Steven Silvers Blog

Corpcomm chief Snyder to leave Frontier Airlines

2009-11-05T09:57:24-07:00

Frontier Airlines corporate communication chief Steve Synder is leaving the company to join ProBuild, the nation’s largest supplier of building supplies. Steve makes the transition in mid-November. Good luck, my friend.
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The State of Colorado says you should gamble because your life is pathetic.

2009-11-02T14:13:02-07:00

The latest TV ad for Colorado Lottery drops the pretense of fun in favor of selling hope.

As in, you’re hopelessly stuck in your pointless little existence unless you “Break free” by winning Powerball.

The “Don’t Forget to Play” tag adds to the loathing, implying that if you don’t win it’s because you screwed up.

The ad follows a sad-looking white-collar worker trudging through another dreary day, a huge chain shackled to his ankle. Before eating his little peanut butter sandwich alone he buys a Powerball ticket. That night a big red ball falls from the sky onto his little weed-infested lawn, breaking him free. He smiles.

Hey. Loser. Don’t forget to play.

We all benefit from lottery revenues. But it’s cruel for a state with as much recession-induced bleakness as Colorado to tell working people that gambling on a multi-million-to-one shot is their way out of it.
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Here's the full version of the health care reform bill.

2009-10-30T12:15:46-06:00

For your informed consent, here are all 1,990 pages of the House health care bill with the seemingly impossible but possibly amazing promise, “To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.”

Or the shorter, more immediately achievable title, “To give Americans a good reason not to watch St. Louis play Detroit this weekend.”
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The staggering speed and scale of Internet culture

2009-10-26T16:17:05-06:00

Less than 12 days after the first headline, a Google Web search for “Balloon Boy” returns more than 11.1 million results – more than the number of people in New York City and Los Angeles combined.
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Associated Press story says media hoaxes work

2009-10-26T16:03:36-06:00

AP television writer David Bauder expands on the “frightening message” that media hoaxes like Balloon Boy and the fake press conference in which activists reversed the U.S. Chamber’s position on global warming are increasingly successful publicity tools.

At least, we think it’s AP television writer David Bauder.
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How breaking news becomes grist for the pop culture mill in only three days

2009-10-22T13:54:48-06:00

The Balloon Boy hubbub proves a rule that any company in crisis should keep in mind: News is entertainment is news at the speed of the Internet.

Here’s how it happens:

The incident goes live. In this case, Balloon Boy’s parents called the TV stations.

The incident becomes breaking news. A herd mentality takes over competing media outlets. Nobody wants to miss the shot that everybody else has. Time elapsed: About half an hour.

Breaking news becomes a national story. Local coverage feeds into national outlets, and everything feeds into the Internet. Live event coverage goes viral. News links and commentary fly around email, Facebook and Twitter. People at work see headlines on the little TVs in the elevators. Time elapsed: About an hour.

The story becomes a controversy. News reports contradict earlier reports, creating scandal. Questions, rumors and speculation become a constant din interspersed with breaking news updates of even the most minuscule facts. Talking heads on cable and radio blame liberals or conservatives for allowing things like this to happen. Internet coverage and chatter multiplies a thousand-fold. Time elapsed: Three to four hours.

The controversy becomes pop culture. The people who started it get interviewed on Larry King. Leno and Letterman make jokes that night. Saturday Night Live refers to it in a promo for this week’s show. Three times the number of media outlets show up the next day, and so do dozens of other people from all over. Some bring alcohol, others bring hand-made posters. Internet coverage and chatter multiplies several thousand-fold. Supermarket tabloids do cover stories. Time elapsed: One to two days.

Pop culture becomes the story. Media coverage and Internet chatter is the same as follows a popular reality TV show. People take sides with and against victims, villains and heroes. Everyone becomes a celebrity. Journalists – many of them ticked off for being played -- investigate school transcripts, arrest records and anonymous tips. Web sites pop up. Talk shows devote whole hours. Authorities launch formal investigations. Politicians express concern. Somebody announces a book.

Media critics blame the news media. News media blame consumers. Consumers find Balloon Boy Halloween costumes on the Internet.

Total time elapsed: About 72 hours, give or take.

(Photo: The New York Post reported that an online gaming company in San Francisco put “Balloon Boy Game” on the Internet in only about six hours after the news story went national.)
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The Harvard Crimson: Sailing away with Balloon Boy
American Chronicle | The "Balloon Boy" and the White House: Good lessons for not mixing "news" and entertainment
Philadelphia Inquirer | Mr. and Mrs. Balloon Boy did it because we will watch
Washington Post | Balloon Boy, media stunts, dream up your own

Bloomberg makes big jump into consumer media with acquisition of BusinessWeek

2009-10-14T15:47:46-06:00

The enduring but ailing BusinessWeek has been sold to Bloomberg LP in a cash deal that depending on who’s talking will either beef up the magazine or result in mass layoffs.

Bloomberg executives say they plan on substantially increasing the number of editorial pages in the magazine, which despite its prominence in the consumer business media market lost more than $40 million last year.

Up to now, privately held Bloomberg has made most of its $6.3 billion in annual revenues from leasing data terminals to investment firms and corporate customers.
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A business primer on the new FTC transparency rules

2009-10-07T20:42:44-06:00

Representing its most sweeping action in 30 years, the Federal Trade Commission’s new rules governing endorsements and testimonials are going to change significantly how marketing is done.

Here’s what the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising say:

ACCOUNTABLE FOR BLOGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA.

The FTC already directs online reviewers to disclose if they’re being paid by advertisers. Under the new rules, however, every blogger, Twitter user or social network member must disclose any “material connection” with a company, product or service.

Taken literally, this connection could result in fines for bloggers who fail to disclose anything from getting a sample can of chili in the mail to having a spouse who owns company stock. While consumer advocates support the guidelines, some prominent bloggers argue that the rules in effect force them to disclose every business relationship they’ve ever had.

