Sketching the city

Sketch by Richard Alomar
posted on February 18, 2013
at urbansketchersnyc.blogspot.com

One of my professors at the Landscape Design MA program at Columbia University, Richard Alomar, is a world-class Urban Sketcher. His work is frequently profiled on the urban sketching blogs -- a great and interesting textscape phenomenon: nothing so ephemeral and spontaneous than sketching en plein air, but the topics/content being the contemporary urban environment and the publication / distribution channel being the web.

Lots of good stuff to sharpen your eye / insights regularly provided by a variety of sketchers' websites and blogs and the Facebook page.

Monticello

Textscape: "Anyone who creates a garden draws a map of their mind on the ground, whether consciously or not."  Wade Graham, American Eden (HarperCollins, 2011).

City College of New York launches new Master's program -- preparing the next generation for the textscape

City College of New York hosted a hard launch luncheon on January 23, 2013 for its new Master’s degree in Branding + Integrated Communications (BIC). The event attracted over 70 guests from Manhattan advertising, branding, digital, PR, and research firms along with academics.  The biggest, established agencies were well represented – Y&R, McCann, Grey, GroupM, Landor, R/GA, Edelman, Ketchum, among others, but so were several emerging media services entrepreneurs who are thriving in the New Tech City.

This widely diverse (expertise, age, gender, ethnicity) group was not shy about offering advice – and warnings – to young professionals working in the shifting environment of integrated communications.

First of all, the discussion acknowledged some old, evolving conversations.

·         The old fuddy-duddies in the room were not the people harping on basic skills, perseverance, resilience, and discipline. It was the 30-something professionals who were making that pitch. The “basics” are as important as they ever were, as the pros not ten years into a career testified.

·         The great land-grab among agencies (particularly between advertising and PR agencies fighting for the social-media or the content-creation dollar) has been going on now for over a decade. It is still part of the landscape, but it is no longer the most interesting conversation. Marketing communications just is, already, integrated – the market/consumers integrated it for us by their behavior and media use. Those agencies and professionals who are spending much time preening about how social or integrated they are may be “thus protesting too much”: if you have to assert those creds too strenuously now in 2013, maybe it is a sign that you’ve already missed that boat.

·         Saul Steinberg’s view of America haunts marketing communications pros. That famous 1976 New Yorker cover could be re-drawn today; the only change would be that the Manhattanites in the foreground would be tweeting. The CCNY luncheon participants repeatedly warned young New York marketing communications professionals: “You are not America.” New media rules, but traditional communications and marketing channels have not gone away. If you really want to succeed, the work is not about out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new; the challenge is doing-the-right-thing for places that are not creative-class enclaves.

Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer,
GroupM Global (center)

Top line advice for the young integrated communications professional:

·         Prepare for the long game. Too many young communications professionals are finding their careers peaking before they turn thirty, because they enter the profession on the basis of their demographic and not on refined skills and examined thought and creative process. You might get a first job on being the social media whiz kid, but that is a formula with a blindingly fast built-in obsolescence.

·         Understand the whole marketing communications mix. You may not be an expert, today, in all the marketing services silos, but you need to know how they work and what they can contribute. Know where your skills and contributions fit in. The traditional channels of advertising, PR, social, IR, etc. all persist – but are evolved to be more interpenetrated and interdependent than ever.

·         One way or another, your career will be data driven, so decide whether you want to do some driving, too – or be left in the back seat. If you are more comfortable calling it “listening,” that is OK. If you are drawn to the Big Data approach to this conversation, all the better. In any case, the successful marketing communications professionals of all variations will have access to amazing and inspiring new levels of insight – but only for those who have gotten over their numeracy phobias. Not all marketing communications professionals have to be Nate Silver, but we need to work with the Nate Silvers on our team, and leaders will make sound decisions based on all that good, new data.

·         To be creative is to be strategic, to be informed, and to be useful. A typical comment: “’Kids’ come into the agency and do graphic and video work on their laptops that are way beyond what experienced pros could do just a few years ago. That’s great. And if you can’t do that stuff – you’re definitely at a disadvantage. But too often, there’s no strategy.”  The best creative people have always been strategic. In the future, all the surviving creatives will have to be.

