Very Dark Side of Digital

By now, you've probably heard the story of Tyler Clementi's suicide at Rutgers. How some fellow students web-streamed him in his dorm room. How they've been charged with invasion of privacy. How he jumped from the George Washington Bridge.

Now Tyler's life and circle of acquaintances have become part of the world wide web -- media, bloggers, interested persons -- all battling for scraps of the story.

These cases are hard, like the mom who cyber-bullied a rival of her child until she killed herself. Or the home invasion with cameras by a voyeuristic neighbor in Louisiana.

By law, none of these persons actions can be directly linked to the horrible results -- mostly because the law is dreadfully behind.

The raging battle between the president of the Michigan ASG and an assistant attorney general gives similar pause. Read that one all the way through the three "more story" jumps -- where does political free speech end and personal cyber-bashing begin?

It's a digital world out there kids. Be careful.

Multiple Texts, One Tweet

Has anyone else seen this problem? User account shows only one tweet on-line, and the user thinks he has sent the tweet only one time. However, I'm receiving double, triple, one time quad, text messages out of Twitter to my mobile. No rhyme or reason -- not on RT, not on original, not always 2x or 3x. Some of the tweets in the stream of consciousness being put out only happened one time. Could it be a setting issue? This one account is the only one that is doing this in the last 24 hours.

Have You No Shame?

OK, I understand that many news sites are shameless in their harvesting of information from official athletic department websites,

But my blogs and original content - not press releases emailed to media?

Really?

Am I the only one who thinks this is a problem?

Not Just Sports

While it's pretty easy to argue if you are an arts teacher and you get up at an open mic night at a club that you know there will be people taping you, Melissa Petro of NYC got not one, but two, patrons posting her expose that in her younger days she was, in her own words, "a sex worker." The New York Daily News is all over the story.

A change of pace from the past sports-oriented, gee, I didn't realize someone would be recording this miscues. We do get a classic quote from the bottom of the Daily News story of one what you have to think is soon to be former colleagues:

"If you want to be a teacher and that's your goal, it's stupid," she said of Petro's openness about her past. "If you want to sell books then maybe not - that's her prerogative."

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

According to e-Marketer, traditional blogs continue to grow in readership. Perhaps not at the speed of social media like Facebook or real-time reporting like Twitter, but the long-form (OK, that's a relative term) is judged as having opinion impact.

There are some very interesting numbers in the article, and on a sense level, I believe it to be a good policy to increase the amount of content. I know anecdotal emails and comments support the blogs, particularly for underserviced sports.

My only question is the survey cited isn't a neutral (Pew, Annenburg, etc.) source. Obviously, e-Marketer has some bias.

The Coming Credential Storm

A must-read from CoSIDA regarding the NHL's proposed blogger policies. One of the key drama quotes:

Jeff Little at The Hockey Writers termed it "short-sighted and misguided." At Hockey Wilderness, a blog devoted to the Minnesota Wild, Bryan Reynolds decried "Jim Crow laws for media."

Those there recall I stood on the floor of convention to ask the question, who defines "legitimate" in media, and what happens when that standard has to be taken into a court of law. I have come across this somewhat dated Society of Professional Journalist's position paper from 2000 that talks about the Colorado and MIAA cases.

More from me later on the subject.

Update on Dark Heart

The Department of Defense recycled the first run of Operation: Dark Heart, a memoir of a former intel officer I commented on earlier this month.

A Quarter Century

Indulge me with a story about our town. Those who follow closely know I have resumed my paused career of cycling, in part because we have a very nice trail system here in Fayetteville.  Well, that and the need to regain a modicum of sanity.

Nevertheless, I had determined today I was going for a quarter-century around town - a 25 mile ride - that would require every trail in town, and then a little more.  Presented with a perfect mid-50s day with a steel-gray sky, I was thrilled to hit the road.  Little wheel truing and a shuffle reload, off to the trails.

There is a little bit of everything on the trails. Lake Fayetteville is like disappearing on a paved Robert Frost path through the Ozark woods. It is complete with he oldest cedar (I think) in the state of Arkansas and in what really is the middle of nowhere a National Park Service-type display to the Butterfield Trail.

A stiff wind came with the weather, gloomy to many; glorious to me. I have never been a summer; the bracing chill of approaching winter has always been my friend.

Working through downtown Fayetteville, I discover the connector on the Frisco Trail is semi-completed. An exciting descent down along the railroad tracks of the old Fayetteville station. At the southern end, I decide to make a detour to extend the ride and see something I had only visited once - the Fayetteville Veterans Cemetery.  Child of a veteran, it wasn't just to ride through, but to pay respects. The sign said no "recreational" activities like jogging or bike riding, so I could only coast along the perimeter fence, reading the names of the fallen I could view from the edges.

On the return ride through the deserted parking lots of Dickson Street, I heard a crash and looked to see a young man on the ground.  He looked a bit stunned.  Recalling my own tumble a couple of weeks earlier - no one stopped or asked - I pulled off.  Asking if he was OK, he said yes, but did I have any napkins or tissue; he had cut himself. No, sorry; sure you're OK? Yeah.

As a started off, I decided the least I could do was roll up to one of the restaurants on Dickson and get him some paper towels. The Jimmy Johns folks were accommodating, and I returned to find him semi-staggering toward the edge of the parking lot, a tee-shirt on his chin.  Hey, use the instead. Yeah, great, he said kind of groggy.  That's when he showed the cut, a complete cleaving of his chin meat, wide-open, side-to-side; the classic head first impact slice to the muscle and bone. OK, we've got to get you some stitches. Do you think? Yes, I'm sure.

I noticed his cap for the first time, Flying Burrito, and that there was a location right behind us.  Are you headed to work? Can someone take you to the hospital? He nodded with his napkins on his chin; somewhat surprisingly not as bloody as you'd expect. 

I felt really bad about leaving him to cross the street, but he insisted it was OK. I wished there was someway to have gotten him to the emergency room, but as my wife reminded me later, certainly his co-workers were able to help.

Finishing out the ride, it was hard not to think about his misfortune. Climbing the new incline off Dickson, I came across a group of four men I had passed earlier. They had seemed out of place, but as I worked up the hill one of them said encouragingly, "work the hill, you've got the prime; go man."

Did he say prime? As in "preem", the sprint or hill climb prize within a bike race. I think he did. It got me thinking about this being the longest ride I had made in almost a quarter-century, the 22-years since moving to Fayetteville.

Back in Louisiana, 25 miles was an everyday thing, and every September, the club I helped organize and run would do the League of American Wheelman century rides. Somewhere in my garage, there's an old wool jersey that fit a much younger man with a bunch of those patches.

Funny the things you will see, the people you will meet and the memories they will bring up - if you will just go out into the world a little more. Sometimes travel is right in your own back yard.   

Life Imitates Art

"Facebook reports . . . Twitter confirms" the Burgundy-esque actor solemnly intones in one of the major cell phone companies' ads. The implication is clear -- social media is the source of our news today.

I knew it was just a matter of time until life proved this art, and we get it through one of the most lively of college sports personalities, Mike Leach. Yes, the fired Texas Tech football coach who once disciplined players for using Twitter and became the relentless subject of national criticism in the social media world for banning his team from using the real-time blogging system. The Pirate Coach famously said "a bunch of narcissists that want to sit and type stuff about themselves all the time."

That was so 2009. Here in the future, Leach finds himself the beneficiary of a million Tweets of his pithy comments now that he's a satellite radio sports host -- having been released from Tech as a coach, purportedly for unusual disciplinary methods.

And the center of the on-going will-he-or-won't-he banter around becoming the next New Mexico coach -- that in and of itself a poke in the eye of "nearby" Texas Tech (remember, nothing is really geographically close in the great American southwest).

The story broke on Facebook. Then, OMG kids, was confirmed on Twitter. Both were terrestrial radio station employees -- the Facebook page now closed to non-friends, the KOB-FM tweet now deleted. (Once again -- fun fact, once it's digital, it lives forever -- plenty got copies of the tweet and have preserved them in news coverage -- see previous link). This lead the one of the top traffic sports new media sites, SportsByBrooks, to bite and off the story flew to the legacy media. The Albuquerque Journal joined in with the usual "unnamed sources." KOB on the TV side became one of the first to start to back away.

