I usually find myself sympathetic to the editorial content of The New York Times (The paper's politics are only slight left of dead-center, but in the US this passes for radical), so when I read the recent series of articles about how Iraq war veterans are committing killings I was initially shocked.
The series began will detailed counts of recorded killings committed by Iraq veterans who'd returned to the US, and many of them were profoundly tragic. But as the articles wore on, I kept asking myself -- what evidence suggests that the rate of fatal crimes among returning military is any worse that other groups in the US? Our fair-minded friends at MAF ran the numbers, and found the murder rate by Vets is lower than the national average by a wide margin. The Times had narrowly discussed the Vet murder rate in terms of year-on-year growth, an alarming number for sure, but hardly noteworthy when compared to the frenzied killings committed year after year by the general public.
The Right has rightly raked the NYTs over the political coals. Too bad, because the bigger issue the NYT raised is the terrible treatment many vets receive on their return to civilian life. We've all seen the reports about poor medical treatment, but the care of mentally scared Vets is no better.
Even worse, no real analysis is offered of how absurdly high the US murder rate is. In the international league or murderers, the US ranks 24th (for the curious, Columbia, Jamaica and South Africa top the list). Mexico and Russia offer good competition, but the next nearest first-world, western democracy in #33 Portugal with a murder rate almost half that of the United States. All this is an old saw debate, but it's also a national insanity that reasonable gun control laws can't be passed. The aforelinked NationMaster website also has a bunch of stats on what correlates with murder rates - wonderful and potentially misleading stuff that I'll look at later.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
HNY
My company, probably for tax reasons rather than anything altruistic, shuts down over Christmas week, so I enjoyed an enforced but welcome break. I took the opportunity to read, and got lucky with two books – Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which came out in 2001 and won all sorts of awards, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was similarly lauded in 2006.
Two very good and very different books – John Updike said that Atonement could not have been written by an American, and the reverse could be said of The Road – it felt absolutely American in style, tone, and narrative.
The Road, a post-apocalyptic story that defines ‘bleak’, may not be the kind of book to read at Christmas by the fire, but it has stayed with me. A lot's been said about McCarthy’s style, which is perfectly suited to the terminal, desolate world he creates. For no reason I can think of it reminded me of Steinbeck.
Atonement has all the trappings, at least initially, of a classic English novel: the old mansion house, an off-kilter family of wealth and connection, the extended cast of servants, cousins, village folk. McEwan keeps the romantic story moving, but the novel slowly departs from the E.M, Forster-ish origin, as stories become embedded in stories. The way he decomposes the whole novel-narrative felt a bit like the way Fowles worked in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but his redemptive intentions are very different.
Both great reads. Happy New Year.
Two very good and very different books – John Updike said that Atonement could not have been written by an American, and the reverse could be said of The Road – it felt absolutely American in style, tone, and narrative.
The Road, a post-apocalyptic story that defines ‘bleak’, may not be the kind of book to read at Christmas by the fire, but it has stayed with me. A lot's been said about McCarthy’s style, which is perfectly suited to the terminal, desolate world he creates. For no reason I can think of it reminded me of Steinbeck.
Atonement has all the trappings, at least initially, of a classic English novel: the old mansion house, an off-kilter family of wealth and connection, the extended cast of servants, cousins, village folk. McEwan keeps the romantic story moving, but the novel slowly departs from the E.M, Forster-ish origin, as stories become embedded in stories. The way he decomposes the whole novel-narrative felt a bit like the way Fowles worked in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but his redemptive intentions are very different.
Both great reads. Happy New Year.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Retail Values
I’ve just started reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with my 8 year-old: she stumbles over the Victorian locutions, but she’s enthralled by Marley, Scrooge, and that wonderful, enveloping atmosphere that Dickens created.
We’ve come a long way since 1843, when Dickens wrote his morality tale and in many ways reestablished what “Christmas values” should be. The grinding poverty that existed in Dickensian London and elsewhere, which Dickens experienced personally during his time in the blacking factory when his father was in debtors prison, has largely vanished. At least, from the western world.
You have to wonder what CD would think about the modern, commercial enterprise that is our Xmas, Dickens’ ‘Christmas Yet To Come’. In an earlier post I talked about how Orwell’s message still resonates when we read about modern-day Burma, and there’s a parallel with Dickens and the retail values we express during a celebration like Christmas.
We’ve come a long way since 1843, when Dickens wrote his morality tale and in many ways reestablished what “Christmas values” should be. The grinding poverty that existed in Dickensian London and elsewhere, which Dickens experienced personally during his time in the blacking factory when his father was in debtors prison, has largely vanished. At least, from the western world.
You have to wonder what CD would think about the modern, commercial enterprise that is our Xmas, Dickens’ ‘Christmas Yet To Come’. In an earlier post I talked about how Orwell’s message still resonates when we read about modern-day Burma, and there’s a parallel with Dickens and the retail values we express during a celebration like Christmas.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Negative Brand Equity
In my last post I picked an easy fight with WalMart and their crappy PR. A lot of others joined in the fun, from Mother Jones to The LA Times.
