Tag: media

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Webchat

I will participate in a live webchat on August 12 (see below).  Please sign up so that I am not embarassed by lack of interests and send in your comments and questions.  Thanks. 

Click on this link to go to the Facebook page.  

Sustainable Forestry and Climate Change
Join forest owner, carbon credit producer and sustainable forestry advocate John Matel for a live chat on August 12

Host:Co.Nx: See the World
Network:Global
Date:Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Time:9:00am – 10:00am
Location:Online
City/Town:Washington, DC
Email:conx@state.gov
 

Description

Date: August 12, 2009
Time: 9:00am EDT (1300GMT)

Experts estimate that 20% of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation. Yet forests are the ultimate in renewable resource. A well-managed forest can produce wood, help clean the water and air, as well as provide a home for wildlife and a place for recreation now and essentially forever. In addition, rapidly growing forests remove and sequester large amounts of carbon dioxide. (Growing one pound of wood in a vigorous young forest removes 1.47 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replaces it with 1.07 pounds of oxygen.) In short, while good forestry practices are not the only solution to the problems of climate change and environmental degradation, there is no workable solution without them.

John Matel is a forest owner who is working to put sustainable forestry into practice on his land in the U.S. State of Virginia. In addition, as Communications Director for the Virginia Forestry Association Tree Farm Program, he helps foster good forestry stewardship on private lands around the Commonwealth of Virginia and beyond. Pine forests in the southern U.S. supply around 58% of the U.S. demand for timber and account for more the 15% of the world’s timber production. This is done sustainably and each year landowners in the southern U.S. plant more than a billion trees.

Drawing on his experience with things like the sale of carbon credits, the environmental value chain, prescribed burning and sustainable forestry, John Matel will be available to answer your questions on a live webchat.

Please read more at his webpage at http://johnsonmatel.com/blog1/forestryecology.

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Broadcast Monitoring System – The Rise of the Machines

Years of science fiction make big real-world advances look puny. All of us have seen the fantastically multimedia computers on Star Trek or the James Bond and have come to expect instantaneous processing time, perfect video delivery and trouble-free operation.   Of course we know that the real world data systems don’t work like this, but even when we know the real world, it is the illusions we recall. 

I thought about that at a briefing today.  I saw a broadcast monitoring system that lets you to search broadcasts using key words, as well as set up permanent watch lists, much the same way you can do now for text.   It monitors major satellite broadcasts and produces machine generated transcripts in original languages. 

And I thought, “So what?  No big deal.” But it is, actually, a big deal even if it looks a lot like what we imagined we had before. Consider the analogy of search engines.  Think of how much better you can search with Google than you could with Lycos, Magellan, the aptly named “dogpile” or so many of the others whose names we forget. But all Google does is the same thing as the most primitive search engines; it just does it better. That is how progress is made, by making incremental improvements until at some point you have something new, but nobody notices. 

Untethered imagination is much overrated. It is funny to hear people say that Leonardo da Vinci invented helicopters, tanks or submarines just because he imagined the concept and drew some unworkable sketches or that Jules Verne pioneered space travel because he wrote a book about going to the moon. Yet when a helicopter flies overhead, you could say, “NBD, da Vinci invented the thing nearly 500 years ago, it just didn’t fly; this is just a minor improvement.” And I hate that childish notion that this or that modern machine was “really” invented by ancient Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Greeks, Incas, Persians, Russians … Who cares?

It matters less who imagined something first than who make it work first and then who keeps improving it.    It also matters who tells others about.  If you make a great discovery, but nobody else knows about it, you really didn’t make a great discovery. You just indulged your idiosyncratic curiosity.

Returning to the subject at hand, the broadcast monitoring system takes the place of those bored guys that used to watch TV and take notes (Presumably, sales of coffee and cigarettes will decline.)  The advantage is that the machine never sleeps or has to take a bathroom break.  The disadvantage is that the machine doesn’t think or make free association.  It only produces exactly what it is asked to give, although more sophisticated programs are allowing them to branch out with a kind of artificial intelligence.

