How to Disrupt Democracy

No matter your political opinion, there's an interesting lesson to be learned from the current town halls being held around the country to discuss health care reform.

It's how activists representing a minority opinion can hijack the debate.

Whether you see them as anti-health care reform operatives or status quo activists, they've done a great job, interrupting the conversation, turning a dialog into a diatribe.

And what's fascinating are the tactics they've successfully compiled, distributed and implemented.

According to the Boston Globe, "Tips from the right on disrupting meeting," "here are some guidelines for conservative activists, published by the operators of www.rightprinciples.com, a website based in Fairfield, Conn., on how to pack and disrupt a local town-hall meeting sponsored by a Democratic member of Congress:

▸Alert people in the district to watch for the first announcement of a town hall - there could be as little as a week’s notice.

▸The team should meet outside the hall with voting records and questions distributed. Everyone should be asked to use one of the questions or a similar one that boxes in the rep. The team should also be advised to spread out within the hall but should try to get seats in the front half.

▸The objective is to put the rep on the defensive with your question and follow-up. The rep should be made to feel that a majority, or at least a significant portion, of the audience opposes the Socialist agenda in Washington.

▸You need to rock the boat early in the rep’s presentation. Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the rep’s statements early. If he blames Bush for something or offers other excuses - call him on it, yell back and have someone else follow-up with a shout-out. Don’t carry on and make a scene, just short intermittent shout-outs. The purpose is to make him uneasy early on and set the tone for the hall as clearly informal and free-wheeling.

▸If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.

Very interesting, very successful tactics.

Yet shouting down opponents is not actually engaging in a dialog. RightPrinciples.com says, "We support the open exchange of a broad range of ideas within our educational institution," though by these tactics, I assume that by "open exchange," they mean they want to be able to shout down opposing perspectives.

I don't generally write about politics, but I am concerned about democracy, and the free flow of ideas. Shouting people down does not promote democracy, and it's not as if people who are upset about health care reform don't have many channels through which to communicate their ideas.

If they believe in the free marketplace of ideas, they should let all of us decide which is the better solution to our health care problem. Have the debate, but actually let it be a debate, a productive exchange of ideas.

The way these activists operate, we both lose.

New Front Opens in Battle Between Flacks & Hacks: Bing vs. Jarvis

In Jeff Jarvis is a twit, Stanley Bing takes Jarvis to task for suggesting:

1. The press release is dead.
2. Journalists do not need PR pros.

I've written before that I don't think the press release is dead. It is evolving. It is interactive, multimedia and SEO'ed, but not dead.

And I also think journalists do need PR pros -- and PR pros, of course, need journalists.

But there's long been a tension and a war of words (on Twitter, that's a war of 140 characters) between flacks and hacks.

Technology hasn't changed the battlefield.

It's only made it easier for everyone to watch and participate.

Read Bing's rant. It's a good defense of PR. Of course, when he's not a columnist, he's the head of corp comm for CBS. So read the comments, too, to get more of Jarvis' perspective (he responds on Bing's blog).

But the most important point is Bing's final sentence: "nobody benefits when the hacks attack the flacks." I would add, flacks don't benefit when they attack hacks.

What we really need to do is respect each other.

Analysis of a Print Newspaper Article on Social Media

The Wall St. Journal ran an article today about text acronyms, "Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means." In cleaning my office, I came across a similar article from the New York Times from 1999 on the new lexicon.

While the world of social media has changed a lot, not much has changed since 2006 in terms of teens developing a new language of their own that takes advantage of new communications tools. The article cites, after all LOL, ROFL, OMG and other examples that have been around so long that some established dictionaries now include them.

What's new is that there are more websites that serve as an English-text dictionary, primarily for parents concerned with what their children are doing and for marketers trying to reach children.

But that's not why the Journal ran its story today. Or why the Times ran its story three years ago.

Fact is: the kids who use the acronyms know what those acronyms stand for -- unlike the person cited in the Journal article who thought LOL meant "Lots of love," and included it in a condolence email. So the new shorthand isn't news to the people using them. They're not necessarily news to the parents or marketers, either.

The Journal, like the Times, ran its article to show that it's with-it, that it "gets" what the kids are doing, and is a relevant as parents who learn the lingo to stay in touch with their kids.

On that score, I'd tell the Journal, Keep Up the Good Work (KUTGW).

