Road Weary But Worth It

There are a few things that make travel exciting -- meeting interesting people, seeing new places, great meals in different areas. So far, this one is batting 1-for-3. Missing hotel reservations, bad airline personnel, rough flight connections and one of the most wholly unremarkable plates of ribs ever.

I did have a nice chat with a woman who was visiting in the NWA area. She was from DC and had been at a corporate event (no, not for THE corporate entity in NWA). Her time was spent at Carnall Hall and she had walked around the campus. A lot of the usual things we hear -- gosh, its so much nicer than we thought, etc.

My seatmate reminded me of something really important about what I do these days, and how extremely valuable one-on-one interaction is for our overall efforts. I hear the gnashing of teeth in the background of the mass market mentality. You're wasting your time with one person.

Really?

You know the butterfly effect, yes? You've read The Long Tail. How do I not know that the one person I've talked to -- who swears that even though her only connection to Arkansas was this conference is now going to log in and read the interactive blog tonight -- won't lead to something important in the future for the Razorbacks.

And that's just it -- I don't. She didn't seem like she was just being polite, and was quite adamant to make sure she was remembering the website name. But if she doesn't, I know that several hundred will be there. Taking long periods of time to stay and discuss the game; to get the updates and descriptions.

I do know what happens if I'm not there. We don't have a connection to New York City, or Seattle, or Doha, or Yokosuka. And the positive impressions and time together reinforces the bond that we want. Said it before, say it many times again, I don't want fans for the University of Arkansas; I want friends.

Fans come and go; friends stay with you. They do favors for you, and you do them in return. The day what we do gets reduced to pure commerce, to spread sheets of return on investment is the day people wake up and realize college sports are not worth what is spent upon them.

Alchemist! Blasphemer! Communist! I could continue down the alphabet, but its true. How do I know so? Look in the major metropolitan areas. Pro sports dominate because at the highest level of pure sport, the skill and artistry will always trump the amateurs. And we'll pay more to see The Rolling Stones than an up-and-coming plucky band of young Brits, well, because they are The Rolling Stones.

Think I'm wrong? Consider the following. What makes last year's Final Four compelling was the battle between the established men of the game, Duke, and the upstarts from Butler. Was there more sheer athleticism on the court than a regular season game shortly before or after featuring the Indiana Pacers? No.

The connection we gained to both sides -- to the legend of Coach K and the underdogs from Butler -- is what made it compelling. And memorable.

At the end of the day, that's my job. It's why I keep showing up out here on the road, plying the story with whatever the latest technology might be to bring it home, but never, ever forgetting what is the most important part.

Serving as the connection between the Razorbacks and their nation.

Chief Content Officers

I like this concept advanced by Bob Rumpza at PR News Online, and it syncs perfectly with my own experience. Compelling content is the long-term solution to what ails you -- whether it is a legacy journalism enterprise trying to transition into a networked world or a public relations/sports information/sports marketing person trying to have impact.

Good content=traffic

Traffic=advertisers

Advertisers=exchange of green rectangles for your services

Rumpza has several great takeaway quotes in this piece, starting with this one that should be bronzed on every college marketing person's desk:

"And consumers told us that when it comes to online advertising, they prefer content-rich articles and information compared to banner ads, or other online ad techniques."

This is at the heart of what I have been preaching for about a year: integrate your marketing messages into the content. Use "buy now" buttons, stories that explain promotions and giveaways, things that translate the old display advertising of the newspaper days into social exchange.

The other great passage is about the value of the content to the end user:

"As reputation management, marketing and brand-building have undergone transformation, the element that has survived untouched is the ability -- and necessity -- to tell a great story efficiently, yet eloquently, that stirs action and favorability among business people and consumers."

The bold is my emphasis.

Now before I hear back from a bunch of number crunchers that I'm just regurging a bunch of anecdotal to support my positions, I'd like to close by reminding you Rumpza's conclusions are supported by a national study looking into that oh-so-precious demo of the young, affluent and highly educated.

