WX Talk

I don't know how many of you are involved in decisions regarding your home events, but these are the times that try men's souls. Seriously. There is nothing more difficult for an administrator than school closures. Full disclosure -- I'm not in that loop anymore here, but I've been at that small table and want to share a little insight.

First, you are never right. It didn't snow enough -- why did we leave early/close school/delay opening -- or worse it snowed/rained/iced/natural disastered more than forecast -- why did you make us show up at work/class/etc. You are always working with the best estimates of your professionals, and making calls in the interest of the greatest number of people. It's a tough job.

A moment about snow. As a professional meteorologist what is the forecast he dreads the most. It's not tornadic storms. It's not hurricane landfall. It's not even long range climate. It's snow. Or, more precisely, winter precipitation. How much, what kind, what duration -- because the forecaster is not just working in three dimensions. He's really in four or five. Huh?

Consider these factors. The forecaster has to know where the moisture is. That's hard on a spring day with flooding by itself. He has to know where the winds are and how that pressure change will bring in the moisture. Factor in the movement of the cold air to cause that moisture to first fall from the atmosphere. Again, tough enough in summer. Now, you need to know the freezing line at the surface -- above 32 for a long period of time, it won't stick to roads and elevated surface. Below 32 -- how long? Day or night? Got that? Now, what's the temp aloft. How "deep" is the cold air. Is there a slice of warmer air near the ground? Your snow melts into rain. If it's higher, it might refreeze into sleet. If it's near the ground, the rain can't form to snow, but freezes on contact.

Again, much respect to the guys that have to figure that out. But then you hand off that best estimate to a public servant who must act on the forecast. Again, tough and thankless.

I give this advice to all of you -- close in and distant. Do you have the decision support pages of your regional National Weather Service office bookmarked? Not to make this a rant or endorsement, but almost all the data that goes into anyone else's forecast starts with your local NWS office. Just like I'd tell my history students, get as close to the original documents as you can and your interpretation of the past is best -- same here.

We are blessed to have at Tulsa NWS some of the leading edge guys on severe weather products, including a new tool called an Ice Damage Index. Pretty cool for decision makers because it is a graphic mashup of the data involved in icing events -- precip, temp, wind -- and turns it into factors. A "2" means limited power outages and damage anticipated; a "4" means longer term outages due to lines down, roads blocked, significant tree damage. And yes, in 2009, this product accurately predicted the 4 and 5 impacts we took with our ice event.

So, for my regional followers bookmark this Tulsa NWS decision page. Pretty graphical, nice little "Chiclets" of color to give warnings. Click on the threat and you get additional graphics and text. For our region, this runs year around, so when we get to tornado season we obviously don't see ice -- it becomes hail threat, etc.
Back to that small group -- safety comes first, and as much of a pain as it may be for extra days in the summer (especially when you're talking public schools) sitting in class in June beats full-body traction or worse in January because you slid off the road.

If you aren't here in Tulsa NWS region -- or you don't know what office you belong to -- go to the National Weather Service main site and search into region and district, then find that "warning decision" page or similar title to bookmark.

Once you get that info, it comes to the public servants to make decisions with that intel. Especially when you're public schools (or universities), safety is going to go first. Sure, no one wants to be sitting in class in June making up days, but it beats the heck out of full traction or worse in January.

So be safe out there.

Social Media Stats

No one loves a good anecdote or stat more than your humble correspondent. Check out these 16 from Arik Hanson.

My fave?

The change in social media use among Baby Boomers 55-64 rose from 9% in Dec. 2008 to 43% in Dec. 2010

Proving again that while 35 and under is a rapidly growing market, we overlook the impact of the internet across the entire spectrum of a fan base at our own peril.

Read Later via Instapaper

A preloaded note while we're running around prepping national signing day. This is a killer app -- Instapaper. It takes any website page, converts it to iSpace friendly text and web, then sets it to download for reading later. I use it for long articles and for stuff to catch up on during flights, etc. It is not just Apple based, works with Kindle and straight browser on-line. Don't forget to add the plug in to your browsers -- then just hit the bookmark and it saves out to your account for use later.

Why Media Relations Should Own the Social Media Strategy

A title that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has been following along, and today's entry is a cribbing of the excellent PR-based view of the same by Chris Lake. Lake's blog entry -- Why your social media strategy shouldn't be owned by a PR agency -- walks though many of the concepts that have been discussed here the past two or three months -- that the PR agency (in our world read: anyone outside athletics) isn't going to reflect the tone and culture of the corporation better than the people in the corporation.

