Next Generation’s New Pathways – And Potential Dead Ends, All Just A Click Away

A recent post on the Future of Media (my favourite new blog) predicts that the next big business boom is likely to be in occupational therapy, (OT) and intimacy counselors. Millennials, the generation born post-1985, will increasingly require their services, having become too plugged in to remember that a “friend request” isn’t always a mouse-click away.

Sadly, I don't think this a prediction, it's turning out to be true - and growing. A report, “Cyber Communication on Today’s Youth,” by the American Counseling Association was already ringing alarm bells in 2008. Reading the document three years on, it's fascinating to note how much the digital landscape has changed in such a short period. While Myspace gets at least minor billing, Facebook, which was already 4-years-old at the time, does not receive a single reference.

How the mighty have fallen. Or, more to the point, how the mighty squandered a golden opportunity. But I digress...

If that much can change in three years, it’s rather hard to envision the next 1,100 days. While I'm praying for an economic rebound, I would hate to think that these new, or "reinvigorated" professions would be spurred by society's digital addiction. When President Obama talked of job creation, it's unlikely he was referring to these.

Taking advantage of our "click addiction"

A recent article in the New York Times looks at Americans' growing reliance on their shrinks - online. Can't make it to your weekly couch-session in person? Not a problem. Just fire up Skype and connect with your therapist anywhere. Having an anxiety attack, possibly caused by having to do an "in-person" interview? Get some webcam time with your therapist for an online RX.

And the irony continues..

Driving to the beach this morning, I was reminded of this growing "click-to-counsel" profession: A huge billboard touting a local hospital's ER room "click and book your ER visit online."

The scenario could go something like this..

Have an accident with the automatic carving knife. Put sorn-off finger(s) on ice. Log on to hospital's ER booking system and reserve your place in the ER queue. Wait at home hoping you don't lose conciousness in the meantime, or take a leisurely stroll for a few hours (with ice pack of course), stopping at a drive-thru before your appointed time slot.

“Turn on, tune in,” may have been part of ‘60s countercultural icon Timothy Leary’s well-known phrases. I doubt he would have imagined the phrase’s 21st century impact on the Children of the Sixties' children.

Of course, "click-to-counsel" hadn't been invented then. I wonder what he would have made of that?

Famous Last Words… Think Before You Speak

It would have been wise if John McWhorter, the renowned linguist, political commentator, lecturer, and blogger had taken his own advice from the title of one of his most recent posts: think before you speak.

McWhorter’s post for thedaily.com, last weekend was a controversial piece that in 842 words upended decades worth of linguistic study and knowledge. If we are to assume that different peoples speaking different languages perceive the world through different prisms, he argues, then the so-called “loser” of that arrangement -- the one with a subpar understanding of a given concept, be it love, hate, length of time, etc., etc. is doomed to inferiority.

“Before we celebrate this as showing that people…experience life in a dramatically different way than we do, we should consider that to embrace the idea of language differences as shaping perception in any radical way…denigrates the cognitive abilities of billions of the world’s human beings,” he says.

But ultimately, it’s McWhorter’s analysis that denigrates people, not the beauty and diversity of human perception. In fact, one could argue, that McWhorter’s all-or-nothing lens through which he views language is highly Amerocentric –that winner-take-all mentality that lay at the cornerstone of political beliefs like Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism and laissez-faire capitalism, and today very much resembles Monday night football.

Does this mean Americans view the world in two-dimensional, linear constructs. I do believe that. But that in no way implies that every non-American can’t view the world the same way if they so desired, and says nothing about different cultures, speaking different languages and their cognitive ability. The fact that IQs tend to rise in developed nations speaks –in whatever language you choose – to the power of opportunity, education and experience. It also suggests that most humans regardless of where live, have similar amounts of latent brainpower.

As PR agencies like mine continue adding new clients from across the globe, communication differences will undoubtedly create challenges in translating one idea and concept into another language and cultural context. I don’t know about you, but diminishing our clients’ cognitive abilities doesn’t sound like a good place to start.

Embracing difference, championing our linguistic uniqueness, and working with our clients to “get the message right” seems to me a far better approach.

Print’s Death March, Again

Here we go again. Another article predicting the end of print media, or to be more precise, referring to its now sunset years. A recent post called Editorial Exit on the Future of Media blog, joins a chorus of naysayers predicting the end of the traditional newsroom and dismantling of old school media.

But are we talking about a sunset or merely a solar eclipse?

Without question the last five years (and even 10 years) have not been kind to a host of traditional media. Web 2.0 (or are we nearly 3.0?), running lightening fast, interactive sites and “iWeb” – the Internet’s mobile revolution – is enjoying double-digit percentage growth.

