WiredPen

I’m on a panel Wednesday morning with Robert Scoble and Pam Miller: "Blogging: Its power and impact on public affairs and the media" is a panel discussion before an audience of public sector PIOs in Seattle.

What to say, what to say? I could start with my comments from a PRSA workshop earlier this month. Or maybe with this image from EuroBlog 2006? (tip) Or this post by Steve Rubel - DoS hosts webchat with David Kline. Ummm …. let’s start by advising folks to watch EPIC2015 — because blogs are just one part of a larger social ecosystem that will change politics and media. And work.

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I love reading. I love reading the paper. Heaven is starting the day with coffee and the morning paper. Or two! (Seattle + New York Times).

It’s not unlike wandering around a bookstore … or Nordstrom’s … where you finger the merchandise and impulse buy. A leisurely journey through the morning paper will provide food for the mind that even news.google is unlikely to dish up.

And of course, the "solution" to (horrors!) a drop in average profitability slightly below 20% is to CUT staff and CUT the size of the paper. Ergo, reduce the number of articles.

When did double-digit profits become the norm? When I used to teach summer sessions for high school students… introducing them to the merits of the "free enterprise system" … my memory is we were talking about single digits.

Molly Ivans talks about the biz this week. Hmmm. Employee-owned or NFP-owned media?

About 100 of the 300 faculty at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville (founded in 1889; enrollment: 5,500 students) are using iPods for education or research — a remarkable adoption rate for any campus but particularly for a rural one. Even the President’s cabinet is using podcasts!

After [President Dorothy] Leland and Jim Wolfgang, the school’s chief information officer,
began seeing iPods around campus in 2002, they decided to explore
educational applications for the devices. They started by farming out
50 donated iPods to faculty who offered the best proposals…

Hank Edmondson, a government professor known around campus as "The
Podfather," was among the first to use iPods to supplement his course
lectures. Edmondson makes lectures, language study programs, indigenous
music and thumbnail art sketches available for download to the iPods of
students in a three-week study abroad program he leads.

During a recent visit to the Prado in Madrid, he recorded a
20-minute lecture on the museum’s artwork. Downloading that in advance
will let students spend their visit to the museum exploring, not
listening to Edmondson talk…

This school year, the school started iVillage, a virtual community
that encouraged incoming students to start communicating before the
start of classes. The first dozen freshmen recruited for the effort
were asked to think up innovative uses for the iPods.

The team is creating an iPod-based freshmen survival guide that
includes advice on classes, dorms and nightlife in this sleepy
community 100 miles south of Atlanta.

Makes this girl’s heart proud!

The four corporate reps provided very diverse examples of how major organizations are integrating new media into their corporate communication strategies.

Nancy Blanton, Port of Seattle, explained some of the process behind the Port’s new website design (yeah! personas!). The focus shifted from the organization to its audiences. One result is a real-time flight info page. [I checked my 1.36 pm flight -- at 9.23. Basic info (gate, departure time, flight number). Nothing yet (too early!) on status.]

The Port is also planning to use RSS syndication to allow interested people (journalists, agency people, citizens, etc) stay up to date on the light rail project, which will connect SeaTac with Seattle.

Nancy also talked about two technologies that most communicators probably aren’t talking about: RFID technology and VoIP. RFID is a technology may be used to enhance/support security; last week they demo’ed the technology for Sen. Murray (D-WA) and Sen. Collins (R-ME), who have introduced the Greenlane Maritime Cargo Security Act (S 2008).

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Giovanni Rodriguez, Eastwick Communications, emphasizes social computing in his keynote remarks at the Puget Sound PRSA seminar on Integrating Web Communications in PR Campaigns. PR is not dead, but is going through a metamorphosis. “Many of us are helping our clients (for the first time) to relate to the public.” The tools for this interaction (wiki, blogs) are easy to use. But what are the rules?

Giovanni impled that Wal-Mart’s use (some say co-option) of the blogosphere conflicted with social rules of the digital world. One key point: the digital world is “more open, inclusive and efficient” because of the nature of zeros-and-ones. “Ignore this at our peril.”

Ten short rules:

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What do you say to a room full of PR folks in five minutes to convince them of the importance of social software … blogging networks … word of mouth? You could begin with quotables:

"We have to convince journalists that the consumer owns the story," says Dan Bradley, vice president of broadcast news at Media General and former news director of WFLA-TV.

    - We Media

Blogging, I firmly believe, is the premier emergent marketing-brandbuilding-lovemarkcreating tool of our times! It is the premier way to have intimate-engaging-informative-WOWing ‘conversations’ with Clients and prospects!

    - Tom Peters

Or examples of how word of mouth have worked (or not).

Another tactic might be to counter current dismissals. A common meme: not many people read blogs. Here are data some from Pew:

• 16% of all U.S. adults read blogs; this is 25% of those online (May 2005)
• 17% of the American public regularly listens to talk radio
  (June 2004)
• 23% of Americans under age 30 read a newspaper yesterday (June 2004)
• 27% of cars in the US are made by GM (January 2005)

Do we write off talk radio as being unimportant? I thought not. Do papers strategize to boost their young readership, or just write them off?

Dismissal is not an option.

However, that argument is disingenious, because it rests on what I believe is a flawed assumption.

Now’s the time to remind folks that we need to separate the technology from the content. (This almost sounds like an XML talk!)

What I mean is this: blogging technology is to blogs what an offset printing press is to newspapers. We can use the printing press (blogging software) to create more than one genre of printed material. What do USA Today, The Seattle Weekly and this week’s Safeway circular have in common? Ink, paper and a printing press. But we don’t lump them together when we’re talking about declining newspaper readership, the growth of free weeklies or how to determine where to advertise food specials.

The best questions are audience-centered:  who is your audience, what media do they consume today and what media do you expect them to consume tomorrow?

The answers will help chart your technological course. I firmly believe that part of that course should involve — or at least consider — social software. But just as I wouldn’t advise everyone to hire a lobbyist or place a full page ad in the New York Times, nor would I automatically assume everyone "needs a blog."

What people do need (want, desire) is a voice. Blogging software (the technology) does that really really well. It’s transformative power is akin to that of Pagemaker on typesetting. No longer do I need to get my hands dirty writing code to publish my thoughts on the Web. (But I still can if I want to.)

But it doesn’t stop there: two more innovations are key.

The first is RSS — real simple syndication. This removes the burden of "bookmark and remember to check to see if there’s anything new" — because an RSS reader will automagically let you know when your "feeds" have been updated (based on your update preferences). Issues remain with ease-of-subscription, but I’m convinced the technologists will solve that problem.

The second is the ability to foster a dialog between author and readers through comments. This interactivity is central to the blogging phenomena, especially in the area of politics.

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On-demand publisher Lulu is counting down the weeks to its first Lulu Blooker Prize for books based on blogs or websites. Judges: Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and co-creator of Boing Boing; Paul Jones, of ibiblio and UNC; and Robin (RobLimo) Miller, is editor-in-chief of OSTG.

The short list of contenders includes books from already published writers, like the guys at Spinsanity, as well as the, ummm, non-traditional: the memoir of a London call girl. Just as there are many more gifted musicians than there is radio station air time, there are more creative wordsmiths than paper-and-ink-combined- with-read-time. Events like this one help us find those new voices.

Technorati Profile

Technorati tags: 
Blogs,
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gada.be tags:
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I’ll be joining Paul Andrews and other Seattle-area business and tech folks for a regional PRSA seminar next week: Integrating Web Communications in Public Relations Campaigns. I’m on the media panel as a blogger and academic.