Lunch Series Session on Search Engine Optimization

It’s time for the first Public Policy Communicators NYC meeting of autumn and we’ve got it scheduled for Wednesday, November 2, 2011. Take off your Halloween costume and come see what tricks and treats we have for you on the topic of search engine optimization.

“Are you doing all you can with SEO?”

Communicators have been talking about the practice of search engine optimization (SEO) for nearly a decade now.  And yet to many of us, it seems like a murky, mysterious or even meaningless set of activities.  When we read The New York Times article “Web Words That Lure the Readers” about some of the rather questionable tactics employed by the Huffington Post, it got us wondering if there were some creative practices in this domain that nonprofits and foundations could be using to draw larger audiences to the content on their sites.

And so we got ourselves an expert to clue us in to the most effective SEO methods:

Daniel Murphy is the owner of Electric Orange Creative, a boutique marketing agency launched in 2008. Electric Orange provides businesses and nonprofits of varying sizes affordable online marketing campaigns. Prior to Electric Orange, Daniel was one of the first employees at YouCast Corp, one of the first social media agencies in NYC and now a division of IAC. While at YouCast he was the creative force behind marketing campaigns for Nike, Schick, Snapple, Twitter, and Kanye West. Daniel graduated with a degree in Media Studies from Hunter College.

And here are the specifics on the next PPC-NYC meeting:

What:              Brown-bag lunch (that means bring your own lunch!)

When:            Wednesday, November 2, 2011; 12:00 – 2:00 p.m. (informal networking from 12:00-12:30, program begins at 12:30)

Topic:             Search Engine Optimization. Electric Orange Creative’s Daniel Murphy will lead our group discussion.

RSVP:           WE ARE CURRENTLY RUNNING A WAIT LIST.  If you would like to be put on that wait list or be included in future invitations, send an email to mremaley [at] ppcnyc [dot] org

Part of the problem is that the first recipients are very well known to those of us in the New York public policy community.  They are well-intentioned, even if some of their choices may be different from the ones we might make.  Here is what was reported on the site BlueAvocado.org…

Rockefeller Foundation and NY Times Win “Just Awards”

Other industries have their “Worst Dressed” awards, the “Golden Fleece” awards for public waste, and the Ig Nobel Prizes for dubious science-related achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think.” Until now, the nonprofit sector has lacked its own such award program. The new Just Awards have announced the “winners” for the first year’s awards: one for Abominable Press Coverage of the Nonprofit Sector, and the other for Narcissism in Philanthropy.

Award for Abominable Press Coverage

For Abominable Press Coverage of the Nonprofit Sector the Just Awards panel of judges chose Stephanie Strom’s November, 2009 article in the New York Times: “Charities Rise, Costing U.S. Billions in Tax Breaks.”

The article reported that the I.R.S. approved 99% of applications for charity status last year, and picked some easy targets to suggest that there are too many nonprofits, and that many or most of them are frivolous.  The article asserts that the U.S. government lost $50 billion in taxes due to donations given to nonprofits . . . making the false assumptions that a) contributions to the nonprofit sector would remain the same without the tax exemption, and b) government could ignore the enormous financial impact of demand for services (such as emergency room visits) that would inevitably follow from fewer nonprofit programs. A better headline: “Charities Rise, Saving U.S. Billions.”Furthermore, the article neglected to provide, as a basis for comparison, information on the many billions more in tax breaks provided to the commercial business sector.  The article can be found here.

In making the Award, the judges did praise the New York Times for covering the nonprofit sector, and Stephanie Strom as “generally a very good reporter.” But judges felt this story was the “worst story of the year” and that its lack of research led to ”bad journalism.” A better headline, said one of the judges, would have been, “Charities Rise, Saving U.S. Government Billions.”

Award for Narcissism in Philanthropy

For the much-anticipated Narcissism in Philanthropy Award, the Just Awards panel of judges chose the Rockefeller Foundation, citing the “overwhelming and relentless promotion” of its president, Judith Rodin.