The original language transcripts are good, the translations, not so good.  They have some of the comical aspects we associate with mistranslation.  However, retrieval is more important than perfection.   Skilled human translators can make whatever changes necessary after the machine does the initial sorting.

The systems I saw can do Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Persian and English. Bahasa, Hindi and Urdu are planned.  It takes at least six months to “train” the program.  They need enough of a sample.   For example, if you let it go for only a short time, for example last week, you might have nothing but Michael Jackson stories.  Your machine would have a strong vocabulary on plastic surgery, gloves, music videos and bizarre behavior by aging man-boys, but maybe not enough on more important topics. 

The system is around 80% accurate, but it depends on who is talking and about what.   It can pick up around 95% of what an anchorman says when he is speaking directly to the camera, but starts to decline when there are multiple participants in a conversation and/or when people start slipping into dialects or even idiolects.  

It works a lot like Google for video and you could probably start using it in less than ten minutes.  The hard part is to know what you want to get from the system and how to use it.   Translation is more an art than a science. Of course, decision making requires even a greater use of judgment. 

I think this is very promising for understanding big trends. As we get more data points to smooth out outliers and the quirks of special situation, we can start seeing the simpler patterns in the ostensible complexity. But despite the coolness of this technology, it provides essentially the same sort of service for video that a reasonably skilled user of Google can achieve with texts. Of course, while Google is very useful in finding information, we still have not really figured out how to use it as an analytical tool for audience research or evaluation.

Still not as cool as I saw on Star Trek many years ago. I suppose Leonardo da Vinci invented the concept.

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Crap TV

When I was in Norway, one of the local television stations constantly played reruns of Ricky Lake and Jerry Springer.  I used to wonder what kind of image of our country these clowns created. They were bad enough, but now we have a whole slew of reality shows.    They show unattractive people being venal and selfish.  We live here and we have a wide variety of other impressions.   But I was imagining if I was to see something like “Bridezillas” w/o other context I might not want anything to do with the culture that produces such monstrosities. 

Americans are no more venal than people in other countries and our television shows are really no worse than other.   For example, the Dutch invented many of the reality shows, like “Big Brother.”   But most of these offerings don’t get distributed around the world.   The Brits seems to have developed the perfect television PR.    I have been to the UK and seen some of what they watch back home.   It is not very uplifting.  Yet in the U.S. and around the world, we get “Masterpiece Theatre.” 

I am not the only one to worry about the coarsening of America.  I don’t know how much television is reflecting changes in America and how much it is driving them.    I also am not sure of how people are looking the programs.   When I see people being selfish and demanding to be covered in bling, I look down on them.   Everybody needs somebody to look down on and the low-lives on reality TV provide an outlet.

There is an old saying that the bad man is a lesson for the good.  You can see what not to do.

But are negative role models enough?  Are they really seen as negative?  A lot of the bad people get what they want by being aggressive.   Maybe some people see that as good thing.

We should not underestimate the power of television.    Advertisers understand that a fifteen or thirty minute commercial can sell a product.   Maybe a thirty minute or an hour program can sell a lifestyle.  I watched a lot of television when I was a kid and I know that I consciously modeled some of the behavior and habits of some of the television characters.     It sometimes surprises me today when I watch an old show and see one of my traits in embryonic form.    Maybe I was just more impressionable than most kids, but I don’t think so.   I hear too many stories, jokes and tag lines from movies. 

Television characters help define the boundaries of what is acceptable.   For example, when did it become acceptable to call women “bitches,” much less use the word on TV?  But both things are now common.   How is it that the “poor” people on reality TV can afford and think they deserve fancy cars and jewelry?

I grew up on science fiction and westerns.   Both were common when I was a kid. They were actually very similar.   “Star Trek”, for example, was a lot like “Wagon Train.”   They travel through unexplored territories meeting strange people, with whom they alternatively cooperate and conflict.    And they all were morality plays, very simple and clear.   They seem very naive today, but they are certainly no more simplistic than “Bridezillas” and they have a better purpose.

