Putting the new rules to work

It’s time to lay off the photo filters.

My hound, Jack, has beautiful coloring. So why would I mess with it like I did with this filter?

Seriously. Just say no. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the photofinishing business, where everybody went to great lengths to produce pictures that faithfully represented reality. Maybe it’s because I’m color blind, or because I’m just old-fashioned. But whatever the reason, I’ve hit my saturation point with pointless sepia tones, fake embossing, drop shadows, torn edges and other “enhancements.”

We seem to hit one of these fads every year or so. In the 1990s, “Shockwave” (a predecessor to Flash) appeared and made it easy to put animated images on web sites, and suddenly we all thought we had to do it. Later, we saw Flash all over the place. Then Apple had a lover’s spat with Adobe (which makes Flash), and decided not to allow it on the iPad. Now the world’s beating a path to the doorway trying to get rid of it. Every time a new version of PowerPoint comes out, we get a new set of wipes, dissolves and other transitions, and everybody who gives a presentation seems to feel a need to use them all.

These days, the obsession with photo filters seems to be driven by Instagram, a social media service that makes it easy to color everything yellow (or gray, or blue, or …) and upload it for use on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. There’s nothing wrong with the service itself, and I use it now and then. Just get over the compulsion to mess with the photos.

Take good pictures. If the color is a little off, use Photoshop or some other tool to tweak them. But if you have to “enhance” every photo you take, you need to either get a better camera or get better at using it. Or maybe take pictures of prettier things.

If everything’s “special,” nothing is.

The wrong question to ask: “Why not?”

The right question: “Why the hell would I?”

One of the most perceptive TV commercials I ever saw was for a television manufacturer. “Here’s the demo,” the announcer said, “but remember: You’re watching it on YOUR TV.”

That was a long time ago, but it illustrates the futility of using the wrong medium to carry your message. Even Jesus warned against putting new wine in old wineskins, though hardly anybody knows why. (Hint: It’s about fermentation and CO2 emissions.)

About four hours into a delightful morning of judging entries in a national social media competition, I had an “Aha!” moment when I realized that we were judging social media efforts (all of which were designed to be seen online) by looking at paper printouts stuffed into three-ring binders.

It’s bad enough to have to fool with paper under any circumstances, now that we’re all addicted to digital media. Sitting around a conference table without a computer in sight, I found myself frustrated with entries that included 200-character URLs leading to YouTube videos and web sites. (As an aside, this was one of the few times I’ve ever actually wished somebody had thought to use QR codes, so I could have at least looked at the links on my phone. But not a single entrant thought to do that.)

In retrospect, it would have a made a lot more sense (and been a lot less expensive) to have the entries submitted to a secured web site, where judges could see the materials in their native ecosystem. But we’ve always used paper-stuffed binders for contest entries, so naturally that’s what we used.

Because of the confidentiality of the judging process, I can’t say much about the entries themselves, except that they ranged from the truly awful to the startlingly creative.

We saw a ton of contests and giveaways to generate online buzz. A lot of these are already starting to feel like trendy tactics that will fade quickly. (Some things that looked really clever in early 2011 just look like spam today.) It also seemed everybody and his/her mom was targeting the “mommy bloggers” who write about things like food, sneakers, coupons, diapers and snotty noses.

Oddly, there wasn’t a single Kleenex campaign. Oh well.

While 69 percent of Americans say that it wouldn’t have a major impact on their lives if their local newspaper no longer existed, the truth is that in actual practice, we actually rely on the local paper for more than we realize.

The table below summarizes findings from the Pew Research Center. You can see the data here.

When I changed the name of my public relations agency to NewMediaRules a few years ago, I was convinced that the media landscape was changing in ways that would require professionals to constantly adapt. But the changes I’ve seen in the last five years have exceeded anything I could have anticipated or predicted.

Now and then, you get one just right.

What I didn’t anticipate was the difficulty of predicting the direction of these changes. With the decline of newspapers and television and the growing role of digital media, the direction seemed pretty well set. For one thing, it seemed perfectly clear that the sharp cutbacks on local news staffs would translate into few opportunities for local news coverage. For a while, that seemed to be the case. But now, the opposite is true. Oops.

