What’s the definition of a Light Green Consumer?

A light green consumer is apparently a woman who shops at Whole Foods, but gets there in a Hummer. (There’s another definition here, if you’re interested.)

The topic came up as we brainstormed at Decision Theater this morning. Derrick Mains CEO of GreenNurture led the meeting and talked about how we plan to use social media to help businesses –Light Green, Dark Green and anything inbetween–promote eco-actions, and have employee buy in? How do you get rid of Styrofoam cups within an organization, and provide scientific basis as to why it is a profitable to it?

It’s all about providing organizations a clear path through the Decision Funnel, said George Basile, Director of the Decision Theater. “The space in which businesses have to make environmental decisions is decreasing –narrowing– over time,” he said. “We know they face all kinds of hurdles –boycotts, resource limitations, skepticism etc …

Basile: What if the funnel widens at the other end, creating a ‘double-sided funnel?’ Could GreenNurture bring the best science and layer it over the an employee-driven sustainability program, to help companies pass through that funnel?

Mains: We will. We are going to know what people are concerned about before hand so our content experts will point to the science that will validate the ‘five things’ being voted on or acted on. We can tell the corporate administrator, “hey that Styrofoam cup idea –it will save you $x,000 at the end of the year.” The social platform on which GreenNurture is based could engage employees, and track their actions.

If you want to see a demo of the GreenNurture platform, the tracking capabilities, click here.

It’s going to be one of the strangest parting shots. My one last project as I transit out of Decision Theater is the redesign of the present web site.

Ridiculous?

The typical questions I get asked go like this:

• Why do you care?
• Why would they want you to manage this?
• Isn’t it odd, for the outgoing Communications Manager to have anything to say about an organization that’s changing direction?

My short answer is: I’ve been asked to do equally bizarre things. The Decision Theater web site, for all its visual appeal has been something I’ve wanted to update for a while. It sends a message of  ‘old media’ when we actually employ some really advanced tools and processes –from GIS data and visualization, to brainstorming tools, to interactive exercises. I began the blog, Light Bulb Moments ( and a podcast and a microblog, and white papers and…) partly as a solution to fill this gap, and partly to communicate quicker, link better, embed more and aspects of Decision Theater that tended to get buried in a static web site. If things go well, the new site will be extremely dynamic.

In case you’re wondering what  ‘transit out of the Decision Theater’ meant, it’s an euphemism I use very cautiously for:  ‘my job was eliminated due to budget cuts.’

Regretful? Yes. But I have started on a path of new media and communications that does not leave time for looking in the rear-view mirror. Ergo, spending my last days at ASU looking at what’s emerging, even in a place I say goodbye to.

Two months after I posted my word cloud, I revisited it via Tweetstats, and can see how by looking at a word cloud over time, I can track how my focus has shifted.

I use a lot of short URLs, via Hootsuite –hence the looming OW factor!

But also News and Flu has come into play. The latter has loomed large ‘cos I’ve talked about the communications implications of  my social media engagement around swine flu, and pandemic planning exercises at Decision Theater, my workplace.

My marketing and media side tells me that this would be a great way to keep track of a long term event.

Speaking of which, here’s a word cloud (left) about news in Iran –with an interesting visual twist. It was made from 84,000 tweets.

Word and Tag clouds could be used from variety of crowd-sourced sites. Take this: I looked up a word tag cloud on Michael Jackson –from people who tagged stories via Delicious. You can be sure the cloud’s focus would move from ‘legacy’ and ‘Barbara Walters’ to messier topics such as estate, drugs etc.

I meet a lot of lecturers and researchers in my job, because they are all using advanced modeling and scientific tools to engage students and look at knowledge in new dimensions.

I also meet a lot of high school teachers who are family friends and professional colleagues. It’s impossible to miss the big shift happening in the classroom, no different from the big changes going on in PR agencies or marketing departments. At the risk of over-simplifying things,what’s going on is the decentralization of knowledge, and the loss of control. In a good way, that is, when it refers to the classroom.

This presentation best illustrates what I am talking about. Via Devon Adams, who’s Teacher 2.0 approach best illustrates this shift.

If you can’t see the video above, click here

Happy to note that I now have six podcasts published on iTunes.
They are also here at the Decision Theater blog.

More to follow!

I began the podcasts, Light Bulb Moments as a complement to the Decision Theater blog that bears the same name.

