Eye-popping Predictions: The Genius Of Perception

The newest trend in communication seems to be the art of prediction.

A quick search on Google reveals some 15.4 million results that contain the word “predicts,” with more than 15,800 appearing in media stories — 400 in the last 24 hours alone. Prediction racks up another 11,000 hits, many trumped up with words like eye-popping, chilling, and current (which gives a nod to the idea that predications change, frequently).

Yep. The hypothetical hyperbole, which we often advise clients to avoid, is king of the hill. It’s become easier than ever to find someone with a crystal ball.

• The Alliance Trust predicts that household expenditures in Britain over the next 12 months will continue to decline as the credit crunch continues to squeeze on people’s finances.

• The Rage predicts that Carrie, in the movie “Sex and the City,” will either fall down a manhole as she rushes to meet the girls for brunch or asphyxiate herself with a Fendi boa.

• Researchers can now predict which button a subject will press 60 percent of the time, slightly better than a random guess.

• The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) predicts a “silent tsunami” in which high food prices across the globe could force as many as 100 million people into hunger.

The latter is significant at the moment because it’s partly true. Increasing demand from developing countries and poor crop yields are to blame for rising rice prices, up 70 percent this year.

However, the reporting of rice shortage predications is causing restaurants to stock up on and hoard rice and major supermarkets to place limits on the product, which has caused even more demand, making the world rice shortage an almost certain self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can make predications too. It’s easy.

There are several great ways to bend perception into reality, but two have become all my all-time favorites.

The non-committal prediction.

The weather will continue to change for a very long time.

The genius of this prediction is that it is no prediction at all, but rather simply a statement of fact, much like predicting a recession. Sooner or later, it happens. You know, like the CIBC predicting gas to hit $7 per gallon by 2012. Heck, I can do better than that. I’ll guess $10 a gallon, unless we do something about it.

The extended timeline prediction.

Within the next 50 or 100 years, something will happen, anything really.

The genius of this is that you can float a long-term prediction, based upon any number of qualifiers, and have a slightly better chance than a random guess. If it happens, you claim credit as a genius. If it does not happen, no one will remember anyway.

Personally, I think it would be just dandy if journalists started rating predictions on their apparent validity and then giving them a less serious, but more accurate terminology — wild guesses. There are only a paltry 58 of those.

Tagging Games: Seven Useless Facts And 12 Great Blogs

A few days ago, Michelle from Monarch Health Promotions, tagged me with a meme that asks I share seven useless facts about me and then tag 12 more blogs, asking the authors to do the same. Her blog as the complete details.

Seven Useless Facts About Rich

1. I worked as stage foreman for a few years in college. The most memorable concert was Pink Floyd, an outdoor show in Sacramento. The 8-story stage took all night to strike in the rain.
2. I also worked as an assistant manager at a 7-Eleven. I was almost robbed at gunpoint by four teenagers. The police officers stopped them at the door, after one of officers reportedly decided against risking a hostage situation.
3. The first time I met Rich Little was at his home in Las Vegas. He’s the same offstage as on.
4 I’m about to serve by third three-year term as a governor-appointed state commissioner for Nevada Volunteers, which administers Americorps programs in our state.
5. I’ve worked on four major hotel casino openings while living in Las Vegas, including New York, New York Hotel & Casino. I wrote their trademarked slogan “The Greatest City In Las Vegas” as part of their pre-opening video.
6. I used to be an avid gamer, a side effect of working with Westwood Studios, the company that developed Command & Conquer and several other popular titles, before they were bought by EA Games.
7. I’ve won more than 100 paper weights in advertising, public relations, and communication. They are no fun to dust.

You know, I’ve always had mixed feelings about memes (pronounced “mi:ms” and I sometimes joke the better pronunciation is “me-me” because that is what most are all about) and professionals generally avoid them (unless they are thinly disguised as cross-blog communication conversations). I do too, but every now and again, I’m reminded that professional and corporate blogs are only a small sliver of the social media scene.

The McCann Universal study, mentioned on Monday, reminded me that 63.5 percent of all blogs are personal, with the majority of the balance evolving as citizen journalism.

So here are the twelve blogs that I am tagging (with no obligation on their part) because they frequently come up on our radar and any blogger — communicators or otherwise — might learn something from them. (No order.)

Twelve Great Blogs On Our Radar

1. Lucky Girl Trading Co. has employed social media to expand her gemstone and jewelry hobby into a growing studio business.

2. Romance Books provides mini reviews and author insights, with a focus on books by Avon Romance, which is a division of HarperCollins Publishers. I don't read romance books, but I get what they're doing.

3. Margie and Edna’s Basement began as satire revolving around the show Jericho from two “elderly” ladies. It has evolved into a bit about everything they like (or not).

