Open Inversions: Getting paid – and doing online things right

I’ve been getting very irritated lately by what people are passing off as “edgy” or “raw” social media content.

When my Dad was alive and playing the vibes, he played with four mallets (see photo), and sometimes hit what you could politely call “a clinker.” He liked to call them “open inversions.” That’s a euphemism for hitting the wrong notes.

You hear a similar euphemism when someone doesn’t know how to manage their content properly, doesn’t want to admit they don’t know it, and doesn’t want to pay someone with the appropriate skill-set to do it correctly for them. They tell you that it is the style of social media to be raw and unedited.

That means we have to suffer through unedited, shaky, badly focused, badly lit handheld videos and indecipherable audio because of this social media “open inversion.”

Sorry, I just don’t buy it.

And neither should companies with social media stars in their eyes, simply because their PR department just met someone who owns a cheap pocket video camera.

I decided to rant about this in some detail because the excerpt of Jaron Lanier’s new book (subscription may be required), You are not a gadget, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, hit a chord with me.

To anyone who’s been online for more than 10 years, you may recall that Lanier was one of the leading rock stars of the virtual reality developers in the early 1990s. He was often pictured in news stories with his wild dreadlocks, wearing a VR glove on one hand, a la Michael Jackson. VR was going to be used in all sorts of applications including visualizing opportunities in foreign currency markets.

What Lanier now thinks and writes, well, it just hit me between the eyes.

…I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working.

Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.

It’s mostly in the emerging online video area where this trend to collectivism and dull outcomes bugs me.

A lot of people have bought Flip cameras and know how to push the big red button. Most of them know very little about what should come next, and so they upload raw, unedited footage on the web, to the applause of their even-more-clueless friends who don’t know how easy pushing the buttons is.

A few weeks ago I got a blast email from a very prominent social media monitoring firm announcing that they had posted on their beautifully designed website some videos they shot at the PRSA International Conference in San Diego.

On this beautiful website, there were two videos, one of a panel program and the other of interviews recorded at their exhibit booth.

The panel program began with nearly four minutes of people sitting, saying nothing, and shuffling papers. At about 2:30 of the video, someone walked to the podium, dropped his papers, and sat down.

Alongside the interview video, there was a notation that the interviews begin after 9:48.

Let me make that clearer.

This company thinks it’s your responsibility to bypass nearly ten minutes of video showing nothing but two empty chairs before you see the interviews.

In an era when every Mac comes with iMovie, and Windows editing software for video can be had for $100 or less, this is appalling laziness. No titles, no voice over telling you what you’re going to watch, ten minutes of empty chairs.

I didn’t immediately blog-to-embarrass the company. I wrote to the company president and suggested they could do better.

He bucked it to his marketing person, who immediately got defensive and said they were filming in what she called a “feet-on-the-street” style, and they were working with an outside multimedia company to produce it this way. She accused me of suggesting they produce a television commercial.

What we did must be the right thing, she suggested, because we are getting lots of visitors to the page. (She didn’t tell me how many visitors actually had the patience to watch the videos.)

Here’s an excerpt of my response to her.

I'm absolutely not advocating that you should make your videos look like heavily produced commercials or network content.  But I do think it is appropriate to take some professional pride in how the finished product represents your brand, and frankly, these videos don't represent your brand well at all.

First of all, I strongly disagree with your perception that a "feet on the street" video should have no postproduction editing at all.

Think about your audience. They want your content because you have some unique content that no one else is providing. So sure, of course you have a lot of people visiting the page. That doesn't mean your videos give them a good end-user experience. That doesn't mean they went away with a good impression.

Why do you think it's appropriate to make your audience work so hard to digest your content? Some social media guru pontificated to you that social media videos need to be "raw and spontaneous."

Even if you don't want to pay a professional to clean it up properly, fix the color balance, contrast, focus, etc., it's very simple to throw this video into a cheap nonlinear editing package costing less than $200 and edit out the beginning of the panel where no one is talking for nearly four minutes.

