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01/16	Surfin'. A new study reveals Internet users watch up to five hours less of television a week without damaging their social lives. In other words, the Internet has partially supplanted TV as an entertainment and information medium of choice. The survey covered 14 countries including the US, UK, Hungary, Chile and South Korea. We know in the US, that young men spend more time playing games than watching TV. This has been part of the reason the audience for network television has declined steeply. The image of a family gathered before a TV set died in the 1970s. Today, Dad works on a computer, Mom uses her personal digital assistant, Junior plays videogames and Sis IMs friends and discusses whatever teenage girls talk about. The TV might be on but chances are no one is watching it -- except the cat. Knowing this, why do advertisers continue to pay outrageous sums for network TV advertising? I've heard reasons, but the reasons are illogical. I believe marketers, like PR practitioners, are trapped in their behavior. They don't want to change because they like things the way they are. And, networks give them reams of numbers to prove a national buy is good value. It's fiction and a few advertisers are starting to wake to the artificiality of it. I won't predict a collapse in the upfront buy of national TV time because I have been predicting a collapse for years, and I've been wrong every year. Behavior is a stubborn thing. It's past time for marketers to move away from network buys into media that reach target audiences more efficiently. But, how often have we heard and read that sentence?
01/15	Good Idea. A forward-looking newspaper in Spokane, Washington is trying something risky but worth the effort. The Spokesman-Review is sending a reporter to cover the New Hampshire primary races with a Treo 600 camera phone. He will be moblogging and photo blogging at the same time. You can read the story here: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/the_weblog_blog/ I have written about the PR feasibility of doing this in the past, especially at events like CES or Comdex. Here is a newspaper willing to give it a try in a spectacular fashion. Incidentally, the reporter is writing for a Spokesman-Review blog called "Spin Control." I don't know the newspaper, but I wish I did. It has gone heavily into blogs including one that allows readers to question the top editors of the newspaper, one that tracks Washington politics, another that tracks Idaho politics and yet another one that follows sports at Eastern Washington University. The paper is developing a blog for garage and antique sales and another for a conservative spokesperson. You can reach all these and more at the following address: http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/ Check them out. They should give you ideas for blogs that you can run in your organization. It is interesting that after years of resisting the Internet and fearing its effects on circulation, newspapers have moved boldly online and are doing some of the more innovative work. It would be nice if the same could be said for PR. But, it doesn't look that way yet. There are a few of us who are trying new things, but too few.
01/14	Threading a Needle. I was asked to tackle a complex problem yesterday related to the cable industry. It was not a problem I understood going in, and I wasn't sure I could find anything to help me understand the source of conflict in the industry. Fortunately, I stumbled on an 89-page Government Accounting Office report that studied the problem in detail. The challenge was to comb the report, understand the issue then digest it with a recommendation for a client. This did not go well. I almost had to draw diagrams to determine who was goring whom at what time and why. The GAO wrote an excellent report but cable industry participants are locked so tightly together in their business dealings that anything one does impacts another. When they start fighting, ramifications are broad. My job was to advise a client how to stay above the fray between battling participants, or if the client should take sides. Four hours into the process, and the answer was staring me in the face. The client cannot afford to alienate either side, it seems to me. The client somehow has stand apart and continue to work with both sides. That said, I'm not sure I defined the message correctly. I will return to the issue tomorrow and look again. The point of this thought is there are situations in which on cannot win in PR. No matter what one does, including keeping silent, one will stand accused of not helping, of taking sides or of some other injury. In these cases, one takes lumps. The client knows this, and the client is far too wise to be surprised by our analysis. I suspect what we will recommend is the position the client already has come to. But I hope we can articulate it in a way that makes it easier for the client to handle.
01/13	Having It Both Ways. Over the weekend, San Jose Mercury columnist, Dan Gillmor, wrote a perceptive column on how the power of major media is being democratized. You can read the column here: http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001654.shtml I found Gillmor's article interesting in light of the braying against the Federal Communications Commission for allowing greater media concentration in the U.S. Gillmor verified what Chairman Powell has been saying all along. There are many media since the debut of the Internet and more to come. Allowing media to concentrate will not affect in the least the number of outlets for reporting and publishing because low-cost outlets are available in infinite numbers. And, with 50% of Internet users connected by broadband now in the U.S., online video and multimedia to report stories are a reality. All this proves again the hypocrisy of Congress and those who see evil corporations under every tent. I am no optimist. I know money captures power and power serves its own interests. Large media combines like Time Warner have to have to be watched closely. But, that said, Time Warner can no more dominate the community I live in than the local community newspaper. We have at least two Web sites serving our small town and information resources are as vast as the Internet itself. Still that won't make a difference to politicians. They depend on local TV advertising for reelection campaigns, and they won't allow anything that might disrupt their access to the airwaves. It's not worth getting angry about, but it is one more example of the way the world works.
01/12	Jitters. I'm writing this amid a tangle of wires, two computers, two terminals and two keyboards. I'm in the middle of a changeover from an old computer to new. I spent a great deal of Saturday on this task, and I might spend a great of today -- Sunday. (Yes, this is a thought for Monday, but I'm not sure I'll be on the air tomorrow.) I get the jitters during changeovers. Rarely does everything go right, and this time was no exception. The new machine booted nicely and registrations went well. (Microsoft wants everything registered without exception.) Even the network switched without a hitch. Then came the dreaded hour -- emptying the old machine and filling the new. I use a program called "PC Relocator," which has software to index everything on the old machine then shoot it by USB wire to the new machine. Except that it didn't work. I spent about three hours twiddling with it. I downloaded the latest copy of the software on both machines. I installed and indexed and connected and disconnected and reconnected the wire. Nada. Nothing. The program worked well within each machine but simply would not recognize the USB. Fortunately, "PC Relocator" allows one to offload to a storage medium as well, and I have an external Maxtor hard drive that worked fine. But this meant offloading to the hard drive then reloading onto the new machine. Two hours later, I had everything on the new machine, and I proceeded to check it out. Sure enough, Microsoft FrontPage won't work. That's the software I use for this Web site. Now, I'm stuck. I can go back and see if I can get FrontPage off the old system somehow and onto the new system or just buy a new -- and expensive copy of FrontPage -- and see if it will recognize the unworkable files on the new machine. Added to all this is a pile of hardware on the floor that I have to reinstall on the new machine because its software is not recognized. No one tells you when you get a new computer how long and difficult it is to change over. The time now is 8:45 a.m. Sunday morning. Let the race begin. Update: I'm in. Whew. It cost me a new copy of FrontPage unfortunately.