Additional research confirmed this consensus among the expert judges based on their experiences and observations. A comparison was made of online mentions of three top foundations and their presidents: the Ford Foundation and Luis Ubiñas, the Kellogg Foundation and Sterling Speirn, and of course, the Rockefeller Foundation and Judith Rodin. Looking only at mentions since 2008 (when Ubiñas, the newest of the  three, started his tenure at Ford) we find that, in proportion to their online mentions in general, Rockefeller promotes its president more than 12 times as often as Ford and more than 176 times as often as Kellogg.

Runners-up

As a runner-up to the Abominable Coverage of the Nonprofit Sector Award, the panel chose to cite “all of journalism” for the coverage of ACORN over the past several months. “It was a giant frame piece,” commented one of the judges.

And the judges chose two funders as runners-up for the Narcissism in Philanthropy Award. One is a California community foundation that gives out approximately $4 million in grants each year, and is building an “$8 million plus headquarters.” The nominating statement commented, “They are openly touting the building and have architects’ plans displayed in their offices for nonprofit grantees to see as they grovel for grants of $5,000 and $10,000.”

The other runner-up is a large bank that gives out funding based on American Idol-like popularity contests where nonprofits must urge their supporters to vote for them on the bank’s website. Judges noted wryly that this type of giving is a demonstration of  “successful corporate philanthropy,” which inherently involves large doses of self-promotion.

The Just Awards are sponsored by Blue Avocado and Nonprofit Online News. Nominations were received from the public; a nominator was required to submit his or her name to the sponsors, but could request anonymity in public. Winners were notified of their upcoming selection but did not respond by press time. For a complete description of the awards and a roster of the panel of judges, please see www.justawards.org.

So, PPC-NYC folks, what do you think?  Does our community need something like this to keep us honest and humble?  Or is this just mean-spirited and unnecessary?

It is an interesting case for the concept of “naming and framing,” as the folks at PPC member Public Agenda might term it. Kristoff notes in his piece that wild dogs…

“…are a species that has become endangered without anyone raising an eyebrow. Until, that is, a globe-trotting adventurer named Greg Rasmussen began working with local villages to rebrand the dogs — and save them from extinction…

Central to Mr. Rasmussen’s effort to save the dogs has been a struggle to rename them, so that they sound exotic rather than feral.

Do-gooders usually have catastrophic marketing skills. Pepsi and Coke invest fortunes to promote their products over their rivals, while humanitarians aren’t nearly as savvy about marketing causes with far higher stakes — famine, disease, mass murder.

Mr. Rasmussen is an exception, and his effort to rebrand the species as “painted dogs” caught on. The name works because the animals’ spotted coats suggest that they ran through an artist’s studio.

Mr. Rasmussen runs the Painted Dog Conservation, a center that offers the animals a refuge from poachers and rehabilitation when they are injured. But most of all, he works with impoverished local villagers so that they feel a stake in preserving painted dogs.

Kristoff says that “If clever marketing and strategic thinking can take reviled varmints such as “wild dogs” and resurrect them (quite justly) as exotic “painted dogs” to be preserved, then no cause is hopeless.”  Well, I suppose that’s true. But I wish that he would look around and see the countless other examples of great marketing and issue framing being done by nonprofits and foundations around the world.

Miller has broken up her advice into topic areas: “A Custom News Feed,” “Check Your Lists,” “Attend a Conference, Virtually,” “What’s Around You Right Now,” and “Ask Questions.”  Each section has at least one good piece advice for the information consumer and a key understanding for the information distributor.  Check out the piece!

By the way, don’t you love that little graphic I made of the Twitter birdie eating the Times?  ha ha.  Old media getting eaten by new media!  That laugh just never gets old, does it?

