Perhaps moderation is on my mind because we just started a “Biggest Loser” contest in my office. Or maybe it is has something to do with hearing this weekend about a great quote attributed to Julia Child (“everything in moderation, including moderation”).

Moderation again came to mind this morning as I work from home before heading down to DC this evening. I have had CNN on in the background, as dull white noise – just as I have for most of the past 19 years of my professional life.

I have not kept track minute-by-minute so my impression could be wrong, but it feels as if the vast majority of coverage is currently about Haiti. Now that’s absolutely a big story that deserves significant coverage, but the wall-to-wall nature mirrors the ongoing habit of cable news. It seems that they blanket their airwaves with one story whenever possible – often manufacturing an important local news story into an all-consuming national event.

I suppose it is a commentary on the media business itself – consumers of information must clearly appreciate this approach since it is so often repeated. And the media entrepreneur in me appreciates that and stands by the business decisions made by broadcasters and publishers.

But the news consumer in me would like to see more balance, and not just in the periodic “top story” fly-bys. There’s plenty of interesting and useful news out there that would be great to have at least some national exposure so that it enters the national consciousness (at least among news junkies).

There’s no doubt that Haiti is an important global story and merits more attention than many other stories today. There are bigger – 9/11 comes to mind – but there are plenty of lesser stories that get similar treatment. Missing interns and students are tragic, but not necessarily worthy of 24/7 coverage.

So am I off base? Is there value in moderation? Or am I too much of a news junky to be a reasonable judge?

Gary Vaynerchuk’s first business book, Crush It!, can be summed up simply: find something you are passionate about and work very hard at doing it superbly.

Like Gary himself, the book is always energetic, frequently personal, and occasionally bombastic. With a writing style that mirrors his style in online videos, the book proceeds at often breakneck pace. Unlike many business books today, it does not feel overly long and windy. Whereas many authors come up with a great idea for a feature magazine article and then need to come up with enough words to make it a written work that is “long enough” to be a book, Gary and his publisher were fine with putting out something that was thin and to the point.

The brevity leaves the reader wanting more. This is certainly better than wishing the book would just end, but at the same time some of the sections are almost impossibly thin. Gary has great passion and ideas, but Crush It! is long on motivation and short on practical guidance.

The Wine Library’s success was not the result of social media

Many who have heard the story of Gary Vaynerchuk assume that his video blog has driven the amazing growth of his retail store in New Jersey, The Wine Library. I have heard social media experts link the Wine Library TV web effort to this expansion.

However, Gary notes that he grew his family’s liquor business at a phenomenal rate before he got involved with his online TV show, going from four million dollars a year to fifty million dollars a year between 1998 and 2005. “Aside from a ton of hard work, it took millions of dollars in advertising with the New York Times, Wine Spectator, and other publications as well as radio stations and local TV,” he writes.

So as powerful as social media can be – and often cost-effective – substantial growth frequently comes at a not insignificant expense using a variety of media.

There are no shortcuts to success.

Web video is not the be-all, end-all

Gary emphasizes the need to choose the right medium for your message: “Adding video or audio elements just for the sake of adding them isn’t going to send your brand and business to the moon. The only way these tools work is if you’re using them for the right job.”

That’s an important takeaway for anyone reading Crush It! because many who look at Gary’s success assume they need to use video to match his accomplishments.

Trust Instinct Over Analytics?

With all the good advice he offers, Gary does provide one suggestion that I would strongly refute:

I use analytics very rarely and I urge you not to rely too much on them either, especially if you’ve got good business instincts. A lot of times the stats and percentages related to my business just don’t support what my instinct says is true, and I’ll trust my instincts over numbers every time.

I have several beefs with this notion:

1. Telling novice entrepreneurs to trust their gut over data is sort of like a master chef telling a first-time cook to ignore the recipe. Years of experience provide a reservoir of knowledge that one can use to feed instinct.

2. Ultimately the data should back up your instincts, no matter how good your gut feel may be. If the data doesn’t jive with your instinct, you are ether using the wrong metrics or your instinct is wrong. When the two don’t match, it should make a smart entrepreneur question why and then work to figure it out so the right data or instinct can be applied in the future.