I'm a big fan of the second and third points Lake makes up front: that you cannot fake it (social media) and you have to share the load. The team approach is best, and when that team is enabled across the groups which impact customer service -- in athletics that would be media relations, marketing, foundation/booster and ticketing -- you have a great chance to begin moving from playing around in social media to mobilizing it to your greater benefit.

Team approach means building that interoperable group, and being willing to let them speak for the organization. We've seen study after study that the fans are wanting more interaction with more voices. That's tough to accept in some ways.

Back to the outside/agency approach. I agree with Lake -- the people that know you, are well, you. When too much "branding" is applied, it can appear formula driven, and nothing turns those in the social realm off quicker than faux social. As Lake points out:

social media is a cultural and organizational challenge for most businesses of any scale

Or, as he his much more blunt in the next sentence:

Only by embracing engagement and by becoming more open - both internally and externally - can a business transform how it is perceived in public

But why is media relations the best place to start the team approach? My opinion -- these are the people with the deepest knowledge of the organization because they have to write about the department from all angles. They write game stories and advances, they do the marketing type stories often (free tickets, season packages on sale, etc.), they work with the media and as a result get a pulse on what they are interested in, they have to know the overall department structure (and often are the ones who may have written policies, procedures or other manuals -- so they know them forward and backward). Most of all, they are skilled in looking over the horizon, considering the impact of a statement beyond tonight's event and they are trained to deal with real-time reporting and crisis management.

Speaking of the crisis, Lake had a particularly apt passage about the PR world and outside agencies:

Nowadays a crisis will erupt on social media platforms, and there’s no way that a PR firm can ‘manage’ it. Twitter, as a broadcast medium, is in the hands of the people who use it, and it cannot be manipulated by PRs in the same way that a newspaper can be. The PR agency can provide guidance on how a brand should react in difficult circumstances, but the response needs to come from the brand itself. Twitter is a personal medium, a publishing platform for consumers, and they will use it to ask questions and complain in public. And questions and complaints are normally best answered by customer services reps, not PRs

Answering those questions, in other words as CoSIDA is fond of saying these days, is best served by a college athletic department's the strategic communicators. Chris Syme has something just this week on these same lines of creating your strategy on Facebook to begin your journey to an overall social media policy.

In the team, you need written standards of how to communicate, as surely as you'd have a style guide for a traditional media release or department logo sheet. Again, the leaders in this area should be the folks who have trained via PR or journalism degrees to be efficient communicators.

This is contrary to most athletic departments across the country. Social media usually belongs to marketing, or is shared with marketing and perhaps a dedicated social media person or media relations. And it often is simply abandoned by media relations.

Perhaps it is time to rethink those relationships.

First Apple TV Placements

I told everyone that Apple TV was a point of emphasis for us here at Arkansas, and now that I've got the bowl game finally behind us and before the rush starts with signing day Wednesday, I'm thrilled that we got our first two offerings on-line.

Neither were purpose-made for Apple TV -- pure repurposing of what we're already doing for the website, and had been reposting at the YouTube channel (ArkRazorbacks).

That said, we are shooting in High Def for the Courtside with Tom Collen women's hoops show, and shot as much of the Sugar Bowl video podcasts as we could. Interestingly, we had to take a feed from the press conferences, and they were not feed in HD -- otherwise, our whole packages would be HD. And, no laughing at the guy who was doing the stand-ups for the first five days.

I think they look really crisp and clean on the Apple TV device, and they are as easy to pull down and watch as anything else you might dig through a DVR/Cable/Sat box to find. This is why I'm seeing Apple TV and the follow on units (most notably, Google TV when they get their price and act together better) become another one of those "death of the internet" concepts.

The best part? How hard is it now for our women's basketball staff to let a potential recruit know that hey, we've got this podcast out there on iTunes? Super easy.

Social Media Audits

While waiting for the arrival of the next winter storm, here's a thought about your social media strategy. College athletics is the most guilty -- mainly due to lack of resources or time -- but the idea of a social media audit before retooling or launching a strategy is a good idea. Here's some quick tips from PRSA's feed earlier in the week. Priya Ramesh writes about not shooting blindly at social media.

And if there isn't much else in this space for the rest of the week, well, you know the snow got me or I've run out of fuel for the genny.

More About the "E"

From the Indiana University sports journalism center, a thoughtful column from Eric Deggans about the increasing entertainment news nature of our sports reportage.

If the story seems true, nobody gets sued and it’s juicy enough, we don’t really care how the story came to light; we just want to be entertained.

