Public Relations Worker Density
August 19, 2014
I read “PR Workers Outnumber Journalists in the US.” This write up surprised me for two reasons. I thought that the ratio for PR people to “real” journalists was higher than five PR types to one “real” journalist types. Second, the sample does not seem to include low tier and mid tier consultants who may be PR folk wearing the garb of shaman.
Qualifications for PR professionals vary widely. I recall the halcyon days when I was supposed to provide oversight to a company’s PR outfit. The firm was Ketchum, Macleod. The PR professionals I encountered were friendly sorts and very good at billing. How does one bill a client for 160 hours and handle several other accounts? Magic, I assumed. The pros were adept at bridge, offering to take me out, and confusing my deadlines with other people’s deadlines. It all ended happily. I met with a former Marine and chatted about the magic of billing. Happiness ensured. Did I mention that the PR pros had worked at college newspapers, rock radio stations, and interpersonal networking. Interesting work indeed.
Are PR professionals engaging in a variant of All Hallow’s Day festivities. Image source: http://bit.ly/YtNmwU
The data on which the article is based does not appear to include “rentals.” These are folks who are positioned as experts and generate content. I suggest you read the rather interesting legal document about Gartner Group at http://slidesha.re/1pPsY21.
Another thought that struck me is that outfits like IDC use third party content, edit it, and put their “experts” name on them are engaged in quasi PR. See http://bit.ly/1thUZAJ. In the case of the Schubmehl affair, IDC sold edited and cheerful versions of my research for $3,500. (My attorney was able to stop the sale of these documents carrying the name of the IDC expert, Dave Schubmehl in July 2014.) Are these documents gussied up PR? Are these documents sweetened to facilitate sales? Are these documents the work on which Pat McGovern built his company? PR? You figure it out.
The point is that if one includes the data set in the “Outnumber” article and mix in the “experts” who sell third party endorsements, the number of PR purveyors goes up. Five to one is, in my view, conservative. A different methodology might inflate the ratio. Seven to one? Nine to one? I don’t know. Five to one seems conservative.
The point is that when organizations and individuals need money, almost anything goes. Heroin? No problem. Failing to pay postage? No problem. Surfing on another’s reputation to further one’s own career? No problem. Generating PR dressed up like the All Hallow’s Eve celebrants? No problem.
Stephen E Arnold, August 19, 2014
How Google Deals with Some Negativity
August 19, 2014
Google is attempting to swat away yet another pesky legal matter, this time in U.S. federal court over their Android licensing practices. Why won’t this unpleasantness just go away? Yahoo News shares, “Google Seeks to Dismiss U.S. Antitrust Lawsuit Over Android.” Writer Dan Levine reports:
“Two smartphone customers filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Google Inc. in May, arguing that the way Google licenses Android to smartphone companies like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is unfair to Google’s competitors for search and other mobile services….
“Plaintiff lawyers had argued that Google forces phone manufacturers to set its own search engine as the default on Android phones. Google knows consumers will not go through the trouble of changing those default settings, the lawsuit said, putting competitors at an unfair disadvantage given Android’s global market share.
“‘Google badly wants default search engine status because it results in more paid search-related advertisements,’ the lawsuit said, ‘which are the source of most of its billions and billions of dollars in annual profits.’”
Well, naturally. The question is whether the tactics are legal. Google responded to charges in a court filing, claiming their actions are completely above board. They go so far as to insist their practices foster healthy, legal competition. They do point to customers’ ability to install a different search engine. They also point out that Android-using manufacturers aren’t required to accept Google apps, and that they can even preload competing apps. Ah, bloatware—so much for putting the customer first.
Cynthia Murrell, August 19, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search Vendors Learn From Comcast Sales Rep
August 19, 2014
Ryan Block experienced horrible customer service while trying to disconnect his Internet with Comcast. Prior to his experience, Comcast had a horrible reputation when it came to customer service and Block’s cancelation attempt brings to light an ongoing problem within the company. TechDirt comments on the situation in the article: “Behind The Veil: Comcast Techs Detail How Customer Service Is Really All Just ‘Sales.’”