I have to stipulate, however, that television has generally improved. The production values as well as the complexity of programs are much better than they used to be.  In addition, we have many fine productions on history, science and human affairs.   But this is a result of a general widening of offerings.  There is much more choice now.    You can choose to watch well produced dramas (like Law & Order), good news programs (Newshour on PBS), technology (Modern Marvels) or any of the great variety of history programs.   Or you can watch crap all day and night.

Choice is enhanced (exacerbated) by the ability to time shift and save programs.  At one time television united the country.  We watched the same things at the same times and that made us more similar.  Most Americans watched the evening news with Walter Cronkite.  Half the country tuned into the final episode of “The Fugitive.”   Now we all watch different things at different times.  I suppose that will make us all more different.  Unequal inputs produce unequal results.

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Twitter as a Broadcast Medium

Twitter all the rage today because of its ostensible (Twitter, BTW, is not available on mobile platforms in Iran) role in the Iranian political mess.  It is certainly helping keep the outside world informed and involved in events there and making it harder for the regime to engage in the bloody repression of earlier days.   A colleague told me that he was seeing hundreds of tweets a minute about Iran, many complaining bitterly that MSM such as CNN was not paying enough attention to the story.   Because of and through the new media, with Twitter in the lead, the whole world is watching as events unfold.  It is not doubt exciting, but let’s think about Twitter and how it works. According to an article I read recently, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is ONE.  What this means is that most people sign up for the service and then either don’t use it at all or use it passively.      Of course the median is not the average, which is much higher because it is driven up by big users.   (Remember that in a group of 99 individuals making $10,000 a year plus Bill Gates, the median income is still only $10,000, but the average man in the group has a net worth of around $400,000,000.)  This divergence suggests that Twitter is not really an interactive social media platform.   It is more correctly a species of broadcaster.   That is how it is being used in Iran, for example.   People inside are using Twitter to broadcast information out.   

So far Twitter’s main success has been as a marketing tool for firms and celebrities.   Ashton Kutcher is the record holder with more than two million followers on Twitter.  You can see why this is so attractive to celebrities.  Their goal is awareness.    Broadcast is unsurpassed at creating massive awareness.  This might make it a very useful tool for public affairs.  We need some kind of inexpensive broadcast tool and perhaps the constrained nature of the messages (140 characters) is not a significant problem for some sorts of messages.  It is a lot like a headline service. 

Public diplomacy, however, is not really in the headline business and our goal usually goes beyond awareness.   I argued, way back in 2001, that we are not really even in the information business anymore.    We are in the knowledge business (information is not knowledge) and we are in the relationship business (relationships are reciprocal).   Twitter can help us take care of business as long as we recognize what we are getting when we tweet on Twitter and recognize the natural power and limitations of what is today and likely will remain a short message broadcasting service.

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ONE Common Man v THE Common Man

The interactive or social media is the future of public diplomacy, but it has the capacity to lead us down lots of blind alleys.  Much of this aimless wandering can be avoided if we just don’t make the error of mistaking ONE common person for THE common person.  Let me explain.

We group things and people in order to simplify and understand our world and we use shorthand phrases, such as the people of country X to describe very large groups that may have little in common with each other.    Marketers, politicians and public diplomacy professional want to reach THE people. The trouble is there is no such thing.  No matter the rhetoric, smart marketers, politician & PD practitioners know this.  That is why we study polling and demographic data.  We try to segment the audience in terms that make sense for our persuasion job. 

We know that in any given population, only a small percentage of the people really care about any particular issue enough to get the facts or develop opinions about it and an even smaller number will leverage the opinions of the larger population.  These influential people are NOT a random sample of the population.  They are people with specific interests, communications skills and access to persuasion methods.  The problem is finding them, especially because you have to find different ones for different occasions.    