In other words, our sports' programs top boosters -- our alums.

Make The BeeGees Stop

I'm not completely certain, but right up there with double digit unemployment, seismic house of representative changes, and that the next incarnation of Call of Duty apparently incorporates a zombie phase in the Pentagon that involves four dead Presidents, the fact that Starbucks is now featuring the BeeGees and playing their greatest hits over, and over, and over in store IS one of the final si guns of the apocalypse.

Oh, please hurry up person with the records you are dropping off to me here.

Remembering Mr. Dunn

Walter Dunn was that teacher. The one that inspired you later in life that you misunderstood. Maybe detested.

Personally, I never had a problem with Mr. Dunn. Others weren't much for his all-essay tests in American History and Advanced Social Studies. I'm sure it's no big surprise that I relished the open-ended nature of the questions. Usually there were two, maybe three. That's 50 points a pop -- 33 if you got three. High risk, high reward.

I still have my handwritten tests, folded length-ways with your name and date on the right side please, from his classes. One of the moments that made me most proud -- and showed me maybe I was pretty smart and not just a class clown jock-type from the wrong kind of family at the private school -- was when I got bonus points for my answer on World War II. Told later by seniors that they'd heard of only one other person that got bonus points from Dunn.

Enough self-congratulations, the reasons I'm thinking of Mr. Dunn today are two-fold. First, he was not a traditional teacher. Really, very few of the teachers at River Oaks during this period were cookie-cutter educationists. He was a former haberdasher, retired; who loved raising roses with his dear wife of who knows now many years. And, he knew his history. I look back on the old-school lecture and essay question format, and he gifted those who survived his headmaster rules strict attitude with incredible confidence and knowledge.

As for the knowledge, let me spread a little Mr. Dunn. On election day during my senior year, someone in the class asked Mr. Dunn who he voted for today. He looked up from his desk and a disgusted frown moved across his face. With an even more stern tone than usual, he looked the person who asked straight in the eye and said "Don't you ever ask anyone that question again."

He went on to lecture the class. This is America, and you have the right to walk into a private place and make your vote. That is your vote, and don't you ever, ever tell anyone how you voted.

You could tell that a very sacred thing had been disturbed, as if you had decided to wipe down the church alter with urine.

So on this election day, here's to you Mr. Dunn. I've got to go do that solemn, and private, duty this morning.

Go Vote Tomorrow

Seriously. This is the inner history professor lecturing you.

I don't care how you vote tomorrow, but don't come to class (talking to you guys that have your test) or work Wednesday to carp about the results one way or the other unless you have at least put some skin in the game.

A Sharp Dressed Man

ZZ Top may have wrote it, but how many times have we heard that the clothes make the man. Noemie Emery wrote this in the Weekly Standard, making political points against the President as she concludes:

He’s your ideal, and if he fails, it means that the things that you value—the smoothness, the snark, the verbal facility, the elevation of talk as against thought and action, the veneer of worldliness; the right schools, the right clothes, the right frame of reference; the nuance; the sophistication—that these things are, in the real world, not all that important.

And then, of course, neither are you.

Political vitriol aside, how often do we find the same in athletics? And see the ever-so-hard crash of the once triumphant Adonis we build. I've been part of that process -- insider and outsider -- and sensed the impact. Emery's last line is telling, something so obvious that I'd never seen it before. It is why fans get so crushed when they have invested so much in a person or team. Many times, we want to see ourselves in them, and we forget, they are playing the games for them -- not us -- at the end of the day.

Oh Sheep, Drop the WiFi

Thanks to Jill Geer on my Facebook page for the heads up to a Peter Shankman rant about the dangers of "Free" public WiFi. Shankman is relating his personal experience with a new plug in for Firefox called Firesheep. It basically allows the user to see anything non-encrypted floating across a public WiFi.