To give myself the benefit of the doubt, opportunities for local coverage did decline — for a while. But several major factors — including the growth and credibility of hyperlocal media, the resurrection of RSS technology and the explosion of tablet computers — have changed all that. In fact, while I expected to simply track the continuing trend that started five or six years ago, I’ve found myself feasting on new opportunities for my clients.

I’ll confess, it caught me by surprise. A change this big has happened only three or four times in my career, but I think the most recent changes are the most dramatic.

I try to keep NewMediaRules.net posts as useful as I can, but this is one of those cases when I have to hold back to protect my own competitive advantage as well as that of my clients. Suffice it to say that things began to turn on their head around mid 2011, and as new data became available, I spotted a trend that my colleagues seem to have missed so far.

With a couple of simple changes in the way I approach the writing, distribution and promotion of press releases, I’ve been able to gain more local and trade media coverage for my clients — especially auction companies — in the first four months of 2012 than I’ve ever seen in a similar time period. Yet, it’s working in an environment where there are fewer reporters, with less space for their stories, than ever.

This is good for everybody. Clients who are competing for business can say, in all candor, that competitors can’t match the effectiveness of the public relations element our campaigns.

I realize that by not giving the secret to these results, I risk sounding like a huckster on a 2 a.m. infomercial, but sometimes it just turns out that way. Don’t worry, though. I’m not peddling books or CDs.

Here’s the best advice I can offer without giving away the goods: Stay flexible. Don’t get too attached to one way of doing things, or to one view of how things are supposed to be working. The only reliable prediction is that the rules will keep right on changing.

This is not a happy headline:

Ouch. It gets worse. Here’s the story that went with it. What went wrong?

For starters, press conferences are obsolete and have been for at least 20 years. Clients and CEOs love them and are always pressing to hold one, but smart media relations professionals generally pat them on the head and hold their hands until the urge passes with no damage done. (The best strategy for talking them out of it is to usually tell them it’s a waste of money, which is always true.)

The press conference was born at least a half century before the first personal computers appeared. Print reporters took notes in tall, skinny notebooks (to be honest, I still use these; old habits are hard to break) and either dictated a story over the phone or ran back to the newsroom to write up the news. Photographers (TV and still) got their shots and headed for the darkroom to develop the film.  In that environment, it provided some efficiency.

Today? Not so much. Here’s why:

1. It’s arrogant. When you hold a press conference, you’re saying, “We’re so important, we’re picking the time and place and expecting you to be there.” Nobody likes that attitude. Not reporters, not editors, not producers. Sure, you can get away with it if you’re Apple. But not if you’re Spotify, which had nothing much to say at any rate.
2. Too much stuff can go wrong. Even in the old days, a press conference was risky. In the 1980s, when I was a public relations manager at BellSouth, we spent weeks preparing for a huge press conference, with the CEO and the governor both addressing media. Then, about a half hour before the press conference, there was a minor accident at the Savannah River nuclear facility, which processed nuclear materials for use in nuclear weapons. Every reporter in Georgia headed to Augusta to cover the possible disaster, and nobody had the slightest interest in our press conference. The public relations manager responsible for the event was left in Atlanta to tap dance for a less-than-impressed CEO and a bored governor.
3. Reporters hate being herded around. Reporters — at least the good ones — want to get their own stories, their own way. They humor the politicians in Washington D.C., because they know everybody else will cover the story and it’s embarrassing if they miss it. But in the corporate world, they’d generally rather get a root canal than cover your event.
4. Nobody has time anymore. In case you didn’t get the memo, the one-day news cycle died 20 years ago. Newspapers and television stations have fired their reporters in droves. The reporters who are left don’t have time to get in the car, work their way through traffic, and stand around waiting on your CEO to arrive. Their time is better spent back at the office, collecting quotes by phone and email.

Do yourself, your CEO and your client a big favor. Next time they say “let’s have a press conference,” just say no. “Hell no” is even better.

Lean, finely textured beef doesn’t sound so bad, does it? At least not unless you’re a vegetarian. According to Penn State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences, it’s lean meat that used to go to waste.

