WesHanson.com

Communications

Half and Half

As of today, there are six months left in the year. Half of the year is gone, for those glass-not-quite-full types. Some say the glass is just too big. But however you see our worldly vessel, the question is what you do with what remains.

It feels sometimes like we’re in a worm hole, doesn’t it, whizzing into new dimensions without quite getting our bearings in the last one. We suddenly are expected to communicate almost constantly with emails, Tweets, blogs, texts, phone calls and even face-to-face conversations. How can we keep up — plus, you know, work and live real lives too.

Every innovation has always had a past-due date, but those dates are getting shorter and shorter. If you don’t replenish by improving your skills, increasing your reach, building your customer base or otherwise growing you go stale. Curdle up and die.

Businesses (including entrepreneurs who have come to see themselves as “brands”) need customers, which means they need marketing communications that put rapidly developing information technology to work for them. (PubArts of course can help you with that… just saying.)

Here’s the tricky thing with progress, though: the better we do, the bigger the problem we make for ourselves because expectations grow faster than the ability to deliver. As Nicholas Rescher wrote in Unpopular Essays on Technological Progress: “Progress produces dissatisfaction because it inflates expectations faster than it can actually meet them.”

It’s a phenomenon that extends to our personal lives and even to political order. Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington did groundbreaking work on the paradox of increased unrest in backward societies emerging out of poverty – the progress itself creates higher expectations that can scarcely be met, leading not infrequently to bloody revolution.

So welcome to the restless new world of 24/7 communications. The more that is technologically possible, the more that is expected of you, even though you were perfectly happy the way things were. And if you can’t or won’t get with the program, your competitors are more than happy to emerge from the encroaching darkness to help themselves to your lunch. Half full or half empty: just drink it up and pour yourself another.

Welcome to the Fourth World

Isn’t it wonderful that the owners of Associated Content are selling their company to Yahoo for a reported $90 million? That’s “wonderful” as in: I’m full of wonder and amazement how it has come to pass that huge numbers of desperate people are willing to work for (almost) free in order to further enrich a brazen few.

Associated Content’s 380,000 freelance contributors are paid close to nothing for providing what the company calls “a broad array of passion points” — with passion being defined as topics that Google has determined are popular search terms (and thus honey to advertisers).

Journalism and professional writing were never great gigs, money-wise; lucre has lured few into the trade. But the Internet age has really sharpened that point. Consider multi-millionaire Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post is supposedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars — and yet doesn’t pay many of its contributors. Or Examiner.com, which is owned by multi-billionaire Phillip Anschutz and doesn’t pay its 300,000 contributors much of anything. Or Demand Media of Santa Monica – another outfit that claims $200 million in ad revenue — and demands its contributors give up all rights to their work in exchange for an average $15 an article.

The saying used to be the freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns the press. Fair enough, and in this electronic age we can all own our own press – we can be masters of our own domain name. But really, why do people exchange their time and skill for pocket change just so millionaires and billionaires can get richer? Yet that’s essentially the business model. It works because the global Internet — the same phenomenon that has made every one a potential publisher — has gutted traditional media employers and empowered mass purveyors of “crowd sourced content” and their advertisers.

If you’re the writer, you might do it because you need the experience or the contacts or the electronic equivalent of “clips” (work samples). If you’re the proprietor, you do it because you’d be a fool not to. After all, why not encourage educated, talented, articulate people to work for free? Who needs Bangalore when you can get Third World labor in Santa Monica? Let’s call it the Fourth World, replacing what we once knew as the Fourth Estate.

Make Google Dance Your Tune

There are lots of clever ways to make Google dance a different tune. Here are five examples of less conventional ways to make the world’s dominant search engine bust a move:

1. Limit your search to a particular site without having to rely on that site’s built-in search tool (which may not be up to the task). To search for the subject “ABC” on the website XYZ.com do this: ABC site:XYZ.com.

2. Use Google to correct your spelling. If Google senses you’ve typed in your query incorrectly, it will suggest the correct spelling. You can also get a word’s definition by searching on: define: word I’m interested in defining.

3. For the math-challenged, Google has a calculator. Just enter the equation you seek to solve.

4. Want to know what time it is in Bangkok? Search: time Bangkok

5. In this world of topsy turvey exchange rates, you might need to know how a certain currency converts to yours. Search: 100 dollars in Euros.

Giving Offense, Getting Noticed

I used to work as a public affairs director at a large mental health organization. Not the kind of place that would get a kick out of a recent Burger King commercial.

A man in a surreally oversized plastic “king” head with a creepy grin is running through an office building pursued by a man dressed in a white lab coat who yells, “Stop that King, he’s crazy!”

It seems the meat sovereign is insane to be “giving away” sandwiches for $3.99.

There is so much stigma assigned to mental illness that this kind of stuff puts people on edge. But as advertising, it works. I remembered it, and it garnered a lot of press notice.

When Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s hot-tempered chief of staff, criticized somebody’s stupid move as “retarded,” the uproar commenced. Sarah Palin, who has a young son with Down’s Syndrome, seized the opportunity to call for Emmanual’s dismissal. Proving once again that one person’s/organization’s bad P.R. is another’s opportunity.

Businessweek (Re)Blooms

When Bloomberg LLP purchased hoary old Business Week magazine from McGraw-Hill you could be forgiven for wondering what they were thinking. The multimillion dollar price tag may have been mere pocket change to the maker of ubiquitous and highly lucrative financial data machines. But still, why bother?

After all, Washington Post Co. is jettisoning Newsweek after nearly 50 years of ownership and a recent complete redesign, because it can’t make the property pay.

Now called Bloomberg Businessweek, both the print and electronic versions of the specialty publication have undergone less of a redesign than a re-imagining. And therein lies the promise of its success.

From it’s very name, it’s clear that the reborn media property is part of a new family and new strategy — the new owner  is the brand, and businessweek is its extension.

It’s a larger and more complicated media property now, packed with information packaged all sorts of ways, serving distinct groups from traders to cultural zeitgeistists. There are short, snappy pieces along with narrative features (Meg Whitman on the campaign trail, municipalities deep-sixed by sophisticated financial trades, etc.), investigative pieces (former Lehman CEO Dick Fuld’s perjury, for-profit college scams), and continuation of special areas of expertise (for instance, the importance of design to productivity).

There are lots of moving parts to manage, so Bloomberg’s strength in low-key, by-the-book management will come in handy. In contrast, other recent attempts to reinvent the business magazine such as Conde Nast’s Portfolio failed, in part because of editorial/managerial temperament.

Bloomberg’s challenge (as with whoever ends up owning Newsweek) is less to make print relevant in the electronic age than to revitalize a trusted (and therefore valuable) brand so that it nimbly adopts new technologies to reach varied audiences in varied ways.

Check it: http://www.businessweek.com/http://www.businessweek.com/