The Importance of and the Way to Research

Now that the turkey and gravy have been consumed, and annoyingly happy noels stalk us on every wintry street corner, it's time to "plan" for 2011. If you work in public relations or marketing, however, there's one important step prior to planning...something not everyone considers, but one which is critical to the success of communications programming: research.

If you support a professional services firm, the type of research you conduct can be one of two types. With internal research, you decide to identify organizational processes and procedures through interviews, surveys or focus groups with leaders of your firm and consider strategies for creating efficiencies and improvements in business development activities.

Or, you might conduct external research across your client markets using similar methods to determine how decision-making occurs, what problems and challenges are faced in the industry (or in today's withering economic environment) and what kinds of professional services clients and prospects find attractive to meet their needs.

One occasional challenge that can beset researchers, though, is the concern that organizational leaders perceive that nothing seems to be happening. Perceptions of public relations and marketing people include ideas that they should be meeting people, building relationships, advertising, zapping out direct mail, sponsoring events, basically whatever demonstrates an effort to gain visibility. The problem, of course, is that while such frenetic activity often may "look" good or valuable, without proper planning and appropriate decision-making ahead of time about who to build relationships with and who to target with your advertising campaigns, nothing positive will likely happen within your organization.

One must feel comfortable conducting research and acquiring knowledge to help make effective planning decisions. Ensuring you can do that starts, first of all, with articulating to management what kind of research you intend to conduct and what you intend to accomplish by doing it. While you may wonder whether management will be supportive, you may be pleasantly surprised by a number of possible reactions--"We've never done research before," "I like the idea of making better decisions" and "It'll be good to know why we're doing something".

I'll save the details of what kind of research you might conduct for another post (i.e. the details of surveys or interviews), but I will say it's good to conduct research before planning occurs. Yet, even given the fortuitous circumstance of management support, research in an organizational setting must be applied (as compared to academic research, which responds primarily to philosophical questions than business ones). Applied research is research intended to serve an organization's goals and objectives.

The trick with overly scientific research--this is when you get into things like random sampling, standards of deviation, etc.--is that it can become all too easy and tempting to get caught up in the details of your research and lose sight of the bigger picture. If too much time passes, if your methodology and indeed your results seem too abstruse or removed from the organization's goals, you become vulnerable to a loss of management support.

If, on the other hand, you the researcher set a research timeline for yourself ahead of time--and every task, from a project management point of view, should have a timeline--then it will be easy to determine when you've conducted sufficient research and determine that it's time to move on with what information you've gathered and enter into the next, planning stage.

It may be difficult to do this. As a researcher, you may find that as you acquire information, you will be inclined to probe further with deeper questions and seek new and more sophisticated answers. But again, this path can stray from the organization's path and lose management support in the process. What you must concede as you conduct research is that you cannot answer every question about your clients due to time constraints but you will get further along than you were beforehand and begin to understand the demographics of potential customers (whether it's your firm's leaders or external clients).

Ultimately, you must execute. You must make plans and, again, you must execute. Research informs planning activities and as you explain to management the basis of your planning decisions, you can proudly point to the research you conducted. That is much better than planning based on hunches, impressions or "just because", which is, sadly, what a lot of public relations and marketing individuals do. It is good to have a foundation for your decisions and for the direction of your communications program.

Even if your first round of research doesn't uncover everything you wanted to--and it likely won't--you have at least established a good direction. So while you're developing goals and objectives during the subsequent planning stage and selecting tactics to achieve them, you can also begin thinking in the back of your mind: what research must I conduct next? Likely, if you've made good planning decisions as a result of your first round of research, you will have the opportunity to conduct more in-depth research in the future, and while the communications program is underway, because management will already decide that you're heading in the right direction. You will often be given the license to continue mining information (which leads to the sophisticated Q&A that is the result) so that, in the long term, even while you're executing, you'll become even more aware of the business environment in which you operate, and will become a valued member of the organization's team.

CRM Wins with Marketing and Public Relations

One benefit of bringing a public relations background into marketing management (like I am) is that you're unlikely to either a) drive too hard for an immediate sale that misses opportunities for long-term brand loyalty, or b) linger on facilitating good relationships that never quite influence the behavior of your audience in the intended fashion. Of course, it is ideal for both sides to work together; culture wars between marketing and PR can lead to low morale or uncertain goals as I have learned in the past, to my chagrin. One great way I've found for both sides to work together is through relationship marketing and the adoption of a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

Such a tool can help marketers identify and segment potential customers for campaigns with strict, shorter-term sales quotas, while public relations has the ability to develop data for more challenging audiences that require more strategic engagement, loyalty-building touch points and activities that share value and increase the attractiveness of your service offerings.

At Gelman, Rosenberg & Freedman, we began collecting and segmenting business prospects into ACT by Sage, a fairly well-known CRM tool. It's taken a mental leap on my part to get past thinking of data entry as only a mindless administrative task and the process has been assisted by two items. First, from a process point of view, our marketing team commits only a limited period of time to data entry so there is never the sense that we are neglecting more strategic duties (and in fact, developing the knowledge about business prospects that can result from research and data entry has become aligned with such duties). Secondly, though, we are already seeing immediate results on new engagement opportunities with nonprofits and government contractors we otherwise would not have had otherwise.

CRM was the topic of a recent post by Tina Lewandowski on the Association of Accounting Marketing's LinkedIn group page. She asked for recommendations of various CRM tools and among those mentioned (and praised) were Microsoft Dynamic's CRM, Interaction and ContactEase.

As greater numbers of business operations move toward the realm of cloud computing, there is a similar shift as well from license-based CRM tools such as ACT toward software as a service, which allows for easier user access and more affordable services; software services are delivered over the Internet, often using a pay-as-you-go model. Salesforce.com is developing a good reputation in some circles.

No matter which tool you utilize however, CRM can satisfy both the shorter-term goals of sales and marketing campaigns while also allowing public relations teams to identify and reach out to higher-value prospects who cannot be engaged so quickly or easily. It can keep marketing and PR working together in a friendly way as they pursue their distinct goals while keeping helpful information about your desired customers or stakeholders always in front of you.

Image: healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Check Yourself at the Door for Effective Communications

How often have you received a marketing or public relations message dripping with the intent of the sender? A media pitch oozing with self-promotion? Marketing collateral inflated with puffery and self-congratulatory language?

