Here are the logos in question. First, the full MH mark:

And here’s the West Sixth logo alongside the Magic Hat #9 Not Quite Pale Ale mark that is the point of gravest consternation.

My initial reaction was along the lines of “bite me, Magic Hat.” I’m someone who tends to believe that most corporate litigation is wankery (the main job of lawyers being to keep their profession healthy) and this is a case where I just don’t see the point. I’m not an attorney, but I have been a brand nazi (I sort of own that role with a couple of clients right now, in fact), so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the issues surrounding brand integrity and infringement.

My friend and former student Seth Michalak (one of the two or three best students I ever had the pleasure of teaching, in fact) isn’t so sure, and we’ve been back and forth this morning on the issue. He began thusly:

Seth: I’m no fan of Magic Hat, but have you seen the logos side by side? It’s fairly telling that West 6th uses the general Magic Hat logo and not the #9 logo that is in question on their site…

Well, they use elements of both. Yes, the W6 “6″ is similar to an upside down MH “9,” but the eight-sided star resembles, sorta, the star on the MH primary logo. W6 uses a clean, symmetrical star as opposed to MH’s stylized “hippie” star, but it’s an eight-sided star paired with a “6″ that employs a similar font to the MH “9.”

How similar are they? Well, close but not exactly. I broke out the Photoshop and did a little overlay for comparison sake.

I have no doubt that the W6 logo is, ummm, inspired by MH. But this kind of thing happens every day. I can easily imagine the folks at W6 telling the design firm that “hey, we like that Magic Hat look and feel – can you do something like that?” And designers being what they are – that is, sheep – the result is a logo that’s a good bit homage. But do you look at the two and get confused?

If imitating were a crime Apple could sue about a million companies. Wander through the world of corporate logo and Web design and count the number of sites that owe their souls to the Cupertino design team, which may be the most influential industrial design collective in history. You can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting a Mac rip-off.

So sure – if I’m MH, I might be sneering at the wannabes, but suing them?

Seth: If people don’t get confused then what is the point of such an homage? It’s trading on someone else’s reputation by creating a link in the consumer’s mind. We both know that a lot of marketing happens on a subconscious level.

Good point. But. You can invoke an emotional response without confusing someone. In fact, you don’t want the imitation to rise to the level of conscious awareness. Once the customer starts thinking actively about it, you lose ground quickly. Brands work best at the emotional and, as you say, subconscious level. Feel is good, think bad. So if you’re going to imitate, do it subtly.

Listen, there are only so many ways that a logo can look. There are a finite number of visual identity approaches that are stylish and that speak to what you want to accomplish as a brand. If you look at the logo samples produced by that design shop, you’ll see a certain trendy, ragged-around-the-edges aesthetic that looks contemporary and familiar and slightly hip. Every single one of them is stylistically familiar, yet the best of the lot come off as fresh and engaging. (These guys aren’t my style, for sure, but they’re not bad at all for a local retail-focused designer.)

If you had never seen the MH logo, the W6 mark wouldn’t look even slightly out of place in that portfolio.

I’m not arguing that West Sixth isn’t ripping Magic Hat off. As I say, designers are sheep and just about every new logo you encounter is ripping somebody off, whether you know it or not. I have sat and watched very talented designers sift through online logo boards looking for things to steal. This is where SO many of them get their ideas. In this case, though, the core idea was apparently lifted from someone visible and established in the same industry, making the process a little more obvious than usual. Were I the brand nazi at W6 I’d have guided the process in a different direction because I don’t want to risk getting lost in someone else’s shadow, but I guess that’s just me.

But this doesn’t mean what they did is necessarily illegal. Ultimately that will be up to the courts to decide if it gets that far (which I doubt). It seems that MH is going to play hell trying to assert that they own a font family that existed long before they did or that another brewery shouldn’t be allowed to use a visual design concept that’s being used by who knows how many other businesses around the country already.

