High-Tech PR Blog >> Beyond the Hype

Getting Ready for Generation 'F'

 
A young colleague of mine sent me an interesting article this week from the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500.”  It makes the point overall that companies who will once again be vying to attract and keep top talent once the economy grows again had better be sharpening their social media skills and mindset. The author, Gary Hamel, included “a list of 12 work relevant characteristics of online life” that he believes will be expected by the best of Generation “F” when they are choosing where they want to work.

With all due respect to Mr. Hamel and the Wall Street Journal (and with full disclosure that although I am one of the oldest people in the agency, I am fully versed in and supportive of all things social media), I am providing my interpretation/caution regarding his 12 characteristics in parentheses:

1.  All ideas compete on an equal footing. (I guess it really IS a democracy now, at least online.)

2.  Contribution counts for more than credentials. (Accuracy is no longer a requirement.)

3.  Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed. (As long as clout is not a reward for out-shouting others.)

4.  Leaders serve rather than follow. (Collaboration and teamwork are still key; roll up your sleeves and help the team win.)

5.  Task is chosen, not assigned. (Working only on what interests you is great as long as you have no requirement to make money.)

6.  Groups are self-defining and –organizing. (Unfortunately, just as you can’t choose your family, this also applies to your work teams at times.)

7.  Resources get attracted, not allocated. (Keep it interesting and challenging to retain the best workers.)

8.  Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it. (Information no longer is power; information is status.)

9  Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed. (Don’t get complacent; the best idea may be the next one.)

10.  Users can veto most policy decisions. (It’s all about shared culture, not rulebooks.)

11.  Intrinsic rewards matter most. (It’s all about the love of the game and the chase.)

12.  Hackers are heroes. (New ideas are always welcome.)

I guess in summary, my belief is that companies that are staying up with social media and serving their customers well by trying and adopting new innovative approaches to communications will win with all generations, including the Facebook crowd. But let’s still remember that at the end of the day, sound business decisions trump pop technology trends. 

I'd like to hear how you interpret any of Gary's Generation F characteristics.  Let's talk about it in the comments.

Back away from the teleprompter, Mr. President

Since I'm an early bird, I missed President Obama's gaffe about the Special Olympics with Jay Leno last week. It seems even his laughter was found appalling by many Americans who are facing serious problems and want to see a serious Commander in Chief wrestling with these at all times. Then there was the response to his anger at a recent press conference when a reporter pushed him for a reaction to the AIG bonuses and his retort was that he needed a few days to form an opinion, thank you very much. On top of that, everyone seems to have an opinion about his sense of humor (too forced; don't do it); his off-the-cuff remarks (stick to State of the Union addresses) and his availability to the media (multiple press conferences, what gives?) and the general public (ESPN, 60 Minutes and Leno in the span of a week!). This definitely is not your father's president when it comes to communication.

A good description of the shift and the reaction to it was in Mary McNamara's article in the L.A. Times today. 

"In the last two weeks alone, he surprised the traditional Washington press corps by passing on its annual Gridiron Club dinner only to make unprecedented appearances on ESPN, where he picked his NCAA bracket favorites, and 'The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,' where he committed his biggest presidential gaffe to date before returning to '60 Minutes' for a tough-questions interview with Steve Kroft. Tuesday night, he held his second prime-time news conference in the last 65 days, during which he not only answered policy questions with bountiful detail but also offered a glimpse of the elusive Obama temper. When a reporter continued to needle him about his 'delayed' response to the AIG bonuses, Obama shut him down: 'It took me a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak, OK?'"

President Obama definitely is creating his own unique style and channel of communication, as evidenced by the decision to bring the interactive "Open for Questions" feature of his change.gov to whitehouse.gov, complete with a video from the President stating that Americans should feel free to directly present any questions they have about the economy that he can answer in his online town hall  this Thursday.

The L.A. Times article concluded:

"Put it all together and he is the ultimate Ready for Prime Time President -- an American leader in the era of reality television. He came of age in front of cameras and digital screens, and he understands not just their power, but their nature. Americans these days want to make up their own minds, whether it's about the next American Idol or what the President's responsibility is toward those outrageous bonuses. Obama understands the definition of reality 'as seen on TV,' where the most important thing is your brand. The Obama brand is about calm amid chaos, strength through humility, and transparency through television.

On your screen, in your living room, he's just a regular guy -- someone you might know, the parent of one of your daughter's friends. Except that, oh yeah, he's also the President."