Enforcement is another matter. The FTC says it will primarily go after the advertisers rather than individual bloggers, though it will take into account how companies encourage transparency in their paid reviews and freebies. Beyond that, the agency will decide matters on a case-by-case basis – which basically means they’ll know deceptive advertising when they see it. What makes things even more convoluted is that the agency doesn’t say by what means it will handle these situations.

Given that the new transparency standards for bloggers are higher than what’s required of commercial news media and politicians, the FTC rules are generating considerable debate among marketers and social media proponents alike. Stay tuned.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR TYPICAL RESULTS.

Ads that feature individual consumer experiences with a product will have to state clearly what kind of results everybody else can expect. Soon to be history are those ubiquitous ads that whisper “results not typical” while showing some guy who lost 300 pounds drinking vitamin shakes.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR EMPLOYEES.

Employees that promote their company or its products online must “clearly and conspicuously” disclose who they work for.

The FTC urges that companies have social media policies as one way to avoid fines or other actions when employees pretend to be someone else – say, a happy customer or invigorated shareholder.

Keep in mind, however, that a recent Deloitte study found that a third of all employees don’t even consider what their boss might think before posting something online.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR CELEBRITIES AND RESEARCH.

A warning to every company that uses movie stars, retired quarterbacks and 70’s sitcom actors for promotional tours. Under the new FTC guidelines, both advertisers and their celebrity spokespeople can be held liable for making false claims as part of a commercial endorsement.

The ramifications are huge. Celebrities making the rounds of late-night talk shows, state fairs and Twitter feeds must disclose their business relationship with any company or agency that’s paying them to pump movies, books, products or even charities.

Companies that quote research must also disclose if they paid for the studies, or if they have any business relationship with the organization that did the research.

These standards go way beyond front groups and hidden clients. From now on, any failure to disclose corporate affiliations could be considered deceptive advertising. That’s going to hit a lot of marketing PR campaigns.
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Download a PDF of the revised FTC rules here.

More CEOs serving as TV pitch-people

2009-09-25T16:10:08-06:00

I’m quoted in a Chicago Tribune story about the increasing numbers of CEOs who star in their own advertising. General Motors, Sprint and Walgreen are among the companies trying the boss-in-front strategy.

In most cases it doesn’t work. There were several unique reasons why Lee Iacocca clicked as an advertising spokesperson. There are a million reasons why today’s chief executives won’t.

At least most companies aren’t treating their CEOs like zany sitcom characters. That’s worth something.
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Stuff you put on the Internet is always fresh, never frozen.

2009-09-23T12:06:49-06:00

One of my most popular posts this week is the one I wrote about Home Depot’s customer service problems. Another blog referred to it in a post titled, The 10 Best (and 10 Worst) Companies for Customer Service. It’s been drawing hits, links and comments all over the Internet.

The problem is that I wrote the post about Home Depot more than three years ago. The post it got linked to is three years old, too.

How did a November 2006 post in a niche market blog outsourced overseas rise above the clutter in September 2009? Hard to say. Somebody pasted the original article verbatim into another site and through the magic of search engines got it to show up. Readers began linking and posting comments to it. And just like that old stuff is current again.

A good rule to remember about social media: Criticism and bad news in particular have an indefinite shelf life.
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Scatterbox | The business of social media creates new headaches for business reputations

Former Rocky finance editor to leave the country

2009-09-23T11:46:04-06:00

Former Rocky Mountain News finance editor, reporter and columnist David Milstead will be leaving Denver to join the Globe and Mail, Canada’s Toronto-based national newspaper.

The Rocky Mountain News was shut down in February, just shy of its 150th birthday, leaving the Denver Post as the city’s only remaining major daily.

Good luck, David.
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I'm...sitting...on...the...patio.

2009-09-10T11:55:08-06:00

A Verizon Wireless commercial creates a classic catch-phrase that embodies the multi-generation goofiness of today’s social media phenomenon.

Score another one for the brand that also defined the mobile phone boom with “Can you hear me now?”

Industry expert asks if Toyota's image is getting a free ride

2009-09-05T16:03:55-06:00

Auto industry veteran Frank Sherosky asks if Toyota’s stellar reputation for quality is more a result of good image management than what really happens on the road.

CBS News reported that a former Toyota lawyer has filed a federal racketeering suit against the company for “ruthlessly” conspiring to hide evidence about hundreds of roll-over accidents in which the roof caved in. The potentially damming case was filed in late July but took more than two months to make the news.

“In that respect,” Sherosky writes in the Detroit Auto Examiner, “it's hard not to at least question the media for bias. Does Toyota own a free-pass card in the press, when American companies like GM, Ford and Chrysler get slammed all the time?”

Toyota denies the allegations and says its former in-house counsel violated attorney-client privilege with his lawsuit and in the consulting work he did after leaving his job with a $3.7 million severance package.

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Scattered links of interest

2009-09-01T21:57:41-06:00

Twitter’s ROI (Forbes.com)
There is a potential danger in that too many people will employ Twitter as a short-cut for customer service.”

Prepare now for “resume tsunami” (Ogilvy Impact)
“With a variety of signs pointing, if somewhat tentatively, toward an economic recovery, it’s not too soon for companies to begin thinking about how they’ll keep their top performers.”

We need a swine flu newsroom (Newsvetter)
“In matters concerning life and death I don't want to be forced to rely (solely) on a news media obsessed with body counts and hot zones.”

PRSA’s meaningless condemnation (O’Dwyer’s Blog)
“…How about revealing the source of your anger? Who in the world are you talking about?”
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Submit links to scatterbox@stevensilvers.com

Latest finger-wagging brings PRSA closer to irrelevance

2009-09-01T06:38:37-06:00

As it has done before, Public Relations Society of America issued another pretentious missive condemning unscrupulous flackery:

Over the last few months, there have been several news accounts of promotional tactics that signal a common thread of malpractice under the Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) Code of Ethics and PRSA Professional Standards Advisories (PSA). … PRSA states categorically that misrepresenting the nature of editorial content or intentionally failing to clearly reveal the source of message contents is unethical.