Seth: I would say check out some of the posts on Reddit that have Magic Hat’s side to this story before doing so. It rounds out the picture a bit more than the post from W6 alone does. W6 says Magic Hat doesn’t want to talk, and Magic Hat says they have talked and W6 walked away. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The point is that W6 likely isn’t the victim of a blindside that the post contends.

Oh, of this I have no doubt. I’m not going to look at those two logos side by side and conclude that West Sixth has all the angels on its side. I encourage readers to have a look at both of those links up top and draw their own conclusions.

In the end, I absolutely get why MH is annoyed, but this is one of those cases where winning the battle might cost them the war. Regardless of the outcome, they have allowed themselves to be cast as a big lawyered-up corporate bully in a dust-up with a brewery in feckin’ Kentucky that until now nobody had ever heard of. And not everybody is going to see the Reddit thread.

It seems to me that there is little to be gained legally and a lot to be lost on the PR front.

The backlash was swift and loud. Makers Mark customers pitched a hissy fit, and at least one marketing analysta (Roger Dooley, writing at Forbes) wondered if the company had committed “brand suicide.”

Do you really want to go on the record as saying the palates of your customers are so unrefined that they can’t tell the difference when the whiskey is diluted? In reality, in blind taste tests most people probably can’t tell the difference between similar colas, beers, whiskeys, etc. Nevertheless, brands still strive to maximize their taste differentiation. Can you imagine Coke saying, “We could change our formula a little, or even put Pepsi in our cans, and not many of our customers would notice.”?

To their credit, MM leadership today changed course, announcing in a public letter that:

…effective immediately, we are reversing our decision to lower the ABV of Maker’s Mark, and resuming production at 45% alcohol by volume (90 proof). Just like we’ve made it since the very beginning.

Good for them. The thing is, we shouldn’t over-congratulate them because this was a butt-stupid mistake to start with. Dooley had commented on their missed opportunity last Thursday:

Maker’s Mark could have used their looming shortage as an opportunity to make their brand stronger. If they encountered sporadic shortages for a period of years, they could raise prices and leverage the scarcity to take the brand up a notch in prestige.

And all he was doing was stating what every smart marketer in America knew instantly: you never give people less. If the choice is between raising prices or cutting portions, for instance, raise the prices. Customers may not like it, but they react worse when they find themselves getting less for their money. Psychologically, when you do so you are taking something away from them.

Same thing with the MM trainwreck. The shortage was arguably even good news from a brand perspective because the unanticipated shortage (whatever that may say about your forecasting operation) emphasized the demand for your product. You could have responded with something like this:

Wow, folks, you like our product so much that you bought more than we expected. It’s going to take us about five or six years to get caught back up because we will not sacrifice the quality of our fine whiskey, no matter how much it costs us. In the meantime, we’re grateful to our customers and salute their discernment.

Instead, you miss the obvious opportunity, you violate the customer’s trust, and you dilute your brand by far more than the three percent you’re cutting the ABV in your now somewhat less prestigious liquid refreshments.

Given that Makers Mark had committed the gaffe, today’s announcement was precisely the right move. But there was no excuse for the mistake in the first place. Now, thanks to a moment of unfathomable stupidity, they’re faced with the challenge of restoring their tarnished reputation.

Maybe Makers Mark will be just fine. Maybe this won’t even register a blip on their sales numbers – time will tell. In the meantime, though, the company’s need to understand what they have done. Leaving the product as is, running a new ad campaign, dumping money into PR aimed at assuring us that everything is hunky-dory, none of that can undo one simple fact: a few days ago, they announced to the world that they can water down their whiskey with no noticeable impact on quality.

That’s a hell of a brand promise, and it’s a bell that you can never unring.

Think. Act. In that order.

Problem is, I can’t figure out how it works. Oh, I get the basic concept: the more people like and follow and share your stuff on major social networks, the better. Especially Facebook and Twitter. But it professes to also count WordPress, YouTube, LinkedIn, G+, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Last.FM and Flickr. I don’t use all these services, but I have connected all the accounts that I do have.