Must read as he describes how easy it is for anyone to steal your passwords and begin to create massive amounts of trouble.

Firesheep is not some wanton script-kiddie black-hat shot at the man. It's a pretty serious move by a programmer named Eric Butler who became concerned about the privacy issue. He made the plug in to reveal the weakness.

I'll confess to having used public WiFi in the past for a quick check in. Not any more. Ever.

Seriously -- read the Shankman story right now.

Don't Forget It's a Conversation

Few things less pleasant than going back through customer service logs when you know there has been a problem. Certainly the case yesterday when no fault to us or our internet provider we lost audio stream.

I know I do the same thing -- "yell" and "scream" at the computer via email. And it's easy to do when you don't think there is a human on the other end of the email.

This is why I am pretty firm about asking fans to not use screen names or handles on interactive blogs, and why I'll be far more tolerant of opinions that seem to come from people with names; Facebook comments being a good example of this, too. If you're that mad and willing to put your name on it -- hearkens back to the old letter to the editor days and the pre-handles days of talk radio.

So I take the time this morning to send each of those very upset -- rightfully so -- fans that had their audio interrupted. Once they are in the conversation with a human, things almost always change. As one person put it:

It's nice to know that my complaints didn't fall on deaf ears...or no ears at all, as is so often the case with internet services.

Indeed.

Case Study in Why Live Blogs Matter

"You're going to do what?"

That's the typical reaction to CoverItLive and other real-time live reporting tools (don't discount Twitter for certain applications) by some administrators and media relations personnel at other schools that haven't tried it. It's often quickly followed by either:

"What good is that going to do?"

And/or:

"That's a waste of time."

Really? In the socially connected world in which we now live, the messaging is micro. It's targeted. It's one-v-one. What better use of your time than to connect with our fans. As I've preached here before, it is about converting fans into friends, going from a brand to a bond. (As an aside, I consider "Brand-to-Bond" a trademark concept, please cite properly -- thanks!)

Today, one of our interns, John Thomas, provides a fantastic example of what the live blog means. He's over at the Billingsly Tennis Courts, dutifully live blogging the ITA Central Regionals.

Huh? He what?

Here was the concept -- one that many SIDs can relate to. You're going to be there all day long. You're going to have very little to do other than keep up with the comings and goings of your team's players. There is too much chaos to run live stats and it's not the NCAA Championships where you'll have demand for all those courts streaming and scoring.

So, I suggested, why not sit by the tournament official (which you're going to likely do anyway) and keep up a live blog of who's going out to the courts and the results when you can get them coming back in. If they use the manual tenders (no umpires in the chairs in the first rounds to operate the scoring system), you can post the occasional "here's the unofficial scores on court X, Y and Z and as we have it A & B are on court X, etc."

OK, say the tennis contacts that will work this weekend. Sounds like fun. And off we go for the weekend.

The image at the bottom is from Day Two - today's blog - is the payoff. One of our European players, Anouk Tigu, is being followed by her dad Sabin from Holland. He was able to ask if his daughter was on the court, and get an answer.

Well, he could have seen that with live stats if you'd cared to set that up, or a live video stream. Yes to the second, and not the same to the first.

I want to belabor this point: Sabin Tigu was able to ask John Thomas how is daughter is doing halfway around the world and John Thomas on behalf of the University of Arkansas was able to interact with Sabin about Anouk.

That's a brand attempting to become a bond with Sabin Tigu.

Live stats posted without interaction -- that's a computer providing information.

Don't get me wrong, live stats have their place, along with that video stream and audio streams. Far too often we let our technology take the place of our humanity.

I see it every week on the football interactive blog -- most of the folks involved cannot reach us in any other way: overseas, military, travelers. They are very appreciative of the effort. You never know where that kindness may lead.