The example that Gary uses to back up his assertion on instinct vs. analytics helps prove my points. He suggests that even if your web stats show that only 7 people visited your blog in the past two months, you should keep at it because a producer for NBC’s Today Show might be one of those readers. “There’s no reason to think that can’t happen,” Gary says.

Well, sure, that’s possible. And many people do give up their online media efforts too quickly – it does take time to build up a meaningful audience. And I preach all the time about the quality of audience vs. the number of raw eyeballs. But if two years pass and you still only have 7 readers in 2 months, it may be time to give up – no matter what your instinct tells you.

If you’re going to bank on the quality of your audience you need to use some sort of metric to assess that. Are you getting intelligent comments from people you are trying to reach? Have you heard through word of mouth or otherwise that an NBC producer really is reading? I can sit here and tell you that my gut tells me that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates read my blog and love it, but that’s a far cry from having even the thinnest bit of evidence to suggest it is true.

The Bottom Line on Crush It!

At a street price of $11-$13, I’d rate Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! a buy. It’s certainly rough around the edges and it does fall short in some areas, but if you take it for what it is as a motivational business book with a handful of ideas that might help trigger your own thoughts, it’s worth the time and money to invest in reading. Like many inexpensive wines, it’s enjoyable going down even if it doesn’t have a long, complex finish.

Barbara Nixon, Shonali Burke, and I had some interesting dialogue on Twitter this morning, and it inspires this post.

The conversation started when I remarked that I had not slept well last night and kept waking up with ideas spinning around in my head. Naturally, that led me to firing off a number of emails this morning to start acting on those thoughts while they were still fresh.

I noted that “I don’t downshift very well. It has been a problem for years. I have 2 speeds: max and crashed.” (The “crashed” part is probably a good blog post for another day.)

The net result is that folks who work for me tend to get a barrage of emails even on weekends, holidays, and at odd hours during the week. Now, I’m not trying to make folks work at the same nutty pace that I do. As I have gotten older i have come to accept that some people actually value downtime. And I guess it isn’t that I don’t value it, I just have a hard time accepting it. When I am not running a mile a minute getting things done I do relax — but that’s when my most creative thoughts have the time to pop into my mind. Leading me right back into work. (But I enjoy it for the most part, so don’t feel too sorry for me.)

When I send emails to my team at the unusual times I don’t expect an immediate response. But I often get them.

Shonali said “That happens when you’re the boss.” She also implored me to let my team downshift this week even if I am not able to.

And she’s right. But it is easier said than done. When my primary role was running CustomScoop and my other companies, I had worked with most of the team for many years and they knew my habits and generally coped well with it (as far as I could tell, at least). I was still the boss, so I got a fair number of responses to my weekend/holiday emails but a fair number also waited — as they could — until the next work day for a response.

In my new gig at DCI I’m working with folks who don’t know me nearly as well. And as a larger company, we have more structure and probably a bit more respect for authority than in the small, entrepreneurial ventures I have spent so much time in.

So the natural reaction is for people to respond quickly, regardless of the day or hour.

Barbara shared a solution she used to employ. “When I was a manager, I’d sometimes delay the sending of my messages, so people wouldn’t feel compelled to respond on weekends,” she wrote.

This is not something I have generally done, in large part because if I draft and save emails up I tend to forget to send them. And I can’t just take my email offline because some of my emails do need to go out in a timely fashion.

But… I did find myself stepping away from my email on Thanksgiving Day this year because too many people were responding to my missives. I was just using some time that morning to get caught up since things were quiet, but I never intended for the people who work for me to set aside their own plans to reply. So I stopped.

And I sent only one work email on Christmas Day (but didn’t get a response, thankfully!)

So here’s how I deal with the disconnect between my email actions and my expectations from the recipient:

• I regularly remind people they don’t need to respond to all of my weekend/holiday emails. I issue these reminders in person and via email.

• I stress when an email is not urgent or timely. The fresh reminder in the email itself never hurts.

• I note when an urgent reply or action is needed. I find those little red exclamation points to be grossly overused, so I almost never employ them myself. But on a truly urgent email I may roll it out. But more importantly, I emphasize with my message the importance of action.

