Digitized Thoughts

I like to gamble. The occasional game of poker for cash aside though, I rarely gamble cash. Writing a post for someone if my team loses to them feels like I’ve TRULY lost a bet. Thus the basis of a bet between myself and Julia Prior a few weeks ago when Iowa hosted Dayton in the first round of the NIT. Iowa pulled the game out, and much happiness was had by me. I neglected to post Julia’s fulfillment of the bet, which you can find below:

Two teams with two brand new coaches met in the first round of the NIT March 13th. One showed an amazing turnaround from the previous season, making their first post season appearance in five years, the other slipping into their old patterns that has landed them in the NIT for the past three years.

In response to Jason Falls’ post yesterday.

Jason has made some very valid and accurate criticisms here. I’m sure there were many people whose feelings were hurt because of the change in Klout’s algorithms. I didn’t really care that  mine went down, and while I will admit to liking the fact that I had a score of 60+ before the change, my ego or professional self-worth has never, and will never, be attached to Klout or any other kind of online social ranking method.

Know why I quit Klout? I wrote about this when I did it, but allow me to reiterate. I have no problem with Klout, as long as people have agreed to have their online presence measured by Klout. The fact that the company was creating profiles for people who hadn’t signed up for the service worried me. Again, I’ve LONG said that your online privacy is your responsibility, not any company to whose services you subscribe, but the catch there is you’ve agreed to their terms of service.

As for my deletion of my Klout account making it more difficult for those using Klout correctly; tough cookies. Tell Joe Fernandez to stop making profiles of people who haven’t agreed to allow Klout to track them and get back to me. When Klout tells me someone like Shonali Burke is influential about the Kardashians, I find it more than a little difficult to take seriously.

There are real reasons for deletion of a Klout account. Will I sign up for Klout again in the future? Probably. I think it’s absolutely a step in the right direction, and they’re blazing a trail in social media measurement. Until I feel like Klout takes itself seriously, (e.g. no longer creating accounts for people who didn’t create them; taking transparent steps toward an end in gaming the system, etc.) I won’t be back.

Photo via Felix Montino; Flickr Creative Commons

I’ve been thinking about weakness lately. It’s something I struggle to pinpoint within myself. That’s not to say I’m not weak. I’m not sure I could even lift 100 pounds right over my head. The hardest question for me to answer in any situation is, “What’s your greatest weakness?” It’s really a contradictory question, isn’t it? What’s your strongest weakness? It’s been such a tough question for me before that I completely blew a job interview on that question once. I basically said I didn’t know. I had no answer. And I’ve come to realize something about myself since then.

My greatest weakness, is also my greatest strength. It’s my ego. I have a monster ego, believe it or not. It is something I have to fight every day to keep in check (there’s a reason I use so much self-deprecating humor). It enables me to believe in myself and to work to achieve the success I so greatly desire. It can also put me in positions that have me out on very thin ice. You see, I do believe we have to think we have the power to do anything we want. However, we also have to understand that we won’t be great at everything we try. We have to understand our limitations; that’s what truly enables us to succeed. What is your greatest weakness?

Shonali has agreed to me being a regular contributor to her outstanding blog Waxing Unlyrical. I’m VERY excited about this as you might imagine. She is someone I owe a great deal of my professional knowledge to, and learn from on a weekly, if not daily, basis. I’ll be talking about communications/PR/marketing topics on a monthly basis to begin. I’m incredibly excited about this opportunity; especially since it puts my writing and thoughts in front of a much larger audience.

Thanks to Shonali for the opportunity. My feelings are best described by this picture:

Because I'm tooting my own horn, you see.

Today’s chat was the last one I’ll be co-hosting/moderating. I had wanted to have Aurora Meyer take over for Sam, but both of us are just not able to commit to doing the chat at this time for a number of reasons I won’t bore you with.

However, #cookchat will live on as Kate and Jessica will be taking over. I have every faith that #cookchat will grow and flourish under their watch. They both have the drive and passion for cooking and food to take #cookchat to that next level. To be honest, I like to cook, but it’s more of a hobby, less of a true passion. And that’s what the host(s) of this chat really need to have. I look forward to participating in their version of #cookchat in the future and wish them both the best of luck.

I was introduced to Joey Strawn on Friday by Gini Dietrich.  The first post I saw on Joey’s website was a marketer’s take on James Lipton’s famous 10 Questions from Inside the Actors Studio he got from Olivier Blachard of The Brand Builder. I love this idea, and as I told Joey in the comments, I am stealing it and posting my answers to the 10 questions, but from a PR rather than  marketing viewpoint:

What is your favorite public relations word?

It is quickly becoming overused/abused, but engagement.

What is your least favorite public relations word?

Impressions/views

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally about public relations?

The opportunity to tell a story. Sometimes it is a story that the client didn’t even know was there.

What turns you off about public relations?

I hate how talking points often take precedence over actually communicating. I believe this comes from assuming the audience isn’t intelligent enough to understand what you are talking about, which is a very dangerous assumption.

What’s your favorite curse word when you see really bad PR?

I prefer the time-honored classic, “shit”.

What sound or noise do PR people make that you love?

I absolutely love the sound of others sharing in celebration of friends/colleagues successes.

What sound or noise do PR people make that you hate?

Any sound that implies any coverage a journalist is able to give them isn’t good enough. Be thankful for what you get.

What profession other than PR should PR pros attempt – to become better at public relations?

