Having a POV: Penzeys Spices
I was surprised to find the following message in my new Penzeys Spices catalog:
Salt
We’re cutting back on salt.
A really good and healthy thing going on with food right now is that people are using less salt. We want to be a part of this. Going forward we will continue to sell reasonably priced generic salts of the earth and sea, but we will no longer be selling the higher priced specialty salts. I feel things have gotten to the point where the specialty salts are glamorizing the use of salt and, with that, encouraging people to use more of it. I have also found that along with the marketing of specialty salt had come a great deal of misinformation, including claims that some salts don’t affect your health like others do. This is just not true and not something we want to be part of. Salt is salt, it really is, and it taste no different no matter where it comes from.
With our belief that cooking comes from caring for those around you we feel part of that is caring for the well-being of the people we cook for. We all have our own relationship with salt and I respect that, but as a cook and a business I feel so much better about working to cut back on the use of salt rather than encouraging the use of more. I hope this makes sense to you.
Bill
This is found on page 43 of the most recent catalog. Just below it are the catalog items for Kosher Style Flake Salt and Pacific Sea Salt. And certain seasoned salts (Shallot Salt, for example) are still available. But the Fleur de Sel and other “gourmet” salts are not. I have no idea whether or not this will increase sales or buy loyalty with customers. In fact, some people are grousing about it on Chowhound. And I must have missed it in an earlier catalog because here’s an Eat Wisconsin post from last November about it (it’s not favorable).
So because it irritated a few people, was Bill Penzey having a point of view on salt a branding mistake? I don’t think so. Penzey’s has always presented itself as a folksy company. The catalog features recipes (plus anecdotes) from customers. These invariably focus on middle America folks who want a better-than-supermarket quality spice and mostly engage in down home cooking. Just the kind of people to be worried about salt and appreciate the folksy tone and concern displayed in Bill’s note. The gourmet market is all about trends, and it’s clear that Penzey’s is in it for the long haul and wants to sell to a broader market even if that means alienating a few foodies. And that means that taking a stance against trendiness and for health is completely consistent with the brand and strengthens rather than weakens it. That’s the power of having and expressing a point of view.
Tablets could be awesome for language learning
What I really want when it comes to new tech is a cheap, ultraportable, lean text writing and editing device. Which means a keyboard, probably. So I haven’t been all that interested in the rush of tablets. But last night I was thinking about how I struggle to keep fresh the foreign languages I know, and it occurred to me that one of the killer uses for a tablet would be language learning and maintanence.
Language learning takes place best in an immersive environment that can be entered consistently and provides a variety of ways to gain spoken, written and reading comprehension competencies. A tablet would be a great way to present video, audio, photos, words, quizzes, etc. Yes, that’s all content that is currently available through websties and software on desktops and laptops and smartphones. But I do think that a tablet form, that allows one to interact in a comfortable, casual setting and requires touch feedback (rather than the mouse or track pad) and has a bright, well-designed screen and an app-driven interface presents enough improvements and enticements and sensory experiences to really make language learning much better.
Whither the PR generalist?
I have had the good fortune (and to a certain extent misfortune) to be a generalist during the course of my career in higher ed public relations. When I was first hired at SF State, most of the other staff were mainly tasked with media relations (and sometimes publications writing). Because I had the interest and skills (and because I had already been doing some of this as a student worker), I was the one who did media relations and internal communications (two print newsletters that I wrote, copyedited and did the layout on) and web communications. As e-communications became increasingly more important I branched out into e-mail newsletters, web content management (I acted as the managing editor of the online news site) and crisis communications (since so much of the activity in this arena involved e-mail and web). When I was hired at Dunwoody, I became involved in even more arenas (including acting as managing editor of the alumni magazine) because it’s such a small institution with a minimal marketing/pr staff (there’s me, my boss, and a coordinator).
I love being a generalist. I enjoy having a wide variety of projects and relationships, and I work well with all types of people — IT professionals, reporters and editors, faculty and students, graphic designers, etc. It’s fun. But it also means that it’s difficult to keep up in any in depth way with all the skills one needs to keep sharp in order to act effectively. I feel that I have enough knowledge of analytics/seo, web programming and layout/graphic design to contribute to and even manage projects featuring in-house experts or outside vendors. But what happens when, as is increasingly the case in the world of smaller budgets, you have to DIY?