While Deggans makes the Farve-Deadspin story the axis of this universe, how many stories can you apply that pull quote to these days?

What is Public Relations

Picked up from the CoSIDA weekly newsletter, Rosanna Fisk writing about a counter-info project of PRSA on Image versus Substance, specifically taking on The Economist for pot shots at the growth of PR related hiring and the decline of journalism positions -- thus in turn leading to the end of Western civilization. Fisk's Tweetaway:

"public relations is not about image; it’s about reputation, trust and credibility. Advertising . . . is about image—the visual, the look, the controlled viewpoint. "

Interesting point, although one might be hard pressed to convince lay persons that image isn't a key part of PR. I get where she is going, and I've argued for some time that we have growing in the near term is branded journalism.

Yes, technically a sports information contact who is writing for the institution's website and then sending that information off to another media outlet as a "press release" is operating as a PR person. But what Fisk is really going for in her quote applies best there. If you're serving as the "reporter" of events, to use Fisk's phrase, your "reputation, trust and credibility" is wrapped up in how that story is written. If it is filled with "happy talk" and makes too much effort to downplay negative aspects of an event, it begins immediate distrust and damage to the reputation of both the individual writer and the institution.

I do agree with Fisk -- that reputation takes years to build. What I caution here, you can throw it away with a few stories. This is particularly apparent in sports, where it seems there is a little less tolerance for the practice of spin from politics. Fewer colleges or universities continue the practice of not writing stories about losses -- the first and most obvious way to undermine. Not leading with the result is also fading. We can't hide from defeat. We can explain it -- taking care to not look too much like excuse-making.

I feel for the journalists, particularly at the local and non-revenue sport level. They are being cut left and right as the media outlets try to maximize their profit centers (and overlook the Long Tail market). People will seek out the information and fill the void. If branded journalism operations try to be more like the myth that The Economist is perpetuating, the readers will head to the friends and neighbors social media network -- which by the way they are more inclined to believe than either the institution or the media.

Reinforcing the Hymnal

If for no reason than the graphic, click over to Sally Falkow's piece on Corporate Spokespeople Getting their Mojo Back. Wish I had this on Sunday when I was making my church analogy to the crowd approach to spreading the word on your organization. Falkow make many of the same points, and adds as one of her keys for 2011 PR groups:

The role of your employees is to engage in the conversation.

Falkow picks up a quote from Neal Fleiger that made me think twice: Does our fan base look first to a search engine for answers before going to the legacy or digital media for information? Fleiger's point being you need those multiple social media voices to increase the chance to being caught in the Googleplex.

Corporate reputations depend ever more on trust. People are looking for quality products, trust, transparency, and employee welfare.

Sound like something we've talked about before? It's because more and more the industry is beating the drum about employee happiness as the key to social media success.

Falkow says one of her 2011 keys for clients: social media training "for as many employees as possible" and notes that Dell, who we've talked about here an in presentations as one of the leaders in getting ahead of social media and digital media trends as a corporation, put 5,000 of its staff through social media training recently.

@ArkRazorbacks has Klout

Picking up on the CoSIDA note today and following the links to The Chronicle of Higher Education's story about a new ranking website for Twitter reach called Klout. Klout declared Stanford the top influential university on Twitter.

On the one hand, a solid metric here. On the other, well, I am proud to announce that not only is @ArkRazorbacks a "Thought Leader" -- which I of course believe we are -- the Razorbacks have the same Klout score as Harvard, Wisconsin and Syracuse at 64.

That's not the Crimson, the Badgers and the Orange. That's the university itself.

BaylorProud, the quite aggressive social media campaign leader from Baylor, is third in score at 59 for the top 10 by Klout. That's a better comparison to us. Just checking a few other random schools, Nebraska athletics was also a 64.

But not a lot: Arkansas leads the SEC with Kentucky and Auburn close at 63, and also thought leaders. Florida was a 58, Tennessee at 57, Georgia a 53, LSU a 52.

I'd guess we'll see a athletic list from Klout shortly.

ADDENDUM: Here's the SEC main athletic feeds as of this morning -- as a dynamic listing, I'm sure it's subject to change.

FEED NAME	KLOUT SCORE	KLOUT CLASSIFICATION
@ArkRazorbacks	64	Thought Leader
@AUAthletics	63	Thought Leader
@UKAthleticsNews	63	Thought Leader
@UAAthletics	61	Specialist
@GatorZoneNews	58	Specialist
@UTAthletics	57	Specialist
@GamecocksOnline	56	Thought Leader
@UGAAthletics	53	Thought Leader
@LSUSports	52	Specialist
@OleMissNow	51	Thought Leader
@MStateAthletics	34	Specialist
@VUCommodores	27	Explorer

Past Twitter Reminder

Missed this back-link in yesterday's Twitter note, but it's worth remembering that Twitter is news, but not always journalism.

