Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views features Nike's CEO on Tiger Woods, social media in publishing, The Facebook Effect, Twitter Chirp, Edelman SM training, and Katie Couric on anonymity in the blogosphere.


"Polarizing but authentic" is how Nike president and CEO Mark Parker describes the much-analyzed Tiger Woods TV spot that aired during this year's Masters golf tournament. (HT Fast Company exec. editor Noah Robischon (@noar))





Social Media Examiner's Michael Stelzner talks with SmartBrief.com's Merritt Colaizzi on how social media is helping publishers. I especially like the opening sequence featuring some of our favorite social media pundits and pros.




In her second appearance in this space in as many weeks, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher interviews Fortune's long-time tech scribe David Kirkpatrick about his forthcoming (June 15) book The Facebook Effect:




Twitter as a force for good w/ Tim O'Reilly, Katie Stanton, Anil Dash, Patrick Meier at the recent Twitter Chirp developer conference. (via justin.tv):




What does social media training entail at the world's largest independent (?) PR firm? Neal Rodriguez gets the inside scoop from my friend, former colleague (and newly promoted) Rick Murray (@rickmurray), president of Edelman D̶i̶g̶i̶t̶a̶l̶ Chicago:




CBS News's Katie Couric (@katiecouric) takes on hateful blog commenters, or, as she describes them, "anonymous atom bombs of animosity."

Jobs Speaks, People Listen

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Here we are again: back to Apple. Tell me: don't all digital roads eventually lead back to Apple? Well, from a PR perspective, actually not. The proprietor of this blog has allocated a decent share of space to the PR peccadilloes of Cupertino's (and the world's) most famous company.

Many of my previous Apple-related posts have pointed to the paradox of how such a traditional, command-and-control PR culture has produced such unprecedented success in today's new socially driven world order.

The company is not active on Twitter, though it has unofficial proxies. It doesn't blog corporately nor does it allow its employees to do so. Others do so on its behalf, much to its chagrin. And its corporate Facebook page is a Wikipedia entry run by who knows who.

In a piece this week "Fortress Apple," Newsweek's Dan Lyons implored the company to "open up." He writes:

"Part of me is glad Apple is doing this, because someone needs to buck the "everything is free" trend and see what happens. But I think the company is taking things to an extreme, exerting a degree of control that may ultimately undermine its own success."

He's referring of course to Apple's long-standing proprietary technology, and how for years, the closed Mac OS allowed the Wintel duopoly to eat its lunch grabbing 90% global market share for PCs. Mr. Lyons updated this argument with Apple's decision to drop Flash in the iPad:

"If you own an iPad or an iPhone, you're aware (and no doubt frustrated) that it won't run videos created in Adobe's Flash software, which accounts for half or more of all the videos on the Web. An Apple spokesman says Flash is "closed and proprietary" and that Apple supports other development tools that are "open and standard."

So I was stunned today to see that Steve Jobs, yes the real Steve Jobs, posted his position on Flash in 1687 words, no less:

"I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain."

I imagine that this uncharacteristic post was fueled by Adobe's stature in the tech industry's pecking order, and the loud industry criticism Apple endured for its unilateral decision to vanquish Flash from its core iProducts.

Whatever the motivation, I am pleased and encouraged that Apple's leader took a page from Google's PR playbook to address an issue of vital importance to its business. Now watch the fallout. I'm hopeful that Mr. Jobs' little conversation starter won't end here.

Update (2:47pm) The Journal live-blogs interview with Adobe CEO.

Crisis Du Jour

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How does one know if a negative story will turn into a full-blown crisis? What factors need to crystallize to transform a short-lived media blip into an extended period of pain for the crisis owner?

And what steps can be taken to shorten the media legs or extinguish the media spotlight altogether? (Now there's a million dollar question, the answer to which is not a press release.)

Those of us toiling in the PR sphere for a decent period of time have developed an innate ability to sense when a seemingly inconsequential incident will morph into a true crisis.

• What were your initial impressions upon hearing the news of that "minor car accident" outside Tiger Woods home?
  

• What about the news of a malfunctioning Japanese automobile?
  

• A mine explosion in West Virginia?
  

• And did Goldman really believe its troubles would dissipate with the start of a new year?

If these incidents had elicited little or fleeting media attention, I suppose one could not classify them as bona fide crises. But the stories just grew and grew, which may have resulted from early PR missteps, but were also fueled by the size and scope of the 2010 editorial channel.