My first issue arises with the fact that they’ll only let you link one account with each service. See, I run four Twitter accounts – one for Black Dog, one personal, one for a team politics/culture blog and another for 5280 Lens Mafia, the awesome new photoblog. I also have the bridge for my personal Facebook, the Black Dog page and a few others. And I host several blogs at WordPress, including this one.

Which means that you cannot conceivably measure my influence, minimal thought it may be, if you limit me to one account per network. You can’t get close. As I see it, this is a problem in the methodology. Not that I’m vain or anything. I just care about services getting it right.

Even if I accept the one account rule, though, the results I get still make no sense. You can change from one connected account to another and the results either don’t change or they change in the wrong direction. For instance, the Twitter feed for the aforementioned poli/culture site has more followers and gets more retweets than my personal account, so if I unhitch Klout from the docslammy account and hook it up to that one, my Klout score should go up, right? Nope.

An even more baffling example: up until a few days ago I had Klout linked to my Lullaby Pit WordPress site. But I figured that if I’m using Klout, I might as well maximize it, because my future hangs in the balance. So I switched the connection from the Pit to the politics/culture site, which does massively more traffic. Heck, I might get less than 100 looks a week at Lullaby Pit, but the other one has been blowing the lid off lately. One recent post drove significantly more traffic in a few days than the Pit did in the last year.

So this change should have caused my Klout score to go up, right? Like, by a lot. Nope. It actually went DOWN a point.

There are two messages in this for the folks at Klout. First, I’m whiny and I want everybody to pay attention to me.

Second, and more important, is that your service is of no value if people don’t know what the scores mean. You want recruiters and managers to employ your results in things like hiring decisions, but only a chimp is going to do that if the methodology is this unreliable. At an elementary level, if you’re measuring X, and X is good, when X goes up the score should go up.

Right now you have a useless metric that confuses and disappoints us hapless vanity seekers and provides no meaningful value whatsoever to that business community you really need to buy in.

Might want to look into it….

Today’s LA Times asks a good question: Is Mark Zuckerberg in over his hoodie as Facebook CEO?

Business writers Walter Hamilton and Jessica Guynn dig into an issue that I suspect some of us have seen before, and it’s remarkable that the clamor over Zuck specifically hasn’t been louder for some time.

Should Mark Zuckerberg, the social media visionary but neophyte corporate manager, step aside as CEO to let a more seasoned executive run the multibillion-dollar company?

…

“There is a growing sense that Mark Zuckerberg, talented though he may be, is in over his hoodie as CEO of a multibillion-dollar public company,” said Sam Hamadeh, head of research firm PrivCo. “While in many cases a company founder can, and does, grow into the job, things are happening so quickly that there is precious little time here for Zuckerberg to do that.”

Doubts about the Facebook founder intensified Thursday as the stock closed below $20 for the first time. The shares, which slipped to $19.87, have shed nearly half their value since Facebook’s disastrous initial public offering three months ago.

The “boy genius” phenomenon isn’t new, nor are the related stresses it can exert on the company. Let me offer up a brief case study on a company founded in the late 1990s by two young guys who’d been best friends in a prominent northeastern institute of technology. In fact, let’s just call it PNIT. The Internet bubble was inflating, and these two kids – let’s call them Bob and Ray - were exceedingly bright. It took them awhile to figure out exactly what they wanted to do, but the idea they finally hit on was a winner. They were talented developers and understood the technical side of building Internet commerce platforms as well as anybody.

They founded a company, hired great (and insanely loyal) people, worked their asses off and before long were selling one of the premier products on the market and enjoying significant success. Significant, as in they were each worth hundreds of millions of dollars significant. The stock price exploded, and after multiple splits it was selling at over $300. The company was hiring like mad, with a planned trajectory of under a hundred employees to 2000 in two years.

Those were interesting days for the thoughtful student of business, especially one who had never experienced the boy genius phenomenon, who didn’t know a lot about PNIT, and who had never been inside an enterprise that was outgrowing its expertise. The good news was that the company’s technology was simply magic – it was as good as it got then and more mature versions of it are still successful today. But…Bob and Ray had very little clue on the business side of things. They thought they did, but they didn’t. And the result was an enterprise that was as bad at the non-technical phases of business as it was good at development. Everyone was too young, too inexperienced, and in many cases, simply too unqualified on any level for the jobs they were asked to do. People who these days would be coordinators were middle managers. People who knew absolutely nothing about communications were responsible for PR. The CMO was regarded as a complete clown. These things happen when the unemployment rate dips below five percent.

