Cedar Mill Communications

As we all know, the only constant in the world is change.  During periods of change we all go through natural cycles of resistance, denial and ultimately everyone moves on and accepts the new reality.

Maybe it has something to do with the speed that news travels via the Web and social media, but class in the face of pressure and change seems to be something that has gone missing in action of late.

The latest example is the scathing letter from Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert about LeBron James’ decision to join the Miami Heat.  In a display of absolutely zero class, Gilbert called LeBron’s decision “a shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own.”

What Gilbert fails to mention is that LeBron’s presence in Cleveland for the last several years has increased the value of his franchise by over $100 million and led to a sold out arena night in and night out. Gilbert should have been thanking LeBron for the contribution to his personal net worth and wished him the best in his new endeavor.

That would be the classy thing to do.  Sure Gilbert is in denial, but perhaps he should he should have just kept it to himself.

A similar example of classless behavior is the cast of Kin characters busily bashing Microsoft over the decision to pull the plug on the much-hyped, but weak-selling social media phones.  No doubt this was mismanaged from the get go. Still, the problem was more that the gap Microsoft was targeting between smart phones and regular phones ended up getting squeezed by low-cost smartphones and high-priced data plans.  The Kin was a non-starter from the get go.

But instead of moving on, disgruntled employees are publicly airing their beefs for the world to read.  What’s the point of this?  No one really cares about your complaints – which only tell one side of the story – and make us think less of you.  Certainly, I would not want someone who’s willing to bash their employer on the Web as a part of my team.

I remember back when email first became accepted in business. We learned quickly never to send emails that you write when you’re angry.  Similarly, it’s time for a bit more restraint before angry letters and blog posts go live. Nothing good ever comes from removing all doubt that you’re a putz.

To quote Ron Burgundy, “You stay classy San Diego.”

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One of the best things about having an annual subscription to the Associated Press Stylebook is its regular updates. I learned how the Christmas Day bomber spells his name, for instance, and how it’s pronounced. It’s Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (OO’-mahr fah-ROOK’ ahb-DOOL’-moo-TAH’-lahb). In my line of work, I don’t deal with terrorist suspects, but I appreciate knowing the info’s there anyway.

Just this week I got another update that made me realize I’m not too technologically challenged – at least in knowing the terms for fast-changing technology. AP has listed nearly 50 terms or words with new definitions that are associated with social media. In fact, the editors have created a whole section called Social Media Guidelines in which the umbrella term is defined: “tools that allow the sharing of information and creating online communities.” I applaud the conciseness. While you could argue you’d have to have been under a rock the past few years not to know about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, it’s also clear that traditional media reporters have a lot to learn about their online cohorts, whom they do they quote. AP points out (to those gullible few) that “phony accounts are rampant in the social media world.” You don’t say.

The fact that AP just now chose to recognize – and in its way legitimize – social media, says to me that the editors were like most conservative institutions and dismissed friending and tweeting as passing fads, but now have decided, like most of us, to just go with it. Why not get a Facebook page? It’s a great way to keep up with folks and reconnect with old, nearly forgotten friends.

By the way, I ran through the terms just to make sure I knew them all. I did pretty well; only hashtag threw me.

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I had the opportunity recently to be a co-presenter in a media training session. One of the tips we always give prospective spokespeople is to avoid the use of jargon and meaningless tech words.

We have a pretty good list:

• Leading
• Enhanced
• Unique
• Significant
• Solution
• Integrated
• Innovative
• Advanced
• Sophisticated
• E-anything
• Best-in-Class

And, last but not least, the word I’ve found most bothersome of late: Leverage.

Most of the time PR, marketing and sales folks are leveraging leverage to such a degree that it’s meaningless. Whether as a verb, noun, adjective, it’s been misused, overused and tweaked to the point where all relevance and impact is gone. There probably hasn’t been an enterprise hardware or software press release issued in the last 20 years without some leverage, somewhere.

It’s especially popular in headlines:

“Oracle Service Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo”

“IBM reveals Long Term File System (LTFS) to leverage LTO-5”

“Webinar: Leverage Microsoft SharePoint in you Online Marketing”

“Leverage Your Existing EMC Centera Investment with OnBase”

“RIM’s New MVS 5 Leverages Cisco Unified Communications Manager”

Maybe somebody knows what it means to leverage LTO-5 with a long-term file system, but you’ve got me with that one. The point of putting out a press release, for instance, is to communicate information so that it can be understood, not to leave people scratching their heads in confusion. Most of time when I see the word leverage, it’s pretty unclear what going on. Maybe the author didn’t know either.