We are all needful creatures, pursuing solutions to our own unique equations of personal and professional satisfaction, and the examples above reflect that self-focused side of human nature--the side that wants to win, to take, to get.

Perhaps more than in any other field, however, professional communicators must recognize the proclivity to speak in this manner, bolstered by the semantics, signposts and expressions of their own personal worlds of meaning rather than in the language and constructs of meaning of those they wish would respond. No wonder our field can have a bad reputation; too many poor practitioners demonstrate complete disregard for their audience and their needs and, in doing so, not only isolate potential clients and supporters but leave a bad taste in their mouths.

Effective communications requires that we abandon ourselves, check ourselves at the door, render ourselves invisible, and tune ourelves to the needs and desires of our audience. Effective communications requires that we understand a world beyond our own.

Misunderstandings can rear themselves in the nastiest of ways--political belligerence, war, broken relationships. While professionals in other fields sometimes don't quite 'get' what it is that we do, this list of tragedies reflects what can happen when professional communicators (or at least the capabilities for effective communications) are absent.

But then, what about the human side of communicators? Who will look out for us? Who will satisfy OUR needs if we sacrifice ourselves to the worlds of our audiences?

An old adage states that one must give before one gets. Not coincidentally, listening, understanding and responding to others is generally recommended as the first step for any individual or organization wishing to develop a presence in the social media space. Social media may be new but...the more things change, apparently, the more things stay the same.

What professional communicators receive as the reward for doing their jobs well is a response. How many frustrated salespeople or marketers wonder why no one listens to them or responds with loyalty or purchased services? How many so-called professionals remain locked in a world of their personal signposts and semantics, believing their words represent actual communication while no one listens?

Our audiences will be attracted to us when we speak in a language familiar to their world. Every one of us is bombarded daily by the messages, advertisements and pitches of others, generating emptiness, stress, loneliness. How rare a thing is it to be spoken to in our language of meaning and need? Is it any wonder then, when that rare instance happens, audiences are attracted?

To communicate this way is neither manipulation nor unethical. So long as our communications are accurate and elicit expectations for goods and services that truly can be delivered by our organizations in the manner we describe, then our conduct--checking ourselves at the door and communicating in the language of our audiences and their needs--becomes a boon and a source of greater competitiveness in the marketplace.

Whenever I think of the power to attract audiences with professional messaging, I think of the scene in Star Wars when Obi-Wan Kenobi commands a risky situation to turn away unwanted attention from Imperial stormtroopers. He utilizes intense but graceful, calm though powerful, reassuring though intentful words to achieve his desired results. Although we may never find ourselves in the Tatooine desert needing to schlep some droids to the planet of Alderaan, the results we can elict are often the same as those of the Jedi Knight.

And remember, Obi-Wan Kenobi was the good guy.

Social Bookmarking for Research

Last year, I read an article about social bookmarking in PRSA's Tactics. At the time, I was unfamiliar with sites such as Delicious, which allow users to store web pages and electronic files of interest. Once you register for a free Delicious account, you're given the option of downloading a toolbar, which thus allows you to bookmark a web page with a single button click.

As you can probably tell by my last sentence, I've since gone ahead and started using Delicious, and it's been a great benefit. You can not only bookmark sites with one click, but you can also organize them using a Tags field. Delicious will save your tag entries, so once you've entered a tag once--such as blogging, or social media, or November elections--bookmarking future sites with the same tags becomes much easier. Just type the first few letters of your tag in the relevant field and Delicious will automatically "guess" using your personal history of tags and populate the field with the full name.

On your personal Delicious page, your column of tags appears on the right side of the screen, allowing you to review all categories under which you've saved pages (as well as the number of pages linked to each tag).

This is, first of all, an easier and more user-friendly way of storing websites than Internet Explorer's Favorites service. Fewer button clicks are involved, the storage system is much more organized, and the layout of stored websites and tags is much more readable. Finally, the social aspect of bookmarking means research with colleagues within an organization or an industry can benefit from multiple users; you can share your tags and stored sites with other Delicious users.

Most mornings, when I go to work, the first thing I do is open Google Reader to scan marketing and PR blogs for posts of interest in various categories. I don't read most of them right then, unless they are particularly relevant to what I am doing that day, that week or maybe that month. But some may be relevant to projects I know are coming but which I haven't thought about yet. Opening posts with such content and clicking Delicious' tag button at the top of the screen allows me to do an instant save under clearly defined tags--"website design", "market research", etc.--so I can save the posts as informational resources when planning those projects.

Working as marketing director at Gelman, Rosenberg & Freedman, CPAs in Bethesda, MD, I am happy to share my links with other marketing team colleagues at the firm, or with non-competing marketing colleagues in industry groups such as the Association of Accounting Marketing or CPAmerica International.

I did issue one public request to share bookmarks to colleagues in an industry group, and got no takers. I don't believe sites such as Delicious have the same notoriety as social media tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. But I believe social bookmarking presents an excellent opportunity to not only store resources for research projects but also to share your results with others who can benefit (and who can provide you with similar resources as well.)

By the way, I am not affiliated nor have I ever been affiliated with anyone with a stake in the success of Delicious.

Copyright Infringement and The Social Network

Maybe it's all the studying I've been doing for the APR exam that's got me thinking about copyrights and The Social Network, which I saw the other day at the Avalon on Connecticut Avenue. Very good movie, though my wife did compare it somewhat disparagingly to The Graduate for its lack of an iconic message for our times. Harsh.

The crux of the film is the issue of whether Mark Zuckerberg "stole" the idea of Facebook from some Harvard crew champions--buff, muscled Aryan types who actually exhibited more personality in the film than you'd expect from your typical baddies. (They decided pummeling the scrawny computer programmer was inappropriate, as other baddies in other films might do, since they were "Men of Harvard". Very interesting).

Whether it happened this way in real life or if it was merely dramatized, these two rich guys/students (blond twins, naturally) first connected with Zuckerberg after learning about his reputation as a first-rate programmer. They asked him to help develop an exclusive social networking site for them and their 'elite' Harvard friends. Zuckerberg said he'd help, then apparently led them on for several weeks telling them he was working on code for the site, or was too busy to work on the site, or this thing or that thing with them apparently growing more and more perplexed with his excuses while he, inspired by the idea of an "exclusive" social networking site, pursued his own vision for what that might look like. Soon Harvard students were introduced to Facebook and the crew champions hit the roof.