But none of this happenned overnight. Podcasting is an interesting a curious exercise. As those who do it will tell you, there are many components to it, from the interview prep, to the editing (if you’re not going live to the drive, as some pros like Mitch Joel and CC Chapman do), and the publishing.

My deep appreciation to two people –fellow IABC members– who have been my inspiration to get started: Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. For the past –what was it?– three or more years I’ve listened to several communications and PR podcasts, and still do. But For Immediate Release has been one show I never fail to get back to. I learned the nuts and bolts of the trade from their book, How to do everything with podcasting, then took a class at ASU, and jumped in. Suddenly the deep-end doesn’t feel so intimidating.

A note about Light Bulb Moments. It’s a sort of a peek behind the curtain, if you will, at what goes on here at the Decision Theater.

The core area (left), a room with floor-to-ceiling screens is a high-tech interactive environment. It’s used for planning –scenario planning– systems thinking and policy making.

We work with cities, businesses, govt agencies, school districts / schools and non-profits; more recently in pandemic influenza planning exercises. It looks very complex from the outside. So since part of my job is to communicate and distill that complexity, podcasts are perfect for this. It lets me capture the light bulb moments, plus the nuances –right down to the ambient sound.

Last evening, I live blogged an event at work, trying out a service called CoverItLive.

Check it here

What was interesting to me was that the event itself was steeped in social media. Basically it was the unveiling of a student-created wiki for sci-fi author, PJ Haarsma, who writes books that are connected online  games, using feedback loops and wiki-interaction to promote better reading habits across America.

To get back to CoverItLive, it’s a great tool, because it lets you update your posts  created on the CoveritLive interface, to any blog. Of course being the first time I used it, I think I messed with the time-zones and as a result, it was not updating. Plan B rolled out! I copied and pasted the posts into the blog. Which defeats the purpose, I know!

But the experience was valuable; it’s only by experimenting with social media tools like this can you get past that learning curve. The very frustration and the mistakes make a lot of other similar social media apps coming after this, easier to master.

Features: What’s neat about CoverItLive is that the audience does not need to refresh the screen — the text keeps streaming onto your blog. Also very valuable, is the ability to conduct a poll while posting.

Recently we looked at using Polldaddy as a sidebar to a live video being streamed via BitGravity, and toyed with the idea of live-blogging and tweeting the event. I love Polldaddy, but application clutter can be distracting. One interface that pulls a lot of other apps together in one box is what I am always looking for.

So the 3 things I learned about live blogging:

• Always conduct a dry run. It seemed to work in a test, but I never went live. If no time for a dry-run, always have a Plan B.
• Work as a team. It’s tough to take photos, record audio and live blog! We did this at the Obama visit a few weeks back.
• Gather media in advance -videos, photos, links etc. Fortunately I had some some homework on this event, so I knew what YouTube video to link to etc

There are two other boxes to check:

• Make sure of the wi-fi connection
• Charge your batteries, and/or sit close to a power outlet

Ever since I read an article about branding sand — I think it was this one– I have been fascinated with what differentiates a commodity from a brand.

Sand or silica is such an abundant mineral  that it’s amazing how much value it holds. Other commodities such as coffee or wheat seem to pale in comparison with what we do with silica.

But the water business comes close. Branding H20 seems commonplace today, but it is a highly competitive business.

Which is why I found this package for Metromint –a cross between a bottle of shampoo and an energy drink– irresistible when I was in the grocery store the other day.

The company has an interesting tone of voice. It is part of the Soma company, that calls itself  ‘an innovative group of beveragistas.’

The Metromint blog is full of consumer-driven stories, contributed by folks like Chocolate Snob and The Karin.

The packaging is simple on its front end (busy at the back) with something called the Chill Factor. There’s a number for every variant. The bottle I picked up, Spearmint, had a factor or -6. On a day like today that’s inching up to 104 degrees, I long to try it.

But…

Just as I was about to chill and try it out, I stumbled on a piece of news. Damn Google! This particular variant had been subject of a health alert and was recalled late last year. Bummer!

Suddenly all the packaging, online presence, promos and social media-enhanced branding didn’t matter. Here was the prospect of ingesting bacillus cereus staring in my face. It’s one of those food-borne bacteria that probably won’t kill me, but it contradicts everything about bottled water — being safer than the stuff off the tap.