Since the new media outburst, Leach's lawyer has made the AP and most of the legacy media saying there's no way he's going to UMN, but of course, the story won't die. In part, because according to a subscriber-only story of the Journal Leach didn't convincingly tell the paper he wasn't interested.

And we don't know the whole story why? Because the ABJ has only teased the non-subscriber with the content preview for Google searching of:

Former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach played it coy Friday when asked about Internet-fueled speculation that he will take over University of New Me... MORE
TO CONTINUE READING, SUBSCRIBE NOW

Could the Journal be guilty here of their own little internet fueling? Or just protecting their copyright content.

The saga continues . . .

E-mail Policies

Grambling State jumped from frying pan over an e-mail that hinted students could not use their university-issued accounts for political advocacy into the fire over a staff and employee guidelines. The gist is the student policy was a false rumor, but the FOI-fest which ensued turned up the staff policy. Subscribers can read from The Chron here.

"shall not be used for the creation or distribution of any disruptive or offensive messages, including offensive comments about race, gender, hair color, disabilities, age, sexual orientation, pornography, religious beliefs and practice, political beliefs, or national origin."

On the surface, this looks like a pretty standard block of text used in the late 1990s to enforce campus speech standards. My initial guess is no one had looked at this in years, and did not know the language was there.

Having watched some political festivities from extremely close range here and having lived and worked in the Louisiana higher ed system where the laws address Long-era abuses of public employees, where this started seems legit. You must be careful in political seasons as a public employee.

It did prompt me to take a quick look at the UA email policy for reference. You might double check yours, and any confidential information or proprietary information policies your school or athletic department might maintain.

Next Gen Politics

Frankly, I could care less about Christine O'Donnell's politics.  The surprise GOP nominee in Delaware does have something everyone should be interested in: a chatty past.

From clips surfacing from her appearances on Bill Mahr's show in the late 1990s - complete with off-handed comments about "dabbling" in witchcraft - to later work on the talk show circuit in which she discusses her views on sex, O'Donnell is facing square on her youth.

O'Donnell is a little different in her TV news appearance past.  Cast her as among the first of the Crossfire generation.  She had to work reasonably hard to get on those shows, and then to stay there, she's going to need to be memorable.  That's a charitable way of saying provocative.

Fast-forward 10, certainly 20, years from now.  And the next Christine O'Donnell is explaining why she friended the campus Wiccan guild and I Love The Bud groups on Facebook.

Think it's a stretch? I don't.

The key is will that generation care? They will realize that each and every one of them that got involved in social media will have a lot of posts and likes they may not be so proud of as adults; lots of hard party night photos. Not to mention, more than their share of out of context pics.

I watch O'Donnell on TV as she deftly maneuvers to slip her past comments.  I get a double sense off her. First, outsiders and persons her age in Delaware might not care about her goofy past.  Second, because she doesn't fit the template, and that bothers the establishment.

Who knows, that next generation may already be here.

NHL Staying on Blog Credential Front Line

It's no big surprise that the NHL has an official blogger policy draft floating around, as Penn State's sports journalism program pointed out this morning. NHL member teams have been leaders in this area. The "leaked" memo draft is here. If you missed the details, read more here.

Travel Addendum

"Have your boarding passes out for the agent at the bottom of the stairs," the frazzled gate agent said. "Please make sure you're getting on the right plane. We are boarding two cites at once."

Yep. I'd be careful. Cause if your options are Panama City, Florida, and Flint, Michigan, you darn sure want to make sure you're in the rig plane.

Road Thanks

Thanks to Bill at REI Perimeter, who took the time to look up a bike part for me. That was above and beyond. No thanks to Varsity Gwinnett -- unusually off its game. How about that traffic in Athens? And Atlanta. Yikes.

But above all, thanks so much to the campus motorcycle cop who pulled me over to give me a ticket for no seat belt -- right after I stopped at the perimeter barricade to ask for help on where to part. Gee officer, the reason I had my seat belt off was, well, I just pulled away from that barricade you followed me through AND I was fumbling with the map.

At least he decided to make it a warning, but honest to God I thought he was about to start my visit to Athens for my first football game THAT much more special. So I guess, thanks to him for that.

Well, Ryan Mallett sure made it a great visit. Now let's hope I can than Delta for one more on-time departure in a few minutes.

While I'm dolling out the travel notes -- paperless boarding passes to the iPhone AND on-line check-in -- con mucho gusto gracias. If you aren't taking advantage, get the app for your airlines of use or at least take advantage of the send to your phone option for on-line check-ins. I did this for the first time this trip and it was great. I suppose the down side could be if the power goes out on your phone.

On to the gate.

Digital Meteorologist

I know that many of the followers here are weather geeks as well (shout out to my RadarScope homies). I'm going to recommend the new blog by one of the members of the WeatherBrains podcast, Kevin Selle.

His Digital Meteorologist blog has a very applicable post about the National Weather Service to what I just discussed here yesterday.

In the weather world, what happens in the NWS suddenly did get into social media and the source became the distributor?

Read what Kevin says here.

There's also a pretty good take on Apple's new iTV. Now where have we heard that business about going direct before and be careful about your rights . . . from 2008, and from 2009.

Pournelle's Law

Jerry Pournelle is not a science fiction writer that I had known until he started appearing periodically on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech. Catching up with old podcasts while on the road, he mentioned in passing his own "Iron Law of Bureaucracy."

"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."

The example Pournelle gave was teachers who worry first about the kids and administrators who worry about the system. His point being the administrators over time will take control and weed out -- through direct action or simple discouragment attrition -- the teachers.

Jerry himself provides his explanation on his email posting from 2006.

What Numbers are Real?

New lines of thought on new media and participation numbers.

In the Nielsen era, ratings were based on a percentage of the TVs tuned to a certain show. Notice, tuned to. Doesn't mean watching, cause you really can tell that. And the audience was extrapolated from a sampling.

So it was a potential audience.

The Audit Bureau provided circulation numbers for newspapers. How many were delivered, how many are subscribers. But the number says the potential total number who could have read a story or advertisement, not how many actually did.

Today, click through is a big factor in advertising, and the numbers are just fractions of the two big legacy measures. In the business, chasing after on-line becomes known as "trading real dollars for digital dimes."

I've heard a lot lately from folks focusing on their Facebook pages and numbers. Oooh, there's 80,000 friends of the page, we should focus there; not on the 8,000 on a Twitter feed or 800 in an interactive blog. Those are made up numbers, but the proportions are not too far off -- they each appear on face value to be orders of magnitude in difference.

Let's run through those. Just like Nielsen and ABC, 80K is the potential audience. Facebook's metrics will tell you the actual participation is much different -- maybe only half the 80K is active user base, then of that maybe 1/4 actually clicked on the item; of that 1/10th liked or commented.

Same applies often to the Twitter feed -- just because 8K follow doesn't mean 8K read.

Why do you put some much value in the smallest of the numbers -- the interactive blogs? Because you know they were there, they took time to participate and more than likely, they lingered (79% at UA) more than one minute on the page to be a part of the event.

So tell me, if only 600 to 1,800 of an 80K Facebook group read/like/comment; if only 800 of an 8K twitter feed take the time to retweet (and it's often more like 80); and 800 were in the interactive blog . . . .

At the end of the day, the numbers of actual participation, consumption of message and integration into the group are really about the same.

When Source Becomes Distribution Network

An interesting collision this weekend put me to thinking about the new role of people and organizations that once served the media ecosystem as sources, and what happens when those sources now have the means to distribute their own information.

Back in the day -- gosh, five years ago -- colleges and universities received notice of a game being on television, and would dutifully give that to the collective media to spread among the fan base.

Today, the moment we receive that information we share it to the media, but also directly to interested parties that follow our websites, real-time distribution networks and social media.

In the past few weeks, the contest to "be first" has led to some interesting events. A mistake by a website caused one of our local media to jump out with the news that an upcoming game would be on a certain network. It wasn't true. And in fact, there was no way it could be due to the league's TV windows and the preset game time.

We knew this, shared it with the media person. OK, retweet. Today, the news finally comes of what the network is -- so in the process of our sending out the info I'm concerned, is this going to look like I'm trying to call this media person out?

The networks and times come out at approximately the same time every week during football season for SEC teams. We have no particular interest in holding that back, or favoring one outlet over another. It's not going to be decided until the SEC says so. The league serves as source to us, and the same thing is going to happen -- as soon as they know, they will tell us and everyone else at once.