• I acknowledge when I am asking for work outside of normal, sane hours. I want my team to know that I recognize the inconvenience of the timing of some of my requests.

• I try to be clear about why timely action is necessary. Sometimes it is obvious, but in other situations my team may not understand why I have launched some email fire drill. Explaining the urgency can often help, especially if it is some outside force driving my action because then they understand I am in the same boat as them.

• I have to be willing to do my share. I am not one of those managers who sloughs off weekend/holiday work to subordinates  just to get it off my plate. If there’s an off-hours fire drill, I stand ready to pitch in however I can — even if it means taking on responsibilities I would normally delegate.

• I recognize the sacrifices my team makes. I do not excel in the area of positive reinforcement. I am a more traditional New Englander who simply expects hard work from myself and others. But I do try as much as I can to call out team members when they go above and beyond and to thank them when they shoulder extra burdens, especially on weekends and holidays.

What do you do as a manager to mitigate your Blackberry bombardments? For those of you on the receiving end, what would you like your managers to do?

It has become increasingly common for me to find myself in conversations with colleagues where I recognize the reality that I have gone from being a young turk to a budding grayhair. I explain things that seem entirely foreign to the 20-somethings who I work with. For example, I did not have a PC or email in my first job on Capitol Hill. I did not have a cell phone until I became CEO of a company 6 years later. I used the Internet before the World Wide Web existed when everything was text-based. I once used an acoustic coupler modem to get online with a local BBS (bulletin board).

Most of this qualifies as just reminiscing about the evolution of technology. At the end of the day, it doesn’t make a huge difference , other than it does give me what I consider to be valuable perspective to the current digital communications landscape since I have familiarity with the foundation of advocacy communications, not just in the new media world.

But one thing from my past jumps out at me as something that is missing from my younger colleagues’ lives that would actually benefit them.

The art of the handwritten letter has largely fallen victim to the evolution of technology. Communications today have become more immediate and almost entirely digital. When I went off to college, I would communicate with friends at far-flung locations by writing and mailing letters updating them on developments and responding to their own letters. When college classmates would spend a semester abroad, we would exchange letters on special airmail paper that was lighter weight and thus cost less to mail. Phone calls were few and far between — even domestically — because long distance rates were so high.

Today, Skype can be used at low-cost to talk to friends overseas. Email lets you stay in touch with friends in every corner of the country and the globe virtually instantly at no significant cost. Text messaging on cell phones even permit instant feedback on the latest concert or movie — while you’re still in your seat.

What do we lose with the decline of letter writing?

• Solid Writing Skills. In the hiring that I have done over the past decade or more, the thing that has disappointed me most in the quality of candidates is writing skill. It often amazes me that many recent college graduates have such a remarkably difficult time communicating effectively in writing. Although they have undoubtedly written plenty of term papers, there’s something about letter writing that I think really helps to hone one’s written communications ability.

• Spelling. Text messaging discourages correct spelling. Email and word processing provides automate spell-checking capability so as long as you type something in the neighborhood of what is correct, you’re probably all set. Writing letters with pen and paper offers no such safety net. It forces you to focus on spelling correctly — or demonstrating your inability to do so in a very glaring fashion.

• The Value of Words. Words matter. When writing a letter, it is important to consider how the words will be interpreted on the other end by the recipient. Because of the time it would take for the postal system to do its work and for the recipient to respond in writing, a single back-and-forth exchange would easily take at least a week — often more. That doesn’t leave much room to clear up misunderstandings quickly, so it forced us to focus more on what we said. In addition, since it took time to write the letter, stick it in an envelope, add a stamp, and get it to a mail box to go out, there was plenty of time to reconsider the message being sent. Email and text messages are now so easy to send that quick-fire responses that the significance of one’s words is often overlooked, sometimes with negative effect.

• The Power of Connecting. In the electronic world, we have many more connections, but we often take them for granted. We bounce from one email or tweet to the next and we think we are connecting. And we are. But it isn’t on the same level as if you were to take 30 minutes crafting a letter to someone. While that letter is being written, the person you are communicating with is top of mind. You are focused on that single relationship. Ultimately, that fosters a stronger bond.