I argued that this is a moral failing, not a PR blunder. And so it may be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be quantified as a costly business mistake, and measured in terms a stock holder would understand outside of any wishy-washy ethical dimension.
Brand equity, so we’re told, is the net gain a branded entity brings to an organization, compared with an unbranded counterpart. In other words, what is a punter prepared to pay for a branded product, above and beyond the price of a competitive product/service of roughly equivalent function? An iPod costs a lot more than an equivalent generic mp3 player, and the difference is seen to be accrued brand value or equity.
In theory, brand equity cannot be negative, or so says Wikipedia. Some disagree, including me. The problem is brand equity is a fuzzy concept that’s very hard to really quantify.
In contrast, good and bad publicity is getting easier to measure, because most media is now available online, and search technologies exist that can give a reasonable indication of subjective content. Such a media barometer could be a strong tool to ascertain true PR equity, especially if we link this to other tangible measures of business health – say a company’s stock price. A clear correlation between the two would be a strong weapon for PR professionals.
Academics have worked on this already. At an extreme, Rao and Hamilton have shown a clear correlation between unethical (read quasi-illegal) behavior and stock indicators, but you’d expect this because the behavior is very likely to have direct financial consequences – lawsuits, and so on. The Phelps Group, an integrated marketing agency, looked at the wider literature and found studies that showed less than 10% of a stock value was accounted for by brand equity. A boatload of methodological issues go along with all this research, but they’re a start. There’s probably more studies I’ve missed, let me know if you’ve seen some.
I argued that this is a moral failing, not a PR blunder. And so it may be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be quantified as a costly business mistake, and measured in terms a stock holder would understand outside of any wishy-washy ethical dimension.
Brand equity, so we’re told, is the net gain a branded entity brings to an organization, compared with an unbranded counterpart. In other words, what is a punter prepared to pay for a branded product, above and beyond the price of a competitive product/service of roughly equivalent function? An iPod costs a lot more than an equivalent generic mp3 player, and the difference is seen to be accrued brand value or equity.
In theory, brand equity cannot be negative, or so says Wikipedia. Some disagree, including me. The problem is brand equity is a fuzzy concept that’s very hard to really quantify.
In contrast, good and bad publicity is getting easier to measure, because most media is now available online, and search technologies exist that can give a reasonable indication of subjective content. Such a media barometer could be a strong tool to ascertain true PR equity, especially if we link this to other tangible measures of business health – say a company’s stock price. A clear correlation between the two would be a strong weapon for PR professionals.
Academics have worked on this already. At an extreme, Rao and Hamilton have shown a clear correlation between unethical (read quasi-illegal) behavior and stock indicators, but you’d expect this because the behavior is very likely to have direct financial consequences – lawsuits, and so on. The Phelps Group, an integrated marketing agency, looked at the wider literature and found studies that showed less than 10% of a stock value was accounted for by brand equity. A boatload of methodological issues go along with all this research, but they’re a start. There’s probably more studies I’ve missed, let me know if you’ve seen some.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The value of PR?
Over the last year of so Walmart has gone from being a Wall Street darling to the embodiment of everything that is bad about Big Business. Alright, so maybe I'm overstating things, but their reputation has been keeping good pace with their sinking stock price, and they seem to take every opportunity to accelerate the decline.
Case in point: Today's Wall Street Journal ran a nasty cover story on the preditory practices of healthcare providers who increasingly are suing accident victims for access to their legal damages settlements. They led with the case of woman hit by a truck who barely made it out of intensive care, and who eventually won a settlement only to be sued by... you guessed it, her employer Walmart. They wanted to recoup the $440k+ they'd paid out in insurance coverage.
Now legally, there's no doubt that Walmart and their healthcare provider have a right to the cash. But ethically, morally? And if they have no ethics, don't they think through the ramifications and cost to their business? They're approaching the retail holiday bonanza with PR that is beyond bad, that will drive off shoppers in droves, and which shows Olympic levels of business stupidity.
Given my profession it would be easy for me to label this a public relations failure, but it really isn't: This is a moral failure that has PR consequences. The Walmart spokesperson rightly stated that they have to protect the interests of all their healthcare plan members and their investors, a stock answer in every sense that displays no sense of proportion, probity, anything.
Maybe this argues for a moral dimension to PR, or is this oxymoronic (or just plain moronic) ?
Case in point: Today's Wall Street Journal ran a nasty cover story on the preditory practices of healthcare providers who increasingly are suing accident victims for access to their legal damages settlements. They led with the case of woman hit by a truck who barely made it out of intensive care, and who eventually won a settlement only to be sued by... you guessed it, her employer Walmart. They wanted to recoup the $440k+ they'd paid out in insurance coverage.