So here’s my question — one that I will explore and attempt to answer for myself over the next few months — what other skills do I add to my generalist set? I’m assuming that to be an effective PR/marketing generalist one should already be a good writer, editor, proofreader and public speaker: basically an overall effective communicator. One should also be somewhat capable of traditional skills: parsing market research, facilitating a focus group, art directing a photo shoot, interviewing senior management and faculty and students, staging a press conference, basic photography and image editing, basic html, etc.
But what else? Here’s what I’m looking at right now:
- Web analytics. Yeah, I can do the basics of Google analytics, but right now it’s all mainly surface metrics.
- Photography. I’m an okay photographer. I can frame a shot and crop and color correct it. But I have yet to master the real mark of an expert — lighting.
- Videography. Both behind and in front of the camera. Editing. Both quick on the fly, low-res stuff for YouTube and more polished work.
- Advanced programming. I need to get better at CSS, for sure, but I wonder if PR folks need to know more about programming, especially app programming. Not necessarily enough to do all the work — this is an area where you need a specialist — but enough to be able to create help plan the concept, develop features, not get ripped off, etc.
As I look at these four areas, I’m struck by how much the younger generation has some of these skills — at least the basics — natively. I consider myself a digital native, but I cut my teeth on an Apple IIe. As much as I enjoy social media, my core love is blogging (yeah, I’m a Gen Xer). And while I can do photography and video, it’s not native to me the way it is to people in their teens and twenties. Perhaps there’s no need to worry about all this — I’m one of those who firmly believes that core of PR is to tell stories authentically, artfully and in the modes and media the audiences you care about prefer. But I’m going to do an inventory of my skills and the needs of my college over the next month or so and figure out where I need to go more in depth. Any suggestions of what to focus on and how to go about it are very welcome.
The problem of the institutional “we”
The problem with the institutional we is that not only is it barely a step up from the use of the passive voice, but that just like the passive voice, it’s a way to diffuse agency. In addition, although it attempts to suggest timelessness, to sidestep the sticky issues of archives where names and titles can be found that no longer are part of the institution, it does not generally succeed. Rather it is a form of stasis.
More importantly, it raise all sorts of issues about community boundaries, institutional coercion and the agenda of the persons writing (or editing, or approving) copy with the use of the institutional we. For although it may be intended to appear inclusive, the we is always connected to a verb or a state of being and objects and noun and verb phrases and all those things that attempt to define who belongs or more often the actions and attitudes of those who do or don’t belong.
I don’t know for sure how to get around it. I personally rely much too heavily on “the College” in my writing for work and ‘I’ in my own writing. But it seems to me that that “we” needs to be made more explicit at times and/or that managers and administrators or going to need to be more willing to use first person singular and speak for themselves because in the world of social media everybody is speaking about the institution and speaking as themselves in relation to it.
Features I want from Hulu, Netflix, Gmail and other web services
I have no major complaints about most of the web services I use*. Of course, that’s a bit tautological because if I hated them, I wouldn’t use them. But anyway, I do have some suggestions for minor improvements to the following web services:
Hulu: I would like a smarter queue that tracks what I have already seen. It’s great that you can subscribe to shows and when new episodes get loaded on to Hulu, they pop in your queue. But because episodes sometimes get taken down (after I have seen them) and then put back up (for example, to drum up excitement for the start of a new season), the queue oftens clogged with episodes of a show that I have already viewed on Hulu. I want an option to only show ones I haven’t viewed already — and for re-uploads to recognize that I saw them on the first go round.
Netflix: I would like a queue that’s just like the current queue but is for tracking purposes only, and I want to be able to subscribe to actors, directors, writers, studios, awards lists, certain critics picks, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and when something new is acquired by Netflix that features the keywords and individuals I’ve subscribed to, I want those titles to appear at the top of that tracking queue.**
Gmail: I love Gmail. I’m one of those who immediately took to thread conversations and tags instead of folders. There is one feature I’d like though: the ability to tag an e-mail before (or as you go to) send it.
