2008 in Retrospect: The Good, The Bad, and The Absolutely Hilarious!

We said goodbye to some extraordinary people this year.

• Arthur C. Clarke, si-fi writer, father of the communications satellite, permanent resident of Sri Lanka – 19, March, 2008
• Hal Riney, advertising man extraordinaire – 25 March, 2008
• Charleston Heston, of “Ten Commandments” and NRA fame – 5 April, 2008
• Tim Russert, journalist extraordinaire, of NBC’s Meet The Press – 14 June, 2008
• Tony Snow, – former White House press secretary – 12 July, 2008
• Randy Pausch, best known for his Last Lecture – 25 July, 2008
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, former exile, and 1970 Nobel Prize winner – 3 August, 2008
• Harold Pinter, British playwright and 2005 winner of Nobel Prize for literature – 24 Dec, 2008

PR disasters and signs of the times

• Bill O’Reilley’s studio performance over a teleprompter
  

• Miley Cyrus‘ photo shoot with Annie Leibowitz, that was apparently misinterpreted!

• Scott McClellan‘s unconvincing tell-all book on his White House years.

• New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer busted in prostitution scandal

• Alaska Senator Ted Stevens found guilty of ethics violations

• Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich charged with corruption

• The Hollywood Writer’s Strike ends

• Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona launches immigration busts.

• Sarah Palin flounders media interviews and blows her debut in serious politics

• Sarah Palin ‘pranked’ by two Canadian radio DJs, into believing she was speaking to French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

• Motrin ad featuring baby-as-fashion accessory got slammed by mommy bloggers.

• The Big Three car makers, GM, Ford and Chrysler, arrived in DC to ask for a bailout in their corporate jets. They were sent back and returned, driving hybrid vehicles. One even car-pooled. Honest!

• Iraq journalist throws his shoes at president George Bush, at a press conference in Baghdad.

• TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington declares the “embargo’ dead.

• The Guardian in London, declares Gillette ad featuring (Roger) Federer, (Tiger) Woods and (Thierry) Henry the worst ad in 2008.

Milestones:

• The 15th birthday of Hypertext – Tim Berners-Lee
• Barack Obama elected the 44th president of the U.S.
• The iPhone cuts its price, and adds a new model
• The New Yorker‘s controversial cover on the Obamas
• The 2008 Olympics in China
• Dipnote celebrates one year as a blog
• Blackberry introduces Storm, the answer to the iPhone
• ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Comm celebrates 25 years
• Saturday Night Live‘s YouTube skit on Sarah Palin
• Arizona governor, Janet Napolitano, picked to be new Sec. of Homeland Security
• Christian Science Monitor – shifts from daily to Weekly
• bizAZ Magazine folds due to downturn in economy
• The horrible Mumbai terrorist attacks, which now have a Wikipedia entry

 

2008: IABC milestones

Many things to be thankful as 2008 comes to a close. As a member of IABC, I attended some great events, connected with some of the smartest people, and witnessed a huge shift in communications at a local chapter and international level. These included:

• IABC Phoenix members are active in social media, with tweets, on Facebook etc

• IABC Students started their own blog TakeThree

• IABC International launched IABC xChange, with many, including its chair, and president, blogging. Its Facebook site has 2,730 members

• IABC International is micro-blogging and podcasting

If you’re not a member of this professional, global network, 2009 will be the year to join.

 

2008: When the definition of PR was revised

2008 brought some sweeping changes to marketing, journalism and PR.

But as PR got tight with marketing, technology and media, the old, timeworn, definitions had to be reworked, as the practice of PR changed. I found a thought provoking definition by Parry Headrick of Shift Communications) who called PR still about fishing, but:

“once there was but an ocean filled with a certain type of fish, today there are channels leading to different bodies of water, where the fish exhibit unusual behaviors and don’t respond to the old bait.

It’s PR’s job to find out what these new fish in these unusual waters like to eat – before ever casting the first line.”

The use of word ‘channels’ is not accidental. The angling metaphor brings up interesting analogies.

Key issues were the blocking of PR Spam, and the assault on the ‘embargo‘ that closed out the year.

 

2008: The year when HAL wasn’t quite as smart

Maybe I had Arthur C. Clarke on my mind, since he passed on this year.

One event in 2008, the stock market melt down, seemed to come straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scene when Dave tells Frank they have just one alternative. Unplugging the HAL, because the system is jeopardizing their survival.

