Archive - Jun 9, 2009
Covering the Board of Education
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 21:48I’ve been at plenty of conferences where people talk about what happens when the watchdog, the local media, is asleep, but they all seem to be too theoretical. So I was pleased when I had the opportunity to speak with Massachusetts Democratic Activists at a session at the end of their state convention about citizen journalism. If we want better government, one of the first things we need to do is get more people informed about what is going on.
For me, this has included going to the monthly meetings of my local board of education, tweeting the meetings and writing up blog posts afterwards. I wish more people would do this, and I tried to give attendees to the workshop at the convention enough hints and motivation to get started.
There are many issues that this raises. When bloggers and citizen journalists start covering local meetings, what sort of training should they get? What would be helpful for them to know? What ethical standards apply? I always encourage people to be upfront about how they are, I detest pseudonyms, except in special cases, and talk about any possible conflicts they might have. I encourage people to read the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics and check out the Investigative Reporters and Editors website for tips on being a better reporter.
Another thing that always annoys me about all those conference where people talk about the future of journalism is that people go for the simple story, casting it as a battle between the traditional journalists, trained at journalism schools and in danger of losing their jobs and the new bloggers, untrained, unethical, and working for free.
It seems as if the real story is about how interconnected the media ecology is. Today provided a good illustration of this. Rick Green wrote a column for the Hartford Courant entitled Websites Battle For Woodstock's Hearts, Minds. I’ve butted heads with Rick in the past, because he often seems all too willing to jump into tired old story of professionals versus bloggers in a manner that I do not believe does anyone any good. However, this column was noteworthy for taking a more nuanced look at what is going on in the media ecology.
I should note that I am ‘friends’ with Rick on Facebook, and it was through Facebook that I found his column. There is an important lesson here. Traditional media outlets are well advised to use sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote their content and draw in readers.
Beyond that, Rick explored in interesting issue in Woodstock, CT. Today, they had a referendum that would cut the terms of Board of Education members from six years to four years. It would cut the number of members of the Woodstock Board of Education from nine to seven, and the terms of all current Board of Education members would end this November.
Ostensibly, this would make the school board more responsive. Here in Woodbridge, we have four year terms, and I think it would be a good idea for Woodstock to also have four year terms. The Woodbridge Board of Education has nine members, and that seems like an appropriate number of members for the Board of Education. I don’t really see a value in cutting it back to seven members. More importantly, I think that prematurely terminating the terms of the current Board of Education members is a bad idea.
Digging deeper, it appears as if there are a handful of people that have had long standing battles with the Board of Education, and this is just the latest in a long history of skirmishes. Reading blog posts and local newspaper stories, it is possible to draw a more complete view of the issues surrounding legal costs and tuition costs.
What is especially interesting is that The Hartford Courant, still the paper of record for the State of Connecticut commented on the election. In Mr. Green’s column, he pointed to two websites, The Woodstock Café and Woodstock Truth. There has been an ongoing battle between these two websites about the board of education. As Mr. Green notes, the battles aren’t always pretty, but it is good to see people more engaged.
I should also note that the Woodstock Villager has provided good coverage of issues around the local board of education as well. All of this points, I believe to the importance of the state paper of record, the local papers, and the blogs, all providing different perspectives about the events in our state. While I wouldn’t wish the drama of Woodstock on other towns in our state, I do wish that other towns had people as interested in the board of education as it appears people in Woodstock are.
As a final note, according to the Woodstock Café, the referendum failed 61% TO 39%
Numerati, Creatives and the Human Condition
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 17:00Yesterday, Stephen Baker, author of the book Numerati spoke at Digiday:Target, a conference in New York City about targeting online advertising. As he started off, he was given the challenge to find the individual in the mountain of data. He spoke about how if you put people in enough different buckets and then tried to find people in specific combinations of buckets, you could probably get to the individual. He compared a chain of these buckets to the genome. Each bucket is common with many people in them, but a specific combination of buckets can be used to uniquely identify someone.
For example, if you target fifty year old white males of a specific education and income level in Woodbridge, CT that own a dog, a cat, a hybrid, and have children in gifted education programs, I suspect I may be the only hit, even though there are plenty of dog owners, cat owners, hybrid owners, and so on in Woodbridge.
If you do find an agency that is targeting people in the demographic I just described, have them call me. It is probably something I’m interested in. This illustrates another point about targeting. Mr. Baker suggested that if you talk about targeting people, they will feel invaded, but if you talk about customized service, they feel rich. Anyone trying to hit a demographic as precise as I just described has to be offering a customized service.
For others, this level of targeting could raise some privacy issues. However, this isn’t a level of targeting that most ad agencies are interested in. Mr. Baker noted that there just aren’t enough creatives to do one-on-one advertising to 100 million people.
Yet this is where I think a lot of targeting breaks down. The other day, my seven year old daughter went to a local art museum. She was intrigued by a portrait of a woman that no matter where she stood, the woman looked directly at her. I am sure that the creative that painted that picture wasn’t targeting suburban seven year old girls.
In other sessions, speakers noted that too often false assumptions are made about audiences. Just because someone did a search on “a dark blue 1998 to 2003 Mercedes Benz CLK-320 coupe” doesn’t mean that I have any intention on buying one. I might simply be reading up more about a horrible hit-and-run fatality in New Haven.
Likewise, determining why people purchase products can be fraught with false assumptions. Some people might buy Portuguese wine because it is inexpensive. Others might buy the same wine because they have Portuguese ancestry. Another speaker described the shock that a client had when they were shown pictures of their fans on MySpace. Too often, people may be targeting the wrong demographic.
It reminds me of a great line from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard. In it, a Dadaist artist has a wonderful line to the effect, “It is the responsibility of the artist to laugh, and jeer, and howl, and belch at the common delusion that infinite generates of causes can be inferred from effects.”
Perhaps creatives at ad agencies need a little more Dadaism in their own work. Instead of targeting fifty year old white males of a specific education and income level in Woodbridge, CT that own a dog, a cat, a hybrid, and have children in gifted education programs, they should target people that want to feel like they are accepted and belong to some group, people that are concerned about the economy, people with complicated emotional ties to their families, people that feel a little self-conscious when someone seems to stare at them from across the room, the way the painting stared at my daughter, or so many other demographics that don’t really narrow things down very much but instead reflect the human condition.
From this, you can get people to feel a personal connection. They might even want to join a discussion others touched by the product or even help an ad go viral.
If we keep focusing more and more on narrowing demographics, we might find the people most likely to be interested in our products, and at the same time, we just may alienate them enough to drive them to our competitors. In the sixties, people had tee shirts that said, I am a human being, do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate. Perhaps a similar tee shirt today would say something like, I am not a demographic.
(Originally posted at DigiDay.)