You might remember that in the early days of the 2000s the dot-com bubble burst. B&R had a six-month galloping head start because the company pissed off investors (basically, they did something major without consulting with their shareholders in advance). Some felt Bob and Ray were in over their heads, and this episode did nothing to dissuade people from that view. Layoffs commenced shortly thereafter.

Eventually Bob and Ray left the company they had founded, passing it into the hands of leaders who knew how to run an established business, and B&R, in time, regained its footing.

The aforementioned thoughtful student of business walks away from this case with some lessons in hand. First, and most importantly, the skills required to found a successful enterprise are not necessarily the skills required to run a mature enterprise. Sometimes you need a gunslinger to tame the west. Once the west is tamed, what is called for is the steady hand of an experienced mayor.

This is not a negative reflection on either leader – no one is good at everything, and organizations thrive when they harness specific strengths to appropriate challenges. Bob and Ray had been exceptional at founding and growing a winning technology company. To a certain point. It’s unlikely those who replaced them could have done what Bob and Ray did. But the time came when they were no longer the right people for the jobs at that point in the company’s arc.

The second lesson is that genius is a wonderful thing. Education and genius working hand in hand can change the world. But neither genius nor education is experience, and there are times when there is simply no substitute for experience. I look at my own career in these terms, in fact. I was smart growing up (although you can certainly find plenty of folks who’d argue if I called myself a genius). And I got a great education. But none of that would have served me terribly well if you’d thrown the challenges I see today at the 28 year-old me. It’s hard to quantify just how much of the value I now represent to my clients stems from the fact that I have seen things before. The first time I saw X, I might have been baffled. Now when I see X, I recognize it and probably have some ideas, borne out of previous encounters, with what works on X and what doesn’t.

Mark Zuckerberg is clearly a really, really smart guy. And he went to Harvard, so at the least he spent a few years in close proximity to a great education. But the wheels are flying off his company. It’s lost nearly half its value in only three months. Mistakes have been made and we here at S&R have commented a number of times on missteps of one sort or another. I hate to engage in too much reductionism, but when the company is all yours – when you are the majority owner, the CEO, the chairman of the board, the grand high exalted poobah and whatever other official titles he might carry – when you are the absolute lone decision maker at the top, yes, the company’s failures are your failures. When the specific problems strike experts as the sorts of things that a more experienced leader would have avoided and you’re a brash 28 year-old, yes, questions will be asked. Hard questions. Billion dollar questions. Questions with no easy answers.

I’m not here to tell the Facebook board or its investors how to behave. But I certainly am in a position to note that we’ve seen this dynamic before and we know how it often ends.

Image Credit: TopNews.in and Google Finance

They’ve been the target of freedom and privacy advocates for some time. All the way back in 2008 I was talking about the company’s anti-privacy tendencies and arguing that things were only going to get worse for the citizenry. More recently, I called them the most congenitally dishonest company in America, and I’m waiting for evidence that proves me wrong.

But these days, us privacy ankle-biters are the least of Mr. Zuckerberg’s concerns. You’re no doubt aware of the debacle surrounding the company’s IPO. They opened at 38, then all hell broke loose, and as I type they’re trading at 20 and change. I’m not sure how much of a loss that represents, but if you were one of the people who bought at 38 (or worse, caught the wave as it surged into the 40s) you’re probably not especially happy right now.

Predictably, some analysts are advising that we remain calm and stick to the plan - long-term prospects are strong.

Investors can expect Facebook’s stock to be volatile for a few years. But analysts say that those willing to wait will likely be rewarded – someday.

“I view it as a tomorrow stock,” said Christian Bertelsen, chief investment officer at the wealth-management firm Global Financial Private Capital.