Pink slime, on the other hand, sounds downright … well, you know.

The terms refer to exactly the same thing. The “pink slime” moniker was coined by a USDA whistleblower named Gerald Zirnstein.

Here’s what it actually is, according to Penn State’s Edward Mills. We’re always looking for ways to avoid wasting food, and there’s always been lean beef that remains on the carcass and can’t be removed with a knife, so it has gone to waste. Now it is removed in a process that involves heating minced trimmings to about 100 degrees, then putting the material into a centrifuge to separate the lean from the fat. To make sure it doesn’t carry any dangerous pathogens like E. coli 0157:H7 or salmonella, it’s briefly exposed to ammonia.

“There is not a safety issue here,” said Mills, quoted by Western Farm Press. On the other hand, he said, “if you are offended by something that is sticky and gooey and red, and in addition you know that it came from meat, you might find it disgusting,” he said.

Then again, a lot of the stuff we eat is equally disgusting if you look at it closely at the wrong stage of its production. We may love a good brat, but we really don’t want to know what’s in it. We don’t fret over organic carrots and potatoes that are buried in the dirt and fertilized with cow dung. We pay extra for them.

As with nearly anything these days that can be talked about in the limits of 140 characters, pink slime has become a big deal. Almost overnight, we’ve had a barrage of back pedaling fast food chains, school systems and others. The Agriculture Department said last week that schools can stop putting it in food next fall. Chalk up a big loss for the beef cattle industry, mainly because of a label.

Hardly anybody complained about lean, finely textured beef, but who wants to eat pink slime?

A healthy humility is good, but our English teachers set us up for trouble when they came down so hard on putting other people first in our writing. Everybody knows it’s best to say “My wife and I went out to eat,” rather than the crude and self-centered “Me and my wife went out to eat.” But if the wife and I are the objects in the sentence, it’s all about “me:”

They invited my wife and me to the event.” (It’s not “the wife and I.)

The easy way to tell is to see how it sounds without the wife. Nobody would say, “They invited I.” At least, I’ve never seen it happen. So like I said, it’s all about “me.”

Let’s move on to my other favorite whipping boy: Using “myself” when you real mean “me” or “I.” Here’s how it looks when we confuse them:

Somebody brought over some chicken for Eddie and myself. (It’s “Eddie and me.”)

Eddie and myself proposed a compromise. (It’s “Eddie and I.”)

This is an easy one. If you don’t use “I” earlier in the sentence, it’s almost never correct to utter myself.

In short, it’s:

Somebody brought over some chicken for Eddie and me.

Again, the easy way to check yourself is to take out the words in between. I’ve never heard anybody say “Somebody brought over some chicken for myself.”

From my friends at Murray Wise Associates, who are doing a great job with the use of video for online purposes.

The Economist has been a remarkable story in its own right, emerging in the past few years as a dominant news source for American readers. Clearly, they’ve been doing some things right, so it’s worth watching to see where they’re going next.

That’s why it’s significant that they just put Oscar Grut, who heads up their tablet editions, in charge of the website and all other digital products.

This doesn’t come out of the blue. In November, Economist chief executive Andrew Rashbass told The Guardian (another British medium that’s getting it right) that the magazine already had more than 100,000 digital subscribers — most of them through its iPad app. Even then, the Economist’s numbers showed that 28 percent of its readers already owned a tablet and another 23 percent expected to own one in the next year.

This is even more stunning in the context, coming before the Christmas rush in which Pew’s numbers showed tablet ownership almost doubling.

The Birmingham News building where I worked for 10 years, vacated in 2006 and now a distant memory.

I was working at The Birmingham News when we converted from the old presses
(which dated back to before World War II) to a shiny new Goss Metroliner offset. They had to dig down so far I thought I saw they’d hit China, and the hole took up a big chunk of a city block.

If the Annenberg School’s forecast is right and nearly all print newspapers will be gone in five years, I guess there’s not much point in having those enormous buildings that house them. You can put all the reporters you can use on a single floor of nearly any decent sized office tower.

So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that newspapers are selling their buildings at a nice clip (and in a few cases, at some nice prices).