The article reposts stories from The Verge where current and former employees confess their customer service stories. Their accounts amount to call center nightmares, stress, and Comcast’s drive to sell, sell, and sell! Comcast is definitely going to have future troubles.
“The question that arises with this kind of thing, particularly with Comcast operating a multi-tiered group of call centers, some outsourced, some not, is whether the company has become too unwieldy to actually meet customer requests. It’s fine for a company to work to retain customers, but that’s typically done by providing great service, not irritating the shit out of anyone who doesn’t think your company’s poop doesn’t stink. Far from too big to fail, Comcast, recently in massive merger discussions, may be getting too big to succeed.”
We’ll leave comments on illegal monopolies for another article, but this brings to mind what search vendors can take from this situation. Poor customer service equals poor client retention and fewer sales. It does not take long for customer complaints to go viral on the Internet, making reputation even more important. Search vendors offer numerous solutions to help with customer support and their products can improve a customer’s experience. Now would be a good time for search vendors to market their customer service products.
Whitney Grace, August 19, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Companies Do Not Reap all the Benefits of SharePoint
August 19, 2014
SharePoint has grown and expanded its many capabilities with the release of SharePoint 2013, and yet many companies are still not fully taking advantage of the platform. ITWeb covers the issue in their article, “How Are Companies Really Using SharePoint?”
The article begins by describing SharePoint:
“It is more than just ‘somewhere to put your documents.’ SharePoint is an enterprise platform that solves multiple business challenges. With this in mind and in an effort to provide a better view of the real-world application of the SharePoint platform and it capabilities, Concero IT, a Specialist SharePoint Service Provider, took it upon itself to analyse exactly what companies are using SharePoint for, and why. As illustrated in the infographic, SharePoint is a very powerful single platform that can address multiple business requirements.”
Some companies may just be overwhelmed by the vastness of SharePoint. It takes time and money to train SharePoint users and managers, but some organizations may find it worthwhile to squeeze all the potential usefulness out of this large application. Stephen E. Arnold has devoted his career to all things search, including a large percentage of that work to SharePoint. His Web site, ArnoldIT.com, is a useful repository of tips and tricks, and his SharePoint feed is especially helpful.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 19, 2014
Inflation: How Professional Publishing Companies Cope
August 18, 2014
I saw a Twitter message at http://bit.ly/1qI2Uow. Here is the image I noted:
I then saw by happenstance another post on Imgur, a source with which I am not familiar:
I wonder if there is a relationship between these two items. I wish I were a student so I could help the publishers deal with the rising cost of paper, shipping, etc. I also wish I could be on a faculty or a library board so I could vote for more expensive peer reviewed journals and more databases of content produced by professors and researchers. Note: I do not want to be a professor or researcher. I think the pay for scholarly output is not as good as working in some other occupations; for example, professional publishing management at Springer, Elsevier, Wiley. Of course, these data may be bogus. If true, I find them suggestive.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2014
Governance Information for Office 365
August 18, 2014
Short honk: I am not sure what governance means. But search and content processing vendors bandy about words better than Serena Williams hits tennis balls. If you are governance hungry and use Office 365, Concept Searching has an “online information source” for you. More information is at http://bit.ly/1teO5fA. My hunch is that you will learn to license some smart software to index documents. What happens when there is no Internet connection? Oh, no big deal.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2014
Big Data: Oh, Oh, This Revolution Requires Grunt Work
August 18, 2014
I read “For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ Is Key Hurdle to Insights.” The write up from the newspaper that does not yet have hot links to the New York Times’ store, has revealed that Big Data involves “janitor work.”
Interesting. I thought that Big Data was a silver bullet, a magic jinni, a miracle, etc. The write up reports that “far too much handcrafted work — what data scientists call “data wrangling,” “data munging” and “data janitor work” — is still required.”
And who does the work? The MBAs? The venture capitalists? The failed Webmasters? The content management specialists? The faux consultants pitching information governance?
Nah.
The work is done by data scientists.
The New York Times has learned:
Before a software algorithm can go looking for answers, the data must be cleaned up and converted into a unified form that the algorithm can understand.
Quiet a surprise for the folks at the newspaper.
How much of a data scientist’s time goes to data clean up? The New York Times has learned:
Data scientists, according to interviews and expert estimates, spend from 50 percent to 80 percent of their time mired in this more mundane labor of collecting and preparing unruly digital data, before it can be explored for useful nuggets.