“The whole thing on Facebook is, look, if your time horizon is hourly, weekly, or even monthly, this is not the stock for you,” he said. “You need to take a much longer-term view on it.”

Bertelson is no doubt an informed resource. But it isn’t clear that he’s taking into account Facebook’s real problem. To wit: the company faces mounting evidence that its advertising simply doesn’t work. Back in May, just a couple of days before the IPO, General Motors announced that it was dumping Facebook from its advertising/marketing mix.

A hammer blow was struck for the Facebook advertising model today as car giant General Motors (GM) declared that they were scrapping their Facebook ads because they were not delivering results.

The decision by GM puts the spotlight on the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook. A study by TNS last year found that over 60% of Facebook users didn’t want to be bothered by adverts, whilst the click through rate on Facebook adverts is notoriously low, often hitting just 0.05%.

How much damage GM’s move inflicted is hard to assess, but if I’m Facebook the $10M lost in direct revenue is nothing compared to the PR hit.

Now this comes along: another advertiser just decamped FB, saying that 80% of its Facebook clicks come from bots. From MediaPost:

In a much-circulated blog post, Limited Run, which offers Web site services to artists and musicians, informed fans that it is deleting its Facebook page and moving over to Twitter, with the following explanation, which I have taken the liberty of re-posting at length:

“Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience; only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.”

Yowch. So, how worried should Facebook be? Or perhaps I should ask the question this way: if you own Facebook stock, should you hold or sell now and cut your losses? Should you take Bertelson’s advice and think long-term (or cut and run if you’re not a long-term investor)?And what if you’re an advertiser? Do you spend your cash with FB or go somewhere else?

Keep an eye on what happens with the Limited Run story. It’s a near-certainty that others are going to conduct the same kind of proprietary analysis and if LR’s results are replicated consistently you’re going to see revenue fleeing Facebook like rats off a sinking ship. This doesn’t mean that Facebook will be out of business this time next week – mountains of cash are a wonderful hedge against bumps in the road – but it does probably mean the following:

• 20.13 (the stock price at the moment) isn’t the bottom.
• That long-term success horizon may be further out than some analystas imagine.
• Facebook may have to rethink its business model, a process that will be dramatically complicated if ad revenues plummet – that kind of stress can wreak havoc with the innovative juices, as it’s hard to be creatively brilliant with a gun to your head.

Things to think about.

Oh, one more. If I’m Limited Run, I’m currently ramping up a new services offering. There are lots of companies out there wondering if they’re wasting money on Facebook. If they’d like to find out for sure, they can either a) reinvent the wheel, or b) use my proven tools and methodology. This sounds to me like a revenue stream.

Again, just throwing things out there….

New York-based marketing firm BBH Labs equipped homeless people on the streets of Austin with devices that made them wireless hot spots. Internet seekers then paid what they wanted—in cash or via PayPal—to access the Web. The homeless men and women kept all of the money.

The media wasn’t amused, and now BBH Labs is licking its wounds.

ReadWriteWeb slammed BBH Labs, pointing out that these are people, “not helpless pieces of privilege-extending human infrastructure.”

The T-shirts that the people participating in the campaign wear say:

I’M [FIRST NAME],
A 4G HOTSPOT
SMS HH [FIRST NAME]
TO 25827 FOR ACCESS
http://www.homelesshotspots.org

Wired referred to it as something out of a “darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.”

It seems like the idea was ultimately about benefiting the homeless. I’m a huge fan of that, and anybody familiar with me and my work knows I have no aversion to risky and edgy, either. So I suppose I applaud to core concept.

But I’m also a big fan of thinking things through. “Risky” comes, you know, with risk. If you’re going to take chances, you have an obligation to game the potential scenarios, to anticipate where things might go wrong and to plan your way around the minefields.

It doesn’t look like BBH did a very good job on this front and now they’ve garnered lots and lots of exposure. Contrary to what you may have heard, all publicity is not good publicity, especially when the end result is that you may have actually damaged your cause.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation has hired a big-hitter PR firm. And not just any PR firm, either.