Now, I’m not saying we should drop electronic communications and move back to the handwritten letter. But we would all do well to consider what we have lost as this art has disappeared and think about how we might incorporate the best of it into our current communications arsenal.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Send handwritten notes periodically to your connections. I try to send notes to recognize significant milestones, and express thanks for some action, but I could do better.

• Try to craft more thoughtful emails. There’s value in brevity, but sometimes it would help to provide greater context to an email discussion. There’s no need to turn an email into an essay every time you hit send, but take the time to embellish your thoughts where appropriate.

• Pause before hitting send. There’s no harm in re-reading an email before you send it. Don’t just look for typos — try to put yourself in the shoes of the recipient to judge how the message will be received. Especially when attempting humor or sarcasm — or when issuing an admonishment — electronic communications can often be misunderstood.

What ideas would you add?

Photo credit: a.drian via Flickr

My favorite restaurant in Washington, DC suffered a serious fire early yesterday morning while the place was empty. Check out the pictures from Tim Carman at the Washington City Paper to get a feel for the damage at Todd Gray’s Equinox.

It certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but there is clearly extensive work that needs to be done to allow it to reopen.

Those who know me know that I spend considerable time dining at Equinox during my weekly visits to the city. Todd, Ellen, and the entire staff are all great people who provide excellent food and service.

This is obviously a tough time of year to have something like this happen, but it sounds like the Todd and his crew are already rebounding, having set up shop in some dining space provided by another DC establishment, Aria. Hopefully this will allow Equinox to honor the reservations of those who have holiday dining plans so they can still enjoy the quality meals they have been known for over the past decade plus.

I haven’t had a chance to talk to Todd yet, but it surely has to qualify as a roller-coaster year. It started with President-elect Obama and the future First Lady making it their first fine dining stop in the city just before they officially took office and it ends with this serious challenge.

I’m obviously rooting for Todd and the team to be back in place as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I plan to eat wherever he is cooking when I return to DC after this holiday break.

At DCI Group this year, we decided to have a little fun with our holiday card. Instead of sending out scads of printed cards that would just get lost in the pile of others just like it on the desks of those we work for and with, we went with a holiday e-card.

But we didn’t just put together a standard holiday-themed web animation. Instead, our Creative Services team developed a concept for a holiday video that features the great people at DCI in a pretty entertaining way (if I do say so myself).

But rather than having me blather on about it, check out the DCI Holiday e-Card for yourself. We had a great time making it and hopefully you will enjoy watching.

The web is all about metrics. Unique visitors, sessions, page views, time on site, impressions, click-through rates, cost per click, number of engagements, cost per engagement, and more can all be tracked for a web-based issue advocacy campaign.

Inevitably, internal and external clients get excited by the biggest numbers. How many eyeballs are seeing the content? How many people took action? They want to see lots of trailing zeros.

But not all traffic is created equal.

Judging Results Based on Specific Goals

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how many millions of emails you sent or impressions you got or unique visitors who came to your site if what you really need are letters to Congress. Conversely, if you are fighting to build awareness of an issue, it may be better for millions to see your message than hundreds or thousands to contact Congress.

Ultimately, every campaign — and every project within that broader campaign — needs to have well-defined objectives to make it possible to develop an accurate assessment of the results.

Issue Advocacy Branding Campaigns

We often think of major consumer companies when we contemplate the concept of a “brand campaign.” We don’t think twice about a soda company, a car manufacturer, or a bank running ads that tout the overall benefit of the brand rather than selling a specific product.

The goal of a branding campaign in business is to build awareness of a company or product line so that it is easier to make the actual sale when the time is right.

As we shift into the world of politics and public affairs, the same concept can be applied — although most in this space don’t really think of it as a “branding campaign” per se.

But that’s exactly what it is when a candidate launches a bio spot in the early days of a campaign. Or even as the campaign runs more issue-specific ads as Election Day draws closer. It is not until the later stages of the campaign that the more action-oriented “Vote for Candidate X” messaging starts to take on greater prominence.

In effect, the candidate’s campaign has been running a branding campaign to make it easier to ask for that vote at the polls when the time was right.