The obvious one is journalism (which you should try), but I’ll throw waiting tables in there. There is no harder deadline than someone yelling for their food, or ruder when you are late delivering a pizza. The lessons learned doing those jobs are invaluable in PR and business.

What profession should PR pros never try?

Lineman. Not the football kind. The electrical kind.

If PR heaven exists, what would God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

“Well done.”

Let’s have your answers in the comments! Or tell me how wrong my answers are. If you’d like to steal this idea, I’d encourage you to do so, as long as you give credit to Joey and Olivier.

Having an inflated ego is generally regarded as a bad thing in American society. We love self-confidence, but when someone begins to think of themselves a bit too highly, we rush to take a safety-pin to their ballooned ego. For example:

I mean, the AUDACITY!!!!! 7 months later, that still makes me upset. I digress.

Make no mistake, your ego can get you into trouble, but I contend it is nothing to be ashamed of, and is actually quite important to develop if you want your career to develop along with it. The cruel, harsh, unvarnished truth is this: If you don’t believe in yourself, and know, deep down inside, that you can succeed in whatever your chosen path in life is, you’ll never get to where you want to go.

I think as human beings, we tend to find it easier to believe negative things directed at us, rather than positive. Think about it. How much easier is it for you to process when your boss, or your spouse, or whomever, has a criticism of you? Now think about it when someone compliments you. Personally, it’s easier to accept the negative criticism of myself than any praise I get.

It is so important to remember that you DO know what you’re talking about. You CAN do the things you want to do in your career. The only way you can do that is to develop a strong ego that is able to bounce back and not take the negative to heart, but rather use it as fuel to correct your mistakes, or a desire to prove the one criticizing you wrong. An ego won’t turn people off. However, not keeping it in check will. Take the hype with a grain of salt. Know that you are good because you work at it, not because it’s easy. Self confidence and a healthy ego is one thing. Being LeBron James is quite another.

Full disclosure. I hate paywalls, generally speaking. If a news organization makes me pay for access to the basic facts gathered from public sources, I don’t frequent its site. I feel a paywall is not the answer to saving news reporting. That’s another post though. I want to be upfront with you, dear reader.

As much as I may not like paywalls, they are coming. The New York Times will begin charging for its content next month. The question in my mind, is which audience is worth paying more attention to. The audience who views the X-number of articles the Times allows them each month for free, or the audience that pays the flat, monthly fee for access?

At first glance, the audience that pays for information would seem the one most likely to give more attention to since it is spending money already. The question is, how BIG is that audience? A relevant case study is the London Times vs. the Guardian. Based on this report in July, putting up a paywall drives massive amounts of traffic away from your site. No matter how loyal an audience you have, if it isn’t going to sustain you, or your client, why pour a ton of effort into researching it?

Make no mistake, I’m not saying you SHOULDN’T pay attention to that audience, but immediately dismissing the other, non-paying audience, could be a huge mistake. Those who will begin turning away from the New York Times for information, know that same information, generally speaking, is available elsewhere online, for free. So what do we know about this audience? First glance might say they’re cheap (they are. Trust me. I’m one of them). However, I’d argue that more than cheap, they’re savvy consumers. These could potentially be more engaging consumers as they want to participate with the website, having a say in how the news is reported.

The first group may have that same quality, but I believe it will be smaller and less engaged with your site. As marketers and public relations practitioners, we should be most concerned about the audience that WANTS to be engaged with. To me, a paywall makes your audience passive. A website without a paywall, in my opinion, will possess an engaged audience that responds to messages. Good or bad, I want to deal with an audience who will DO something, rather than just sit in front of its computer screen and do nothing.

There’s a lot of conjecture, opinion and assumptions in this post. In no way am I saying a person who ponies up for a paywall is a zombie, incapable of interacting with anyone online. The more I think about it, I simply think that those most willing to engage with a publication online are those unwilling to pay for the opportunity to do so. If you disagree, think of it this way. If you were to pay a small fee, say, a penny, for every tweet you send, would your level of interaction increase, decrease, or remain the same? For me, I know it would decrease. Let me have it in the comments.

Last week, several notable celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, and many others died a “digital death” to help raise money for Keys’ Keep A Child Alive Foundation. The premise was for these, and other, celebrities to go silent on various social media sites, specifically Twitter, until $1 million was raised for the foundation. Others have covered the relative failure of the campaign, such as Shonali Burke. Check out her take here (disclosure, Shonali is a friend and someone I look up to in the PR world).

The one angle I’ve not seen covered is how the PR teams of these people could all fail so miserably in not seeing the inherent flaws in the campaign. I’m sure none of them would say the campaign was a failure. It reached its $1 million goal on Monday, which is admirable. However, it did not have the splash anyone intended it to have. From not realizing “killing” the celebs off first would create a “meh” response, to allowing donations of no less than $10, every facet of this campaign was bumbled.

Whether it was not having the courage to tell their clients this was ill-conceived idea, or simply employing a “yes man/woman” tactic, they don’t deserve to keep their jobs. With as much potential this campaign had, it could have been a huge success; raised $1 million so quickly the goal was raised to $2 million.

A PR pro’s job isn’t always to generate headlines, conduct crisis communications, promote the latest happening or anything like that. It’s to be a strong advocate for your client, which sometimes means telling them the idea they think is fantastic is a huge stink bomb waiting to be lit. The customer (or client in this case) is NOT always right. And they need to be saved from themselves on certain occasions. You’ll retain many more clients this way than by being a bobblehead and constantly nodding yes. Do your job. Protect your client from all threats. Foreign (crisis) and domestic (homegrown bad ideas).