After consuming The New York Times in its web-based digital editions for several years, I read an actual Sunday paper edition recently. It made me think about the advantages and disadvantages of digital and print media, and about two key challenges that digital media hasn’t yet solved: news as real estate, and tactile sharing.

Digital news products have lots of advantages over print: they’re faster and more timely. They eliminate paper waste. They simplify the archiving and finding of news and information. They enable customizable, highly interactive versions of news from multiple sources. They make it extremely easy to share news with people far away.

I once helped IBM tell the story of new prototypes for personal computers, and one prototype from more than a decade ago was an electronic newspaper. Tablets have now solved much of this problem, but I remember what a colleague, the industrial designer David Hill, told me about print newspapers – that they had a user interface developed over hundreds of years, and it was a highly portable and efficient design. Website design has improved enormously in 20 years, but digital editions do not yet offer the expansive, wide-open-real-estate, open-choice display environment of a newspaper that is 2 feet wide by 2 feet tall (61 by 61 centimeters). Digital editions also make it harder to share a story with someone across the table, and make it impossible for one person to read the opinion section, while another person reads the sports section. Digital news products enable a virtual conversation, but they complicate an in-person conversation.

The layout editors of print editions still have the ability to convey the value and importance of news by size and placement. Identifying importance and priorities in a digital edition is more difficult. Stories are still usually presented as lists, and the headlines all tend to run together, and it’s difficult for me as a reader to determine what’s important.

Both of these problems appear imminently solvable. The diagonal measurement of a print newspaper is about 32 inches (81 centimeters). High-resolution monitors are already close to that size, but a touch interface comes close to making the physical size irrelevant. You can use fingers to swipe, pan, and zoom in on stories. As for the sharing and passing-back-and-forth of sections, it may be dependent on each person holding a tablet. But right now, digital news makes it easier to share a news link with someone across the world than to hand a story across the table.

This is my viewpoint as a news consumer. Khoi Vinh, former design director of The New York Times, examines this topic regularly on his website, subtraction.com. He addresses these challenges from the viewpoint of a news producer in a September 2010 lecture in the “Freitag am Donnerstag” series in Zurich.

Three researchers at the University of Maryland came to an evolved view of the Chinese concept of guanxi in a 2009 article for Public Relations Review. Their conclusions say as much about healthy relationships anywhere as they do about PR practices in China.

The piece, “Culture and Chinese Public Relations: A multi-method ‘inside-out’ approach,” examines current views of public relations within China. To research the article, Ai Zhang, Hongmei Shen and Hua Jiang interviewed 17 communications professionals from multinational companies operating in China and analyzed the web sites of 15 Chinese public agencies. Their analysis is pointed out by China strategist Richard Burger, who writes extensively about guanxi.

From the Maryland article: “The ongoing process of guanxi entails: (1) identification of connections or group of people you have worked to network with; (2) realization of the delicate process of maintaining these connections; (3) treating your connections as ‘ends’ rather than ‘means to ends,’ such as through a one-on-one bonding.” In short, they say guanxi goes beyond gift-giving and banquet invitations.

The researchers also point to an explication of the Chinese characters of guan and xi by Alex Koi, then president of the High Team agency. Koi left High Team in 2007 to become general manager of Cooper Tires’ China operations.

Koi “decomposed the character guan into two parts. Guan, or big, at the bottom means ‘the infinite number of people on earth’ and the top part of guan denotes ‘to maintain your networks.’ In other words, one must be clear about who his or her connections are – ‘a group of people you have worked to network with’ who in turn can provide help and services.

“Similarly, Koi broke down the character xi this way:

“The top part means ‘silk’ in Chinese, while the bottom signifies ‘smallness.’ Silk – ‘a tightly woven but delicate fabric,’ is a metaphor for ‘the way the Chinese view their networks of connections.’ One must cultivate and maintain his or her connections in a delicate fashion. He emphasized that ‘If more than one year passes without contact, that connection is considered dead in the water.’ Furthermore, ‘smallness’ suggests that one needs to ensure that their connections feel a ‘sense of exclusiveness.’”

The Maryland researchers selected the 15 Chinese national agencies from a 2005 ranking by the China International Public Relations Association and a 2004 survey by Marketing China. In addition to High Team, the other agencies were China Global PR, Eastwei, WinWin Communications, Linkus Communication Group, BlueFocus Consulting, Zhi Lan Jing Wei Public Relations, D&S Consulting, Genedigi Consulting, eVision Consulting, Broadcom Communication Group, Marketing Resource Group, Shunya Communications network, Zenith Integrated Marketing Communications and Pegasus Communications.