PRSA’s latest reprimand won’t change a thing. That’s because it doesn’t name, much less admonish, the companies and agencies whose bad behavior was made public in news reports.

PRSA sent out a similarly mealymouthed email last year, warning all members to “avoid misleading practices” like the front groups it was referring to but wouldn’t actually divulge. That was followed by an open letter to presidential candidates Obama and McCain demanding they agree to follow PRSA’s code of ethics. Both campaigns ignored it.

You have to wonder why PRSA even bothers.

For all its authoritative posturing -- the phrase “malpractice under the PRSA code” is downright laughable – statements like this only reinforce the association's growing irrelevance within the multi-faceted, multi-billion dollar influence industry.

Pretty much nobody cares what PRSA has to say about it. Not the pros, and certainly not the charlatans.

And things will stay that way until PRSA becomes more than just another big-talk trade group without the courage to act on its convictions.
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O'Dwyer's PR Blog | PRSA's Meaningless Condemnation

Send comments and links to scatterbox@stevensilvers.com or post here.

More and more job applicants rejected because of what they've posted on social media sites

2009-08-21T10:24:19-06:00

CareerBuilder reports that 35 percent of 2,600 hiring managers surveyed decided not to employ someone specifically because of what that person posted on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter or blogs.

When I first wrote about the “The Transparent Generation” in 2006, only a small percentage of employers made it a point to research job candidates on social media sites. Today almost half do so.

It’s bound to be standard practice before long.

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It's a fact: PR people are just as ethical as dental students

2009-08-19T21:42:56-06:00

Next time somebody throws out the old tripe about sleazy flacks, I’ll just say, “Au contraire! You obviously are unaware of the scientific research conducted by two Johnson Legacy Scholars at the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication at Penn State University!”

Okay, I may have to write that down. But I’ll explain how some smart people did the first empirical study to measure PR people’s moral standing in comparison to other occupations.

“It turns out that public relations professionals are good ethical thinkers,” said scholar Renita Coleman in a press release. “They show similarity to other professionals with comparable levels of education such as journalists, nurses and dental students.”

Even more interesting, public relations pros scored better on the moral compass than accounting and veterinary students, orthopedic surgeons and even “business professionals.”

No doubt that general executive category includes the bosses of the Boeing company spokesman who just got caught posing as an independent blogger so he could sit in on a competitor’s briefings. You sure don’t see dental students doing stuff like that.

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What's behind The Twitter of Babble

2009-08-18T13:22:06-06:00

A new study finds that 40.55 percent of all Twitter messages are “pointless babble.”

Of course, that percentage goes way higher if you also include babble that is irrelevant, incoherent or inane.

But what’s driving this share-your-nothingness phenomenon? Why are there so many millions of people who feel compelled to tell strangers on the Internet that their feet are cold or that they’re going to lunch?

Some experts say we live in the most narcissistic age ever. But others think the babblers are filling a void.

“Twittering stems from a lack of identity,” one clinical psychologist told the London Times. “It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”
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Selling the public school option

2009-08-17T13:39:55-06:00

"Schools are really getting that they can't just expect students to show up any more. They have to go out and recruit."

-- A marketing director with Denver Public Schools on why shrinking school districts around the country are running business-like advertising and PR campaigns. New students bring schools up to $8,000 a head in much-needed state funding, as well as promoting community support for their continued operation.

Source: Wall Street Journal | Hard-Hit Schools Try Public-Relations Push

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Most popular recent posts

2009-08-08T14:05:35-06:00

Managing the unmanageable: Employees talking about your company on the Internet

America's pundit problem

CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

KFC free chicken promo runs around like a PR stunt with its head cut off

Six standards for employee use of social media

2009-08-04T08:55:54-06:00

PR lawyer Michael Lasky summarizes four key principals to include in company policies for how employees may use blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media:

Respect for intellectual property … Avoiding plagiarism and copyright infringement.
Standards of truth … Attributing information, knowing the difference between fact and opinion.
Confidentiality … Knowing what can be made public via the Internet, and what should be protected.
Common sense … Using the same rules that apply to memos, emails, press releases, web sites and other company communication.

While these are broad enough to cover most concerns, I would also make sure that your social media standards address these two important areas:

Transparency … That official communications will not be misleading, disguised or anonymous.
Accountability … That the company will protect stakeholder interests by tracking social media use and content, and that employees will be held responsible for misrepresenting or maligning the company on the Internet, even if they do so on their own time.

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Proof that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't

2009-07-27T21:37:16-06:00

Anyone who’s been a boss knows this already, but new research from NYU Stern confirms that executives who choose between two rotten choices – like eliminating healthcare or firing people to avoid going out of business -- are likely to be blamed no matter what choice they make.
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Why most companies should just ignore all those anonymous rate-your-employer sites

2009-07-23T23:00:26-06:00

Internet Evolution blogger Chris Poley points to another aspect of employees using the Internet to ridicule the companies they work for. [Read Scatterbox: Managing the Unmanageable.]

One way they do this is through Internet sites that rate companies based on anonymous input from current and former employees, and even people who only tried getting jobs with a company.

But the impact these user-generated sites have on a company’s reputation is debatable. Glassdoor.com, for example, touts its “inside look” at more than 26,000 companies. Large companies like Wal-Mart list hundreds of anonymous comments, which in reading lead you to the not-so-shocking revelation that some people like their employers and some people don’t. Many other companies garner only one or two comments, most of them rants about stupid bosses and rotten culture.

Basically it’s like listening to strangers on the bus to work.