What Twitter Isn't

Amen to Lauren Dugan with her 3 Things Most People Don't Understand About Twitter. Especially to her No. 1 point: Twitter is not a social network. This is why I have preached and preached it is a real-time reporting system. You can fake the interaction that comes with a true social system like Facebook. Twitter's primary strength is distribution, particularly to a mobile network. It's a generic push alert that RSS never really was and the promise of Topix and other web-based "personal newspapers" never delivered in the late 1990s-early 2000s.

You know what -- I can take Lauren down to the Tweetable nugget from her post:

"You don’t sign up for Twitter to socialize – you sign up to find information."

I hesitate to say more -- this is one of those links that requires little elucidation.

But as a shameless reminder of a constant problem I see every day, don't babble on the Twitter and keep in mind that it's reporting, but not always journalism.

Well, There You Pad

Looking back at early comments about the pad's role in our news distribution future, here's the latest development as my regional/local paper is launching its new free iPad specific app. Downloading later tonight, but I suspect it will operate like the website -- you must be a paying subscriber to read full stories, especially those that are proprietary content -- but the app itself is free.

I'd highly advocate that model -- as we did with iHog -- as we build forward. I foresee a "news reader" of our top content working a lot like Washington Post's app, or like Flipboard, to give the user a pad atmosphere. Content wise, the vast majority of the info is the same, just re-engineered into a new layout format. Cost wise, the world is trying to be subscription.

Think of it as two storefronts for your website -- one that is graphically based (read: Recruiting!) and one that is news based.

Two Ends of the Spectrum

No big surprise as they were taken off guard first by the Twitter revolution, Iran is forming its own cyber cop squad. Bit of a late story, I sense, as they did become extremely adept at knocking down proxy servers and other means of masking communications after the Nada incident. That they are after whoever dropped the Stuxnet virus on their industrial complex -- I'm thinking that's more cyber military than cyber cop, but Boston.com wants to cast it that way.

At the polar opposite end of the real world, the Pope has issued a limited blessing to social networks. Benedict made one important point brought out in the Reuters story that is worth noting by anyone, not just Cathloics:

"It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives."

Well put.

Three More Reasons on Facebook

Another great clip coming through via PRSA, today a lovely screed about the Five Reasons Facebook Won't Replace Your Website. Everything Maggie McGary says is spot on, but here's three more reasons why college athletic team websites won't be replaced with Facebook (or any other social media site).

1) Media guide. The term is rapidly becoming dated, but the repository of your institutional memory needs a static place. Even when this becomes a vbook or other portable digital document, there will always be the need for a storefront to present those items. It is your archives (more in a moment). Don't confuse this with the WIRED argument about the "web is dead" -- just like those who say there is no place for a printed paper version of vital messaging or information.

2) Central point of aggregation. Where can the end user go to get it all at once? YouTube won't have the box score, but plenty of highlights. Flickr isn't going to have the media guide PDF. None of us really let outside sources manage our streaming anyway. Facebook as McGary said severely limits your ability to format, and as we discussed yesterday, who's to say Facebook is here in five more years.

3) Commerce. Facebook isn't set up for purchases -- now -- and do you really want someone else taking a taste off the top of your tee-shirt or DVD sales than is already happening with whichever provider you are using.

Here's where a unified plan is important, and even more so, knowing the specific roles required. The website is the catalog, library, archive, almanac, fixed point of reference. It may not be where the increasingly mobile fan base goes to consume our news, but it will be where they go to look things up later and if correctly integrated, will be where the other items are fed.

The social media tools are where interaction with the fans takes place. Think beyond Facebook -- interactive blogs like CoverItLive or if you so desire real-time places like Twitter. Again, INTERACT with the fans, not just sell to them. The reason why display advertising is disappearing from front-line websites is the research is telling both the content provider and the advertiser that the end users do not like the over pitching. The quickest way to reducing the interaction numbers (likes and comments) is to make everything a pitch to buy something.

Mobile news tools like real-time systems (Twitter) or news reading apps (in our case, something like iHog) deliver info direct to users where they are, especially when incorporating well-managed push notifications via mobile apps.

How Quaint

Found this graphic in my 2006 presentation to the CoSIDA Convention. Do you remember when this was relevant?



