Below the Fold

Living the Absent Life

Every week at least one or two people start following me on Twitter. This in itself is not a problem – my feed is public and I have nothing to hide from friend, foe or even Yankee fan.

What I find interesting is that I haven’t posted anything on Twitter since I signed up for the service when it was still in beta. One look at my page will make that painfully obvious, so either people 1) are hoping against hope that I’ll say something important someday, or 2) could care less about what I have to say and just want to be connected in case I commit suicide, and as a last-minute plea for attention I broadcast my 140-character cry for help.

Nothing against Twitter – I think it’s a great service and have recommended it to clients where it made sense. But as those of you who follow this blog know, I have enough trouble maintaining Below the Fold, much less another channel. And besides, if I can’t think of anything important to say for over a month here, I certainly wouldn’t be able to keep pace with a Twitter channel, 140 characters per post or not.

Twitter reminds me of the early days of blogging, when posts about bathroom breaks, travel delays and the cute thing the cat just did dominated the nascent blogosphere. I distinctly remember a post from Dan Gillmor, then and still one of my idols, where he made sure to let everyone know he would be offline for two hours and not to worry, he would be back and posting again as soon as possible.

Suffice to say we’ve all gotten more patient. Some early stars like Jason Calacanis have even stopped blogging altogether. Yet information has not slowed, outlets have not diminished and the thirst for being first often quenches being right.

WE LIVE IN A TIME OF PLENTY – plenty good and plenty bad. You could say the same thing about almost any decade at any time in modern history. The difference today, I believe, is not so much in what we have, but in what is missing.

There is the “Digital Life’ that many of us live – certainly those of us who read blogs, update their Facebook profiles, send texts or record podcasts. And then there is the Absent Life, the place where we fail to connect with each other like so many unused Twitter feeds.

The Absent Life is talking to people online without engaging in a real conversation. It’s about knowing without understanding. The Absent Life is what goes on around us while we are busy being busy.

It’s the guy on his Blackberry at dinner with his wife. It’s the person sending e-mail at Midnight when 8 AM would suffice. It’s the excuse that you can’t afford to disconnect from the Internet, when in fact you are just disconnecting from the real world. And it’s the dichotomy of wanting to stay on top of the latest news and trends while also trying to stay on top of everything else demanding your immediate attention.

Our lives are digital. Our work is digital. And our friends are digital. Everything we want is at our fingertips. We think we have it all, because in many ways we do.

Really, we are fortunate. People are making real connections online, engaging and supporting each other. Media is forging new ground and taking storytelling to levels never before possible in the world of mere atoms.

The Digital Life is worth living. What we need is a better way to balance our digital world so we don’t become absent in the real one.

A case in point: a few months ago, a colleague placed a picture of a little girl in my office. The girl was much younger than my daughter but about the same age as his. I thanked him for the photo and commented how cute his daughter looked.

Just one problem – the picture was of my own daughter, taken years earlier in my own backyard when I was apparently standing nearby. My little girl, my yard, my life – and not a clue or wisp of memory of my daughter ever looking that way.

The Digital Life is where I try to be. But the Absent Life is me.

We Are the Firemen

In May 1993 – the exact date and time escape me – my inner world, the one where thoughts are born, developed and processed, lost its ability to be silent. I since have lived with constant noise, the result of a tumor that, in an ironic nod to God’s comic grace, left me deaf in one ear yet covered in a perpetual blanket of ringing static.

Sometimes it’s not too bad, other times it’s so loud it sounds like there’s a KISS concert in my cranium. But it is always there, never fully abated, never completely quiet. It will never be quiet, and it has been so long I have forgotten what quiet is, what silence sounds like, what kinds of thoughts stillness brings. How much smarter, how less painful the headaches and seizures, how more aware of my environment would I be if only I could hear more – and then, like most people, dial down the volume and hear nothing but thinking.

Rather than go insane, I did the next best thing – I went into marketing. Turns out my decision was less pathos than it was prescience, as I watch my former trade of journalism in some cases melt away, in others morph into a new kind of socially-driven journalism enabled (if not always ennobled) by modern technology.

THE DESCENT OF PRINT alone is not a problem for our society. But the descent of thought is. And this death of reasonable thinking and discourse has given rise to a ringing in all our ears, a cacophony of “social media” for its own sake rather than the sake of the consumer.

Don’t get me wrong (though I guarantee someone will) – I love technology and Web 2.0. I believe in the power of conversation and the promise of connecting people to each other with authentic communications. But in this new silicon rush we far too often discount what’s gone before, throwing judgment into the intellectual pyre like so many worn newspapers.