To be sure, some companies use search engine optimization – also hyped as “online reputation management” – to push negative comments deeper into the Internet clutter. Other companies have their flacks post anonymous positive comments to counter the anonymous criticisms (the ethics of which are for another post).

Most employers, however, simply ignore the sites. And in most cases that’s the best approach.

Why? Because without attribution, scientific basis or mass context these opinion boards have as much information value as random graffiti.

It’s no surprise that a relatively few unhappy, unnamed employees are more likely to gripe online. And that creates representations way out of sync with more credible reputation measurements. Look up insurance giant Aflac on Glassdoor.com, for example, and you get a 5,000-employee company with a “neutral company rating” because half of the 26 comments that make up the score are from people like the agent who wrote that “they have no morals and they don't know what their [SIC] doing there.”

Meanwhile, Aflac was named 2009’s most reputable and ethical insurance company by Reputation Institute's Global Reputation Pulse, an annual public survey of the nation's 153 largest corporations. Second year in a row, too.

It doesn’t take a PR expert to know which image matters most.
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So is the president anti-business?

2009-07-17T14:57:15-06:00

Freelancer Susan Morgan quotes American Standard editor Fred Barnes and others regarding the administration’s alleged disconnect with American business.

Previously in Scatterbox: Obama anti-business rhetoric puts strain on forced bond between government and corporate community.
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Judging the reputation of America's law firms

2009-07-09T20:11:16-06:00

US News and World Report will launch a new annual listing of the nation’s 3,000 largest law firms. The rankings will combine hard data with results from surveys sent to tens of thousands of private practice attorneys, clients and law firm employees.

A law firm scorecard is sure to generate considerable fear and loathing, just as the magazine's well-known college rankings have done for years.

Two years ago a dozen university presidents went so far as to send a letter to hundreds of liberal arts colleges urging them to not complete US News’ "offensive" survey of institutional reputations, which accounts for the largest percentage of each school’s score.

"Reputation can be another word for gossip," Washington State Trinity University’s president said at the time. People being surveyed, she said, had no personal knowledge or experience with all of the colleges they were asked to rank.

"This is not a survey that has integrity based on objective data," she argued to media that would listen. "We are saying that we will not engage in slandering each other’s institutions or inflating each other."

No doubt many law firms will have a similar reaction to being rated based in large part on the input of competitors, bad clients and other people with agendas to pursue.
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To my attorney friends: What do you think of all this? What are your PR people going to do to either stop it, ignore it or make sure you get to the top of the list? What's the sense of urgency? Drop me a note. I'll stay on it.

Facebook gets gray around the edges

2009-07-09T15:13:28-06:00

New research shows that people age 35 to 54 are now the biggest group using Facebook, making up more than 28 percent of all accounts.

Experts suggest that recession job losses and the use of Facebook by 2008 presidential candidates may be behind the growing numbers of older people joining the social networking site.

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Testimony to the truth about Twitter

2009-07-06T22:38:43-06:00

Many people reacted to my post, “CEOs won’t say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it.” Here are a few representative comments:

“My Twitter account is filled with so much junk I don't want to link it to my Blackberry because my texting charges will go into overload instantly. I find Facebook far more useful.”

“I rarely check my account because I go on into instant Twitter overload, skimming through messages to find something of relevance.”

“It worked for me when I quit trying to make it DO something… It's the same with most technologies… they can be used for multiple purposes. Once you find yours, you'll wonder how you got along without it (like the DVR.)”

“I have used Twitter to build my online brand. Now I get paid to teach others the same. Long live Twitter!”

“If a new online social medium can be developed that doubled my business in six months the way Twitter did, I'm all for it.”

“One of the most damning condemnations of Twitter ... is that there is no business model… And we all know a business that doesn't make money simply ceases to be a business. Period.”

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The most media-driven White House in history

2009-07-06T14:22:57-06:00

“The Obama administration has started with 14 professionals working in the office of the press secretary—and an astounding 47 more devoted to other aspects of media and message—which is significantly more than the communications staffs of many Fortune 500 corporations. But the media operation goes deeper than that. It’s more central than in any previous administration, and run more knowledgeably.”

-- Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff in The Power and the Story, on the administration’s seemingly total control of the press.

CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

2009-06-30T14:44:29-06:00

What a time.

Four years ago, a BusinessWeek cover story said blogs will change your business and influence the course of civilization just like the invention of the printing press did more than five hundred years ago.

Now a Time Magazine cover story announces that Twitter will change the way we live .

At this rate we should expect another planet-altering social media tool by Labor Day.

That is, unless you don't think a free online short-message service rastes with our generation’s revolutionary information technologies: voice mail, cell phones, the Web.

You’re the people who think Twitter is the Internet-era version of the CB radio fad.

And you don’t believe that hot hype will take precedent over the cold realities of the marketplace.

In "Ten ways Twitter will change American business," Time’s writer predicts that the ability to send and selectively receive 140-character Tweets will give business, politicians, media, investors and other interests the ability to “engage” people like never before. For example:

“Twitter … will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce, and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter… having the opportunity to tell customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater geographic accuracy.”

The problem with this vision is that it assumes consumers will do four things:

… One, that they'll stay fixed on reading and writing Tweets all day long, day after day.

… Two, that they’ll want to receive product announcements, promotions, surveys, celebrity restaurant orders, contests and other sponsored messages, at every turn of their day.

… Three, that they’ll overlook the intrusive advertising and spam that will increasingly pollute their legitimate news and conversation stream.

… And four, that they won’t mind how Twitter reserves all rights to sell any information it has on them so others can identify, locate or contact users.

Consumers don’t behave this way. They won’t for Twitter.

Twitter’s problem is that the Internet has no walls. There are no beachheads to dissipate the relentless waves of marketing and campaigning. We hear anecdotes like how a suitcase company responded to a customer who Tweeted about his broken handle. But take that scenario a few years from now – if that long – and that same customer will be inundated by followers, followees and interlopers Tweeting everything from luggage deals and discount travel to political fundraisers and pleas to help some secret princess transfer money.

