Internet and web – Page 197

Strategist and marketing consultant David Houle (who has a nice futuristic blog called Evolution Shift) pulled double duty at last month’s Global Marketing Summit — as the ringmaster who got to introduce speakers and make housekeeping announcements, and as a last-minute fill-in for one of the scheduled speakers who got waylaid by a snowstorm.

But Houle was up for the task and presented a broad view of the trends that are changing how we all work, play and exist in this current age (which he’s dubbed the Shift Age).

Houle’s presentation was not as focused on marketing as the other presentations, but that was fine with me. I thought his presentation helped to put in place a context for the shifts facing the marketing and communications world, and helped to set the stage for the rest of the conference. Drawing together ideas popularized by Tom Friedman (The World Is Flat), Marshall McLuhan and others, and intermixing PowerPoint graphs and charts to support his points (and a reference to the forecasts of the Mayan calendar to boot), Houle provided a broad but comprehensive overview of this new era. Personally, I’d love to sit down with the guy over a couple of beers or a cup of coffee to talk more about this stuff. But it wasn’t to be at this conference. Maybe another time.

Houle pointed out three fundamental forces of the Shift Age:

The flow to global. Economics have led the way to globalization, followed by politics, then culture.
The flow to the individual. The nation-state is becoming an anachronism, and other traditional social institutions — “the pillars of society” such as governments, religious organizations and, yes, even educational institutions — are “being diminished in terms of social impact.” People see themselves more as “global citizens.”
Accelerated connectedness. “For the first time in human history, we have a self-awareness of what’s going on around the world.” Expanding on Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village, Houle discussed the notion of the Internet as a “neurosphere” (which is also the title of a book that ponders similar ideas).

Next, Houle presented the current realities of the Shift Age as they relate to marketing communications:

No gatekeepers. Individuals decide when and where they watch, read, listen. The age of mobile communication, iPods, TiVo and the Slingbox have given individuals more control over when, how and where they will get their information and entertainment.
Faster and faster. Everything’s speeding up. Nothing is slowing down.
Disintermediation. This term has fallen out of vogue, but Houle would like to see it make a comeback. It means the end of the middleman. It’s happened to the insurance industry (witness the rise of Geico, Progressive, Esurance, etc.), and Houle says it’s about to happen to the residential real estate business. [In some sense, it’s happening in education, too. – ed] To thrive in the era of disintermediation, organizations must either 1.) add value or 2.) lower rates.
Power to the people.
Say goodbye to long-range planning. Given the current pace of change, who can plan three to five years into the future? Even 18 months out seems like an eternity, and so much can change between now and then.

Anyone interested in this kind of stuff should check out Houle’s blog, Evolution Shift. If you read only one post on his site (but I doubt you can read just one), I recommend it be the one titled New and Threatening Becomes Acceptable and Mainstream.

It’s been a long, exhilarating, frustrating week for the media relations staff of our campus. As mentioned in the previous post, my conference plans were pre-empted on Tuesday, Feb. 27, when I received word of an incident on campus in which a graduate student claiming to have a bomb and anthrax was subdued by campus police, then arrested and charged with six felonies. (It turns out there was no bomb, the white powdery substance the suspect carried was sugar and it was all a hoax.)

As I made my way back to Rolla from Myrtle Beach via a layover in Atlanta, I followed the story as it unfolded and stayed connected with our media relations folks via email and cell phone. (Thank you, Myrtle Beach airport, for free WiFi.) The picture I put together based on many of the media and blogosphere reports I read between flights was pretty sensational, as you might expect.

At the outset, we did not release the student’s name. He hadn’t yet been charged, and we decided that the release of that information should come either from the city police or the county prosecuting attorney. But we did respond in the affirmative when one reporter asked if the student was an international student. Once that was mentioned, right-leaning bloggers like Little Green Footballs and conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh homed in on that fact and leapt to the conclusion that the student must be an Islamic terrorist. (Limbaugh’s link was publicly available yesterday, but now it’s exclusive to members, and I haven’t kept up my membership. But the headline, “Sudden Jihad Syndrome Hits University of Missouri-Rolla,” sums up the gist of his take.)

Add to that the fact that the police had described his activities as “terroristic,” our decision to cancel classes for the day, and the mention of “anthrax,” and the presence of a bomb deactivation unit from a nearby military base, and you have the ingredients for some mighty fine tabloidism.

The update to Little Green Footballs’ initial report included this snippet:

The CNN report includes this:

The man’s identity and nationality were not released, though school spokesman Lance Feyh said he was an international student.

And from there the comments focused on the conspiracy to withhold his name and ethnicity.

But the blog’s later update sets the record straight:

The student who terrorized the University of Missouri-Rolla has been identified as a graduate student from India. … That looks like a Hindu name, but the types of threats he made were right out of the Islamic terror playbook.

Sighs.

To top it all off, a guy who is most likely a dittohead called me at the office Thursday afternoon. The conversation went something like this:

Dittohead: Are you all the ones who had the student that did the bomb threat?

Me: Yes.

Dittohead: What was his nationality?

Me: Who are you affiliated with, sir?

Dittohead: I’m with myself.

Me: OK. We don’t release that information due to FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. [Had he pursued, I would have explained that it was public record and he could obtain the information from the prosecuting attorney’s office.]

Dittohead: Well he’s a graduate student, so he’s an adult, right?

Me: He’s still protected by FERPA.

Dittohead: Was he a diaperhead?

Me: [pause]

Dittohead: He was a f___ing diaperhead, bitch!

Dittohead: [click]

Some folks wonder why I love this job so much. It’s because of the people.

Category: Internet and web

UMR, the media and the war on error