If the media isn't happy with this style, it's unlikely it will matter. David Plouffe, the campaign manager for President Obama's successful election campaign told an audience I was in recently that a big difference between the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign was their reaction to the media. The former stayed the course and basically ignored the media, listening more to the general public using the Internet and other direct channels. The McCain campaign seemed more reactive to how things were playing in the media.  My assumption, therefore, is that unless the tide of public opinion changes radically and the White House communications aides determine this through their own polling methods, we won't see President Obama restricting himself to controlled presentations, teleprompter-only sessions, less Q&A, and no popular media appearances. In my humble opinion, that is a good thing.

 

 

Move over Real Shaq, Twitter is for business

It was ironic today that just as I was reading a blog post on Open Innovators called 77 Revenue Models for Twitter, I saw a tweet from Sam Houston about how the revenue has indeed started. Sam pointed me to a VentureBeat post on the project by Federated Media to promote its ExecTweets service through ad space on Twitter profiles.

Most interesting in this is how the first advertising experiment is geared towards business users.

This focus on business users is interesting in this case because much of the talk about Twitter’s eventual business model is that it will also focus on business clients. One of the rumored ideas was that businesses would pay a fee to be prominently featured somewhere on the service, in order to gain users.

This, coupled with Salesforce's announcement today that it is integrating Twitter into its Service Cloud offering to allow customer service reps to more easily find customer complaints and issues that are increasingly dispersed across the Web, reinforces my belief that Twitter cannot be ignored as a business communication channel. Because of the impact that opinions and experiences that anybody can publish on Twitter or anywhere can have on a company's image, PR and communicators have a great opportunity to drive a program to leverage these new channels.

Another reason to love JetBlue

Hat tip to @dchurbuck who tweeted yesterday "way to go, JetBlue" along with a link to the company's hysterical new video on its site, The CEO's Guide to Jetting that is a send-up of CEOs being forced to give up their private jets and fly like the little people. With the swirling anger about AIG bonuses and top executive compensation programs, this clever marketing of JetBlue's cheaper but more comfortable flights ("let your assistant's assistant book you on JetBlue") was a very welcome tonic.

Do take a look.  And, if you dare, send it to your favorite CEO.

Everybody's somebody at SXSWi

As we mentioned here, our Austin crew has been welcoming people from all over for the SXSW festivals. I've enjoyed following the live blogging and tweeting by Linsey Krauss and Lauren Whittenberg since last Friday, but we want to give Linsey the opportunity to share their highlights and takeaways through a guest post here. Enjoy!

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It's been a busy past five days here in Austin, Texas as the SXSW Interactive Conference just wrapped up to welcome a new crop of visitors -- the music buffs.

My colleague Lauren Whittenberg and I immersed ourselves in as many panel discussions, keynote topics and core conversations as we possibly could and managed to come out of it all even more pumped to pass along that knowledge to clients and colleagues. The thing that’s most unique about this conference is the networking, aka parties. Yes, part of it is getting to see Scoble carry his video camera into a bar or even Brian Solis and Peter Shankman talk about a new venture, but it extends far beyond that. At the core, it’s about getting to connect with other like-minded individuals to talk through the day's discussions to gain more insight into a world outside of your own.

One of my favorite panels, “The Future of Social Networks” was presented by Charlene Li, in which she kicked off an interactive discussion by declaring, “social networks will be like air.” According to Charlene, this means your friends, family - the people you care about, the people like you, will be available anywhere and anytime that you need them.

SXSW09: The Future Of Social Networks

View more presentations from Charlene Li.

My favorite section was around customers and how companies are re-structuring their organizations to put the customer at the top of the chart – social networks will disrupt traditional information flows.

I had the chance to catch up with Charlene to get my copy of Groundswell signed and snap a quick picture. She called her panel topic “Groundswell 2.0” and even though she did a similar panel last year there was further distinction made around spheres of influence and how organizations need to decide on the end goal to figure out the best way for them to embrace the openness of social networks.

The following were other highlights of note.

• Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester predicted Twitter’s future will be as a CRM/Marketing tool
• Dell announced The Adamo
• Robert Scoble joined Rackspace
• Facebook Connect for the iPhone
• During the Diggnation party, rumors were swirling about the new iPhone 3.0

While we didn’t have another Sarah Lacey/Mark Zuckerberg moment, the biggest draw this year was interactive games, which bridged the online with the offline in an attempt to get attendees to put down the smart phone and meet the people on their friend lists. Zappos had its Zappos5 card game, SXSW encouraged picture bingo and Andrew McCollum, co-founder of Facebook, came up with the idea for Assassins. 

We'll share more insights from our experience at this year's conference, but in the meantime, you can see some other images on our Flickr page.

Finally, a constructive post about PR

I've long since accepted the reality that platforms like blogs and Twitter enable frequent and very public opinions about PR. I've also held the personal feeling that exposing bad PR practices in this way will in the long run lead to improvement across the profession. Or at least that has been my hope.