Barri Rafferty, CEO North America,
Ketchum;
Bill Murray, COO
Public Relations Society of America

Such advice and insights – condensed from a couple of hours of enthusiasm and tuna salad wraps  – are, of course, the reason City College created its new graduate degree in Branding + Integrated Communications. Such thinking has also been behind the wide range of new, and newly re-configured, integrated communications graduate programs from Syracuse to Medill, to online programs from USC to West Virginia, to international programs such as at the American University of Paris and the London School of Business.

The Master’s degree may or may not be the “new Bachelor’s,” but clearly the traditional configuration of the undergrad degree in advertising or public relations or even mass communications is not doing justice to the current practice in this industry. While the industry welcomes the English or sociology major to entry level jobs, that liberal arts ideal of “learning how to think,” while necessary, may not be sufficient if there is not also a bit of “learning how to do.”

One unanticipated consequence of the emerging world of integrated communications, big data, and new media technologies is that reflections on our work are coalescing around a robust, cross-disciplinary intellectual enterprise that embraces human relations, behavioral and political economics, statistics, psychology, neuroscience, and aesthetics. Our work now has methodological rigor, historical precedents, and predictive power. The new graduate academic programs demonstrate that integrated communications has become the profession to which the twentieth-century practices of advertising and public relations once aspired.

This post is also published at
commPRO.biz, January 27. 2013

Every moment, each day, is perfect

Forge Motion Pictures' new video, just posted yesterday, Cascada. on Vimeo.

View from the Summit

The Institute for Public Relations Measurement Commission has been the organizer of the Measurement Summit each autumn for about the last decade. Throughout most of those years the Summit has been held at venues in and around Portsmouth, New Hampshire just as the autumn color emerges. The event has always benefited from that rich set of energies emergent from the end of summer (as we prepare to take life more seriously) and with the beginning of the school year (when optimism rebounds about the possibilities for acquiring new knowledge and making a better world).

The Measurement Summit, like the Measurement Commission itself, attracts a distinctive mix of professionals who care about excellence and effectiveness in the practice of public relations. Summit participants want not only to be successful practitioners of public relations, they also tend a bit to the high-minded (concerned about ethics and means vs. ends of PR) and to the pointy-headed (lots of hand-wringing over purpose, methodology, and standards).

Uniquely, the Measurement Summit attracts public relations professionals who work at corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and agencies; it also includes a wide variety of professional researchers – ranging from survey research experts, to market and communications channel analysts, to media monitoring and analysis experts, to qualitative researchers. The Summit also welcomes university professors from communications, marketing, and business fields. It is fair to say that from each of these categories, the leading organizations of our nation are represented – from Fortune 50 companies, the top PR agencies, highest-profile non-profit organizations, the most sophisticated and competitive providers of research services, and the highest-ranked universities in PR and communications.

Over the years the Measurement Commission members have structured the Summit agenda around two goals: 1) to provide a peers-among-peers networking and relationship-sustaining opportunity for the high-minded and pointy-headed in public relations and 2) to foment – or give a bit of push – to reform and best-practices movements.  The Measurement Commission members and Summit participants have been prominent players, alongside the PRSA, AMEC, Council of PR Firms, and other organizations, in an admirable array of initiatives:

• In defining, establishing, and educating the PR profession about public relations terminology.

• In advancing the symmetrical model of communications for the practice of public relations.

• In making the business case for public relations.

• In discrediting the use of AVEs (advertising value equivalencies) in evaluating the impact of PR.

• In clarifying the concept of ROI (return on investment) as it is applied to PR and marketing services.

• In developing workable market-mix models of communications analysis.

• And – always – defining terms, stating positions, and promoting of authoritative, responsible, and ethical standards for the monitoring, measuring, and analysis of public relations, including the evolving varieties of social media.

On October 3 - 4, 2012 the Measurement Summit re-convened in “3.0” form. (1.0 had been the founding years: just getting the industry to pay serious attention to applying scientific method and management science within PR and building the personal relationships that became the Measurement Commission. The 2.0 era brought measurement and evaluation methods “to the masses,” particularly through fundamental educational sessions and PR research 101 / boot camp experiences.)