Now, Komen is assessing the damage, and it’s using a consulting firm founded by two former Democratic strategists. Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), the firm Komen hired to help determine how badly the crisis hurt its reputation, is founded by former Democratic strategists Mark Penn and Doug Schoen.

The goal here seems obvious. Komen’s recent bout of ballistic podiatry cost it massive amounts of support among people who believe that women’s health shouldn’t be held captive to a partisan agenda. The foundation has accurately understood that this means it needs people from the center and points left in order to thrive. Or, at this point, survive. So they go out and hire … Mark Penn.

Wait, what?

I suppose the thinking is that Penn is “one of them,” a plugged-in Democratic apparatchik, and is thus well-positioned to help get the embattled foundation back on the right path. Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. As it turns out, Penn is, in fact, tight as a banjo string with the Clintons and, if I might borrow a phrase from famed SNL sports commentator Chico Esquela, Obama been bery bery good to him, too. But Penn is loathed by the progressive wing of the American polity for precisely those reasons: he’s regarded as a centrist, corporatist machine whore (I’ve actually heard him called a lot worse) who’d pimp his mother to the highest bidder. Is the allegation fair? Well, his detractors would no doubt note that his firm is now working for the social conservatives who cut off Planned Parenthood.

If Komen thinks it can win the political center on issues of women’s health, good luck, but the presumption lies strongly to the left here. It was the early warning array of the progressive infrastructure that created and whipped the backlash against Komen. It was not, as Komen seems to be thinking, about Republican vs. Democrat. If this were a crisis on Capitol Hill where inside connections and lobbying savvy were the mechanism of success, it might be a different story. Instead, this is a matter of public opinion that runs far deeper than party affiliations, terrain where Penn not only doesn’t help you, he probably hurts you. Not that Penn is untalented, exactly. He’s a pro’s pro, although as I think I may have suggested in the past, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a compliment.

I also have some problems with the PR Daily article on the story. I exchanged some e-mail on the subject with Michael Sebastien, the author and the founding editor of Ragan’s PR Daily. Let me be clear – I’m a regular subscriber to Ragan’s services and generally regard them to be essential reading for anyone in the field of professional communications. Not only do they cover the industry adroitly, their editorial content frequently exhibits a genuine pro-social ethos that the public relations field all too often seems to be lacking. Consider them recommended. In this case, though, I felt like Michael dropped the ball and I told him so.

He acknowledged my concern about the difference between progressive and Democrat in this case:

I appreciate the criticism, and I suppose the remark was a tad flip on my part. You’re right about Penn. Perhaps I should have referred to him as a man known for his work with the Democratic party.

He then challenged me right back:

But, I’m curious, what makes you say that progressives are the touchpoint? I don’t think the whole Planned Parenthood debacle would have shaken the organization so deeply if the touchpoint had been progressives. I think the people in the middle of the political spectrum are the touchpoint, and it’s among the reasons Komen reversed course and apologized. Wouldn’t bowing to progressives be seen as equally as bad as cutting funding to an organization over pressure from right-wing conservatives.

Which is a good point, and likely underlies the thinking at Komen. Here’s how I see it. In a nutshell, Komen is no doubt thinking “the heck with the left, what we need to do here is win back the middle.” Sound strategy on its face, I suppose. As I note above, Penn certainly understands the center (or, more accurately, the center/right, which is where the Clinton and Obama power bases resides). But he has no access, that I have seen, to the infrastructure beneath the formal party apparatus. Need the president’s ear? Sure. Can Bill help out here? He’s on speed dial.

But the reaction against Komen was in no way formal. It was grassroots and organic, and the organizations affecting the path of that backlash were issue-oriented constituencies and alt-media (read, blogs) in nature. Penn has minimal influence in that world, if any. If Komen wants to go to war using big-ticket ad and PR campaigns (that is, traditional media tactics), they may enjoy some success. But they’re up against massive socially driven viral involving cancer victims who feel betrayed. Let’s just say this will be a fun case study to write up when all is said and done.