In other words, in our well-meant effort to broaden and share our knowledge, are we also destroying the very knowledge and reasoned discussion we so boldly claim to seek?

Because we can connect with people like ourselves, we do. And then we act as if other opinions don't exist -- or if they do, then don't matter. We do this within our social networks, the pseudo social media intelligentsia do it at conferences and on their blogs, and the news media does it by giving us news tuned to whatever ideological frequency we desire.

We jump to conclusions and applaud hyperbole until the slightest chance of digesting an idea is gone. That idea is destroyed forever, lost in the echo chamber of self-important consultants and rash Twitter feeds.

Never before in human history has so much information been available so readily to so many. Yet although we are creating and writing more, we are saying less.

IN FAHRENHEIT 451, RAY BRADBURY’S seminal novel about censorship and intellectual intolerance, a “fireman” was someone who burned books. Well, we don’t burn books per se, but we burn discourse. We don't destroy newspapers, but our actions are killing them off just the same. We are the firemen.

So this is my warning and my plea: don’t get caught up in the social media panacea. Instead, experiment and decide what works for you and your company. Focus on the customer first and the technology second. It’s okay to take small steps, to do what’s best for your business, to embrace new tools at your own pace even if it goes against the “purists” who argue that there’s only one way to move forward.

And above all, take time to think, to plan, to discuss and learn. Embrace the unknown and reject those who insist they know it all. Find some silence and make decisions without being surrounded by so much noise.

I would give anything for just a few seconds of mental peace and quiet. Don’t squander yours.

News Redux

"We hope that through our virtual newsroom users will be able to connect better with the day’s news stories, leading to a greater understanding of the real world." -- Sky News Head of News John Ryley

News is bad enough these days, what with wars, shootings, psycho celebrity parents and Paris Hilton getting fitted for an L.A. County Jail jumpsuit, it’s hard to believe anyone would want to recreate any of it. Yet that’s exactly what Britain’s Sky News says it plans to do as part of its June launch in Second Life.

Linda Zimmer of Business Communicators of Second Life pulls out a key statement from the official Sky News announcement, noting that “Sky News apparently plans to recreate news-worthy events, such as ‘court cases, crime scenes and natural disasters’ to provide a ‘deeper understanding of the issues.’ ”

Linda goes on:

“As 3D spaces become more accessible to content creators and audiences, content will become animated, 360-degree, un-flat, multi-dimensional and multimedia. This applies as richly to news as it does to other forms of communications.”

I agree – but there is another, perhaps larger question. Does recreating news in a 3D space change our perceptions of the original, “real” news event? Will we “see” things differently, better understand other points of view, or react in different ways because we have experienced the news “firsthand” rather than as a passive observer?

The answer, at least in part, depends on whether you believe the 3D person inside Second Life is an extension of you or something “other” than you. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of behavioral psychology, the truth is we are our avatars and they are us. Our actions and experiences online can have a deep and profound effect on our real lives – including how we understand news, or perhaps even changing news itself.

For now, of course, no one knows whether Sky News’ virtual experiment will affect real news. But if it does, the change will have less to do with Second Life’s technology than with the authentic human emotions this same technology inspires.

Put another way, technology is like the heart, a machine pumping binary blood through digital veins. And like blood, technology by itself is cold. So is news when left alone.

But emotions are the soul – they are what make us greater than machines. And news with a soul is something today’s journalism is sorely missing. Second Life may just help journalism get its soul back.

Beware the Flying Cars of Progress

"If you invest more in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes. If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money." -- Esther Thorson, Director of Research, Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, which for me is especially disturbing since I only post a few times a month anyway. This would be worse, of course, if I actually had readers – so no harm, no foul.

Nevertheless, the guilt of these blogless days weighed heavy upon my soul. So many stories have come and gone, passing me by faster than Sanjaya Malakar’s fame. Yet the demands of Powerpoint presentations, conference calls, travel and listening to Gomes go on and on about Linux left no time for me to add another grain of digital sand on the endless of beach of Person Created Content (PCP for short – hmmm, on second thought, that’s perhaps not the best acronym.)

I thought about writing a long essay about the future of journalism, or a 140 character Haiku about Twitter, or a witty satire about a social media something. But the first option would take too long, the second required too much creativity, and the last almost certainly would have been taken too seriously by Shel Holtz. In the end, I decided to write about flying cars.