I was sparring with a friend about how our headlong rush into technologies, and our marvelous apps might be working against us. (An odd angle for someone who writes about technology) A few countries like Brazil and Kuwait have had to suspend trading on the stock market because the ‘system’ run by machines was endangering itself.

Dave: “We would have to cut his higher-brain functions…without disturbing the purely automatic and regulatory systems.”

Hal: “Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid….”

Even Alan Greenspan seemed very a…fraid.

 

Aerotropolis, Sustainability and the mixed lexicon in 2008

Looking back, it’s been a momentous year for me. Fresh into the first week in ’08, I took up an amazing job at the Decision Theater.

In 2008, the words that made an impact, in no particular order have been:

• ‘CleanTech‘ is very exciting and relevant to my job, my family, my community. I don’t have to be a technology writer to want to explore it further.

• Sustainability, which once seemed like a big word for making responsible decisions about forests and oceans, is now a lens through which we look at entire economic, social and business systems.

• The obscure instrument called a ‘mortgage backed security‘ could unhinge our economy, including the free-fall of house prices in Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, England, the price of a gallon of gas, and a ‘cheap’ tree ornament made in China.

• An ‘aerotropolis‘ which is a compressed urban environment around a commercial airport could revitalize community life.

• The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig‘ became a silly diversion in the run up to the elections, but also stuck out as how quickly, an unplanned cosmetic element of a campaign could generate buzz.

• The word ‘Outlier‘ which has been cropping up, has a mathematical connotation. As in: ‘numerically distant from the rest of the data.’

• Android, the mobile operating system from Google, could be the OS we all gravitate to.

• Meatball Sundae –a book by Seth Godin that was actually published in Dec ’07 – is the notion that applying new marketing on top of traditional products can have a gross results.

 

Quotes for the week ending 27 Dec, 2008

“I’d made sure I’d bought plastic handcuffs and a plastic whistle but I hadn’t realised that the costume had a metal ban.”

A clown, David Vaughan who was made to strip down to his underwear when passing through a security checkpoint in the Birmingham airport in the UK.

“So, although it’s true we need a president who can juggle several issues at once, we don’t need a president who falls prey to “continuous partial attention.”

Eric Weiner, author, in a column (memo) asking Barack Obama to kick the Blackberry habit.

“Vatican embraces iTunes prayer book.”

AP story on how the Vatican (which has a ‘Pontifical Council for Social Communications’) is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes app. Better still the application was created by an Italian priest.

“Only a tiny, tiny number of individuals could even theoretically ‘twitter for a living’ — just as almost no one successfully blogs for a living.”

Sam Lessin, CEO of Dropio, in Advertising Age, in a column about how advertisers could turn Twitter into an ad network.

“being in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

John Holden, the man tipped to be Obasmas’s science adviser, on how the US is currently addressing environmental issues.

“So, why exactly are you planning on the future being just like it is now, but with better uniforms?”

Seth Godin, on why predicting the future is futile, and why readiness is the only sensible strategy

 

Kidnapping media people, not funny

I have strong reservations about this PR stunt conducted by JWT in Sri Lanka on behalf of its client, marketing Reborn t-shirts.

While the idea seemed clever –faking the kidnapping of radio DJs to create buzz, it is very close to something else that has plagued the country: the political abduction of prominent people, including those from THE MEDIA. It even uses a yellow van as the abduction vehicle, alluding to the “white van syndrome” – a reference to the abduction vehicle of choice. White vans have been used to abduct people, who are then held at ransom. A prominent journalist, Keith Noyahr was abducted in May this year and beaten up badly, as reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

While the harsh treatment of prominent media people –even one this month — may be a fact of life in some parts, creating a parody of the situation only helps legitimize it.

 

Harold Pinter, RIP.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate who once spoke of death as “crafty” put it this way:

“But death permits you
To arrange your hours

While he sucks the honey
From your lovely flowers.”

 

Happy Christmas from Cactus Country!

 

Data becomes art: what a virus and a microblogger look like

They steal your passwords, hide under the folds of your browser, and turn off your virus protection software.

Alex Dragulescu turned these deadly computer virus into visual models that look like works of art.

We work with huge amounts of data at the Decision Theater, and often over-simplify what we refer to as a ‘visualization’ — a JPG, a PowerPoint, a map are, after all, visualizations. But data can be rendered as a city, a strand of DNA, a mathematical model…a Twitter user’s digital profile? That’s an eye-opener for me.

Take this, from Alex Dragulescu. It’s a look at what Twitter users do when they micro-blog, creating a data profile as it were. As Alex puts it:

“we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create a portrait of the author.”