In an IM earlier this morning, I told my friend Curt that I would be heading into the Chautauqua lecture by Arianna Huffington. He said, “Heh… make sure you slap her for me.”

I admit. I had the same thought. I’ve always sort of ascribed Huffington with the Ivanna Trump vibe — funky accent, firey speech, not a lot there. Now that I’ve seen her up close, I know that two out of those three are correct. I’m just not sure which two.

Obviously, she was here to contribute to the discussion on media, new media, ethics in media, and media bashing. To be sure, there’s been a boatload of each. But while the other folks in the discussion were from inside the fold, working in traditional media newsrooms and desperately trying to wrap their arms around this non-traditional whatnot, Huffington is coming at it from a different angle. She founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 and while she contends hers is one of the highest trafficked sites on the net, she doens’t hold much of a candle to the other representatives who’ve shared the stage with her so far this week. Click on the graph below to see Alexa.com’s rankings comparing her site to ABCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and nytimes.com (she’s at the bottom).

More on this lecture after I actually see it. But there was a Huffington editorial in the local paper today and she had this comparison regarding traditional media converging with new media:

The shifting dynamic between those two forces is exactly like the relationship between Sarah Conner and the T101 in the “Terminator” movies. At first, the visitor from the future(digital) seemed intent on killing Sarah (print). But as the relationship progressed and the sequels unspooled, the Terminator became Sarah and her son’s one hope for salvation. Today, you can almost hear digital media (which for some reason has a thick Austrian accent) saying to print: “Come with me if you want to live!”

Am I the only one who finds that … funny?

Let me start by saying that, as far as executives inside major corporations go, my experience heretofor has been that company lawyers are about the last folks you want to invite to the big chair, to Presidencies and Chief-Executiveships. That’s not to say that savvy business people can’t be lawyers too, but those folks who specifically exist to protect the organization by managing relationships vis the law have a strange and wonderful perspective on growth and development of initiatives. They say “no” a lot.

About two years ago, before I joined the communications department, we were approached by an agency pushing us to have their bloggers for hire go out and start blogging positive mojo about our then-new educational asset, Axia College. The original pitch was just that: bloggers, who aren’t our students, telling the blogosphere, MySpace-dom, Facebook-hood, and the rest of the world just how great it is to go to school with us.

I joined and was handed the contract. We’d spend a boatload with this agency specing out this contract that no one in the department really knew what to do with, so they passed it off to the only guy who had any skin in the game.

I had a huge problem with the arrangement, and I have the same problem now that it’s evolved and reared it’s head from Microsoft and Cisco. Valleywag has a good summary. Here’s a snitch:

Break

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.

The evolution is fairly obvious — in this case, these lassoed bloggers are shilling, and making it clear that they’re shilling, for an advertiser. On the surface, that should be the end of the discussion if you hang your hat on the “Truth in Advertising” mantra. Nick Chase tries to paint this issue with spit and polish in the Valleywag comment thread.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM’s authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

Duh.

Then why do I still have such a problem with this mess? In my own situation, I tried to make this work. The first proposed change was to use our own stable of bloggers — current students of Axia college who might happen to have had blogs at the time. We couldn’t find enough of them, and the ones we did find couldn’t blog for beans.

Then we thought about having the agency stable of bloggers go back to school with Axia to legitimize their shill. Of course, they wanted to be paid hourly for their time in school, their time studying, their time writing papers, their time thinking about school, and so on.

As you can imagine, the whole pitch was suddenly loosing its luster. I cancelled the program.

I cancelled it because the methods did not meet the objectives of the program. The pitch was all about creating a discussion with our prospective students. But no matter how you spin it, there’s no way to create a legitimate, authentic discussion when that discussion starts from the voices of those who are not students, are not experienced, are not authentic.

Commenter Filament nails it far more eloquently than I ever did:

This is only “conversational” in the sense that a chat with Tony Snow about Bush’s record is a conversation: only technically. What you’re doing is creating the false appearance of conversation to make money.