That’s how I see it, anyway. I invite Michael’s thoughts, either in the comments or, if he likes, I’ll be happy to post an op-ed.

Also, one final gripe that I didn’t raise with Sebastien before. He says:

Komen took a public lashing for its decision and later apologized and reinstated the funds to Planned Parenthood.

No, that’s what they wanted everyone to think they did. As I explained earlier this month, Komen was executing a fairly obvious smoke-and-mirrors misdirection ploy, but when you read what they actually said, it was a pretend apology that didn’t begin to deliver what they implied. Worse, America’s newsrooms simply got played.

I expect as much from the “press,” of course, but PR Daily is good at this stuff. They know how the game works but wrote an article that bought into it, anyway.

I’d love to see thm have another whack at the story with this conversation in mind.

Many thanks to Sebastien for allowing me to use his e-mail comments in this post.

Whom do we trust when we’re looking for information? Increasingly, research shows that Americans are more likely trust friends, peers and word-of-mouth over “experts.” For instance:

• A 2007 eMarketer survey of the most trusted sources of information for US consumers was topped by “friends, family and acquaintances” and “strangers with experience.” These sources outranked “teachers” and “newspapers and magazines.”
• A CDC study shows that moms trust pediatricians the most, but that they trust “friends and family” more than everybody else, including parenting books, employees in the doctor’s office, and newspaper and magazine articles.
• Heck – just sift through this page at BazaarVoice if you need dozens more examples of this phenomenon.

I’m assuming that reviews from trained professionals (like movie, music, food and software reviewers) would be included under the general “newspaper and magazine” categories, although I can’t be sure.

One of the artifacts of the Web 2.0 explosion has been the profusion of sites soliciting consumer feedback. One of the most successful such operations (maybe the most successful – it’s certainly the one I am personally most aware of) is Yelp, but you can find comments on all kinds of businesses at the Web sites for local TV and print outlets, alt weeklies, independent blogs, you name it. Because by golly, in the age of social media, we care what you think!

Which leads me to my reason for writing today. I have been known to comment that, yes indeed, opinions are like assholes – everybody in fact has one. (Well, except for this guy.) However, informed opinions are more like Mercedes-Benz E550 convertibles – that is, they’re somewhat rarer.

Last Saturday I found myself hankering for some good Mexican – specifically, something slathered in the chile verde that this part of the country is famous for. There are a couple of places that have long been my go-to options for green chile – Lime and Benny’s are very different, but I love both. I was feeling like exploring, though, maybe trying something new, and I remembered that a week or two ago my Yelp e-mailer devoted an issue to “D-town Green Chile Lowdown.” So I dug it out, read the reviews and recommendations, and settled on one of the two places closest to where I live. The commenters had some small carps about various peripheral issues, but the consensus was that the green chile was righteous.

I had to wait awhile for a seat because the place was packed. Good sign, as a rule. I ordered my favorite Mexican dish – beef burrito with chile verde. It arrives, I dig in, and let me tell you, “righteous” isn’t quite the right word. A better word would be … let me think here, because I want to get this right … ummmm … what’s the word for “completely and utterly without any taste whatsoever”?

The beef itself was doing its part to hold down the restaurant’s seasoning costs and the chile, well, put it this way. I’m not a renowned Mexican chef by any stretch, but I have two recipes that are worlds better.

Disappointed? You betcha. I can’t imagine going back there, especially since it was also a dollar or two pricier than other Mexican restaurants in its general class.

I can only theorize that all those positive, nay glowing comments on the sparkling fabulosity of this place’s verde were written by employees or family members of the owners. And that’s the problem with consumer reviews – comments are of no value in the absence of some means for determining credibility. If you’re vested in the business, you may lack objectivity. Or maybe you’re an idiot, which also tends to compromise the value of your contributions.

Sure, I have family and friends I might trust on certain questions – a brother-in-law who’s a CFO in the furniture industry, for instance, might be of some value if I’m hunting for furniture bargains. But I have other relatives and social associates that I wouldn’t trust if I were trying to figure out what color the sky is.

