Advocacy Amplified

Maybe I’ve just been in a wordy mood lately, but I think the most interesting 2008 wrap-up I’ve seen so far was published in the New York Times last week.  2008 was a year of buzzwords.  Choice Syllables for 2008, You Betcha describes how politics and culture collided to bring all new (or newly repurposed) terms into public consciousness this year.  With our nation so engrossed in the presidential election we couldn’t help but be bombarded with buzzwords from both sides of the aisle.  Remember when Obama referred to McCain’s tactics as putting “lipstick on a pig” or how McCain himself resurrected the oldie but goodie, “maverick” about a thousand times too many?

This kind of Maverick?

The election wasn’t the only event driving buzzwords in 2008. According to lexicographer and NPR host of “A Way With Words” Grant Barrett, the Olympics created some terms that will not be soon forgotten.  His examples include:

age-doping
The falsification of records to show that an athlete meets participation requirements for a sporting event. This issue arose with Chinese gymnasts in the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Greyjing
A nickname for Beijing, whose skies are some of the most polluted in the world.

Phelpsian
Excellent in the fashion of the swimmer Michael Phelps, who won eight medals and set seven world records at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

My favorite buzzwords from the article, however, are not related to politics or sports.  They are funny sideshow terms collected from popular culture, like:

D.W.T.
The distracting practice of sending text messages while operating an automobile.

Twi-hard
A fan of Stephenie Meyer’s ”Twilight” book series about vampires. Rhymes with ”die-hard.” (sidenote: I will not confirm or deny having read these books or being a twi-hard fan.)

nuke the fridge
To ruin a movie franchise; usually attributed to the arrogance of a successful producer or director. The term was coined based on a scene in the latest Indiana Jones movie, in which the hero survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator. The term is patterned after jump the shark, coined a few years ago to refer to anything that had peaked in popularity or quality and was now on a downward slide toward ridiculousness and irrelevancy.

And last but not least, as a self-confessed Twitter addict, my number one buzzword entry from 2008:

Tw-, Tweet-, Twitt-
Combining forms all inspired by Twitter, what might be called a free nano-blogging service. It helps small groups share what they’re thinking or doing in just 140 characters per message, or tweet, as such a message is called. The service has generated new words and related Web sites. Tweet-up, for example, is either a meeting of people organized through Twitter, or the Web site that helps bring about the meetings.

I cannot think of a better way to sum up 2008 and all it’s highlights (and lowlights).  I wonder which terms will survive (hockey mom, fail and pregorexia), which ones will disappear into obscurity (skadoosh, change and recessionista) and what new terms we will come up with during 2009?

Last week we held our quarterly A2G book club discussion.  The A2G book group is definitely unique in the world of business book clubs.  When a coworker picks a title, the only requirement for the book chosen is that it somehow relates to marketing or our company culture, which means we rarely stick to traditional business books.  Titles in the past year have included: Into Thin Air, Good to Great and Losing My Virginity.

This quarter we read The Meaning of Everything: The Story of The Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester.  The Meaning of Everything tells the personality-filled history of the OED and the long, strange 72 year journey it took to get it to print.  On the surface it’s a book about words and the people who love them, but if you dig a little deeper it’s the story of a group of innovators who saw a great need and jumped in to fill the hole, no matter how trying or arduous the task. I think that’s something that anyone in any field can relate to.

It’s a book club tradition to open up the meeting with each members’ favorite passage. This time we changed things up a bit and instead went around the room and volunteered our favorite (apoplectic, yes, hoi polloi and onomatopoeia) and least favorite (moist, no, racked and buoy) word.  We use the English language everyday to communicate with each other, but often take for granted that words themselves can be interesting and as individual as the person using them. As we each offered our words, it quickly became obvious that we were all a bunch of word nerds!

During our wordy discussion, we got on the subject of Project Gutenberg and archive.org. If you aren’t familiar, these websites provide the largest databases of online books and documents.  Both of these sites take text that isn’t subject to copyright, upload it and distribute it on the web for free.  Like the creation of the OED, uploading all that information seems to be an almost impossible task.  Are the books simply scanned?  I did some research and it turns out, yes…and no.  Most texts are photographically scanned and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR) in order to make them manageable size files.  This could be a completely automated system, but unfortunately OCR isn’t perfect and there are many words that cannot be read by a computer.  So, that’s where the folks at reCAPTCHA come in.

As you probably know, a CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether it’s user is a human or a computer.  It usually consists of two mildly distorted words at the bottom of web registration forms.

If a human encounters a CAPTCHA, they enter the words and gain access to the desired information.  Spamming programs aren’t able to read distorted text, so they can’t get through.  reCAPTCHA has raised the bar one step further.  The words they use in their spam blockers are actually text that OCR can’t make out.

So, every time you encounter a reCAPTCHA form on the internet and you enter the words, you are helping these projects by deciphering text from books, old newspapers, and classic radio shows ensuring they get digitized to share with future generations.  According to reCAPTCHA, over 200 million CAPTCHA’s are solved everyday around the world taking each user about 10 seconds of their time.  That is not a lot of time for single individuals, but when added up together it constitutes about 150,000 hours of work each day.  If every CAPTCHA on the internet helped digitize books, these projects just got a lot more manageable. Too bad the editors of the first Oxford English Dictionary didn’t have access to reCAPTCHA.  It probably would have taken them a fraction of the 72 years to complete their masterpiece!

For more information about reCAPTCHA you can read here and here.

For more information about how you can add reCAPTCHA to your website click here.