On the technical labor side, let's repeat my number one point about the interactive and live reporting -- you're going to be there anyway. Unless there is a pressing demand for other work (like being on the radio) you can use that time to interact with fans, and help convert them into friends.

At least this morning, I'll bet John's got a new friend named Sabin.

More on College Legal Limits On-Line

The Chronicle's Wired Campus feed provides an interesting review of the legal abilities of a university to discipline students in on-line behavior. It is in relation to the tragedy at Rutgers earlier this month.

I remind again our athletics colleagues of the opinion that as participants in student activities campus has more of an ability to sanction on the grounds they are quasi-representatives of the institution and as voluntary participants in our activities have signed off on regulation.

Thinking Android, Not Blackberry

Curious to hear your feedback on this question: after building an iSpace app, what is next - Android or Blackberry?

One clue overheard on This Week in Tech. Leo Laporte makes the off-hand comment that in spite of improvements lately, a Blackberry "is the phone they hand you along with your ID card" at a job and iPhone or Android "is the phone you'll buy at the cell phone store."

Along with previous posts about the growth in Android platform share in the market via Nielsen Line, consider this further twist off Leo's point. If Android is the one you'd buy for yourself, it is more likely to be a reflection of your personal life. Bonding to the personal social graph is the future for athletic media relations. Again, advantage Android.

One last one: who is your target audience? Business types that might be ticket buyers or boosters or future students (and student-athletes). No big shakes of which phone fits which group.

What is Public Property

You may have read about the mild dust-up on our campus regarding the taping of a U.S. Senate campaign ad by a former Razorback football player who is one of the two candidates in the race. Part of that story line was what is public property and what constitutes an endorsement.

From The Chronicle we get alert to a brewing First Amendment challenge to the University of Kentucky's rights package. The interesting twist that reminds me of the Razorbacks is down in the student paper's coverage:

UK is a state-funded university and owns Commonwealth Stadium, making the venue a public place.

This was one of the items that came up in our events. Read through all the points of view here -- notably that the local newspaper once distributed papers at games but had also been stopped. The student paper seems to be reviving a battle already fought and decided.

A compromise allowed the students fixed locations to distribute, but could not roam the parking lots.

One gets the clear sense from the media coverage that it is far from over. The lawyer for the students tells the local Lexington newspaper:

Jon Fleischaker, a Louisville lawyer who is an expert on the First Amendment, said that prohibiting the distribution of publications at Commonwealth Stadium, which is part of a publicly funded institution, violates the U.S. Constitution.

"Anybody — not just the students — anybody has the right to go onto public property and distribute information," Fleischaker said. And, he said, they don't have to have permission from anyone to do so.

"It's a public facility. It's an open-forum public facility," he said. "I just think a public university ought to know better."

Athletic Director Twitters

Certainly I speak a lot about our own achievements here, and Jeff Long has certainly been a prolific tweet -- his engagement with students and fans over new style NIKE uniforms in the college football season opener gained him some national attention.

However, I'd like to take a moment to point out some kudos for a really nice use of the medium by Miss State's Scott Stricklin. After his Bulldogs pulled off the win at Florida, his tweets touched the three keys to successful engagement.

First, they were informative. His first post-game tweet was:

Team should arrive on campus (at Templeton Academic center) at 1 AM. I'll update as we get ready to leave Fla

And that got updated right before the plane departed.

Second, they provided something a little personal. Two in particular spoke to the emotions of the event:

Gave game ball to @CoachDanMullen postgm. Told team "u don't win cause you're at a special place, you win cause u have special people."

And:

We talk in Ath Dept that our goal is to create great experiences for all Mississippians. Tonight was a GREAT experience!

Through the event, Stricklin brings attention back to some of the core values MSU has been pushing all year. It's not preachy, but it's a nice chance to remind folks that the goals can yield results.

Finally, they were social. In the midst of his props for the team, he gave a retweet to one of his beat writers, Brandon Marcello (yes, as in former NW Arkansas Times/ADG on-line editor):

True. RT @bmarcello: Dan Mullen had Chinese food Wed; fortune cookie read, "You're heading south to experience much happiness."