When my sister was young – a long, long, long time ago – a teacher told her that by time she was old enough to drive, everyone would have a flying car. She did get a Ford Cobra II, but every time she tried to fly the California Highway Patrol brought her back to Earth.

I heard the same thing when I was young, but my Chevy Cavalier often never moved, much less flew. And just the other day, a friend’s eight-year-old daughter echoed the generational promise: “When I get older, everyone will have a flying car.”

There’s nothing wrong with dreams – but if your head is always in the clouds it become hard to see the way forward. Put another way, I’m all for chasing the next new thing, whether it’s viral video, micro blogging, widget mania or any number of technological advances that are the “flying cars” of the social media age. But none of these tools replace the need for intelligent storytelling, critical thinking or core communications skills.

For example, in many newsrooms today, reporters are now required to shoot video or maintain blogs as part of their reporting duties. Yet shooting video alone doesn’t necessarily make for better journalism. In fact, a study out of the University of Missouri shows that investing in well-trained journalists increases newspaper circulation – I’m not sure the same would be true for investing in DV cams.

So beware the flying cars of progress. Don’t let the promises of the future betray your responsibilities to the present. Technology can’t help you if you don’t have anything to say.

Redefining the Social Network and Social Media

“I don’t think it is easy for MySpace and Facebook to adapt and bend to the needs of individual brands.” – Alexander Mouldovan, Founder, Crowd Factory

They had names like Compuserve, The Well, Tribe and Usenet. One of them, a little regarded place called America Online, became a behemoth, though the others fell either into history or obscurity. The Internet turned into the World Wide Web,  into the entomology of modern life.

Now there is Web 2.0 and “social” media technology – enabling an Internet created by individuals as well as corporations. But this is not, as some people and media reports would have you believe, a new Internet – rather, it is a decades-old promise finally coming true.

More than a year ago I said that 2006 would be the year that blogging passes from novelty into utility, and it did – blogs are not only mainstream media themselves, but they are a staple of traditional media news sites. The same shift is now happening with social networks, albeit with a significant difference.

Blogs were something new, a powerful self-publishing tool that opened the door to a “read-write” web. Moreover, blogs will always be a part of the web, not the web in its entirety.

But social networks – or to be more exact, technologies that allow people to interact and share ideas and content instantaneously – are becoming the Web. Eventually, the Internet itself will be one, giant, global social network, created by and for individuals.

The First Wave – Gated Communities
You can’t scratch the Internet today without finding the word “social.” Instead of building static web sites, corporations are now building their own “social networks.” Cisco Systems, which owns a social network development company, is purchasing Tribe.Net’s technology so it can build networks for corporate customers.

Nike has a social network. So do Carnival Cruises and Sheraton hotels. There are hundreds of social networks with more going online all the time – and while acting as separate membership communities, almost all have the same “social” features like blogs, audio and video sharing, messaging and friends lists.

These types of social networks – led by the likes of powerhouses MySpace and Facebook, Bebo and Gather – represent the first wave. They give members freedom but within certain parameters and interfaces. They are not so much closed communities but “gated” ones, where members must act and express themselves in certain ways or discuss defined topics. Think of it as being part of a homeowner’s association that allows everyone to have a garage as long as it’s painted one of five pre-approved colors (sounds strange, but I live in Orange County, Calif., where this really happens.)

The Second Wave – An Internet Built With Bridges
But if Internet users hate anything, they hate constraint. A second wave of social networks promises to remove all constraint – in effect, to disband the homeowner’s association and let people paint their garages whatever color they want.

These networks – networks like Second Life and Ning, the latest brainchild from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen – aim to turn the Internet into a tabula rasa where customization is king. According to a recent New York Times article, Ning allows “anyone to set up a community on any topic…Ning users choose the features they want to include, like videos, photos, discussion forums or blogs. Their sites can appear like MySpace, YouTube or the photo sharing site Flickr – or something singular.”

Furthermore, standards like OpenID hope to make identity transferable from community to community. Just think – an Internet of true imagination, entire worlds that people build themselves. An Internet built not with walls or gates, but with bridges.

People Make It Social, Not Technology
For this to happen we need to do our part, too:

• We need to change our thinking of the Internet as something that includes social networks to something that is a social network.

• Technology allows media to be shared, but technology alone doesn’t make blogs or RSS feeds or tagging “social.” Only people can do that. In other words, a blog is “sharable” media – media that is easily shared with others anywhere, that can be updated quickly and with which we can interact – but it’s how people engage with the blog that determines whether it is also “social" media.