Nobody says Twitter doesn’t have huge potential for mass communication. It does. The Iranian election aftermath shows how microblogging can facilitate real-time citizen-journalism. But the same holds true for misinformation and propaganda. The bad guys know how to use Twitter too.

That's one reason corporate America isn’t exactly clamoring to get on board. And Twitter's goofy dot-commish name itself alienates the service from thousands of CEOs already averse to social media.

In fact, big brands see less value and more risk in associating with any Internet free-for-alls.

Consider YouTube. Time Magazine reports that despite drawing 99.7 million viewers watching 5.9 billion videos, YouTube's content is overall so bad that marketers have become reluctant to embed their messages within it.

After paying $1.65 billion to own it, Google told investors that YouTube is "not material,” making the Web’s third-most popular destination also one of the ten biggest technology failures of the last decade.

It's a stretch to think Twitter will do better. It doesn’t even own the micro-blogging concept, and several competitors already offer more features and open-sourcing. RSS inventor Dave Winer, who PC World calls the father of modern-day content distribution, went so far as to predict that Twitter is the next Netscape.

As for the 29 million users, new research also suggests that Twittermania may have already peaked:

90 percent of all Tweets come from only 10 percent of all Twitter users. (Harvard University study of randomly selected sample of 300,000 Twitter users)
Though 99 percent of Generation Y -- age 18 to 24 -- use social media, only 22 percent of them use Twitter. (Pace University study for Participatory Marketing Network)
55 percent of Twitter account holders have never posted a Tweet and 56 percent aren’t following anyone. 53 percent have no followers. (HubSpot analysis of 4.5 million Twitter accounts over nine-month period)
60 percent of Twitter users quit after the first month. (Tracking from Nielsen Online)
Twitter’s growth came to a screeching stop in May, growing by only 1.5 percent. (Tracking by Mashable)

Then there’s the Oprah factor.

Well over a million people signed up for Twitter in the first 72 hours after Oprah featured the service on her show. But as Silicon Valley Insider reported, Oprah is already bored with it. Despite having 1.56 million followers, Oprah herself follows only 14 people and Tweeted just four times in June.

So what are we to make of all this? I agree with InternetNews columnist Mike Elgan, who thinks Twitter is simply leveling out to what it really is minus the hype.

“It’s no longer a new frontier, an elite club or a culture-transforming medium,” he writes. “It's just a service for sending messages.”

And you can get mine at Twitter.com/StevenSilvers. Or at least until I move on to the next big thing.
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Also read: No, social media doesn't actually sell anything. And no, you can't afford to ignore it.

Logos must face away from the face

2009-06-11T17:58:05-06:00

Valencian football team Club Deportivo Dénia reminds players that goal celebrations are a good time to remember who pays for the laundry.

Managing the unmanageable: Employees talking about your company on the Internet

2009-05-31T21:40:31-06:00

Here's one of the questions I hear most:

"How are we supposed to manage what our employees say about us when they're on Twitter and Facebook all the time?"

Executives worry about social media in relation to two things: risk to the company and loss of productivity. Both are legitimate concerns. Yet many of those same executives are downright tepid about bringing up the productivity issue. It's as if they're worried about sounding ridiculous, like the old dolt who doesn't get this World Wide Web hullabaloo.

Or perhaps they've seen studies like the one claiming that employees who use the Internet for personal reasons are nine percent more productive. Researchers in Australia report that "workplace Internet leisure browsing, or WILB, helped to sharpened workers' concentration."

There you go. Can't argue with an acronym.

But even CEOs who buy it are concerned about how social-networking employees might be representing the company. And they dang well should be.

Deloitte's 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey found that 75 percent of working Americans think it's easy to damage a brand's reputation via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media services. Yet a third of all employees say they never even consider what their boss might think before posting something online.

This is scary stuff. It means that a good chunk of any company's workforce could include people with the same kind of mental disposition as the two Domino's employees, aged 31 and 32, who posted a video of themselves spitting on food and stuffing cheese up their nose -- all while laughing that "somebody will be eating them, yes eating them... Now that's how we roll at Domino's!"

In the first 48 hours, more than a million people watched the gross-out video just on YouTube. Internet exposure and news coverage hit like a hurricane. And in only four days of tracking, consumer perceptions toward one of the nation's most popular brands went from great to rotten.

Domino's responded comprehensively and is even being credited with being the "Tylenol crisis" of the new media era. But winning a PR trophy doesn't come close to accounting for what that little video prank cost the company in lost sales, bad publicity and ridicule, penalties paid for health-code violations, costs associated with managing the crisis and the expenses of investigations and litigation.

And unlike the Tylenol crisis, the image of a smirking Domino's employee sticking cheese up his nose will keep showing up on the Internet forever.

In a New York Times story, a Domino's spokesman underscored the real bottom-line risk of social media:

"We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea. Even people who've been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino's, and that's not fair."

Companies must have comprehensive social media policies in place, and many do. But rules alone won't change how many people behave online. In a world where so many employees (and bosses) could give your brand a black eye, it will take considerable internal culture-building and communications programs to ensure they don't.

Technology savvy or not, that gives every CEO good reason to wonder how much time their people are spending on social media. And what exactly they're doing there.
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Links & Resources

Deloitte | 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey Results
New York Times | Video prank at Domino's taints brand
USA Today | Domino's nightmare holds lessons for marketers
Domino's | CEO YouTube response: "Disgusting Dominos people"
Scatterbox | Transparent generation realizes downside to growing up online

No, social media doesn't actually sell anything. And no, you can't afford to ignore it.

2009-05-25T21:09:50-06:00

For all we know, social media services like Facebook and Twitter could change the course of marketing history just like the telephone, the Web and the commemorative plastic drink cup.