Five years ago. We thought MySpace held the world in its hands, and no one really imagined any social networking site having reach that would exceed the U.S. population.

Makes you wonder in this year of The Social Network if in five years we won't be looking back on how quaint that young Zuckerberg kid was.

Where's Your Hymnal?

Through the 1990s, the operations manual for corporate public relations was pretty clear -- speak with one voice through one spokesperson. That worked in the Ptolomey-like world before those darn internets. Now that networking atomizes single points of information distribution and the one-to-many decrees ring about as relevant to the masses as that scientific reference in the previous sentence, where do you turn?

Time to go back to church.

As surely as our current media models are not the product of the new age, but instead a revival of old (perhaps the original) opinion-fueled penny and party press of the 19th and early 20th century, perhaps the most effective paradigm for the large entity seeking to reach out to its constituency can be found in the same place.

Every church has a leader, but only in the most extreme cults of personality do you find a singular voice. There are assistants, lay readers and a choir. For the most part, they work from a single text, and sing from a single hymnal. The most effective religious leaders are the ones that can relate on a personal level with individual parishioners, yet at the same time appeal to the masses of the congregation. While they may hold the central spot within the service, the preacher or priest or devotional leader shares the space with voices are very different, even though they are carrying essentially the same message.

Now -- apply that to your strategic communication here in the oh-so-advanced 21st century. There may be a primary spokesperson -- and it still may be the CEO -- who gives the sermon. But the brands/institutions/teams with the broadest bases employ their lay persons to repeat and amplify that message. Others within the group handle the other tasks of speaking, and those that can sing provide the word according to Team in their unique voices.

Stop The News

How many times have you seen this response to difficult information?





Hey kids, I've got nothing else. Sometimes, you can't improve perfection.

Thought Leadership

One of the reasons arguing for the investment of time in things like social media or real-time reporting is to reach "influencers." Several recent surveys have pointed out that not as many people use Twitter, and that the penetration numbers for Facebook might not be as big as people thought. This has led some to conclude we are in the midst of a "social media bubble" like the Dot.com bubble of the last 1990s.

Leave it to Pew Research to slightly reinforce the not as many people as you think angle, but to absolutely blow out of the water the concept that you're wasting your time with putting social media techniques at the top of the priority list.

The Social Side of the Internet released by Pew shows that people who active in social groups -- for our purposes, think sports fans who participate through attendance or membership in booster groups, etc -- are influenced by and believe in the influence from the internet. From the summary paragraph:

And social media users are even more likely to be active: 82% of social network users and 85% of Twitter users are group participants

Move down past some of the general numbers at the top -- some which might lead you to feel, well, it's only 50-60% of the survey group impacted -- to the breakouts at the bottom of this on-line summary.

Look at the percentage of activity within groups for those who are internet users versus non-internet users. 60% or more of the internet active are likely to attend a meeting, volunteer to work in a group or give money to their social causes.

And then, this key conclusion:

Perhaps reflecting their higher levels of participation, internet users are also more likely than non-users to say that, in the past 12 months, they have felt really proud of a group they are active in because of something it accomplished or a positive difference it made (62% v. 47%) and that they have accomplished something as part of a group that they could not have accomplished themselves (48% v. 35%).

What does it mean? It means that goal of converting Fan to Friend starts through those social media connections, by reaching out and getting involved with others and having the organization becoming more active in interacting through social media means (interactive blogs, actually posting and answering through social mediums). The way to reach your leadership is to get out and talk with them -- sounds simple because it is.

Know it When You See It

First, a moment of Gump-Ian clarity: the PRSA membership is worth it's weight in daily informational links. What's the connection, Forrest? Ah might not be a smart man, but I knows things when I see them. Probably three or four a week from the emails along, and many of them becoming core ideas heading into this blog and getting picked up by others, reinforcing that again, I'm some sort of smart guy. More than once, I will confess to simply being the one eyed man in the land of the blind.

That humble-ation aside, here's today's pure gold nugget of social media info, courtesy of one of those (fill in the number) things you need to do today. This one was five keys to being a socially engaged company from Soren Gordhamer, but number one pretty much was enough for me.

Within the first point on culture of a company, Gordhamer said that:

trying to force unhappy staff to treat customers with respect and joy was a losing battle. You cannot ask staff to give what they do not receive. What is inside the company will be felt by those outside it.

Or to further distill it:

The Old Paradigm: “Force people to do what you want.”

The New Paradigm: “Give people what you want them to offer.”