Is that copyright infringement? Judging by the facts presented in the movie, the answer is an unequivocal no. Copyright law states that an idea is protected from public use as soon as a creative expression of the idea exists; when the Harvard crew guys met up with Zuckerberg, they had an idea for an exclusive social networking site but it did not exist in any manifest form. There may be other areas of legality surrounding intellectual property that I'm not as familiar with but in terms of whether these Harvard guys could reasonably claim a copyright on an elite social networking site, it only existed in conversation until Zuckerberg came along.

Additionally, if they DID want to complain about his theft, they themselves might have been asked to answer to the fact that they were 'borrowing' the idea of a social networking site in the first place. But as Zuckerberg says during the film, look, you have an idea for a chair, and chairs have existed for a long time. But you still have the legal right to make and sell your own chair.

The Social Network does suggest that Zuckerberg did make a kind of gentleman's agreement with the Harvard crew guys in agreeing to help them in the first place and then was less than candid with them as he pursued his own vision for an exclusive social network (Facebook, based on 'friends'). There are ethical issues there, no doubt. But if the question comes down to legal issues, then it wouldn't seem he broke any laws.

Of course, the film does conclude with the news that he settled a lawsuit with the Harvard crew guys for $65 million, so there might have been other issues involved in the real-life play-by-play that didn't make it to celluloid. But that goes beyond the scope the film The Social Network and this post. The movie was very much worth seeing and I recommend it to anyone who'd care to see how a social network phenomenon came to life.

Do You Want Management to Think You Are an Expert?

I just came across a list in a communications textbook that identifies four types of public relations professionals. The first, a "communications technician", is an individual responsible for process-oriented tasks--writing newsletters and copy for collateral, producing and distributing news releases, maintaining a contact database, etc. The role is purely tactical and more often than not represents the first role in a young public relations practitioner's career.

The third and fourth classifications of professional reflect strategic roles in which they understand their clients' business and industry, and are capable of making informed recommendations based on environmental scanning, risk assessments and relationship-building opportunities with key publics. Yet it is the second classification of professional--the "expert prescriber"--that most interests me as a potential danger to the client organization and the practitioner.

I was once hired by an organization to generate publicity for projects the company believed had newsworthy value within its target industries. Fair enough. If you haven't proactively done this before and if you believe you are doing newsworthy work, why not pursue this? I was hired as the public relations expert and, as such, was expected by management to build relationships with and deliver visibility in tier 1 media markets.

There were warning signs even at the beginning which, if I'd been more experienced at the time, I would have recognized as dangers-in-waiting. First, in this role I had no access to top management, and therefore lacked insight into key issues impacting the organization. With this knowledge, I might have had the tools to make more strategic decisions about which media markets to focus on. My new role also included responsibility for producing internal publications requiring significant communication with employees to develop accurate and in-depth copy; this essentially brought an overwhelming overlap of technical and strategic responsibilities. Finally, representatives of middle management often did not attend meetings to discuss activity in their departments.

When I was hired, it was as the public relations expert and, as such, little corresponding sense of responsibility remained with management to participate in the public relations process. No champion for PR existed in the suite of top management professionals. Any and all PR within the organization fell in my lap, no matter how essential collaborations were to success.

My relationship with the organization did not end well. I was an "expert" who ultimately was not deemed an expert. The failure was not entirely that of the organization, but a failure of my ability to lay out (at the beginning of my tenure) realistic expectations and an explanation of resources needed to attain the success the organization wished to achieve.

The dangers of being an "expert" were apparent almost immediately; without the participation, buy-in and endorsement from top management public relations can accomplish little. Of the four types of public relations professional, the role as "expert prescriber" has the potential to present the most danger.

Mismanaging the 9/11 Tribute Says a Lot about America Today

This was the first year since 2002 that I woke up and had to be reminded by a news broadcast that it was 9/11. Time passes and our lives accumulate the detritus of daily responsibilities. But nine years later, the terrorist attacks seem no less horrible nor does my memory of the morning fade; I remember the clear blue sky of Washington, DC where I worked two blocks from the White House. I remember facilitating a morning event for the Science and Technology Fellows at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I remember the phone call I got from my friend Greg who first told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

Earlier today, as I was perusing my Facebook page, I came across the image of a 9/11 tribute flag on the feed of a high school friend (see above).

I added it to my feed as well, believing it a noble tribute to the 3,000 Americans who lost their lives that day. Well, it was a noble tribute. It may have also been a partisan ploy for publicity.

When the flag appeared on my Facebook feed, a small subhead also appeared under the image that read "Being Conservative". Whether I am conservative or not isn't important. If it had said "Being Liberal", I would have been just as disappointed. Needless to say, I removed the flag. Or rather, I removed the flag that happened to be attached to a partisan message.

One memory I have from just after 9/11 is when Republican and Democratic members of Congress sang God Bless America together in a striking and moving show of bi-partisanship. As one commenter on YouTube wrote about this video, "This always makes me cry...."

Two days ago, CNNMoney.com ran an article entitled "U.S. Losing Competitive Edge". In terms of international competitiveness, America slipped behind Sweden and Singapore to the number four spot on the list of all nations (we were already behind Switzerland before the list was published). One of the contributing factors to the loss of our competitiveness is that: "the United States is hamstrung by its distrust of politicians".

That we have become more partisan as a nation is plain to see. That our sick economy is sinking beneath the weight of bloated debt on one hand and inconceivable levels of unemployment on the other is also clear. That this alarming situation has not brought political leaders together to devise solutions on behalf of one nation that has experienced three horrible years is a tragedy beyond words.

These three horrible years still do not compare to the horror of 9/11. But when we honor 9/11 by "being conservative", we lose America. That's the road we seem to be on now and that is, unfortunately, yet one more tragedy.

Let all Americans always remember the 3,000 people who lost their lives nine years ago. Let us also work together to improve our economy and bring a new dawn to the United States.

Signed,

"Being American"

When Twitter Should Take a Back Seat

As Twitter allows us to do more things--segment follower lists, add bling to profile pages and categorize topic-related tweets via hashtags--it's easy to come worship at the altar of Twitter. What can't it do? Twitter is a great communications tool!

Except when it's not.

In honor of Ethics Month, the Public Relations Society of America held a Twitter chat about ethics on September 2 and posted the transcript on their website.

In a recent tweet, I complained how difficult it was to make sense of the transcript as it recorded every retweet announcing the chat beforehand. And the hashtags are all in blue which, when set against the black font of the actual conversation, makes for difficult reading. I guess this is what a transcript, literally defined, is supposed to be. But I didn't read it.