So I am disappointed every time I see one get published and then bounce around the echo chamber for the ensuing one or two days. I am disappointed not because I don't want bloggers to vent, but rather that the bad practices continue to trigger them, which makes it seem like there is no improvement taking place. I am disappointed also because most rants paint the profession negatively with a broad brush.

The latest one by Matt Asay, an open source blogger for CNET, was triggered by his frustration not only due to off-the-mark pitches he gets for his blog, but also for the Open Source Business Conference that he founded and chairs. Unlike other posts, however, it stood out to me because it’s constructive and gives people concrete information they can use to improve. Matt also does his readers a service by articulating why he believes PR has value. (In full disclosure, Matt is a client of ours and one with whom we have a great relationship, to a large extent because he gets it. So we of course were grateful that he mentioned us -- on his own volition -- as an example of a good firm.)

Thank you to Matt for offering a constructive point of view on PR that we all can immediately act upon and improve how we do our jobs so you and your fellow bloggers no longer feel the need to vent.

Citizen Journalists or Citizen News-Readers?

I have long held the belief that the growth of social media and the woes of print publications ultimately will spawn an evolved news media that includes more citizen journalism. The medium is not dying. It is morphing into new vehicles that better serve a public using computers, handheld devices and, perhaps, interactive television to stay informed, conduct research and express opinions. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism just released their lengthy report, "The State of the News Media" for 2009 and the speed of the evolution is striking. The study disclosed that "nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone."  The biggest issue for all news media -- including the new online media -- is revenue and the current economic downturn, naturally, is taking its toll. 

"If estimates by Advertising Age prove accurate, total spending on advertising fell for the second consecutive year. Another decline is predicted for 2009. That would mark the first consecutive three-year decline in advertising spending since the Great Depression. For news, some of this—perhaps at least half—cannot be attributed solely to the cyclical downturn.It also reflects the powerful structural shifts brought on by digital technology, which has allowed those who want to reach consumers to do so without the news media as intermediary. "

A new segment of the report this year on citizen-based media was particularly interesting to me. In many ways, though, I believe the writers buried the lead. The last paragraph contained the most intriguing nugget:

"Even among those most engaged with the new technology, the numbers are not large. Only one-in-five of the most technologically oriented users, a group that amounts to 13% of adults, post a comment on news stories even just occasionally. And only 1-in-12 have ever posted a photo or video."

The report talks about citizen blogs, which are largely opinion and, interestingly, usually don't encourage or even support commentary. It contrasts these with the rarer citizen news sites, which are more accepting of comments and material from readers, but are usually narrowly scoped. Some of these have filled the gaps in local communities that have lost their daily or weekly newspaper to cover local events, for example. There is some original reporting in the citizen news sites, but they and the citizen blogs often source legacy news sites to make their points. Certainly we have seen -- and encouraged -- the trend of self-publishing with our own clients, many of whom are connecting with their own customers and partners via blogs, Twitter and other social media outlets. They are still working with the legacy media, print and online, and the new social media sites and bloggers. But they are making sure they deliver their messages directly to their customers, as this is what customers now want -- a direct connection with the vendors who are most critical to their success. When you are spending a significant amount of your IT budget on something for your enterprise and you have to show return on your investment in a tight budget year, you want to feel that your vendor is listening to you directly. You also want to double-check your decision on that vendor -- not only with analysts, but also with other customers through citizen blogs and other social media.  

It's an interesting many-faceted study which does a very good job of detailing the nuances of this mid-stream evolution. It both defines the economics issue which affects all of these forms of media and also points out the differences in the new offerings. It will be fascinating to see how this shifts over the next year, especially as the economy improves and with the anomaly of last year's election removed. I'll be particularly interested to learn whether visitors to blogs and sites increase their number of comments and postings over the next year, showing they truly want this to be an interactive dialogue rather than just a research process.

 

Word-of-mouth starts with opening your mouth

 
I received an e-mail last week from a colleague with a link to a story in B2B magazine about an Aberdeen report on social media spending plans. I thought I had that day's blog post in the bag -- until I clicked on the link in the story to Aberdeen's site. My effort to blog on it ended there, as all I got was an executive summary that actually gave me less information than the B2B story.

What was ironic was that the report about which I was prepared to help drive word-of-mouth was about "Why It Pays to Drive Word of Mouth."  And yet Aberdeen was ascribing to old marketing techniques by requiring me to register to get more any more information than an executive summary. I always get good value out of Aberdeen's reports, so I would have loved it if they offered an abridged version of the findings -- replete with Tweetable data nuggets or a couple of Creative Commons-licensed charts -- to invite folks like myself to blog about it, put out a string of Tweets, etc. to share it with my audience of marketers, communicators and others interested in social media. If it's valuable information, chances are they will share it through their own blogs or Twitter channels, and so on.

