GerardMcLean.com

This was originally written as a comment to Karina Stenquist’s post on her blog. The issue of respecting the intelligence of young readers came up again today and I thought I would post this here as well. While specific to NIE, this comment could — and should — apply to anyone creating marketing and reading material for young readers, especially those who think it clever to turn the “N” and “R” backwards on a chalkboard. Read the original post from Karina first.

I was at the Newspapers in Education department at a daily newspaper from 1998-2002. Anyone who has worked in NIE knows that on paper, the department was set up to “promote literacy, cultivate young readers, blah, blah” The real world was, “We’ve got a captive audience where we can dump newspapers on Tuesdays and make our 5-day ABC numbers look better.”

Before I got there, the NIE page was kids mazes and puzzles, word games, etc. the typical crap you see on kids stuff. Part of my gig was that if we were going to really increase literacy and make the newspaper a teaching tool, let’s really do it. Let’s write articles that teachers could use as lesson plans. What did we have to lose? We had a captive audience where we were dumping papers anyway.

So, we wrote serious articles about wildlife, conservation, the science of the Olympics, nutrition using a pizza analysis, the physics of snowboarding. And we used smart words; we spoke to the kids (3rd-6 grade) like we respected their intelligence. We reduced the font size from 14pt goofy to 11pt real newspaper. We wrote in AP Style. We went out and got our own photos and wrote real captions. But for the KidsINK logo on the page and the small line of “editorial disclaimer” on the page, it was indistinguishable from the rest of the editorial.

And our sales went through the damn roof! Teachers couldn’t wait for every other Tuesday. When we visited classes on NIE day, kids would have the newspapers sprawled open and they were reading the articles aloud and talking about the things they were reading about. Discussions got lively! When kids got to a word they did not know, it become an ad hoc vocab lesson. And if you watched closely, they got that momentary flash of “smart” when the eyes get slightly brighter, the lips smile gently, the face flushes and the head bobs when the word is filed in the brain. And teachers had that almost giddy look of excitement on their faces. This was “real world learning” for them and anyone who knows a good teacher, you know they ache for this kind of stuff.

There is nothing like that feeling you get when you watch your work being consumed by a room full of eager 4th graders. Nothing. It made all the dirty, messy bits of pulling together a page worth going through the next week and more.

But then, the marketing people at the newspaper saw resource consolidation and figured our little 3-person rag-tag band of talent could also be used to do in-house promotions and “merged” the departments. I left then. The mission was over, the magic was gone. And NIE sales declined as more puzzles were added as filler when nobody had enough time to “write an article.”

People rise to challenges. People ache for challenge. Using simpler words is not the answer; it is the cause of the decline of readership. Newspapers and media in general have abdicated their public trust. Everything now is entertainment, but those who lead this charge are forgetting that learning and reaching are also entertainment.

I dunno.. sad that dumb is the new black.

At the risk of ragging on the US Postal Service a bit, I’ll keep this really short.

The postal staff placed this letter in our PO Box today. At first, I thought it was one of those meaningless surveys where they keep asking how they are doing, like a yappy little puppy. I almost threw it away unopened, but then Twitter went down and I found myself with an extra few minutes to spare. So, I opened the letter.

It appeared they added more services to our PO box. I don’t know what that could possibly mean, but they gave a web address, so I went there.

Nothing new.

Here is what I think the US Post Office should provide to registered corporations. We would even be willing to pay extra for these services.

1) A giant shredder. We could start it up with our PO box key even so that only companies that are buying PO box services could use it. It would have to be strong enough to shred catalogs. Lots of catalogs.

2) A physical mailing address for UPS and FedEx deliveries. It never fails that the only time these outfits want to deliver something that requires a signature is when everyone is out of the office and the receptionist zips out across the street for a quick cup of coffee. I want to be able to have someone send something to 116 W National Rd, Suite 6, Englewood, OH 45322 without having to worry about hitting that three-second window the UPS gives you to race back across the street with three hot lattes and a sticky bun.

3) Email/SMS Text messaging when something is placed in the PO box. You could put a sensor in the bottom of the box that automatically sends out a text when something is delivered. And of course, text message/email for UPS/FedEx as well.

With a lot of companies downsizing their office space and many asking employees to work from home, these services sound like they make sense. The infrastructure (with the exception of the giant shredder) is already in place. The USPS just needs to relax some of their policies a bit. Any legitimate corporation would be able to provide all the documentation needed to control stuff for Homeland Security concerns.

Instead of trying to get us to stuff our business into standard-sized boxes, maybe the USPS needs to be thinking a little more outside theirs.

Small business is being crushed to death by the unrestrained expectations of 24/7/365 customer service. As we struggle to provide more and more services with fewer resources and lower revenues, this is what happens.

Eventually, we will lose all track of who our customers are and what they needed when. And we can’t even find time to organize because their incessant demands prevents us from finding the time to do so.

It’s Monday and my twitter stream is filing up with tweets from business people just getting into the office and tweeting out news and links that I’ve been seeing all weekend. These folks work for companies that shut down on Friday afternoon and come back into work on Monday. For most who are connected into twitter, these tweets are really, really, really old news.