If a company today has skeletons to hide, this new, expansive (muckraking) media environment almost guarantees that they will emerge publicly to reap reputational havoc.

Today I'm keeping an eye on a developing story in the Gulf of Mexico. This is not your run-of-the-mill oil spill. It's an environmental disaster that may very well rival Exxon Valdez. Its underlying cause is just beginning to seep out, in the same vein as Massey Energy's did.

Apparently the rig's operators conspired with industry groups to forestall government-sought safety regulations. A piece in HuffPost "Big Oil Fought Off New Safety Rules Before Rig Explosion" reveals:

"The industry has launched a coordinated campaign to attack those regulations, with over 100 letters objecting to the regulations -- in a September 14, 2009 letter to MMS, BP vice president for Gulf of Mexico production, Richard Morrison, wrote that 'we are not supportive of the extensive, prescriptive regulations as proposed in this rule,' arguing that the voluntary programs 'have been and continue to be very successful,' along with a list of very specific objections to the wording of the proposed regulations."

This new "there are no secrets" world in which PR counselors now operate may finally demand an openness that's eluded command-and-control corporate cultures for as long as I've been in the business. Hopefully, it will lead to sustainable changes that give fresh meaning to the aphorism "doing well by doing good."

I'm now headed back to watch Mr. Blankfein's testimony on the Hill.

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views captures notable quotables from both coasts, including Mark Zuckerberg, David Remnick, Kara Swisher, Steven B. Johnson, Jeff Pulver, Gary Vaynerchuk and others...


To start, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher sets the hand-held stage for Facebook's inaugural f8 conference for application developers, held in Santa Clara:




From the same conference, we get a rare take from Mark Zuckerberg on how his increasingly dominant channel (and way of life) will affect users in the future, a subject also explored in a thoughtful piece from The Atlantic. (HT @jolieodell via @mashable):




At Jeff Pulver's 140 Character Conference, we get to hear from the socially savvy and effusively entertaining oeniphile Gary Vaynerchuk:




The Life and Rise of Barack Obama author and award-winning New Yorker editor David Remnick waxes on the future of his publication (HT @FishBowl New York, sibling site of our fave PR blog @PRNewser, and my friends at BigThink:



Columbia Journalism School's Dean of Student Affairs & digital media professor Sree Sreenivasan introduces the brilliant author, entrepreneur and new media prognosticator Steven B. Johnson last night for the Hearst Foundation New Media Lecture. His topic: the future of text, linked here, since the embed wouldn't show the video from the start.


Finally, as marketers everywhere seek the magic elixir for creating videos that go viral, here's one that SONY sponsored, which uses compelling story-telling (and SONY video equipment) to draw viewers in. It also includes a subtle (but effective) reference to the commercial sponsor at the end. The video has elicited 516,000+ views in its first month. (HT @mcuban)

Conventional PR and The Constitution

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When the Bush appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court prevailed in a recent ruling that equated corporations to citizens when it comes to spending on political campaigns, the whole left side (and many in the middle) of the political spectrum cried foul.

The nation's Constitutional scholars and political pundits publicly decried Citizens United. Some some even called for a Constitutional Convention to reverse the ruling's expected chilling effect on the democratic process.

Now this is not a political blog. It is one written primarily for public relations professionals operating across a wide spectrum of industries and interests, politics among them. As such, its author took notice of one reaction to the Citizens United ruling: a legislative initiative that would require all advertising to openly identify who's really footing the bill. From The Times:

"One provision would require the chief executive of any company or group that is the main backer of a campaign advertisement to personally appear in television and radio spots to acknowledge the sponsorship, the officials said."

This is an issue of paramount importance to the PR industry and anyone in a position of paid advocacy. It speaks to transparency, but with more than just lip service.

This week the folks at Talking Points Memo decided to do some sleuthing on their own to learn the true identities of those behind a progressive-sounding group called "Stop Too Big To Fail." They discovered that the organization is actually an astroturfing initiative determined to derail financial reform.

The group was so effective in masking its political DNA that it ensnared the esteemed MIT Sloan professor and 13 Bankers author Simon Johnson to lend his name. Embarrassed, Prof. Johnson has since withdrawn his "endorsement."