For now, however, social media isn't actually selling anything but itself.

A study from research firm Knowledge Networks shows that while 85 percent of people online use social media, less than five percent visit those networks for help making purchase decisions.

Word-of-mouth is still the greatest influence on what people decide to buy. That's followed by TV, a medium of influence that keeps hanging around despite its alleged obsolescence.

"Obviously, a lot of people are using social media, but they are not explicitly turning to it for marketing purposes, or for finding out what products to buy. It's really about connecting with friends, or connecting with other people," Knowledge Networks executive Dave Tice told Marketing VOX. "The influence of social media isn't at the bottom of the list, but it is somewhere in the long tail of marketing - about the same as print ads, or online [display] ads."

Lack of tangible results, however, aren't keeping companies from getting into social media as fast as mass media can hype it.

In a story headlined "Jumping on the Twitter bandwagon," USA Today reports that major banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America are "establishing presences on social-networking sites to tap into a growing demographic and to control the conversation about their brands. Yet the economic turmoil, some say, makes it even more important to reach out to customers any way they can."

It's overstatement to suggest that collecting Facebook friends and Tweeting free 140-character online messages will give a company the power to control what consumers want to say about them. That's the hype part.

But as one banking company's spokeswoman told USA Today, "Social media is a whole new world, and you cannot afford to not be a part of it."

That's the truth part.
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Also read: CEOs won't say Twitter and other contraditions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it.

Rhetoric strains forced bond between government and corporate community

2009-05-17T21:25:07-06:00

The nation's media reports that the corporate world is peeved about what it considers President Obama's devisive anti-corporate rhetoric. As U.S. News and World Report observes, "Another week, another assault on business-as-usual by President Obama. Or is it, as some critics are starting to wonder, an assault on business, as usual?"

Reports Associated Press:

"Relations between President Barack Obama and U.S. corporate leaders have grown tense in recent weeks, with business groups bristling over his sharp rebukes of lenders and multinational companies in particular.

Executives and trade groups that praised Obama's outreach during his post-election transition period say they have felt less welcome since he took office in January. More troubling, they say, are his populist-tinged, sometimes acid critiques of certain sectors, including large companies that keep some profits overseas to reduce their U.S. tax burden."

A U.S. Chamber spokesman called the President's talking points "an oversimplification of the real world." Another trade lobbyist called it the same old cynical, political class warfare.

The White House is throwing out its own doublespeak, explaining that the business community is just freaked out by how shockingly supportive the President really is. Said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke in the U.S. News report:

"President Obama has a very good relationship with the business community. He's working extra hard on creating more jobs and stabilizing the financial crisis.... In many ways, he's perhaps surprised the business community with just how moderate he has been and how much he is willing to work with them."

The posturing between Obama and corporate America has always been convoluted. As a candidate, Obama ran anti-corporate campaign ads criticizing CEO compensation. Yet he still raised enormous sums of money from corporate backers including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, National Amusements and Google.

A few months before the election, a Chief Executive poll found that more than 70 percent of all CEOs thought an Obama presidency would be a "disaster." Yet Business Week reported that corporate leaders gave President Obama "relatively good grades" after his first 100 days. People were still wary on the details, but as the Business Roundtable's president told the magazine: "We're happy with the general outlines of what he's done; things are starting to take hold."

Today's ambivalence between government and business represents tensions that exist within a shotgun marrage unlike anything in history. Taxpayers are now direct stakeholders in the financial and auto industries, and are rapidly becoming the safety net by which the nation's housing, healthcare, energy and even news media industries will be supported while they are transformed. That makes the President of the United States both Commander in Chief and CEO.

We're at the point now, writes Wall Street Journal columnist Gerland Seib, that "it seems almost anachronistic to talk about a divide between government and business."

Perhaps the publicized angst about Obama being anti-business means the honeymoon that never really was is over. What certain is that corporate PR is going to be more complicated than when all the talk about public-private partnership was mostly just talk.
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Send comments and links to scatterbox@stevensilvers.com

Get on President Obama's email update list

2009-05-14T09:56:55-06:00

Drop a note to WhiteHouse.Gov and you'll be added to President Obama's email blast list.

The White House is using official letter-looking emails -- like this one about health care reform -- "as a way to directly communicate about important issues and opportunities."

The email letters include links to other White House web sites designed to educate and build support for various administration initiatives.

You can get on the official Obama email updates list by clicking here.
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Like so many others, Google finally turns to TV ads

2009-05-08T18:57:23-06:00

Google's decision to run television advertising is another vindication of the marketing medium that was supposed to have been made obsolete by the Internet age.

But as Advertising Age reports, "even Google is seeing the limits of search ads and YouTube."

It's amazing how even companies that grew to be huge success stories without commercials eventually come to decide they can't live without them. Case in point: Hershey's began running TV advertising in 1970 after relying on only word-of-mouth marketing from the day the company was founded in 1901.

Google's TV ads will promote the company's new browser, Google Chrome. (Look for the Scatterbox review in early June.)
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Come celebrate 35 years of civic leadership

2009-05-08T10:37:03-06:00

Come join the Denver Metro Chamber Leadership Foundation as we celebrate the 35th anniversary of Leadership Denver, the longest-standing such program in Colorado and one of the most respected in the nation.

Alumni and friends of all Foundation programs are welcome to the reception on Friday, June 5 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The event kicks of at 5:30 in the Leprino Family Atrium and will go to around 8:00. Cost is $55.

Click here to RSVP. Hope to see you there.
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Fear and Loathing in Lost Media

2009-05-08T08:52:03-06:00

Bulldog Reporter notes how news companies hate that Google doesn't share the money it makes by selling ads tied to news blurbs it "scrapes" to create Google News. Experts say it would take only a few lines of code to prevent Google from indexing content from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and hundreds of the other sources it gleans from.