What’s this mean in terms of cost?
Put simply, Big Data is likely to cost more than the MBAs, the venture capitalists, faux information government consultants, et al assumed.
No kidding.
So as the volume of Big Data expands ever larger, doesn’t this mean that the price tag for Big Data grows ever larger. I don’t want to follow this logic too far. Exponentiating costs and falling farther and farther behind the most recent data is likely to make the folks with those fancy, real time predictive models based on Big Data uncomfortable.
Don’t worry. Be happy. The Big Data did miss the Ebola issue, the caliphate, various financial problems, and a handful of trivial events.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2014
Even Content Marketers React to Pay to Play Allegation
August 18, 2014
I find CMS Wire quite interesting. A number of the articles are by consultants and some seem quite vendor centric. In general, it is a useful way to keep track of what’s hot and what’s not in the world of content management. Like knowledge management or anything with the word “management” in its moniker, I am not sure what these disciplines embrace. Like the equally fuzzy notion of predicative analytics, I find that the aura of meaning often at odds with reality. Whether it is the failure of certain professionals to “predict” problems with the caliphate or whether it focuses on predicting which start up with be the next big thing, the here and now are often slippery, surprising, and, at times, baffling.
Not in “How Vendors learn to Play the Gartner Game.” This is a darned good write up and it introduces a bound phrase I find intellectually satisfying: “the Gartner Game.” I understand Scrabble and checkers. More sophisticated games are beyond my ken. I am not able to play the Gartner Game, but I can enjoy certain aspects of it.
The article explains the game clearly:
Now, in fairness, just because someone gives you a wad of cash — even in the form of extra business — it’s no guarantee you’ll write something favorable. Trust me on this: Back when news was still reported in daily papers and reporters were wooed with more insincerity than a contestant on The Bachelor, it was customary for sources to send gifts.
My own brush with Gartner-like firms was a bit different. I did not expect to see a report with my name on sold on Amazon from late 2012 to July 2014. Why? I provided content/research to IDC, a Gartner competitor. IDC took the information, created reports, and sold those reports. I received no contract. No sales reports. When one of the documents turned up on Amazon, I realized that an IDC expert named Schubmehl was surfing on my work.
I wrote a short commentary about the apparent erosion of certain business practices. In that article, I found a thread connecting the HP problem with the post office, the Google executive’s brush with heroin and a female not involved in Kolmogorov analyses, and IDC’s Schubmehl. In each case, executives made decisions that probably seemed really good at the time. Over time, the decisions proved to be startling. I mean the post office and postage. Horrific. I mean the Google wizard who ended up dead on a yacht while his wife took care of the kids. Professionally clumsy. I mean an “expert” who writes reports taking another person’s information and using it to close information centric deals.
I don’t know much about the world of mid tier consulting firms. I worked for a number of years at a pretty good outfit, Booz, Allen & Hamilton. I did some work for other consulting firms as well. I do not recall a single instance of a failure to pay postage, a colleague flat lining from heroin, or a professional on our team using another’s work or name to make professional hay.
None of these actions surprise me. I am getting older and I suppose I am able to cruise forward in Harrod’s Creek without worrying about the situational decisions that produce some interesting business situations. Exciting stuff this world of mid tier consulting and the unbounded scope of action some executives enjoy. Wow. Postage, heroin, and using another’s name to look informed. Amazing.
I will expand on this notion of “loose governance” in one of my columns. This notion of “governance” is an intriguing topic in knowledge management.
As Einstein said:
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Stephen E Arnold, August 15, 2014
One User Finds Some Flaws in Elasticsearch
August 18, 2014
We are jazzed about Elasticsearch. Our own search expert Stephen E. Arnold, who has been yearning for some real innovation in search for years now, recently declared, “I will be telling those who attend my lectures to go with Elasticsearch. That’s where the developers and the money are.” Personally, I’m inclined to go with the search expert here (though I admit I may be a bit biased.) This declaration is just to preface my reaction to a post at Sammaye’s Blog, “Things I Have Learnt in the First 5 Minutes of Using Elastic Search.” Apparently, how to spell the name correctly was not one of those things.