Why do you think it's OK to force your viewers to fast-forward through the dead space? Why not just cut it out?

You can put a simple title up that tells people what they are going to see, who is in it, and when it was recorded.  Make it easy for the audience to engage.

You could even put a voice over on it to say "Welcome to our video of the PRSA panel, blah blah blah" and at least they would not have to work so hard for the content.

Same thing on the second video.

Why in the world do you think it is acceptable to throw completely raw video on your site and tell people, oh, just fast forward through ten minutes of empty chairs (it's "feet on the street style" -- no one will care that we didn't even edit it.) This is the difference between professionalism and not knowing how to manage the medium properly.

You are lucky that the content is useful to people and they are willing to put up with all the dead stuff to get to the good stuff.

It's just very surprising to me that a company like [name redacted] would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on your products, your marketing materials, your website, your logo, your branding, and then have such a casual attitude when someone questions the quality of your videos.

Whether you believe it or not, these give people an impression about your brand, and the raw, unedited nature of them makes them look slipshod.

Take a look at the PR videos that Ragan Communications produces. They have a beginning title and an end title. They do not look like commercials, but they are polished.

I can only imagine that the multimedia firm you're working with is doing very well from your business, since you apparently don't ask them to do much except point the camera (from strange angles) and press record.

I got irritated again by a similar series of unedited videos posted this week by a major nonprofit journalism seminar organization, one that’s supposed to be helping business journalists become better business journalists.

In an era when starving journalists can’t afford NOT to learn how to shoot, edit, and post-produce video, this respected journalism organization posted videos from its seminar shot by automated cameras in the classrooms set to start recording at a specific time whether anyone was speaking or not.

The resulting series of videos is accompanied by web notes saying things like “this lecture starts after 22 minutes and 48 seconds.”

So when I saw Jaron’s excerpt in the Journal, I posted a short rant on Facebook in support of his philosophy. I suggested that too many people wanted too many other people to work for too little money, or for free.

One of my friends commented that “it depends.”

I partly agree.

I'm all in favor of giving advice, help, pointing to resources. That's an important part of the ethos of cyberspace since the days of shareware distributed on BBSes.

But too many people expect too many other people to produce work for little or no compensation, for the glory, to be known as a social media “rock star.” That doesn’t pay the bills.

There are tons of freelance writing "websites" where you have to write three posts a week , but they don't pay you anything unless you get 1,000 page views.

There are podcast advertising "buys" that require three or four hours of production work in each episode for about $20 per quarter in total revenue. You’d be better off flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

Everyone has a cell phone camera, and no one wants to pay a professional photographer a living wage. Look at the unrealistic ads on Craig’s List asking for someone to shoot a wedding for eight hours in return for $50 and food.

The worst part is that if you don't want to do it for free or low pay, they do it themselves – badly -- and then call themselves "experts."

Just like the multimillion-dollar social media monitoring company and the journalism seminar that can't be bothered to edit the videos they post.

Globalization casts a long eye on US news media’s world language skills – or lack thereof

There’s an old joke that goes like this:

Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

A: Tri-lingual.

Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

A: Bilingual.

Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?

A. American.

In their unceasing efforts to prove they are cosmopolitan and global, the US news media have once again demonstrated their ignorance of foreign languages and pronunciations.

In all the stories about Tiger Woods’ troubles, the media continue to mispronounce Tiger’s wife’s first name.

This is almost certainly an effort to show how worldly they are when they encounter a name that doesn’t follow the ridiculous spelling conventions we’ve grown up with in American (and British) English.

Thanks to Hjörtur Smárason for confirming my suspicions about how silly the American broadcasters all sound.

Let’s take a closer look at this unreported aspect of the Woods story.

The woman’s name is spelled Elin.

The English version of this name would be Ellen, just Ellen.

