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.”

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Edelman gets a lot of the glory, but Fleishman-Hillard has really embraced blogging and digital PR in a huge way. More than just getting staffers to blog or recommending blogs as a solution to clients, they’ve got one of their internal recruiters blogging as well. This is damned smart, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other large shops and recruiting firms followed suit.

Beyond the fundamental sense of exposing F-H opportunities to the blogosphere — an audience rife with top-notch communicators — there’s more to this than filling the human-capital pipeline.

Having your recruiter blog — and blog well — says a lot about your corporate culture. When’s the last time you thought “open” (Heck, when’s the last time you thought “human?”) when you thought about HR? Betsy Beard’s manner is engaging and open — she doesn’t come across like HR at all. Well played, F-H.

Now I have to find out what Betsy thinks of my five favorite job interview questions.

(And no pro-HR hatin’, please… Despite the occasional genuinely helpful soul, There’s plenty of anecdotal and quantitative evidence about HR’s need, as a management practice area, for an overhaul, a good kick in the ass, or both.)

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A colleague from another shop and I recently talked about hiring and how you ferret out talent in an interview. We traded interview questions and, while I don’t want to post his without permission, you’re more than welcome to use mine.
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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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