Measurement Summit 3.0 was intentionally a smaller meeting of the cognoscenti (geeks) that recalled the earliest meetings. The electrical power and Wi-Fi outage that morning the conference convened helped to focus everyone’s typically multitasking-fragmented-attention mode to the meeting.  The “where do we go from here” spirit informing all the topics considered ultimately gravitated on two imperatives.

1: United We Stand. Divided We Flounder. The quest for, and enforcement – through social pressure – of standards is not new to the Measurement Commission and the Summit. PR research professionals can legitimately cite real progress. But the pressure to deliver has gained new urgency. In the intensifying land-grab among various marketing and communications disciplines and services, the digitally and quantitatively sophisticated have the edge. Peter Drucker long ago preached that you cannot manage what you cannot measure; today we can add that you cannot get to the top of the communications status ladder in the CEO’s mind without an analytics and a metalanguage that that is transparent, insightful, and open to data inputs from other parts of the organization and readily transferrable and useful to enterprise-wide audit.

For young, new people entering public relations, we need to demand higher levels of numeracy and digital literacy. For mature and experienced practitioners, we just have to get over ourselves and face facts about our employers’ expectations for data-driven and methodologically consistent practice, the changed media environment, and consumer behavior.

Put another way, enough talk already about standards and methods. We (PR professionals) have got to do it (implement and live the standards) or resign ourselves to some other function in the market-mix, multichannel communications model to do it for us. Measurement Commission members in cooperation with lots of other good professionals have completed or are well on the way to establishing standards for public relations and social media research, in all the dimensions of conceptualizing problems, methods of application, and ethical behavior. An equal resolve and commitment now needs to be made to educating and encouraging the industry leaders to sign-on and walk-the-walk.

2. Brave New World.  With time, a bit of the awe and wonder about social media has subsided (it’s like Justin Bieber getting older: what really was all that fuss about?). It has now sunk in that most people are not on Twitter and among those who are on Twitter, more than one of them has bought 1,000 or more followers for $240 from an obliging offshore company. We now admit that probably a majority of Facebook “Likes” are frauds or meaningless (in terms of pointing toward a transaction or environmental change of any measurable kind). Yes, digital media and new communications technologies have changed the world – but just because Google Analytics is free and fairly easy to use does not mean that we have amazing new predictive insights about markets or that human nature has mutated.

Socialized communication, location marketing, mobile media and transactions (and all their attendant analytics) – and more – do not represent the sum of western civilization. They do represent a first wave of vastly more robust technologies mediating market behavior and social change. While public relations people – “on the ground” – are sometimes floundering just to establish a common currency of concepts and practice among themselves (see point 1, “United, We Stand, “ above), it is difficult to identify how and where PR people are on the playing field in the advance of communications technologies, neuroscience and cognitive research, and social and political change.

In short, the second, ultimately more important challenge for the public relations profession is upping our game. Public relations needs to link itself more strongly, thoughtfully and pragmatically, to basic research. Business is grounded in economics, medicine in biology, engineering in physics, and law in moral philosophy. In order to master – and not be a fawning instrument of -- the new technologies and their potentials, PR, the practice of building and sustaining public relationships, needs deeper grounding, more rigor, more humility, and more gravitas. A perfect mandate for the high-minded and pointy-headed participants of the IPR Measurement Summit.

The Measurement Summit 3.0 probably did not change the world. But taken as a whole, it was an encouraging expression of resolve to recommit the practice of public relations to authenticity, self-examination, and excellence. Those attending took the resolve of the Summit back to their work at General Motors, at Edelman PR, at Roper GfK, at SAS, at Boston University, and at a couple of dozen other trend leading organizations. When the leaves turn and the lobster shells harden again next fall, plan to join Summit 3.1 and hold us accountable for helping to keep public relations a high art and rigorous practice, the original inspiration for the Institute for Public Relations and Measurement Commission.

*          *          *

This post also appears as the Research Conversations Blog at the Institute for PR web page.

Textscape of lies

The past several months have presented us with a series of narratives seemingly designed to unsettle the most committed optimists about human nature and the most idealistic defenders of professional and public communications. To say it has been a season of lies is an understatement. I recount just some "highlights" of the current textscape of deceit, fabrication, guile, and distortion.