So why don't they?
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KFC free chicken promotion runs around like a PR stunt with its head cut off

2009-05-06T23:10:50-06:00

It will go down as one of the least thought-out marketing publicity stunts since Sony used a decapitated goat to promote a video game.

The idea seemed simple enough. Strike a deal to have Oprah to "give away" two pieces of KFC's new grilled chicken to everybody in America. Tell people to download an Internet coupon and show up at a store. Publicize madly. Post a Tweet from Oprah reading, "You're Getting a Chicken! You're Getting a Chicken!"

But like many good intentions gone bad, this campaign didn't plan for the most obvious potential PR problems:

Contingency: Not enough Internet. The servers crashed from so many people trying to get coupons at the same time. Maybe we understand how the Colorado Rockies weren't ready to sell World Series tickets, but how can one America's largest consumer companies not have the plumbing worked out?

Contingency: Unprepared stores. Consumers didn't read the fine print and assumed every KFC was a participating store. Many stores were overwhelmed. Some locked the doors. Other taped hand-written "no Internet coupons!" signs to the door. Police were called. Managers freaked out, politicians called for action.

Contingency: Consumers gone wild. People who didn't get their free chicken behaved like they were being denied the right to vote. In New York, angry citizens staged a sit-in while the world's news media looked on. The Internet exploded with smarmy bloggers, angry customers, finger-wagging criticisms and conspiracy theories. Talk shows had a field day.

Contingency: Caught in a lie. Animal rights activists loathe KFC. But just last year, PETA gave Oprah its "Person of the Year Award" for helping to expose factory farm abuses, including a show titled "How we treat the animals we eat." A Huffington Post column called it Oprah's "most hypocritical move yet ."

Both KFC's and Oprah's PR machines are in full swing. They'll survive.

But companies with fewer resources for damage control should be paying close attention.
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Changing our religions

2009-05-05T12:40:21-06:00

The lack of long-term brand loyalty that defines American consumers extends to even their chosen faiths.

A new study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that half of all Americans change their religions at least once, and many more than that. Catholicism shows the greatest numbers of members who leave the church for something else.
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Why you can't spin global warming to be a better consumer product

2009-05-05T11:34:57-06:00

The New York Times got hold a draft report by a nonprofit "environmental marketing firm" that recommends using better spin to win people over on this whole global warming thing. The Times reports:

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about "our deteriorating atmosphere." Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up "moving away from the dirty fuels of the past." Don't confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like "cap and cash back" or "pollution reduction refund."...

In fact, the group's surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term "the environment" and talk about "the air we breathe, the water our children drink."

I can hear every good PR expert in the world groaning at this.

Put aside the fact that this calculated euphemism insults Americans who know what "environment" means. You're still left with several risks.

One: You're taking a bus to get to the same point. Instead of referring to global warming, you're saying that, no, the real problem is our deteriorating atmosphere, which is the result of greenhouse gas emissions that in turn cause global warming. Flack rhetoric makes things less clear, not more.

Two: You're hurting your cause. Global warming is a literal concept, proven by literal events and research. "Our deteriorating atmosphere" is bad packaging, like something out of Hollywood's current preoccupation with end-of-the-world movies. They're great special effects, but everybody knows they're pretend.

Three: You act like your spin exists in a vacuum. Huge mistake. If your research shows that people are uncomfortable with the word environment, then your opposition will find ways to say environmentalists twenty times a minute. Thirty times a minute if they're Rush Limbaugh.

Four: If you give up "environment," you'll need even more doublespeak to label what you do.

What... You're going to start referring to people as Our Deteriorating Atmosphere Solutions Providers?
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Business magazines sinking like successful stones in a rising river

2009-04-28T14:53:56-06:00

Business media are rightly cynical about how many corporations spin bad news. So it's either funny or sad how failing business publications do the same thing.

Conde Nast announced that it is shutting down Portfolio, the Vanity Fair-type business magazine it launched with great hoopla two years ago. Editor in chief Joanne Lipman announced the news by telling staff how the magazine was "ahead of its business plan on various business metrics" and that it had won a lot of awards.

What Lipman did at the Wall Street Journal -- like creating the Weekend Journal -- was brilliant. But to paint Portfolio as an undeserving victim of falling ad revenues is PR talk . Portfolio was inconsistent, egocentric and overly glossy to the point that many executives didn't want to be seen with it. It hardly sold at the newsstand, and 20 percent of the 449,000 magazines out there were freebies.

Success is also killing PRWeek, which announced it will publish monthly and start charging people $198 a year to read articles on its web site.

"As our traffic has grown, our subscriber base has not," the trade's publishing director told the New York Times. "And our subscribers deserve the best content we have."

Given the competitive transparency of the PR world, chasing online readers away to get a few more that pay doesn't seem the best way to get your magazine's head above water.

But hey. I read Denver PR blog to find out what's going on anyway.
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Internet scammers run like pigs to the Swine Flu trough

2009-04-27T17:27:14-06:00

Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs reports that spammers and scammers are working overtime to profit from public fears of a Swine Flu epidemic.

Just days after the first headlines, more than two percent of all Internet spam tried to get people to click on hundreds of new Swine Flu-labeled sites selling everything from "survival guides" to fake prescription drugs.
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Why InDenverTimes failed

2009-04-23T12:23:31-06:00

Investors have pulled out of InDenverTimes, the online news site started by former reporters and staffers of the defunct Rocky Mountain News.

I would have yanked out my money also.

One, there are too many people hanging around hoping to get paychecks. Start-ups have skeleton staffs, not departments.

Second -- and most of all -- InDenverTimes is simply a bad product. Today's home page is dominated by a story about how the Rocky Mountain News would have been 150 years old today, and how InDenverTimes is made up of people who used to work for the Rocky Mountain News, and how it wants to pick up on the rich history of the Rocky Mountain News.

Most of the rest of the home page consists of appeals for subscribers, promising that they'll get better content and the chance to talk to editors and reporters.