But don't expect the kids to be fooled. And don't expect the Journal, when it decides to GETW (get back to work) to start text shorthand in its articles.

BusinessWeek's Jon Fine Agrees with Us: Local Media

In Jan. 2009, we issued our annual list of media predictions. One of them was that local cable/TV operators will have a bumpy road but will survive.

In the Aug. 3rd issue of BusinessWeek, media critic Jon Fine wrote that when the recovery returns, local TV is likely to see the biggest return.

Of course, since his column validates our prediction, I agree with him. Check out, "The Big Bounceback? Local TV; Why local TV stations may have several advantages over other media such as national TV and newspapers when the ad market finally turns."

Keep in mind:

"Make no mistake: TV station groups won't be rolling in the roses once a recovery finally arrives. The business will still face numerous challenges. The sector may not be the play so much as picking its survivors—the stations and companies that will best endure. I'm not sure anyone looking to invest in traditional media companies these days is wise, but if you're determined to make this bet, local TV may be where to place your chips."

In other words, it's going to be a bumpy road, just like we said.

Can Local Bloggers Replace Local Newspapers?

According to BusinessWeek's media critic, Jon Fine, one of the problems facing advertisers -- and I'd add PR functions -- is that the demise of local papers makes it much more difficult to reach local markets.

In "Taming the Web for Local Advertisers," Fines' focus in on a company, GrowthSpur, that aims to connect businesses with fragmented audiences.

Fine makes the point that what's replacing local media are local bloggers, but that they're often one or two person operations for whom blogging is a hobby.

What's more, the problem with the fact that a "zillion local blogs have popped up" is that "some of them have real value. But the thing is, there's a zillion of them, and few have followings of any size, so you have to amalgamate ad buys across 10 or 15 blogs to get anything resembling a decent audience."

This fragmentaiton of local media is a significant challenge for organizations that want to reach local markets. GrowthSpur aims to assemble a network of local bloggers for advertiser. That may work nicely for advertisers, because they're paying bloggers for ads, that doesn't work as well for PR efforts since we don't pay for coverage.

And while some bloggers do expect swag or payments from companies to blog about their products or services, that's not appropriate or acceptable for many organizations, including our clients. Even if the bloggers disclose the fact that they've received payment or gifts in kind in exchange for a positive mention in their blogs.

In PR, we've got the same problem: We've got to target more local bloggers than we once had to when we targeted only local newspapers. Clients sometimes think that social media is a ticket to quick and inexpensive buzz -- but it often takes more effort to reach a similar result to a media campaign a few years ago.

The Accidental Entrepreneur: Evan Williams & Biz Stone

In case you haven't heard the background of Twitter, and how Evan Williams and Biz Stone developed the company as a side project, Michael Malone's article, "The Twitter Revolution: The brains behind the Web's hottest networking tool" in the Wall St. Journal is worth reading.

There's a lot of emphasis in the small business publications like Inc., Entrepreneur, FSB, and BusinessWeek SmallBiz, on developing a business plan.

And a lot of emphasis on tons and tons of hard work to execute against that business plan.

Williams, however, started Blogger.com as a side project while at Pyra Labs, as a way to make notes as a kind of project management tool. Blogger.com went on to be sold to Google for millions.

Then they started a new company, Odeo, developed a new business model as a podcasting company. And, once again, developed Twitter as a sideline. Which took off.

I guess the point here is that business plans are important but you have to be able to adjust.

Social Media Advertising: IDG launches new initiative

Social media is coming to the advertising world through a new initiative, IDG Amplify.

According to B-toBOnline, "IDG creates social media ad opportunities," the way it works is:

“An advertiser would run an ad on our site. It would look like a regular display ad, but it could say, "Question of the day. What do you want to see from a smart phone: option A or option B?' And the user could click on that and say, "I want to see option B.' ”

Without leaving the IDG site, visitors could join the conversation about either option A or option B.

What's interesting about this is the that it blurs the line between advertising and editorial, for example:

"The online conversations could also be started by editorial content. For instance, in an article about networks, a user could roll over a highlighted word—say, “routers”—and join in a conversation started by a question from Cisco Systems. However the conversation starts—either from editorial content or an online ad—the b-to-b marketer would pay a marketing fee to start this conversation."

This opens up new ways of working with IDG properties. Of course, we would recommend that organizations be transparent in posting content to articles that mention -- or should have mentioned -- their client or company.