Comfortably Smug

Shashank Tripathi

For sheer perversity, you cannot beat the most recent example of the digitally mediated prevarications of Shashank Tripathi, a 29-year-old hedge fund analyst and now former political campaign manager for Christopher Wight, candidate for New York State's 12th Congressional District.

We really do not yet know why, but under the presumably safe anonymity of his Twitter handle, @ComfortablySmug, Tripathi was tweeting actively to his 6,500+ followers on Monday, October 29, a stream of tweets about the progress and effects on New York City of Superstorm Sandy. Many of the tweets were, apparently, accurate. Some, notably, were not. Intentionally, not.

One tweet: "BREAKING: Con Edison has begun shutting down all power in Manhattan."  Another: "BREAKING: Governor Cuomo is trapped in Manhattan. Has been taken to a secure shelter." According to gantdaily.com, "The account user [Tripathi] also noted that all major lines of the New York City subways had been flooded and would be shut down for at least a week. He also added to the chaotic reports that the New York Stock Exchange was under water, which was not true. Several media network[s], including CNN and the Weather Channel, picked up the NYSE flooding narration after being reported on the National Weather Service's website."

New York Magazine reported that "[Tripathi] tweeted, falsely, that Con Edison workers were trapped in a facility, that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had flooded, and that ConEd would shut down power to all of Manhattan."

Buzzfeed contributor, Jack Stuef, sleuthed out Tripathi's identity and reported: "For years, he's been a prolific commenter at NYmag.com and a popular conservative presence on Twitter." A minor media firestorm of outrage (and embarrassment) that mainstream media believed and repeated Tripathi's un-fact-checked tweets has been a footnote to the Hurricane Sandy saga.

Now, just a few days later, Tripathi has resigned from candidate Wight's campaign (his Wall Street employment status, if continuing, has been speculated about but not confirmed). The Manhattan District Attorney is considering criminal charges against Tripathi. We have also learned from Buzzfeed and other sources, as New York Magazine's post reports, about earlier non-Sandy-related @ComfortablySmug posts about his sexual exploits and ungenerous assessment of his purported sex partner. Class act.

Do we lie, because we can? For just the rush of it? To be a part of the big story?


Confidently Establishment

Mitt Romney

New York Times columnist and blogger, Charles M. Blow, wrote on the Campaign Stops blog, November 1st, about how "This election may go down in history as the moment when truth and lies lost their honor and stigma, respectively. Mitt Romney has demonstrated an uncanny, unflinching willingness to say anything and everything to win this election. And that person, the unprincipled prince of untruths, is running roughly even with or slightly ahead of the president in the national polls. . . . the list of Romney's out-and-out lies (and yes, there is no other more polite word for them) is too long to recount."

Blow then goes on to dissect the notorious Romney claim that GM and Chrysler are shipping American jobs to China -- and to demonstrate that there is absolutely no factual basis to Romney's assertion and to recount the largely ignored indignant, and apparently factual, denials, not just from the Obama campaign, but from GM and Chrysler.

Blow is shocked, just shocked, that "In fact, Romney seems to have decided that the only things standing between him and the White House are stubborn facts. . . . Unfortunately, there is some evidence that facts and the people who check them don't carry the same weight that they once did."  Blow sees Romney's behavior as just an indicator of "the [political] right's disinformation machine . . . [that] is, explicitly and implicitly, making the argument that facts (science, math, evidence) are fungible and have been co-opted by liberal eggheads. They have declared war on facts in response to what they claim is a liberal war on faith."

In Blow's November 3rd Times column, "Is Romney Unraveling?" he writes: "Evidence continues to emerge that Romney is one of the most dishonest, duplicitous candidates to ever seek the presidency. He criticized Obama for telling then-President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia that he would have 'more flexibility' to deal with sensitive issues between the two countries after he won re-election. . . . However, according to a report on Friday in The New York Times, Romney's son Matt recently traveled to Russia and delivered a message to President Vladimir Putin. 'Mr. [Matt] Romney told a Russian known to be able to deliver messages to Mr. Putin that despite the campaign rhetoric, his father wants good relations if he becomes president.' . . . This is the kind of hypocrisy that just makes you shake your head in disbelief."

