CAN'T WE GET ALONG FOR THE SAKE OF THE KIDS!?

In addition to the myriad crises happening abroad, a still-struggling economy and mass unemployment levels, we mustn’t overlook another crisis we’re facing here at home – EDUCATION.

Did you know that 6.2 million students have dropped out of school, and that's only for the year 2007? And that over one third of all public high school students(with a disproportionate percentage of that figure representing minority groups)fails to graduate from high school? This means that each year there are millions of young adults entering society without the tools, knowledge and skill sets required to survive in this increasingly complex and competitive world.

These teens and young adults are primarily kids from forgotten neighborhoods who haven't been given the encouragement and opportunity needed to fulfill their potential. They are kids from diverse backgrounds who may not fit the standard education mold, and while it may not be our problem today, it certainly will be tomorrow, unless both the left and right in Congress can come together and forge a plan to get these millions of future American citizens up and running with skills that can land them jobs, get them into college or enable them to start their own businesses. We have to equip them with the tools they need to participate and contribute to society, and to fulfill their destiny.

In a recent article in the Huffington Post, Amy Rosen, President & CEO of NFTE, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, reminds us of Obama's words at the beginning of his administration where he decidedly named Entrepreneurship Training "the best anti-poverty program around." Rosen applauded the amount of funding allocated to the "Race to the Top" education stimulus fund, but the work is far from done.

Click here to read Ms. Rosen's pointed article. When you look at the big picture, this issue – educating youth out of poverty - affects us all, doesn't it?

If you want to learn more about the great work that NFTE does around the country to help young teens and adults stay engaged in school, build dreams and develop their own small businesses, visit www.nfte.com..

Because everyone needs some help in life. Sometimes all it takes is a little push, and for someone to tell us that we can succeed if we try hard enough.

NYT's finest says, "Charge 'Em!"

When I heard about the New York Times’ plan to begin charging visitors a flat fee to access its website beginning in 2011, I had a handful of reactions that ranged from puzzlement to rabid indignation. Well, maybe my indignation wasn’t quite rabid; I didn’t foam at the mouth or anything. A quiet indignation, then, like what I might experience if Starbucks started raising the price of my morning latte by fifteen cents.

Price increase notwithstanding, I am prepared to shell out and I think my reaction characterizes the straight-up consumer reaction to the Grey Lady’s so-called “paywall” for content. Diehard readers will pay whatever nominal fee the Times imposes, because somewhere in the back of their minds (and I think with the Times’ readership demographic we can assume that they can make this logical leap) they know that the content they consume online deserves to be paid for. The current system, industry-wide, of offering up the efforts of trained professional journalists and columnists for free is untenable; compensation must come from somewhere. YOU don’t work for free, do you???

The trouble is, many of us assumed it would come from advertising. And this is the origin for my second reaction, puzzlement. If any publication should be able to support its online presence through advertising, it is the New York Times. It has the quality content, the extended page views, and the traffic that advertisers ought to be creaming themselves over. The site attracts more than 146 million visitors annually, has more than twice the number of unique visitors than the next most popular newspaper website (it’s 59th among all websites), and has spawned 22 of the top 50 most popular newspaper blogs. Yet a company the size of the Times needs well over a billion pageviews per month to generate enough advertising revenue to stay afloat, which it’s currently not getting.

As the Times has tried charging consumers before, déjà vu was my third reaction. Times Select, which charged for access to popular columns and other features, was discontinued after two years after bloggers routinely reposted content that lain behind that particular paywall. It seems rather strange that the Times would try something so similar again, and with little promise of achieving different results.

Is the move is a good one for the Times? I want to yes because I support paying for quality content, but I’m torn because they tried this once before.

The social media sphere is so much more developed today than it was at the outset of the Times Select “experiment”, and therefore more important as a traffic generator for the site. If the NYT limits this source of trackbacks and links, traffic will fall further at the site than it might anyway, and artificially restricting the newspaper’s online presence is hardly a good strategy in this day and age.