If you’re a TV watcher, you know that leverage even has it owns series on TNT starring Timothy Hutton. The series is solid, and the use of the word leverage here almost forgivable. Leverage is so vague that you’re not entirely sure what the show is about. As names for undercover spy-like thrillers with a twist go, it’s tough to top Mission Impossible. But I guess Leverage isn’t all that bad.

If you’re producing a hit TV series, I’ll let you off the hook. For everyone else, take a minute and look at your copy or slide deck. How many times are you leveraging something? Three? Five? Ten? Do yourself and your readers a favor and cut that number in half. Or, if you’re truly committed to reform, delete them all. You just don’t need any more leverage.

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I have to admit we named our company Cedar Mill Communications because No. 1 it’s where we live, but No. 2 because I thought a tree would make a nice logo for our business cards. Turns out both are still true, but it’s also true that we’re even more firmly rooted to this lovely area now that we’re members of the Cedar Mill Business Association, a community and business organization that works in our unincorporated part of Washington County.

You’ll be hearing more about the CMBA in coming posts. If you live in the area, those colorful flower baskets that will soon be hanging from Cedar Mill light posts are a CMBA effort. Virginia Bruce, the editor of the Cedar Mill News featured us – along with several other local businesses in the April issue’s New Member Spotlight. So have a look, and please introduce yourself at the next CMBA meeting.

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I like the sound of those words liberation theology. I like that you can sense freedom through words, in this words from a person of God. Just the sound of those words inspires me. Even better the true meaning of them: if you believe and follow the words of Jesus, you will do right by all people. In other words if you’re a good Christian you will not abide oppression and inequality from one person to another.

I’m not aiming to preach here. I’m aiming to remind you that we, humans, are capable of much good.

Sunday we saw that we could come together for the greater good of all Americans and bring good, hopefully someday even affordable health care to all. We want to extend a hand so that young people, those with pre-existing conditions, those of us who haven’t stockpiled thousands or even millions to afford ever more expensive health care might have the same care our politicians have. We aren’t a society that believes “I got mine, now you get yours.” We showed we believe we all benefit if we’re healthy. If we’re able to worry less about a doctor visit busting the monthly budget – yeah, $100 per is a lot — never mind the thousands a surgery might cost.

I don’t feel as good about it as I would have if I’d gotten the option of joining a government plan that likely would have been less expensive and more comprehensive than the high deductible plan I have now. I’m envious of my German friends’ public/private plans that pay for everything, even dental, at a reasonable price. But I’m hopeful the Democrats will polish the offerings as they go along. I have no hope for the Republicans whose obstructionist ways seem without end.

How does liberation theology tie in with health care reform? And why am I talking about it now? Today’s the 30^th anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, by a paid government assassin. He was gunned down during Mass, the day after he’d pleaded with El Salvador’s police-cum-thugs to listen to the small, quiet voice in their hearts — the one that compels us to love one another. Those guys preferred to listen to the rightist government that paid them to kill a man of God. Romeo spoke out against the government that had sent death squads to kill the poor who had the audacity to fight for fairness against the government that had been rewarding only the wealthy for years.

Romero’s legacy was mixed in that his death started a 12-year civil war in which thousands died or were displaced. But when that ended El Salvador saw a 70 percent reduction in armed forces, economic growth programs to alleviate poverty and monitored elections. It’s still not a wealthy place, but El Salvadorans born today can expect to live just about as long as Americans, which is a huge step up from Romero’s time. He lost his life for seeking equality and dignity for all, not just those who can pay for it.

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The editors of the Wall Street Journal probably thought the story of Angela Iannelli and her parrot Luke, prominently displayed in a full color photo teaser, above the fold, in today’s paper was a good color story. It was. The story was an ooops, look what the silly bank did piece about how Bank of America erroneously sent a contractor into Ms. Iannelli’s house, changed the locks, shut off her utilities, fouled her toilets (?!), damaged her flooring and took her bird — all as part of the process of booting out a deadbeat mortgagee. Turns out she wasn’t in foreclosure. Nope, she wasn’t even behind in a payment.

Understandably, she was pretty darned upset at the turn of events, particularly the abduction of her parrot. She lost track of him for over a week (one wonders how the poor thing was treated while in custody), and wound up with anxiety such that she needed medication. Gee, I need medication just thinking about the mess she must have faced. Imagine coming home to a trashed house? Well, trying to come home to one. The locks were all changed.