I'm a proud member of PRSA and am less than two months from sitting for my Accreditation in Public Relations exam. As a result, I was eager to read what people had to say about ethics--but then was quickly turned off when I saw how difficult it was to read.

@joederupo replied with a tweet reminding me that an edited transcript (which, I suppose, I was indirectly requesting) might somehow and somewhere intersect with the PRSA Code of Ethics as it pertains to accuracy and transparency.

I think that's a little ridiculous. I'm not here to serve Twitter; Twitter is here to serve me. And if Twitter is supposed to be a communications tool, it should facilitate not inhibit communications.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, if you wanted to be a web designer, you needed to know HTML. Nowadays, WYSIWYG content management software can help get past that problem (even though it's still good to know HTML!).

Similarly, there has to be some way of documenting Twitter chats that doesn't make the reading experience a painful turn-off.

In Hamlet, there was a yammering old man named Polonius who kept talking and talking; he had some memorable lines but most of what he spouted was hot air. Finally, the irritated queen who was forced to listen to Polonius told him: "More matter with less art."

When I'm using Twitter, hashtags and retweet symbols (RT) are useful tools. In a transcript though, especially if you're presenting it for public consumption, less art would be much appreciated.

Some Problems with Marketing Language

It drives me crazy the way some phrases get bandied about in the communications world (or elsewhere). I don't believe they contribute to effective strategy or success in your marketing programs; they have been overused to the point of making them meaningless.

"Doing More with Less"--The only way to do more with less is to develop improved skill sets, efficiencies or communications among existing team members when resources are dwindling. This prevents a weakening in your competitiveness and may, in fact, improve it. Client concerns about restructuring or downsizing in your business become irrelevant as the level of service they are used to does not undergo significant change--or improves, if the efficiencies or enhanced skill sets are executed as intended. If, however, your team already has "the right people on the bus", as Jim Collins would have it, it's likely that a loss can deal a real, significant blow. "Doing more with less" could more effectively be articulated to mean 'efficient', 'strategic' and 'results-oriented'. During times when resources that used to be available no longer are, these adjectives (assuming they accurately reflect your business) sound more compelling than one trite phrase and brings value you're offering a client to the forefront of your marketing language.

"Under Promise and Over Deliver"--It's ridiculous to underpromise levels of service in a highly competitive world like today's. If you're out bidding, you won't get the job because someone else "is" promising your business prospect the moon. Never mind if they can deliver. Sure there may be one unhappy client down the line ripe for the picking, but if your philosophy is to underpromise, you won't get the job even then. Not only that, but clients, like other human beings, don't necessarily like surprises. Over delivery sometimes means making assumptions about what a client wants and if you make the wrong assumption, well, that won't make the client happy. You may want to happily surprise a client with additional expertise they weren't expecting...but why not articulate this expertise during the bidding process? Wouldn't that make you more attractive from the get go? Listen to your client to find out what they want, set goals, define a strategy for getting there, and then just do it. It's not dramatic but your client will be back for more.

You Think You're Not Doing PR?...Think Again!

For those of you who believe you're not doing public relations...for those who think you HIRE people to do public relations, here's a story for you:

A few weeks ago, in a neighborhood close to Denver that will remain nameless, I had two not-so-great experiences in a period of only five minutes that helped me form a powerfully negative opinion about that neighborhood at the speed of light. As I was walking down the sidewalk past some business buildings, two women headed toward me, chatting with each other. They did not do anything to give me space to walk by; they simply took up the entire breadth of the sidewalk, forcing me to step down into the access road to the parking lot. Pretty rude, I thought--I had to look both ways to make sure no cars were coming before I stepped down--but then I let the matter drop.

Just a few minutes later, though, I was leaving a branch of the Wells Fargo Bank, I saw a father with two children coming up behind me to leave as well. I held the door; the two kids walked through, no big deal, and then so did the father, not touching the door to take responsibility for it, not thanking me, not even LOOKING at me, as he came through, slowly ushering his kids along.

If it had been just one bad incident, those would have been some rude people. But then another one happened shortly thereafter, and my opinion of the neighborhood just plummeted. I guess these are the kinds of people who live here, I thought. And I've shared that story with other friends, ensuring they have some negative association with that neighborhood now, as well.

Your actions have an impact on those around you and on the opinions they form; you represent where you are and what you do. In this simple way, there is no such thing as a PR practitioner; whenever you interact with someone...you leave an impression. You are always doing public relations.

Fascination with the Abomination Makes for Despicable Advertising

Yesterday, someone I follow on Twitter issued a tweet to this video. WARNING: it is graphic, disturbing and gruesome.

The point of the video is to show what horrible things can result when you let yourself get distracted by your mobile phone when you're driving. This is something I also feel strongly about: if someone is calling when I'm driving, I'll most likely let the call go to voice mail or, if it's a call I have to respond to, I may answer, but only to explain that I'm driving and will call back when I arrive at my destination.

Yet, I despise advertising that resorts to terrifying people. This will happen to you unless....etc. I don't believe graphic depictions of teenage-girls getting mutilated in a car accident is the right way to warn people away from using their cell phones while driving. If this tactic works, and I don't know that it does, it ends up leaving me feeling depressed and no longer giving a crap about cell phones at all.

In some ways, it's a lot like advertisers who develop such incredibly creative and appealing ads for television that viewers forget to associate a particular brand with the ad simply because there is such strong entertainment value in the images.

The two are a lot alike. Except that ads that rely on scare tactics are cheap and indulge in our base fascination with violence.

PR People Should Walk a Mile in Reporters' Shoes

A lot of PR people come from journalism and for good reason. They have prior experience going through the hassle of developing and delivering stories on deadline, even when people don't call back or seem unwilling to talk to you. Consequently, once they enter the PR world, they're more likely to be helpful to journalists calling for information. They've been there before.

PR pros who have never walked a mile in those scuffed, well-worn shoes--and I'm guessing many haven't--should try some freelance writing to see what it's like. I recently wrote an article that meant calling several utilities to schedule interviews with their Smart Grid experts. Some PR people were incredibly receptive and helpful; others were cool and detached like concierges checking me into a hotel, and I had no confidence they would put me in touch with the people I needed to speak with. Many of these--my absolute favorites!--simply said, with a false cheerful lilt in their voice that they'd call back once they made contact with their experts. And then they never did.