4. Vubx highlights any number of interesting, odd, and creative gadgets from wooden phones to flying robot cameras.

5. Thomas Laupstad is a photographer from Northern Norway. I’ve become a fan over the past year.

6. About Offshoring by Remi Vespa features and opinions about IT outsourcing for small and medium-sized businesses. Very smart stuff.

7. Truebluetrain by Rob Schultz has been documenting his trials and tribulations on what he calls an entrepreneurial journey.

8. An Unsuspecting Notebook, penned by Chungyen Chang, shares something about life, writing, and her personal journey to find something greater.

9. RMO focuses on what it takes to be a successful Internet entrepreneur and what seems to work online.

10. Lisa’s World is a little bit everything weird, interesting, or funny. (Warning: this one is very addictive reading.)

11. Geek Mom Mashup has built her blog around intelligent conversation, moderately geeky tech talk, and very funny mom stories.

12. Designer's Depot provides a fun mix of photography tips, design hints, and artist reviews.

Checking Reality: Green For A Day?

For all the success of Earthday, there seems to be some cause for concern too . I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s like over commercialization and meaningless messages at the same time.

"Every company is out there touting 'we're green' -- it's the new requirement for being a good corporate citizen," Allen Adamson, managing director of WPP Group's branding consultancy Landor Associates, told The Wall Street Journal. "The noise level is so high now. The first few people into it had some benefit. Now it's a cost of entry.”

The Wall Street Journal article was something I thought about today while meeting with one of our clients — an engineering firm that retrofits boilers, making them more energy efficient and environmentally friendly. Enough so that one retrofit is equivalent to planting 700,000 trees. It’s important because of what they do, but it’s not their only message. Their work also achieves payback in less than one year.

And then I thought of some other messages I had seen today: Subaru of America is donating 160 cherry trees across the country; Nokia launched a program to make recycling mobile phones easier. SmarterTravel highlighted “green” travel designations on their Web site.

While there is nothing really wrong with any of it, it does makes me wonder.

Do these more frivolous pursuits for media attention do any good? Or do they merely distract from people and companies who do things daily? Does seeing a commercial with two Anheuser-Busch employees talking about the environment make you want to buy the beer? Was Wal-Mart really smart to declare April "Earth Month?" Should we all send Earthday cards around the planet from now on?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s the difference between participation and engagement. You can celebrate Earthday today and/or you can do something about the environment daily.

We’re dropping some artificial turf in the backyard tomorrow, which makes sense when you live in a desert. (Water conservation is a big deal here.) I suppose I could have issued a news release and called it an Earthday solution.

But given we can only communicate so many messages about ourselves and hope to have any one of them be remembered, there wasn’t much point in pretending. Huh. Maybe we could call that message conservation.

Right on. Let's make Earthday daily, but not a marketing gimmick or public relations stunt. We have enough of those already.

Tinkering With Definitions: Social Media Engagement

According to Universal McCann, a full-service media communications company, there is no slowdown in social media adoption.

Globally, 73 percent of Internet users are reading blogs with 48 percent seeking out consumer generated content. In some countries, like South Korea, new media has already edged out old media with 77 percent of Internet users reading blogs and only 58 percent reading the mainstream press.

But here’s the rub. As Adweek pinpointed in the Universal McCann study, consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe are more likely to be passive social media participants — sharing videos and reading blogs — while those in emerging markets are more likely to be content creators.

Social Media Engagement Is Not A Measure

According to the study, more than 60 percent of Internet users in the U.S. read blogs, but only 26 percent are blog content creators. In contrast, more than 70 percent of Internet users blog in South Korea and China.

"By and large, in the U.S. we're a country of voyeurs," said David Cohen, U.S. director of digital communications at Universal McCann, which conducted the study. "We love to watch and consume content created by others, but there's a fairly small group that are doing that creation -- unlike China, which is a country of creators."

This might ruffle some feathers among social media experts that have inflated the “value” of social media engagement (comments, bookmarks, and links from other bloggers) over other forms of engagement (regular readers, tangible actions, and changes in behavior). The reason: companies that create sites reliant on user created content only appeals a fraction of total audience and not necessarily for the right reasons.

It also hints at why the sudden surge in “my” URL Web sites might be the wrong illusion. Simply adding “my” to a Web site does not make it automatically more personal.

Sure, the idea worked for some and there is no dispute that people want to feel connected to the sites they visit. However, one must always take care to remember that the participants they are catering to are most likely the choir and not the parishioners (never mind those who never made it into the service).

Engagement Takes Many Forms, Not Just One

If we consider that there are approximately three passive visitors for every one participant, then the most vocal of the total audience might not always be representative of the total population. In other words, if companies define engagement too narrowly, then they might inadvertently disengage passive participants — people who are engaged and take their actions offline.