Well, there you are. I’m conflicted, a jumble of confusion and (mild) frustration. I guess that puts me in the same boat with the Times executives behind this decision.

Anyone else out there who is also feeling conflicted?

Re: Sex and the Digital City

Picked up Robert Wright’s posting in the Times Opinionator blog a couple of days ago entitled “Sex and the Digital City”, and my takeaway -- beyond the impression that he’s my kind of writer, with just enough post-ironic, witty self-awareness in his prose to make his point palatable -- is that he touched on a couple of critical points about our culture and way information is disseminated in a hyper-connected age.

This concept appears to be the elephant in the room that everyone can’t stop talking about, and yet couching it in terms of marital fidelity lends it a visceral quality while simultaneously stripping the ever-titillating topic of who’s-screwing-who of some of its juice. Wright maintains that the age of paperless communication is actually the age of immortal ‘paper’ trails, and whether you’re a pro golfer or the Governor of a small southern state or just the philanderer next door, you can expect your latest tryst to be accompanied by an army of zombie missives revived from trash folders and T-Mobile’s memory banks.

And like all good zombies, they don’t stop until they consume everyone’s brain.

Wright asks, toward the end of his piece, whether our new culture scourged with binary sex zombies (which, Dave Barry (if you’re reading), would make an excellent name for a rock band) will lead to fewer instances of infidelity, out of fear of exposure, or more, having created an environment where such deviancy is effectively the norm. He hinges this argument on increasing instances of hypocrisy- the more hypocrites get exposed, the more a particular behavior becomes acceptable.

Without agreeing completely with Wright’s conclusion, I believe that the modern information echo chamber lives on hypocrisy of this kind, and it will continue to feed itself with the help of its information-zombie minions. There is no escape.

Does that mean the collapse of American family life, and the dissolution of faithful marriage in general? No.

A little erosion, perhaps, but nothing that the previous half-century hasn’t already sloughed away.

Who Can Nonprofits Turn To For Help? From Marketing Daily

There isn't a person in this country (excluding, perhaps, Pat Robertson) who hasn't been deeply saddened by what happened in Haiti on Jan. 12. Actually, make that most of the world. Watching the heart-wrenching coverage, we are reminded that natural disasters can strike anywhere, at anytime. It's how we react and respond in times of need that can make a difference.

For many, myself included, the crisis in Haiti is a throwback to August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf States and wiped out more than 850,000 homes and displaced several hundred thousand Americans. While the death toll doesn't even compare with that of Haiti, millions of Americans lost their homes and more than $10 billion was spent on rebuilding levies, which devastated a land mass bigger than Haiti. But the fundraising efforts and how the country reacted then to today's crisis is strikingly different.

In just two days, the American Red Cross was able to raise $8 million, according to Mobile Marketer.com, with millions more raised by nonprofits, including Yéle, UN Foundation and the International Rescue Committee. Millions of people were moved and money was mobilized -- instantaneously -- thanks in large part to mobile donations.

Just a year ago, however, most people hadn't heard of mobile donations; only a handful of behind-the-scenes companies like GiveOnTheGo and mGive, that had been developing this powerful fundraising platform for charitable organizations, knew what was brewing in the mobile space.

Now, sadly, thanks to the Haitian crisis, millions of consumers have been abruptly introduced to mobile giving overnight. And they don't seem to have a problem with it.

For nonprofits, fundraising -- on any scale -- is an operational imperative. Without supporting funds, there is no organization, period. And while mobile giving is being crowned as a charity's newest savior, it's a rather useless one if the organization doesn't have a proper structure. And by proper structure, I mean a having robust and sensible PR and marketing strategy -- of which mobile is a part. Simply having a mission and a vision to "do good" is all well and good, but it falls flat when no one knows about a nonprofit's work.