I don’t bring this up to denigrate the Soma brand. It is probably as susceptible as any restaurant or packaged food. But it highlights how branding in today’s world is a completely different task than what it was less than a decade ago. The mere presence of negative ‘Google juice’ –the ability for any and every mention of a brand to be preserved for eternity– is something every brand custodian has to keep in mind.

Outside of bottled water, any service (any ‘branded’ business for that matter) is vulnerable. That’s the reality that I have to face up to as well in my job, using a slew of communication tools to get people to interact with the Decision Theater. I am sure you do too, whether you are nurturing your personal brand or one of your clients.

And it’s not just Google’s memory we have to think about.

Today’s economic summit, for the Greater Phoenix Economic Summit, GPEC hosted here at Decision Theater proved to be truly interactive, in more ways than one.

On the expected level, there was interactivity between business leaders and the media.

But while all this was happening, the camera that you see here was live streaming video made available to a web audience. We used BitGravity for this. The BitgGavity feed was embedded in a dedicated web page. At one time we tracked more than 600 people on that site. This extended audience got to interact with the speakers through an embedded chat program, and via a polling tool.

In an adjacent  conference room –call it the social media hub– I was part of the team watching the live web stream. Someone from the GPEC comms team would forward the questions to the Drum via Blackberry. All this, as we tweeted and blogged the event.

Photos taken during the event were immediately uploaded to Flickr -you can see them on the right of this page- and TwitPic.

What a week for social media!

I’ve been doing a lot of data-gathering on the swine flu since we were alerted to the outbreak last Friday. We are a visualization center and decision-lab that happened to hold pandemic flu exercises, so while we are not public health experts, we know a thing or two about emergency planning.

Apart from talking to the media, managing new media efforts and outreach, my work involves being the eyes and ears of the Decision Theater.

A few years ago this would have taken an enormous amount or work. Today, time-crunch notwithstanding, being plugged into social media has made it easier to stay on top of things. It’s all about being connected to the sources and monitoring the monitors.

Is it live, or is it ‘public?’ Sometimes when I brief the media on a story, what I assume to be public knowledge, is not. When the WHO raises a threat level, when a state epidemiologist confirms a new case, when the governor releases a new document or the state health officials hold a web conference … all these go public as they hit the wires. But unless we have an effective monitoring mechanism, or have hired a media monitoring agency, critical data can get buried in the clutter –and chatter. I subscribe to some news services via SMS, and of course follow a few organizations, on my phone via Twitter. I can now ping a reporter using the Twitter with direct message to confirm something.

Direct from the source. I know, all this tweeting, re-tweeting, Facebooking and blog angst (some of which I have referred to) is precisely what adds to that chatter. But rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, I think that we are better off with more information, if we know how to use it well. Many who have good data are now not limited to squeezing it through the old pipes (cable) and intermediaries (wire services). They do issue press releases, but they also give us a direct feed.  And we are better off for that.

Here are a handful that do a good job of it. An expanded list is on our Decision Theater Blog, Lightbulb Moments.

• The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is using Twitter for emergency alerts, and has a YouTube Channel
• The World Health Organization has an  RSS feed for disease outbreak updates
• Homeland Security has a blog
• FEMA has  Twitter Media advisory, and a FEMA feed
• Of course there’s always Google Alerts. Cranky at times, but useful.
• HealthMap, which is a great way to track global disease, also has a Twitter account

The latter is worth elaborating on. HealthMap is an interesting project. The two people behind it  (John S. Brownstein, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Clark Freifeld, a software engineer) grab several feeds and lay them out to help us make sense of all that data.

TMI? We can deselect categories in HealthMap if we so wish. In an emergency, few seem to complain about too much information. If at all, there would be an uproar had any organization  inadvertently held back some information.

I have seen a flurry of responses to the outbreak of swine flu over the past few days, and have to wonder if our ability to monitor and repeat information often overstates the situation /crisis. Or exploit it.

I can say this with some confidence since:

(a) I work at a the Decision Theater, where we have conducted three pandemic flu exercises –the last of which was in February this year.

(b) We have to caution many people who ask, because everyone’s in reactive mode, not realizing that this is still an outbreak, not an epidemic, and still far from being declared a pandemic.

I suppose we could hype up the situation, and claim to be ‘experts’ in the field, just to get media attention. But we won’t go there. It is not in the public interest to add to the uncertainty.