I sometimes fail to understand what leads some people into the PR profession. The role of PR is to help people and establish effective professional relationships. If you aren't willing to help a reporter out, why are you there? Try writing an article with an editor breathing down your neck to ensure you deliver your copy on deadline. It's a great way to improve your media relations skills.

Tweeting For Your Nonprofit (Part II)

Below are additional tips and suggestions for improving your nonprofit’s exposure by using Twitter. These follow a post generated on Sunday, June 7.

4. Follow Your Impact on Twitter By Monitoring Retweets

How are your followers responding to your tweets? Are they retweeting your messages to disseminate them to an even wider audience? Occasionally, click your profile name on the menu that appears on the right side of the screen to find out how many tweets sent by other tweeple reference your profile name. Many could include retweets of former postings you generated. Continue building this loyalty among followers so they become great mouthpieces for your organization and its cause.

5. Drive Followers to Your Web Site (and Measure the Impact)

Thanks to http://www.tinyurl.com/, Twitter users can convert long URL addresses into short pithy links to web sites, which can be embedded in tweets. Indeed, an excellent way to ensure a loyal audience of Twitter followers is to serve as a reliable information resource. Sending Tiny URL links to other web pages and documents is a good way to do that. If you monitor the traffic your web site receives (and if you don't, you should), you can measure the impact of tweets on your followers by tweeting links to your web site (perhaps to new videos, pages or project success stories recently posted) and then determining whether your web traffic has increased. It's not an exact science, but if you notice a significant uptick in your web site visitors shortly after you've posted a tweet with a web site link, you'll have a good guess why people came by).

6. Tweet Often

As Woody Allen said, fifty percent of success is just showing up. Or was it sixty, or seventy or eighty percent? I forget, but the point remains. Tweeting often convinces your followers and the Twitterverse that you're in it for the long haul, that you didn't just set up an account to see what it is like. One tweet I received the other day linked to an article claiming that more than 80 percent of Twitter profiles have fewer than 10 followers. Individuals just passing through don't interest other tweeple and so, to ensure you are not one of those, tweet loud and tweet often. You'll generate respect and engagement (though it may take time) and, in the end, you'll have discovered a great tool that is already having a huge impact in online communications and allows you to spread the word about your great cause and mission!

Tweeting For Your Nonprofit (Part I)

I wish Twitter had been around back in the days when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sri Lanka and the communications director of a non-profit humanitarian organization, American Near East Refugee Aid. Twitter can help communications professionals connect with new supporters, donors and other stakeholders, and develop exposure for the needs facing underserved populations around the world. For those professionals currently tasked with fundraising and generating visibility for your mission or who want to incorporate the use of Twitter into your marketing strategy, here are a few tips and suggestions.

1. Find mutually passionate individuals utilizing Twitter and hashtags

If your organization uses Twitter, one way to reach potential supporters is to find them with hashtags. Tweets are often followed by a number sign and word (e.g. #gaza). These "hashtags" offer a system for filing tweets by subject. At http://www.hashtags.org/, enter a keyword that is critical to your mission in the box at the top of the screen. Other individuals who have tweeted about this subject with the hashtag will appear in a list that scrolls down the screen. (ANERA, the organization I worked for, provides aid to economically and socially challenged individuals in the Middle East, hence my above example of the Gaza hashtag). Checking out the profiles of those tweeting about subjects related to your mission may encourage you to follow those matching your target audiences. In turn, the connection you establish may encourage them to follow you, as well, creating the basis for a relationship.

2. Find Reporters Who Tweet

Keep a sharp eye out for articles that appear in traditional media related to your mission and/or cause. More and more reporters are using Twitter, and it would be worthwhile, when you find articles highlighting your area of concern, to research the reporter online and determine whether they have Twitter profiles. Following reporters positions you to serve as a resource (and a potential interview source) as they develop more editorial related to the subject. Establishing a Twitter connection also provides access to the reporter's followers, another channel for identifying stakeholders. Scrolling through these followers can help you find other individuals your organization may want to know about, as many of them likely are interested in the same topic as you (i.e. the type of editorial generated by the reporter).

3. Follow Other Fundraising/Charitable Organizations

Are organizations utilizing Twitter to generate coverage for a capital fundraising campaign? Are they tweeting statistics to highlight the plight of underserved populations around the world and to encourage donations? Social media has been, is, and maybe always will be a work-in-progress and in flux. Following other organizations to find out how they are maximizing the value of their presence on Twitter can provide you with ideas or examples for how to successfully execute a communications strategy. One internationally-oriented organization that has a great presence (and a lot of followers!) on Twitter is @charitywater. Another good one is @theonecampaign.

My Peace Corps Assignment in Sri Lanka (Part I)

(In light of Sri Lanka's high profile these past few weeks, and the end of the 26-year-old war between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil Tigers, I submit this multi-part entry on my assignment as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sri Lanka from 1997 to 1998).

When the Peace Corps pulled its volunteers out of Sri Lanka in 1998, I didn't want to go. That year marked the 50th anniversary of Sri Lanka's independence from England and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, an organized group of militants who'd fought for a Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern parts of the country since 1983, had broadened its operations beyond the capital of Colombo to other parts of the country. The Tigers had long been known for their public relations and fundraising successes and 1998, an important symbolic year, provided the chance to grab national and international headlines once again.

As an English language instructor working with the majority Sinhalese in Kandy, I felt reasonably safe. The city had not been targeted in the past nor had the central, western and southern parts of the country, which usually were left in peace. Naturally, these were the areas where Peace Corps stationed its volunteers.

Then came February 1998. By February, I'd been in-country nine months, spoke the Sinhalese language well enough and could travel with relative ease. I was also due for a vacation. Most of the other volunteers were in distant parts of the country, so I couldn't effectively make plans with them (for lack of access to phones), and, anyway, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my time or where I wanted to go; consequently I made no effort to reach out, not even to my friend Kevin in Beliatta, to find out if anyone wanted to travel.

I ended up, unsurprisingly, in Unawatuna, a sadly unheralded beach resort of great splendor in southern Sri Lanka, not far from Galle, where I intended to do little more than read, eat, swim, wander the beach and practice my Sinhalese with the waiters for several days. Despite my rare visits here, the wait staff knew me. Any foreigner who can speak the local language is not easily forgotten. It was on my second or third morning in Unawatuna when I was sitting on the patio of the Happy Banana Restaurant and Hotel, near the Indian Ocean. A hazy heat dulled my senses--though I'd just woken up, I still felt groggy--and, gazing out at the waves, flickering fairies of bouncing sunlight seared my brain, urging me to turn away. I was slow with my eggs and coffee; my mind was a million miles away and when the waiter came by with a plate of sliced bananas, I had to ask him to repeat what he'd just said.

