Back on the Beat – Reporting on #blogchat

Posted on August 22, 2010
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I haven’t posted to Beetles Beat since last October. Been too busy with other blogs, but have been wanting to get back to my own. And, now, here’s the perfect incentive: to recognize and pass along the word about a Web community on blogging.

The last post I did was about community in my old neighborhood on Long Island during World War II and the post-war years – I’m big on community. Where it exists, it needs to be cherished and extended.

And it can exist on the Web, virtually, as well as anywhere else. (“Virtually” may be the key word here.) I discovered that tonight in happening upon a weekly Twitter forum on blogging – #blogchat. It’s on from 9 P.M. Eastern time for an hour (or whenever) every Sunday. Tonight’s topic was the function of sidebars on a blog – what should, or should not, be part of them.

Blogchat was apparently conceived and is maintained by Mack Collier, in Alabama. It’s an inspired idea – draws apparently hundreds of followers with good things to suggest and report on their progress in blogging. Here’s an instant community that draws people together from all over the nation and the world around a subject of mutual interest.

After an hour, Mack somehow, magically, produces a printed transcript of the tweeted conversation, nothing short of a miracle to enshrine this community and make it more useful to everyone.

Can you imagine – even Twitter, with its 140 character limit, is perfectly capable of sponsoring a community around a subject of interest to participants. This is a marvelous aspect of the Web.

If you blog, or have been thinking of doing so, check out #blogchat. Hey, it’s good to be back on the communication beat!

Crisis Communication Becoming Locally Global

Posted on May 18, 2009
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The best laid plans of corporate and governmental communicators for providing – and controlling – information during a crisis are being undone by the growing use of social media.

People building personal networks on Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, Flickr and other social media today would be turning to them tomorrow to ask questions and spread information should a crisis strike.

They could quickly get ahead of the official information purveyors, especially if the official folks are located far from the scene – like the operators of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station, who have chosen to move the plant’s media center 60 miles away.

Such thoughts are reinforced by an article in the January, 2009, issue of Nature, “Crisis Communication, Messages appear on Internet-based social networks within minutes of disasters occurring…”

Science writer Lea Winerman notes that federal and local disaster response agencies who trained under the “top down” approach are now having to consider a far more distributed information system. And they had better plan to be in the midst of it, not miles, or counties, away.

‘How do you convince people that they are at risk?,” asks Dennis Mileti, a disaster-management researcher at the University of Colorado. “Only through other people.” And now, notes Winerman, there is the Internet to extend their reach. Using email and social media you can check in with people from the neighborhood or the globe. They’re all as close at hand as your computer screen.

And probably quite reliably so. During one series of California wildfires, researchers monitored social media sites. They had already discovered that national news websites ignored much of what was going on and that “the county so-called emergency site was always crashed.”

Local media sites, though, provided updates from “any local resident and an Internet connection and information to share.” The same kind of thing has occurred during earthquakes in China, Winerman notes.

Being envisioned is a web-based “‘community response grid’ that would combine the power of social networking sites with official government emergency-response systems.” While such an inclusive grid may be a ways off, the potential for sharing scraps or whole scenarios of information is growing rapidly.

Don’t forget, Winerman writes at the start of her article, students on the campus of Virginia Tech had already identified all 32 of Seung-Hui Cho’s 2007 massacre victims online by the time the university released their names a day later.

Baldridge Criteria Can Improve Communication

Posted on April 16, 2009
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In communication terms, as well as those of production, organizations can do well by adopting the Baldridge Criteria for Performance Excellence, whether they intend to seek the national quality award or not.

Boiled down, which is what Quality Digest does handily in its April issue, the Baldridge criteria are leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; process management, and results.

These can be as much of a mandate for a deliberate, attentive approach to organizational communication as they are for production quality. Communication, too, has results and we often are blissfully unaware of them, especially if they’re unfavorable.

Leadership starts with vision and is propelled by effective communication. You can’t focus on customers without communicating with them, by whatever means, effectively or not. Your staff members become the beneficiary of enlightened communication or the victims of poorly presented organizational imperatives.

And, above all, communication is a process that needs to be deliberately and intelligently managed. Do all that with your organizational utterances and you’re an award winner – if only in your own setting which, of course, is where effectiveness matters most.