I don’t profess to being a daily reader of a hard copy newspaper.  Time, attention span, the Internet, the pressure of reading, well, everything has continued to get in the way of becoming a hard copy newspaper devotee (an unsuccessful New Year’s resolution year after year.)  Enter the Kindel.

For months friends and family were encouraging me to check out the Kindle, Amazon’s wireless reading device.  As one friend put it, “It’s the only way to read the newspaper!”   Ironically, while not a daily reader, there is one ritual that I look forward to every weekend: vegging on the couch with a cup of tea and The NY Times.  Something about a fresh paper and all that information packed into those pages makes me almost giddy at times…and certainly makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something when I’m done.  

I didn’t care how easy, efficient, consuming, small or miraculous this product might be. I wasn’t willing to give up my Sunday morning R&R.  And then my neighbor (you know who you are) stole my Sunday paper.  As fate would have it, as I complained over brunch, a friend leaned over and gave me his Kindle with some gentle encouragement, “Go on.  Try it for the day.  It’s going to change your life.”  Yeah, right.

That was three months ago and I haven’t looked back.  No longer is there the mad dash to get the newspaper.  Nor is there the frustration that someone has already read the paper, leaving me with a crumpled pile of sections.  My newspaper reading has gone to a whole new level of relaxation.  

I even find that I’m reading and enjoying sections that I’d never found interesting.  Sports. (McNabb is on fire!)  Op-Ed. (I’ve certainly had a few drunkenfreude moments.)  Science.  (It’s true.  Diesel fuel can be made from coffee grounds.)  I read everything!

My favorite feature?  Hands down, it’s the dictionary.  Before I had to get off the couch, get the dictionary and look up the word.  Now it’s literally at-my-fingertips.  

This amazing device that has made newspaper reading easy and enjoyable isn’t perfect.  Nor do I think I’ll ever have the heart to part with reading an actual book.  But for now, this little piece of technology has simplified and made pleasurable a task that I’d always found daunting.

And, thanks to my Kindle, I’ve accomplished one of my New Year’s resolutions – EARLY!

If you have a few moments, this podcast is worth a listen.   It is a series of personal recordings that one person made for just one other person.

————

Prologue.

We hear a tape that a man named David Cossin made for a woman in Italy, who he’d met during a week he spent there. In the tape, he tries to convince her to visit him in New York. Host Ira Glass explains that hearing this tape — made by one person, for one other — is different than other things you hear on the radio. There’s something unusually emotional and direct about it. Most radio stories are for an audience of many. This week, an audience of many listens in on tapes intended for an audience of one. (2 minutes)

Act One. Buddy Picture.

Producer Jonathan Goldstein with a story about friendship, mothers and sons, and what some have called the greatest phone message in the world — it circulated at Columbia University in New York City, and had something to do with the Little Mermaid. (19 minutes)

Act Two. Special Effects Story.

Kevin Murphy is a college student in Idaho who stutters. Using the power of radio editing, he and the production staff of This American Life removed his pauses, stutters and repeats so that he could record a message in which he doesn’t stutter at all. This allowed him to tape a message about something that’s been bothering him, to send to one man … a pizza guy, in Idaho. Visit the National Stuttering Association website. (6 minutes)

Act Three. War Story.

During the Persian Gulf War, John Brasfield was an army scout. He went on dangerous missions, in which he was exposed to enemy fire with little protection. On most missions, he took along a cassette recorder and taped the action for his wife. He did it so that if something did happen to him, she’d at least know what happened, and he might get a chance to say goodbye. And then, on February 27, 1991, he accidentally recorded an incident that haunted him for years … an incident in which Iraqi soldiers may have been unnecessarily killed. (18 minutes)

Song: ” The Battle Is Over (But the War Goes On),” Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry

Act Four. Love Story.

We hear more of David Cossin’s tapes. He made over a dozen for the woman in Italy. And we hear from the woman — Allesandra Pomarico — about whether they worked, and what she thought of them. (10 minutes)

Song: ” Send Me Some Lovin,’ Otis Redding,”

It seems like everyone is trying to green the world.  To be recognized as a green leader, a brand must do something novel and do it consistently. Comprehensive or simple, businesses and individuals shouldn’t be discouraged by the false perception that it must be an elaborate program.  Aligning one’s business model with appropriate sustainable efforts will benefit both the environment and the brand.

 
To create a green, or sustainable, program, identify the company’s core competency. Working with senior management including members of the risk management team, assess if there are ways to streamline people, processes and procedures (the 3 P’s).  Once this data has been collected, one should begin to look at the external resources that support a brand and it’s services/products.  

A retail company could reach out to manufacturers and distributors to find out how vendors can offset electricity generation with renewable energy credits.  If the business sells a service, an idea may be to donate a percentage of the revenue stream to local causes that help to renew and beautify the surrounding area.  The donation is a tax write-off that also carries marketing benefits.  A local hardware store can set-up an eco drop-off for products such as batteries and light bulbs.  Regardless of the contribution, be sure to involve local media.  Press coverage will more than offset the investment and continue to raise brand awareness.

Once all of the analysis has been done, calculate potential cost savings and efficiencies for the company BEFORE presenting ideas.  While most are familiar with global warming and the green trend, it’s important to recognize that some people will not be as aware, passionate or committed.  Therefore, emphasize the cost savings that a sustainability program could generate as well as the PR benefits so the decision-maker(s) can understand the program goals in case they are not green savvy.  

If creative, sincere and diligent, any company can deliver a successful green program that will benefit their company and their customers.