He said it again and this time when I asked him to repeat himself, it wasn't because I hadn't heard his words but because I wasn't sure I'd understood them correctly. With infinite patience, the waiter explained yet again that a suicide bomber had driven a truckload of explosives into the Dalada Maligawa, the world-famous Buddhist temple, in the heart of Kandy, less than two miles from my home. Nearly 20 people had been killed. I had visited the temple recently; the truck had exploded in an place I'd been less than two weeks before.

My first reaction, right there, should have been to call the Peace Corps office in Colombo, tell them I was not in Kandy and that I was all right. But a fairly emotional 25-year-old doesn't always think practically. In a somewhat confused state, I instead left Unawatuna for Galle and caught a bus back to Kandy. I had no real plan or any idea what I was doing or why I was going back. It truly was a rather stupid thing to do. Throughout the journey, I tried feeling out the locals around me--how many of them had heard the news? Did they seem quieter than usual? Did they seem shocked? It was hard to tell; the Sinhalese tend to be a stoical people by nature, and it wasn't until hours later, after I'd switched buses in Colombo and we arrived at the first sentry post on the way into the hill country that I had my first inclination that the impact of the bombing was already rippling through the country.

Sentry points are a daily reality in a war-torn nation such as Sri Lanka; I'd learned to take them in stride. In fact, my experiences only left me only with a sense of entitlement. As a foreigner who could speak Sinhalese, I was obviously not to be toyed with. The guards who had no problems jostling around the locals and irreverently probing through their belongings, treated me like royalty, offering me drinks of water, patting me good-naturedly on the back, and acting as though my comfort was a top priority for them. Well...not today, however. On the afternoon that the Kandy bomb exploded, the sentries who stopped our bus in the foothills of the hill country showed no trace of the good humor I'd become used to. They grabbed and rifled through my bag in the same perfunctory manner which with they investigated everyone else's baggage, made no effort at eye contact and showed no trace of a smile.

I made it through the checkpoint, as did everyone else. But as everyone boarded again and the bus churned up endless switchbacks into the deep green jungle, higher into the hill country and got closer to Kandy, I began to doubt, for the first time, the wisdom of my return. I had an indescribable sense of silence, of absence, of being among people whose lives were no longer there in the bus with me, or among conversation, or social interaction, or of looking through the windows or at the lone foreigner on the bus. Eyes were cast every which way; really, it made no difference. But the one consistency, I thought, was in my ability to sense deep, violent thinking on the part of my bus companions. It was obvious they knew what had happened; if they'd been simply shocked before the sentry point, the visible anger of the guards had, it seemed, given these Sinhalese citizens the permission they needed to tap into their own well of bitterness and fury at the Tamils who had attacked the most precious cultural relic in the country. It was one thing to attack banks and hotels in the capital, symbols of economic wealth, as the Tigers were wont to do. It was another thing to attack the soul of the Sinhalese identity.

During the first few hours of the trip, most people on the bus had sat quietly, unmoving, dwelling more than expressing. But I began to notice some odd twitches now, especially among the men, as though an emotional foundation for action was being laid. I didn't know what this meant. I didn't know if or how the Sinhalese had yet responded to the strike against the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy. But it did seem as though I were entering a place where the breaking of a single, psychical string could potentially unleash some really dreadful events.

(Part II to come soon.)

4.4 million People Were Hired in January

Notwithstanding the Dow Jones nosedive today, the last few months have offered indications that the stock market is showing something slightly better than a flat line. The cover of this week's New Yorker even takes a somewhat Lord of the Rings-ish approach to offering glimpses of hope for future days. (Anyone who has seen that visual of a construction worker perched atop the steel-beam frame of a skyscraper and gazing thoughtfully at a fluttering butterfly nearby may recall Gandalf's visitation by an innocent-seeming moth as he's stranded at the top of Saruman's tower with nary a friend in sight.)

But unless you've been asleep for the past two years, you'll assumedly know by now that there is no one indicator of the health of the economy and while the Dow Jones may be up nearly 2,000 points since scraping rock bottom back in early March, several other "cheerful" reminders that we are no longer out of Mirkwood wax profusely. Today's disappointing retail sales report from April (indirect author of the Dow Jones plummet), escalating housing foreclosures and last week's Department of Labor report limning the more than 500,000 lost jobs in April alone vouch for our continued descent into an economic Dante's Inferno.

That's why I really appreciated a rich-media presentation by Forbes Magazine from several months ago called "How to Find a Job". It's been sitting in my e-mail inbox for some time (sent to me by I can't even remember who) but highlighting this very distinct fact: "4.4 million people were hired in January." That's according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wow. I mean, wow. Who'd've thunk it? Of course the report explains that this statistic is like the equivalent of a lone, uplifting jester prancing around a broader, gloomier and more harrowing Shakespearean tragedy of statistics riveting audiences with endless numbers of lost jobs and an increasing percentage of unemployment, leading to more competition, naturally, for every available position.

But the article does so to make a point, which is that finding a job these days requires a few key elements: 1) stop sending out massive amounts of resumes; 2) be creative; 3) network like crazy. I will not go so far as to call the 4.4 million statistic "green shoots"; aside from its trite, overused and frankly, dumb, phrasing, green shoots will not get at the heart of what unemployed folk such as myself must recognize in the coming months and, okay, I'll say it, possibly years.

In a BusinessWeek article from last week, "Jobs: What a Rebound Will Look Like", Moira Herbst suggests that temp hiring will lead the way. It makes sense. Coincidentally, a friend in New York who'd lost her job in early March just began a temp-to-hire position yesterday. That could be what the new job market will look like in the near-term future: a slow ride back up. The economy has been burned, like, really badly these past couple years and investments will crawl back only slowly. And yet, there were those 4.4 million jobs back in January, according to Forbes.