It’s something to think about, especially because there is still ample wiggle room between online traffic measures. Enough so that digital-advertising executives have long doubted comScore and Nielsen Online because they already know that there are research gaps. Even less reliable is Alexa, despite being the favorite among bloggers to compare scores and its frequency of use among ranking algorithms.

The bottom line is that engagement takes many forms. Some people might leave a comment or cite what you write on their blogs. But then there are also those who might read a company blog faithfully and only take offline actions.

For example, the last time I had a question about a home repair, I sourced the company and found the information. I didn’t blog about it nor did I leave a comment, but I did use the information to get the job done.

While I might be counted as being engaged by their social media consultant, I most certainly might have been more engaged than the person who had left a comment that disagreed with their solution. You see, unlike the commenter who theorized, I actually did the task and found that it worked.

Advertising Empty: Recession Creates Cuts

While The Wall Street Journal speculates that the economy might be hurting Google, others are already pointing to across-the-board cuts in advertising and public relations. Even some advertising messages have changed, skewing toward sales and savings, as an admission that times are tough.

“Advertising and the economy seem to go hand in hand,” Bob Liodice, president of the Association of National Advertisers, told Reuters. “Really, the fact that the economy is weakening is going to have an impact on the industry in the short term.”

There is some truth to that. Companies frequently find that advertising budgets are the first to be cut amidst worries of an economic downturn. The reason, which was also attributed to the 9.3 percent drop in Google ad clicks, is because people are more likely to window shop and less likely to buy.

But does that really mean companies need to cut corners on communication? It depends on the company, but not always if one recalls the wisdom of Bruce Barton, co-founder of BDO, which later merged with Batten Co. to become BBDO.

“In good times, people want to advertise; in bad times, they have to,” he said.

This might be especially true when some economic reports remain mixed. But even if the reports weren’t mixed, cutting communication budgets isn’t always the most prudent choice.

Hundreds of companies and products have been successfully launched during recessions, most notably Trader Joe’s, MTV, and the iPod. (Copywrite, Ink. is also a recession-born company, 1991.)

In almost every case, these companies increased their presence in the marketplace while everyone else cut back. Doing so increases market share, especially against larger competitors, strengthening the company’s position when the economy turns around. They also did not resort to distress advertising, sweeping discounts, or “I feel your pain” advertising, recognizing short-term messages sometimes erode long-term brands.

Of course, that is not to say that most communication and advertising plans don’t need some refinement (most do, whether there is a recession or not). And I don’t necessarily think such refinement means jumping on the rally cry of social media. Social media is better used as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement tool as some suggest.

Keep that in mind when reading those who suggest social media is the most viable solution during a downturn, a concept that seems to be largely based on the logic of Forrester Research a few months ago.

Silicon Ally Insider Henry Blodget provides a better balance. Social media remains mixed because it requires more nurturing than traditional communication.

As I mentioned in March, there are two kinds of people who have a higher propensity to get into car accidents: those who never think they will and those who always think they will. The idea is to hit the middle.

Blogging For Rights: BlogCatalog.com

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” — Thomas Jefferson

About a year ago, Antony Berkman, president of BlogCatalog.com, had an idea. He noted the media attention other social networks received were often based on raising investment capital.

He decided to do something else. He wanted to raise social capital instead.

“We had yet to see an online social community come together to raise funds for a good cause,” said Berkman. “So we saw it as an opportunity to empower and recognize bloggers who collectively focus their blogs for good.”

While Berkman says he wasn’t sure the first campaign would succeed — one that raised funds that directly benefited more than 1,000 students across the United States — he is happy to find Bloggers Unite has come full circle. One year and four campaigns later, BlogCatalog members hopes to inspire again.

This time, on May 15, bloggers are being asked to tackle a topic selected by members — Bloggers Unite For Human Rights. Although no one knew it a few months ago, the timing for a human rights social awareness campaign couldn’t be better. This year is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

For most of us, human rights — life, liberty, justice, and freedom of expression — seem so commonplace that they are taken for granted. Yet, all over the world and sometimes just out of sight in our own backyards, human rights are tread with utter disregard. This is a great opportunity to speak out for those who cannot.

In Durfar, Sudan, women and children are raped and brutally attacked by government forces and militia. In South America, human trafficking continues to be increasing concern. In Zimbabwe, journalists are being arrested. And all over the world, censorship, from the Internet to everything, is becoming the rule and not the exception.

What can you do about it? Bloggers Unite For Human Rights.

Dedicate a post on any issue related to Human Rights this May 15 and encourage others to do the same. You can find several badges to display on your blog or submit new badges to Bloggers Unite.

Copywrite, Ink. will be recognizing several top bloggers who join the campaign and list their posts on the Bloggers Unite Discussion Group on May 15. Please give it some thought and consider how ten, one hundred, ten thousand, or tens of thousands can make a difference.