By Posted on Posted in media-general, Publishing

A wonderfully snarky Op-ed in the New York Times by Timothy Egan, called “Typing Without a Clue“–basically attacking Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin for the book deals they’re expected to ink, and saying writing should be left to the many talented but unappreciated writers out there and not sold off as if it were junk bonds by those in the 14th minute of their 15 minutes of fame.

He has a point, certainly–but I’m actually rather fond of the democratization of writing, music making, movie making, etc. There’s still plenty of third-party validation available for those who want to judge these works by some kind of standard–but there’s also an openness, an ability to disseminate a message, that I could never have dreamed of in 1972 when I published my first articles (in an underground high school newspaper published, oddly enough, by conservatives–they ran my liberal stuff with disclaimers). From these mimeographed samizdats–already more accessible than traditional media–to the disintermediated world of blogs, e-zines, Tweets and, yes, hundreds of thousands of books every year is an amazing leap.

Now all we have to do is find time to read one-millionth of it, ha ha ha.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government

Four years after launching the Business Ethics Pledge campaign, and five years after publishing my book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, that shows that ethical businesses can more easily succeed, the goal of making future Enron scandals unthinkable seems very distant this week. One dismal news story after another!

A little sampling of the depressing headlines:

Democratic Governor Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, arrested on corruption charges, manages to paint himself as more venal and small-minded, and more focused on personal gain, than even Richard Nixon. Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

Lostremote.com has an astounding post: a traditional print journalist ranted that a TV station allowing its viewers to select one story for the nightly newscast was the death of standards. The station, in best-practices Web 2.0 fashion, invited him on the show to debate the issue publicly.

And this is how the journalist responded:

“I’m told that this multiple-choice reporter has called me out with a public invitation, on her blog or her twitter or whatever, to debate her before her ubiquitous Web camera with its on-line audience of literally dozens of voyeurs and three or four lonely, misfit bloggers who spend all their time communicating only with each other. I need not lend my experience and credibility to draw her a crowd.”

Talk about clueless! This kind of arrogance might have worked for The New York Times 100 years ago, but it sure doesn’t work now for an unknown journalist working for a newspaper in Arkansas! What he doesn’t get is that he has no credibility with the audience he’s rejecting (other than he apparently writes a blog on politics)–and that his appearance on the show might have built credibility for his position, and might have gone viral, being seen by tens of thousands.

Now, mind you–I am trained as a traditional print journalist. I have enormous respect for people who follow the old principles and standards–who do research before they write, who understand the importance of objectivity, and who try to tell the important stories that are very hard to find on mainstream broadcast media–and I’m horrified by the decline both in journalistic standards within a story and in the general willingness to go after a tough (and expensive) but important story. That failure in part led us to the Iraq debacle. Journalists absolutely need to ask hard questions, grapple with the answers, and filter the world for their public. In an era where we all have far too much information and limited ability to process it, we still need traditional journalists as intermediaries. Citizen journalism is vital, but it’s not the whole thing. Professional journalism is crucial, still.

But I think you can have both journalistic standards and an openness to listening to your readers/listeners/viewers. You can have deep investigative journalism and a viewpoint, even in nonprint media–look at the amazing radio/TV show, Democracy Now, if you want an example. And you can have dialog without threatening your position. I think this journo was extremely short-sighted.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media

The post directly above this one, about the death of traditional journalism, has a very interesting provenance. I thought I’d share it with you and provide a look into the mindset of one blogger choosing one story–because as someone who was raised on newspapers, I’ve obviously come far in my information patterns.

PR guru Peter Shankman started a service less than a year ago called Help A Reporter Out; it matches journalists seeking sources with over 40,000 readers seeking news coverage. The venture is free, and advertising-supported. It started as a Facebook group, an I’m proud to say that I was the sixth member.