Blow has been on the trail of campaign lying since last summer. Back on August 31st, shortly after the Republican presidential nominating convention, Blow wrote a column in the Times, "The G.O.P. Fact Vacuum," which quotes Mediaite's Tommy Christoper commenting on PolitiFact's analysis: "'Mitt Romney's statements have been judged Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire 46 percent of the time, versus only 29 percent for President Obama. In the Pants on Fire category alone, Romney is more than four times as likely to suffer trouser immolation that the president. Nearly 1 in 10 statements by Romney earned flaming slacks, versus 1 out of every 50 for Obama."'

Charles Blow wrapped up his August 31st column asking, "If we allow our leaders to completely abandon any semblance of honesty, what do we have left? When rancid disinformation stands in the space where actual information should be, what will grow? And how can a party that incessantly repeats the mantra that our rights were granted by God repeatedly violate a basic tenet of almost every religion: truth-telling? . . . We deserve better and should demand better."

One might wonder with Charles Blow, why don't we?

Hip-ly Fraudulent. (Fraudulently Hip.)

Jonah Lehrer

The Icarian story of youthful, hipster, brilliant media-genic Jonah Lehrer has been probed and dissected for months. Jim Romenesko broke the story on June 19th charging that Lehrer had re-cycled for his NewYorker.com blog Lehrer's own previous work that had been published in The Wall Street Journal. In June there were a handful of additional similar revelations about Lehrer's self-plagiarizing, and then in July the information broke that Lehrer was not just re-cycling his own work; he had also been just making stuff up.

Julie Bosman in the Times Media Decoder blog last July 30th provided a summary, "Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up dylan Quotes for His Book." Bosman sketched out Lehrer's unraveling -- a resignation from The New Yorker after being charged (apparently accurately) with fabricating quotations for his most recent book -- this was after he had already been publicly shamed, multiple times, for plagiarizing himself on and offline.

A more damning audit of Lehrer's less than truthful production then appeared a month later, on August 31st, by Julie Moos on Poynter.org, "Wired severs ties with Jonah Lehrer after investigator finds 22 more examples of plagiaism, recycling," Poynter and other outlets published excerpts of an investigation commissioned by Wired magazine and conducted by NYU journalism professor and experienced science journalist, Charles Seife.  Seife himself wrote at Slate.com, "I examined 18 out of several hundred [of Lehrer's] postings [at Wired.com]; most were chosen by Wired.com editors as suspect, others were chosen by them randomly, and I selected a few additional blog posts to ensure that the sample wasn't entirely under control of Wired.com editors. In this sample, all but one piece revealed evidence of some journalist misdeed. . . . Lehrer has been recycling his material for years; he was doing it in 2008 and probably even earlier. It's amazing -- and disturbing -- that it took so long for anyone to notice."

Fast forward to November. New York magazine publishes a feature by Boris Kachka, "Proust Wasn't a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah Lehrer." Kacha rehearses the now-familiar timeline of the Lehrer fall. Kachka provides some biographical color, some of which suggests we should have sympathy for Lehrer, but much of which also rather bluntly portrays a despairing poseur unmasked: "a desperate Lehrer finally managed to reach Moynihan [Michael Moynihan, a freelance writer and Bob Dylan enthusiast, who had had suspicions and confirmed that Lehrer fabricated Dylan quotations for his best-selling book, Imagine]. Didn't he realize, Lehrer pleaded, that if Moynihan went forward, he would never write again -- would end up nothing more than a school-teacher? The story was published soon after. That afternoon, Lehrer announced through his publisher that he'd resigned from The New Yorker and would do everything he could to help correct the record. 'The lies,' he said, 'are over now.'"

Kachka's feature, however, moves beyond the narrative of the Lehrer's exposure to reflect on 1) the difficulty of writing about advanced scientific work in ways that can be understood by the general public (When does simplification become dumbing-down? When does dumbing-down become divorced from reality?) and 2) the temptation of big money and fame that accrues to popular purveyors of "the Insight" --"the dubious promised land of the convention hall, where the book, blog, TED talk, and article are merely delivery systems for a core commodity," the Insight, that can pay the author/celebrity very, very well.