From TPMuckraker:

"The group's leader has a long history running a rent-a-front operation: offering up his services to large corporations who are willing to pay top dollar for a "consumers group" that will engage in stealth advocacy on behalf of industry. The group refuses to divulge its funding sources. The respected economist whose support the group touts now says he was deceived. And Stop Too Big To Fail has links to DCI Group, one of Washington's best-known astroturf operators."

Sadly, this is not some isolated incident of duplicity. The practice of creating noble-sounding organizations to opaquely (and deceptively) advocate on behalf of private concerns exists at most of the world's biggest PR firms. And in my opinion, it is our industry's Achilles heal, if not fatal flaw. The practice ironically flourishes at a time when our industry trumpets authenticity and transparency as a means to build legitimacy and respect for ourselves and our clients.

This is different from "constituency-building" in which agencies engage like-minded organizations to openly join forces to sway public, regulatory or legislative opinions. It falls in the categories of hiding the sponsor of a piece of syndicated video or the services of Frank Luntz, an expert in devising discourse designed to deceive. I still wonder who's paying his bills?

More on Stop Too Big To Fail from TPMuckraker (and Rachel Maddow) here.

Second-Guessing Goldman

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So Kwittken & Co's namesake founder appears on CNBC to nudge Goldman Sachs' beleaguered CEO Lloyd Blankfein to get out there more.

Separately, Hiltzik Strategies' namesake founder appears on Bloomberg TV to nudge Goldman Sachs' embattled CEO Lloyd Blankfein to lay low.



So which shall it be fellas???? And shouldn't there be a PRSA ethical code forbidding PR pros from publicly second-guessing companies in crisis without primary knowledge of the facts driving strategy? We'll save that discourse for another day, since this PR pro may also be guilty of a similar transgression.

You may remember the first eruption enveloping Goldman. It was one theme covered at the Council of PR Firms' recent Critical Issues Forum. Since that time, the world's most prestigious bank did announce a fairly substantive initiative that apparently proved insufficient in stemming the tide of public (and now governmental) scrutiny and distrust.

At the time of the Council event, I (pointedly) pointed out that simply throwing money at the problem -- no matter how much -- would be painted by the media as a PR ploy. And it was. In fact, who can even remember what it was that Goldman announced to try to neutralize the naysayers back then?

Flash forward to today. The company has two options, or so it's been told:

1. Lay low and pray that the 24/7 cacophonous news cycle will eventually disjoin the words fraud and Goldman Sachs in the same sentence, or
2. Take to the media, fully trained to deliver the words and phrases that show some level of contrition or, as is currently the case, a defense of the company's business practices.
   

In my opinion, there are two more desirable options:

1. Take tangible and genuine steps to demonstrate the company's interest in the public good (versus the good of those fortunate enough to work there).
2. Then borrow a page from Google to openly disseminate the company's new and more magnanimous POV via its website or blog (God forbid) in a controlled and equitable manner.
   

Even NYC's Mayor Mike gave the company a message cue this week when he warned the Feds that a weakened Wall Street is not just bad for the New York economy, but it's bad for the U.S. and global economies.

There isn't a single PR pill that will effectively treat what poisons Goldman's reputation right now. But I gotta believe that Lloyd Blankfein has reached a stage where he earnestly wants to do the right thing, and not just for his employees and stakeholders, but for a public whose trust he's learned can weigh heavily on the firm's fate and fortunes.

Let's just hope that the legions of external PR consiglieres who've undoubtedly shuttled through the doors of 85 Broad Street in recent months have sufficient wherewithal to advise him to bite the bullet. (And while they're at it, they might request Twitter to dismantle the fake @lucasvpraag handle that's spewing all kinds of unsavory tweets on the firm.)

The Social Season

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So many new media confabs, and no clones available to attend them. I thus decided to stay local to audit Stowe Boyd's inaugural Social Business Edge event held at Fleishman Hillard's New York offices yesterday.

I had a chance to hear Mr. Boyd's overview of the business world's new social order, the acerbic and entertaining wit of The Onion's twitterific Baratunde Thurston, the erudition of NYU's Jay Rosen waxing on open source journalism, and observations of the business-cultural shift from FH's own Joshua Michele-Ross.

Here are some of the notable quotables I gleaned from Stowe's introductory monologue (RT: approx 22 minutes; Forgive noisy audio up front):

"To really have a social business, you really have to rethink things at a fundamental level.

