Archive for August 19th, 2008
By Kyle Austin
By Kyle Austin
A few weeks ago the blogs were alive with chatter about a call between Steve Jobs and New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. If you didn’t catch the run-in, I can paraphrase by saying, Nocera picked up the phone and heard this from Mr. Jobs:
“You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”
At the time, I was trying to track down Nocera for a Q&A session and I didn’t get to include his recollection of the call for my post. I finally tracked down Nocera – back from drinking rosé under a walnut tree - and he kindly agreed to answer my questions on his run-in with Jobs, the media industry and his blog.
RaceTalk: So Joe, I guess I have to ask you first if the call from Steve Jobs caught you completely off-guard?
Joe Nocera: It most certainly did catch me off guard. This is the fifth column I’ve written about Apple since starting my column three and a half years ago, and it is the first time Jobs has called me–and the first words out of his mouth also took me by surprise, to say the least. It’s not every day a CEO of a major corporation calls you a slime bucket!
RaceTalk: Some are blaming you for letting him talk off the record and spin another story – in the form of an ambush call. In my mind it seems to be a flawed PR strategy and one that is going to alienate every reporter they view as neutral or friendly. It also doesn’t read well when played back in a column like yours. As for his opening remark to you, when was the last time the two of you spoke? During your Fortune days? In reading your stories earlier this year and late last year on the iPhone and backdating scandal it doesn’t appear like you chatted?
JN: I don’t know what an “ambush call” really means. Certainly, if he was trying to talk me out of writing the column, it didn’t work. If he was trying to keep me from saying he had another bout with cancer, well, I wasn’t going to say that anyway: my own reporting suggested that that hadn’t happen. I think he was trying to turn a potential adversary into a potential ally–by whispering in my ear, he would somehow be co-opting me, and in-so-doing, turn the argument I was going to make in my column in his favor. But I strongly disagree with his central belief–that he and only he has a right to know about his health. So while I listened respectfully–and made several attempts after the call to get part of it on the record–he didn’t sway my views. I’ve answered some of this already, but to be clear: I never spoke to Jobs either while at Fortune or at the New York Times (until a few weeks ago). At Fortune, I edited several stories about him, but it was always the reporter–and sometimes John Huey–who spoke to him. I did write a story about him in 1986, for Esquire, which is reprinting in my new book, Good Guys and Bad Guys. I spend a week with him as he was starting up NeXT, and he was incredibly accessible, even though he wasn’t selling anything. It was an amazing experience, but one that I’ll never have again–and I doubt any other journalist will either. Jobs now only makes himself available when he has a new product to peddle.
RaceTalk: You recently launched your new blog on the New York Times Website, which you have named “Executive Suite.” Can you talk about what your hope is for the new blog and how it will assist in keeping the dialogue going with your readers?
JN: The blog does several things: it allows me to write shorter pieces in which I can throw out ideas or comments without having to fully develop them as I have to do with the column. It allows me to comment much more than once a week, too, which is nice because there are often points I want to make about something in the news, but have no forum to make them. Now I do. And I think it does wonders for my dialogue with readers. Before the blog, readers had to send email comments to me directly–and I would wind up having 100 conversations a week that were two-way only. Now they can comment on the blog, and readers can interact with each other. It makes for a much better debate and discussion, and I’m enjoying reading all the comments–even the ones that aren’t very nice to me!
RaceTalk: What is your overall thought on the changing media landscape? Do you fear that someday “America’s paper of record” will only be available online?
JN: Someday, some newspaper will go online only, but it won’t be the New York Times–not for a very long time. There is still a lot of loyalty to the paper version of the Times, and it still generates a lot more advertising than the online paper, despite the shrinking ads in all newspapers. What’s really happening here is that there is a melding of the Website and the newspaper, as the Times becomes increasingly “platform agnostic”. The point is to get the best stories in print as quickly as possible–and that matters a lot more than whether they appear online or in the newspaper.
RaceTalk: A few weeks ago I was at Fortune Brainstorm: TECH, with some of your former colleagues, and one of the big general themes was a change in corporate thinking around utilizing customers to shape where the business is going. Michael Dell spoke about what they are doing with Dell’s IdeaStorm and the “My Starbucks Idea” example was tossed around. What’s your thought on corporate willingness to exchange in this new type of discussion and what have you heard from CEO’s on this potential change?
JN: I haven’t really heard much from other CEO’s about this kind of discussion–then again, I haven’t really asked. I’ll start looking into it. Thanks for the blog tip!
August 19th, 2008
By racetalk
There’s a revolution coming in public relations… visualisation.
[Courtesy Christopher Baker]
Picture the scene
You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?
It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.
Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.
To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?
Welcome to the world of data visualisation.
Digesting data
Information technology has made the collation and manipulation of masses of data relatively mundane. When you’re looking to manipulate data in a specific way, the machine can chunk through it pretty quickly and answer your defined and closed questions:
- What were the sales in week 39?
- How much did we invest in PR last year?
- In our last market research, how did our perceived value for money rate versus the competition?
But what if you don’t know what you’re looking for? How do you decipher the mass of data? How do you see what’s going on so you can learn and respond appropriately? How can you answer undefined and open questions such as:
- What’s the buzz amongst our customers?
- Who or what is exerting most influence?
- What trends should we know about?
- Who’s most likely to have started this rumour?
- Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers?
- Who and what influenced Charles Arthur today?
Data and dimensions
Gathering the data is, of course, no mean feat. But the rise of the social Web presents the broadest and deepest pool marketers have ever had to swim in, and I cover this topic in The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 (which, to my surprise, is being downloaded over 500 times a week!). Of course, there is also the little issue of who owns this information, which this article about the Social Graph on Read Write Web covers succinctly.