But because it looks DIFFERENT, they insist on pronouncing it EE – lin, with an English “Long E” sound. They think that makes it foreign sounding. It makes them sound, well, stupid and ignorant, and Swedes must be chortling every time they hear an American reporting on this story.

Unfortunately, you see, Scandinavian languages, just like other European languages, don’t follow the pronunciation the American journalists are ascribing to it.

If these journalists had bothered to ask someone, they would have found out that the “e” in European languages has more of an English “long A” sound, making the name’s correct pronunciation more like “AY-lin.”

But let’s take it a step further.

The “I” in Elin should be pronounced more like an English “long E” so the actual correct way to say the poor girl’s name is “ay-LEEN”

It reminds me of the sportscaster who couldn’t quite bring himself to commit to the correct Spanish pronunciation of a jockey’s first name Jorge.

The correct pronunciation in Spanish makes the J sound like an H. But most Americans don’t realize that a G before an E or an I is ALSO an H sound in Spanish.

So the correct way to say Jorge is HOR-hay.

Almost certainly uncomfortable allowing his audience to hear what he thought sounded like the word WHORE, he couldn’t bring himself to pronounce the G correctly.

The best sportscaster could say was HOR-gay.

Yeah, that was real better. (Mucho mejor, in Spanish, and that J is pronounced like an H.)

Over to you, EE-lin.

PRSA Philadelphia 2009 Pepperpot Awards Music Video

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This music video from the PRSA/Philadelphia 2009 Pepperpot Awards Dinner December 3, 2009 includes photos of award winners, scenes of the dinner and candids from the social hour. Individual images available for purchase at http://lubetkin.eventpictures.com.

People we’ve photographed named to Governor-Elect Christie’s transition team

(Editor’s Note: All photos are Copyright © Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights are reserved, but available for license.)

We’re pleased that a number of political and business leaders we’ve photographed have been named to Gov.-Elect Chris Christie’s transition planning teams.  Including the Governor-Elect:

Of course, we’d like to think that the images we made impressed the governor-elect and his team enough to name these folks, but that probably isn’t what happened.

Joseph Corbo, Jr.
Vice President and General Counsel
Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa

Emlyn Koster (second from left)
President/ C.E.O., Liberty Science Center

Koster is posing during a 2002 reception for the opening of the exhibit, “A Question of Truth,” exploring bias and prejudice in scientific inquiry. At the ceremonies, Fleet Bank donated $100,000 to the Liberty Science Center. In photo with Koster are (from left): Alan Respler, executive director emeritus, Jewish Community Relations Council of Southern New Jersey; Koster; Lucia DiNapoli Gibbons, then president of Fleet Small Business Banking, now President-Northern New Jersey, Wachovia Bank; Fr. Joseph Wallace, co-chair with Respler of the Catholic Jewish Commission of Southern New Jersey; and Jack Collins, then vice-chair, Fleet New Jersey.

Dennis Bone
President, Verizon New Jersey Inc.

Bone is second from left in this 2003 photo that also includes Bruce Wheeler, then president of Fleet New Jersey.

The Honorable Bob Franks
Former United States Congressman and President of the Health Care Institute of New Jersey

Rick Lloyd
Executive Director, State Government Affairs
and Community Relations
Johnson and Johnson

 

Peter Spirgel, Esq. (left)
Managing Shareholder, Flaster Greenberg

Debra P. DiLorenzo
President/CEO, Chamber Of Commerce Southern New Jersey

We’d love to help you make dramatic images of your executives too. Keep us in mind for your event photography, especially during the holiday season, huh?

Don’t assume that social media is an age thing, it’s a knowledge thing

I was meeting a new business connection for coffee in the Barnes & Noble store near Deptford, NJ a couple of weeks ago, and while I was waiting for her, I saw a father and his young son in the cafe taking their food order to the table.

It was a mid-week morning, and on their tray was a toasted bagel and butter and a chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing.