Google Docs: Yes, you can export Google Docs in a variety of formats, but there are occassions where I like to simply publish a Doc. For those instances I’d like to be able to have the option of auto-pagination (and be able to specify how many paragraphs or words for each page).
Twitter: I know this is supposed to be on the way, but, imo, the ability to RT from the web interface can’t happen soon enough. Yes, I use Tweetdeck and Hootsuite fairly often, but sometimes the web interface it just easiest to use, and I’d like to be able to easily retweet from it.
YouTube: I want 20 minute video uploads. Some better metrics tools (and even integration with Google Analytics) would be nice too.
Flock: I want it to open faster.
Flickr: I want the ability to batch organize sets and collections without going in to Flickr’s Ajax (sometimes browser resource heavy) Organizer e.g. just using titles of everything without thumbnails and the drag and drop feature — a light version, I guess, of the Flickr Organizer.
GoodReads: I want the ability to easily order titles on shelves (both drag and drop and enter number) and the ability to select multiple shelves and only show the titles that match all the selected shelves.
*Facebook is the Big Exception, but I’m not going to go in to all that in what is intended to be a light, quick post.
**I also want Linux supported Netflix On Demand, but that’s not a feature improvement, per se.
I want non-destructive editing for photos
I encountered two things recently that crystallized for me an issue I have been having with image files. The first was doing some reading on Final Cut Pro and finding out about non-destructive editing. The second was this Signal vs. Noise post by Jazon Z. titled Work in Photoshop, don’t Save in Photoshop. Jason talks about how when he works in Photoshop on user interface concepts, he no longer saves the results as PSD files (complete with layers), but instead he just takes a screenshot of the various iterations.
As I thought about those two bits of information, I began to realize that image management and editing is fundamentally lame because you have to save image files for every iteration of any photo you work with. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But there are times when I end up with a source photo, a photo with a conservative crop, one with a funky crop, the photo I upload to Flickr, the one that I size for placing on a web page, the one that I e-mail to people that’s print quality but under 3 mb (because that’s the attachment size limit at work), etc. etc.
What if there was some killer piece of image management software that helped you catalog and tag your photos AND kept a record of all the various pieces of specialized software that accessed the image, but didn’t keep any of the edits/filters/resizings you used. But then if you open the image in Photoshop (or GIMP or Aviary’s Phoenix, etc.), Photoshop itself has saved the various versions of the image that you told it to save and brings those up in a dialogue that you can scroll through and as you view each one, Photoshop is applying those parameters or filters, but the source image itself isn’t touched e.g. non-destructive editing. The same is true if you open it in Fireworks or Dreamweaver. The source file is the same but the filters native to that program and attached to that image come in to play when you’re actually working with it. And then, of course, the image that gets uploaded to the server is the correctly edited and sized jpeg or png or gif (or maybe even not then, but that’s getting in to some issues with cloud computing and future versions of html that are beyond my ken).
And did I mention that the source file will keep data on where it’s been uploaded via the image management software (whether that’s Picasa, iPhoto, F-spot, or Lightroom or Aperture, etc.) so you can see if you uploaded it to Facebook or Spreadshirt or icanhascheezburger or Google Presentation (and when)? Because that’d be cool. Frankly, image/photo management is a huge pain and the number of different versions of a photo or image one needs is verging on the ridiculous. Is this an unreasonable request? Is something like this already being worked on? Is anybody else as dissatisfied as I am with the state of photo management?
Professors, PR and the public
I’ve been thinking about a comment that I made on Gideon Burton’s Academic Evolution blog. In a post titled Scholar or Public Intellectual? I briefly talk about the sometimes uneasy relationship between higher ed pr professionals and academics and then state:
If PR can continue its turn towards authenticity and engagement and story-telling, and if academia can embrace its role in creating and disseminating knowledge, then I think we could get something really good going. Part of that means, of course, that academics are going to need to speak for themselves and PR people are going to need to be less gatekeepers as curators, connectors and consultants.