So is being first that important anymore? And if the source is also distributing the answers, is guessing to be first before the source makes a decision worth the chance of being wrong?

This echos locally back to the Mike Wise business. Now he claims that he was just making his "fake" tweet as a media gag on his radio show, and got caught by the Twitter Fail Whale -- his near immediate "hey, this is a joke and let's see how many people bite" tweet that he was saying over his radio show did not go out for 40 minutes. (You can listen more about his explanation through On the Media -- worth the click over).

But let's just say that Wise said he was guessing. Or that he had a mystery source. Or read another media account. When the NFL finally puts out their decision -- as source -- they send it through their distribution networks that Big Ben is getting four games.

What if Wise said four? He looks clairvoyant. He'd have bet the future with pocket deuces and come up the big winner. Would anyone really have been challenging him?

In our case if being on X network at Y time was almost systematically impossible, who's to say the media who jumped the gun would be at risk, if the risk proved correct.

Sometimes we get the sense that increasingly competitive media to be first are badgering for an insider edge, but get upset when we say no. The decision will be out when we've got it ready. Instead of respecting that as was the case in the past, the counter is "you're just holding it back so you can be first." No, we're holding it back until we know we're right.

I could have reasonably guessed that next week's football game with Alabama would be on CBS based upon several factors. But until the SEC tells us via email memo that it indeed is a done deal, it's just our opinion. And if we had put that out to fans that we're "pretty sure," we'd be barbecued by the same folks that upset that we're holding back from them.

I know it's a damned if you do/don't dilemma.

Will CoSIDA be Last?

A point of discussion for some years within the organization is certification. The consensus was to not have it during the late 90s, early 00s. Increasingly, the point is moot. Other organizations around athletics are adding certification as a means of portraying themselves as "professional" and separating average skills from "college-level".

Look, I am the first to say I find the entire "wears a good suit" school of hiring -- total appearance over substance -- abhorrent.

Problem is that's not the world we live in, kids.

No offense to their profession when I say this, but the business card form comes across the transom a few weeks ago for one of our assistant equipment managers, who's got some alphabet soup after his name. I ask, and he's "certified" in collegiate equipment manager skills.

So add equipment managers to strength coaches, trainers, counselors, academic support, marketing, certain sport coaching groups, et al, that now provide certification to the members of their organizations.

The time has passed for it in the PR community associated with athletics. There. I said it.

Consider me certifiable.

Creepy Marketing? Maybe.

From Nielsen Wire, a brief on how neuromarketing research was used to promote sales for New Scientist magazine's cover. Briefly, the testing of covers to see where the eye went and what the deep recesses of the brain were lighting up through EEG scans picked the cover that went on to result in a double-digit spike in sales for the month.

On face value, determining what works via brain scan sounds a little creepy. Still, you get past attempts not so much to deceive as to give the answers perhaps a questioner wants to hear with the scanning. Lie To Me meets Scanners.

I've heard a good deal of skepticism on neuromarketing, and a lot of it based in a Luddite reaction.

Tell me something: what's creepier -- a volunteer hooked up to a bunch of electrodes knowingly studied or another "volunteer" who clicked "I Agree" to a EULA that allows complex algorithms to sift through all your searches, personal data and other trending data to deliver you ads that "fit" your predicted preferences.

At least the first volunteer knows it's happening.

Disturbing

Fellow punk rockers -- raise your hand if you still remember slam dancing -- I've go to say perhaps the most unsettling song I've heard in some time is Florence + The Machine "Kiss with a Fist," which I uncovered while pulling down the more current "Dog Days are Over."

The lyrics are beyond inappropriate, but just like quality old school punk, oddly, you can't look away because of the music.

Dark Heart Brings Fiction to Life

One of my all-time favorite movies is Hopscotch. Walter Matthau plays a seasoned CIA operative, that, well, I'll just quote IMDB:

tired of his incompetent colleagues retires and dares them to stop him from publishing an embarrassing book of memoirs

Actually, more like quits because he's not going to accept a desk job, which was a blatant attempt at driving him from the field, again, courtesy of the incompetent boss of covert ops. As the years pass, I love this movie more and more . . . but I digress.

Today, I pick up the newspaper to read: Sources: U.S. seeks all copies of memoir. Apparently one Anthony Shaffer has written a tell-all book, Operation Dark Heart. The book was cleared by Army Reserve, but Defense Intelligence has objected. Oops, too late, the book is already printed.

No problem, the Pentagon offered to buy up the entire 10,000 book first run. (OK, the BBC link is gratuitous; but love to see the "Defence Department").

Sort of like when the CIA operatives go to visit Miles Kendig's publisher in England and threaten to do evil things -- like burn down the warehouse -- to prevent that book's release. Ah, Myerson; I've known you well.

All said, the bumbling efforts of the Pentagon to get and destroy the book are going to make it the most sought after download of the fall season.

If the DIA wasn't being so ham-fisted about it, you'd almost wonder if it wasn't a publicity stunt to get attention for the book.

" . . . this is Eleanor Roooooosevelt. Joe Cutter is tied to a chair in his rooooom . . . "

Seen Today

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but a clip from a recent Division I school job description:

social media experience (professional use of social media outlets)

As opposed to all those amateurs using social media to influence the reputation of our respective teams and brands.

I'll give benefit of doubt that was was meant was someone who during their professional PR career had worked with social media in their strategy. Because if the meaning was the opposite -- we'd like to have very professional attitudes and professional language and professional approaches to a calculating use of social media outlets, including the ever so professional manipulation and spinning of said outlets -- well, ya ain't gettin' what this is all 'bout.

Be genuine. Professional = plastic; 60s Mad Men false. It's that confusing serious with solemn again.

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Blogger

OK, I know when you are the receiving end of EDSBS and the rapier of Spencer Hall, it's not funny at all. But one must give props to anyone willing to pen the line:

THE SATANIC HIRSUTE HIPPO DOG OF VICTORY APPROACHES

As a tag line to a photo of the new Virginia mascot. The lead item of this week's Curious Index.

Prejudices, Reissued

I learn via the Arts and Letters RSS that H.L. Mencken's series, Prejudices, has been reissued as a single collection. I have hunted copies of the series -- collections of the Bad Boy of Baltimore's harshest critiques -- at used bookstores across America.

I've found Mencken fascinating first as the ultimate iconoclast; skeptical but not a cynic. His role in defining the early 20th century culturally is often underestimated.

More recently, I find him a presentist echo for today's chattering class on cable news. As Truman said, the only thing new in the world is the history we don't know, and it is very easy to point backwards to Mencken and say, there, there is the precursor of Bill O'Reilly; of Keith Obermann; of Glenn Beck; of Rachel Maddow.

In some ways yes, but in many, it does violence to the record. Mencken was, to use the now almost passe term, a hater. He was, however, a self-aware hater -- a critic who fully understood he was expressing his personal view of the upper class and those who perceived of themselves as successful.

A&L links to a review on Barnes and Noble's site by Katherine Powers:

Prejudices must be taken at its title's word: the pieces within are the enunciation of visceral, intransigent opinions, often pedestrian in their substance and riven by inconsistency. They are, in a word, journalism.

Oooh. That was, dare I say, a Mencken-esque turn of phrase by Powers.

I use Mencken extensively in my history class, and for those who would like a taste of what a really catty column reads like, pick up a Prejudiced or two. Sahara of Bozart comes quickly to mind, or his missives from the Scopes Trial. Powers reminds of the obituary column of William Jennings Bryan in which Mencken writes of midwestern statesman: a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity.

Next time you think a Limbaugh is biting, or a Dennis Miller turns an erudite riposte -- spend a little time in the 1920s.

While You Were Starting the Season

Perhaps you were like me and only paid slight attention to the showdown between Time Warner and Disney over the carriage of ESPN on TW's cable systems. PaidContent provides the very, very important backstory for college sports fans (and athletic departments).

ESPN3 gets even wider access and approaches a TV Everywhere system.

For now, you have to hope your internet provider allows it through.

This isn't unlike our own iHog audio strategy -- if you are a subscriber, we should not care what device or mode you use to access it. Same applies here with ESPN3 as a follow-on piece of the TV Everywhere concept.

Read more at Paid Content.