Social media works 24/7/365. That means nights and weekends. And it is creating a donut hole for small to medium-sized business, making them seem out-of-touch instead of connected. Follow me on this.

For twitter to work well, someone has to be at the switch pretty much 24/7. The old adage, “A lie will make its way half way round the world before the truth even gets out of bed” is fairly accurate. Ask Dominos, Amazon, Target or any other brand that has suffered a twitterstorm (though less in vogue nowadays) if they wished they worked weekends. Amazon does, but their lawyers don’t, at least not for the normal day rate.

For one-man shows like most of the twitter and social media elite, social media is not an issue. They are on 24/7/365 anyway. The cost of their labor is cheap and they are able to monitor their brand whenever, wherever it is being discussed. They are also the ones quick to berate brands for not responding sooner, by not making their brand more human, etc, etc. For the very large brands who have money to staff up 24/7/365, the issue goes away just by making someone a Community Manager and staffing up a department.

But for small to medium-sized companies, we’re out here kinda screwed by the Social Media donut hole. Sure, you can hire someone to be “on call” and mandate they check the social media accounts regularly on evenings, weekends and early mornings and many will gladly do it, relishing their flexible work conditions. But, as anyone who has ever work “flexible hours” knows, it becomes apparent that the flex is all about the flexibility for the company, not the employee. If flex favored employees, then they would have the option of NOT being available to respond.

And resentment builds and somebody somewhere has enough of being taken advantage of and calls in a State labor board who has an entirely different view on what constitutes “working hours.” That flexible position that you created in response to the market need quickly becomes about the most expensive you’ve ever created with lawyer fees, labor board responses, unemployment hearing and eventual back taxes and overtime pay. What you see as flexibility, the State see as indentured servitude.

The current expectations of social media are unsustainable by small to medium-sized companies. In response, most just do nothing as the return is not worth even the labor investment. And labor laws are not flexible enough to make human 24/7/365 social media monitoring a viable option for many. Some resort to automated response which exacerbates the issue in the minds of the social media purists.

I’d love for some of our brands to be more real-time with social media, but until labor laws catches up with the real world realities of the modern workplace, those social media plans are on hold. Monday mornings will just be very busy here for a while.

NB: As I was writing this, a tweet came over from @JenKaneCo on twitter customer service. Thanks, Jennifer!

I was wheeling my cart through the shampoo and body wash aisle of my local Kroger when I was stopped dead in my tracks by a familiar voice. He said:

Look at my body wash, now look in your cart, now look at my body wash and take a bottle and place it in your cart. You are standing on my abs.

And I looked down and I was standing on Mustafa’s rock-hard abs!

Nice story, only it didn’t happen. I made it all up. This is what the last ten yards of a well-executed Old Spice social media campaign would have looked like.

For all the adulations Old Spice received from blogger after blogger, media show after show, tweet after tweet, somehow everyone forgot to actually sell something. The Old Spice display at Kroger in Englewood, Ohio — just a mere sixty miles up the road from P&G — looked the same today as it did before the campaign started on Wednesday. I took a picture in case you didn’t believe me.

In addition to the whiz-bang marketing that Wieden + Kennedy did for the social media campaign, they could also have easily contracted several merchandising service organizations to execute at retail with shelf talkers and floor mats. Even a simple cut-out and case pack at the end of the aisle would have worked; probably better and easier to execute.

Perhaps the next brand will get it right and carry the ball at a full-run across the end zone for a touchdown. It’s time for social media to get out of marketing and media and into operational execution. Eyeballs and clicks don’t buy product; bellybuttons do.

And that just leads to another vignette featuring Mustafa’s rock-hard abs starring his manly bellybutton.

Your thoughts? Leave them below.

If you are wondering where retail is heading, this might get you thinking.

Really comfy chairs at the 2010 NSCAA

I have been to several conferences already this year and plan on going to several more. With the exception of one where it was part of my contractual arrangement to tweet and populate the social media spaces, I did not tweet or take photos and send up to twitpic, live-blog any particular workshop or do a video about my experience. Instead, I just attended, met lots of people face-to-face, had conversations, attended the workshops and really engaged myself in the experience around me. And after a few hours, I did not miss myself tweeting and taking photos.

And I have only two observations about conferences.

1. Every conference should have a meeting/networking area with really, really comfortable leather chairs. Really. It is amazing how rich a conversation becomes when each person is able to sit on a throne.

2. Social media should be all over conferences, but not primarily generated by the attendees. The days of hoping the attendees will tweet out about your conference and pithy quotes the speaker just said is about at its end. When attendees are tweeting the last thing they heard, they are missing the next thing that is probably more important.

That does not mean conferences should quit using social media. Far from it. It means the conference should take more ownership in representing themselves in the social media spaces. Send up tweets about the workshops in advance, link up videos of speakers doing interviews before and after their presentations, link their agenda to twitter hashtags to give the attendees “hooks” for feedback, encourage attendees/speakers to write feedback blog posts that you can point back to and send out tweets by the conference staff on main points during the keynote and general sessions (kinda like what E!’s Red Carpet does during the Oscars, Golden Globe, etc.)