A new book by Derek Bok and published by Princeton University Press, “The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being” is going on the very top of my “to read” list.  This is a brief description from the publisher:

During the past forty years, thousands of studies have been carried out on the subject of happiness. Some have explored the levels of happiness or dissatisfaction associated with typical daily activities, such as working, seeing friends, or doing household chores. Others have tried to determine the extent to which income, family, religion, and other factors are associated with the satisfaction people feel about their lives. The Gallup organization has begun conducting global surveys of happiness, and several countries are considering publishing periodic reports on the growth or decline of happiness among their people. One nation, tiny Bhutan, has actually made “Gross National Happiness” the central aim of its domestic policy. How might happiness research affect government policy in the United States–and beyond? In The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard president Derek Bok examines how governments could use happiness research in a variety of policy areas to increase well-being and improve the quality of life for all their citizens.

Bok first describes the principal findings of happiness researchers. He considers how reliable the results appear to be and whether they deserve to be taken into account in devising government policies. Recognizing both the strengths and weaknesses of happiness research, Bok looks at the policy implications for economic growth, equality, retirement, unemployment, health care, mental illness, family programs, education, and government quality, among other subjects. Timely and incisive, The Politics of Happiness sheds light on what makes people happy and the vital role government policy could play in fostering satisfaction and well-being.

The New York Times gave the book a review this past weekend, and while the review is worth reading, I discount most of its negative commentary.  The reviewer, Alan Wolfe, seems hostile to the entire field of behavioral economics and makes several poorly founded arguments against the book’s themes.  For one, he questions whether it is the role of government to attempt to maximize happiness. My counter argument is that government has no greater mandate to maximize family income, and yet it has been attempting to do just that in a thousand different ways.  Governments make value choices.  Why not place value on happiness?  Wolfe also implies that the theories and findings produced by the larger field of behavioral economics are not really trustworthy.  To counter that incorrect assertion I can only say that the field is growing in respect and voluminous documentation because hundreds of respected academics are contributing a great deal of time, resources and intellectual capital into proving its merit.  There is more than 30 years of research showing that, indeed, often what we thought would make us happy actually does not, and more broadly in B.E. literature, that human beings are not the great rational, economically motivated people our government usually assumes them to be.

The NYTimes review does have enough key points from the book itself to convince me that it is worth buying and reading.

]]> http://www.ppcnyc.org/2010/02/recommended-reading-the-politics-of-happiness/feed/ 3 http://www.ppcnyc.org/2010/01/crash-blossoms-are-hilarious-unless-theyre-your-own/ http://www.ppcnyc.org/2010/01/crash-blossoms-are-hilarious-unless-theyre-your-own/#comments Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:43:01 +0000 Michael Hamill Remaley http://www.ppcnyc.org/?p=110 The New York Times Magazine “On Language” column has a fun, yet serious, piece today on “Crash Blossoms” — the common occurrence of changed meaning, double meaning, or ambiguity introduced to a headline when one edits out “unnecessary” words to reduce the word count.  All the examples cited in the article like “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge” and “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” makes for a delightful read, but the piece is also informative for those of us who are writing our own headlines for press releases, and trying to encapsulate our messages in 140 character Twitter posts.

The piece does a great job of explaining why the English language is particularly vulnerable to these “crash blossoms”:

After encountering enough crash blossoms, you start to realize that English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context. If that A.P. headline had read “McDonald’s Fries Are the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers,” there would have been no crash blossom for our enjoyment.

Communications professionals write lots of headlines for press releases and other tools where we have to compress our language. So the possibility of creating a potentially embarrassing “crash blossom” when we are shortening phrases is something we need to be vigilant against (although I suppose it could be a brilliant strategy for getting attention, if done just perfectly).  It’s all very funny when it happens to others, not so funny when 1,000 tweeters re-tweet your embarrassing mistake.

The piece, written by RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA, is generally neutral on the potential positive or negative impacts of this trend for the public.  It names some of the most high profile new players — ProPublica (a member of PPC-NYC), Global Post, Politico, Kaiser Health News, The Fiscal Times and the Chicago News Cooperative — and puts the outsourcing of news gathering in a bit of historical perspective.  It raises only one example — the Bush Administration producing its own “news” to try to manipulate Medicare debate — of the potential negative ramifications the trend.  The analysts cited in the piece mostly states the obvious: that the “respected” newspapers and its readers need to be aware of any potential agenda of the news producing source and take that agenda into account.