In today's climate, a nonprofit has to market itself like a business, yet most don't. I'm not talking about The Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières or Oxfam. I'm talking about the 1,569,572 or so nonprofits in this country that have set out to create change, to help those less fortunate and to make our world a much better place. They might not be selling products or services, but they are selling a cause.

For many of those nonprofits, however, PR and marketing is ranked number 8 or 9 (10 being the least important). And where does PR/marketing rank for a for-profit company? Number 2, 3 or 4.

So why the disparity?

In working with nonprofits, I've found it to be an inherent part of the funding and grant-writing structure. Foundations and large donors enforce strict stipulations about the amount of money a nonprofit can spend to promote itself. And yet, if it doesn't promote itself to endear its cause and mission to a new generation of donors and consumers, its fundraising and awareness building-efforts will be severely limited. It's a Catch-22.

I'm not saying that all nonprofits need to go crazy with big marketing budgets. But if they want the world, or even just their local community to know about their invaluable work and deeds, they need to invest in themselves and their story a lot more.

In times of crisis, it's clear that millions of people pay attention to these worthy organizations.

But it's the rest of the time that nonprofits have to worry about. Because that is the time when having a robust PR and marketing strategy can be the difference between success and failure for many of them.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=121276&nid=110455

My mobile dream for 2010 - from Mobile Marketer

The start of the year was a very different kind of New Year for me. Whereas previous years have always started and ended with fireworks, festivities and a very big bang – and a massive headache to boot – this New Year’s Eve was an altogether different affair.

Subdued, reflective, calm and quiet. Huddled up on a snowy mountain top away from emails, news and the twang of social media, I finally had the brain bandwidth to think about goals and dreams for 2010, personally and collectively.

Yes, a very big change to previous years and indicative of the type of mental preparation needed for a new year, a new decade and a new era.

Gone are the brash excesses, hasty decisions and knee-jerk reactions. Out with insecurity and fear, and in with sensibility, logic and decisiveness. Oh, and accountability, all very welcomed, thank you very much.

Welcome to a very different decade in our lives as marketers. Bring it on, I say!

And so we begin this new era from a very different place to where we were in 2000, or 2001, if you are one of those calendar purists.

Saddled with choking debt and less money – but greater and more demanding expectations from consumers and our clients – marketers across all channels have a lot to sort through and sort out.

Although there seem to be startups blooming everywhere – and thank goodness for that: we need new blood, new ideas, new thinkers and revitalized innovation – there are fewer venture capital funds sitting at the end of the digital/tech rainbow.

Veni vidi VC
Whereas 2009 was a funding desert, funds are opening up their coffers once more. But they will be more demanding and expecting a lot more in return. Notice those two words again?

Gone is the era of throwing money at flashy and splashy campaigns and budgets, or reckless startups and the glory days of playing with other peoples’ money. Those days are so over – or at least until we relapse into a time of fake plenty again.

No, this is most definitely an era of thrift and resourcefulness, an era where clients will be tempted to say “You know, we’re going to try doing this ourselves,” or “We’re going to look for a more cost-effective partner because we need to achieve more but with less.”

Sounds familiar, right?

So what does this mean?
Click here to read the rest of the article.

Focus on the Family Bring messing with The Super Bowl? Sacrilegious!!!

I read an article by Jim Edwards on BNET today, which really got me worked up

It seems the social conservative group Focus on the Family, headed by the always-entertaining “9/11-was-God’s-punishment” James Dobson, has bought itself a 30 second spot during the Super Bowl. For their millions, FOF joins an elite fraternity of deep-pocketed advertisers that includes GoDaddy.com, Anheuser-Busch and Cash4Gold… all like-minded institutions with a similar political agenda.

Wait, let me get my facts straight. It’s Anheuser-Busch that has a petition out to stop the passage of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Hate Crimes Bill, which increases the penalties on those who commit hate crimes, right? No? Then it must be GoDaddy.com leading the charge to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. That’s not right either, is it? I got it: Cash4Gold is the company that advocates treating homosexuality as a disease.