Clocking 3,600-plus followers, Stricklin has built a nice base with pretty consistent work. He's averaging four to six tweets a day in his messaging, and in a reasonably short time pushed out over 1,100 messages.

From the outside, it appears MSU had put their young AD out front as the primary messenger. In contrast, the department's feed is not far ahead of Stricklin at 3,900 follow but only 262 tweets.

Let's not forget where Stricklin cut his teeth -- sports info.

Hey A Week On the Road Will Do That

Apologies for the lag here -- nothing like the 24-hours of Le Auburn to put a crimp in the blog. And I might add a nice stone bruise from the MINI steering wheel on that 12 hour drive down and back. Working on some new things in the background that should be pretty exciting. Back with more soon.

One Does Wonder

NPR has a provocative piece today about whether it makes any sense to attend journalism school. Talking with faculty and students at Southern Cal's Annenberg School, it does give one pause at items like:

At USC, undergraduate tuition alone reaches $40,000, and, when taken with fees, books, room, board and other charges, a year’s cost can exceed $55,000. These days journalism schools around the country are often challenged to justify a mission that trains students at such a high cost for a collapsing industry that doesn't even require a degree.

Ouch.

Look, this isn't something that hasn't been discussed here (Picking up on NYU's Jay Rosen | John Dvorak's similar rant | And my own takes on creative destruction and a brave new j-world) The Age of Watergate gave us the desire to "professionalize" the education of journalists. H.L. Mencken did just fine without J-School, as did many of the legends of the Golden Age in the 1950s and 1960s.

This is not to say the Annenberg School is sitting still. Say, does this quote in the story sound familiar:

Among Annenberg's new projects: giving flip cameras and cell phones to migrant workers so they can post blog entries about their own experiences.

That's convergence and P.O.V. -- coin of a content driven realm. They quote one of the stars of the USC program, Callie Schweitzer:

"We need reliable journalists who are trustworthy and credible," Schweitzer said. "I look at people on Twitter who build followings; it's because they're reputable."

Bingo -- and heavy on the last four words: it's because they're reputable.

Keep that thought in mind on your own real-time reporting and blogs.

End of Yet Another Era

In a year that's been filled with disappointing endings, today's was a bittersweet realization. Coming out of my son's apartment, I look up to see the Lewis Soccer Fields.

Oh. Yeah, it's about 5:45 p.m. Game time. But not anymore for me. Fayetteville Youth Soccer - no more for the Smith family.

That's about 14 years through our two children, and most of that time serving as a coach. I really enjoyed it, not only for the chance to be Will and Ashley, but also helping bring the sport up from a somewhat niche activity for youngsters to one of the activities.

It also went a long way toward building my love for the beautiful game. When I started with the kids, I was still working a lot with our women's soccer team as heir sports information director. Helped design and build the first women's only field, then stadium, in Division I. The first televised SEC soccer match. First video streaming.

Even in the years after handing off the sport to other SIDs, I still had a hand in hiring two coaching staffs, traveling to England with one of them for our only foreign tour in 2000. Until this fall, I'd been the play-by-play for soccer, either for radio or video steaming.

But through it all, there was the Lewis Fields.

In all the changes this fall, I'd just forgotten. And now the once six-year-old first-touch player as a 19-year-old young man has it first on-his-own apartment overlooking those youth pitches.

Time marches on, but we don't have to like it.

From the Twitterverse

A couple of Chronicle articles catch the eye this week. The first one is about the future of archiving social media, thinking first of the great Library of Congress project with Twitter generally and of the Iranian revolution specifically. Interesting read, and one very telling passage:

Web users have voiced concern that their personal online footprints will be kept open for all to see in perpetuity. As much fun as, say, that drunken tweet from your weekend in Vegas may have been at the time, you may not want a possible employer reading through your indiscretions on the Library of Congress Web site in a few years. The solution may be keeping archives "dark"—that is, restricting archive access to researchers or sealing the records for a set amount of time.