The story reminds me of a book I read recently, The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. It’s the story of a murder involving a parrot that was thought to be a witness. But the bird was abducted because he endlessly recited a series of numbers that the killer thought was the code for a Swiss bank account. When a friend of mine first heard the story of the bank error/parrot taking she thought maybe the bird was spouting pin numbers. Ah, that would be nice touch, wouldn’t it: Big BofA worried a parrot was going around reeling off customers’ pins.

Sadly, it was the bank that was (again) the culprit. Taking $20 billion in taxpayer money wasn’t enough. They take a parrot, too.

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Committing to buying a spot in the Super Bowl is always a big risk due to the vast sums of money at stake. For those with the wherewithal to pull it off, a big splash around the Super Bowl may generate more buzz than a year’s worth of mediocrity.

The year’s game, featuring one of football’s biggest stars in Peyton Manning and the feel good story of the past year in the New Orleans Saints, was the most watched TV show in the United States ever with 106.5 million viewers. With all the entertainment options people have now compared to when the previous record was set by the MASH finale in 1983, this is an amazing accomplishment.

Even more astonishing, people don’t DVR the Super Bowl and zip past the ads; instead they sit in groups and watch the ads intently hoping for a big laugh. In my case, I printed out a list of the expected ads from adbowl.com and had the people at the party help me decide on the rankings. (Next year, I’ll be doing this in realtime with the aid of my iPad).

More than just the massive, rapt audience, marketers also get the benefit of all the hype and exposure surrounding the Super Bowl.

And, now, it has caught on with social media.

BtoB magazine reports that of the 38 brands that ran TV spots during the Super Bowl, 75% saw the number of blog posts about their brands double, compared with the average number of blog posts on Sunday evenings over the past six months. Overall, blog posts about the Super Bowl increased to 25,725 this year, up from 15,702 last year. Of these, more than 3,600 posts were specifically related to advertising. Twitter also saw increased Super Bowl-related activity, with more than 720,000 tweets about the game.

Seriously, if you’re a marketer and you’re considering this brand-building extravaganza, do it. But do it right.

Here are a few basic observations on what “right” looks like. It still boggles the mind that companies can get this wrong. I’m not going to bash anyone, but there were some real stinkers in the mix, as there have been in the past.

1. Be clever and funny. David Letterman nailed this with his 10 second spot with Oprah and Leno. Did it help Leno? Who cares, it was funny and led to gobs of media coverage. Learn from this folks. We’re watching the Super Bowl at a party and we want to be amused.
2. Don’t get old and worn out. Hey is anyone home at eTrade and GoDaddy? The baby thing isn’t funny anymore (loved it first time out) and GoDaddy, it’s time to move on. Come up with something new.
3. Big names doing funny things work. The consensus #1 ad this year was Snicker’s with Betty White and Abe Vigoda. Hyunda’s ancient Brett Farve and VW’s Punch Dub with Stevie Wonder and Tracy Morgan also were hits with the audience.
4. If you can’t be funny, sentimental works too. Google’s surprise ad – which had been on YouTube for a few months – about using search for Paris love was fantastic. Our crowd thought that it was the winner.
5. Keep coming back – but with new stuff. Audi’s brand is quickly moving to the top of the charts. The German automaker has been on the Super Bowl roster for a couple of years and had a clever entry this year.
6. Maximize your PR and social media outreach. Be sure to wrap lots of marketing, PR and social media activities around your investment in the Super Bowl.
7. Give stuff away. As was humorously portrayed by terrified chickens, Denny’s used the Super Bowl to promote free Grand Slams on Tuesday. Well it worked. At least one of my neighbors braved the crowds to get her eggs and hash browns.

If you missed out on the Super Bowl, you still have some big sporting events on tap. In particular you might want to think about real football, as in Futbol or Fußball, like what’s played everywhere else on the planet. If the US team makes the World Cup quarterfinals or semifinals it will be huge. Or not. Like it or not, the Super Bowl is the biggest and best brand building machine in the US today.

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Too often it seems our world is surprised by violence or death or simply disappointment. I can’t bring myself to read the Wall Street Journal some mornings when the world or the country has had a particularly awful previous day. (The Oregonian doesn’t upset me as much – don’t know why.) But in the past few days I’ve been pleasantly surprised by two events: the birthday of the coining of “serendipity” and a true incidence of the same.