Nevertheless, the next wave is here. Social networks and social media are disappearing into the fabric of the Web. The promise of Compuserve and “Web 1.0” sites is here.

And as for what comes next? Well, that responsibility now appears to lie with us.

JetBlue’s PR Strategy Puts it all Together

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
I'll be home by Thursday,
But not on jetBlue. – submission to a JetBlue poetry contest on Dadlabs.com

 
I met David Neeleman, CEO of jetBlue, a few years ago on a flight from New York City to California. Neeleman was handing out potato chips and other snacks, chatting with passengers and listening to their comments and ideas. Whether this was a gimmick or he actually used the advice was irrelevant – what mattered is that one could never imagine the CEO of American Airlines, United, Delta or any other major carrier doing the same thing. And certainly not in coach.

This “quirkiness” was part of jetBlue’s masterful strategy to be the “anti-airline,” the only carrier about whom, when the flight attendant thanked you for choosing their company, your first reaction was not to throw up but to say you’re welcome. jetBlue’s core wasn’t in-flight TV or leather seats, but customer service that didn’t belie the phrase. And it all started with a CEO whose business was about the sky, yet’s whose approach was down to earth.

So I wasn’t surprised at how Neeleman handled his airline’s recent crisis. A wicked winter storm, combined with operational miscalculations, caused a week canceled flights, lost baggage and passengers jet blue in the face with anger (though thanks to jetBlue’s track record, most regular passengers forgave their favorite airline for its transgressions – that’s the power of “branding” in action.)

Neeleman stepped up and did the right thing – he acknowledged fault, he told the truth, he provided compensation. Most importantly, he said he was sorry. And he meant it.

He also used multiple platforms to get his message out – from traditional newspapers to direct mail, to the Web and YouTube. And this, in my opinion, is jetBlue’s contribution to communications history.

The young airline told a real story in ways that were relevant to how modern audiences consume information. New media was used as a strategy, not as a tactic or something extra for the kids – and in fact, jetBlue proved that the line between new and traditional media is, if not gone, is fading fast.

The company made some waves by using “social media” technologies like YouTube to speak directly to consumers, but just posting a video on YouTube doesn’t automatically give you a “get out of PR jail free” card. Nor was this simply another example of Marshall McLuhan being full of crap when he said “the medium is the message.” This was about the power of story and the ability – in fact, the necessity – of good storytelling to be medium agnostic.

jetBlue is to be applauded for using today's full range of communications channels. The airline didn't do it to be more “transparent,” but because these are the channels that have become very much the normal, everyday, routine ways to communicate. And again, without a good story to tell or without the honesty and willingness to accept responsibility, the effort would have failed no matter how many videos  Neeleman posted.

Neeleman and jetBlue should feel horrible about what happened to their thousands of customers – but they have nothing to be ashamed of.

Measuring the Impact of “Micro Memories”

“Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized forms of news and entertainment.” – Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1996

SINCE THE DAWN of the Internet Age – and even before – we have bemoaned the wane of collective experience.

In his seminal work, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte talked about the “Daily Me,” a newspaper containing only the news the reader wanted, in the order he or she wanted and whenever he or she wanted to read. More than a decade later, this prescient prediction is not only reality but necessity for millions. Moreover, the Daily “We” – otherwise known as the metropolitan newspaper – is fading in readers and influence.

But Negroponte’s vision failed to encompass other factors that accelerated today’s Balkanized information flow. High-speed Internet connections, multimedia mobile devices, video games and mistrust of traditional institutions (including the mainstream press) have left our media “unbundled” at best, fragmented at worst.

We gather to watch the Super Bowl, yet we also tune to hundreds of other channels competing for our attention, urging us to participate and filling us with, yes, exactly what we want, when we want it and how we want it.

Micro Memories
So although we watch the game with friends, we leave with different experiences. One memory of one event is now divided into many smaller “micro memories” – and when added up, they are a sum not necessarily greater than the parts. In fact, the sum of micro memories may not add up at all, or they may resemble something entirely different that the original experience.

Micro memory is neither good nor bad – it is what it is. But it raises important issues, such as how do we best communicate a communal experience when the commune is empty? How do you mobilize for large actions, like saving the environment? In today’s micro memory world, it’s far easier to mobilize support to save a specific tree than the entire forest. We’ve moved from reaching “far and wide” to influencing narrow and drilling deep.