This whole mess smacks of a key learning that so many companies are failing to learn. Companies formerly accustomed to building relationships through the brute force of advertising dollars don’t know how to translate their wares into anything more transparent than tin foil. You can’t blame Microsoft for giving it a shot. They’re not architected to know any better.

It’s harder, as with all things, to do it right. It’s harder to actually build an army of flag-waving maniacs sreaming from the rooftops about your organization. Leaders have to shake the trees, clear out old-media thinking and build the army the right way, from the beginning. Otherwise, you’re building a Potemkin Village, and your conversation is nothing more than vapor.

John Harwood was an interesting choice to have kick off the Chautauqua season, and the week one series of discussions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that political party polarization both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for viewership of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to parties as “brands”, and says that in the political sphere, these brands have done nothing but solidify, cementing public participation in a binary system. This simplification is driven by the notion that people, by-in-large, want to know what they’re getting in a particular candidate or party.Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat.

Does Harwood have his real hair? Yes, he says, demonstrating his answer to what may be the most important political question of the morning.Decline of the political party system? Hardly, he says. We’re just on the cusp of a new party system. “The new one hasn’t ended the parties; it’s changed the way people think and understand them, and I think they’ve actually emerged stronger, because people know what they’re voting for.”Do they really? There’s some data to support it, at least to support the assertion that when it counts, the public steps up to the plate. In 2000, only 105 million people voted. In 2004, that number went up to 122 million, largely attributed to strong sentiment one way or the other toward the Iraq war.And yet, in spite of this solidification in the party system as Harwood proports, the American public is becoming less and less easy to pin down on some more traditionally divisive social issues. According to a recent study by the Pew Foundation, we the people skew right on gay marriage and gay adoption, left on embryonic stem cell research, and straight down the middle on abortion. We’re not moving further apart, we’re moving closer to center, according to the study.Harwood is on the community line in this speech. I’m hard-pressed to find a scholar of media that doesn’t support the assertion that the search for viewers and increased circulation drives desperation reportage across news outlets; a drive to cover sensational and salacious that trumps – intentionally or otherwise – reporting stories to their conclusion. Dare we bring up Duke LaCrosse?On the other side of the fence, political pundits are better now than ever at taking control of the conversation, themselves trumping newsgathering with talking points and spin.But I’m not convinced Harwood made a clear and compelling connection that the media is complicit in the on-going bifurcation in the party system. Instead, I’d submit that media is reporting less adeptly on social issues, taking the easy — and cheap — out on hard reporting decisions, and the result is the appearance of a media role in goosing outrage and salaciousness for fun and profit. That the parties are better at this game than the media doesn’t make it news.

A bit off topic, he brought up one of the best points of his speech in the Q&A.

Q: Let’s focus on newspapers for a second. One question has to do with what is the consequence of the reducation of newspapers, the reduction of staff, on journalism, and is there a ripple affect of reducing commitment in journalism in newspapers that will then have a consequence in the overall delivery in news beyond newspapers?Harwood: That’s a very smart question, and it’s absolutely true for this reason. The most important piece in television news everyday is what’s in newspapers. One of the interesting things that I’ve noticied going from, you know, people you keep their foot in both camps: Television people don’t have a lot of self confidence about their own judgement.

This is the paper of record connundrum. I fully contend that much of the market for broadcast doesn’t consider their medium as important as traditional print news. This fuels the more symbiotic relationship between print and broadcast: news begins in the papers, is supplemented the next day in pictures, and is investigated to conclusion in print. The rise in cable outlets and their 24-hour coverage has had some affect on the practical application of this relationship, but it’s certainly there. Fewer reporters trained in print newsgathering will most certainly have a negative affect on quality and quantity of reportage.I had the opportunity to meet Harwood after his talk. Turns out, he’s joining the online discussion and starting a blog this week through his role as a political reporter with CNBC. He stopped short of supporting the assertion that the rise of citizen media fueled by David Gilmor and his ilk was leading to a new middle-media. I told him I thought it was great, his journey into the blogosphere, and welcomed him. Where could we find him online?He couldn’t remember the URL.Tomorrow, David Westin, President of ABC News.