It reminded me of when my dad used to go to the bakery and the newsstand on weekends and come home with hard rolls for him and my mom, and chocolate cupcakes for me.

Do not ever assume you know what is happening.

When they sat down, the dad passed the bagel across the table to his son, who started munching happily while the dad enjoyed the cupcake.

It continues to disturb and frustrate me that people who position themselves as experts in something get press coverage or blog space and then use it to completely misunderstand the space in which they claim expertise.

There have been lots of blog posts and even some news articles recently suggesting that only people in their 20s understand “social media” (you know, the online networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and the blogs, and Twitter,and all that other stuff.)

I am really offended by the theme of these blog posts and articles. In the Chicago Tribune piece, some young professional suggested that younger people can teach older professionals about social media because, for one reason, they use AOL’s Instant Messenger client eight hours a day.

What?

I’m going to say it explicitly here. I posted these comments on both the PRSA blog post and on the Chicago Tribune site, but I think I need to say it here too.

Just because someone is young does NOT mean they understand “social media” or some other technology better than someone with a few more years in the business.

I’ve had an email address on my business card since 1988.

I started participating  in online conferencing and networking through CompuServe in 1984 when high-speed connections were 1200 bps modems.

I’ve been counselling my various senior managements and clients  about the Internet since the early 1990s.

Did I mention that I graduated from the University of Phoenix’s online MBA program in 1994, long before any major university even considered having a course or two online?

Even earlier than that -- possibly even before the parents of some of these 20 somethings were out of diapers -- in 1977 I was one of two reporters (for the record, Bob Williams, still an editor at the Asbury Park Press was the other one) who lugged a 60-pound “portable” computer terminal onto a helicopter to be flown into a Grateful Dead concert where we filed our stories by connecting that terminal to an acoustic modem coupler and then placed the telephone handset into the coupler to do the transmission.

I also remember mimeographs and Group 1 fax machines that took 6 minutes a page and you had to manually insert the thermal paper one page at a time.

The leading technologies of their day!

We used to hate it when Congressman Jim Howard’s press secretary would call the newspaper to fax us a three-page press release that would tie us up by the machine for 20 minutes – if all the pages came through on the first try without disconnecting.

Rep. James J. Howard, second from left, greets teachers and students from Oceanport, NJ schools during the 1970 8th grade class trip to Washington. With Howard are Clement Jablonski, left; Rosemary McCartney, and Donald Byrne, teachers chaperoning the trip. (Steve Lubetkin photo. Copyright ©1970, 2009. All rights reserved.)

 

My age doesn’t make me incapable of understanding new communications channels when they come along.

My 20-something children make fun of me because I use Twitter — they don’t use it at all, and my youngest daughter (age 20) has very little interest in posting on Facebook.

And if these so-called social media experts would bother to do a smidgen of research, they would know that the fastest adopting demographic on Facebook from September 2008 to February 2009 was overwhelmingly women over 55.

Do you really think the best equipped group to communicate with that demographic are 20-somethings?

So much for the millenials being the key to PR nirvana in the social media, huh?

Facebook Guantanamo

Last November, we essentially threw out our government for a new one, and one of the main reasons was that we didn’t like that they were holding people in secret prisons without telling them why they were detained, or the charges against them.

But boy, when we get stars in our social media eyes about some darling of the networking space, no matter what they do, it just rolls off them, doesn’t it?

Let’s see. Facebook shuts down your account without warning or explanation. They ignore emails. They don’t even provide a phone number to call them.

And we continue to love them? Why?

Facebook gets the Guantanamo award from this blog for its ham-handed approach to alleged violations of its rules.

Here’s an excerpt from the email I just sent to the Electronic Frontier Foundation asking for help. I will let you know if it does any good at all.

Good evening. I'm a 53-year old former corporate PR executive, running my own social media consultancy for the past five years. I have used Facebook to promote my expertise and activities, until 20 days ago when Facebook, without any warning or explanation, disabled my account. 

