"Measure What Matters" Chapter One

The first chapter of "Measure What Matters" is basically devoted to telling about why measuring is important in social--that is, gathering and analyzing data about customers and potential customers. The chapter gives examples of how measuring has helped companies improve their efficiency and get ahead of the competition. It closes by dispelling a lot of the myths surrounding measurement, such as the idea that it will bring bad news (obviously the bad news it would bring would exist without measurement) or that it will somehow damage those who subject themselves to it. The author asserts that is quite the contrary of the true consequences for assuming accountability.

To be honest, there wasn't a great deal that I got out of this chapter. In fairness, that's probably just because of how much the previous books we've read have covered the importance of measurement in social media, so reading a whole chapter devoted to it is mostly just telling me things I already know. For an outsider, and someone who doesn't yet understand the importance of measuring, this chapter would probably be more interesting, particularly if you believed any of the myths dispelled at the end. (I didn't, and while I don't doubt that there are people who believe them, they mostly seemed obviously wrong to me, not to sound pretentious.)

I imagine a lot of this book will focus mostly on how to measure, rather than just why, which is a subject that could cover a lot more new ground than this chapter did. Again, this chapter did make all of its points perfectly well, it just didn't really tell me much that I didn't already know, but obviously my perspective is a bit different than the average reader's by this point.

Week 9

This was a decent enough week for me. Classes were mostly okay, although Tuesday night became a mess when I realized I had a 30-page short story that I hadn't started (I mostly have to blame myself for that one). Thursday was probably the most eventful day for me, as I got to meet with a visiting author, Tessa Mellas, to go over a piece I'd written. We definitely have two different writing styles, but I did get some useful feedback from the meeting and I'm glad I got the opportunity to have it. I also went to the reading that hosted her that night, which was pretty interesting.

That was definitely the most significant thing to happen this week, as for the most part for the rest of the week I just worked on whatever I needed to get done (quite a few things were for this class, though I again have my procrastination to blame for that). On Friday we analyzed a Britney Spears song for one of my classes, which was pretty weird to begin with, but made even weirder that the rest of the class decided I should read the lyrics, which I did.

Other than that, not an especially eventful week for me, but enough happened that I wasn't bored either, so I can't complain.

Ohio Northern's Promotion of Homecoming

Homecoming, as we all know, was last weekend, and it's important for any school to promote such a big event. Ohio Northern has both its own Facebook and Twitter pages, so it should be able to promote such an event pretty effectively to at least anyone with any interest in what's going on here. I'll take a look here at how effectively it did on both in the weeks before homecoming.

On Facebook, Ohio Northern did a good job of at least letting everyone know that Homecoming was nearing by posting about events during Spirit Week, and posting photos from these events. This is certainly good, as it's visually stimulating and attention-grabbing; for those interesting in ONU's events, seeing pictures like these may get people talking about the events, and, as we remember from "Groundswell," word of mouth is a particularly effective way of energizing people around a product or event.

Unfortunately, Ohio Northern did not seem to post many links to provide information about the events that were coming up during Homecoming, which damages it because otherwise people might be more inclined to see what events are coming up and then attend if the events sound interesting to them. As "Share This" states, it is important to include detail when appropriate, and this is a case where it could have been useful.

Ohio Northern's Twitter is the bigger issue, though. Aside from a tweet or two, it looks like Ohio Northern mostly neglected to mention Homecoming over Twitter until the day itself, which is not good for promoting an event. Perhaps they wanted to avoid seeming repetitive, but that would be a smaller mistake than not under-mentioning Homecoming, which they seem to have done. They did prove willing to retweet at least one tweet about Homecoming, which is good, as it is a form of interacting in real time, which the book of the same has let us know is very important.

Overall, there was definitely some good stuff on both accounts, but also room for substantial improvement.

Link to my Storify covering Homecoming:  http://sfy.co/dSay
 

"Real-Time" Chapter 14

Chapter 14 of "Real-Time" is called "How Your Web Site Becomes a Real-Time Machine." After briefly giving a history of websites, the book notes that we are entering a new phase where they are sales in marketing machines that operate in (surprise) real-time. Websites have progressed to become more interactive with their users, to the extent that going onto a company's website is close to entering an actual store for that company.

Accordingly, for a company website to have any chance at success, it must operate within these guidelines. A big part of this is responding to potential buyers as quickly as possible, when they're still interested in buying your product or service and haven't moved on to other things. The book gives the example of the website of Bella Pictures, a wedding photography company, which flags inquiries for prompt response if both a wedding date and reception venue have been chosen. Further, a company should do its best to make sure its website stays, ideally, ahead of its competitors by analyzing data from users as quickly as is practicable.

Most of this chapter's ideas seem like no-brainers, but I suppose it is easy for companies to overlook them. It is important to keep up with new technology to make response time and all other necessary functions of a website as quick as possible, and there are definitely websites out there that have yet to deal with their users in real-time. The chapter is surprisingly brief, but that may just be because of how simple a lot of the things it puts forward are. It definitely seems to offer some useful advice, even if it doesn't have that much terribly surprising to say.