Now legally, there's no doubt that Walmart and their healthcare provider have a right to the cash. But ethically, morally? And if they have no ethics, don't they think through the ramifications and cost to their business? They're approaching the retail holiday bonanza with PR that is beyond bad, that will drive off shoppers in droves, and which shows Olympic levels of business stupidity.
Given my profession it would be easy for me to label this a public relations failure, but it really isn't: This is a moral failure that has PR consequences. The Walmart spokesperson rightly stated that they have to protect the interests of all their healthcare plan members and their investors, a stock answer in every sense that displays no sense of proportion, probity, anything.
Maybe this argues for a moral dimension to PR, or is this oxymoronic (or just plain moronic) ?
Friday, November 2, 2007
The chicken was first
Sometimes you bump into a website and rediscover why it's called the World Wide Web, and why it's cool. Ask500People is a relatively simple mashup/social computing site, but it's oceans of fun. Ask a (relatively) random sample of 500 people anywhere in the world a simple question, any question, and see the answers stream in real-time, with location information and voting patterns. Is Hillary going to win? Ever smoked hash? Is marriage archiac? Can you calculate the mean of these five numbers?
And it's official: the chicken came first, but only just.
And it's official: the chicken came first, but only just.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
What are we talking about?
A while back I blogged about Adoption of Innovation research, and I’ve also talked about how blogs might generously be described to have a symbiotic relationship with conventional media, and uncharitably be described as vampiric.
Back in the day when I studied this stuff, one of the few theories that seemed to have merit was Agenda Setting theory. The theory is oft summarized with the axiom “the media may not tell people what to think, but they do tell people what to think about.” The theory goes that media outlets focus on an agenda of items that are considered newsworthy – these can be enduring news values, or specific news events. For example, proximity is an enduring news value – the closer the ‘news” is to the reader, the more newsworthy it becomes (hence, as happened with The New York Times some years back, a front page story might describe a local car crash where a dozen people died, while buried on page three is a squib about a train wreck in India with over 300 casualties). A specific news ‘event’ might be immigration, or avian flu, or the lead in children’s toys, to name a few of the moment.
There have been mountains of research to show that there is a causal relationship between people’s agendas and what the media is highlighting. This is one reason why politicians are always trying to create an agenda that favors their views or corners their competitors.
Agenda Setting works when you have a fairly monolithic media, with a few controlling interests commanding considerable public reach: This was the case pre-Internet, but has rapidly eroded. Today, most people get their news from many sources, not just their local paper. Today we have blogs.
Does this change anything? Probably, and possibly not for the better. Journalism.org reported that when the mainstream media focused on Iraq and immigration, the alternative media focused on iPhones and game consuls. Blogs do the same thing, as I noted in a past post where nerd-level subjects like Web 2.0 outdo mainstream discussions of President Bush.
Tobias Escher at the OII is doing research in this area, as has Kaye Sweetser and colleagues: Early days, but blogs seems to have some influence on overall news agendas. The effect seems to be indirect – again, an amplification process, rather than establishing agendas.
Blogs exist in subcultures – narrow, divisive, tribal, and often contumacious. They accentuate some abiding news values and usually have a very narrow agenda of interest. In this sense, blogs represent the opposite of mass media – the media of division.
Back in the day when I studied this stuff, one of the few theories that seemed to have merit was Agenda Setting theory. The theory is oft summarized with the axiom “the media may not tell people what to think, but they do tell people what to think about.” The theory goes that media outlets focus on an agenda of items that are considered newsworthy – these can be enduring news values, or specific news events. For example, proximity is an enduring news value – the closer the ‘news” is to the reader, the more newsworthy it becomes (hence, as happened with The New York Times some years back, a front page story might describe a local car crash where a dozen people died, while buried on page three is a squib about a train wreck in India with over 300 casualties). A specific news ‘event’ might be immigration, or avian flu, or the lead in children’s toys, to name a few of the moment.
There have been mountains of research to show that there is a causal relationship between people’s agendas and what the media is highlighting. This is one reason why politicians are always trying to create an agenda that favors their views or corners their competitors.
Agenda Setting works when you have a fairly monolithic media, with a few controlling interests commanding considerable public reach: This was the case pre-Internet, but has rapidly eroded. Today, most people get their news from many sources, not just their local paper. Today we have blogs.
Does this change anything? Probably, and possibly not for the better. Journalism.org reported that when the mainstream media focused on Iraq and immigration, the alternative media focused on iPhones and game consuls. Blogs do the same thing, as I noted in a past post where nerd-level subjects like Web 2.0 outdo mainstream discussions of President Bush.
Tobias Escher at the OII is doing research in this area, as has Kaye Sweetser and colleagues: Early days, but blogs seems to have some influence on overall news agendas. The effect seems to be indirect – again, an amplification process, rather than establishing agendas.
Blogs exist in subcultures – narrow, divisive, tribal, and often contumacious. They accentuate some abiding news values and usually have a very narrow agenda of interest. In this sense, blogs represent the opposite of mass media – the media of division.
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