So get familiar with what the Baldridge people expect of top-performing organizations, but in communication terms above all. Baldridge may not, in fact, have express communication criteria because they are implicit in their entire program. Do well in quality and you’re likely an effective communicator.

But give your communication stance express consideration. How are you getting the results you get? Could they be better with better communication? Very likely.

Countering Information Overload

Posted on April 2, 2009
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There was Kathleen Parker on the op-ed page of The Washington Post writing about a “TMI-addled nation.” Her reflections coincided with the 30th anniversary of the accident at my former workplace, and I thought for a moment she was exaggerating the anniversary’s impact a bit. But no, she was reflecting on “Too Much Information.” Now there’s a concern for these times.

Ironically, information overload is occurring at a time when newspapers, the core of the traditional media, are disintegrating. In my own Pennsylvania neighborhood, the two Lancaster papers just merged and my hometown paper, The Lebanon Daily News, will shortly be printed by a sister paper in York, 53 miles away. (It will be interesting to see how the delivery time holds up there.)

But Kathleen has a point in that the media array is atomizing, our information setting is becoming highly variegated and challenging to comprehend. I wouldn’t say too much so, because it’s not clear how all this will settle out. As Clay Shirky says, we’re in 1,500, with electronic Gutenbergs clamoring for our attention from the Internet and cable TV.

The danger, as Ms. Parker notes, is that as people become overwhelmed with information they become less attentive, less hopeful of, and thereby less interested in, finding meaning in the buzz. Prolonged, such an overload state can make for a truly dysfunctional, inattentive society.

Maybe the best we can all do is to stake out our own information limits, and stay with them. Choose the blogs we want to follow, the books we want to read, the electronic media we want to indulge (like Bill Moyers, not Fox) and stay with them, piecing together meaning for ourselves but not expecting to get it universally – or, as they used to say, objectively – correct.

Instead of going with the flow, use a dipstick and hope it provides accurate enough samplings.

Posting Suspended, Pending Site Improvements

Posted on January 13, 2009
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Posting on Beetles Beat is temporarily suspended while changes are made on the Resource Relations website to reflect the growing importance of social media and to launch a second blog, this one on organizational communication. All should be up and running fairly soon. We are looking forward to a wider conversation, and new relationships, with our readers.

Where We Are Isn’t Pretty, and It Isn’t Us

Posted on November 21, 2008
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If there was ever an example of why the nation is in deep economic disarray, it’s the result yesterday of the visit by the “Big Three” auto companies to Washington. That and the real restate environment I happened to learn about in my old neighborhood in Queens, New York.

The auto companies displayed no sense of regard for public and congressional opinion by showing up at House and Senate hearings in private jets and without a plan on how to spend $25 billion in “bailout” aid in a convincingly useful manner.

Yet Congress showed no awareness of its own role in avoiding creation of a national health care system that would relieve the auto companies and other employers of heavy health insurance costs.

What we saw at the auto hearings was a dire example of how much we have lost sight of the public interest ? our common interest ? in an era of unfettered market capitalism.

And in my old neighborhood in Queens, there is a timeworn house for sale with an air-conditioner hanging out its front window. Asking price: $549,000. More than a half-million dollars for a home that has no doubt been a comfortable, yet work-a-day, residence for years upon years. If this house sells for anything close to the asking price, I’d say it’s a candidate for default in the future. And there are still, apparently, many offerings like it on the market.

We cannot sustain this dereliction of reality in manufacturing centers, the nation’s capital and my old neighborhood. We have to realize we are one people living in context with our time and needs, not speculators on our common future.

An Earmark to Celebrate – There Must be Others, Too

Posted on October 24, 2008
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Central Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Holden was at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center yesterday to announce and get deserved credit for a $2.8 million appropriation he included in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for development of the Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute. He’s done that six times now, and has provided $31 million for the emerging, $121 million center through congressional appropriations.

Congressman Holden was celebrating “earmarks” needed to build an important new medical center in his home territory. And why shouldn’t he? What’s the function of a congressman but to represent valid public interests back home?

So long as he does it openly, which Congressman Holden does. His name has been on the appropriations for the Hershey cancer center. They’ve been listed for anyone who wants to track them. They have originated in partnership with the National Naval Medical Center and its own cancer research. That’s why they’re in defense appropriations bills.

