Over at Global Nerdy, there’s a terrific outline post covering Danah Boyd’s presentation at Harvard’s Beckman Center for Internet and Society.

Boyd, an ethonographer focusing on youth in America, became a mini phenom for her paper on class divisions between MySpace and Facebook. And whether you agree with her observations or not (she’d be the first to tell you it’s not rigorous scientific research), the outline of her luncheon talk is pure gold for those marketing to youth. Go read it.

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I’m going to talk about the importance of authenticity in communications. But on the way to that point, I have to touch on movie piracy, economics and lobbying — come along for the ride!

The folks over at NBC Universal, like so much of Hollywood, have a piracy problem. (There’s a conflated problem in that much of their product is crap, but that’s a different discussion.)

So what does a big business do when it has a problem? If it’s smart, it lobbies. As Jonathan Rauch (one of my favorite policy journalists) pointed out more than 10 years ago in Reason, lobbying pays huge returns.:

In a developed economy, a marginal dollar invested in a new die-cutter or inventory-control system might produce a return of, say, 10 percent a year. Compare that with a shrewd investment in lobbying. In 1992, The New York Times reported that a handful of sugar refiners donated $8,500 to Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R- N.Y.) and received his successful support for a tariff rebate worth $365 million–a return of about 4 million percent. Only a fool would pass up such an investment, or even the occasional shot at one. “If I throw in a million here or a million there, I might get a hundred million back,” a Washington lobbyist once told me. “And there are probably enough cases like that so they keep throwing money in.”

Read more …

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Over at The McKinsey Quarterly, Eighty-four percent of the executives polled agreed that their companies should pursue not only shareholder value but also broader contributions to the public good; most said their companies could handle sociopolitical issues more successfully, as well.

I haven’t chugged the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Kool-Aid as much as some of my colleagues, but it doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to see that the principles of doing well by doing right can be applied strategically rather than merely as a tactical response to activists or isolated market pressures.

But how to go about it? McKinsey resarchers offer some helpful guidance:
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Talk to PR and marketing agency types, and you’ll hear all manner of moans and groans over Requests For Propopsals (RFPs) or their lesser-seen siblings, the Request For Information (RFI) or Request For Quote (RFQ).

Why? Well, part of it is just Pollyanna-ish thinking about how business comes in the door — a surprising number of agencies grow their practices through purely organic networking and word-of-mouth marketing. This isn’t a bad move (more on that in another post), but it’s hard to be known by all the right people all the time. Now and then, a great piece of work will come up and you’re going to have to walk through the beauty pageant just like everyone else.

But the other reason agencies sometimes shy away from competitive bids is a little more basic: There are a lot of unreasonable, unclear or otherwise undesirable RFPs out there. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

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Friend and uber-flack Peter Shankman (professional, personal, unfortunate headshot) is more of a “pure” PR guy than me — he manages to get great media hits for everything from porn distributors to yarnmakers.

Peter’s good, but he also has interesting products and services to pitch to the media. What happens when your product isn’t buzzworthy?

James Archer has some thoughts. And they’re good ones.

James makes several points and it’s a short read — so go read it. The closing graph even has some takeaway for those who market themselves, not just products:

Above all, remember to be fascinating. If your product or service is boring in itself, then it’s up to you — yes, you personally — to be amazing. Everyone can do it, you just have to be the one who actually follows through with it.

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More than a year ago, I came across Chiristopher Allen’s solid analysis of several social networking sites and bookmarked it; I re-read it today while cleaning out my bookmarks (a singularly post-modern, 21st century drudgery) and pretty much everything he wrote still holds true.

I use LinkedIn (profile here, although I doubt you can view it unless you’re a member), and the basic Cocktail Party Rule applies: If you are polite and know how to gently work a room, you can make some spectacularly useful contacts; if you wander around like a bull in a china shop wondering how many people you can “sell,” then you’re not going to get too far.

On LinkedIn, as with online dating sites and every AOL chatroom ever created, it might be the meek who inherit the earth, but the communicators are going to end up owning the internet.

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