"In 1999, I noticed a new category of software emerging...it wasn't about being more efficient. It wasn't about number-crunching. It was about shaping culture. So I decided to use the term 'social tools' because it seemed so profoundly, different..."

"We can expect that social businesses of the future will be more fluid and less solid than we think of them today. There will be people cooperating and competing for resources in a way that is probably not generally supported or even allowed in a lot of businesses."

"And as in a village, reputation will be significantly more important than titles, and connections to other people will be significantly more important than rank or popularity. And authority will be derived from social capital not control. So the maxim you can walk away with around this idea is that I am made greater by the sum of my connections..."

Also in New York this week we find Jeff Pulver's pumped up 140 Character Conference, celebrating all things Twitter. It starts today and runs two days. Great line-up of speakers. I did however find the qualifications for obtaining press creds rather curious:

Press passes will only be issued to members of the Working Media who are also members of editorial staffs. Press passes will not be issued to non-editorial staff, equity analysts or to PR firms. For consideration please email a copy of your press credentials together with a story that you have written within the past three months that has been published to: jeff@pulver.com. If you are a freelancer, please be sure to include a copy of your assignment letter for consideration. We have a limited amount of space for members of the media and each application will be considered for it’s [sic] merit. Credentials must be sent in order for the submission to be considered.

This line threw me: "...members of the Working Media who are also members of editorial staffs." Independent bloggers need not apply? Whatever. I'll cut him some slack since the protocol for landing press credentials remains a work in progress nowadays.

On the left coast, the annual Society of New Communications Research kicks off its Newcomm Forum 2010 confab in the Valley today with a range of high-value communications-minded speakers and topics that include KD Paine ("Defining Social Media ROI"), Paul Gillin ("B2B Social Media Marketing - Really!"), Jen McClure ("Intro to Social CRM: Panel Discussion"), JD Lasica ("The Path to the New Jounalism"), Jackie Huba ("The One Percenters: Twitterers, Bloggers & Facebookers Who Influence Opinions"), Shel Israel ("Blurring Boundaries"), Maggie Fox ("Building Channel: Understanding the New Media Landscape"), and the list of social media luminaries goes on. I truly wish I was there.

Then we have Vanity Fair and Harpo Studio teaming up for a morning get-together at the Harvard Club in New York with the likes of Michael Eisner, Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, Tom Peters and others to talk about the "business models of tomorrow."

On the horizon are a couple of gatherings in which this PR person will play a physical role. The first is PRSA's Digital Impact Conference where I'll preside over a panel on the afternoon of May 7 featuring Kami Huyse, Joe Jaffe and Soraya Darabi. And then on May 12, the Publicity Club of NY will host a handful of the leaders in the local/hyperlocal media revolution including The New York Times, AOL Patch. NBC NY, Gothamist and Lost Remote.

Hope to see you in-person in May!

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views features a Tiger Woods ad parody (from the Wall Street Journal), a tete a tete between two tempestuous talking heads, the author of Wikinomics' call for entries, check-in fraud on FourSquare, and two iPad clips.


Wall Street Journal columnist Peter Jeffrey offers up his own version of the Tiger Woods Nike ad. (HT @emilysteel) Apparently, the original ad also came up short. First, it didn't garner positive reviews and second, it backfired with the one person whose approval should have taken priority. Parodies of the ad proved more viral.





Sharon Waxman of TheWrap.com fired the first salvo by accusing Michael Wolff's aggregated and curated news site, Newser.com, of parasitical behavior by using her content without sufficient attribution or link love. Howard Kurtz (smartly) decided to invite both on CNN's "Reliable Sources" to duke it out. Here's the exchange.




Wikinomics author, speaker and new media pundit Don Tapscott took to YouTube to invite the crowd to his website to participate in two initiatives called NextGen Education and the Macrowikinomics Challenge. Enter by May 1.




As you may have heard, the location-aware folks at FourSquare posted on their blog last week steps they're taking to eliminate "check-in fraud," i.e., the acts of falsely checking in to venues to garner points and badges. Here's a clip of what they should be doing to stop these crimes against digitally mobile humanity:




Many of us caught the video of the 2 1/2-year-old tooling with a brand new iPad. What about Iggy the cat?




And if the words alone in Alice in Wonderland didn't get one's imaginative juices flowing, this iPad-only version hopes to.

