens I don’t have any big spare laptop batteries with me, this time. But I do have a pile of little rechargeable ones. We’ll see how they do on Friday at LAX.

The (n)ever ending story

January 5, 2008 in Business, Journalism, News, Past, Places, problems | Permalink

Barney Brantingham, who probably holds the record for length of service as a Santa Barbara News-Press journalist (nearly half a century), gives us The Endless Stunner: News-Press Strife Goes Way Past Overtime. The money grafs:

The refs call penalty after penalty: offside against Team McCaw: illegal procedures, ineligible receivers downfield, unsportsmanlike conduct, personal fouls, touchbacks and safeties and everything else in the rule book. Everything, that is, except blow their whistles to end the craziness.

This game has been running now for 18 months but time on the clock seems to be expanding like a Salvador Dali surrealist watch face. If this was a real football game the players would all be drawing Social Security before it ends — if it ever does. It’s like one of those 1930s marathon dances except that McCaw’s legal tapdancers never seem to get tired or slump to the floor.

The year 2006 has gone into 2007 and now 2008. Just the other day, National Labor Relations Board Judge William Kocol ruled that McCaw violated enough federal unfair labor practices to fill a whole L.A. Times sports section. Among other things, his 71-page decision ruled that McCaw must rehire eight journalists fired in retaliation for their union activities. She disregarded their “fundamental rights” as employees, Kocol said. Some people have been saying that the workers have no rights and that McCaw could do anything she wanted. She owns the paper, doesn’t she? No so, the judge ruled. Employees have a legal right under federal law to organize and it’s illegal to try to thwart them.

This was settled in the courts generations ago.

So the yellow flags have been thrown against the paper once more and once more McCaw has vowed to appeal. That’s her legal right too and she can afford it. But the handful of journalists could never have financed this battle if they hadn’t been backed by the NLRB, the Teamsters — and the law of the land. By one estimate, the Teamsters have shelled out $400,000 in the battle, and are still racking up costs without end.

Here’s the LA Times piece on the latest.

Twixtonomy

January 5, 2008 in Art, Blogging, problems | 2 comments

Paul Downey: I see two kinds of Twitterers emerging: Twits and Twerps.

Interesting read. Not sure if I’m either, both or neither.

Who’s talking to (or with) whom

January 3, 2008 in Ideas, Past, problems, VRM | 7 comments

In CBS Video: Not In The Conversation, John Battelle writes,

  Close readers will notice a trend in 2008 here on Searchblog: I’ll be posting stuff about conversations, and in particular how companies are doing when it comes to having conversations with their key constituents.

I want to look at it from the opposite side, asking How are customers doing when it comes to having conversations with their key companies?

More to the point, how can we equip customers with better tools for communicating with their suppliers — across all those suppliers’ CRM (Customer “Relationship” Management) systems? Especially when most of those systems are designed to deflect or prevent actual human-to-human contact.

For example, I would like a dashboard — or the technology and standards that would allow anybody to build a dashboard — by which I could manage my billing relationships with all my suppliers.

Right now my bookkeeper, my wife and I are together trying to figure out what the hell a bunch of Visa bill expenses are for. Visa bills tend to have a list of transactions, most of which have little or no useful information associated with them. Usually it’s just a phone number. Call that number and you get routed into the supplier’s deflection maze or to a machine where you leave message and nothing happens. Once in awhile you actually reach somebody. But even then the mystery sometimes only deepens.

Right now my bookkeeper is on the phone with Dish Network, which for some reason is charging us for two accounts, including one at a strange address where we’ve never lived. It’s very complicated. (Later… it was just solved, and we’ll get a check from them for having collected on the account that didn’t exist.)

I have other mysteries right now involving Sirius, 1&1, T-Mobile, SixApart, Verizon, Rhapsody and AT&T. All those companies have their own billing and CRM systems. In some cases (such as Rhapsody), I just want to cancel the service but don’t know how, since I lack any kind of paperwork (physical or virtual) on the “relationship”. In other cases I want to know exactly what I’m being charged for, since the charges are at variance with my understanding of what I should be paying (which in some cases is zero).

I think what we need is something like an API. Let’s call it an VRI: Interface. Through it I could know, and see, what I’m getting from each vendor with which I “relate”. On top of that the dashboard could be built.

An interesting thing here is that I really don’t want to have a conversation of the literal kind with most of these companies, unless there’s a problem. I do want to relate with them, however. That is, I would like to request or arrange for services, pay bills and occasionally make suggestions or provide feedback. Most of that does not require wasting the time of another human being. A lot of that could be automated. I believe that automation would be easier if there were a consistent way of relating established on the customer side. That would be one set of wheels that all these different suppliers would not have to invent and re-invent over and over again, each in their own different ways. There could be standard routines for querying transaction histories, or for requesting information about current service offerings, or turning services on or off or up or down.

Whatever we do, “management” needs to go both ways. For the good of both parties.

Okay, back to making calls and doing research and wasting three people’s time…

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