Sharing the Labor on Labor Day

Lots of talk at NAB 2010 among some of the digeratti about "reverse distribution networks." Let's just call them friends.

If your content is compelling, or you have a lot of friends that can help you in a good cause, a very effective and cost efficient way to get the word out is to put your fans to work for you.

See, everyone in the past had distribution lists to media so you could get a story out about an upcoming event. That's still a way to reach certain key demographics and put your facts and details in front of media VIPs.

Facebook and Twitter are the front line. Need to get the word out about, oh, let's say the most recent accomplishment of a star athlete and create buzz about the fact? Create a custom hash tag, share the meaning of the tag with those fans and let them go to work replicating your message.

This past weekend, we toss out to our fans -- with the instructions on what to do -- our new hash tag of #15Mallett. If they see that tag, we are telling them to retweet, repost, like and share.

More Wise Twitter

Courtesy of the Indiana Sports Journalism feed, David Kindred remembers some of the all-time media "jokes" gone wrong.

Along with more insights on the whole sordid affair, a reminder of a classic from the Age of Watergate:

Ben Bradlee, in his time as the Post’s executive editor, once said, "Yes, we print lies. We print what people tell us."

Repurposing and Wallpaper

How do you afford to pay a designer or have the time yourselves to make all those wallpapers?

It is all about re-purposing.

In the past, every printed guide needed a cover. OK, that made sense. But these days, everything is on-line (or so the NCAA and lots of people say/think).

Alright then, what is the master aspect ratio of what you're doing now? A landscape 4x3 at minimum, 16x9 more likely?

Gee, how hard is it to turn those page graphics from your "on-line" media guide into wallpaper that can be distributed to the fans so they can join in.

Keep in mind, internet 2.0 was all about sharing, a conversation. The 3.0 world we live in now takes that two-way street and puts in the back pocket of a fan who not only wants to be involved with you directly, they want to be a part of the program.

So, why not provide them visual message to share with their friends (and potential future students at your school)?

Our plan is to provide an image piece -- adapted from a cover art/schedule card/poster -- and a schedule piece -- often the back cover -- as well as three flexible pieces of art for mobile. We are also doing each one in three aspect ratios -- 800x800 for older computers and two flavors of wide screen/resolution -- 1280x900 and 1900x1200.

So yes, that's a minimum of nine pieces of art for every sport; 19 sports -- OK, you do the math.

That's not including our Game Week wallpaper to give fans a quick shot of info about the upcoming football opponent and a bonus wallpaper based on a great play from the past week's game. Yep, another six (2x3 resolutions) per week in football.

If you want to see the collection, we have a home page just for that at ArkansasRazorbacks.com.

Carving Out Niches

Tomorrow, we'll see a couple of brave experiments come to a first test. They might stumble, but I'm pretty sure they won't fail. More important, they represent the digital future for athletic departments.

Both are related to the rapid encroachment of rights holders -- local, conference and national -- onto campus. Long ago the ability to stream live football left Arkansas to various parties. What we own is anything not game, and anything before kickoff (or after).

OK -- let's create a streaming video pregame. For two years, that was just the same video that went to the main scoreboard screen coupled with the audio of football radio pregame.

Tomorrow, we'll have our own little original programing Countdown to Kickoff. Student run and manned through the RazorVision Academy.

The RazorVision Academy is the completion of a dream I laid out for the first time in 2006 to the J-School here. Battling for the concept through 2008 and 2009, here in 2010 it's about to start paying off dividends with the hiring of our dual-appointment sports journalism production assistant professor and director of the RazorVision Academy.

Along with the pregame show for football, they'll do all home soccer, volleyball, softball and track. That refocuses our professional staff onto other sports and into our specialty productions for on-line recruiting. Tons of real-world experience for students, better production for all.

Original experience programing is the untapped future. Big 10 Network vacuums up everything live, along with many other league-wide deals. So what is left? Get creative. We did a nine-part series this summer "Meet the Coaches" that was half sitdown with our assistant coaches and half mic'd up in practice feature. Fans get to know the assistant coaches. Assistant coaches get to talk about things that are important message points to potential recruits. We get a summer series for RazorVision subscribers when there is no other programing. Again, everyone wets their beak.

The other is iHog bringing out audio from football. This is still the beta in many ways, but I'm putting our money, time and engineering into audio streaming to mobile devices.

But I want to see the game, say the fans. Great. ESPN3 and the SEC Digital Network are going to do that either this year or next. They own the rights. And we're not going to dump very significant money into code and effort for something that may exist in our control for only a year.

Audio, however, belongs to the campus. And that's where our niche will be in the third-screen web 3.0 mobile world.

Take Care with Tweets

Personally, could care less about celeb gossip -- except when they are making new media news. For those more wrapped up in tonight's game or this weekend's openers, Paris Hilton got rung up for cocaine possession last week. No, no says Paris, who ironically was at the nearby Wynne in Las Vegas, wasn't my coke cause it was a borrowed purse.

She admitted yes, my ID; my money; my rolling papers; but no no no no to the blow.

Today, we learn through one of the celeb sites who took a little review time of Hilton's Twitter feed that at the very least, the heiress and former brief Arkansas resident owns a purse just like the one she was arrested with.

Props to Radar for the story here || Jump to the tweet

Let this be a lesson about those spur of the moment TwitPics. One never knows when it may become at least an embarrassment and at worst a legal entanglement.

Two Things That Always Follow You

Your reputation and your standards, and Mike Wise got a hard lesson in that this week. As speculation swirls about Pittsburgh Steeler QB Ben Roethlisberger's suspension length, Wise sent out a Tweet saying he knew it was five weeks now, not the original six (interesting since the preseason game on Fox was reporting the possibility of it being cut to four). Washington Post ombudsman blog || Original note at National Sports Journalism Center.

Wise's message set off alarms across the league, and he came back to say that it was false -- made up of whole cloth -- and he was doing it just to prove a point about accountability in social media.

He's right. Amateurs aren't held to accountability standards, and they are often posting as PigBoy47.

Pros know better.

Lets keep the terms straight. When PigBoy47 does it, you could call it Tweeting.

When Mike Wise does it -- or anyone else who wishes to lay claim to a "journalist" label -- it is real-time reporting. No more, no less. Same rules of proof should apply there as in his home publication.

Whether Wise likes it or not, his paradigm doesn't shift with the account he's using to log into his readers.

One of two nut quotes:

Vita (the sports editor at the Post) sent a note to his staff reminding them of The Post’s rules on social media. They say that in anything transmitted via social media networks, like Twitter or Facebook, “we must protect our professional integrity.”

“We must be accurate in our reporting and transparent about our intentions,” the guidelines read.

The other one was written by the ombudsman, Andrew Alexander. It's your 140 takeaway:

But Wise wasn’t reporting. He was fabricating, which is the greatest sin in journalism.

What does that mean in this space? It goes double for the person formerly known as "the source." If an athletic administrator, a coach or an athlete sends out into they know is misleading, they get hit twice. First, you deceived. Second, you have no one to blame -- you did it to yourself.

In this, Wise gets the man-up credit for not blaming a source for bad information.

I've heard many a player (occasionally a coach) say it's not fair that they can't "joke around" with their Facebook or Twitter pages like other students or friends. I can have some empathy, but that was the trade off many of us faced when we signed on as public figures.

Pythons Give the Best Advice

Ah, as we launch into the first week of football season, I am reminded of the ever so important advice of John Cleese:

Don't confuse serious with solemn

It's a game. Go have fun.

On National Anthems

(A double entry tonight -- both here and on my regular Bill's Blog for UA)

The worst national anthem I've ever witnessed happened just over 20 years ago. The opponent shall remain nameless to protect the innocent.

The arena was characteristically empty for this particular team at this point in its women's basketball history. No student section. No band. No fans - I counted about 50 people in the facility.

In walks the singer. She begins and quickly begins to sing her own song. Literally.

" . . . And the sun, over the mountains . . . "

Mountains? Did I hear that right?

She sang with such confidence, maybe I heard her wrong. I looked across the floor to the reporter from the NW Arkansas Times that had traveled with us. The grin on his face is growing.

"O're the land of the free, and the land, of the, free."

And she was gone. Our journalist friend had taped the last half, because it was too much to believe at the time. Lady'Backs went on to pound the other team, but for years what those of us that were there remembered was the anthem.

I recall that time to frame the events of this past week.