Social media create terrific ways to meet people virtually. They’re great tools for distributing news and ideas. If you’re an Irish expatriate blogger in Turkey, like Catherine Yiğit, they enable you to build a community from behind a computer. But they’re less good at introducing us to the basic mensch-ness of people.

Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells are changing that. They founded the Social Media Club almost five years ago in San Francisco as a way to make social media even more social. With more than 200 chapters on six continents, the group helps people share their understanding of new media. The club’s mantra is “If you get it, share it.”

One of the group’s programs is organizing clubhouses for bloggers and communicators at social media conferences. Last weekend Social Media Clubhouse 4 took place in Las Vegas, at Blog World Expo 2010. Lenovo, the personal computing company that makes the ThinkPad on which I am creating this post, sponsored the house. Baltimore blogger Amy Phillips summarizes the value of Blog World, one of the leading social media conferences, as being focused on business, brand interactions, honing content, Radian6 and Google. (Among other things, the house provided the opportunity to learn about WordPress solutions like page.ly, founded by club members Josh and Sally Strebel. And among the organizations with truly surprising stories to tell at the conference: Ford, Kodak, Southwest Airlines, and the U.S. Army.)

One highlight was the serendipitous opportunity to attend the wedding of Emma Merkas, a blogger from Melbourne, who renewed her vows with husband Denis at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel on the final night of the conference. Emma had met my friend and colleague, Lenovo social media strategist Gavin O’Hara, while waiting for coffee at a Starbucks in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Emma edits “$30 Date Night,” a crazy website focused on ways to keep a marriage interesting. She invited Gavin and his crew to attend the ceremony.

The event distilled the awesomeness — as club member Zane Aveton would put it — of Las Vegas and social media into 15 minutes. Bride and groom arrived in a pink Cadillac, driven by an Elvis impersonator in white cape and rhinestones. After vows to give each other a hunka hunka burning love, not to treat each other like hound dogs, and not to step on each other’s blue suede shoes, punctuated by bursts of white mist, broadcast in real-time over the Internet, documented on YouTube, promoted on Facebook, real-time reported on Twitter, Emma and Dennis were married again. And then they trooped off to karaoke at The Palms casino. But for those 15 minutes, 20 people from both hemispheres met and celebrated with inspiration and hope, recognized each other’s mensch-ness, and vowed to write cross-promotional blog posts. Designed for Search Engine Optimization. In Elvis We Trust.

Among the crew of the Social Media Clubhouse 4 at Blog World Expo 2010, 14-16 Oct. in Las Vegas. From left, Bob Page, Chris Heuer, Nano Serwich, Kristie Wells, Erik Yowell, Jessica Murray, Sally Boldt-Strebel, Josh Strebel, Gavin O’Hara, Zane Aveton and Amy Phillips. Photograph by Bryan Haraway. Top photograph, of Emma and Denis Merkas, by the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.

James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at Ketchum, calmly frames a discussion of crisis communications strategy by Toyota, BP and Goldman Sachs in The New York Times this weekend. Donnelly takes care not to focus on the actions of a particular company, displaying respect for the work of other people and organizations. I sometimes see the opposite behavior from consultants, a desire to profit and self-promote at the expense of others.

A recurrent theme in the Times story is conflict between lawyers and communication strategists, shown in the excerpts below. The journalist, Peter S. Goodman, may actually be siding with the strategists. The story raises a question worth further discussion among friends in these professions: How can attorneys and communicators best work together in these scenarios? If this conflict is built-in from the start, rather than one side ‘winning’ against the other, how can it be resolved on behalf of the organization — which both teams are responsible for defending?

UPDATE: James Donnelly encourages communicators, attorneys and interested observers to participate in a poll on this question on his crisis management website, JamesJDonnelly.com.

~~~

“‘Companies that typically handle crises well, you never hear about them,’ says James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at the public relations colossus Ketchum, who — like many practitioners contacted for this article — required elaborate promises that he would not be portrayed as speaking about any particular company. ‘There’s not a lot of news when the company takes responsibility and moves on. The good crisis-management examples rarely end waving the flag of victory. They end with a whisper, and it’s over in a day or two.’ …

~~~

“In times of crisis, communications professionals and lawyers often pursue conflicting agendas. Communications strategists are inclined to mollify public anger with expressions of concern, while lawyers warn that contrition can be construed as admissions of guilt in potentially expensive lawsuits.

“For BP, this tension burst into view in May, when executives went to Capitol Hill with officials from two of its contractors: Transocean, which owned the offshore rig that exploded, and Halliburton, which aided BP in drilling. Executives from the three companies each disowned culpability while pointing fingers at one another.