Exploring the many micro memories available online is also revealing, and in fact lay proof to what we’ve always suspected about the human condition: That a single event is processed and recorded by individuals in different ways. The Internet – and simple tools that allow us to publish and share – now allow us to eavesdrop.

We can and should move to a model that looks beyond cold statistics like Nielsen ratings and 18-34 year old age targets. We have the ability to see what those numbers represent, to dissect millions of micro memories and, in the end, engage in communications practices that are more accurate, more personal – and dare I say, more human.

The Day the Press Release Died (Again)

Okay, before the PR purists get their keyboards in a digital wad, I know that the press release is still alive and still has a purpose, especially with regard to investor relations.

Nevertheless, today was significant. Today was another step on the road toward the erosion of online and offline media, toward the marginalization of traditional "massive" media and toward the democratizing effect of media created by and for the masses.

For today, the world learned that Barack Obama will explore a bid to become president of the United States not from a leak to CNN and not from a press conference on the Capitol steps, but from a video posted on his personal web site. The first candidate for the You Tube era has arrived.

Continue to do you job the same way, with the same tools and tactics, and with the same mindset and assumptions of who and what is media, and you will be fine for a while.  You just won't be in this business for much longer.

Goodbye, Virtual World

I've been preaching for a long time that the web is where conversation happens today, period. It seems that everyone goes online at some point to talk about a company, a product, an issue or their personal lives. Using the web is like having access to an infinite number of backyard fences, a party line that never goes dead or gets dull.

In fact, online communication has become so ubiquitous that there is no longer any difference between the online world and the "offline" world -- it's all just "the world," and we live in it with little conscious realization of where offline ends and online begins.

So, given all this, why do we view Second Life as a virtual world, but not for example Amazon.com?

Is Amazon a "real" store? Of course not. It exists only as strings of code, just like Second Life. Yet we believe Amazon to be real and Second Life to be virtual.

Is Amazon real because it sells what we consider "real" products? Again, the premise is flawed. I buy a book on Amazon and I can hold it and read it, because that's the product's purpose. I buy a book in Second Life and my avatar holds it and reads. Both things really happen, and both products do what they are supposed to do.

I've got news for you:  every  online destination is  virtual. That's just the reality.

Social Media Tools and Modern Technology Only Tell Part of the Story

The Riverside Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., requires its entry-level reporters to shoot video of their stories in addition to the written versions. The directive is optional for older or more established reporters, but the message is clear: Get with the future or get out.

There is some truth and I’m sure even noble purpose to this obvious attempt to remain relevant. And the Press-Enterprise is hardly alone – these are trying times for the soul of newspapers everywhere, and 2007 will be different only in terms of magnitude.

Newspapers are not dead; the traditional newspaper is. But technology itself is not enough to resuscitate the dying patient that is today’s printed press.

What newspapers lack is not video or blogs, podcasts or RSS feeds, avatars or consumer/citizen/user/customer/whoever-generated content. Newspapers no longer tell us stories – especially those stories we need to hear.

We get snippets, digests and broad strokes. We get opinion without context, commentary without research and sound bite upon sound bite upon sound bite. Like almost every other form of media, the newspaper has been “Tivoed” and revamped to address our mass cultural Attention Deficit Disorder, so much so that we know more about Tom and Katie than Shiite and Sunni (and care more about the former as well.)

Nevertheless, there is still a thirst for story that newspapers can quench. While the Internet version of news excels at the short pass, the print version needs to go long with stories that awaken people’s emotions, not their modems. In fact, this approach is not just for print but for the online newspaper as well. With an unlimited amount of space, there is plenty of room for good storytelling.

And yes, these stories, when warranted or possible, will need to include video and graphics, and audience engagement via commenting and other social media norms, among other things. All media is multimedia, and that goes for newspapers, too.

But rather than shoot video for video’s sake, tomorrow’s journalists need to learn how to be visual and audio storytellers. Just using the technology doesn’t make you relevant or hip – you can shoot all the video you want, but if it doesn’t tell a story, then you are wasting the audience’s time.

When I was in journalism school I had to choose whether to study print or broadcast journalism. But today there are no print journalists, TV journalists, radio journalists or Internet journalists. There are just journalists reporting across all mediums, in all forms, and in real time. The main universal thread is story, which should be every journalism student’s major and every professional’s focus.

This is where we are headed in 2007 – a world without a mass media, without a common tongue to tell our human tales. What we have instead is a world with many mediums, affording countless opportunities to reach more people in more ways than ever before.

This is our great challenge as communicators – and our greatest hope for a meaningful future.