But referring to the present time period as traditional media’s sunset years is premature at best, and dead wrong at worst. In its annual report on American Journalism, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, highlights some quite positive news hinting that the worst of traditional media’s die off has ended. Newspapers, once a bulwark for the communications industry, saw its weekday circulation numbers contract by 5 percent in 2010. While not fantastic, the losses in 2009 were twice that. In revenue terms the picture looked even brighter at cable news, network television and local news outlets as all three saw growth. Certainly, traditional media’s influence has shrunk from a global superpower to a component of an increasingly diverse set of communications outlets, including web sites, mobile apps, blogs, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages.

The bottom line: Record stores still exist, vinyl can still be purchased, and the “paperless office” has yet to fully mature. Traditional media may no longer be king, but it’s still serving in the king’s court.

Lose The Word INNOVATION And Focus On What Really Counts: DELIVERING

“Avoid clichés like the plague,” is thrown about frequently in journalism and media circles as it is at ThinkInk. Like a well-worn record, or maybe I should update my own tired imagery to something like an endlessly re-tweeted tweet, clichés usually succeed in getting their point across, but not without the listener rolling their eyes over yet another hackneyed phrase. Too much use with too little care and the force behind the words is totally lost.

In today’s schizoid re-invent-the-wheel-every-day atmosphere – from wordy ways to jump start the job market, to long-winded debates over the commonsense logic of having the US government meet its debt obligations (yawn) – even the word “innovation” has lost much of its sparkle, according to Jack Springman, author and growth strategies consultant in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post.

His advice to readers: jettison the word “innovation” from their business vocabulary. Doing so, he says, refocuses a company’s attention on delivering quality to its customers, not the manufacture of buzzwords directed inward at corporate higher-ups.

While so deliberately discarding a word sounds a little sophomoric, kind of like having a “no-cursing” change jar to dissuade poor language (which definitely hasn’t worked at our agency – we simply love a good swear), Springman is nevertheless on to something. While doing research for his piece, a search of the term “innovation” on the HBR site came up with 4,700 results. Perform a similar Google search for “innovation” and “business” and you end up with 423,000,000 hits. Clearly the term innovation has, wait for it….. had its day in the sun.

Innovation, like guru, and expert, among countless other words, is a term that should be used like salt in a recipe, sparingly and with extreme care to not scuttle the dish. PR and communications firms should also take note Springman’s advice. I don’t know if innovation should be completely excised from our corporate lexicon, but a timeout is certainly in order.

What’s Your Digital Fitness Level?

Work It Social Media!

Earlier this week PepsiCo’s director of digital and social media B.

Bonin Bough again chastised the PR industry for being digitally out of shape. “Digital fitness,” or knowledge about how clients use social media and a 101-understanding of the science behind search algorithms, said Bough, is essential if communications companies wish to stay on top of the ever-changing digital front.

To a large extent Bough’s tonic for the industry falls flat - pun intended. Put another way, if the PR industry –and the country – were as physically fit as we are digitally, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic on our hands. Digital fitness may be a great buzzword that generates web traffic, (of course we wouldn’t know as digital luddites) but the reality is, social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds or the almost-antique email, are already major components of our communications tool belts.

Think about it. Can anyone really imagine a PR company – or almost any successful organization – not relying on social media to promote their brand in some way? Moreover, today’s clients expect social media outreach as par for the proverbial course and not some gimmick-driven extra. Many of today’s college graduates entering the working world have already been using Facebook for a third of their lives, first signing on when they were in early high school in 2004.

A growing number too are graduating with degrees in social media.

And while demographers and the like forecast a graying workforce, data indicates that 78 percent of the US workforce in 2009 was made up of individuals ages 25-54. I don’t know about you, but I know plenty of 40 and 50-somethings who are just as (and if not more) iPad-savvy as the next 20 or 30-something.

To Bough’s point that Facebookers and Tweetters must intimately understand the science behind their media outlets, comparing the process to how children learn to ride bicycles, I cry foul. Yes, it’s true children don’t learn to ride a bicycle watching it sit idly by the curb. That’s why they get on and pedal. But ask a five-year-old about the basic laws of Newtonian motion that lie at the underpinnings of his first successful ride and he’ll draw a blank.

My point: Intimate knowledge of the inner workings of social media is important, to be sure, but just by using social media and receiving immediate feedback from our clients ensures that its usefulness and effectiveness grows organically.

Of all the ailments besetting our economy and the challenges communications companies face at attracting new clients in these difficult times, our collective digital fitness is not one of them. Now that I’m done exercising my fingers with this post I’m off to hit the pavement for a 5-k run.

