JUNE 1, 2009

In the spirit of the Twitter craze, here is a microblog-esque guide to the month of May on Undercurrents and beyond…

May on Undercurrents:

• When is wiki just plain wacky? I love wikipedia, Dr Zhivago, and a successful scam.
• It’s a crisis. Social media can help. Learn how.
• Lost in cyberspace? Listen for tweets, or read the guides.
• Back to basics? From real food to real frugal to real protest to real heroes.

And other brilliantly non-boring May moments:

Diversity - Another First
• Sonia Sotomayor: first Hispanic woman nominated to the Supreme Court. Yes! Now that’s a long way from Carmen Miranda.

Protection of Our Digital Assets
• Barely 20 years old, yet cyber-life is considered a national security matter. We will now have a cyber-czar to protect us from a weapon of mass disruption. President Obama set out to protect our digital infrastructure as a strategic national asset.

Who Says Mass Media is Dead?
• Kris Allen beat Allen Lambert on American Idol - 34 million viewers, 1 country
• Barcelona beat Manchester United in the UEFA cup - 100 million viewers , 230 countries
• Susan Boyle lost Britain’s Got Talent - 235 million viral viewers

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MAY 4, 2009

Every month on Undercurrents, we reflect on the past month of posts. In April, the common thread was clearly the economy and its impact on our lives.

We talked about Cheerios investing in its customers, which will help to retain them during tougher times. It’s my favorite cereal and now I have more reason to love it. We talked about getting your resume right for the all the spidering and filtering that can mean the difference between “you’re hired” or not. We talked about paying for school. And we talked about some companies that have taken the economic lemons they’ve been handed and made lemonade.

It all begs the question that someone asked me this past week, “What do you think will be dramatically changed because of the economic downturn?”

I thought about it for a second, but I couldn’t quickly come up with something that I thought would be a lasting transformation. I see this downturn as part of ongoing business cycles. Unfortunately, this downturn is worse than most, but that can mean that the ride back up will be better than most.

Just as there are high and lows of the business cycle, we also tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. In the not-too-distant past, there have been the Michael Milken/Junk Bond King crimes and the Savings and Loan crises, both of which leveled enormous hits on Wall Street and on our economy. And when we had it good, we looked back to see that it was “irrational exuberance.”

Still, I am optimistic that our nation will get back on track and focus on new areas of growth, if only to experience another downturn sometime later. I do believe that the net of these cycles will continue to be positive. I am hopeful that the next economic upticks will come in the form of growth from alternative energy investments, or IT-related innovations or research-driven discoveries in biotechnology. We just don’t know for sure where or when they’ll happen, but I strongly believe they will happen.

In the meantime, there will be anxiety and there will be concern about the economy. The past month of Undercurrents posts are a testament to our collective state of our economic torpor. Even investing icon Warren Buffet seems to have temporarily lost his mojo. What would the Oracle from Omaha say if asked, “What might change now that we’ve been economically tarred and feathered?” In remarks this week, Buffet talked about newspapers and how he wouldn’t buy one at any price. The undeniable downward trend of traditional media has been accelerated by the bad economy. Corey asked about what might happen next in his post, “Democracy, Publishing and Money“. I have been following what thinkers like Walter Isaacson and Paul Steiger have been saying, and my guess is that valuable reporting such as Corey pines for will find an audience, even if it means paying for it, albeit online only.

In the automotive industry, clearly changes are afoot.

In banking, it’s unclear to me that there are any major consumer-level changes. I would like to hope that we would carry less debt and save more as a nation, but I don’t see that happening, barring a much more severe economic downturn.

In my life, it’s an acceptance that the newspaper is dead. I will miss the Sunday ritual of reading The New York Times and The Washington Post. It will be replaced by the massive world of information that is already there, but I haven’t been able to make a Sunday ritual of it yet.

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APRIL 3, 2009

I try to read the Undercurrents blog every day, and I am starting to learn the “voices” of the different bloggers on our team.  For instance, Patrick was our most prolific blog writer this month, and I was engaged by his technique of incorporating conversations with Peter, his coworker, into his entries.  I liked their discussion about Girl Scout cookies, and whether it was right for a particular enterprising cookie seller to use the internet to increase her sales.  They also talked about Twitter and how its all-consuming power over people (most recently jurors in a trial setting) can be destructive. 

I recognized Gayle’s sage approach when she talked about how companies can use social media in crisis situations.  She had good advice about knowing the landscape, becoming engaged with the community before a crisis, and being transparent and engaged.  Social media doesn’t work unless it is a two-way street.

Monica’s green conscience came through in her post on thinking “ecologically.”  It made me aware that there is a lot more to saving our environment than just recycling.  We have to understand the genesis of the products we use, and it helps to have sites like “Good Guide” to show us the way.