When there is a market, a significant market, for "the Insight," need the Insight be true?

And then there is Lance.

Lance Armstrong

It is hard to believe that human nature has changed so much. One can reasonably presume that people do not lie any more frequently today than our predecessors did. Boris Kachka's New York article about Jonah Lehrer cites behavioral economist Daniel Ariely's assertion that "We all cheat by a 'fudge factor' of roughly 15 percent, regardless of how likely we are to get caught; a few of us advance gradually to bigger and bigger fudges, often driven by social pressures; and it's only when our backs are up against the wall that we resort to brazen lies."

But "everybody lies" and "everybody has always lied" just does not satisfactorily explain away the bad taste left in our mouths after any discussion about Lance or Jonah or Mitt or Shashank. Somehow, we have the enduring suspicion that 21st century media has somehow fundamentally magnified the practice of deceit (kind of deception with special effects?). We reel between reactions -- the lies are just so preposterous as to be unbelievable; the lies are so common and unsurprising as to be banal.

Detail, Michelangelo's
Sistine Chapel ceiling,
the expulsion of Adam and Even
from the Garden of Eden

As I teach my college students the principles and best practices of public relations and marketing communications, I force them -- and myself -- to confront the textscape of lies as a high-risk and potentially catastrophically costly space. Lance, Jonah, Mitt, and Shashank -- just like the characters in the Garden of Eden story -- link the Lie to our Irreparable Loss, to our Self-inflicted Separations.

Listening to the laughscape

Sigmund Freud discusses in Civilization and Its Discontents how humans deflect pain (misery) through transient pleasures, through intoxications, and through laughter. Freud wouldn’t be at all surprised about the recently proliferated stand-up comedy material on the Internet today. Particularly with YouTube and podcasts, one can hear innumerable stand-up routines – classic and contemporary – reflecting on (laughing at) the miseries of experience.

We’ve long known about the roles that the jester plays at court in shaping perceptions of and by the king. But now, to an unprecedented extent, we have access to a plethora of jesters – who give us a laugh, but who also provide a textscape on our lives that is easily found and not easily dismissed.

The more we laugh, the more serious it all is. We have routine access to having ourselves and our condition and our societies be exposed for their inherent silliness in radio shows such as NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! and the BBC’s The Now Show and The News Quiz.  Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and others – along with the print stalwarts-sisters of Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins – are helping us laugh our way down the road to ruin. This is not an era for Milton Berle or vaudeville; we’re in a new Swiftian era of laughter as psychological exploration and social criticism.

Marc Maron

Nowhere has this prominence and pervasiveness of the laugh – as a strategy for dealing with the misery of our internal and external landscapes – so evident as in the relatively new medium of podcasts (and radio-podcast hybrids). A whole new sub-genre of talk show / cultural and social criticism / psychological-confessional analytics has emerged through very popular podcasts such as WTF with Marc Maron, The Nerdist with Chris Hardwick, and You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes.

Chris Hardwick

The premise of these, and others, is very similar. The interviewer/host is someone who has a career working in comedy (stand-up comedy, television and film writing, cartooning, acting, etc.); that host interviews (each week or so) someone else who also has a career in comedy. (The format is very Inside the Actors Studio, but the interviewer is far more participative, a strong, often self-mocking character.) Topics discussed range intentionally widely: the common premise (promise) is outrageousness or, at least, idiosyncrasy. (Maron’s WFT, or What the Fuck!?!? exploits the double meaning of “I can’t believe he/she said that!"  with “Who cares? I’m too jaded / sophisticated to be shaken.”  Hardwick’s Nerdist presumes the topics discussed are in the realm of passionately committed comedy fans – along with Comic-Con fans and an array of other pop culture enthusiasts.  Holmes’ You Made It Weird seeks to draw out at least three weird discoveries – exposures – of each guest interviewed.)

Pete Holmes

There is a big dose in these interviews/conversations of inside-baseball kinds discussion about performing and writing comedy, including some long pretty boring stretches of gossip about other people working in that business now and over the past twenty years. The compelling bits of the conversations are the relentlessly shameless, uninhibited talking (probing) about the sex lives, childhood and family traumas, divorces and break-ups, injustices, hostilities, jealousies, hurt feelings, grudges, illnesses, medications, substance abuse, and . . . . well, you get the picture. Surprisingly, at least to me, however, is how thoughtful, smart, and very often literate these discussions routinely are – while also being, well, funny.

