This weblog attempts to shine a brighter light on the subtle role public relations plays in politics, popular culture, journalism, business/finance, entertainment, technology, social media, consumer marketing and sports.
Pretty much anyone tooling in the PR biz is keyed in on the latest chapter in Goldman Sachs' extended trial in the court of public opinion.
James Gorman
What is it about this particular company that compels the media, regulators, legislators and general public to pounce on it at every turn? Are Goldman's standards and culture any different than those in its peer set? Is Lloyd Blankfein less ethical than Jamie Dimon or Jim Gorman? Is the company more deleterious to the future health of the nation than let's say Koch Industries? I doubt it.
In fact, anyone who knows anything about the business world -- in both the private and public sectors, academia too -- will tell you that Goldman Sachs is the gold standard among all financial institutions. It's the hardest finance job to land coming out of the nation's most competitive colleges and universities (even with the softness of the last couple of years).
Sure, the digital-social-startup economy offers college grads more options than ever before, but if it's banking one wants, Goldman is the ticket. (Startups still need financing, right?) And let's not forget that the financial services sector employs 300K+ in New York City alone.
The Poison Pen-Man
So one has to wonder why such an incessant media barrage against this one company. Why hasn't Goldman been able to claw its way out of this reputational rut? Time heels, right? Well, not for this company. Was Goldman too smart for its own good when it emerged relatively unscathed following the financial meltdown?
And how big a factor was the allure of fame in motivating the disgruntled (career-shorted) Brit who penned the caustic op-ed in The New York Times? (Its publication did calibrate so nicely with his resignation letter.)
Still, I'm scratching my head wondering why hasn't Goldman been able to shake this? Back in late 2009 when navigating another media onslaught, the firm pledged a half billion dollars (!) to help small businesses recover from the shattered economy. It made little or no impact on forestalling the anti-Goldman forces.
This time around, the firm finally decided to can its long-time PR chief who, while generally well-regarded, may not have been the most media-accommodating corp comms guy around. His Beltway-bred replacement didn't have time to smell the coffee before The Times bombshell hit. Talk about trial by fire.
Frankly I don't know how Goldman will break free of this PR-debilitating yolk around its neck. If I were a betting man I'd say that a change at the top may ultimately be necessary - a la Mike D'Antoni or Tony Hayward -- in spite of the fact that Messrs. Blankfein and Cohn have done pretty darn well for the firm's many stakeholders over the years. Taking one for the team tends to be an effective remedy.
When I started penning this post earlier today -- before some burp across the Internet erased all of it -- I really didn't wish to re-hash what every media outlet so gleefully echoed. I actually hoped to segue quickly out of Goldman mode and into the tech realm where I've observed certain companies wallowing in the same reputational rut as Goldman.
Consider these headlines and leads:
TechCrunch on RIM: "Clueless: RIM Releases The $120 BlackBerry PlayBook Mini Keyboard" Research In Motion announced the PlayBook 17 months ago. Then, eleven months ago, the company actually launched the product. It took them another 10 months to finally bring a native email and messaging app to the product. Now, almost a full year after the product hit stores, RIM is releasing a keyboard folio case for the struggling tablet. Oh, and it costs $120.
BusinessInsider on AOL: "The Real Reason Everyone Is Suddenly Quitting AOL Again" AOL CTO Alex Gounares is leaving the company. So is the top engineer in the Huffington Post Media Group, Tim Dierks, according to a report from Peter Kafka.
An ex-AOLer speculates about the timing and says we should expect more departures:
Forbes on Groupon: "Whither Groupon And Merchants' Appetite For Daily Deals?"
Despite differing opinions about the long-term prospects for its business model, Groupon has made a ton of money for its early financial backers. So whom do they have to thank for their newly found largess? Not the kind of people one might assume would be scouring their emails for daily deals ranging from cut-rate hamburgers to bargain Botox.
Wasn't Microsoft once known as the "Evil Empire?" Yet between its bloggers, the XBOX and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it somehow managed to break free of that yolk and (re)achieve a reasonable modicum of respectability.
If you've been keeping tabs on this blogger's Twitterstream, you're (painfully) aware that I finally made my way to Austin for the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. No longer a Newbie, I earned the 2012 SXSW Sophomore Badge on Foursquare upon arrival at Austin Bergstrom Airport.
Whooppeee! Let the games begin.
At last year's SXSW, I waited until the final day to opine on the single trend I felt permeated the world's premier gathering of entrepreneurial technologists. It was 2-D barcodes (or QR codes as they're now known). They were everywhere - from the Chevy Volts and pedicabs that shuttled attendees around downtown Austin to the coffee cups, t-shirts, mousepads and bodysuits with which festival-goers interacted daily.