Janice’s interest in philanthropy and politics came through in her post on the benefits of volunteering when you are unemployed.

Corey’s insight into what is new on the horizon was evident in his post about ongoing innovation on the web.  I hope he’s right that it could help lead us out of the current recession.  His blog tied in nicely with Michelle’s entry about using her Smartphone for shopping, and how technology is making it easier for us to have instant access to product information.  I remember her previous post about using the internet to prepare for her wedding, and it’s apparent Michelle is a savvy user of the internet as a personal resource.

Reading all of these different perspectives makes me more in tune with perceptions outside of my own world view.  That’s why the blogosphere is so powerful, and why every day I check out Undercurrents I am enlightened by its insights. 

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MARCH 2, 2009

I always discover something new when I read Undercurrents - not only things that I may have missed in the news, but entirely new things about the blogosphere or new ways of finding and sharing information. And that was certainly the case last month.  As usual, Undercurrents covered a remarkably diverse set of topics - from a hot new product called the Snuggie to cutting-edge social networking web sites.

For example, consider the rapidly evolving world of social networking where new ideas pop up as fast as the grass on my lawn in the spring. Gloria wrote last month about the race to lure users away from Facebook and how some social networks like BeBo and FriendFeed are remaking themselves into one-stop aggregators for people’s digital lives.

And Gayle produced an illuminating blog about Yelp, a Web site that bills itself as a community-driven city guide that has also been accused of manipulating its ratings to extract payments from the businesses and merchants it reviews.  This example underscores the point that not all information on the Web is reliable, and that in this age of information-overload the careful reader must approach all information with a skeptical eye.  The websites that engender the most trust, Gayle points out, are the ones that take transparency seriously. And for any information provider, whether it is a cutting-edge site or a free city newspaper, trust is the key to long-term viability.

Transparency is a topic that comes up often on Undercurrents because it’s so important to creating trust in an expanding universe of information.  Who you trust ultimately means who will survive in this mega-information age.  Monica wrote about the timely topic of the need for greater transparency in credit, a need underscored by the deepening credit mess that is choking our economy.  She focused on an idea advanced by two authors that broader credit safety regulations should be adopted, including the formation of an oversight panel like the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  Corey wrote about transparency, too, arguing that transparency doesn’t mean the indiscriminate dumping of information into the public square.  Even in the name of transparency, businesses and governments should be careful to put their information into context.

And the Snuggie?  It’s a blanket with arms — an old product that has found mass market appeal through a new marketing pitch and a good dose of luck.  Our blogger Kristen argued that the infomercial used to pitch the product was so bad and out of touch that its ineptitude actually attracted attention, even spawning YouTube parodies.  All that attention triggered a word-of-mouth buzz among consumers.  And that, Kristen argued, is what has helped produce some 4 million sales so far.

There was much more great blogging on Undercurrents last month, from Mallory’s look at the renewed interest in sewing that reflects a back-to basics movement in a troubled economy, to Michele’s examination of a newsweekly’s effort to reinvent itself in the declining days of print.  All in all, another rich and varied month on Undercurrents.

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FEBRUARY 2, 2009

January was a pretty interesting month here at Undercurrents.

As I read back through the month’s posts, I was struck by the dramatic change that this blog documented in so many areas of our lives - our relationship with our government, the world of media, the way we’re marketed to, even the way we work.

Gloria wrote about the new, transparent voice of the White House, as shown in the newly revamped White House website and President Obama’s use of social media tools, such as YouTube and a new blog, to connect with Americans and solicit their opinions. Will the Obama administration truly re-invent the relationship between government and citizen? Or are these changes too superficial to effect real change? It’s too soon to tell.

Lisa shared one of her favorite Twitter feeds - The Media Is Dying - which chronicles the daily barrage of media layoffs, closings, and consolidations. This simple feed, which does not link to other sites or offer commentary on the news it shares, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of how the economy and Web 2.0 are together causing irreparable harm to traditional media.

Michele took a closer look at a new ad campaign from Burger King that encouraged users to unfriend people on Facebook in order to earn credit for a free Whopper.  She raised the right questions - was this just a clever way to get attention, or was it actually effective as a marketing campaign? From a social media perspective, I thought it was interesting to see how a brick-and-mortar company used Facebook to drive traffic into its stores. Even more interesting was that the campaign was yanked due to privacy issues around the process of unfriending - a sentence I wouldn’t even have understood two years ago.

Finally, Janice talked about Gigonomics, the impact that Millennials are having on the workforce. Young entrepreneurs are out there, many of them casualties of layoffs and the fact that Gen Y expects to switch jobs many times throughout their careers. Janice’s post asked how the creativity of these young workers could be harnessed by companies, and what types of changes in the workforce are needed to keep them happy - and off the job-hunting sites.

I can hardly wait to see what February will bring.

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