Down-playing. Sort of. If at all, I have had to tell media who call that guess what, Arizona was recently ranked the most prepared state as far as pandemic plans. I also sat in a meeting where one researcher in this field noted that Mexico has some of the most advanced epidemiologists, and that their health care monitoring system was not to be doubted.

I have seen communicators jump into this space. Some in a good way. But as Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute noted, “too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.”

Here’s a short list of how some in the industry reacted:

• On Sunday, while I was monitoring the information on the outbreak (at 10 pm Mountain Time), Gerard Baud pinged me about how his outfit is looking at the crisis, with a short podcast. Unfortunately it was an ad for a tele-seminar that you would have to pay for. I would have preferred if the response, in the public interest, was a free ’seat’ at the teleconference for at least one person in the organization.

• Melcrum today published a short but intelligent piece in the Melcrum Hub about an effective crisis communications plan. One of the points they raised seemed so pertinent to the present situation: Stick to the known facts. It’s so easy to go on anecdotal evidence –as in stuff you saw online, repeated by someone who thought she had heard it from a ’source.’
• Ragan Communications also published a good piece on it but unfortunately they too have connencted it to a webinar that will cost you $99.

• Happy to note that IABC is making a teleseminar available free. Details here.

Bottom Line. I know times are tough. But people are also getting sick. There are lots of cities, school districts and healthcare systems who have plans but will like to see what else they could do. I don’t think at this time they should pay for learning about better communications to help their local community and their country.

Hey, that’s just me.

While I was away for two weeks, Educause, an organization promoting intelligent use of information technology, published a video I produced with a student last month.

It’s yet another way to see what the Decision Theater is all about, and what exactly goes on in a facility that is less theater and more laboratory.

Lame move on my part!

I admit I don’t follow everyone who follows me on Twitter, because it’s just not possible to pay attention to so much chatter.

But today, I realized I had been following the wrong tweet on my mobile. In a real-world event this could have had major repercussions, especially if that person or group was part of a coordinated team.

The event I am talking about was a terrorist attack on a football stadium. OK, it was a mock  terrorist attack! The event was an emergency planning exercise at Arizona State University.

I was tweeting, taking photos, and recording audio for a podcast while my communication colleagues were tweeting. But ASU has so many people on Twitter now, it’s possible to not follow the right person! I feel more stupid since it was only last week that two others and I presented to a group about the value of Twitter, where I specifically mentioned how easy it was to send an on or off command via your mobile device to follow or turn off someone!

So the lessons learned:

• Be careful whom you don’t follow – deliberately or accidentally
• Think of Twitter as two parts listening post, one part micro-blog
• Keep a short list of those you really need to follow –in a notebook!
• Regularly check your account settings –esp ‘Device Updates’

I cannot attend this one but I just heard from Angela Sinickas about a Ragan webinar she is conducting this afternoon on measuring social media.

The idea of knowing and measuring what effect social media has on the business you are in, drives people nuts –sometimes in a good way.

Yesterday I showed a colleague in the office how I track visitors to our blog, Light Bulb Moments, and she wanted to know “where I got those from.” That it was just the built-in dashboard for WordPress blew her away. And that’s not even getting into Google analytics.

Social Media analytics has got a lot more complex, and necessary. Before diving into any social media tool, first think of what results and measures you would like to have. Start with the end in mind, I guess.

Listen to Angela describe it in a much more succing way here.

This has been under the radar for some time, but I have been working on a series of podcasts called Light Bulb Moments for the Decision Theater blog of the same name.

Here is the link to the first, on the Pandemic ‘flu exercise.

Since it’s Friday, thought I’d share something far removed from the social media and marketing stuff you see here. Call it my glass-is-half-full story.

I work with people with an unusual skills at the Decision Theater. But how often do you find someone who could put together a home-made teleprompter? With nothing more than a cardboard box, a sheet of glass he pilfered from me, some buggy freeware, and a bit of duct tape, my colleague Dustin Hampton is ready to shoot a series of videos featuring simulated news reports.

The laptop makes the mirrored text scroll onto the flat screen monitor taped down at a 45-degree angle. It is then reflected up at the sheet of glass –on the other side of the camera you see here!

Yes, like everyone else in the state, the universities are facing budget cuts. But there’s work to be done. This project involves pandemic flu planning. I like to think of this as our way of not sitting back and waiting for the sun to rise.

(cross posting from LightBulb Moments)

But what if the ‘CEO’ was the Prime Minister of the country?