When John McCain inveighs in a broadside manner against earmarks, does he realize that he’s indicting projects like the Hershey cancer center, among other similarly worthy ones? Does he wonder what congressmen and senators are supposed to do if not to think and act creatively in support of the public interest back home? Are they supposed to sit around waiting for the president, or fate, to provide for everything?

The strength of America is in the health of its people and in the creativity of their leaders as long as those leaders have a pertinent sense of priorities. Rep. Holden and his Hershey and Navy research partners pretty clearly do.

“The most-feared words in the English language are ‘You have cancer,’” Rep. Holden said during his Hershey news conference. “Too often, people in central Pennsylvania have had to travel to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh or Baltimore, and we’ll have a state-of-the-art facility right here in Hershey that can provide those services.”

That’s an earmark and a congressional service ? provided openly and above-board ? that’s well worth celebrating, not condemning. And repeating, until the new center is built, dedicated and functioning for the benefit of Central Pennsylvanians. That’s precisely, it would seem, what representative government is about.

Guilt by Association…but with Walter Annenberg?

Posted on October 9, 2008
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John McCain joined in with Sarah Palin today in attacking Barack Obama as being associated with William Ayers, a Vietnam War-era radical and now a professor at the University of Illinois. A McCain TV ad laid it on too: It claimed that one of the nonprofits on which Obama and Ayers worked was a radical education foundation.

The foundation? Why the Annenberg Challenge funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which was founded by the late Walter Annenberg.

If Walter Annenberg, the sometimes testy publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, founder of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain, had ever heard himself described as a radical…, oh my! (Annenberg founded the Annenberg Challenge to improve school performance.)

What, a Role for Government After All?

Posted on September 18, 2008
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The stock market reversed course and gained 400 points today upon reports that the federal government may create an entity like the Resolution Trust Corp. (RTC) of the ’80s and ’90s to take over corporate bad debt.

What’s that, a role for the federal government? Every time I hear that government is “too big” and serves little useful purpose, I cringe. During the 1930s we recognized that there is, indeed, a necessary role for modern government (apart from raising armies and fighting wars). It’s to monitor and enable the efficient functioning of important programs and markets in the interest of us all.

When the government, the Federal Reserve and whatever other agencies, laid back and allowed the unregulated “derivatives” market to soar, that was a misuse of government – government held in abeyance. “Deregulation” is going to be shown up as one of the more colossal frauds of our time.

When Wall Street gets into scary straits because of unregulated excesses, there are sighs of relief when government officials – the secretary of the Treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve belatedly show up – to sort through the turmoil and, hopefully, stop it. “Where’s government been?” frightened folks ask. “Off on the sidelines, sent there by free market ideologues,” is the answer.

Now word that an agency like the RTC in the earlier savings and loan crisis may be created to take debt off the balance sheets of reeling firms prompts cheers. “Bear markets are very sensitive to news. And on a scale of 1 to 10, this one is a 13,” said Scott Fullman, director of derivatives investment strategy for WJB Capital Group in New York.

We need to recognize that government exists to protect the general welfare, year after year, and maintain balance between the people and greed. If greed powers the markets, it also can ruin people who get caught unawares, or are encouraged to make bad investments, including home mortgages they can’t afford.

Government is, or should be, a balance wheel and safety check, a necessary umpire and regulator of tactics that can go awry and cause enormous harm. It’s role is indispensable, and we ought not to be hearing otherwise from reckless politicians and power brokers.

Need Amtrak be a Stepchild?

Posted on July 31, 2008
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When you book a train trip on Amtrak to the West Coast, you’re told by Amtrak that “we don’t control the tracks” and that some delays are possible to let freight trains go by.

In an era in which we should be rethinking our transportation priorities, and acting to change habits involving gasoline consumption, it seems there’s something wrong with Amtrak being a stepchild on the rails.

It’s not as simple a matter, no doubt, as “people over freight.” Yet it does seem there should be a new priority for passenger train traffic for the rail system. We should at least be talking about that as part of a clear-eyed view of energy choices to diminish reliance on automobile and jet fuel. Shouldn’t we?

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