On the first. Serendipity was first coined on January 27, 1754, by British member of Parliament Horace Walpole. In a letter to a friend living in Italy he mentioned he’d come up with the word from a fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip,” in which “as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Though they were from Serendip – today Sri Lanka – their happy accidents (and I do believe they must have been happy) seems to me the best way to travel.

Which brings me to event two. Our morning dog walk often takes us to a small park near the house. Lost Park isn’t really lost, but it is far from the madding crowds, especially in the mornings after the official work day has begun. This morning we climbed the stairs at the base of the park and heard music drifting over the trees and the tennis courts. As we got further in, it became clear it was trumpet music – random notes, perhaps scales, then gradually bars of a song I thought I could pick out. What could be more charming then a sunny February day in a cool and lush park populated only by two people, three dogs and one trumpet player (with her own dog) playing the Pink Panther theme song?

мебель в болгарии

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Tablets like what Steve Jobs and Apple just introduced have long been forecast in science fiction, so you just knew that sooner or later devices like this would become reality. 

Steve Jobs with his new pad.

For example, in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke describes something called a “Newspad” that Heywood Floyd, “plugs into the ship’s information circuit and scans the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.”

While there will be little need to know codes by heart, Clarke’s vision of getting electronic papers on a pad-like device is finally here.  To be sure the iPad is likely far from perfect, I fully expect that it will inevitably become more refined and in the process move us much further to full electronic delivery of premier content – much of which is currently paper-based. 

Sure you can get content on either a smartphone or a laptop, but neither is ideal. The smartphone is just too small and the laptop is too clumsy. I just don’t find myself sitting at breakfast surfing news on my laptop, or trying to peer into a tiny screen on the BlackBerry. 

Instead I get volumes of newspaper – big piles of it that inevitably end up being recycled.  Speaking of which, the environmental impact of all that paper is not good. Paper consumes large amounts of water and energy, levels forests, and requires many gallons of fuel to get it to my doorstep. Electronic delivery has almost zero impact in comparison.

I can, however, imagine using the iPad as my daily news feed. What’s more there’s economic justification simply on the basis of replacing paid-for printed content I currently consume.  While I expect to still pay for the electronic content, the price will go down significantly.  Note that some of the publications have yet to adopt eReader technology like what the NY Times currently offers, but publishers that expect to survive will offer similar technology. Based on my calculations, I figure I could save $652 per year, easily justifying a $499 iPad.

Beyond lowering costs, the iPad will deliver a much improved experience.  Publishers will be able to blend video and printed words. Instead of a few photos, I will be able to see the entire sequence if I so desire. I’ll also be able to look up related information, or make comments. Basically it’s everything we love about the Web, but in a nice magazine-like format.  When I’m travelling, all I’ll need to pack is my iPad and a cell phone. No longer will I need a few magazines, a couple of books, media player, GPS, or even a laptop. And, of course, there will be countless numbers of cool apps.

Sounds like science fiction? Not anymore.

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In my last post, Real Journalism, I pointed out the benefit of educating and paying people to investigate and write about our world. How else will we know about abuses of power or inequality or any number of societal ills? But as a writer, if I’m given a choice between tackling a paying job that comes in or writing a blog about a subject that rankles me, I’ll take the paying one. The bills can’t be paid on ire after all.

I still stand by that argument. But I’ve learned that the blogosphere does have the power to help traditional media effect change. The most recent evidence is a story of how a New York City college student went up against two large retail chains over an apparent policy to destroy unworn clothing they couldn’t sell. Cynthia Magnus found garbage bags of slashed clothing outside a NYC H&M store along with bags of clothing bearing Wal-Mart tags that had been punched full of holes. Rather than donate the clothing, the retailers left them fit only for the garbage dump. H&M’s action was especially egregious because the garbage bags of destroyed clothing were just around the corner from a collection point from New York Cares, a charity that collects coats for the needy.

I heard the story as a quick news blurb on KINK, the station my alarm is set to. I woke up thinking geez, what a crappy thing to do in a city with so many poor people – and such cold weather.

Turns out the story didn’t spring from a blog as KINK reported, but from the New York Times. Magnus had tried unsuccessfully to contact H&M. When they wouldn’t give her the time of day, she turned to the Times. Two days after the story ran H&M issued a promise to donate, not destroy unsold clothing. I searched but didn’t find out what happened with Wal-Mart. The story got picked up by AP and ran about everywhere. Twitter even got in on the action, as one blogger claimed the flurry of tweets led H&M to straighten up. What this says to me is that reporters and bloggers and people who twitter (twitterers?) can have a synergy that leads to action, in this case for cold, poor New Yorkers.

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