I don't know just yet what cool product or killer app will emerge this year, though I did see that my friends at (the soon-to-be CNN sub?) Mashable are keeping tabs on the most buzzed-about SXSW startups. The list included Highlight, a geo-location mobile app that attempts to tackle the problem of capturing in real-time one's FB friends in physical proximity to the user. (It also allows randoids using the app to know your coordinates.)
The app benefitted from the Arrington-Scoble Effect. Mr. Arrington, the founder and former editor of TechCrunch -- and now venture capitalist who's invested in Highlight -- used his klout to set Twitter tongues-a-waggin a week before SXSW started, which include that of Mr. Scoble who took a more judicious approach. I'm sure others startups with competitive solutions are crying foul at the media kickstart Mr. Arrington heaped upon his investment.
No matter. Highlight is not highlighting this blogger's time here in Austin. Frankly, I was impressed by the prospects for LISNX (local instant social network) whose developer I recently befriended. It attempts to tackle the some of the same challenges but it is not at SXSW, nor publicly available...yet.
As for this year's winner, I would only ask one question: What would SXSW be without Foursquare?
The geo-local check-in service launched at the New York Tech Meetup in 2009 and then took SouthBy by storm. Back then, 4Sq and Austin-based Gowalla were going head to head. As of this week, however, Gowalla is no more. Don't feel sorry for them. Facebook just bought the company and swallowed their talent...just in time for FB's IPO.
Foursquare's Dennis Crowley Doing What He Does
This year, Foursquare is everywhere at SXSW. It is the perfect dopamine-releasing app that melds the physical and virtual worlds in real time. It's the ideal way to keep track of the whereabouts of SXSW's movers & shakers as they navigate the cacophony of panels and parties that abound.
Company founder Dennis Crowley joined Shira Lazar and Zappo's Tony Hsieh on stage in Samsung's Blogger Lounge yesterday:
"We're part of the fabric of what goes on here. It's our third year here. We now have 100 employees and 20 million users. We're on a rocketship course."
The company also throws the hottest party at SXSW, which may or may not be relevant to its future prospects - but it sure can't hurt. Here are some of my 4Sq check-ins thus far (in reverse chronolgical order):
Guess what? The Internet is full of b******t and its volume is rapidly replicating - mostly unchecked. Much of the spurious info we find on the Web originates from amateur "we the media" types. However, more and more mis/disinformation is purposefully propagated by partisan entities, some with nefarious agendas. A Google search on "Martin Luther King" produces a top five result, "Martin Luther King Jr. - A True Historical Examination." It was created by a white supremacist organization.
What's worse, the identities of those bankrolling the dissemination of such digital propaganda often are hidden...legally.
As the November elections draw nearer, the online explosion and public consumption of factually challenged news and information threatens the very foundation of our democracy. (Thank you, Justice Roberts.)
Craig Newmark & Colbert's Speaker Flag
With the (Herculean) goal of exploring remedies for an increasingly untrustworthy digital media environment, I ventured to Harvard Law School yesterday to participate in the first Truthiness in Digital Media conference.
Joining me were a who's who of media pundits, legal scholars, hackers, media watchdog and public advocacy groups, nearly all of whom were painfully aware of the dangers digital delusion holds in a democracy.
Craig Silverman, formerly of Columbia Journalism Review who's toiling since November for the Poynter Institute, re-posted the conference description here:
This conference will focus on exploring the many facets of this complex issue with an eye to crafting tools and strategies to ameliorate the negative impacts of deception, bias, and inaccuracy in the digital media ecosystem. We hope to come to a better position to take advantage of the benefits promised by digital media while appreciating the positive aspects of creative media-making and probing the blurred boundaries between nefarious and beneficial media shaping practices.
This blogger at left. (Photo: Craig Newmark)
And Cambridge-based Nieman Journalism Lab live-blogged the event here. More here on the Truthiness blog.
As someone who's made a career out of trying to wrap his arms around what makes a story meme catch fire in traditional news media, and more recently in the blogosphere and social channels, I had more than a passing interest in the conference's theme and purpose.
I also may have been the only PR professional there other than the PR Director for the Ford Foundation and Wendell Potter who outed an unfortunate side of the industry with his PR-antagonistic book about his work spinning for a giant health insurer. Most everyone else in that room were intensely smart and committed activists. Needless to say, many held the PR industry in relatively low esteem.