Here's the thing about singing the national anthem. It takes nerve. Incredible guts. You don't just walk out there and do it, and no one who hasn't walked out in front of an audience and been the soloist can really understand.

Back in my college days, one of my j-school teachers and one of the instructors of a coaching class said the exact same thing: don't criticize until you've tried it. In both cases, they were talking about officiating. That's what led me to officiating junior high basketball for a semester; and getting a real clear understanding.

So a young woman stepped to the floor at one of our events this past weekend. She confidently and clearly belted out the first couple of lines and then, it happened. She forgot where she was. She stopped. She turned to the sound op and made a brief icebreaker little joke that he'd jinxed her. And calmly, she restarted the anthem.

All was well, until she approached that same spot in the song. The fear came across her face. Like a marathoner at 22 miles, she hit the wall. She gasped.

What happened next is what this blog is about. Before she could think about her next move; before she could restart; before she could walk away.

The crowd, as if on cue, picked up as one the next word. And they sang together as one with a voice that reached out to lift her up. She joined back in over the PA system, and together, the singer and the crowd completed a stirring opening of the event.

As she proudly made her exit, she was patted on the back by many for her courage. No one was upset, in fact, the crowd seemed to understand. These things happen.

I would bet she has performed the anthem dozens of times; probably before much larger audiences. Certainly, she will remember that night, but I will too, just not for the same reason.

Having been that person who made a public error, I know she will only recall the humiliation. She won't imagine that I won't have the same opinion of her.

Far from the truth. She's not the one I'll think about.

It will be the crowd. A group of around a thousand people of all ages and backgrounds. Most of them didn't know the person sitting next to them.

However, for one moment, they came together as one to rescue a person that most of them did not know. They did what we do best in times of trouble, help one and other.

Five years ago this weekend, we were all called to help an entire city. For the most part, we did. I sit back and watch the news accounts and the remembrances of Katrina. I don't dwell on Brownie, or any of the other mistakes that were made. We've learned from them. What sticks with me are the volunteers who did what they had to do to help people when they needed it most.

When we came together, as one, to lift up the ones that needed our help.

The Byline According to Luke

Bylines on institutional websites remain contentious. Are you representing the whole or promoting yourself? Not that long ago, a colleague confronted me because I used my name on a departmental blog. I had never thought of it as the attempt to be self-promoting that I was being accused of. Here, yes; there, no -- transparent and accountable.

I've written in the past about the need for the byline to let the consumers know who is responsible for copy. Today's church service included Luke 14:1, 7-14. OK, none of you have known me to get into bible study here -- and that's not the point. The parable is about Jesus making a point that you shouldn't assume a place of honor for yourself, and it began to get me thinking about the byline: "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

A little pensive time, and I come to this conclusion. Putting out a byline is more about humbling than exalting. Huh? Follow me on this.

Earlier in the passage, Luke records how Jesus instructed that you should take your place at the banquet at the lowest spot, and wait to be invited by your host to sit in the place of honor. This also served to avoid the wrongful assumption you are THE distinguished guest. By having the staff that work the website place bylines and credit lines on work, they are indeed laying themselves out for potential humbling. And if the work meets with the pleasure of those who read or view the website, the people will let you know "friend, move up higher; then you will be honored."

At the start of the credits of every single media guide I served as the editor for over the previous 25 years of my media relations career, I began with this line: "Credit goes to many who are listed in this space; blame rests solely with your editor."

HTML and CoverItLive News

Many of you may already know this, but I'll toss it out to both our staff and many followers who are starting to use the CoverItLive engine. We are encouraging links to live stats and live streams, and if you use the News Alert box to place the links. Sure, you can just drop them in raw, and the system will make them live, but you'll get something nasty like:

http://www.arkansasrazorbacks.com/newLiveStats/Volleyball/index.html?GAME_STAT_ID=510588&db_oem_id=6100

A little tinkering, and you can put any standard HTML commands in the news alert space, which means you can get a nice representation like:

Live Stats || Live Video

by just adding in the "A HREF=" command plus a little formatting from a CENTER, FONT SIZE=3 and B at the opening of the info. Obviously, you need to add your "<" brackets around those commands. Except for closing the HREF's, I save the extra characters that closing the formatting would normally require. You have only 450 characters to use in the news alert space. If you view source this blog to see the code here, it does have the proper HTML syntax because Blogger won't allow the broken formatting.

Now, right up front with your scoreboard, you have the quick links to encourage fans to get more stats than what the text-oriented blog provides and a way to push them to the video or audio to enhance the on-line interaction.

Value and Worth

Why We Like What We Like from NPR Science Friday could not be more spot on.  The interview of Harvard's Paul Bloom confirmed something at I suspected based on personal experience.  They story opened by pointing out a first chair violin genius going down into the subway and making $32 the night after having led the same city's philharmonic to a tens of thousands of dollar performance.

What was different? One was perceived to have cost a lot of money to attend, and then in turn, must have been a better performer than the street violinist.

The book, How Pleasure Works, showed that we perceive pleasure and value when we think there was more effort or cost going into it.  I've lived this effect - guide covers or other layouts that were considered outstanding, but once the artist or price was revealed, some of the same people who loved it no longer thought it was quality work.

The takeaway quote from Bloom:
You think wine doesn't taste as good if you don't know it's expensive or special wine. A painting is going to look different to you, and you're going to value it differently, if you don't - depending on who you think created it.

I often see the same in the social media world, where the tools are often free or very low cost.  Certainly the skill to make a free tool sing is the difference between craftsman and a dilettante, but to the consumer or administrator, how can that free thing have the same impact as an expensive similar solution.

FourSquare is a perfect example.  It can provide the same marketing potential as an affinity card program, but for a fraction of the cost.  Still, FourSquare is perceived as a toy; the five-figure card program with readers, databases and sponsorships far more "impactful."

Bloom adds that meaning often points to essence.  How pleasing we think something is is often based upon who we think did the work and how much effort or cost it took to create it.

To listen to the story or read the transcript, jump here.

Marvel Method of Management

One of the great surprises of this year's NAB event was Stan Lee.  Like every dozens of fanboys in attendance, I came simply to kiss the ring of the creator of the Marvel universe.

Stan the Man proved to be something much, much more.

Along with the bombastic one-liners, Lee handed down some profound insight into how to succeed, particularly in fields like ours.

Paraphrasing Lee's management style that was vital to the "Marvel Method:"

The key is understanding when people have talent, recognize that and let them make the decisions.  Micromanaging leads to people not letting the people who know the problem and have the skills not make the decisions they are best at.

There's some truth that you can't find in a stack of top-down management style books.

Excelsior!!!

High Cost of Tweeting

Chad Ochocinco lost veinticinco grande for his in-game tweet, the NFL handing out the fine today. It prompted another Chad tweet to his followers. Here in our neighborhood, according to the radio station, tweets and other social media played a role in the Rene Gork events.

The bottom line: know the social media policies of the agencies you are working with. It can be costly.

More on Photoshop Express

Today's football fan day a perfect example of how this program can help you fix photos on the run.
Here's the original iPhone pick of Ryan Mallett signing for one of the first fans. OK, but not really usable. A quick crop, hard push on the exposure and now I've got something I can email into our website and Twitter feed.Believe me -- you need this app. And, I've mentioned this one but it does cost $9.95, if you're quarterback draws a serpentine line of hundreds, maybe over a thousand, than want his pre-Heisman run autograph, you need to get Pano also.
Not bad for a five image stitch.

Just Call Me Wikan

We've been doing some clean-up editing out on the internets the past few weeks, particularly fixing some small errors and adding some key people to Wikipedia. I'd highly recommend anyone in the business taking a moment to check their coaches and teams to make sure that A) they exist and B) they're accurately portrayed.

We made a very transparent login -- ArkRazorbacks, of course -- because we didn't want the Wikipedia folks confused at all. As I always recommend, post as who you are; they'll find out eventually anyway.

That didn't sit well as we got an email back saying, you appear to be an institution or organization, and we frown upon that. Excuse me? Who is going to be the most accurate source on the exact date Bobby Petrino arrived.

Now, I understand they don't want to have us in there making editorial changes to opinion -- and just like any message board or other public commentary space -- that's not our place.

The other thing Wikipedia asked was "are you sure these persons are noteworthy?"