A PR Strategy: Deceive and Divide

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As the Party-of-No prepares to again deceive and divide the American people over the issue of financial reform, the emergence of Frank Luntz's name should come as no surprise to those who've followed just how far obfuscation has come in the age of political spin.

Mr. Luntz is the name partner in a firm called Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research, and another called The Word Doctors, which describes itself as "a powerhouse in the profession of message creation and image management."

The firm's specialty: to devise incendiary, yet frequently misleading sound bites that will help his "clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate."

Some of his memorable semantics include "death panels," "Obama's war on Medicare," and, for the global warming-denier crowd, "The scientific debate remains open."

Unfortunately for America, this favorite of Fox News has little interest in or need for PRSA's Code of Ethics when his wordsmithing talents are in such high and lucrative demand. Mr. Obama's election and the Democratic majorities in Congress have only been a boon to his business. Still he and his band of media manipulators might pay attention to the Code's very first guideline:

"Be honest and accurate in all communications."

If you haven't guessed, Mr. Luntz, IMHO, is a menace and frankly a blight on the practice of PR, if that's what you'd even call what he does. TIME Magazine's "Swampland" blog just compared his talking points memo for derailing much-needed financial reform with the talking points delivered this week by Mitch McConnell (R.-KY) (whose biggest donors happen to be from, surprise, the securities and investment industries):

Luntz: "The single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout."

McConnell: "We cannot allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks. And that's why we must not pass the financial reform bill that's about to hit the floor."

Luntz: "Taxpayers should not be held responsible for the failure of big business any longer. If a business is going to fail, not matter how big, let it fail."

McConnell: "[The Dodd bill] gives the government a new backdoor mechanism for propping up failing or failed institutions.... We won't solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail."

Luntz: "Government policies caused the bubble and its ultimate crash. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, and the Community Reinvestment Act all had a role in the catastrophe. The government inflated economic bubbles with easy credit policies."

McConnell: “It also directs the Fed to oversee 35 to 50 of the biggest firms, replicating on an even larger scale the same distortions that plagued the housing market and helped trigger a massive bubble we'll be suffering from for years. If you thought Fannie and Freddie were dangerous, how about 35 to 50 of them?"

I return to the second guideline in PRSA's Code of Ethics:

"Reveal sponsors for represented causes and interests."

We can probably guess whose paying his fees to kill financial reform, but it would be instructive to know for sure. At least Sen. Dodd (D.-CT), the bill's architect, called out McConnell (and Luntz) this go-round. Prepare for more histrionics, and more Frank Luntz.

The PR Machine

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As New York's current governor languishes in a stagnant puddle of media and public criticism, The New York Times today describes his presumed successor as "a PR machine" who "has managed to steer clear of much of what is messy about Albany..."

So what is the PR secret to NYS Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's "61 percent" positive approval rating at a time when state officials are roundly despised by the voting public?

Could this be a social media case study in the making?

• Did Mr. Cuomo start penning a personal weblog to share his opinions, in effect bypassing a news media that previously played a lead role in exposing and toppling the current Governor? Nope.

• Has he taken to Twitter to build a groundswell of followers who in turn will spread his gospel to their followers and so on? Nah.

• What about that Facebook fan page to capture and commandeer corps of volunteers? Or an edgy embeddable highlights video posted to YouTube? Fuhget about it!

Mr. Cuomo has turned to the telephone! (Touch tone too, I bet.) Yep, he has denied all one-on-one interview requests, instead opting for group media conference calls and off-hour, off-the-record dial-ups to select reporters.

"In a way that is rare in an age of publicists, communications staff members and strategists, Mr. Cuomo is his own image shaper, relentlessly working the news media in a way that is unseen by the public and that is challenging for those trying to pin him down on any issue."

Apparently conference calls and personal backgrounders fall short of satisfying reporters' incessant demands for access. This is in spite of Mr. Cuomo's personal participation therein. NY1 News is so frustrated, it created the “Cuomo Clock,” which...

...details the number of days that the attorney general has ignored invitations to appear for an on-camera interview (as of Monday, it was 1,195).

The media's frustration has a Tiger Woods kind of feel to it, though Tiger faced an issue no Governor should ever have to. Ooops. But Tiger chose to post his POV on his own web site in an effort to control the message. When he did face the media, it was a carefully orchestrated affair with no questions...and for that matter no media in attendance to ask questions.