Everyone has a theory on how the employment market will shape up in the near-term. Why blog about it? Why add one more voice? Forbes and BusinessWeek are about as reputable as you can get. What I especially like about the Forbes article is its emphasis on doing more than what job seekers typically do, which is sending out resumes and which, thanks to a glowing economy over the past 20 years, has been usually sufficient to win the prize. Well, I'll tell you, this country is down on its luck right now, and if job-seekers have to step outside the box a little, stand a little taller, think a little more creatively and entrepreneurially to get back in the game, then so be it. I'd hate to think America is an outdated old spinster on its way out to pasture, and if it takes a little more octane and some extraordinary motivation on the part of employment seekers to snag one of those 4.4 million jobs then so be it. We've been lazy for far too long.

Going Green in Denver is a Dirty Business

Last weekend, I volunteered at the Green Festival in Denver, co-hosted by Green America and Global Exchange. My assignment was to oversee a recycling, composting and trash station on the trade show floor. Throughout my four-hour shift, exhibitors and attendees stopped by. In many cases, they knew where to put their waste. Other times, I had to help out. Most of the discarded products--plates, napkins and food waste--went right into the compost bin. What surprised some people was that the utensils went there, too; the food vendors were using products made of corn. Occasionally, when I was engaged in routing one person's waste to the correct bin, I didn't have time to get to someone else who ended up dropping such items in the trash bin. In those cases, my hands encased in latex gloves, I went foraging through the trash to dig it out. Not fun, but after a while, it became second nature to rummage through all the discarded items.

It wasn't always easy to figure out where discarded items belonged, though. Our volunteer leader, for example, said one particular kind of fork belonged in the trash. He snapped one in front of me, pointed out how the easy break revealed it as cheap plastic, and then threw it away. And yet, about a half hour later, he returned with a sheepish expression. He'd checked the box the forks had come in and admitted he'd made a mistake, that in fact, those forks could be composted too.

There is a lot involved in learning how to go green and, in some cases, it is a dirty job. Many items were recycled: Tetra Pak juice containers, e-waste such as batteries, and bottle caps. Aveda has a bottle-cap recycling program. After a few hours, someone came over with a giant, empty, plastic meal container. It had obviously come from outside the festival because it looked different from anything I'd seen that day. Sure enough, it had to go into the trash. After all the hours I'd spent routing different products to the recycling and composting bins, that plastic container seemed like the ugliest thing I had seen all day.

One of the most fascinating parts of the day, and which I suppose is the element of going green that people know (or care to know) the least about was when I emptied the bin bags, tied them and brought them through a side door of the well-adorned trade show floor. (The festival was in the Denver convention center). In a low-lit loading dock out back, other members of the green team were emptying waste content from the bin bags onto long, flat tables and sorting through it. The festival had partnerships with different recycling and composting vendors, and sorting through the waste materials was essential to making sure everything ended up going to the right place (in most cases, not to the local landfill). While I was on the trade floor, several people actually asked me who our partners were. I was wearing a staff t-shirt and the assumption they'd made was that I wasn't just the guy standing at the bin station but that I also knew a lot more about the business relationships in place. I wished I could have been more helpful.

Another fascinating part of the green festival was the number of devout and appreciative expressions I received, ones you would expect would be reserved for the likes of heads of state and rock stars. That greatly surprised me. I supposed I might be perceived as the grubby guy sorting through the trash, but this event had drawn loyal and very committed advocates of sustainable living. In hindsight, I suppose, the volunteers monitoring the stations were perceived as nothing less than front-line warriors of the green movement.

By the end of my shift, I had unloaded five composting bags and only one trash bag from the bins while my station partner, who was overseeing the recycling bin, had unloaded three bags. As Thomas Friedman and Auden Schendler have pointed out, the sustainability movement isn't an ethereal, magical party. It's a dirty job. Being on the front line is quite an experience.

Renewable Energy: Not Just for our Wise Elders

Last night, I attended the May meeting of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society at Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden. The topic was "Climate Change and the Role of Concentrating Solar Power" and the speaker was Chuck Kutscher, principal engineer and manager of the Thermal Systems Group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and past chair of the American Solar Energy Society.

Dr. Kutscher spoke about solar energy technologies that can help us achieve sufficient base load generation for the nation's electricity needs while cutting our carbon emissions essentially to nil. His focus last night was concentrating solar power.

What struck me most about the meeting, however, was the average age of the attendee. I would say close to 100 people came to the presentation but no more than five or six were under 40. There is an incredible amount of data, statistics and insights available regarding the current course of global warming and climate change. Dr. Kutscher alluded several times to the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But successfully overcoming the challenges facing our planet will require a long-term effort and the generation of Americans that is only now entering the workforce will need to know as much as possible as soon as possible. So where were they last night?

Both Thomas Friedman in Hot, Flat and Crowded, and Auden Schendler in Getting Green Done address in no uncertain terms the variety of "feel-good" initiatiaves we have chosen to pursue as a society, while patting ourselves on the backs for doing it. Every magazine in the world, it seems, has a green issue out filled with tips and suggestions for how we can all make a personal difference in saving the planet. What bullshit! Friedman and Schendler suggest. And they are right. I wonder, though, if this low-hanging and ultimately unproductive fruit is what most of our younger professionals are drawn to.

It's no secret that engineers and technical specialists have been in short supply in this country for a long time. The work they do is decidedly unsexy, the value of entering these fields has not been sufficiently marketed, and younger generations have been increasingly drawn to other fields. Nevertheless, it is the technical professionals who will ultimately make the greatest contributions toward ending our reliance on fossil fuels and carbon emissions.

Younger professionals who choose to pursue only feel-good efforts won't save the planet. This generation must begin working NOW to develop the technical talent and familiarity with renewable technologies needed to make a real difference, no matter how unsexy it seems.

And yet...there were virtually none of these people at Dr. Kutscher's presentation last night...and that frightens me almost as much as the stark realities of climate change and global warming.

Perspective in Tragedy: Honoring Binghamton and the Rest of Us

This morning the U.S. Department of Labor released its March (un)employment report and, as expected, the numbers were pretty rough, spiking the nation's unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. One amusing aspect of the DOL language--only a dry, bureaucratic government report could pull this one off--was how it described the unemployed as "job losers" (paragraph 4). Even I had to smile. Yes, I am a job loser.

My home page on Internet Explorer is iGoogle, and I subscribe to several news feeds--from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and the Denver Post--so that, whenever I access the Internet, the latest, greatest and most troublesome flotsam and jetsam from the planet at large are summarized in tweet-sized headlines before my very eyes. As expected, the unemployment figures loomed large in virtually every feed window as I initiated the day's perpetually cheerful and long job search.