“‘What that screamed is the lawyers are in control,’ says Eddie Reeves, a former vice president for media relations at Merrill Lynch. ‘All it did was get everybody all the more peeved at them.’ …

~~~

“‘Toyota blew it,’ says Brad Burns, who ran communications at WorldCom, the telecommunications giant leveled by a 2001 accounting scandal. ‘It’s been the proverbial death by a thousand cuts. They knew they had problems long ago, whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error, but they knew they had an issue they had to deal with. And rather than put public safety over profits, they appear to have listened to the product liability lawyers and they totally lost it. It’s brand damage.’ …

~~~

“Above all, crisis management is conducted with stress and sleeplessness layered atop the usual factionalism and politics afflicting any big organization. Eric Dezenhall, a communications strategist in Washington who worked in the White House for President Ronald Reagan, is amused by crises as glimpsed in movies, where people sit at banks of synchronized computers, speaking calmly into headsets.

“‘The reality is absolute chaos,’ he says. ‘Nobody knows what the facts are. The lawyers are trying to get the P.R. consultants fired and the P.R. consultants are criticizing the lawyers. Everybody despises each other. It’s a totally unmanageable situation. A corporation in crisis is not a corporation. It is a collection of panicked individuals motivated by self-preservation.’”

The New York innovation consultancy PSFK created an inspirational report about the future of health and technology for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Imagine the creativity of thousands of medical, technology and creative professionals applied to persistent global health problems. Amazing work, very dense, more than 200 pages of new solutions, presented in simple visuals. Solid evidence for encouragement about the future.

Above, an instructional baby blanket prototype by the advertising agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay, from page 133 of the report.

It started with a newspaper article, that impersonal medium seeming personally addressed to me – two American women living in Istanbul were looking for submissions for an anthology. I read twice to make sure I understood the Turkish completely.

I was living in Çanakkale, home to Troy, the birthplace of literature and Gallipolli, the end of the Ottoman empire. Both have a constant stream of visitors, but few stay for more than a day or two, blown on by the incessant wind. Though there are a few expats, there is no expat community and I was lonely.

After two years in Turkey I was not put off by the title “Tales from the Expat Harem.” I knew it was more than the seedy stereotype known outside of Turkey. The harem was the centre of the Sultan’s household, the domestic powerbase that supported him. Girls were brought to the harem from throughout the Sultan’s realm, many from outside the borders of modern Turkey.

Thrown into a new culture and new language, I shared some of their bewilderment and loneliness. Though the harem bore little relation to my life in Turkey, the desire to link to a community of women in a similar position was overpowering. Letting my 9-month-old oversleep, I wrote a raw piece about my first arrival to Turkey and hit send.

It was rejected.

The editors, Anastasia Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gökmen, asked if I could write another piece, more relevant to life within Turkey. ‘The Food Factory’ was about my acceptance of my place as gelin, bride, within a typical Turkish family. Through months of back and forth editing my imagination was alive with thoughts of the book’s launch. I would travel to Istanbul, meet these unknown friends, live my 15 minutes.

It didn’t happen.

By the time of the book’s Turkish release in late 2005 I was over eight months pregnant, and the six-hour commute with a toddler was too much. The official launch was a week after my son’s birth; 15 minutes of sleep was the limit of my ambition. Needless to say I missed the American launch the following spring.

Lines of communication sprang up with other contributors. E-mail exchanges of writing, Facebook friendships and Twitter conversations expanded my circle.

Three years later Anastasia announced her ambition to refashion the website as a global niche, a hub around which expats, travellers, the culturally aware could interact. Launched in October 2009 the expat+HAREM has sparked conversations on topics as varied as motherhood, language, archaeology and the dangers of smiling. Contributors, both male and female, are geographically spread from Taiwan to Turkey, New York to Moscow and represent half a dozen nationalities. Rose Deniz, spurred on by Tara Lutman Ağacayak, developed Dialogue2010, a place to talk about art, culture and the hybrid life of the expat.

In the last eight months I finally made it to Istanbul and met Anastasia. I participated in a global phone conversation with nine other expats. I’ve set up my own business. I’ve expanded my blog.

Being surrounded by a dynamic group has ignited my drive. Friendships made with inspiring, creative women, linking up through social media, interacting in a real sense, having real conversations.

I’ve found my community without stirring from my desk chair.

2007 photograph of the Harem at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, © Catherine Yiğit.

Catherine Yiğit runs a language-editing business Skaian Gates English, blogs at the Skaian Gates and tweets with an ever-expanding circle of expats, writers and the culturally aware from her home in northwest Turkey. She holds a degree in geology from Trinity College in Dublin.