There are many accomplished journalists at InDenverTimes. But good intentions and a dead newspaper are not a business model.
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Westword | Only 3,000 subscribers signed up for InDenverTimes
Scatterbox | Rocky road for online news site

Ten years later, the face of Columbine looks in a mass media mirror

2009-04-20T13:27:20-06:00

National media played up Oprah Winfrey's decision to pull a previously-taped show that was to commemorate the Columbine High School massacre ten years ago. Winfrey decided that the show "focused too much on the killers."

One of the people on the canceled show was Columbine High School principal Frank DeAngelis, who's had a constant presence in media coverage leading up to and during the ten-year anniversary.

Some critics argue that media is focusing far too much on Columbine's principal as well.

Westword media columnist Michael Roberts finds something "unsettling" about how eagerly DeAngelis seems to be engaging with the press, considering the criticism and lawsuits that alleged he had not done enough to prevent two teenage boys from murdering 12 students and a teacher. Roberts writes:

Perhaps he's simply trying to be responsive to press inquiries, of which he's no doubt swamped on a regular basis -- although saying "yes" to every request tends to reinforce the equating of Columbine and school shootings, as opposed to emphasizing that the school has moved on...

Or maybe he's interested in establishing himself as the person most responsible for bringing Columbine back from an unimaginable nightmare, as opposed to helping to fuel problems that may have contributed to the event.

Sure, DeAnglelis wants credit. He deserves it. But to suggest there's no more to it echos an unfortunately typical black-or-white, sincere-or-insincere interpretation of people who put themselves in the media limelight after such tragedies.

People are more complicated than that. And that includes people like DeAngelis, who looked a killer in the eyes and missed being killed himself by a few inches before kids slaughtered kids in his school.

"You start reading about yourself, and people are saying you have blood on your hands," DeAngelis told the Denver Post. " You receive threats on your life. And it gets to the point where you ask, 'Are they right? Am I a bad person?'

Being public through mass media seems one way that the face of Columbine is helping to answer to those questions.
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(Photo courtesy of the Denver Post)

The U.S. government buys a marketing publicity stunt

2009-04-14T16:10:48-06:00

A St. Louis presentation coach who gets hired by lawyers ginned up some ridiculously good publicity for himself by proclaiming April 14 as National Be Kind to Lawyers Day.

Yes, announcing a Something-Something Day is the oldest trick in the book. But even nonsense has a way of being repeated until somebody takes it seriously.

Sometimes we citizens even pay for it.

Case in point: The U.S. Census Bureau made Mr. Hughes' National Be Kind to Lawyers Day the subject of its April 13 "Profile America" series, a daily 60-second radio feature that promotes "key events, observances or commemorations."

Seriously. Listen to the taxpayer-paid radio spot here.

And now that it's on the official calendar, don't be surprised to see more babble about this made-up commemoration next year.
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News from the Front

2009-04-10T13:47:51-06:00

Death-defying popularity.
The deceased mayor of a Missouri town won his fourth reelection with 90 percent of the vote.

Eat out tonight? Forkin' A, man.
The Colorado Restaurant Association hopes to stimulate dining out with its "Fork the Recession" advertising campaign.

A good time will be had by all.
North Korea's official news service announced that "Pyongyang, the venue of the 26th April Spring Friendship Art Festival, is seething in a festival mood now."

There wasn't much going on today, anyway.
The Los Angles Times placed a pretend news story on its front page to promote a new NBC police drama

Except they don't use the word solutions in every other sentence.
A New York Times editor in Washington says many of his anonymous sources are like "human press releases."
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Former Rocky city editor named Denver communications director

2009-04-10T10:19:31-06:00

Former Rocky Mountain News city editor Eric Brown will join Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's staff as Director of Communications on April 20.

Eric was one of the many good people who lost their jobs when the Rocky was shut down in late February 2009.
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Free advice about social media

2009-04-10T09:26:18-06:00

Here's a short "white paper" outlining some tools and tips to manage a broad social media presence for you, your company or client. Compliments of media directory and monitoring company BurrellesLuce.
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Inside Denver's economic development machine

2009-04-09T13:13:18-06:00

Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation's new blog gives an inside look at how the region's business community works to attract new employers and investments.

"Clark's Cone of Silence" is named for Metro Denver EDC honcho -- and decent electric guitar player -- Tom Clark, who is referring to the old Get Smart gag about a big transparent cone that was supposed to keep conversations confidential but didn't.

"We've also learned that this mechanism doesn't work," Tom said in an announcement. "So we thought, let's give people outside of our 'Cone of Silence' an inside look at not only what we do every day in economic development, but more importantly, why we do it."
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If no one hears a Hummer knock over a tree in the forest, does it still get a ticket?

2009-04-08T12:49:33-06:00

It might. A report from ISO's Quality Planning Corporation names the Hummer H2 and H3 as the most-ticketed vehicles on the road.

"The sense of power that Hummer drivers derive from their vehicle may be directly correlated with the number of violations they incur," said Quality Planning President Dr. Raj Bhat. "Or perhaps Hummer drivers, by virtue of their driving position, are less likely to notice road hazards, signs, pedestrians, and other drivers."

The study didn't consider how negative perceptions toward Hummers influence the violations they get for not noticing speed limits, small cars or kids crossing the street. But many people assume a connection.

"Hummer drivers feel like kings of the road because of their elevated driving positions," auto expert Mark Foster told Wired.com. "As these statistics show, they are leading the pack when it comes to violating the law, which may reflect their driving attitude."

Even casual environmentalists hate Hummer for being the worst polluter on the road -- and because being a "utility" vehicle makes it exempt from fuel economy standards. Whether or not Hummer stays in production, financial and environmental controversies will continue to give Hummers plenty of grief. And probably a few more traffic tickets.

(Below: The 2009 Hummer H3T)