Seeing The Real Green: Modesto

Modesto, Calif. is located in Stanislaus County, an area that grows more than 250 commodities, anything and everything from apricots (called “cots” there) to walnuts. In fact, the $1.3 billion agriculture industry employs more than one-third of the population.

But rich farmland is only part of the story in Modesto. After the harvest, much of the produce is often shipped to canneries and processing centers, powered by boilers that are facing tightened emission regulations — particularly as they relate to nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

That’s were I’ve been for the last few days, touring several processing centers and gathering base information for a special report. The report was commissioned by Benz Air Engineering, a company that evaluates power systems and then determines the best combination of new technologies and retrofits to reduce fuel consumption and emissions in the boiler room, which is the heart of any processing center.

What’s especially significant about the work done by Benz Air Engineering is that it allows these centers to maintain peak operations without overly expensive alternative energy solutions, the installation of new boilers, or the additional cost of emission penalties. All of which you and I would eventually pay for at the local grocery store, which is already experiencing double digit price jumps.

While the tour was an eye-opening crash course in mechanical engineering, there was something else that stood out to me. Most public relations and communication professionals aren’t prepared to communicate green, which is why some programs eventually fall flat. Sure, General Motors seems to be doing an adequate job, but green communication requires something more than slapping a green or blue sticker on a company Web site.

The future of green communication is going to require communicators to get their hands dirty at the source while remembering that multiple publics depend on different communication strategies to stay moving in the same direction. As it stands now, I no longer sure the general public knows what it means to be green or that their efforts to preserve the planet might adversely affect the very industry that seems to epitomize green in their minds.

Maybe it's time to forget fancy ideas for now — like Steron’s marketing snafu that overshot on the concept of free energy or cars that run on veggies — and think in terms of what might work with today’s infrastructure. According to Benz Air Engineering, the solution is simple. Increasing plant efficiency will dramatically reduce nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. How much?

Just one of their retrofits reduced the nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions of one boiler from 30 parts per million to 6 parts per million. And, because the boiler is operating more efficiently and burning less fuel while delivering the same output, CO2 was reduced 20 percent. What does that mean? Maybe it means that the backbone of American manufacturing and processing isn’t exclusively reliant on alternative fuels or the increased production of natural resources. Maybe we just need to make more efficient use of the energy we have on hand.

By doing that, it seems to me, plants could not only appreciate an immediate cost savings and financial payback in less than two years, but the overall cost of fossil fuels might level or drop in the short term as the result of diminished demand. At the same time, we all benefit from a greener planet without placing additional hardships on farmers.

In other words, we might not need to polarize environmental communication in the presidential debates between John McCain and Barack Obama. Maybe, we just need to be more efficient with our energy and our communication about it.

Celebrating Mars: Fans Cheer Rumors

Reporting with an exclusive, Michael Ausiello with EW.com just fueled the fire in the hearts of Veronica Mars fans. According to Ausiello, Rob Thomas had an impromptu meeting with Kristen Bell to discuss a Veronica Mars movie.

"It's very tough to focus on it right now with two pilots on my plate," Thomas told EW. He is reworking a resurrected series called Cupid and an adaptation of the New Zealand series called Outrageous Fortune. "But as soon as I have any free time, that's my top priority."

The reason for the continued interest in Veronica Mars? The fan base, which assembled too late to save the series, has maintained that slow and steady is the pace to see Veronica Mars on, this time, the silver screen. They seem to right too. Bell admitted she misses the show and is bullish (while pretending to be modest) on the idea.

I started covering the fan base efforts more than a year ago as fans from three different cancelled series came together using social media to save their shows. At the time, Veronica Mars seemed the second most likely to succeed and a different show seemed to be an easy favorite as long as the fans stayed focused.

Things quickly began to change from there, demonstrating that social media is indeed merely a tool with mixed results that seem dependent on leadership. By the end of the year, Veronica Mars fans were able to exhibit that they had exactly that.

Sure, they may have smartly given up on short-term hopes to see the series return, and began to focus on making new fans while winning over the hearts of everyone they came into contact with in much the same way that BrownCoats gave Firefly its shot on the silver screen.