Still we should give Mr. Cuomo some credit for availing himself to the prodding of the fourth estate, albeit faceless and surrounded by advisors armed with legal pads to ensure that all the AG's messages are covered off. The Times even acknowledges the success of this strategy:

"Still, whatever the grumblings, Mr. Cuomo’s strategy has largely worked: He has avoided taking positions on controversial issues, even as the state, facing a large budget gap, grapples with the prospects of laying off state workers, raising taxes or eliminating programs."

Still Andrew, you might consider taking a page from the Obama-ites by getting social with the voters of New York State. We are after all in the second decade of the 21st century, right?

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views features social media marketing myths, FourSquare (again), Google's fave cities in 3D, Al Gore's Current TV, and two vids that only deep-pocketed iPad owners would even consider attempting.

First up: AdWeek's digital editor Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) talks des rues de Paris (thank you Edelman) about common social media marketing myths.



Business Insider's @nichcarlson tweeted my attention to a Howcast video, "How To Unlock Your World With Foursquare," all in 118 seconds.

How To Unlock Your World With Foursquare on Howcast

And while we're on the subject of the increasingly dominant (and brand marketer-worthy) location-based service, here's a JD Lasica (@jdlasica) chat with FourSquare co-founder Dennis Crowley (@dens) shot at O'Reilly Media's Where 2.0 Conference.

An insider's look at Al Gore's Current TV.




To mark Google's movement to a 3D Web, here are the company's favorite user-created 3D towns. (via Mashable)




And for many, these last two clips are sacrilegious (or should I say macrilegious), but fun nonetheless.

Reading Room Revisited

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Last winter, I wrote a post that extolled the value of long-form reading, as opposed to the microbursts of information that flows ephemerally across our desktops, laptops, Blackberrys, iPhones and Nexus Ones. The number of new books heralding in the new world order might only be exceeded by the myriad trade shows and meet-ups coalescing around the same themes.

Since that November 2009 post, some new titles have emerged to make our Kindles and shiny new iPads more complete. Below is a very random selection. I invite you to submit others that you feel merit consideration by my (hopefully) forward-thinking readers in the media, marketing and PR realms.

• Ken Auletta
  
Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

• Brian Solis
  
Engage

• Joseph Jaffe
Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

• Jonathan Zittrain
The Future of the Internet...and How to Stop It

• Ben Mezrich
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal

• Charlene Li
Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead

• Seth Godin
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

• Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Trusting Anonymity

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One of my sons is an elite high school athlete. I recently noticed an unsupported negative comment about his play on one of the popular discussion boards for his sport.

I decided to analyze this anonymous person's posting history, and determined that it emanated from a father of a player on a rival team. It wasn't the first time this person denigrated my son (or touted his own son) anonymously. (Shades of that cheerleader's Mom?)

Now Michael Arrington and others would have you believe that it's OK for the crowd to anonymously spew negativity. After all, the atomization of media and its desensitizing effect on a scandal-wary public may not produce the deleterious impact on reputation that it once did. Then there's the increasingly outmoded notion that the Internet has an inherent capacity to self-correct.

To be honest, I know many in the PR and marketing professions who would be happy to astroturf their clients' products, services and POVs into the hearts and minds of online audiences. I'm not one of them. I think it's imperative to identify the source of the content that we as a profession produce and syndicate. The same goes for marketing videos posted to YouTube and advocacy groups whose buoyant-sounding names mask the identities of their funders.

The trend toward anonymity speaks to the broader issue of how to establish reader trust without demanding a full reveal of those contributing. This is especially valid for consumer-facing sites like Yelp, Amazon, Wikipedia and now, a new, much buzzed-about site called Unvarnished that lets anyone say anything about anyone else anonymously.

We already know about Formspring.me, the site that channeled those malicious and anonymous posts that led to a L.I. high school girl's recent suicide.

I admit that by requiring one's identity, some will be discouraged to share their unvarnished opinions. So what are the alternatives? How can review sites build reader trust without compromising their integrity?

Craig Newmark today addresses this issue with an insightful post titled "Trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence" in which he writes:

"We already see various forms of reputation and recommendation systems evolve, often with mixtures of pre-selected experts or professionals. Amazon and Consumer Reports Online do a good job of this."