After listening to a couple of dozen of these conversations, you realize they are about anxiety, craving, love, work, loneliness, and fear of death. And you’re not even surprised, or put off, when Dimitri Martin discusses The Varieties of Religious Experience or when Russell Brand discusses childhood obesity. It’s just what you come to expect. In between genuinely funny anecdotes about erotic misadventure and professional failure and resentment. This genre of podcast is a new shape for us discontents to laugh our way both toward and away from experience.

Humans -- part of Nature

At this late date, it is exasperating (and quaint?) that we still need to be reminded that "man [sic] is part of nature." That is the topic of a TEDxWDC presentation by landscape architect Jeff Lee recently reported by ASLA's The Dirt. With the urbanization trend unabated ("China alone will build 300 new cities the size of Chicago [by 2050]," I suppose we need to readjust just how we understand humans-in-nature. Not only are humans "part of nature," but urbanization is part of nature. Big Systems are natural -- whether they be populations of microscopic organisms in our gut, data on the Internet, or urban living networks in the 21st century. Big cities and urban life can be good for humanity; we just have to do it right. Lee's presentation is a good reminder, but I miss more emphasis on what could be a very valid, compelling celebration of the benefits that Big Systems can provide. Advocates for sustainability of all kinds have to stop being jeremiads and scolds. Let's hear more sentiment from Lee, and others, like his observation: "nature shows us the way to build and the way to live. With our awareness that we are part of nature and not over it, and with our ability to communicate and connect as never before, we can leave our grandchildren's children something of awe and inspiration."

More biophilia evidence: How urban parks enhance your brain

The Atlantic Cities posted yesterday on "How Urban Parks Enhance Your Brain" -- Eric Jaffee, an Atlantic Cities blogger, reviews current research on the impact of nature walks vs. urban walks on memory and mood. In that relatively circumscribed set of experiences, the nature walks showed strong positive effects on subjects in a number of studies. Jaffee notes: " 'incorporating nearby nature into urban environments may counteract' some of the cognitive strains placed on the brain by the city, the authors write. Recent research has suggested economic and crime benefits of urban greenery; now advocates can legitimately add 'public health' to their list of arguments." Omsted would not have been surprised.

I've posted recently on various aspects of biophilia and public health: Bringing biophilia indoors, Richard Louv challenges the environmental establishment brand, Genius of place: Frederick Law Olmsted, and Keep walking.

Dan Barber understands textscape

Dan Barber, Chef / Restaurateur at Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Krista Tippett's American Public Media radio show and podcast, On Being, recently reprised her 2010 interview with Dan Barber, the chef and founder of restaurants Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Barber never explicitly discusses communications, as such, but he makes very nuanced, and insightful, observations about how the full experience of eating (like most other things in life) is multidimensional (and is a textscape) -- comprised of the setting, the people, the evocation of past experience, a confrontation with our expectations.

Visualize this

A quick follow up on my June 1 post. This scoop.it topic on data visualization is both full of smart inisght as well as data-driven eye candy.

Seeing is believing -- why PR people should take infographics more seriously

Infographics are cool. You probably get fed infographics every day on Facebook and Pinterest, you follow the Infographic of the Day on Fast Company, or you have at least browsed at or played around with Google Fusion Tables. Yet most PR people have not realized the immense challenge—to our analytical and visual competencies—that infographics have presented.

My own interest in infographics comes from their obvious capability (often compelling, but surely limited) to help solve the PR person’s dilemma with research (PR person’s dilemma: “I don’t really understand the full implications of the data. Neither does my audience. But I have to be a responsible advocate for my client/boss.” PR person’s solution: “A picture is worth a thousand words. And there’s a tsunami of use/interest in infographics—via readily available business graphics software, mobile, Pinterest, etc.”) I acknowledge that many of the purists in the PR/marketing research field just wish that the infographics fad would go away; don’t hold your breath.