I'm not sure, but I suspect that some idiot playing one of those insipid "Mafia Wars" games somehow injected it into my contact list (despite my previous configuration of my Facebook profile to ignore all of those games) and it may have spammed a bunch of people. I don't know for sure, I can only speculate, because I haven't been able to get into my account.

But hey, I am a grown up, you know?

That's not how I would operate my business, and I shouldn't be penalized because Facebook allows its users to play those stupid games.

And if any company that we depended on for mission critical business applications treated its users with this much disdain, people would be outside corporate headquarters with torches and pitchforks. Can you imagine what Michael Moore would do if they disabled his account?

Repeated emails from me to disabled@facebook.com have been ignored or received auto-replies that promise a response that never arrives.

This is like a Kafka novel. I don't know why they disabled my account, they won't tell me anything, they won't reply to emails, and there's nowhere to call.

I know Facebook is a "free" social networking site, but it seems a bit lopsided that they get to make these arbitrary decisions without explaining themselves or offering recourse, and meanwhile they get to collect billions of dollars in advertising revenue by selling the knowledge they've collected from us "free" users.

Why are we treating Facebook with such kid gloves?

Why is YouTube the only video site clients ask about?

Since we began producing video podcast content for clients four years ago, I’m often asked about posting the content on YouTube.

I usually try to persuade my clients NOT to post their content there, for two reasons.

First, the YouTube Terms of Use agreement that no one ever really reads too carefully contains what I regard as confiscatory claims of ownership of the content.

Despite what they say in public statements and news releases, the actual legal agreement claims ownership of pretty much everything you post there.

What that means is that – absent a separate, superceding legal agreement with YouTube -- a company with valuable intellectual property is in danger of losing ownership of processes or procedures they discuss, trademarks, service marks, logos, taglines, etc., if they post the material to YouTube.

Yes, I know it hasn’t been tested in court, but what company would volunteer to be the test case if they truly understood the exposure they face?

It also means that YouTube owns anything slightly newsworthy that you post, like video of President Obama visiting your neighborhood restaurant. So, if CNN decides to use that footage, they pay YouTube a license fee for the broadcast, but you get nothing.

In addition to these legal and financial concerns, PR people and others who make YouTube central to a social media strategy need to get the “viral video” stars out of their eyes and think more like brand owners.

YouTube is full of a lot of nonsense video, people whacking themselves with rubber chickens, inappropriate videos of kids waking up from anesthesia after oral surgery, celebs behaving badly.

It strikes me as being mainly a collection of the worst excesses in amateur video.

To me, it's a mostly honky-tonk neighborhood where professionally produced videos designed to promote businesses almost always get lost -- because most of YouTube is obsessed with the wild chase to be the next "viral" video showing something silly.

Let’s face it, you cannot deliberately create a viral video, like the spontaneous one of the little girl who threw the foul ball back onto the field.

Despite all of these problems, many people think YouTube is the "go-to" place for distributing any kind of business videos.

As a PR professional, I always try to counsel my clients to consider and use the most appropriate communications channel for their business outreach.

My questions to all my clients are these:

1. Does it really advance the brand of your organization to have a house in the same neighborhood as all that other stuff?

2. Is it because YouTube is the video platform with which you are most familiar, and therefore the one you think you need to be on?

3. What exactly are you trying to achieve by thinking about having the video on YouTube? Is it just because you think it makes it easier to send a link to other people, which we can already help you do, or is there some other reason?

4. What is the real "value" to you of YouTube specifically?

Again, the reason I raise these questions is because I want clients to put the best foot forward for their businesses, and without knowing why YouTube is on their radar, I can't give the best advice.

My gut instinct is that most businesses are better served having their carefully produced videos available on a different, less comic/less unprofessional platform.

What do you think?

Do you think YouTube is a good (or bad) place to post business video? Why do you feel that way?

Comments please!