Last week marketing agencies in Shanghai and Toronto announced with breathless enthusiasm that everybody who wants to sell something should jump into social media immediately.

On 14 July, OgilvyOne released a study on social media in China saying that “social media users are no longer discriminating between ‘brands’ and ‘friends.’ They are simply identifying a third group that they can engage with – ‘frands.’”

On the same day, Espresso, a digital agency based in Toronto, distributed its third evaluation of the state of social media. The summary, in two words: BLAZING HOT. David Armano, a digital strategist at Edelman, provided this quote to Espresso: “Social media is the crack cocaine of the Internet. We want it, we need it, and we go into withdrawal when we don’t get enough of it.”

Social media may well be the new crack cocaine of marketers. But the foaming-at-the-mouth tone of these reports doesn’t convince me that consumers in China, the United States, Canada, or anywhere else are stupid enough to think brands that want to sell stuff to them are actually their friends. I am also skeptical of the presumption that if companies are clever enough about insinuating themselves into social media, they will succeed at levels beyond their wildest expectations.

I’m a 20-something graduate student in communication in New York, media capital of the Western world. I grew up with social media in China, enjoy it as much as anyone else, believe it is a powerful tool, and have a vested interest in knowing its impact on behavior. But as a consumer, I know when I am being treated like a mark.

OgilvyOne, for example, states that Chinese “social media users are going online to experience a relaxing, social place full of information about products and brands that can be shared with friends. It’s about feeding a fascination for consumerism and it’s about being able to influence others with what you know.”

The majority of Chinese people probably have no idea as to what “social media” means. This doesn’t prevent them from being major players in the social media landscape in China and worldwide. Millions of Google users in China cannot spell the word “google,” according to Kai-Fu Lee, the founding president of Google China. But Google services are still important to them.

Instead of claiming that social media is a relaxing place to talk about brands, I would say social media is a place where potential consumers go for peer comments before making purchases. Social media is a buzzword now, but it is not a magic wand for generating gigantic amounts of profit. Companies might choose to become facilitators for conversations and discussions online, rather than believing they can manipulate the behavior of online influencers. Social media ushers in a new age for marketing methods and research, but it’s not going to replace the basic psychology of consumer behavior.

OgilvyOne makes sense in identifying some passionate brand chasers as “frands.” But it is awfully soon to declare, and rather disrespectful of human beings, to say they no longer know the difference between brands and friends.

Social media might be a relaxing place. But is it really true that people have nothing interesting to talk about but brands? I doubt that.

Wang, a graduate student in communication at Columbia University, is from Maanshan, China.

Above, an illustration from OgilvyOne’s July 2010 report on social media in China.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language by Robert McCrum, 2010, Viking Press, London.

For better or worse, English is the pre-eminent language of global capitalism, of the Internet, of popular culture and international relations. One of the principal reasons for Ireland’s popularity as a destination for migrant workers and students is the possibility of living among native English speakers who have the reputation for facility with the language. I myself taught a course on Anglo-Irish literature to foreign students for several years. Poles, Chinese, Nigerians, Pakistanis — everyone, it seemed, wanted to learn English.

In his book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, Robert McCrum examines the medium of ‘Globish,’ as identified by a former IBM executive, Jean-Paul Nerriere. He coined the term based on his observations of Asian workers who were able to successfully communicate with one another as non-native English speakers in a truncated form of English.

Globish consists of a vocabulary of about 1,500 words, eliminates idiom and vernacular, and provides a simple syntax that minimises the number of clauses in a sentence.

Teaching a course on Irish literature gave me a chance to engage with young men and women from all over the world. The students I taught, in a classroom of the Museum Building at Trinity College in Dublin, were a hodge podge of different backgrounds and nationalities. They ranged from the son of a teacher in Gdansk to the daughter of a fireman in Boston, from the son of an army officer in Nairobi to the daughters of a pediatrician in Kuala Lumpur. They had two things in common, an interest in language and a love of books, two sentiments I reciprocated heartily.

Although the standard of spoken and written English among the students was variable, all had a modicum of English, certainly enough to get by, a Globish standard if you will. So when I knew that some of the non-native English speakers were having difficulty what I did, subconsciously, was to prepare ‘Globish’ lectures in which concepts were explained using relatively simple terminology. Local vernacular, which I used to give students a flavour of Irish writing, was either eliminated or dealt with cautiously. One of the major issues, however, was the translation of Irish idioms or slang terms, particularly in the novels of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien.