What? Willy Robinson and Garrick McGee not noteworthy? Are these Wikans wearing Gator hats while they type that response? Do they understand what wrath that could invoke?

So, it made me think -- what other notable individuals are missing from the pages of the world's largest encyclopedia? And I found one -- Otus the Head Cat.

Before you laugh, if Opus the Penguin can have an entry, Michael Storey of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's weekly fiction and satire column nom de plume deserves one. So I made it.

Outing myself as the Wikian, Wikan, Wikipedist -- what is the correct form there -- might get the entry whacked, but let me point out -- it's been edited twice by other fans who cleaned up a couple of mistakes I made. After all, isn't that the point of the whole business?

I'll also confess this -- I've been a highly skeptical user of Wikipedia, what with having that PhD in history and all. But I am seeing less and less of what I would call partisan error or inexperienced mistakes. As a result, I use it more and more myself for a quick look-up. Yes, I would not let a student use it as a primary source on a report, but as a Cliff Notes guide, sure. Just make sure you verify facts with other sources. After all, that is the heart of good research.

If you haven't read Otus, you're really missing out on some really cleaver stuff. Some of it may be lost in the translation to my colleagues who are not of this region -- it is very Arkansas-based stuff -- it's still a really humorous weekly read. Here's this week's column (pay site warning) about the discovery of Otus' enshrinement into Wikipedia.

As a PS: This would be the 911 post of the blog. Once upon a time, that simply meant the automobile I most wanted to own -- a turbo Porsche 911 targa, preferably with the whale tail. These days, little more ominous.

Mind your TweetDeck

Something ill happened with the latest iPad upgrade, and I now find my TweetDeck firing uncontrollably. Posts that I directed at one account (the Doctor_BS) appeared on another (ArkRazorbacks), and even when I tried to isolate to individual accounts for test, I still got duplicates to my primary business account.

Probably will uninstall and reinstall now that I'm back home, but all you folks out there using it -- take care.

Photoshop Express

If you are an iSpace user, I highly recommend grabbing the new Photoshop Express. A lot of the simple adjustments that can clean up a quick point-and-shoot photo that might have required opening on a laptop can now be done within the phone, and the application then used to upload to Facebook, TwitPic or an online Adobe photo storage account.

The price is right -- free -- even if it didn't do an outstanding job. Must ad for on-the-go media relations folks, right up there with Pano.

The photo here is a quick crop, lightening of exposure, touch of sharpening, then uploaded direct to Blogger for the posting. The color correction leaves something to be desired, but again, consider the original file below and that you're using pretty basic tools on a smart phone to achieve the edit.

Curious how much better this will work on iPad -- out to get a photo connection kit tomorrow, something I thought would be totally useless until this quick little app showed up.

How to Dismantle an F-Bomb

Oh, we can laugh about it today. When I had my telephone stolen back in November 2009 on the way to Dallas, and it was used to send out the following tweet over the athletic department feed:

"F*** you"

It took a rapid response and a pretty set series of actions to prevent first my unemployment and second to protect the reputation of the athletic department.

Golden hour response time is all the rage in PR these days, but it proved to be the difference maker. I was monitoring our feed through text alerts, and others monitor our feed as well. We never thought the monitoring would be used to attack a hacker.

The moment it happened, I knew that a rapid response was required. I called my two immediate supervisors and reminded them about the stolen phone. That part is crucial, because once the device went missing, I had reported it to supervisors, property control and the phone office.

I remembered that we had a press conference for men's basketball underway at the time, so I knew we had to respond quickly as the media certainly saw the tweet. What I didn't remember is that a football game management meeting was also underway. Imagine the internal audience surprise to that text.

Five minutes in, this was sheer reaction. An aggressively transparent series of tweets were sent. Acknowledging that an inappropriate message was sent, apologizing for the inappropriate message, reassuring that it was stolen and wouldn't happen again.

I was later asked if I thought a press release or other action was needed. No, I thought then and believe now that you respond in the medium -- in this case, Twitter. If it had been a message board, it would be there. This also was working within the social context of the error.

This was a crisis situation, at least of reputation, and you execute your crisis plan in such circumstances. Alert appropriate parties, take action to mediate the impact, survey the circumstances and then plan to prevent it from happening again.

Here we learned some important hard lessons about our technology. No matter how convenient, pairing mobile devices to any system is dangerous. The kids didn't get a bunch of passwords, they had just started sending the same seven-letter message to random numbers in the phone. And, they knew that if they sent a text to "40404", if the phone was paired with a Twitter account, it would automatically display the message.

Did you know that even if your phone is turned off, it may not be shut down for as much as four hours after the kill command is sent? So in this case, even though one of the critical technicians didn't answer their phone and the first alert of the event became a voice mail, it didn't matter.

Because I went aggressively into a plan that fulfilled those great four goals of ICS -- it became something we can study now. But what if it didn't, what if I lost my job over it?

Here's the difference between responsibility and fault. Having a teenager steal my phone and use it for a prank was not my fault. The phone, however, was my responsibility. It was issued to me. You can -- and must -- accept responsibility for events; you just don't have to be beaten down by fault.

Consider the unfortunate lives of Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short. They were the naval and military commanders of the Hawaiian Islands in 1941. Specifically, the island of O'ahu. Each executed the plan they were given. Kimmel lined the battleships up side-by-side to protect against submarine incursion into Pearl Harbor. Short moved all the aircraft and other key resources to the center of the airfields, wingtip to wingtip, to prevent saboteurs from breaching the fences.

Who would have expected the Imperial Naval Air Forces bombing Pearl? No one.

Yet they were relieved of duty, assumed to have been court-marshaled [corrected] and for decades public opinion for being at fault for our failure. Years later, we learn, they were indeed the responsible commanders, and fell on their swords, but they were not given all the info they needed and they were following orders. In 1999, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution to exonerate them.

In the end, you prepare for these kind of days by a series of events -- deaths, probation, firing on the low side; Final Fours and national championships on the up side -- and you learn from it all how to react under these kind of events.

In the end, they don't pay you for the good days; they pay you for the bad days. You work the good ones for free, an old colleague once said.

Keep Calm Carry On is the famous meme born of a plan to settle the British masses in the event of Nazi invasion of the home islands. It's a pretty good motto for anyone in this business.

FourSquare next wave

It isn't an apocryphal story: I was a first hand witness to a major Division I BCS level football SID/head office manager say he would never have an email address because that was just a useless fad.

. . . And then the ones that said Twitter.

. . . And just this week, overheard having "no use at all for Facebook."

Add to the list FourSquare. We had a couple of bright young stars at CoSIDA Convention talking up the geolocation service. I'd been playing with it off and on most of the year, picking it over the rival service Gowalla, and noticed a story in The Chronicle regarding the way campus tours were getting unknown graffette. Campus visit prospects were leaving behind brutally honest comments about points on campus.

I've sensed that it will be a better way to do affinity or other checkin type rewards - why force students or others to carry a special card and invest in the scanning and recording infrastructure when FourSquare provides it.

Today, two more indicators that FourSquare as a concept is real.

As I check in at XNA, I get a special alert from one of my FourSquare friends about trying out the dyson hand driers. Huh? That was a comment left by him, and because we are FourSquare friends, it auto pops up. Imagine that social power - we believe our friends and value their opinions more than marketers. What if he left behind a recommendation on a restaurant or service? Suppose at the other end of my trip, he's been there also and said "XYZ bar-be-que rocks" - where do you think I'll think of going?

In this case, XNA might take a moment to assess some of the comments left by FourSquare folks about the airport's services. Those are semipermanent comments.

The second was sitting here and listening to the news that Facebook is getting ready to launch a geolocation check in for mobile. So stores can give you coupons. So friends can find where you are. So you can post your comments about where you are.

The mobile web is becoming more personal each and every day.

Have you claimed all your home sports venues on FourSquare? You better today.

The Voice in My Head

While working on other projects, I came across this extremely clear explanation of why splash screens on website home pages are bad architecture, if not potential evil. OK, that might be a bit much.

Sink the Splash Pages incorporates some Nielson work along with a lot of internet common sense. You're putting a wall between your extremely expensive content and the world, and it's going to have unintended consequences.