The next biggest challenge to spotting patterns and trends is simply that the data has more dimensions than we can cope with. Take your computer screen… two dimensional. Add some nifty mathematics and you can represent three dimensions. Change it over (compressed) time, and you can “see” four dimensions… but that’s about the best we can achieve.
So now we have two new battles on our hands.
The first is presenting data brilliantly in the three or four dimensions we can deal with. And the second is building in some intelligence so that we’re more than likely looking at the right combination of three or four dimensions amongst the dozens or hundreds represented in the data set.
Great visualisations
One of the fascinating outcomes of this new branch of public relations is the value non-geeks can literally “see” in it. There’s a reason someone coined the term “a picture paints a thousand words”. Perhaps “a data visualisation renders a million influences” will trip off the tongue in the future?! How cool is it to ’see’ a meme?
And it’s not coincidental that some visualisations are beautiful; not that I’m about to author a treatise on beauty, but heuristically it makes sense that we’re more likely to find the interpretation of something that looks good easier than something that looks a mess.
I’ll leave you with some visualisations, with hyperlinks to the source should you, like me, become entranced by visualisation.
My TwitArc
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitArcs/TwitArcs.html
Visualising Flickr contacts
Courtesy of Eskimoblood on Flickr.
Twitter conversations map
Courtesy of Walter Rafelsberger on Flickr.
Facebook Visualiser
Courtesy Sebastian Van Sand, Visual Complexity.
MySpace Type Use
Courtesy of Felix Heinen.
Instant Messenger IRC Who Is Talking To Who?
Courtesy of Martin Dittus.
Social Circles – Mailing List Social Visualisation
Courtesy of Marumushi.
Genealogy of influence
Courtesy of goosebumps4all.net.
Touch Graph
Courtesy of Mike Love.
August 19th, 2008
By Kyle Austin
By Kyle Austin
Peter Shankman, the creator of the much talked about HARO (Help A Reporter Out) service has been a feel good media story. Guy starts a free service to help reporters find sources. Guy sends the list to PR folks for free so they can get their clients mentioned as sources. Guy grows the list on his own to over 23,000 to compete with paid service from Profnet. Guy signs on advertisers to keep it free for users and gets “way over $100 CPM’s,” as advertisers reach a very targeted group. Everybody wins. What’s not to love about this story? Capitalism at its very best.
Unfortunately, fairy tales don’t usually last forever.
This morning while scanning some Twitter updates my colleague stumbled across this:
and then this:
My first thought – Maybe Hamilton Nolan is right and this is some sort of cult. Folks what are we thinking? I realize Peter does use shock value, he did agree to get tasered after all. But his use of the word “lynching” and all the connotations that come with the word is totally uncalled for and wrong. Now I obviously don’t know the race of the PR person that he is referring to and despite our name, we don’t usually get into racial discussions on our blog. If the PR person happens to be white – then perhaps it’s nothing more then an egregious error in judgement. If the PR person happens to black his use of the word is unconscionable. Either way, the use of the word that brings back images of one of the most despicable acts in our Nation’s history is wrong.
There’s obviously some comparisons that can be made here to the recent incident involving Golf Channel host Kelly Tilghman and her use of the word “lynch” in referring to Tiger Woods. Her use of the word in context was “young players who wanted to challenge Tiger Woods should lynch him in a back alley.” Tiger’s race, being an issue on the tour since he first set foot on it, made the remark a punishable offense and the network rightly suspended her for two weeks.
Since I started this post Shankman has updated his Twitter feed and let everyone know that the PR person has sent him a heartfelt apology:
At the very least Shankman owes everyone a heartfelt apology of his own for the consistent use of the word.
August 19th, 2008
By Kyle Austin
By Kyle Austin
Everyone within the media industry likes to speculate on the “death of newspapers.” However, sometimes TV news outlets get placed into the conversation as an additional dying medium. Local news outlets certainly have had issues in maintaining viewership during the Internet age. However, if you plan to reach the masses with news (or a message) – national network television – remains the best place to target multiple demographics. At least that is what the numbers say. Pew Research Center’s biannual survey on news consumption, released Sunday, found that the largest group (46%) of news consumers still turn to their televisions (almost solely) for news.
Although Internet news consumption continues to grow it still represents the smallest group of news consumers (13%). This group is also the youngest demographic of news consumers, with a median age of 35; 17 years younger then the median average of the group reliant on TV news. The study does echo the general shift towards online consumption and away from print news outlets. 34 percent of those surveyed stated they had read a newspaper the day before – down from 40 percent in 2006. Meanwhile, 25 percent of those surveyed noted they go to the Internet for news at least three times each week – up from 18 percent two years ago.
In addition, another statistic that is always interesting to look at within the biannual Pew research are the “Believability Ratings.” Mediabistro nicely highlights the findings here and I’ve embedded below as well.
Not that surprisingly, the CNN brand carries credibility with viewers – scoring the top believability rating. However, I am surprised that it was graded higher by TV viewers than 60 Minutes. Although the study notes that almost every outlet has had its credibility marks decline over the last decade – these two aforementioned outlets have managed to stay relevant in most people’s eyes. Not so relevant is Katie Couric and CBS, who fell below Fox News in the ratings.
NBC News won the believability battle between the three major networks; another feather in its cap as it basks in the glow of its Olympic ratings triumph. Bill Carter and Richard Sandomir further illustrated just how successful the games have been for NBC, in today’s NYT’s:
The Games have drawn an average audience of about 30 million a night on NBC itself, millions more on NBC’s cable channels, 30 million unique visitors to NBC’s Olympics Web site, 6.3 million shared videos from the coverage streamed on the site and an ultimate profit that network executives project will surpass $100 million.
A successful multi-channel (digital and television) initiative – NBC may have figured “it” out.
August 19th, 2008
