Communication Technology Doesn't Make Everything Better All the Time

Sometimes, modern communications make me pine for the old days.

As excited as I get about new technologies, especially the kind that facilitates and improves our experiences communicating with each other, I also think our over-reliance on communication technology can be a double-edge sword.

While we garner amazing amounts of information about people and places and things through advanced communication technology, I also believe we deprive ourselves of some of the mystery that existed -- and that some of us enjoyed --  before the invention of the tools we use to communicate on a daily basis basis.

Example.  When I traveled abroad as a college student, the adventure had a great element of mystery that's lacking for many of today's student travelers.  That's not to say that the anticipation of studying abroad is any less exciting for a college student in 2011.  I know that it is, as I recently witnessed my youngest daughter's anticipation of travelling abroad to study in Spain.

But the mystery, well, it wasn't quite at the same level for her as it was for me during my college years.  Let's just say it was different.

Before the availability of technologies like Google Street View, Facebook, Skype or Picasa, among others, college students travelling outside the U.S. for a semester abroad knew what the places they were visiting looked like through still images in brochures and magazines and textbooks, what they were told by other travelers and by what they saw on TV, etc.  They began getting to know their new room mates when they flopped jet-lagged into their living quarters, an apartment in Barcelona or a dorm room in Florence.  They decided if living with them would be tolerable after they got to know each other the old fashioned way, and not through a digital first impression courtesy of Facebook.

There was a great mystery to it all, a level of excitement that is different (better?) than what today's students are experiencing.

When my daughter received an email from her travel abroad administrator with the names of her soon-to-be roommates, she immediately viewed their pages on Facebook.  The pending roommates friended each other, exchanged messages, wrote on each others walls, viewed each others photos, knew each others interests -- all before meeting in person.

Using Google Street View, my daughter found the neighborhood she would be a part of for the next four months.  Together on her laptop, we scrolled up and down her street, checking out the shops, the apartment buildings, trying to figure out where the closest cafe was.

Now that Emily is safely (and happy) in Barcelona and settling in, we've been using Skype's chat tool as if she were in her dorm room at Northeastern University in Beantown.

We've had a few Skype video calls too, using the technology nonchalantly, taking for granted we are 3,651 miles apart.

Some of you may still remember the days when everyone in the house got so excited when a family member or friend was calling the U.S. from Europe.

There was a time when such a call was an exciting, planned event. Things are different today -- often better, but not always.

This evening, my daughter put up a batch of photos, taken earlier today, in a Picasa web album. 

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Much has been written recently about the continued success of powerful technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple. These companies are reshaping the entire landscape of computing and telecommunications; how we talk to one another, how we gather information, how we entertain ourselves, and are leading the way toward a new way of human connection and interaction. As these companies ascend in prominence, many pundits have been simultaneously predicting the demise, and possible death, to the once all-powerful tech giant Microsoft. The PC is being replaced by tablets, smartphones and tablet/smartphone hybrids. As that happens, these pundits predict, the billion plus users of the Windows OS will stop buying from Microsoft and will begin using operating systems developed by Google, Apple, RIM, Nokia and others. This past summer, in an attempt to fight back, Microsoft decided to enter the smartphone business with Kin, which turned out to be one of the most disastrous new product introductions in the history of the technology industry. Microsoft pulled the plug on the ill-fated product less than a month after it was introduced. Again, the pundits had a field day with this news, using it as further evidence of Microsoft's decline. So it might be easy to dismiss the lumbering giant as a dinosaur headed for extinction. But not so fast. At this year's CES, video game consoles, along with smartphones and tablets, are center stage. And no company's video game console is selling more units in the US than Microsoft's Xbox, which moved 1.37 million units in November alone. The new Kinect accessory for the Xbox sold more than 8 million units in its first 60 days on the market. On the smartphone front Microsoft launched its Windows Phone 7, or WP7, in October and according to the company it has sold more than 1.5 million units in the first six weeks. In addition, the WP7 had more than 5000 apps available in the marketplace and reached that number 3 times faster than Google did with its Android OS. The analyst firm IDC says, "it is precisely the broad launch and sure-footed execution that allows us to predict long-term success for WP7 at this early stage." So obviously Microsoft learned a thing or two from its misstep with Kin. Microsoft's search engine, Bing, is now the power behind Yahoo Search and achieved its highest levels of success to date late in 2010, and the company expects Bing growth to continue. And with what might be Microsoft's biggest bet of all, cloud computing, the company seems to be fairing quite well as evidenced by its recent wins of federal, state, and local government contracts. Sure, Microsoft isn't perfect, and it is no longer the industry behemoth it was a decade ago, but it is still a force with which to be reckoned. It is a company with more than a $200 billion market cap and more than $35 billion in cash on hand. And with all of the momentum of the company's smartphones, game consoles and cloud computing, I think it would be unwise to count Microsoft out of the game quite yet.

The Dawn of the Anti-Blogger

I think a lot of marketing communications people and other creative types got excited when blogging became part of the day job vs. a nice-to-have.  While blogging is one more task on top of many in a day in the life, it offered a respite from the more processed writing style associated with business communications. Generating and delivering content using traditional marketing communications tools -- news releases, white papers, presentations, brochureware, case histories, etc. -- requires more of a left brained approach.  Writing a blog entry, however, allows the writer to exercise the brain's often less used right hemisphere, where creativity, intuition and subjectivity rule.