I understand the need to capture leads, especially in the current economy, but every marketer needs to think differently now based upon the opportunity for content marketing that social media presents them. There's a balance that easily can be struck between opening up more compelling content to encourage people to share it and determining who specifically is interested in it to use from a lead generation perspective. You will know who is interested based upon who talks about it on Twitter, Facebook or in blogs, and the word of mouth interest will drive more people to supplemental content that could be made available through registration.

Have you had success with this?  Or is the need to capture leads the traditional way more important right now?

By the way, the report states that social media spending is going up, but that marketers still think it's hard to measure. I just wish I could tell you more.

IBM Jumps into the Water

In January, I was sifting through clean tech press coverage for our quarterly meeting with the Austin Clean Energy Council and I couldn't help but be amazed by the frenzy of optimism (otherwise known as market hype) in the business press related to smart grid technologies. I can't help it, I'm a sucker for new, exciting markets with growth potential. That is probably why I'm in the PR technology profession.

Back to my point, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Wired, The New York Times, CNN, etc. were all speculating on the money to be made by updating the U.S. power grid (which is, according to utility experts, still in the dark ages, along with much of the U.S. infrastructure. This is all relative, of course).

The coverage was fueled by President Obama's declarations for serious investment into smart grid technologies. Though, what probably impressed me more than anything I read at the time was that IBM's Venture Capital Group had set its sights on the smart grid. Keep in mind this group does not invest in companies, instead it talks to start-ups and VCs to determine future trends. So, this means they aren't nearly as biased as the typical corporate investment wing that invests in the technology, then promotes its potential like crazy.

This past Friday, IBM executed on this vision and announced it is unveiling a new line of water services to help manage water more effectively and find new ways to reduce pollution. The release explained that this is part of a larger initiative the company is rolling out to overhaul infrastructure and power grid issues facing utilities.

I must admit, I'm all for improving the energy system, but I tend to get cynical when I think I'm going to have to wait for the government to accomplish this task (and I worked for the govt. briefly, so i can say this). But seeing an industry heavyweight like IBM jump into this effort in full force is refreshing to see. Granted, dollar signs are the motivation, but there's nothing wrong with making money by improving living and environmental conditions.

As IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano explained, "We will not simply ride out the storm. Rather, we will take a long-term view, and go on offense."

I will save my feelings on "storm" sound-bites for another day, but regardless, I like IBM's approach to this problem and I hope it is successful.

SXSW is Underway in Austin

Mid-March is always an exciting time of year to live in Austin, TX. As I my colleague Ted mentioned earlier, SXSW has arrived in Austin.  Over the next two weeks, the interactive, film and music event will reportedly bring $95 million to the Austin area and thousands of participants from all over the world.

The interactive portion alone last year brought 10,000 people to Austin. This year, event organizers and media speculated that the interactive event will double or triple its size this year, which combats any doubts people had about interest in social media dipping during a recession.

LP&P has several people attending the interactive conference for all five days, as Ted mentioned. Linsey Krauss sits on SXSW's Panel Liaison, which helps coordinate and schedule all of the round tables and sessions and she works closely with the panelists to ensure logistics run as smoothly as possible.

As you might imagine, PowerPoint sessions are frowned upon at this venue, which has to be a struggle for some of the traditional presenters (probably won't find many of these at this event). But it is important to note that the sessions are free-flowing and pretty much agenda-free to encourage an active information exchange. And there will be little tolerance for excessive corporate jargon, or B.S. As Linsey explained, "This crowd doesn't have a problem calling you out." A case in point was the Sarah Lacy interview with Mark Zuckerberg last year. 

I guess that is one of the benefits and drawbacks of social media - people often hide behind their devices and say what they really feel (which is often brutal for whoever happens to be the topic at hand). Yet honesty and transparency are in abundance, which is refreshing and it tends to encourage genuine and intelligent information exchanges.

Last year, a lot of the sessions focused on the tools and technology itself, yet this year the panels are set up to explore more trend and business discussions, which to me is a sure sign that social computing is maturing and becoming integrated into the business world faster than many people might have anticipated.

But for those still seeking the bleeding edge technologies, check out the SXSW Accelerator on Monday at the Hilton downtown. And if you want to meet our colleagues at the show, or if you need advice from locals on places to eat and visit in town, Twitter Linsey (@linseykrauss), Lauren (@lwhitt) and we'll help you out! Stay tuned for more SXSW info.  In the meantime, you can follow Linsey's and Lauren's live blogging of today's events below.