Feeding The Search Beast: Google Acquires Restaurant Guide, Zagat

Thirty points out of thirty. That’s how restaurant guide Zagat ranked its own acquisition by Google earlier today with a now-famous dining out scale.

Zagat-o-philes, too, will likely approve of the deal, which will help Google deliver even better localized restaurant, foodie, and nightlife search results.

In a letter posted on Zagat’s website husband and wife team Tim and Nina Zagat referred to their 32-year-old company as a longtime innovator in user-generated content. “Google delivers the most relevant and high-quality information, and it's the perfect home for our content,” they wrote. “We are thrilled to see our baby placed in such good hands and to start today as official ‘Googlers.’”

But Brad McCarty, blogger for thenextweb blog rightly points out there’s more going on than just improving Google searches and an older company moving into the "next course" of its career. Besides, the Zagat app for mobile devices is already onto version 4.0.4 and the latest one was launched just last month. Are foodies so ravenous for better search results?

The purchase by the behemoth search engine – and the anything and everything portal to the web – comes some three years after Zagat reportedly put itself up for sale for $200 million but then backed out of the process. Today, Zagat will join ranks with the 100+ other companies already purchased by Google. Considering Google’s increasing forays into other travel-related ventures, there’s no telling what other markets Google plans on gobbling up next.

Advertising Age agrees, and says “the internet giant is starting to look a little more like a media company.”

The Very Hungry Google

From a PR perspective, such developments reinforce the need to make certain our clients figure prominently in Google searches. Our stories and releases must take into account search optimization and search marketing - it's no longer an afterthought, but embedded in our thinking and our products.

The web, and Google, continue to remake how we as communications experts package and deliver our clients’ messages right down to the local dining out guide.

All this talk of restaurants and dining out has made me hungry and on that note, I'm off for a bite.

Is Journalism As We Know It Becoming Obsolete?

Not yet. But a few prayers couldn’t hurt.

Last week Gigaom.com blogger Matthew Ingram resurrected the decade-old question: is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete? His answer – after a nearly 900-word build up:

No. “I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing,” he writes.

Pardon the bluntness, but to me that doesn’t read like a satisfying conclusion. The cells in my stomach are evolving, dividing one by one, millisecond by millisecond, year by year. My stomach expands with each new meal I consume. But without a little help from digestion and peristalsis to keep that expansion in check or DNA coding to prevent runaway “cell evolution,” my body would grow sick and unable to function.

If left unchecked I’d land in the Morgue – the place where humans – and newspapers ultimately retire.

To conclude that today’s twitter-centric and blog-frenzied journalism is “evolving and expanding” isn’t good enough. Chalking the process up to the cyclical “rise and fall” of newspapers and bloggers doesn’t cut it either. A more nuanced question is: how is journalism expanding and evolving and what safeguards, if any, are working to ensure its healthy growth?

Ingram rightly points out that journalism is about: “a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things.” He’s also correct when he references programming scholar Dave Winter’s suggestion that in today’s world, with often zero mass publishing barriers, anyone can do it.

But the fact that “anyone can do it” doesn’t mean that everyone can do it equally well. Possessing a spirit of enquiry, of curiosity, and of wanting to make sense of things are platitudes that can be applied to almost any profession.

Eighteenth and 19^th century journalism, wrought with hyper opinion, political party dominance, and a healthy dose of sensationalism effectively blurred the lines of hard news, soft news, and what today would be called “infotainment.” Not until the middle and latter 20^th century did a more separation of church and state-like thinking transform journalism into today’s polished and professional product.

It’s not that today’s citizen journalists, CNN’s iReporters or Arab Spring bloggers are bad. It’s just that too often their skills are unrefined.

To be sure, gathering facts, observing breaking news, and collecting what else has been written on a topic – termed aggregating on the web – is the first step toward quality journalism. But placing that information into a compelling and concise narrative with context and fact-checked sources is where the professional differences lie. A world where citizen journalists, bloggers, and traditional reporters remember they’re playing on the same team, in equal numbers would be the best way to ensure that the hard fought professional standards achievements of the 20^th century and the internet mass publishing miracles of the 21^st work in concert, not in chaos.

In the last decade, as newspapers and other print formats struggle to engineer the magic bullet of profitable web publishing, thousands of professional journalists have left the profession entirely, jumping ship for the perceived safer and often better-paying waters of public relations, corporate communications and government outreach.

An industry losing its institutional knowledge is an industry in danger of losing itself.

Is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete?

Only if we let it.