An illuminating blog post by Crystalyn Stuart of the company 5Loom appeared May 16 at the Council of PR Firms blog, Firm Voice,  about “data storytelling,” which she defined as “(1) how we use data visualization to help us see and read the story social data tells, and (2) how we as social media experts package that story and make adjustments to campaigns.” 5Loom says they help you to bridge that gap between acquiring data, analyzing data, understanding data, and conveying accurate, responsible data-driven messages that can be understood by people (other than algorithm-writers and statisticians).

In a recent New York Internet Week presentation, a New York-Philadelphia-India-based business improvement software/services firm, Atidan, described itself as focusing “on delivering relevant, accurate and timely answers and insights that help businesses find new revenue, improve decision-making and solve business problems.” (They want to help you do stuff better.) For a PR person, Atidan’s most interesting offering is how they apply/integrate the Microsoft SharePoint solution. The feature called SharePoint Insights provides “business intelligence for everyone.”

The technology solution accesses all the data collected about the business and its markets through the ecommerce, websites, intranets, extranets; has analytic capabilities; and then provides a “decomposition tree” (to show “root cause analyses”) and dashboards. In theory, a CMO could use such a product—in which all communication is digitally mediated and analytically centralized—to have a coherent analytical perspective and a user-friendly, primarily infographic interface.

Along the same lines, IBM is offering an (integrated) enterprise marketing management platform, a product that helps an organization understand its “Generation C” (connected) customers focusing on 1) “visual exploration: . . . intuitive charts, graphs and other visual representations of customer behavior” and 2) “predictive analytics: predicts customer response based on past behavior and attributes.” The IBM Enterprise Marketing Managementpitch explicitly acknowledges the “burden” faced by “marketers with analytic chores.” The technology is said to relieve marketers “of burdensome data sorting in spreadsheets.”

I do not have hands-on knowledge of 5Loom’s Data Storytelling, or Microsoft’s SharePoint Insight, or IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management solutions—but they are clearly all sensing the same need in the marketing management sector. The process has not changed (IBM calls it the “Enterprise Marketing Management loop . . . the integrated processes of Collect, Decide, Deliver and Manage.” Doesn’t that sound like the old PR dictum of research, plan, communicate and evaluate?). But the enormity of the inputs and sophistication on the technology side (the collect/research phase) has left too many marketers, and certainly too many quant-phobic PR people, in the dust. Hence infographics (data visualization, visual exploration, decomposition trees . . . pictures). And when Microsoft and IBM put their resources and their own marketing muscle behind providing pictures, it is hard to dismiss the surge in infographics as a fad.

The implications for public relations professionals are profound:

• The issue of strategically linking research to PR is actually settled. Microsoft, IBM, and others take it for granted. Which means their business enterprise clients (the CMOs) are (or soon will be) taking it for granted, too. PR people might as well quit worrying so much about defining PR ROI – Microsoft, IBM, and the others are going to do it for us.

• A PR department or PR agency that does not integrate with state-of-the-art data management and analysis (their own or with partners) has slipped back into the exclusive domain of smoke and mirrors (and all the worst stereotypes about PR). Beware to all clients and users of PR services: Do those PR people walk the walk about “research”? Be tough-minded when you ask that question. The ability to “do” social media is not the same as providing data-driven insight and evidence-based program evaluation.

• The current, and the next, generation of PR professionals needs to be educated and informed about big data management and technologies. Implications abound for PR and marketing college and grad school curricula. You would not expect to get a business degree or MBA without a firm quantitative grounding; study of PR, marketing and communications is going to have join the other business disciplines in embracing data. Advice to young PR professionals: work on your quantitative chops.

• Finally, however, there remains the Art, along with the Science, of public relations. As PR becomes a grown-up in the world of big data management, it also has to become much more sophisticated about visualization and design. The parameters of the human glance and the attention span are not likely to change, to adapt to big data. Effective, responsible, and ethical communicators are going to have to learn how—through evidence and tested processes—to create imagery/infographics that communicate accurately. Infographics are actually getting harder to do than ever. Infographics is not about pretty/arresting images any more than PR is about creativity.

• Showing and telling—within the big data management environment—is the PR challenge of the decade.

This blog post was originally published
at CommPRO.biz on May 30, 2012