That is, until Binghamton.

Fourteen people were shot and killed at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, NY earlier today (as of this writing, the shooter is "possibly" included in those statistics, according to the New York Times) with several others injured, some critically. To the extreme credit of the media, the unemployment figures were suddenly given second billing.

I received my undergraduate degree from Binghamton University in 1994 and, as I read through coverage of today's tragedy, several phrases--Broome County, Johnson City--brought me stirringly back to the early '90s when that was a familiar and an incredibly happy landscape in my life. Coincidentally, I also got a message today, before the shooting occurred, from a Binghamton friend whom I recently reconnected with on Facebook.

Of course, I didn't spend my entire college career there. During my freshman and sophomore years, I studied English at Virginia Tech where Seung-Hui Cho massacred 32 students and teachers (and injured more than 20 others) before killing himself back in the spring of 2007. I studied under some of the same professors as Cho, some of whom were quoted in the national media after the massacre, including Edward Falco, an early mentor.

Fast forward to my years with the Peace Corps in Sri Lanka where our group of volunteers was evacuated early from two years of service because the nation's civil war was getting increasingly violent. A suicide bomber detonated himself, killing 17 other people less than two miles from my home in the city of Kandy. The city almost rioted and, over the course of the following weeks, my walk to work as a teacher meant navigating through groups of gun-toting and very dour-looking soldiers who'd been mobilized to either keep watch over suspicious Tamil homes and businesses, or to protect those Tamils from being attacked by furious Sinhalese mobs.

But because the Peace Corps is so concerned about the volunteers' safety, they took us out of Sri Lanka early and I found myself instead working for the organization in a much safer place--the World Trade Center in New York City. No, I wasn't there during 9/11, I had by that unforgettable date moved on to another office job two blocks from the White House.

I hope Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper doesn't read this blog post. He may ask me, rather politely of course, to please leave his city.

How does one make sense of the proximity to so much violence? Is this blog post solipsistic and self-indulgent? Yes, probably. I mean, what about the Sri Lankans themselves who have been suffering from the civil war since 1983? What about Palestinians who have been living in refugee camps for half a century? A friend of mine from Binghamton is Serbian and his country wasn't exactly having an easy time of it when we were hanging out together in the early 1990s. Most importantly, what about those who are no longer with us simply because of today's tragedy in Binghamton or any of the other events mentioned above?

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who's been amusedly hard on President Obama of late, pointed out in a recent New York Times editorial that, for the poor, today's economic downturn literally is an event that could precipitate a struggle between life and death. He's correct and, in one sense, I would argue this represents perhaps the worst tragedy of all since such a perpetually marginalized group will not even enjoy the benefit of a national media spotlight during their final downfall. What did T. S. Eliot say in The Hollow Men?: "This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. "

One of my most powerful memories from Sri Lanka was in the final days of training, just before the 16 of us were to be sworn in as volunteers. A group of Buddhist monks, bald, scary-looking and swaddled in saffron robes, was called upon to deliver a blessing upon this scraggly, smelly group of Americans. As they sat regally in cushioned chairs behind the only table in the room (we, of course, were uncomfortably crouching and complaining about it on the floor), the monks quietly unspooled a ball of thread and asked each of us to press our fingers to a small piece of it. The unspooled thread started with one monk, passed among the volunteers, and ended with another monk at the far end of the table. Throughout the blessing--a chant in Pali, the ancient language of Buddha--it was hard not to feel connected with virtually every being and force in the world. I think that was their intention. Through it all, I kept my eyes closed.

Today's sad events in Binghamton are a powerful reminder. Of what, I won't say, since all it will do is come across like a bad cliche. But it's there anyway. Times are tough right now for millions of people not only in this country but around this world. The economic crisis. The war that is close to ending in Sri Lanka but at the expense of immense human rights abuses. There still is no peace in the Middle East.

I know I am an incredibly lucky man, no matter what my current situation. And in any case, whatever ends up happening, I doubt I'll ever let go of that long piece of thread.

Selling Fear: How to Frighten Americans and Make Money

I'm feeling good.

At the Tattered Cover Bookstore the other day, a certain book title grabbed my attention: The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History by Harry Dent. Searching Amazon.com for similarly inspiring titles later on, I found these lovely little nuggets: Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy by Stephen Leeb and The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It: What You Need to Know about the Greatest Financial Crisis of our Time--and How to Survive It by Dave Kansas.

Reading the book jacket of The Great Depression Ahead, Mr. Dent predicts apocalypse (well, maybe I'm being slightly hyperbolic). However, IF you buy his book, he says, he will provide helpful advice for how you and your family can thrive in the midst of troubled times. And then yesterday, after Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner put forth a plan to purchase toxic assets from banks that set the markets soaring, this is what Mr. Leeb, above-mentioned author and President at Leeb Capital Management, had to say on CNNMoney.com: "The plan is a rehash of what we've seen before and it still doesn't resolve the issue of how to value the bad assets."

He does have have a point about valuing assets; it still is one of the unresolved challenges facing a government that wants to flush out the banks, recapitalize them and restore faith in the markets. I wonder, though, whether Mr. Leeb might also be concerned that if Americans start showing such optimism and confidence as they did yesterday, his book sales may go the way of the Dow Jones last October. Was yesterday an opportunity for him to renew the call for fear and uncertainty?

Fear is a ball bouncing around the wreckage that is our economy today and it took Larry Summers on March 13 to say enough is enough. "It is this transition from an excess of greed to an excess of fear that President Roosevelt had in mind when he famously observed that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself," he was quoted as saying.

Americans have always looked for an easy way to earn easy money or assets: first, the VC crowd was sure it was doing right when it overcapitalized the dot-coms a decade ago. Whoops. Next came the subprime gurus who offered to give...I mean sell you a house without your actually having to pay for it. What we're seeing now is the emergence of fearmongers to tap into people's emotions and there is no emotion like fear to drive people to action.

Insightful salesmen recognize that...and they will take advantage of it. Don't let the books scare you; let's face it, if Warren Buffet can't get through these tough times without taking a hit then neither will you or I, no matter what anyone tells you. And great salesmen can, as the saying goes, sell dirt to a farmer, so it's worth being careful when people get up on their boxes and start telling us the end is nigh. But I actually think, in one way, that this phenomenon of promoting fear for profit is a good sign: it shows that, however much we as American are changing as a result of this crisis, in some ways we are still the same.