He goes on to say:

"We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested. Perhaps there's a need for new law in this area."

Consumers will continue to look to Amazon, Consumer Reports and others to innovate in their efforts to thwart self-serving, untrustworthy or tainted content. By so doing, they will earn their esteem (and business). Newmark writes:

"How do we trust the custodians of trustworthiness? We need to have some confidence that they're not fiddling the ratings, that they're reasonably secure. After all, trust and reputation are really valuable assets."

As for the PR industry, which is frequently charged with the creation and dissemination of original content, it's a slippery and dangerous slope to do so anonymously or pseudonymously.

Big Agency Digital Cred

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The namesake of Ragan's PR Daily today called out Fleishman-Hillard (NYSE: OMC) CEO Dave Senay with the following tweet:

@MarkRaganCEO Fleishman CEO doesn't tweet, has no Facebook page, and uses ghostwriters to help with his blog

Mr. Ragan's goal: to incite eyeballs to his daily aggregated PR newsfeed. This particular piece took those he baited to a Q and A with Mr. Senay that appeared Friday in Canada's most influential business publication, The Globe and Mail. It was titled "Power to the PR People."

The piece comes on the heals of a PR Newser post last week of a growing social media presence under the HeishmanFlillard pseudo-name that reportedly is being fueled by former F-H personnel.

But back to Mr. Senay (at right) whom I've never met, but have heard only positive things about. He explains his absence from the Twitterverse and blogosphere as follows:

"I have a heavily read internal blog; that's where I concentrate my time. I post two or three times a week. I probably write 90 per cent, at least. When I'm on the road, I'll ask somebody to ghostwrite something if I can't be there, then I'll rewrite it.

We've got 2,400 other thought leaders out there, and I've tried to create an environment where they're the ones who are making their mark."

Professionally, I'm not bothered by the insinuation that the CEO of one of the industry's most respected large firms is not as personally engaged with the social graph as others in his organization. In a client-service organization, it is probably more important for day-to-day account teams to tool with the tools, and senior management to encourage and support it.

"My job, I think, is to create an environment where all this adaptation takes place in real time. And almost instantaneously, because I think there's two traits of a successful firm in this era: One is instantaneousness – how quickly can you turn the information, contextualize it, put it for or against your client or your opponent. The second is anticipation."

Yet I do believe, as his real-time allows, Mr. Senay would benefit greatly by listening to a Twitter selection of authoritative voices from the PR, marketing and media industries, and perhaps those of his firm's top-tier clients. Start with Sawhorse Media's Listorious and Muckrack, then Twiangulate from there.

I know many professionals on the Fleishman-Hillard Digital team who more than account for the agency's digital cred. It's a misnomer to think that social media savvy only resides in a handful of boutique specialty firms. In fact, I'm looking forward to attending the April 19 Social Business Edge event that Stowe Boyd and others have organized at F-H's New York offices. Hope to see you there.

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views looks at the iPad, a very cool Photoshop editing app, one agency's take on the 25 defining moments in PR, a chat with LinkedIn's social media manager, Google Maps for cyclists, and Facebook as a bank(?).

Forget Mossberg and Pogue. New York Times intrepid media reporters (bloggers, columnists and Twitterers) David Carr and Brian Stelter got their hands on the iPad and gush on what it portends for media delivery and consumption moving forward.

Click here to watch (since this particular NYT video is NOT embeddable...hmmm).



Adobe released a video, now in viral mode, offering a sneak peek of its super cool Photoshop application called Content-Aware Fill. Take a look.




Pollack PR & Marketing Group pulled together this clip of its "25 Defining Moments of PR" to celebrate the L.A.-based firm's 25th anniversary. Would you say that the next 25 years of our industry's most defining moments remain inextricably tied to major news events? I wonder.




I follow Mario Sundar, but didn't realize that he was social media manager for LinkedIn. Now, thanks to PR Week's recent SF-->Boston transplant Aarti Shah, I do. Still, why isn't this video embeddable?

Click here to view the clip.




Cyclists take note: Google Maps now offers directions for those traveling by bike. HT to The Onion's Baratunde Thurston (@baratunde), a most eclectic person to follow on Twitter.




eAcademy's Thomas Power's explains the social media order, i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Google, and a "what if" scenario of Facebook getting into the banking biz. Just think of the implications for p-to-p lending. (HT to @louisgray)