The advent of interactive social media does not solve this problem.  Although it empowers us to move much faster, sometimes we might just be moving faster down the path to nowhere and the fastest way to go nowhere in PD is to wrongly identify a representative audience as an influential audience.   A representative sample of 1000 people might be sufficient to accurately measure the attitudes of a millions, but it won’t suffice to influence a change in those attitudes.   On the other hand, 1000 influentials could indeed affect the course of the nation. 

Social media at once reveal and obscure this reality.    We can graphically watch the spread of information on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter and see the power of opinion leaders.  We knew they were out there but to a long time public diplomacy guy, actually seeing them is as amazing as really seeing gravity or magnetic waves would be for a physicist.  But it is more complicated.   Physical forces don’t exercise options or free will; people do.  Physical particles always react the same way; people don’t.   A physical object cannot just lose interest in gravity and stop exerting influence.   People … you get the picture. 

I have noticed a hazardous trend in public diplomacy.   We have started to become much more interested in numbers counted than in influence achieved.   Maybe that is because we can so easily generate numbers with our new technologies, while influence is nearly impossible to quantify.   Numbers can talk, but they don’t always tell the truth and they never tell the truth unless surrounded by an explanatory context.   For example, is it better to reach 1000 people or 100,000 people?  You really cannot answer that question until you know the context. 

Let me illustrate with my own number fallacy.   I fell into it when I started to use Facebook.  It is an embarrassingly simple error, but I have since seen it widely.   Social media is about friends.    The average Facebook user may have 500 friends.  So if my Facebook message reaches 500 people, can’t I just multiply by 500 and claim that my audience was 250,000?   And by that logic, I would only need 2000 people to reach a million.  My job just got a lot easier.  Of course, friends’ networks overlap.   In some communities, the overlap might be 90%+. 

In other words, by reaching one or two, you have already bumped up against boundary of your influence.   Adding hundreds or thousands more from the same group may not add any value at all.  The total number is meaningless. It is like saying that you want infinity and being disappointed that you had to settle for half of it.

BTW – Business Week has a very good article about what an online friend is worth. 

We used to call them boutique programs.  They are the kinds of things you set up for an ambassador or a VIP to give him/her the flavor of an issue or area.    For example, the VIP talks to a youth audience and leaves with the impression that he/she has met THE youth.  He/she has, in fact, spoken maybe sixty people, most of whom know each other (i.e. their communities overlap).  It is a very useful exercise, as long as you know what you are getting into and when you leave the boutique you go to talk to opinion leaders and people who can make connections.  Then maybe look carefully at some polling data.   

You should stay out of the boutique if you think you are getting anything more scientific than a personal impression.  Boutique programs are easier to do online and easier to fall into than they are in non-virtual life.  So remember whether online or in person, meeting ONE common person, or even fifty or a hundred of them, is not the same as meeting THE common person.

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President’s Speech & New Media

The State Department is a unique organization with unique needs.   It is tempting to emulate success management and media techniques of successful private firms (what would Google do?).   We can and have learned much from them, but the USG is the only organization with the worldwide presence, reach and responsibilities.   Who and what we are and the fact that we represent the United States of America enhances our opportunities and constrains them.     We saw this at work in the Cairo speech PD effort.

All forms of traditional media carried President Obama’s Cairo speech and we in PD can no more take ownership for that than a rooster can claim credit for the sunrise.  My organization – IIP – added an interactive twist of the new media with tools such as SMS messages to reach mobile users, IIP’s multimedia interactive platform,   CO.NX, interactive blogs, live chats and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.   The Digital Outreach Team communicated with the blogosphere in Urdu, Persian and Arabic.  We posted also contextual information and the speech translated into Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay, Pashtu, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu.  In addition to serving overseas posts, America.Gov also carried the speech in English and the languages mentioned above for readers worldwide.

I believe that this was the first time this robust mix of new media technologies in so many languages was applied for an event worldwide.   Tell me if I am wrong. But I feel a bit like a guy who has just won the lottery.   It makes me feel great, but don’t think that we can count on that particular strategy to produce similarly happy results regularly far into the future.  Not every event will be a important as this one and the test of our online communities will be seeing how they do with less exciting things.