On June 29th, Apple will launch their next great evolution. The iPhone will hit Apple and AT&T Wireless stores with great hoopla at 6:00 p.m. and the world market for handheld devices will change again. This is what Apple does — change market dynamics.

But there’s raw beauty in the iPhone campaign that comes from lessons learned over the last decade of Apple advertising. This is as unadulterated a product marketing mix as I’ve seen in the market in very long time, and the point it serves to prove is thus: EB White had it right — “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

The “Switch” campaign was considered (mostly by me) to be a critical success and a business non-starter. But it was the first time that Apple attempted to tell their story transparently, and that was an important move. It taught them the power of the unadulterated user’s voice, the untarnished message. They were already making powerful, beautiful products. The “Switch” campaign sold the experience, sort of.

The iPod “Sillouhette” campaign drove the message further, selling the outcomes of the experience, linking the product to the feeling you get when you use it. It was beautiful and compelling and engaging, and sold the experience, sort of.

The iPhone capitalizes on everything the first two campaigns delivered so well, and drives the messaging completely naked. The broadcast advertising is nothing more than a screencast on using features of the product. Their print and outdoor focus on dates. Their 25 minute introduction to iPhone uses Young Steve Jobs to deliver transparent, real world use cases to demonstrate the device.

All this is to say one thing: tell your story. Rely less on agency steerage and paranoia and more on your own instinct. You’re the only one that knows your customer the way you know your customer. The closer you get to mirroring their experience in your messaging, the closer you’ll get to communicating your product or service to the unititiated.

Stick to the simple truth.

John Harwood was an interesting choice to have kick off the Chautauqua season, and the week one series of discussions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that political party polarization both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for viewership of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to parties as “brands”, and says that in the political sphere, these brands have done nothing but solidify, cementing public participation in a binary system. This simplification is driven by the notion that people, by-in-large, want to know what they’re getting in a particular candidate or party.

Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat.

From Dave Weinberger’s blog — he attended the New Media Academic Summit and caught a snippet of the end of a blogging and journalism panel with Jodi Kantor, Dan Gillmor and Steve Rubel.

I asked whether the rhetorical voice of blogging is changing the reportorial voice. Jodi replied that that voice has been getting more informal for years, and not just because of blogging. But, she said, when you can see how your readers are taking what you say, you try to write even more clearly and precisely.

“Another example of how blogging is improving journalism,” said Dan.

The same argument could be made inversely. The fact that the reportorial voice is becoming more casual, more approachable, may be what makes more people return to words in the first place. It’s a different time. I had a conversation with Mark Alexander who brought up an interesting point vis Marc Prensky. The gist of it is this: we have to be so careful to understand why we chose to teach what we teach. Just because the papers I grade today don’t conform to the rules of yesterday, does that make them any less appropriate? Content-rich? Accurate? We thought video games would destroy civilization. Now we’re using them as teaching tools.

I don’t want to agree. There’s something deep in me that pushes, rallies against this. But as educators, we have to own what’s ours, and fight the battles that really need fighting.

Ratcheting up the bar another notch, a new Dutch show aims to sweep all other reality shows through a delightful revisioning of "21 Grams". From NineMSN:

In The Big Donor Show, which is set to air this Friday, a terminally ill cancer patient will select one of three patients to receive her kidneys.

Viewers will watch testimonials from the three Dutch contestants, aged between 18 and 40, and send in text message advice to the donor to help her decide who should receive the lifesaving operation.

In a massive surprise to the broadcaster, officials haven’t thrown universal support around the concept. Some in the industry say it’s because the losers actually die. Luckily, it’s a hoax (thanks Curt!). From Reuters:

A Dutch reality show in which a supposedly dying woman had to pick one of three contestants to receive her kidneys was revealed as a hoax on Friday.

Identified only as "Lisa", the 37-year-old woman turned out to be a healthy actress but the three candidates were genuine kidney patients, details the show’s producers revealed in the last minutes of the "The Big Donorshow".