First, you just better assume that your life in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas anymore, it will live in some form of perpetuity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Second, the idea of an arbitrary "dark" gives me a creepy non-FOI feel, or worse, access for those that know how to work (even more worse, can afford to) the system.

The next article was more about professor's use of Twitter, and had some of the usual stereotype comments about the lack of teens and college age using Twitter versus Facebook until the very bottom:

“Now I hear students say, 'Facebook is where I go to socialize, and Twitter is where I go to work,'” Mr. Junco says.

Bingo. Twitter is real-time reporting, just like CoverItLive (kind of), SMS text-messaging (exactly, but costly) or any future short-form burst of info system. Facebook is the social aspect -- Twitter is news.

Social Media Killed the Public Relations Star?

An alert from the front lines and a shameless Buggles reference. On Bulldog Reporter today, a provocative piece on the demise of media relations as we know it. The dire prediction is social media overruns all within two years.

Two years? Could be sooner than that.

Don Bates is the head of the study -- Bulldog has transcribed interview today. Three important nut quotes:

In 10 years, it will all come back around — there won't be distinctions like "traditional" and "social": there will just be "media." Right now, it's not that way — but some people are having a hard time with the distinctions.

Twitter can be quick and dirty and get people to link to you, and the notion of 140 characters linking to a larger story is certainly going to get more popular. But you have to focus on the content and links to the larger story to keep people's interest.

You also have to craft a personality online so people can know you.

Invest the time today in this story. It's far more than those three blurbs.

And On Cue, NFL Weighs In

Missed in the week's work was this supporting tidbit to my earlier comment about On The Media's story regarding licensing of news footage in campaign material. Seems Russ Feingold of Minnesota was trying to make a joke with Vikings footage. Guess what happened next:

The National Football League has thrown a yellow flag at the campaign of Sen. Russ Feingold, saying a newly released campaign ad featuring a snippet of NFL footage was not properly licensed.

Our own mini-tempest about Razorback Stadium not withstanding, I think that only reinforces the point that while Professor Sonia Kaytal's concerns about the potential infringement of political speech via ads is valid, copyright is going to trump.

I have to give props to the quote of the morning on the commercial, posted by Tom Blumer at Media Busters:

The National Football League is whistling incumbent Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's campaign team for illegal use of film.

Classic.

Digital Content Rights

A very interesting discussion of a political fight that resembles some of the arguments tossed around last fall when the Southeastern Conference began to enforce new digital copyright regulations. In this case, Fox News has gone to court to recover damages because a political campaign used footage from a show without compensation or permission. On the Media brings the details of the story, and I'd recommend listening to the piece at the embed above. Stay with it to the very end, and you'll hear Sonia Katyal make this point:

(i)f a court decided to rule in favor of FOX would be that suddenly individuals who are making campaign commercials would have to consider licensing all news clips that they relied on, potentially all headlines, potentially all content that drew on news organizations. And the consequences of that would be staggering.

Really, Sonia. Welcome to the world of sports and entertainment.

There are some good arguments regarding how political speech is different, but Katayl admits that musicians often exert their copyright privileges when they are not pleased with a particular candidate using a song without permission.

Hmmm. Sort of like what would happen to anyone else who used digital content without permission.

I fully understand the political angles being worked here. But we're talking law now, and whether you like Fox or not, there is real cost involved in making footage, and lifting it without compensation for a political ad is no different than if a television station decided to re-air highlights in the sports broadcast from another outlet without attribution. Or these days, violated any of the pro sports limits on video. Or, closer to home, the SEC content rules.

Bono can own the copyright to his performance. The SEC certainly has exerted it's position regarding athletic events. Why not a cable news network?