Research from all levels, Nielson to local, show that splash screens increase the likelihood of a user not continuing to the website. You've got to get advertising, but doing it in this way -- or promoting things you as a department are selling like tickets -- becomes an annoyance and has a negative impact on the content. They violate that most basic of modern internet communication precepts: it’s not a speech anymore, it’s a conversation. The splash screen isn’t just an outbound lecture, it’s screaming at your consumers to pay attention to something.

Nielson said it best: The homepage's impact on a company's bottom line is far greater than simple measures of e-commerce revenues: the homepage is also your company's face to the world.

Andy King adds this pithy assessment: Splash pages can backfire with users. Rather than enticing them to explore further you repel them clicking and screaming.

Where do splash screens work? When the message they convey is something of great interest to the end users and complements the message of the website’s home page. Primary example, short-time frame celebrations – a splash page that lauds a national championship or other momentous achievement that the users will find more information about after the click through.

A More Effective Checklist

Third of a series on the ideas behind the new ArkansasRazorbacks.com layout.

By reducing the number of advertising positions, the value of those remaining increased, which is a bonus to the rights holders. By increasing the editorial content areas, the consumers feel they are getting a better product, and are more inclined to use the product. This in turn increases page views and unique users, which of course, increases the value of the reduced ads.

The marketing messages that were scattered all over the previous designs – we must have “X” on the front page at all times! – were not seen by the end user as athletic department promotion or the well-intended attempt to bring to fan’s attention specials and programs that benefited them. They were just another advertisement; just another piece of visual clutter.

Those messages are now carried by a pair of new vehicles. The primary way information about tickets and promotions are presented are through additional stories written by the marketing and ticketing areas of the athletic department to convey the info. The second is through features on the larger programs which can be displayed in a targeted manner – sport-by-sport on the features module rotator.

Breaking this down into the life cycle of an event, here are the parts that assemble into the whole experience for the fan.

Each editorial story is the nucleus around which the electrons of marketing information orbit.

PRE-EVENT STORY: Links to tickets for the event, promotion for the event, directions and fan guide information to the event, streaming data, streaming audio/video, live blog.

IN EVENT: Now the live blog becomes the placeholder for the same links – tickets, promotions, directions, streaming information.

POST EVENT STORY: A recap of the event along with links to text/HTML statistics, computer generated play-by-play or other stats, PDF reports of stats, game notes or quotes, post-game press conference video, replays of video/audio/interactive blogs.

In this way, fans can find the information they need, and by having it available in text forms that promote sharing, they can forward it to friends to invite them to join them at these events.

Whisper To A Scream

Part two of three on the ideas behind the new layout at ArkansasRazorbacks.com

Icicle Works is one of my fav one-hit-wonder 80's bands. Birds Fly is their Shatner-esque effort. Nobody remembers the title. Everyone remembers the refrain -- a whisper to a scream.

Check it out on iTunes. The melody builds slowly, then it explodes into a hard Taiko-drum roll. Just like your promotional ideas -- they should start as your whisper to your fans and their social graphs -- the reverse distribution group that will have the greatest lasting impact because it is the most trusted distribution network.

Want you subliminal message du jure? Tell me that in the middle of that song isn't the inadvertent explanation of the state of net marketing in the modern it's not longer a speech, it's a conversation world: "Finding our way around indecision; we are, we are rather helpless."

Next time you hear that song on the golden oldies station, you'll remember this column.

And that, kids, is a successful meme.

Today’s successful advertisement is a meme, a brilliantly clear message set adrift into the internet; a mental virus to be calculating about it that will multiply and spread among those interested in receiving it. Marketers who spend time figuring out how “to go viral” are laboring to get that perfect meme.

The steps are simple. Almost too simple to be believed.

First, have a quality product. Ron Harlan said it, if the product sucks, social media won’t fix it. In turn, no amount of advertising or promotion can repair it. It is shocking how many people believe they can succeed in the marketplace without this basic fact.

The rest of the steps are easy.

Bring the key information together with clear language written in active voice.

Verify the accuracy of all facts, figures and action points like phone numbers, emails, addresses both physical and virtual.

Keep the details up to date and attached to as many carrier stories as possible.

Deploy easy to use tools for your consumers to spread the information to friends.

That’s it.

No elaborate splash screens. No flash videos.

This was the heart of the most recent design at ArkansasRazorbacks.com. Less ads, more editorial, clear marketing messages, everybody wins.

Next: A checklist of integrating marketing into editorial.

Sunday Notes

I freely admit to getting ideas while sitting in church, and other inspirations. Tell me, can anyone not read the 64th psalm and not think that was written for anyone under message board or other assault?

Nevertheless, I've moved up to making the occasional note on my iPhone. It's too easy not to, but I do admit to being a little sheepish of whipping out a cell phone in church for notes. Am I the only person who does that?

Of course, I could claim I was just texting prayers.

Robocalls Come to Athletics

One of the viral marketing tools making its way around college athletics are the simulated personal pitch for tickets. You fill out a form, get to see your number on a jersey than receive a robocall from the coach telling you how much you are needed.

Every athletic administrator who sees this done by another school races to get it for his school because it’s so cool.

Yep, feeds right into that desire for acceptance from good old Coach. Preys upon the insecurity of being needed by the group.

The question is: do they work?

Here’s my point. These marketing tools are directed at consumers of a particular product or team. Would those individuals have made the same purchase without the elaborate appeal – and the related financial cost? Could a more direct, simple and social network driven alternative have resulted in the same level or response? Was the increased response from the email and robocall eaten up by the overhead cost of the campaign?

Consider it the modern day equivalent of the splash screen with an opt-in feature.

Integrated Marketing

First in a series of three posts about the theory behind the new layout of ArkansasRazorbacks.com

With declining impact of traditional display advertising and low click-through rate for on-screen image advertising, editorial-based information presents at least the equal impact of these older formats, and research shows some direct and many anecdotal impacts of increased probability of messages resulting in positive action.

The goal of integrating marketing is to infuse the editorial content which fans value with the necessary information to inspire them to be aware of promotions and other awareness on behalf of advertisers, but to do so in ways that can be easily shared within the social graph and understood by the consumer.

In other words, write out the details in a clear story.

Traditional marketing consumes inordinate amounts of time, money and verbiage to get across a simple point: tickets are on sale for $10 at the gate; tonight is cap night; there is a $5 off coupon for a family of four at the game.

Those details, written as a story or as bullet points attached to editorial content achieve their goal. They can then be shared by among friends, either via social network sites like Facebook or over direct message systems like Twitter, SMS text or traditional email.

Time saved on the creation and delivery of elaborate display advertising is spent on targeting the message to people likely to act upon it: again, the readers of editorial content about the teams and athletes in question.

This does not mean turning old-school newspaper ads into an email and blasting it out across every possible address an institution owns. No matter how noble one believes the cause, that is pure and simple spam.

Next, the steps to turn meme to action.

Celebrating 900

Another milestone for the blog here; earlier today a 1,000th tweet on that side of things.

There have been some very significant changes in the past month for The Road Scholar. I'm guessing those aren't quite done, either.

Fox Soccer in HD

Opening weekend of the Premiership and my matches are now in HD; add that to an opening win at home for the Wolves, 2-1, over Stoke -- that's all-and-all not a bad way to open. Plus a nice Arsenal-Liverpool match for Sunday.

New Content Ideas

Blogs and live content separate the average from the destination website. To that end, each of the sport contacts at Arkansas is opening up a minimum of a weekly notes column.

Why? Because we want to replace our local media? No, because our local media -- by no fault of their own thanks to the overall collapse of the existing advertising models -- isn't providing the vehicle for that coverage. Only the most cynical and manipulative within the sports PR community would prefer that.

This is a simple reality. The person who once did a weekly notes column in our statewide paper was among the cutbacks two years ago. And the space that person would have used has now gone away as well.

Fans and nature abhor a vacuum. These columns seek to fill it.

With the start of football season, my weekly pre-game columns are back, but this academic year will continue all year long on various subjects.

Tonight kicks off the first of many -- what will likely be well over 100 -- real-time event blogs using the CoverItLive tool. All home events that have the capacity and the need will get interactive blogs this year, and we are dramatically increasing the number from road events this year as well.

We're also bringing in curation columns for football and men's basketball, and working those elements into the weekly notes columns of each sport.

Wait a minute -- you are actively drawing attention to your "competitors" and linking off to their stories?