No, it’s Focus on the Family that holds all of these positions, but you can bet they won’t be prominently featured during the spot. Instead they’re trotting out All-American Good Guy Tim Tebow to talk about values, family, puppy dogs and ice cream. Awwwww. If you want to get the full quotient of hate, you’ll have to visit their website for that.

So why is FOF joining all of these consumer products and services companies and dropping the gross domestic product of Guam on half a minute’s worth of airtime during the Super Bowl? I’m sure they think their message of intolerance and fundamentalist Christianity should be viewed by the widest audience possible, and since they have the resources, they have every right to secure that viewing. Right?

But honestly, does that message belong there? After all, CBS, which is broadcasting the big game this year, denied an ad by MoveOn.org in 2004 critical of then-president George W Bush. (That liberal media bias really is daunting, isn’t it?) Will it eventually become commonplace for organizations with political agendas to save the resources they might put into more constructive pursuits for an advertising nuclear option that, it should be noted, is entirely contingent upon football fans not getting up to get a beer at that exact moment?

Maybe FOF thinks it’s rallying its base, that Joe Sixpack is more likely to be watching the game on Sunday Feb. 7 than shopping at the Berkeley Co-Op. Maybe it’s some of the timely context they’ve been presented with, considering the ongoing challenge to Proposition 8 in California and today’s Supreme Court ruling that legitimizes corporate-funded political messages as free speech. But whatever their internal rationale may be, that message has no place on broadcast television.

Because of their intolerant, abhorrent agenda - and regardless of the actual content of the spot - FOF’s Super Bowl ad is more like one of the hate crimes they seem to want legalized and less like an expression of first amendment rights.

The best way to discourage groups like this, speaking as a viewer, is to make sure that their ad dollars go wasted. If they’re betting on a big audience for their message of intolerance, then don’t give it to them.

I imagine I’ll be up getting a drink when it airs, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Get Your Good On

Go on, give until it hurts – then just give a little more, you’ll feel better. Honest.

The horrors we’ve witnessed this week (if only digitally or electronically) have proven to be yet another eye opener for this country.

Life is indeed temporal, and although we attempt to safeguard ourselves, our families and property from forces beyond our control, stuff happens. Every day. Carpe diem and all that, but what should we be reaching for to genuinely enrich our quality of life and overall well-being, when death, misery and destruction is lurking around every corner of the globe?

Of course, that’s for each of us to decide, but studies are showing that it isn’t a holiday in the sun or a designer handbag. St. Francis was probably right when he said, "For it is in giving that we receive."

A couple of years ago, neuroscientists from the National Institutes of Health scanned the brains of volunteers who were asked to envision themselves making a generous donation to a charity and then to envision keeping the money for themselves. They found that when the volunteers envisioned altruistic, selfless acts, a primitive part of their brains lit up like a Christmas tree - the same response rendered when the subjects thought about food and wait for it…sex!

And this moral bio-coding isn’t exclusive to humans - studies also showed that even rats experience empathy. When a rat was given food and its neighbor in turn received an electrical shock, over time the well fed rats chose to forego the food.

We’re social creatures and are inter-dependent on each other for survival. We’re biologically programmed to look after each other. Over the coming days and weeks, in the midst of our own struggles to stay afloat and survive in an economically fraught jungle, we’re likely to be bombarded by requests to donate to the Haitian relief efforts. As a PR person, I know that there’s a good chance that people will start to feel inundated, then overwhelmed and finally tune out when they hear the words “Haiti” or “earthquake”.

But if or when this happens, I’m hoping we can remember to be as good or better than the rats, and remember just how good being good feels.

What’s in it for us? Lots. So much so, in fact, that it could be argued that an altruistic act is really an impossibility. Ha!

So if you want to feel REALLY good today, (perhaps you’ve already eaten and aren’t in the mood for sex), follow this link to the Red Cross site and “get your good on”.