Greetings from San Francisco

I'm spending this week in San Francisco, attending the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD) Conference and discussing the vagaries of healthcare planning, marketing and public relations. My colleague Dan Millar and I gave a presentation on Wednesday morning dealing with Crisis Communication and Social Media (you can see the link to our survey on the subject to the left), which went very well. We laughed at the opening session entertainment featuring political satirist Mark Russell - with his political jokes, piano and still entertaining audiences with hat and bowtie.

Today's opening session featured author Andrew Keen, who bills himself as the "anti-christ of silicon valley". His remarks regarding Web 2.0 and the "Cult of the Amateur" were interesting and provacative. His premise is that Web 2.0 has created an environment where - while everyone has access and can be an author - we have lost respect for expertise and there is little or no mechanism to proof, check, authenticate or serve as gatekeeper to prevent false and often crazy information being labeled as "the truth." He told one story where he was talking to a person before the last election, and the person said -"I could never vote for Al Gore, he's Jewish!" Andrew asked, "how do you know that?" The answer was, "I read it on the internet!" Falsehoods, lies and malicious information are now being passed off as accurate or true. Keen says that this total lack of respect for expertise has already led to negative impact in the Music Industry, Journalism and a variety of other fields as "talent" is no longer being paid for being talented, and he chastized marketers for falling into the trap that the Internet (YouTube, Facebook, Google, etc.) provides a forum for "free marketing" - when in fact it isn't free, the internet companies are th e only ones being paid, and advertising is not discernable from informational content, and eventually it could "all be marketing" - so there beign no such thing as paid marketing, we're putting ourselves out of a job. Take a look at his Blog, or read his book, "The Cult of the Amateur"

Fred

Wordle

I finished my first assignment for my online distance learning instruction class this week, and was intrigued by all the interesting resources out there. For instance, despite having been on iTunes a gazillion times to download music, I was unaware that there was a "iTunes University" with thousands of free downloads of class lectures and videos from dozens of schools and hundreds of topics. I also learned about "Wordle" - a fun little toy that creates word clouds from any block of text:

You can see how it interpreted my blog above.

Fred

Technology here I come

As anyone who has ventured to this little blog knows, I haven't been a house-afire in keeping my postings current. SO, to push the effort a little and to get this Boomer a little more comfortable with the technology of the 21st century, I've signed up for a class in designing a class in distance learning. Might as well dive in - sticking my toe in didn't help.

The course started this week with assignments in learning how to post things in OnCourse, the software for the class. I'll keep you informed as to how it goes!

Fred

Being Bad

I'm being bad!

This blog thing seemed like a good idea at the time, and it has made me better at monitoring my RSS blog feeds. But keeping up with other folks blogs is one thing...keeping up with my own is something entirely different.

So, if you stumble across this blog - realize it hasn't been updated for a while and are in the mood for some PR discussion...plug in to PRSA's professional blog: ComPRehension (http://comprehension.prsa.org/).

Oh, and I will get back on this thing...

Fred

Another vacation photo

I posted my excuse for not posting in June - my trip to Norwegian Fjords, and actually had a real live person suggest that I post another vacation pic...
Your wish is my command...