In the world of issue advocacy, far fewer people contemplate the value of brand advertising for the issue itself. But it should not be overlooked. Not all issue advocacy campaigns need to be centered on the concept of “Call Congress Today to Help Stop X” or “Tell Congress We Need Y.”

Organizations with sufficient foresight (and budget) will begin to engage on an important issue before the vote draws near and the ask becomes urgent.

One of the reasons that issue-oriented branding campaigns tend to be less popular is that it is harder to measure, and as noted metrics are often the focus in the world of digital communications.

How do you gauge success of a branding campaign for an issue?

Ultimately, this is a difficult question to answer. Very few campaigns have the budget to go into the field to do regular survey research on an issue to determine how well an issue-oriented branding campaign is working.

This means that much of the “research” becomes more anecdotal. Are you hearing that folks are getting the message? Is there buzz on the issue?

In the online environment there are several things you can look at for signs that a branding campaign may be working on your issue that are less anecdotal:

• Is the amount of non-sponsored web traffic increasing? In other words are folks coming to your web site without clicking on an ad?
• Are more web sites providing unsolicited links to your content? This demonstrates the issue — and your organization — are more top of mind with influencers.
• Are the number of search queries on your issue increasing? This one is a bit harder to nail down and may be the result of the issue becoming more ripe or derive from the activities of other organizations, but it is worth keeping an eye on nonetheless.

Basically, what you are looking to measure is the level of unaided awareness of and sympathy for your issue.

Issue Advocacy Action Campaigns

When it comes to an action campaign, the deliverables matter most. It is very much like an e-commerce campaign that is judged on the success of how many widgets get sold.

Since action campaigns are so much easier to track, they tend to be the most popular ones to deploy in the online space. Are you getting petition signatures? Email signups? Letters or calls to Congress?

But even within these obvious metrics, there are less obvious ones to consider. Are the actions being taken the most useful ones? In other words, are they coming from the most influential people? Are they from the most significant geographic areas for the campaign?

Quantity vs. Quality of Web Traffic on Advocacy Sites

Remember I said that not all traffic is created equal, right? That’s where one of the biggest differences between branding and action campaigns play out over the course of the campaign.

Branding is largely about eyeballs. You need to get as many people as possible in your target group to see your message several times in order to drive the point home. In this orientation, clicks don’t matter, impressions do.

Action is about attracting likely activists. It’s not about the largest number of eyeballs or even the greatest number of clicks, it is about finding those individuals likely to have the greatest pre-existing sympathy for your issue who can be easily convince to take action.

The people who will write a letter to Congress are an entirely different breed than those who may be interested in learning about and even paying attention to an issue. Think about it. How many people outside of the political/policy sphere do you know who regularly contact their Member of Congress — or state rep, county council member, or other public official?

The tension between the desire to get a high quantity of web traffic and the need to get the highest quality will always be present in a digital issue campaign. Understanding your objectives at the outset — and determining whether you are in a branding mode or an action one — will help guide quality decision-making.

I had a conversation recently with an ad sales rep for a prominent web publisher who quite bluntly pitched a pay to play scheme. While I understand that the editorial side of the publishing business is not blind to the needs of advertisers (nor am I a purist who believes that business interests should not play a role in content selection), I was very surprised at just how overt this individual was about the connection.

Here’s a paraphrased version of how the conversation generally went:

AD SALES REP: Something else to consider is a “value ad” that we offer to some advertisers. You can get us your content and we’ll make sure one of our writers gets it published on our site. Now, you can’t just give us a press release. It needs to be written more like an article and have a valid hook for our audience, but we can get it up there.

ME: So, you’re saying that if we agree to spend a certain amount, we could get our content published without it being listed as an advertisement.

REP: Yes. Now, we wouldn’t put it in writing anywhere. You won’t see it in a campaign plan or any other document, but you’ll know you will get it anyway.

ME: What level of spending would we need to get that “added value”?

REP: It depends, but in general $50,000 would do it. And remember, it won’t show up in any campaign plan.

Again, I’m not naive, and I know these games are played. But this discussion just seemed so brazen and blatant — especially the repeated emphasis about doing it in such a way that there would be nothing in writing about the deal.

I don’t take issue with sponsored media content that comes with disclosure, nor do I object to publishers considering the wishes of advertisers when making editorial decisions (it is a business after all).