Fortunately, I still subscribe to PRSA's code of ethics (and Harold Burson). I firmly believe that quality journalism is even more essential today in an increasingly polluted news ecosystem. (Maybe it was my past work for The New York Times and The AP that cemented my stalwart POV on this.) Conference attendee Micah Sifrey said it like this:
"If the media is the immune system of democracy, as Craig Newmark likes to say, then the act of asking questions of the powerful might be thought of as the mitochondria, the energy source that powers the immune system."
Attendees heard from a range of esteemed presenters and were encouraged to hit the red button to liven their microphones to chime in. Some of the presentations that resonated for me included:
Wendell Potter, Cigna's former PR chief-turned-whistleblower who wrote Deadly Spin. He noted that the diminished news ranks have given corporations an upper hand in propagating their messages. He also acknowledged the increasingly important role fact-checking orgs play in the new digital/social media ecosystem.
What Influenced SOPA/PIPA's demise
Berkman Center's Yochai Benkler analyzed the underpinnings of the SOPA/PIPA defeat, and gave considerable credit to TechDirt and other influential tech media sites, though it was clear that they didn't act alone. Other "action-oriented sites" made important contributions to the demise of the proposed bills.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), took her five minutes to (rightfully) castigate astroturfing king and PRSA ethics violator Richard Berman who serves as "executive director" of 25 non-profit stealth advocacy organizations, one of which purchased an anti-union commercial...during the Super Bowl telecast!
Next up was Filippo Menczer from Indiana University, which developed Truthy as means to understand how memes spread online. If you like this, watch Jake Porway's presentation on Cascade from The New York Times's R&D department.
Filippo was followed Tim Hwang whose presentation on the use of bots to influence the online conversation frightened the heck out of me.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson of University pf Pennsylvania's Annenberg School kicked off the next session titled "Elusive Objectivity: Finding the Truth is Hard," by showcasing FlackCheck.org, a sibling of FactCheck.org but focused on misleading political advertising.
I asked her why the term "flack," a pejorative term associated with PR (and the name of this blog). She explained its association with FactCheck and that its connotation would be readily understood. More importantly, she told me that TV stations airing misleading if not downright false advertising have no legal or regulatory obligation to not air them. Her hope is that public awareness and pressure will prevail in getting these ads pulled.
From one Ivy to another, Emily Bell of the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School, formerly with The Guardian where she played a pivotal role in bringing the UK's most esteemed newspaper into the digital age, opened by showing the Guardian's Three Little Pigs video on the state of journalism today:
She then made a couple of observation that resonated with me:
"Allowing people to interact with news content will 'sustain journalism'"
and
"Very few news orgs have guidelines for consumer engagement, ability to analyze large data sets."
Dem & GOP Orientations (via Chris Mooney)
In the next session "Biases Abound: You Can’t Handle (or Don’t Want) the Truth," author Chris Mooney introduced the audience to the term the "Smart Idiot Effect" or ""There is a science of why we deny science." He shared research that demonstrated how the views of educated political conservatives will not change when faced with cold hard facts that directly contradict their intractable point-of-views.
Furthermore, facts alone for this particular demographic makes them even more emboldened in their thinking. (Not that birthers are educated, but I understood his point.)
He penned a post today on his experience at the Truthiness event in which he questioned whether there is an easy way to fact-check the vast amount of misinformation out their in the digispheres. He alluded to the above graphic of where these fact-checking orgs reside in relation to one another. He also penned a second post that sums up some of what was discussed yesterday.
I enjoyed hearing UMichigan's Paul Resnick present the Fact Spreaders and NewsCube tools, and Gilad Lotan demo SocialFlow, which purports to take "a scientific approach to measurably increased engagement."
Here are a few more tweets emanating from my Macbook Pro yesterday:
@PeterHimler @niemanlab's @jbenton cites @NPR's new ethics policy #truthicon News orgs need to make debunking a core purpose.
@PeterHimler @SunFoundation's @ellnmllr shows Poligraft, a way to see interconnections of entities in news articles. #Truthicon
@PeterHimler Regret the Error's editor @craigsilverman, formerly @cjr now @Poynter: U.S. newspaper errors at highest level #truthicon
@PeterHimler @Mlsif recommends @cjoh's new book The Information Diet. Also, ask better questions [to quell misinformation]. #Truthicon
Today, the conference moves over to MIT for a hack day, according to MIT Media Lab's Ethan Zuckerman, designed to take a "more experimental approach" to the problem versus Harvard's "more systematic approach." "We'll focus on 'tractable' vs. 'intractable' questions, i.e., little experiments that can measurably thwart disinformation."
As for me, I'd love to be there, but I'm tied up disseminating fact-based information to the many influencers in the digital spheres on behalf of my clients. Thanks Colin Maclay and the Berkman team for putting on a most elucidating day.
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