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The President’s Speech

My colleagues and I have been working hard to get the President’s speech in Cairo out on new media.   We are breaking new ground.  No private firm is as worldwide as the U.S. State Department.   It is exciting.  I don’t often write so directly about my work, but I think this time it might be appropriate, since even the NYT noticed us.  This is what I have been doing all day. 

 Interacting with President Obama“Be among the first to get highlights of U.S. President Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo and tell us what you think.   Go to  http://www.america.gov/sms.html  and be part of the action.”  That is the tweetable text telling mobile users worldwide how they can be part of President Obama’s historic speech in Cairo. 

President Obama’s June 4 speech will certainly be carried on traditional media all over the world and the U.S. State Department will add an interactive twist, using new media tools such as SMS messages to reach mobile users as well as interactive blogs, live chats and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.   This is in addition to outreach efforts by a digital outreach team, communicating with the blogosphere in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and translations and more traditional webpage posting of the speech in Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay, Pashtu, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu.

Those interested in interacting can participate in several formats.   They can comment on blogs at (http://blogs.america.gov), join a social network (http://www.america.gov/communities/social-networks.html), chat and watch a live webcast (http://www.america.gov/multimedia/askamerica.html) or comment via mobile using the Clickatell system. 

Interest so far is significant.    The chat room, for example, already had more than a thousand participants signed up, some of them lurking inside a couple days in advance.  The mobile/Clickatell experience will represent the first time a President has been fully interactive on a mobile platform from an international location.  The new media allows a greater connection with people.  I think we got it right this time.  Gotta be here tomorrow at 5:30.  Tomorrow will tell.

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The Dot.com Bubble All Over Again?

It is starting to look like the dot.com bubble.   Nobody has really figured out how to monetize Web 2.0 and most of the current value of Web 2.0 companies comes from expectation of future value.  There is great excitement about building online communities, but it is hard to get these communities to do very much except be communities.   There is no doubt Web 2.0 has already changed how people communicate and how they do business.  But how can we really use it?

There was a South Park episode last year where one of the kids became an internet sensation in hopes of making a pile of money.   When he went to collect, he was told that his great fame had indeed earned him millions of internet bucks, but that they were not exchangeable into real money.    In PD 2.0 we are not trying to earn money, but we are trying to achieve sustained changes in attitudes and behavior in fields important to U.S. policies.   What if we reach millions of people only to find that our internet influence is not exchangeable into anything that matters to us?

What about the holy grail of Web 2.0, going viral?  Some top viral videos are at this link. Many of the things that go viral are just silly, like a cat flushing a toilet.   But I question the effectiveness even of the serious contenders.   It is great to get exposure, but what is it good for?   I remember a study of the “Clio Awards.”   Those were the academy awards of commercials, where the funniest and most artistic commercials were chosen by the cognoscenti of commercials.    The problem was that the winners were not particularly good at selling the products they represented.   In fact, they were below average.    People often loved the commercial, but didn’t care about the product and sometimes they couldn’t even tell what product was being advertised.   Many of the viral videos are like the Clio award winners that get lots of attention and even critical acclaim, but don’t do the job.

There is also no reliable way to predict if something will go viral. Studying successful viral videos is not much use.    We can identify – in retrospect – what they did right, but when we compare this to the millions of others that didn’t make it, we find that they also did many of the same things.   It is a type of survivor bias, like attributing special skills to the winner of a very long and multi-round game of Russian roulette.   The guy would probably write a book.  He and all of us would think that his astonishing success must be due to something other than random chance, but we would all be wrong and we should not be enticed into the playing the game with his “proven” method.

The lesson is NOT that we stop exploring new media.  Rather it is that we should not fall in love with it or with any particular aspect, platform or technology.   It is easy to be beguiled by large numbers and exponential growth rates but we should be persistent in questioning HOW we can use it in PD.   Some things will be very useful, but maybe not always or everywhere and others might just be exciting w/o payback.   It is good to think about the differences.