But if content on a media publisher’s web site has been explicitly bargained for — even if not in writing — it ought to be disclosed as sponsored.

MG Siegler over at TechCrunch rolls out a litany of claims about the future of news that simply cannot be reconciled with reality. It’s a target-rich environment so I almost don’t know where to begin.

So let’s just dive right in.

First, let’s summarize MG’s case.

MG writes:

“Earthquakes, the massive San Diego fires, the shootings in Mumbai, the situation in Iran, and even Michael Jackson’s death. The realtime web beat the mainstream media easily to each of these stories. And this disparity will only increase going forward.”

By “realtime web” he seems to be implying mostly Twitter. Or at least that’s what the headline of one post suggests: “In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite.”

He proffers additional proof in the form of the Tiger Woods story appearing on Twitter from BNO News some 45 minutes before CNN went to air with its first report on the accident.

From here he circles back to his original point – that coverage of the JFK assassination would have changed dramatically in the age of Twitter:

“The difference is that had the Kennedy assassination happened today, it would not have taken 38 minutes from the time of President Kennedy being declared dead to the time Cronkite broke the news on the air. Actually, it may have. But it would have been reported on services like Twitter much sooner. Had it played out that way, where do you think people would turn the next time there was an event unfolding in realtime?”

Of course, this all circles back (in a separate post from MG) to the tired old mantra that “Information wants to be free, and the web, with services like Twitter, provides the easiest way for that to happen.”

Now, let’s have a reality check.

I should note at the outset that I get a real kick out of a professional journalist touting the “information wants to be free” line. Just to be clear, TechCrunch is designed to make money by selling information (in exchange for eyeballs that drive advertising dollars – among other revenue sources). MG and others are paid by TechCrunch to discover news – preferably by doing something other than surfing Twitter and regurgitating what others are saying and instead developing their own original reporting.

But for now let’s set that aside and move on to some of the specific examples here.

Let’s start with the recent past. Tiger Woods was in a car accident at 2:30 in the morning near his Florida home. BNO News was right on top of it, by announcing it on Twitter a half day or so later. This despite the number of people in Florida (and elsewhere) who likely already knew what had happened. MG intends to demonstrate that the “real-time web” in the form of Twitter scooped traditional media.

That’s simply wrong. At least one major Florida news outlet (WESH TV) beat BNO News by about a half hour, according to time stamps on their web site. Specifically, WESH shows a story on Tiger Woods appearing on their web site at 1:57 PM on November 27, while Twitter shows the BNO News report being posted at 2:24 PM.

To be clear: the mainstream, professional media beat the “real-time web” to the Tiger Woods news.

But we shouldn’t let the facts get in the way here. If we dial back the clock to the JFK assassination, we can watch the Walter Cronkite video that MG shared that clearly demonstrates the local media in Texas getting the first, unconfirmed report of the President’s death. It is not at all clear that the “real-time web” would have scooped the local media. Unless some doctor in the hospital whipped out his iPhone to tweet the death notice, chances are some local news outlet with local connections would be first with the news still today.

But let’s assume that what MG really meant to argue was not that the “real-time web” would actually report anything, but will instead serve as a megaphone for local or niche news sources. That may be a fair point, but does anyone truly believe that the Twitter megaphone is bigger than the one that CNN or other major professional media outlets possess?

If a national poll was conducted to find out where people first learned about the Tiger Woods accident, I have little doubt that Twitter would not be at the top of the list.

Perhaps we can dial back the rhetoric a bit and recognize that Twitter has value, but so do traditional news outlets. One does not replace the other. They serve different functions, each of which has merit.

My good friend Mark Story has an excellent post titled “Top Ten Tips on How to Build a First-Rate Online Public Affairs Offering – Or At Least One that Doesn’t Suck.” In it, he offers up a number of great suggestions — many of which I’m keenly interested in as I build out a robust Digital Public Affairs practice in my day job.

I especially enjoyed this one: “Be a thought leader – if you do all of the above well, you are likely smart as hell.  Engage in online conversations with others that a) further your learning and b) further your reputation.”

Sounds like exactly what Mark is doing!