Today, Peter ran this ad:

This HARO: Cinterim. Cinterim is technology marketing like you
never seen it before, time-sliced marketing: only what you need,
when you need it. They’ve termed it Marketing as a Service: From
Chief Marketing Officers and market-driven business strategy to
complete outsourced marketing services. But they don’t have any
clients or accounts, rather, they serve as a partner to every
company they work with, whether helping a start-up to focus or
turning a later stage or public company’s strategies and execution.
Cinterim is fully invested in each partner’s short- and long-term
success. Make Cinterim your secret weapon. Find them at
www.cinterim.com. And be sure to check out co-founders Lisa Arthur
and Michael Bloom’s hard hitting blog, www.fearofmarketing.com , a
prelude to their book-in-progress, Fear of Marketing, Why the
companies that connect people are disconnected.

Now, I’m not someone who clicks on ads a lot, but I do read Peter’s sponsorship notices, and have followed several of them. I went to the blog. And found this very intelligent and thoughtful article about GM’s troubles (I’ll forgive the sloppy proofreading–lord knows, I’ve certainly been guilty of that!). I even put in a comment, about market share not necessarily being what it’s cracked up to be.

And then I glanced at the blogroll, which only had four entries. I saw three blogs I knew and respected, and this intriguing-sounding one called Lost Remote. So I clicked over and found the story I blogged about.

In fact, I sent my assistant a note asking her to add both Fear of Marketing and Lost Remote to both my own blogroll and my personal blog-reading widget that notifies me of new posts.

Of course, the problem with this kind of journo-voyeuristic ADD, which I get a lot, is that my goal for the last hour was to lower my inbox from 997 to 950.I got it all the way to 996. Yeah, my inbox is so crowded because I’ll get a mailing from Huffington Post or Marketing Sherpa or dozens of others, and I start following a lot of the links, and then at some point I have to do paying work. Oh well, next time!

And if you haven’t read my post on the death of journalism, please scroll up. It’ll be right on top of this one.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Wow! Mashable reports that the Pulitzer Prize people have opened up the award to online journalists without a print publication, if they meet certain criteria. That means bloggers, e-zine/webzine publishers and perhaps others are seen as legitimate journalists.

As a blogger, publisher of four e-zines, and publisher of five webzines, I welcome this.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that I heard this news on a social media site: Twitter.

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

Just read PCWorld’s review of Facebook Connect–a service that not only lets you log in to many sites with your Facebook ID (a la Open ID), but also pings back your participation (if you allow it to) to your Facebook profile.

Oddly enough, the last section of my new book I wrote yesterday was on the idea of growing your influence by syndication (something I see and use constantly on social networks)–and here’s Facebook implementing that very thing.

Already, thousands of Twitter users (including me) feed their Tweets into their Facebook profiles. And I can tell you I get a lot of comments from Facebook Friends about my Tweets.

For a great article on the power of syndication across multiple sites, visit this post by Alex Mandossian.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability

Your holiday spending can support sustainability goals. It’s not that hard. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Shop local–and that doesn’t mean the local branch of a giant international conglomerate, but a locally owned, locally operated merchant. The dollars will continue to circulate in your own local economy, helping to recession-proof your own community.
  • Consider gift certificates to local stores, or even a town-wide gift certificate redeemable at many participating stores (many Chambers of Commerce offer these).
  • If buying food products, look for organic, locally made items whose every ingredient you can spell without looking.
  • If you live in an area where the tap water is drinkable, or can be made drinkable with a simple filter, make a family promise to give up bottled water, or use it only in special situations (long car trips, extended hikes). for most people in the US, Canada, and Europe, this is an easy one. The environmental costs of bottled water are enormous and complex.
  • Buy some family presents that will pay energy dividends for years to come: window caulk, door snakes, heat-trapping blinds or curtains, even things as simple as foam pads and baby protectors for your electrical outlets on outside walls (you’d be amazed at how much energy you’ll save). They may not be glamorous, but if you point out how the money you collectively save will be channeled into some fun family activity, it’s a good way to make the shift.