But encourage attendees to be present first.

And being present means networking in real life with people around them and listening to and thinking about the material being presented to them in workshops and keynotes. It means freeing up your attendees to participate in the live event, while planning also to satisfy the curiosity of those outside looking in. It should not mean a robotic parroting of quotes during speeches.

And ultimately, it means creating enough excitement that those who are following along on your blog, through twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook are wishing they had gone and will plan to next year.

Social media for conferences is all about increasing participation at your live event.

I’ve never had a formal mentor arrangement with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but perhaps I’ve always associated with folks who weren’t closers. And when feeling closed upon by my “mentors,” I backed away. Perhaps that is the way these things are supposed to work; a support system of bumper rails without risk of co-dependency.

Looking back, when asked to be someone’s mentor, my first question was always, “What do you want?” It was almost always met with indecision. “I just want some help. My career seems to be stalled, I’m feeling frustrated and taken for granted. I want to be more like you” was a common reply. Little did any of these poor, hapless, rudderless folks know that I was just as lost. I guess I just hid it better.

But without a direction, without knowing what they wanted, I could not help. But I tried anyway, helping perhaps to define the direction, the needs and wants and winding the charge own the path. But because the direction did not come from the fire in the gut, it usually burned quickly, smoldered and finally died. Most drifted off, afraid somehow to tell me they no longer wanted to be mentored.

For myself, I’ve always wanted a mentor and have attracted a few. But what started out as a mentor relationship slowly evolved into someone older guiding me into a career they wished they had, not what I wanted. We usually parted without a goodbye.

And now blogging has replaced the need to mentor for me. If any of my ramblings are helpful in any way, take them, use them and make them your own. But don’t ask me for more than I am willing to give here; both of us will be disappointed and part strangers.

This mentor round-table challenge was thrown out by Holly Hoffman of WorkLoveLife.com

It started this morning with a simple tweet from Shannon Paul:

Airports really aren’t as fun as they could be :-/

More accurately, I tweeted back, that airports aren’t as much fun as they USED to be. And then it hit me that they aren’t fun anymore because we have made travel all about the destination rather than the journey. In our quest for über-efficiency and profit, we have stripped out everything fun about what happens between point A and point B. It’s not a bad thing; it is just who we are.

But the human being needs fun. It needs a place to experience and enjoy the journey, the process.

And right then and there, the whole purpose of social media became clear to me. In the absence of a journey between the handshake and the close, human beings have created this thing called social media where we have permission to enjoy the journey. The rules are clear; be kind, be friendly, help others, don’t self-promote, don’t hard-sell. In a culture that seeks to carve away all the human inefficiencies of getting from point A to point B, nature has found a way to adapt.

And what frustrates the closers and the efficiency experts is that the journey takes too long. It wanders from the path too often and doesn’t close a sale with deft. They demand an ROI.

But, sadly, like airports, social media way stations will eventually become an efficient place to transact stuff. I wonder where else we will find a place to hang out, enjoy the journey.

Shannon Paul can be found hanging out online, enjoying the journey at her blog, Very Official Blog. Pull up a chair; her door is always open.

It’s been a couple of months now since the life coaches and go-getters pushed out their brand of RAH RAH RAH and GO! GO! GO! for 2010. We’ve seen folks choose keywords for their life, new resolution for the year, non-resolution for the year, themes instead of resolutions and all sorts of various predictions and start-up dreams, etc.

And very little living. Only doing.

When I worked at a newspaper a long time ago* I spent about 70% of my time wandering around with my cup of coffee, talking with other people in the building; Gary in accounting, Ted, John and MB in editorial art, Jeff in photo and all the print shop and pre-print guys. Before that, when I worked at SPAR Marketing, most of my day was spent wandering around talking to people with my coffee cup. And before that, I did the same thing at Huffy.

And I got a lot done as a result.

But every year during my performance appraisal, my boss of the moment would take the opportunity to chastise and berate me on how much time I wasted walking around, talking to people instead of spending that time at my desk “producing.” And yet, each boss was amazed at my ability to produce a ton of work. No doubt they reasoned that if I could produce this much work walking around socializing, think about how much they could get out of me if I didn’t walk around.**

Here was the secret. What they saw as me wasting time, I saw as gathering stories about what mattered to people. I saw impromptu conversations over a cup of coffee as inspiration for change. I took away their frustrations and ranting as opportunities to solve organizational problems, to remove barriers. I saw my wanderings as keeping in touch with what mattered to people most, what worried them, what gave them fear. When I did “work at my desk” I worked on proposals that solved real problems and helped the organization become more efficient. I presented budget proposals that produced much more than busy work or boondoggles for management. I produced writing that talked to real issues that real people were feeling. The work seemed more real because it connected with real people, not just caricatures or stereotypes.

And that I think is the real value of all this time-wasting social media. To many, it looks like foolin’-around-time. But to those of us who know better, it is the inspiration and fuel of innovation and productivity..

*A long time ago = When the year started with 19
**About half as much, maybe less.