Remember pets.com during the dot.com bubble with that sock puppet?  Everybody loved the marketing.   They even bought a super bowl add featuring the sock puppet.  They were defunct less than a year later.  I could never figure out how most of those companies could make any money; after a while, neither could anybody else.

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The Fault Lies Not in our Stars, but in Ourselves

I have been talking to leaders of technology firms in Brazil and it has been very interesting.  While it is not appropriate to post details, some of the general thoughts are applicable across a wide spectrum of endeavors and I will share them here.

One of the problems I have wrestled with has to do with the nature of knowledge and how to pass it within groups and organizations.   I find that this is a common problem and nobody seems to have developed a really robust solution.   I don’t think there is one; at least we cannot create a system that will take care of it.   Knowledge cannot be separated from its human carriers.  We like to use the term “viral” and it really fits here.  Passing knowledge just takes commitment and work by smart people.  Too often, organizations try to outsource their brains by giving the job of thinking and analyzing to consultants or computers.  Well, the buck stops with the decision maker.  He/she certainly doesn’t need to be an expert on all things.  Those consultants and computers can help inform decisions, but they cannot make them.   I was thinking about these things during our discussions.

Let me start by making a distinction between information and knowledge.  The two are synonyms and often used interchangeable, but in the deeper meaning information is the raw material that becomes knowledge when it is when it is understood and integrated into thinking.

Many management challenges are common to both public and private business and one of the most persistent is the difficulty of passing reliable knowledge and experience within an organization.  One of the most confusing circumstances is when information passes w/o the knowledge to make it meaningful or put it in proper context.   It is confusing because the recipients of the information may not perceive the problem.   They may feel satisfied that they are “informed” but remain misled. 

This is an age old problem.  As any organization grows beyond the size where frequent face-to-face contacts are common and easy, information sharing and knowledge production become an acute challenge.  It is especially true today in the fast changing and multifaceted environment created by the new media.  Information is held by specific individuals who may have very deep knowledge in a particular specialty, but not know how it fits into the bigger picture and may be unaware of the significance of what they know in other contexts.   In an information rich environment, the problem is how to arrange it to make it useful and how to tap into tacit knowledge that people may possess but be unable to properly express.  A learning organization is one where the total knowledge and expertise available to the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.   This condition is easier to aspire than achieve. 

Technology provides some help.  One way to address the challenge is through a wiki where everyone can contribute as well as see, consider and enhance what others have contributed.   In theory, a wiki can tap into the wisdom of the group.   It can be made available only to particular groups, to the entire organization or even to a more general public.   A larger group will create greater management problems, but will likely tap into a more diverse set of talent and knowledge.   Remember that no matter how good you and your colleagues are, the smartest people on any particular subject probably don’t work for you.  Your decisions will be better if you can think of a way to bring them in.

The amount of openness is a management decision.   However management cannot really decide if individuals in the organization will enthusiastically contribute.   Enthusiasm cannot be mandated, but it can be incentivized and those incentives must come from a true commitment at the top.   Good contributions must be recognized and the inevitable good-faith errors must be corrected but not punished.  

The new media allows and requires many choices.  The mix of tools changes depending on the situation and they change over time.  Yesterday’s solution is often today’s problem, but that does not necessarily imply that any mistakes were made.   Employees have to be confident that their good solutions that solve today’s problems will not be held against them when the situation changes tomorrow.  It takes a long time to build the kind of trust that lets people stick their necks out and months or years of work can be dissipated by one serious breach.  Leadership cannot indulge its emotions or look for people to blame when sound decisions are overtaken by events.  These are pernicious breaches of trust.

Another important aspect of knowledge sharing is to have the knowledge available to share in the first place.  Diverse and dispersed world-wide organizations tend to have information but it is often not translated into useful knowledge.  One tech fix is to make everything is available online in “the cloud.”  Groups working on particular tasks may not be near each other geographically or even in the same time zones, but they can be virtually side by side.  We have talked about this for many years, but technology has only recently made it practical, since real collaboration requires good connections and a lot of bandwidth.  