    Plenty more eco-friendly gift and living ideas at https://www.frugalfun.com/ – look for the back issues of Monthly Frugal Fun Tips as well as Frugal & Fashionable Living magazine.

    Shel Horowitz has been combining frugality and sustainability for over 20 years, including his e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Ethics: General, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

    Apparently, a lot of players in the international adoption world have been a little too glib about where these babies are coming from, and some children have been stolen from their parents to be adopted by people in the Northern hemisphere.

    Even though it delayed and may have prevented her adoption, one adoptive mom, Jennifer Hemsley, got too suspicious. Her courageous battle with the system and great personal/family/financial hardship in order to do the right thing are a model of how to behave in an ethically cloudy situation, even if the outcome is the opposite of what you’re striving for.

    Medical reports seemed obvious forgeries, without letterhead or doctor’s signature. And during a critical hearing, Hemsley said, her Guatemalan advisers tried to pay a stranger to pose as Hazel’s foster mother.

    “Todd and I felt a lot like, ‘Gee, is this really happening?’ Maybe we should just look the other way and keep plodding along, because every time I tried to tell someone, nobody cared,” Hemsley said. “I couldn’t look the other way. I just couldn’t turn my head.”

    Ricardo Ordonez, the Hemsleys’ adoption attorney, denied any fraud and vowed to clear his name by producing the birth mother for new DNA tests. Another court hearing is pending.

    If the Hemsleys had walked away, as hundreds of other Americans did after problems surfaced, Hazel would likely have been abandoned or reoffered for adoption under another false identity, Tecu said. Instead, Jennifer Hemsley stayed with Hazel for months, draining more than $70,000 from a second mortgage on their home and paying for a trusted nanny.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, People Helping People, Politics

    Nelson Mandela was the first black president of South Africa, who came to power after decades of an oppressive apartheid regime that enforced a horrible climate on its people of color–the vast majority of its population. Mandela himself was imprisoned for 27 years.

    When Mandela and the African National Congress came to power, it would have been easy to conduct Nuremberg-style trials and punish the transgressors. But instead, South Africa established an official Truth and Reconciliation Commission; he handled the need to change with love. The Commission thoroughly investigated many of the old regime’s criminals, but did not punish them–instead using the trials to create healing rather than division.

    While it’s easy to imagine taking a good deal of satisfaction from seeing the rogues of our rogue state–Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales…and especially Rove and Cheney–on trial and facing long prison terms, from the point of view of healing the country and actually accomplishing a progressive agenda in these already-difficult times, it may make sense to have the trials but have them under the banner of truth and reconciliation, and let their consciences (such as they are) or the Higher Power they call claim to believe in, be the ones to punish them.

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    By Posted on Posted in Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    I just made up the word “jrip” and the phrase “jargon jrip.” It’s like drip (as in seriously uncool person, common in the late 1950s/early 1960s)–except it begins with a j to go with jargon.

    And I made it in response to these couple of lines that showed up in my e-mail (name withheld to protect the guilty):

    an Internet-wide shared-user system for user-centric demographic/privacy control, personalization, advertising and content payment aggregation.

    Now, I’m a professional writer; I work with words every day. I know what every one of those words means individually, but they make absolutely no sense when strung together. I have no idea from that phrase what this person is talking about. Other parts of the press release and announcement tell me that he wants to establish a new social network that includes an e-commerce component. But the difficult phrase was in the first sentence! I don’t think most people will get far enough to figure it out.

    It’s technobabble like this that gives corporate communications in general, and corporate-speak press releases in particular, a bad name. As a copywriter, I make it my business to try to eliminate that kind of press release from the business toolkit, and replace it with press releases that actually communicate both facts and emotion, yet stay out of the hype zone. When I see this sort of crap, it reminds me that we have a loooong way to go.

    Clear writing communicates; jargon blocks communication. Down with jargon! Don’t be a jargon jrip!

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