The days of being the sole destination are gone, and we all benefit from a rich mix of coverage from all sources. Why not? We have written stories for some time about national or regional media that cover our teams. Fans are interested in what other say about us, and since the media for decades have taken our stories to populate their pages and websites, the least we can do is share back by bringing some attention to their work that is of interest to our fans.

We've also taken the time to start Digg-ing our major stories to put them out there for fans that use the new 4.0 version of that service to find information. In the next weeks, we'll be taking more time to push out lite versions of video pieces through YouTube for the same reason.

Finally, we are starting a Spanish language blog that will be a curation of the main ArkansasRazorbacks.com website, translating the weekly highlights into Spanish and also providing news to that community about athletes and teams in which they have a special interest.

Whut, Whut, Car-din-als!

Two things from the state of Arkansas captured my attention as a journalism student back at the University Formerly Known as Northeast. The first was John Robert Starr, clinching a K-Bar knife in his teeth squatting atop a turned over Gazette paper rack. The second, only slightly more sane, was Otus the Head Cat.

As the person to whom folks who don't read ALL the way to the end may be calling (at least for the next few weeks), no, we're not changing the Hog Call to the Cardinal Tweet and you can't find that "Brand New Look" link on ArkansasRazorbacks.com. Although, the one angle Otus forgot was Bobby Petrino's former mascot was . . . . but I digress.

Dead or alive, Otus is one of those great weekend guilty past times of leisurely newspaper reading. It is wholly a pleasure to soak in the Kalakan wisdom; although, I am somewhat distressed at the lack of reliable humidity pod forecasting this year.

Classic Gathering; Modern Tool

Don't overlook the ability for real-time reporting tools and short form messaging to serve as that media force multiplier. There might not be a whole fleet of supporting staff surrounding an aircraft carrier of a reporter like John Brummett, but he's got his organization's Twitter feed.

Did you qualify for a lottery scholarship but not receive one? The Arkansas News Bureau wants to talk to you. Call John at 501-370-8316.

The new in-state controversy is the perception of mishandled applications for the new state lottery funded college scholarships. I'll be willing to bet the Brummett finds three or four stories of woe that he'd have never found thanks to that tweet.

Check Out the Guest Appearance

Chris Syme at Montana State is one of those folks in CoSIDA that I take a moment to soak up whatever presentation she'd make. She's the person who brought the crisis PR concept of aggressive disclosure into one of the messiest college sports scandals in years up. It cleaned up the reputation of the Bobcats, and it took guts.

She asked me to pen some notes on the pitfalls of doing your own iPhone app. They ran today on her blog, and was picked up by CoSIDA for the national Twitter feed as well. Thanks for the promo, Chris. Good luck up in the Big Sky country.

Gallop Confidence Drop

In several presentations to CoSIDA, I've referenced a growing gap between trust in social graph - your physical friends and virtual ones through Facebook, etc. - and the media at large. Today's news from the Gallop Poll only adds to that as traditional newspapers and television news hit historic lows.

The numbers are bad for one of our cornerstone institutions of American life. You can read the entire package here.

Newspapers get a 25%, TV news a 21%. The good news? This was a confidence in institutions survey, and the media was right there with most of America's big segments: banks, health care, government - no one did well. It may indicate an overall dissatisfied public, rather than a particular animus toward the media.

What A Difference in Brits

After soaking in the old Michael Palin travel series, sitting down to modern BBC personality is pretty jarring. You can't get much farther away from the laid back Python alum than Gordon Ramsey. As he'd say, bloody hell. Did he really just say "dog's bollocks"? He's about to get a dose of his own medicine at the hand of a master chef.

Had The Answer All Along

Amazing what you'll forget if you didn't keep records, and then what you'll lose when you misfile them. Case in point. When Walter Cronkite passed away, I posted the image of and quick story of the photo that's been hanging on my home office wall for almost as long as I've been in the business of either reporting or working with reporters.

I'd always wondered who was the crew, what was the mission, the details of the posed image. It's a confident flight crew looking in one direction, a little bit nervous Walter looking toward the camera man who has snapped the photo I have with Cronkite's autograph.



Cleaning through old files, I came across a 1990 letter from Cronkite's executive assistant, Allysa Adams, which revealed the names. I had completely forgotten about having it. The sad part of this -- folks have been looking for that cutline for years.

Fast forward to today, and a little googling to find more info at The Writing 69th's website.

Memory Lane

Doing some housecleaning today I came across some old resume files. Remember the mid-90s, ah yes, the wild west days of those interwebs. The 2.0 version of the old Lady'Back site was quite the rage in 1996. In fact, Arkansas, Stanford and Tennessee tied in a national survey of the most complete women's basketball websites in those pioneer days.

Once upon a time, I had an older colleague that said you need to keep a folder of the good things you've done. It will help you to remember things for resumes and such, but more important he said, it will be there for you when things aren't as rosy to remind you of the good times.

Twenty years later when I went to advanced public information officer training at the National Fire Academy/FEMA, I remember one of the PIOs that had gone through some rough times say the exact same thing. She kept a three-ring binder of the letters of accommodation she received. Some of us thought that was a bit ego-centric, but she continued to say that on those days something really bad happened -- not necessarily to her, because the PIO business can be life and death for served agencies and the public -- she could pull that out and spend a little time recharging and remembering happier days.

These digital days, a little harder to have a folder. Maybe get yourself a thumb drive.

Some advice remains timeless.

RadarScope Update Rocks

The last detail is now in - the trapezoid warnings for tornado and severe thunderstorm are added. What was already the best weather radar program at $9.95 now becomes an absolutely no brainer.

Scare Tactics Formula

Greetings from the political race down under (and our good friends at Gruen), here's the Aussie formula for how to make a scary, threatening political ad.



It's funny. It's also sort of scary accurate.

GEEK POST SCRIPT: When you pick up that embed text from YouTube, it defaults to 640 pixels wide. Initially, that was cutting off about 1/3 of the image here in Blogger. So, a little adjusting to the embed text and the size fits nicely. If you want to know, I changed to 400x225 (a division of 16x9 for widescreen), and you need to make that width/height change both at the start of the embed text you get [the object tag] and at the end [right before the close embed tag].

Another Reason to Love FYV

So breaking out the old TREK to get some knee and ankle relief has gotten me out into the Fayetteville trail system. Walking from the house in the past had put Raven and parts of Mud Creek on my map, and the longer walks began to put some of the really nature trail like parts of trails into reach. Driving by for years, gee, that just looks like it runs through a bunch of mess.

For my local followers, if you haven't taken advantage, you are really missing out. For example, our trail system has tunnels. Who knew? The monstrously long one that runs under the Fulbright Expressway Is a little scary, and I see how folks may want to use the land bypass. Scull Creek runs along the edge of the UA AgriPark Cross County Course. And once they rebuild the connector through the Dickson Street area, it will get easy to reach some of the very forest like parts of Frisco.

Now I made the run again today, and survived much better. Hey, guess what - even if you grew up riding in high humidity north Louisiana - you're a old fat guy trying to get back in cycling shape during a heat advisory. And good Samaritan at UBC who stopped to see if the guy lying under the tree was OK, truth be told, if you showed up five minutes earlier, I might have admitted to being in some heat prostration trouble.

Funny how years in the toe clips built up a ton of muscle memory, and efficient cycling learned with the old LAW techniques come back quickly.

When we moved to Fayetteville, I gave up riding because the roads were narrow and the drivers, well, they flat out didn't respect cyclists. The trails system go a long way toward providing me the opportunity to recapture what was a great physical activity. And 22 years will change attitudes. Add in the wider bike friendly street work that's happened in recent years.

Here's to getting back to that easy 25 every weekend morning.

Boomer Brain

No, not a backhanded Oklahoma joke. From Nielsen Wire, a review of The Buying Brain, that includes some very interesting conclusions about how Baby Boomer brains work in the marketing and messaging world. The research is based on how certain parts of the brain age, and after 50, there is a tendency for a part of the brain that processes negative thoughts and feedback (sort of fight or flight & reproductive aggression also) tends to fade.

The Boomer Brain, therefore, sees a positive, or overlooks a negative.

Takeaway 140 characters:
when presented with a negative message, older brains can “delete” the NOT and remember it as a DO over time

I find this a bit interesting when reading participatory media -- could this be what in a small part drives younger posters to trollish behavior and leads older fans to not even read or pay attention to the messages because of the somewhat negatively biased format? Not sure, but read more here.