And while the traditional tools all serve a purpose as part of a marketing communications campaign that may include product publicity, cause marketing, thought leadership, influencer relations, issues management, etc., they only communicate out and provide little or no feedback loop. By design, these tools don't encourage conversation or the exchange of information.

When integrated into a broad communications campaign that does includes two-way communication channels -- like blogging -- they continue to be very effective, however.

Still, traditional business communication forms often don't allow for marketing services pros to be what many of us are or "secretly" want to be:  thoughtful and creative writers.  Writing for business is all about business.  It's what we do to generate awareness for our clients so our clients can sell more products and/or services and make more money and so we can get paid. Ask any professional blogger why they blog.  It's for the same reasons.

For the rest of us, the non-professional blogger, blogging was making it possible for us to scratch our creative and expressive itch. It's a format, so we thought, that gives us just the right amount of editorial and artistic license that news releases and white papers, generally, deny us.  It gave us a new outlet that satisfied the "I want to be a thoughtful writer" craving many of us have suppressed for too many years. So we thought.

For better or worse, though, these are the facts:  SEO, page ranking, backlinking, link baiting, ping services, social bookmarking, etc., are working overtime to put blogging in the same class as the traditional forms of business communications. The irony to me is that blogging gives us suppressed creative writers a creative outlet within our profession, finally, only to be microscoped by Google Juice.

Beth Harte, client services director at Serengeti Communications, initiated a Facebook discussion earlier this week on this subject, and puts it quite simply:  "But at the end of the day writing only for Google Juice doesn't always provide real value to your clients/customers.  Or, if you're a non-professional blogger like me, it's just not fun."

Perhaps we are seeing the dawn of the anti-blogger - folks who blog because they have something to say and care less about page rank and comments.

The Generation Gap is Shrinking When it Comes to Digital Privacy

More and more people, across generations, are learning the hard way that the posting of certain kinds of personal information on social networks can be a bad idea.

As we age, do we become more private?  Do we become more protective as we accumulate more things in our lives, like a reputation built over a lifetime, material wealth or opinions we'd rather not share with the world but only with the closest of friends?

If the results from a new report from technology and market research firm Forrester Research, Inc. hold true, then the answer to these questions is "yes."

Credit social media with helping to bridge the generation gap among Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and even Millennials (to some extent, anyway) on at least one important issue -- digital privacy.

It appears that no matter how old we are, we spend some time worrying about social media-related privacy.  And the older we are, the more time we spend worrying about it.

While 18 to 29 year-olds -- aka Millennials -- are the least concerned (as you might expect since the use of social media is in their DNA), even their privacy concerns increased over a year ago, according to the Forrester report.

Baby Boomers, as you might assume, are the most concerned about social media-related privacy --especially the older boomers, aged 54 to 64.  Their privacy concerns jumped from 32% to 50% in a single year.  Younger boomers (44 to 53 years of age...and includes me!) express somewhat less concern and are more closely aligned with the attitudes toward online privacy as Gen Xers (30 - 43).  With that said, privacy concerns for both younger Boomers and Gen X also increased over 2009.

Companies like Google and Facebook are constantly in the news due to digital privacy issues.  Google recently created a privacy-centric fund and donated $8.5M to it largely as a result of the mishandling of its Google Buzz launch last February.  And Facebook, it seems, is forever digging out of the privacy holes it creates for itself.

Social media is evolving and so too are users' attitudes toward it. Backlash against social networks dictating privacy policies to customers is growing stronger. 

Older Gen Xers aren't too far away from the half way point in their lives.  And as Sid Yadav of VentureBeat points out, it would behoove Facebook to "figure out a middle ground on privacy before its first users reach middle age."

10 Public Relations-related Discussions I Could Live Without

Everyday I look forward to the avalanche of creative ideas, links to information and news I wouldn't see otherwise, the levity, the quirkiness and the provocative conversations, blogs, tweets and posts and all that spills forth from my favorite social media networks.

Well, almost all that spills forth... 

We're probably a lot alike in that we start each day by browsing Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, etc., and end each day pretty much the same way.  We want to know "what's new" even before we get out of bed (some of us).  And in just a few minutes, before we take that first sip of Sumatra or Chai, we have a pretty good take on the conversations that took place while we slept and about what's trending for the day ahead.

Unfortunately, however, much of the creativity and thoughtfulness that is shared within our social networks - I'm finding -- is being offset by the seemingly never-ending regurgitation of (too) familiar discussions.  I am specifically speaking of the conversations taking place within the world of public relations. And more specifically, technology public relations.  

This may sound a bit like whining to you.  I'm sure it would to Seth Godin, who blogged just today about whining.


Mr. Godin says whining is just a waste of time.  He's right.  Still, I believe everyone has the right to whine, albeit only once in a while.

Today, it's my turn.  

With that, I give you my short list of regurgitated, recycled and restated discussions which are taking place in a PR-oriented social media community near you. All are discussions we, 'er I, can live without:  

• Is traditional media really dead?
• Press release:  R.I.P.
• Who should own social media? Ad agency, PR agency, in-house team or social media agency?
• Why PR agencies missed the social media train.
• What journalists hate about PR people.
• 10 essential tools for measuring social media (especially annoying when they're tools you never heard of and when you click on the links half of them are already obsolete!)
• How to pitch bloggers.
• How many CEOs are actively using social media.
• How do you measure PR success?
• Is PR dead?

Phew.  Quite a list.  But I'm sure I missed a few, so please feel free to weigh in with your personal favs.