While Neptune Rising is still fairly far off from hearing a Veronica Mars movie has received a green light, everything seems to be working in the fans’ favor. In short, they were able to help boost Veronica Mars from a fan favorite into something that resembles a true future franchise.

It’s not out of the question that Thomas could take Veronica Mars anywhere — picking up where season three left off, her first year at the academy, with her own start-up detective agency, or anywhere for that matter.

Melting Credibility: Bigfoot Hunters

So Matt Whitton and his friend Rick Dyer, a former Georgia corrections officer, supposedly chanced onto the remains of Bigfoot and decided to share their story on YouTube. More recently, they held a press conference.

"It's not a human, it's not an ape," Whitton, a Georgia police officer, told the media.

Whitton was right about that. It wasn’t human or an ape, but a rubber suit designed to drive traffic to their Web site and, presumably, to an online store where you can purchase a shirt or spend upwards of $5,000 (currently) to be taken to the site where they found, er, planted their phony evidence.

The Bigfoot hunters are probably not laughing now. The police department intends to fire Whitton; they will likely be charged with fraud; and the messages filling up their guest book are less than sympathetic.

While Whitton and Dyer reportedly admitted it to be a hoax after being confronted, they have since fled. And most people, it seems, consider Tom Biscardi, who was allegedly defrauded for $50,000 or more, in on the hoax.

Perhaps most disappointed of all was Jeffrey Turner, chief of police in Clayton County, Georgia. He had granted Whitton medical leave after the officer was shot while attempting to stop a robbery.

“This turn of events from hero to someone who defrauds a nation is just baffling. I don’t know how he got from one point to the other,” Turner told the reporters. “For someone to do a complete three-sixty like that, I can't explain it."

Hmmm … maybe those Bigfoot hunters were led to believe that “all publicity is good publicity.”

Flattening Writers: Dave Fleet

Dave Fleet is a communications professional based in Toronto with a self described passion for social media. I was recently reintroduced to his blog via The Buzz Bin after Mike Nelson included it among the posts selected for “Great Blogs of Fire!”

Dave Fleet has a good blog, no question. But the highlighted post? It’s only close.

How Might Friedman’s Flat World Affect The Public Relations Industry?

Fleet takes journalist Thomas Friedman’s sixth chapter and applies it to public relations and other communication fields, establishing that public relations can stay ahead an increasingly competitive global market by anchoring and becoming really adaptable.

The second point, adaptability, has always been part of the communication equation and has very little to do with flattening. Public relations, along with communication, is one giant exercise in staying ahead of the curve.

But the first point, anchoring, can easily be misinterpreted. It deserves some check and balance. While there is some truth that anchoring (knowing your market) provides some advantages, it can also diminish your competitive value on the global stage and tie you, sometimes fatally, to one market.

For example, although I would not classify my company as a public relations firm, our out-of-market and international assignments are expanding, not retracting. In other words, it’s working in reverse. And it suggests to me that communication remains wide open, requiring companies to expand in both directions — local presence and international market penetration.

Knowing this also leads me to the other portion of his post that caught my attention. Despite the prevalence of English overseas, writing is not so at risk.

Sure, it’s possible. As the editor of an international trade publication several years ago, I worked with more than 40 writers located all over the world. We still tap the best of them on select assignments from time to time.

However, after contracting overseas writers during that five years, I learned to appreciate that the prevalence of English and the quality of English writers does not necessarily go hand in hand. In fact, often times, some of the best assignments came from English and Canadian writers living abroad in places like India and Hong Kong. Don’t get me wrong, we worked with Indian and Chinese freelancers too. Nationality wasn’t an indicator of a great writer, which is why I think Fleet might be upside down in placing writers at risk.

Still, there are distinctions. For example, there is a significant difference between a correspondent who can write a decent article and a copywriter who understands how to fuse strategic communication, key contrast points, demographics, and psychographics into advertising copy well enough that it doesn’t read like one-way communication.