Macy's and Thanksgiving

Macy's recently polled its employees on how they would feel about working Thanksgiving night. The results weren't disclosed, but whatever the employees said, Macy's decided to open 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving. The company has (understandably) endured some criticism for deciding to open on a night that's usually reserved for spending time with the family, but in response they've said the decision was based on the responses of customers who want to start shopping earlier. "'Black Friday is the biggest shopping event of the year and brings with it a level of fun and excitement to our customers around the nation,' said Macy’s chief stores officer. 'For Macy’s, it’s important to make this day enjoyable and convenient for everyone, as our customers search for great deals on favorite wish-list items.'" (Quote from the PR Daily article)

While this may seem like a bad move from a PR standpoint, it is apparently a pretty safe one, as Macy's is not the first store to open on Thanksgiving. Furthermore, by portraying this as attempting to serve their customers better, the company will probably be able to shift some of the attention off of the employees who have to come to work the night of Thanksgiving.

The fact that this decision probably won't damage Macy's, though, doesn't necessarily make it any less worthy of scorn. "Consumerist" has called the 8 p.m. opening time "obscenely early," and it's easy to see why. Whatever benefit Macy's may reap from the decision, its employees are certainly going to have to suffer enough for it (and it's pretty unlikely that poll yielded many favorable responses to this idea). Whether the convenience this supposedly gives to the customers and whatever profit Macy's may get from this move justify making customers come in on Thanksgiving is for the observer to judge. 

Week 8

Because of fall break, this was, of course, a short week, so I don't have all that much to write about. The night I came back I wrote an entire seven-page paper about the philosophical message of "Memento," only to find out the due date had been postponed two days. Obviously this isn't the best start to a week, but I suppose I've seen much worse. The next day we had to turn in our revisions to our poetry for Intro to Creative Writing, and ironically I didn't have that, but I managed to get it in by the end of the day. The revisions were not easy since we had to remove all abstractions from our poems and my poems were largely about abstractions.

Thursday was mostly uneventful, although I did have a piano lesson I literally hadn't practiced for at all. That went surprisingly well, actually. Also, I'm apparently supposed to send out a few pages from a novel I wrote for I wrote to be adapted into a screenplay for my Screenwriting Workshop, which is actually pretty interesting. I haven't adapted anything I've written as a screenplay, so I'm kind of eager to do so.

On Friday I didn't make it to either of my classes, so perhaps it's better that this was a three-day week. Today I went to the parade this morning (which I live-tweeted) but other than that I didn't end up going to most of the Homecoming events. The parade was a pretty good one, although the weather made it a bit hard to enjoy. Anyway, that's basically been my week.

Real-Time Chapter 6

Chapter Six of "Real-Time Marketing & PR" is about communicating with the media on their time rather than one's own--in other words, at their convenience. The author gives a personal example where he didn't call a journalist back as soon as he could have, and ended up missing an opportunity to have a quote featured in a significant article the journalist published. He uses this to reinforce his point that one can't interact with the media simply when it's convenient, but rather has to engage them whenever the opportunity arises in order to both promote products or services and handle crises better.

As an example of the latter, the author cites the case where Amazon removed copies of "1984" and other novels from their customers Kindle accounts (the copies were illegal due to copyright issues) without telling them why. While negative sentiment grew more and more over social media, and news outlets published stories, Amazon still failed to respond until a week after the event when an apology was finally offered (which many customers seemed to accept). Had Amazon simply apologized and explained the situation earlier, the crisis could have been averted.

I think the chapter makes a lot of good points. The media are not there for companies' convenience, so they'd be naive to think it a good strategy to only engage them when it's convenient. The media are quite powerful and influential, and one would be wise to take whatever opportunity is given to get better coverage.

The Vatican's Mistake

There have already been a few recent PR snafus that have happened--Pepsi and Coke have been among the more notable ones, maybe--but this has to be seen as one of the more incredible ones. The Vatican recently had a number of bronze, gold, and silver medals minted, but had to recall six thousand of them because, almost unbelievably, the medals had "Jesus" misspelled as "Lesus." The Vatican caught this early enough that only four of the medals had been sold, fortunately for them.

One still has to wonder, once again, how things could have gotten so far before the mistake was caught. Coca-Cola's choosing to pair a French and English word without realizing that there could be some unfortunate combinations was poor planning, Pepsi-Cola's failure to recognize that its design for its posters made "AAPE" appear more like "RAPE" was more difficult to explain, but the Vatican's failure to notice not only a misspelled word but that the name of the figure central to their religion was misspelled is truly baffling.

It's pretty doubtful that this mistake, ridiculous and amusing as it may be, is going to damage the Vatican in any meaningful way, though it certainly doesn't speak too well of the level of competence going on in whatever department designed the medal. Nonetheless, not too many Catholics are likely to convert over a misspelling, so mostly this is just an embarrassing incident for the Vatican.