The PM of Kazakhstan, who was once the communist party boss, is reportedly forcing his ministers to blog. The reason? He has his own!  And why not? British PM, Gordon Brown has one, too.

The point is, not often does the request or exec order come from this far up the chain of command. I happen to be in a good place –my executive director refers to social media as the way to communicate. While I used to hear “let’s issue a press release about that” in many previous organizations, I now hear “why don’t we blog that?“

This has been running under the radar for awhile. Lightbulb Moments, the first in a series of social media initiatives I am rolling out at the Decision Theater.

If you are interested in what decision-making involves, what goes on in the “drum’ involving visualization, 3D modeling and collaborative decision-making check us out.

If you need to grab an RSS feed, this is it.

]]> http://hoipolloi.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/aerotropolis-sustainability-and-the-mixed-lexicon-in-2008/ Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:11:54 +0000 Angelo http://hoipolloi.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/aerotropolis-sustainability-and-the-mixed-lexicon-in-2008/

Looking back, it’s been a momentous year for me. Fresh into the first week in ‘08, I took up an amazing job at the Decision Theater.

In 2008, the words that made an impact, in no particular order have been:

• ‘CleanTech‘ is very exciting and relevant to my job, my family, my community. I don’t have to be a technology writer to want to explore it further.

• Sustainability, which once seemed like a big word for making responsible decisions about forests and oceans, is now a lens through which we look at entire economic, social and business systems.

• The obscure instrument called a ‘mortgage backed security‘ could unhinge our economy, including the free-fall of house prices in Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, England, the price of a gallon of gas, and a ‘cheap’ tree ornament made in China.

• An ‘aerotropolis‘ which is a compressed urban environment around a commercial airport could revitalize community life.

• The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig‘ became a silly diversion in the run up to the elections, but also stuck out as how quickly, an unplanned cosmetic element of a campaign could generate buzz.

• The word ‘Outlier‘ which has been cropping up, has a mathematical connotation. As in: ‘numerically distant from the rest of the data.’

• Android, the mobile operating system from Google, could be the OS we all gravitate to.

• Meatball Sundae –a book by Seth Godin that was actually published in Dec ‘07 – is the notion that applying new marketing on top of traditional products can have a gross results.

They steal your passwords, hide under the folds of your browser, and turn off your virus protection software.

Alex Dragulescu turned these deadly computer virus into visual models that look like works of art.

We work with huge amounts of data at the Decision Theater, and often over-simplify what we refer to as a ‘visualization’ — a JPG, a PowerPoint, a map are, after all, visualizations. But data can be rendered as a city, a strand of DNA, a mathematical model…a Twitter user’s digital profile? That’s an eye-opener for me.

Take this, from Alex Dragulescu. It’s a look at what Twitter users do when they micro-blog, creating a data profile as it were. As Alex puts it:

“we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create a portrait of the author.”

Welcome to the ideas, updates, events and commentary about decision-making. This blog launches today, but it reaches back into posts I have made on visualization, collaboration and decision-making at my marketing communication blog, HoipolloiReport.com.

As it is specifically associated with the Decision Theater, I talk about some of the projects we are currently working on, including some of the forward thinking ideas swirling around sustainable business practices.

The Decision Theater is an unit of the Global Institute of Sustainability, home also of the first School of Sustainability in the U.S. As such, this blog will be a good place to find news to cutting edge research, speakers, lectures, white papers and publications around sustainability.

I have been looking into how a GUI ( geekspeak for ‘graphic user interface’) could enhance a message, and am considering doing some cool interactive, kiosk-type visualizations in our lobby at the Decision Theater. Interactive displays such as the Campus Metabolism project from the Global Institute of Sustainability is one way to do this. It’s a web-based but is much more interesting on a touch-screen in their lobby.

But apart from aggregating data, a GUI could simplify the user experience, for news, as this site called Newstin demonstrates.

Click on the Newstin map, and it basically organizes world news from 166,000 sources, organized into about 1 million topics. Mind you, Newstin was created before the iPhone, so it’s easy to see how a widget could transfer this kind of experience to a mobile device.

How could a building or  structural feature send a stronger message about what you stand for than other design elements –web site, brochures, annual reports– you put out on a regular basis?

Not everyone could build a spectacular ’shrine’ like Apple has, in Manhattan.

At ASU, the Global Institute of Sustainability takes a more pragmatic approach, with wind turbines on the roof generating power, even while solar panels are being installed in other parts of the campuses so as to take care of 20 percent of the total energy.