More to the point, I think what Fleet touches on is that there are many businesses out there, especially public relations firms, that entrust too much communication — releases and correspondence — to unseasoned professionals and interns without enough oversight by senior writers.

When you consider the impact that communication can have on a brand over the long term, I think it would be a mistake to hire writers based on nothing more than the number of dictionaries they happen to own and a price point. So no, writers are not at risk as long as companies continue to understand that the ability to write and the ability to generate results with words are not the same thing.

Trending The Inevitable: Retail Leaves Print

It’s no surprise that Kohl’s and JCPenney are reevaluating their newspaper-circular strategy. online advertising has been chasing newspapers for some time.

Losing even a small share of two retail giants will hurt. Last year, JCPenney spent an estimated $149 million in newspaper advertising. Kohl’s spent $136 million. Like many companies, these two retailers are finding that online marketing works.

Since July, JCPenney has seen steady increases in site traffic since July. Kohl’s is up slightly during the same period. The appeal of both sites seems to be their ability to attract online shoppers and entice online window shoppers, with the latter group sourcing online catalogues before visiting brick-and-mortar stores.

Their reasons are simple enough. They can save travel time and money when they know which retail store is having a sale or what particular styles might be in stock. In other words, consumers don’t have to visit four or five stores in person.

Newspapers aren’t dead. Not by a long shot.

While newspapers continue to be hit, they aren’t dead. Early online adopters such as The New York Times seem to be well ahead of the curve. Sure, online advertising revenue has yet to make up the diminishing print revenue, even for The New York Times as Scott Karp, creator of Publishing 2.0, pointed out. Stuff that the Washington Post has been covering even longer.

However, it seems to me that newspapers will eventually make up the losses as online advertising doubles in the next five years, spurred by the realization that they need their own version of product placement — advertising buys that are tied to specific subjects and stories.

In other words, if newspapers can dominate search terms and continue to lead as sourced content, then advertisers will be there. It makes more sense for marketers than the current model, which used to work when people spent better than a few minutes glancing at headlines or waiting for a friend to prompt them to read an actual story. It requires some to rethink media buys.

Ergo, instead of JCPenney relying on newspapers to carry a truncated circular to your door, it relies more heavily on online newspapers to provide content along with direct messages that are designed to entice online readers to visit an entire online catalog. (For example, a back-to-school sale advertisement seems suited to stories about education or fashion.)

Done right, a future JCPenney site will not only provide you the option to buy online, but also let you know which brick-and-mortar store near you has that specific item in stock, and maybe which size. Who knows? You might even be able to place a hold on the item before you pick it up.

Measuring Potential: Intent Over Industry Trend

Despite some bullish interruptions that online advertising is exempt from economic pressures, eMarketer has scaled back its estimates for online marketing. The firm adjusted its online advertising forecast for 2008 from $25.9 billion to $24.9 billion, and social network advertising from $1.6 billion to $1.4 million.

However, it’s hard to jump on the doom and gloom bandwagon based on this adjustment and Google's failure to meet analyst projections.

Online advertising is still projected to be up $3.7 billion from 2007, representing a 17 percent increase in online advertising revenue. Google still demonstrated a 35 percent increase in profits during the second quarter.

In other words, online advertising is growing while other media continues to be earmarked for additional cuts. Traditionally, newspapers have been the hardest hit along with network radio.

In looking at all the stories, companies might consider shooting for the middle. Personally, I would never develop a marketing strategy based on media trends over the media’s ability to meet the communication goals of a company. So in some ways, economic pressures help marketers because it increases a demand for accountability online and off. Blind benefits are not enough.

For example, one recent Web site project we completed for a start-up community relations firm had two primary functions — to summarize the full scope of service after meeting prospective clients and to prompt calls from prospective clients after being found on the Web. Long term, the consulting company will employ a blog and other social media tools to expand its presence online and open more channels for two-way communication.

As the program expands, targeted print ads and online advertisements can assist in driving traffic to the blog. While this is only a portion of their plan, none of it follows industry trends as much as intent. And each step has easily measured goals and objectives, which we think is important in demonstrating tangible value.