Of note: The show aired. That it turns out the donor was an actress doesn’t save the fact that this thing made it to TV in the first place.

A year ago, I never would have imagined I’d be writing two posts back to back about the vision at Microsoft. But they’re doing a great job on a number of fronts right now, the big one being that they’re getting just the right messages to the media, timed expertly.

This time, it’s about Photosynth. You can find the TED demo here. The gist is this: through a beautifully architected set of algorithms, they’re discovering networks in visual imagery just as the web makes apparent networks of semantic data in text. In the demo, Microsoft Labs researcher Blaise Aquera y Arcas shows the technology off with all photos tagged "Notre Dame." The result is — in a word — stunning.

I updated a talk I give pretty regularly on the new nature of marketing relationships and delivered it again just last Friday. It’s a fun presentation to give to small- to medium-sized organizations, those predominantly based on sales-not-marketing communication models, because it gives me the opportunity to teach a bit on the changing nature of the business. As I was updating the deck to prepare, inserting messages all aligned around the move from big-business brute force marketing through money to developing the relationships organizations have through more open communication, I realized suddenly that I was talking about Microsoft.

See, this notion of transparency is working for Microsoft. It started with Channel 9 some years back, and continues with Labs: the notion that this gigantic company is working on something more than just Windows, just Office, that there’s something out there to look forward to — this drives massive amounts of discussion. It’s the new version of lock-in: I’m less likely to switch platforms when I see that this organization is driving amazing new technology that I’ll get to play with someday.

Take a look at the results. Technorati alone is tracking nearly 3,000 blog posts this morning around Photosynth. Most of the descriptors end with something like "…simply amazing," with the exception of one including a "badass."

This demonstrates the power of creating your own discussion in spades. It doesn’t have to be flashy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It simply has to be honest and accurate.

If you’ve never heard of Chautauqua, join the club. It’s one of the best kept intellectual destinations out there. Nestled against Lake Chautauqua in western NY, the annual Chautauqua instituation ranks as my A#1 spot for resting the spirit and engaging the mind.

The Institution is broken into a nine week series, each week focusing on a differnt subject area for exploration. I’ll be here for the first two weeks of the series. The first entitled “The Media & News: Applied Ethics; the second, “The Family: All of a Kind? All Different?” You can read more about the program for 2007 here.

I’ve been doing my usual searches through the blogosphere looking for others who might be blogging Chautauqua, and I’m surprised at the lack of traffic this place generates. I’ll try and pull some of the load here myself.

It’s 4:30 here now, however. There’s a light breeze gusting across our Victorian porch, and that screams “Wine:O’Clock”. Check back later for more!

I remember the first time I saw this technology demonstrated. It was Jeff Han’s talk at TED a few years back. You should be able to find it in iTunes here.

From Ebert’s page at suntimes.com:

I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers.

Although months in bed after the bleeding episodes caused a lack of strength and coordination, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago restored my ability to walk on my own, climb stairs, etc.

I no longer use a walker much and the wheelchair is more for occasional speed and comfort than need. Just today we went for a long stroll in Lincoln Park.

We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival.

Well done, Roger. Welcome back.

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Some people are natural athletes. Some are gifted in the arts. Those gifted with a mind for numbers and systems contribute in engineering and sciences and more. It’s these natural gifts that allow each of us the opportunity to shine in our own way, to make the world that much better for those still to come.Tammie Reed can talk.”Everyone has a gift,” says Tammie. “Mine is running my mouth.”

Late nights, long hours.It’s 10:00PM and I’m just wrapping up a class on technology marketing for a group of engineers made up of folks from Intel, Synopsis, and Tektronix. They look tired, but they’re tracking the material, studying hard, and putting in what it takes in these late nights, long hours.They know education, these folks. There are eight of them in class and not only do they have their bachelor’s degrees in computer science and master’s degrees in engineering, they’re here studying marketing with me as part of their MBA regimen. And still, in spite of the years they’ve put into their academic careers, this is hard work.