Sometimes, however, the students picked up their own local vernacular from the streets of Dublin. I remember on one occasion trying to explain one of Joyce’s particularly difficult passages in Ulysses. After a solid 20 minutes of me speaking, when I became very conscious of the entire class, even the native English speakers, getting increasingly lost in translation, I finally finished my explanation and asked what they all thought. The classroom was silent until a teenager from Krakow named Piotr —  whose English was very limited indeed — looked up and said “ah Jaysus” in a perfect imitation of a working-class Dublin accent. The class descended into an uproar of laughter.

Robert McCrum’s book looks at that very generation of literature students who increasingly use English as a means of expression. McCrum examines how English spread throughout the globe in tandem with the spread of the British Empire and how, in fact, English was one of the principal weapons in the cultural arsenal of colonialism.  Despite this, he argues that rather than being a tool of oppression this new form of English, Globish, is a potentially liberating phenomenon. He suggests that it allows cross-border communication using modern technologies enabling cultural and intellectual exchanges to take place between people who would otherwise never have the chance to interact or exchange ideas. “Language becomes more than just an essential means of communication; it embodies a contemporary aspiration, expressing a willingness to innovate with new ideas, to adapt old uses and to enfranchise new people,” he writes.

However, this highlights a central problem with McCrum’s argument, namely that Globish is a relatively limited and limiting mode of expression. It is tied quite explicitly to the economic arena of trade, finance and global capitalism. As useful on a pedestrian, everyday level as it is, Globish lacks the vocabulary of political or cultural modes of expression. Nerriere argues that Globish will retard the spread of English and will ultimately render it useless as a global language.

History is full of pidgin languages that emerged as a stop-gap for people from disparate groups to communicate. These pidgins are usually linked to specific purposes, such as trade.  Ireland’s colonial past and its problematic relationship with its geographical neighbour Britain in general, and the English in particular, left many legacies. Probably the most lasting legacy is the English language, which my visiting students were so intrigued by. Posing and answering questions about Joyce and Flann O’Brien, Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen, I was reminded that visitors wanted a far deeper engagement with Ireland and Irish culture than a phrasebook could possibly provide.

Perhaps they only wanted to get on in life, perhaps they saw learning English as a path to career advancement. A Chinese colleague once told a friend of mine that she viewed English as a tool to make money. But all of these students of English wanted to learn and to know, and not simply to get by. As a simplified and utilitarian variant of English, Globish is unlikely to have the lasting impact of its parent language or to give its users what they want in the long term out of any language.

A writer and teacher in Dublin, Garry Prendiville founded SpeakWrite Media and is the editor of The Moth and the Candle.

Above, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s ‘Sphere within a Sphere’ at the Museum Building, Trinity College, Dublin. 2010 photograph by Javi Masa of Sevilla, Spain.

“It’s quite obvious. You’re seeing a knuckle-ball effect.”

– Rabi Mehta, an aerospace engineer at NASA, on the official ball of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

FIFA announced the official ball of the 2010 World Cup — the Adidas Jabulani — in December 2009. Adidas called it the roundest and most accurate ball ever made, citing wind tunnel testing at Loughborough University in England and its own laboratory in Germany.

In June, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, released analysis indicating the ball wobbles at speeds of 45-50 miles per hour. It doesn’t look like the Loughborough people were talking to the NASA people.

Two observations:

1. NASA’s timing and use of sports to teach concepts of physics is brilliant.

2. Experts in computational fluid dynamics, such as physicists at NASA and designers at Formula 1 racing teams, have an opportunity to collaborate on equipment for future sports events. The potential for co-branding, education, and credibility is substantial.

]]> http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/07/nasa-on-the-world-cup-ball/feed/ 0 http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/07/andy-grove-on-a-job-centric-economy-lessons-from-east-asia-in-the-1970s-and-80s/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=andy-grove-on-a-job-centric-economy-lessons-from-east-asia-in-the-1970s-and-80s http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/07/andy-grove-on-a-job-centric-economy-lessons-from-east-asia-in-the-1970s-and-80s/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:35:24 +0000 Bob Page http://www.mercurybrief.com/?p=3520

After getting out of one industry after another, the USA is running out of businesses to get out of. From an opinion piece by former Intel Chairman Andy Grove in the 5 July edition of Bloomberg Businessweek:

“Manufacturing employment in the US computer industry today is about 166,000. One company in Taiwan and China, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn, employs more than 800,000. This is more than the combined headcount of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Sony….

“New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote that if Washington really wants to create jobs, it should back startups. Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment….

“In a thorough study of the industrial development of East Asia, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics found that these economies turned in precedent- shattering economic performances over the 1970s and 1980s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries….

“If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us.”