We have a great opportunity.  There is a lot of low hanging fruit and that we should take advantage of new technologies and interested participants right away.   Opportunities are out there.  It is there for us.  The most important obstacle is our own inability to take them and make them work.  We have to work to create learning organizations.  It is a steep hill to climb, but not beyond our ability.

Evaluate AND Take Action

They also emphasized the need to evaluate AND prune dead wood.  Sections are evaluated every six months to see what is working and what is not.   An organization in this competitive world cannot allow itself to hold on to programs and platforms that are not performing, no matter how many people work there or love them.   The less performing sections are cannibalized to support the ones that are doing better.  This creative destruction is a challenge in government.   Private firms are not really better at anticipating the future than we are, but they are a lot more effective at getting rid of things that are not performing.   They just cannot afford to keep or pour more resources into the programs that are losing money.

The title of this post is a paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.   Let me end with another one that applies.   “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads to fortune.”

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Gutenberg for the 21st Century

IIP Publications (Pubs) show an example of a respected traditional product line that adapted to the new media w/o losing its way.    People look to Pubs for useful content and their offerings have long been among the popular IIP products with our posts and audiences overseas.   Generations of students have relied on the outline series and PAOs handed out printed publications to their contacts.   Publications were among the first products to be put online and all of them are available in full text on America.gov.   But these remained essentially one way communications in the old, pre-web 2.0 model.

The Pubs staff knows that a dialogue is a more effective way of winning friends and influencing people.  Listening as well as talking is a sign of respect that new media audiences demand.    Changing the paradigm from producing products to producing conversations is never an easy transition, but Pubs has significant advantages in this endeavor. 

Most importantly, Pubs has content the audiences want to get and want to discuss.   This is further enhanced by the provenance of most of the articles and chapters in a Pubs product.   They are almost always written by outside experts.   These experts come already equipped with their own audiences, points of view and networks of colleagues.    There is a natural focus for dialogue in each of the articles.

Take the example of the most recent ePublication, Energy Efficiency: the First Fuel.  Several of the articles stimulated me to think and want to respond.  In many ways the response and the cross talk will be better than the articles themselves, since they will tap into the wider knowledge of the readers.   This is the new world of PD 2.0, and we can be part of it if we have the courage to engage.

Pubs is working on this through Facebook, Twitter and other means.   They well understand the need to be flexible and they do not have a “Facebook strategy” or a “Twitter Plan.”  Rather they are working out strategies that involve Facebook or Twitter while still taking advantage of the significant “old media” distribution network long in place, the one that works through posts, IRCs and printing distribution. 

It is still early in the game for Pubs and the new media, but the staff was able to share a couple of insights.   One is that micro-blogging, via Twitter, is easier and less time intensive than ordinary blogging, but it can produce significant results when linked back to an existing IIP publication.    Another observation is that Facebook can serve as a central hub for other online products and activities.    The advantages of Facebook are that it is easily available to customers all over the world and it is easy to update.   Pubs also realizes that much of its product distribution will be outside IIP or USG channels. Since Pubs provides free content,  the products are often copied and repurposed.    Most of the publications are or soon will be available on platforms such as Google Books, Amazon Kindles or I-Phone aps, among others.

George Clack, who directs IIP Pubs shared some experience in thinking about a marketing plan for the new media.   First is to indeed have a written plan.   While you have to recognize that the plan will not be carried out in the detail you envision, having a plan allows everybody to riff off something that is organized and thought out.   

This plan, as all plans should, begins with the end in mind.  Interestingly, many planners forget this step and that, paraphrasing the Cheshire Cat, “if you don’t know where you want to go, you will probably end up someplace else.”   But the direction must be light.   We work with creative people and we have to let them be creative in their own ways.  We must also recognize the MOST of the creativity available to us is outside our own organization.  The new media allows us to tap into that creativity – if we allow it.  That is the path Pubs is pursuing, and they are off to a good start.