I wonder how that really would work and if it really could. I may get to some methodologies in later posts, but what I want to do first is pinpoint where my optimism lays. I think it comes down to this:
a) some academics are genuinely interested in playing the role of public intellectual or (because I think that term is a bit too laden with meaning) at the very least in using their expertise to help create a better informed citizenry.
b) some higher education public relations professional find helping bring that expertise to the public (and in a form that at least a portion of the public finds understandable and somewhat palatable) to be a very satisfying experience.
c) some of the general public finds scholarship that is translated (which doesn’t necessarily mean watered down) in to approachable forms/narratives interesting, illuminating and worth spending a bit of time with.
Given those assumptions — and yes, it gets sticky when one moves from the abstract to real world specifics — it seems to me that the media relations driven method of publicizing the work of scholars has been somewhat ineffective. In general, the news cycle and the needs of editors/reporters choose what research is of value and interest and how much of the news hole to devote to it. What’s more, it is told solely in narrative format without references to prior work and without conversation and often without much context (and generally forgotten the next day). The exciting thing about social media and about the concept of open scholarship is that good academic work packaged with the help of pr pros no longer needs to live or die (or be completely misinterpreted in some cases) by newspaper and TV news editors. The difficult thing is to figure out how to find the specific publics and match them with the scholars that share a mutual interest and finesse what the role of pr pros should be in that exchange. I have some ideas percolating. Hopefully they will soon be in expressible form.
The online/offline networking circle
Sometimes lost in the breathy enthusiasm for social media and the skepticism by old-school business-card-in-hand networking types is this simple fact: communities that form in the metaverse always end up meeting up in meatspace.
Every listserv, web forum, MUD, blog community, Facebook movement and Twitter niche that I have actively participated in or observed has invariably at some point felt the need to have some sort of meet up, social hour, service activity, con, trip, etc.
That’s not surprising — when people discover that they have a lot in common, they want to do things together. They tend to want to meet in Real Life. What’s more, such events almost always strengthen the online community, creating closer ties among members and a pool of shared memories that can help sustain online engagement. And, in fact, such meet ups even benefit those members of the virtual community that are not able to attend (because of distance, other commitments, interminable shyness, etc.) because even though there may be some sense of feeling left out, such events lead to online reports and stories about the personalities involved that help the entire community get to know more of its members better. It also generates excitement for the next event and/or the impetus for others in the group who live in or are traveling to a different geographic location to plan events of their own.
And it works the other way too. When members of an online community meet in meatspace, there is often less overall awkwardness (although there is always a certain amount of awkwardness whenever diverse personalities meet) because members feel like they already know quite a bit about each other. At the very least, small talk becomes easier because attendees have been storing ambient awareness about the other people at the event. You don’t have to go through the lame roster of “Where do you work? Where did you go to school? Do you have a family?” because you oftentimes already know much of that information. You can dive right in to conversation about, well, what you were talking about on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, somebody’s blog just yesterday or last week.
And when communities are truly engaged, this online/off-line activity creates a circle of relationship building that ensures a healthy, long-lasting network of individuals.
So yes, when we (and I’m especially talking about Alumni Relations professionals here*) talk about the benefits of social networking, we should talk about the benefits of ambient awareness and the fact that it’s not just who you know, but also who who you know knows. But especially when dealing with those who think collecting business cards = smart networking, we should talk about not just the online tools, but how the online tools can facilitate the building of vibrant communities.
* I’m not in Alumni Relations, but I’m involved in it from the marketing/PR side.
Wm’s Twitter stream- morriswm: Hey CBS -- it's a semifinal game and the lead is almost 30. How about we switch to the Pac-10 championship now? #nooffensefellowtwincitians March 13, 2010
- morriswm: Taking the family to the @curryup #maplegrove for the lunch buffet. March 12, 2010
- morriswm: Why Chinese Food and Donuts in Calif? http://ow.ly/1hpcJ [the place I used to live around the corner from in Oakland also had fried chicken] March 11, 2010
- morriswm: Marco.org on "Overdoing the interface metaphor": http://ow.ly/1hknw (hat tip to @ClarkGoble) March 11, 2010
- morriswm: RT @mikecane: This is the post setting a new traffic record: Who Fatally Wounded Microsoft? It Was Bill Gates. http://tinyurl.com/ylfooak March 11, 2010
- morriswm: @BastardMachine Yes, you should. Community is currently using its cast and quirky/funny/sweet better than any other show out there. March 11, 2010
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