Seventh Week

While I didn't have any major events that I went to this week, classes did provide some interesting moments. In my Philosophy and Film class, we watched a movie called "Dead Man," which pretty much succeeded in confusing everyone in the class because of its long stretches of wandering through the woods and its excessively weird, psychedelic tone. It's a movie I would recommend just for the experience of watching it, considering how many bizarre moments it managed to fit into two hours.

In English Proseminar we read about, and discussed, feminism, which I just sort of avoided saying much one way or the other about in class. The discussion was pretty interesting though, as it bounced around between problems with radical feminism, whether men can be feminists, and so on and so forth. Earlier in the week we also had our second drill in that class, where we had to interpret a poem psychoanalytically, which was definitely kind of a challenge to say the least.

Other than that, I've mostly just had to revise my poems for one of my other classes, which has been a great experience given how easily it comes to me to write poetry to begin with (which is to say not at all). I'm also going to have to write a paper analyzing the philosophy of a movie soon, but I haven't started that yet, probably unwisely.

Real-Time: Chapter 1

The first chapter of "Real-Time Marketing & PR" succeeded in getting my attention, mostly by using an example I was already familiar with. The chapter focuses on singer-songwriter Dave Carroll's successful vendetta against United Airlines after his Taylor guitar was broken in transit. Carroll posted a song on YouTube entitled "United Breaks Guitars" that described the incident and United Airlines' failure to compensate him, and the video went viral. I actually remember a few years ago, probably shortly after the video began to gain rapidly in popularity, when one of my friends showed it to me. I didn't put all that much thought into it at the time, but this chapter definitely shows pretty well how significant it was in terms of PR.

Inevitably, a viral video attacking United Airlines proved rather negative for the company's credibility, but it was interesting just how badly the company handled the situation, doing nothing publicly to counteract the damage. Meanwhile, both Taylor Guitars and Calton Cases (a guitar case manufacturer) managed to capitalize quite well off the situation through fast action. The chapter did make an interesting and compelling case for how money is neither the sole nor even most important factor in PR, but rather the ability to act quickly and effectively and seize whatever opportunities come up is what can make or break a company.

Even having seen the video the book discusses, I'd never put too much thought into what kind of impact it would have or what its overall significance really was, but the book did contextualize it pretty nicely, showing how it was a sort of David vs. Goliath victory of a little-known songwriter over a huge corporation, as well as just why that victory was able to happen and how the companies that did benefit were able to do so.

Government Shutdown and PR

I've already examined a few issues relating politics and PR, and with the first government shutdown in seventeen years, it seems appropriate to look at how PR plays into this. The source of the conflict is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," which Republicans attempted to defund. Congressional Democrats refused to pass Republican budget bills that defunded the law, and Republicans refused to pass a bill that did not defund the law, so, with no budget bill passed, the government shut down from lack of funding.

In terms of the conflict itself, there is a great deal of reality to it, and neither side is doing what it is doing entirely for show. The Republicans certainly hope to extract some concession through the shutdown, and the Democrats certainly don't want to defund the healthcare law. However, it is likely that part of the Republican motivation is to emphasize its opposition to the law by refusing to a pass a budget bill that doesn't defund it, and the Democrats (President Obama in particular) are likely trying to avoid being seen as too eager to compromise, as many liberals have criticized Obama for being throughout his presidency. Hence, both parties likely hope to use this to appeal to their more ideologically extreme bases--their target audiences--by emphasizing how they "stand by their principles."

Both parties also have to try to convince the public at large that they are right in this conflict. The Democrats' strategy has been straightforward, arguing that Republicans forced the shutdown by insisting on defunding a law that had already been passed years ago. This appeals to the average American's idea of democracy--that once a bill is passed, it should be allowed to become law rather than being defunded through some partisan battle--and appealing to the widespread desire for bipartisanship by portraying the Republicans as being excessively stubborn and refusing to compromise.

The Republicans' strategy has been more muddled. On the one hand, some have tried to argue that the shutdown is the Democrats' fault for refusing to even delay the healthcare law. This in and of itself would be a reasonable strategy--though perhaps not a successful one--but it's being undermined by other Republicans who are arguing the shutdown is actually positive, or at least not such a bad thing. These two strategies have a basic conflict, and this may perhaps contribute to the fact that so far the shutdown has not at all been helpful for the Republicans' image (though it hasn't necessarily helped the Democrats either).

Sixth Week

I can't say this week has been a particularly eventful one for me, though I did go to the first meeting for any extracurricular group I've attended so far this year (I said I would look into those in the first entry on this blog, but scheduling conflicts and the like prevented me from going to meetings for any of the clubs I was interested in up until this week). It was for the Environmentalists. The meeting was pretty short because there wasn't much that needed to be covered but I got to talk to a few new people so I won't complain.

Classes didn't seem to hold too many surprises for me this week, either. There were no papers due, only a short story assigned for one of my classes (the same one I had to write poetry for last week), which was not a big problem for me (the poetry had been the much bigger challenge). My English Proseminar class kept things interesting (to put it one way) by talking about psychoanalysis, which made for some slightly awkward class discussions.

Aside from that, I don't have too much else I've been involved with. I do have a few other meetings coming up that I plan to go to, but things are pretty calm at the moment.