What the piece fails to notice is that most of the new nonprofit news producers are unlike the generalist syndicates of the past like Associated Press and Reuters that were in the business to make money.  Instead, most of the new news syndicates have been created because of a perceived inadequacy of the current news coverage of specific topics or geographic locations.  THIS is the real trend.  News syndicates have been around forever and large news organizations have always relied on them and freelancers.  But the fact that nonprofits and foundations who want to see better coverage and more public attention to their issues are taking more control and creating their own news.  That’s the news here.

These are some of the key points the author makes that should be noted:

“There are more pressures than ever to acquire content from outside sources, and there are going to be even more going forward,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and former newspaper editor who blogs about the news business. That means that despite declining resources, newsrooms, he said, “have to get better at due diligence in terms of who this provider is,” and at explaining it to their audiences.

And…

“We went through a corporate era, and with more media fragmentation, maybe we’re going back to a stage when individual owners are really more in charge,” said Philip S. Balboni, president and chief executive of Global Post. For an established news organization, “there is, of course, a greater danger when you outsource than when it is fully within your control,” he said, and it will become more important than ever “to be very careful about who you use and to monitor the content that you use.”

Read the article.  More and more foundations are taking on a “news production” role and I am pretty sure this is a topic we should explore at  a PPC lunch session soon.

Now, in his impassioned new book “You Are Not a Gadget,” Mr. Lanier expands this thesis further, looking at the implications that digital Maoism or “cybernetic totalism” have for our society at large. Although some of his suggestions for addressing these problems wander into technical thickets the lay reader will find difficult to follow, the bulk of the book is lucid, powerful and persuasive. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in how the Web and the software we use every day are reshaping culture and the marketplace.

The topic that I am most interested in reading into more is his examination of the wisdom of crowds. Having spent a lot of time in public engagement circles and trying to develop better forms of online engagement, his questioning of whether or not it is such a hot idea to take the lead from the crowd rather than thoughtful, creative or even deeply unpopular individuals is definitely worth thinking about more:

Decisions made in the formative years of computer networking, for instance, promoted online anonymity, and over the years, as millions upon millions of people began using the Web, Mr. Lanier says, anonymity has helped enable the dark side of human nature. Nasty, anonymous attacks on individuals and institutions have flourished, and what Mr. Lanier calls a “culture of sadism” has gone mainstream. In some countries anonymity and mob behavior have resulted in actual witch hunts. “In 2007,” Mr. Lanier reports, “a series of ‘Scarlet Letter’ postings in China incited online throngs to hunt down accused adulterers. In 2008, the focus shifted to Tibet sympathizers.”

Mr. Lanier sensibly notes that the “wisdom of crowds” is a tool that should be used selectively, not glorified for its own sake. Of Wikipedia he writes that “it’s great that we now enjoy a cooperative pop culture concordance” but argues that the site’s ethos ratifies the notion that the individual voice — even the voice of an expert — is eminently dispensable, and “the idea that the collective is closer to the truth.”

I am attracted to this book in part because it is written by a Silicon Valley insider who is deeply questioning some key assumptions about our modern era.  It seems to cover a lot of territory that communications professionals should be thinking about.  I’ll let you know what my own review is later.

Despite this, there were some important ideas that Public Policy Communicators should be aware of:

Advertisement that Watches You

Forensic Polling Analysis

Good Enough is the New Great — this, in my opinion, is the MOST important idea in the issue for PPC members

Social Networks as Foreign Policy

Subscription Artists

Web Searches in Real Time

And any manager would also be interested in reading about these topics:

Myth of the Deficient Older Employee

Random Promotions

All in all, the NYTimes Year in Ideas continues to be essential reading, but I would prefer if they stuck with substance and not with useless “ideas” like empty beer bottles make better weapons and non-trends like “heritage chic.”  There should be more than eight applicable ideas for public policy communicators in the whole thing!