Still, it looks like programmer Sam Millman (aka Sammaye) may have some good points. For example, he describes the querying as “the most verbose in the universe,” balks at the requirement to define indexes client-side, and claims Lucene is a bad platform on which to base search in the first place. He also calls the documentation terrible, and bad documentation happens to be a pet peeve of mine. (I’ve written documentation. If you must supply it, you might as well make it comprehensive, organized, and well-written. It’s not that difficult.) Millman explains:
“Its documentation is great at explaining the API, no doubt about it but if you want to actually find out how something works and why something is then you have to constantly ask StackOverflow. It just describes what parameters to put in and then leaves the rest up to you thinking that you don’t want to bother yourself with those details. We do though, we are not bandwagoning your product, we want to know how sharding and replication works, how indexes work and how to manage the product and more. Even when looking at the API the documentation can sometimes be…unhelpful. Mainly due to its huge font-size, yet tiny middle centered layout, English language problems and disorganisation. Overall I came out less than impressed about Elastic Searches documentation. I actually Google search everything first so I don’t have to navigate that mess.”
So, perhaps Elasticsearch is not perfect. See the article for Millman’s full roster of complaints. However, if Arnold is correct and this is “where the developers and the money are” right now, vexing problems should be fixed in short order. It would be a mistake to not take Elasticsearch seriously. Formed in 2012, the company is based in Amsterdam with offices in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and Switzerland. They are also hiring as of this writing, in case anyone here wants to help them iron out some wrinkles.
Cynthia Murrell, August 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Amazon: Disintermediation as a Business Strategy
August 18, 2014
As the conflict between Amazon and Hachette continues, much of the media is quick to paint Amazon as a bully, the poor publishers as victims, and authors as collateral damage. Some of us hesitate to accept this interpretation. Indeed, if a letter cited in an article we found at TechDirt is accurate, Hachette is at least as culpable. The article is long-windedly but accurately titled, “Amazon Offers Authors 100% of Ebook Sales to Get Them to Recognize Its Fight with Hachette Isn’t About Screwing Authors.”
According to Amazon’s letter to Hachette authors, their publisher is not only outdated but has also been uncooperative and downright rude in response (or lack thereof) to Amazon’s efforts at working out a deal. This recalcitrance is the reason the online seller is going directly to authors, offering them a deal wherein they will make more while customers pay less. How? Why, cut out the obsolete middleman, of course. TechDirt’s Mike Masnick writes:
“The whole situation is quite bizarre when you think about it. At the same time you have Hachette and the Authors Guild insisting that they’re trying to ‘protect the book’ by keeping book prices artificially high, they’re loudly complaining that Amazon won’t discount their books. Notice some hypocrisy here? If you want to understand why this is happening, the best explanation I’ve seen so far comes from Hugh Howey, one of the super successful self-published authors who is firmly in Amazon’s camp on this fight. Writing in the Guardian, he notes the perverse incentives of the traditional publishing world on Amazon:”
Here, Masnick quotes the relevant part of Howey’s Guardian article. I second the endorsement of that clear and concise explanation for anyone still unsure of the details behind this bizarre situation. (Check it out if you wish. I’ll wait….)
The Masnick article goes on:
“In other words, everyone really knows that ebooks should be priced lower, but the old publishing world wants to be able to set much higher prices, forcing Amazon to basically make no money at all on pricing the books lower. Given this scenario, it actually makes sense for Amazon to then make this offer to authors directly: it will hand over 100% of ebook revenue, because under Hachette’s proposal, Amazon would make no money at all (or even lose money) on ebook sales anyway.”
It is important to note that others have used a variant of this strategy to good effect, like ProQuest, Ebsco, and Lexis. Publishers must face facts: just as libraries don’t need librarians like they once did, authors don’t need publishers as they once did. We sympathize with businesses that find themselves growing obsolete with the steady march of time. However, to insist that others accommodate an antiquated business model is unrealistic. (Subsidies for buggy-makers, anyone?) Hachette and other traditional publishers would do well to put that energy toward adapting to inevitable changes. Or, barring that, toward laying off their workers as gently as possible.
Cynthia Murrell, August 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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