And speaking of wind power, this story out of London, of designers creating a column of light using wind power is more than a fancy energy project. It demos the capacity of creativity that could be unleashed within the urban planing when you let energy send a message.

In this ‘tower of power’ as it is being called, there are 120 LED’s being powered by a “gentle” wind. Nothing fancy in the set up. A laptop is the only piece of technology behind it, apart from these 1,200 tiny fans. The designer, Jason Bruges Studio, calls it a wind-light.

Maybe someday outdoor signs will be lit this way.

So that, beyond growing lettuce (watch this video!) on the vertical face of a billboard, as McDonald’s did in this very daring/cool design, existing structures could send a passive message, with some “gentle” asistance from the sun, water and wind.

A colleague sent me this link from an NPR Science Friday story. It’s a story based on the voting pattern as seen through cartograms -maps that have been ‘density equalized’ by Michael Gastner and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan.

Being in the business of scientific visualization at the Decision Theater it’s fascinating to see science take a crack at politics, and why the red-state, blue-state concept trivializes the voting pattern.

The TV news networks, of course love the red-blue metaphor. We saw CNN’s use of the ‘magic wall’ which was a recent creation by a company called Perceptive Pixel (it  sold similar walls to ABC and Fox).  MSNBC set up a 3D studio for some similar visual treats. CNN even played with teleporting, having the anchor interview a hologram, pushing visualization up several notches.

But NPR’s story is a great way to do a visual post-mortem of how the country voted. While holograms are just eye-candy, cartograms give a better picture of what happened. Gastner, by the way, lets you use his cartogram code, here, where there are more maps of the voting pattern. Talk about seeing things diffferently!

A colleague sent me this link from an NPR Science Friday story. It’s a story based on the voting pattern as seen through cartograms -maps that have been ‘density equalized’ by Michael Gastner and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan.

Being in the business of scientific visualization at the Decision Theater it’s fascinating to see science take a crack at politics, and why the red-state, blue-state concept trivializes the voting pattern.

The TV news networks, of course love the red-blue metaphor. We saw CNN’s use of the ‘magic wall’ which was a recent creation by a company called Perceptive Pixel (it  sold similar walls to ABC and Fox).  MSNBC set up a 3D studio for some similar visual treats. CNN even played with teleporting, having the anchor interview a hologram, pushing visualization up several notches.

But NPR’s story is a great way to do a visual post-mortem of how the country voted. While holograms are just eye-candy, cartograms give a better picture of what happened. Gastner, by the way, lets you use his cartogram code, here, where there are more maps of the voting pattern. Talk about seeing things diffferently!

I spoke to someone whom I thought might be interested in a Media Training session today. His reaction was “I don’t talk to the media. Nothing good ever comes out of it!”

Wow!

I was slightly taken aback, even though I have heard something like this before. (No, it was not Sarah Palin.) In fact, I have a mailer on my wall that announces “Don’t talk to the media…” On the reverse, is the line “until you talk to Gerard Braud.” Gerard is an IABC member I met earlier this year, who conducts this kind of thing, and his point is that you could tell an honest story, stripped of spin, and still have a great media experience.

Which brings me to the whole point of this. A survey of journalists just out (Bulldog Reporter/Techgroup International) on media relations practices. It’s an excellent insight into how journos think, what they do to connect (or avoid) PR spin, and how they stay on top of stories using social media. Among the findings:

• Only 29% of journalists read 5 blogs or more to keep up with their beat. The positive side of this is that 75% read one blog or more. One year ago, about 26% read 5 or more blogs.
• RSS usage us low (58.4% don’t use it), journalists abhor phone calls from PR people, and those not familiar with their media outlet.
• Interestingly, newspapers are still a key source of news for them (so will all those newspapers-are-dead promoters stop making it seem worse than it is?), and a large number of them are big on Electronic News Kits.

So if you don’t want to share the same oxygen as journalists, at least try to make it easy to let them suck in your RSS feed from a distance. And that’s not just your from press releases, and your ‘about us’ page, but from your white papers, interviews, podcasts, blogs & thought pieces (same thing, huh?). We may not trust them, but we could trust them to do their ground work if we give them less puff pieces.

Hey, I can afford to say this because I wear two hats. I communicate with the media on behalf of whom I represent, but I also interview companies for my freelance writing.