The bottom line is that you can hit a consumer review site, read the comments, and still have no idea how to decide. One product has dozens of positive reviews – that could mean it’s really good. Or it could mean that the marketing group does a good job leveraging the power of social media.

When I got home, the first thing I did was unsubscribe from that Yelp e-mailer. All it can really do is call my attention to businesses I didn’t know about, but I can get that from a lot of places, including a local alt-weekly – and when I go there I can also find reviews from, you know, reviewers. People who do it for a living. I may not agree with them all the time, but odds are their taste buds can distinguish between tasty chile verde and dishwater thickened up with flour. Also, I’m probably not reading something my waiter wrote on his day off.

My alma mater, Wake Forest University, has a “career connectors” group on LinkedIn, and there’s currently a thread where one of the university’s career dev folks asks for some input on a project she’s working. Specifically, she asks: “If you were hiring a recent graduate, what top five professional skills do you want him/her to possess to be a strong candidate in your profession?”

Great question. Since I’m all in favor of young Deacons taking the world by storm, I thought I’d try to contribute some advice. Here’s a slightly buffed out version of what I wrote.

1: Develop communications skills. Especially the ability to write clearly and flawlessly. The erosion of writing skills over the past 20 years has been dramatic, and a student who can demonstrate this ability has a huge advantage over the competition. A warning, though. When you show us a writing sample, it needs to reflect what you can do, on your own, right now. Too many new grads will present a prospective employer with a sample that’s just gorgeous, but when they’re assigned to write something on day one in their new job it’s clear that the sample was the result of a painstaking semester-long process involving editors, professors and talented friends. In fact, the new hire isn’t prepared to contribute on one of the job’s important criteria.

It’s like showing up for a Match.com date and realizing that your date’s profile picture was one part photo and two parts Photoshop. The reality isn’t what it needs to be and you now know there’s no hope of ever trusting them. It’s bait-and-switch and depending on a variety of factors I might fire you on the spot.

Also – and this applies mostly to women (although not exclusively) – speak like a professional adult. Way too many young women have adopted what we call “upspeaking” (or, more technically, the “high rising terminal”), an inflection pattern that sounds like there’s a question mark at the end of each sentence. What this communicates to the listener is that you have no idea what you’re talking about or that you have no faith in your own judgment.

Listen to accomplished professionals speak. They say “we need to increase our direct marketing spend,” not “we need to increase our direct marketing spend?”

In sum, I’m not going to take you seriously if you don’t.

2: Show me that you understand the difference between earning something and being entitled to it. The Millennial Generation has cultivated a reputation as the Entitled Generation, and while it’s the fault of the parents who raised them and the educational system that failed them at every turn, not their own, they’re still the ones who have to deal with it.

When you graduate from college understand that you’re entitled to nothing but a diploma and you have earned nothing but an opportunity. Those of us who have worked our asses off in our careers will respect that attitude, I promise you.

3: Work on your critical thinking. Another thing Millennials have to confront is that while they’re exceptional in teams and are very good at executing on clearly defined tasks, they come from an educational paradigm that has placed almost no emphasis on the ability to think critically or solve problems. When they encounter a situation they haven’t seen before, they tend to “go limp.” However, if I can hit you with a brand new challenge and you can think your way through to a working solution, you’re going to get lots and lots of opportunities to shine.

Sadly, this one is easier said than done. Effective critical thinking is something that takes a long time to get really good at and it evolves in three stages: 1) something you do; 2) something you are; 3) something you can’t stop doing. You won’t reach stage 3 quickly no matter how hard you work, but if you show up for an interview in stage 1 you’ll help yourself immensely.

4: Cultivate resourcefulness. Once upon a time, back in the good old days, we had these things called “budgets.” A budget, for those of you who have never seen one, is this pile of money that can be used to run operations, hire talent and solve problems.

These days, even people at my level (heck, especially people at my level) are asked to do more and more with less and less. Somedays it feels like we’re expected to do everything with nothing. “Here, here’s a piece of string. Can you dominate a mature, commodified market by end of day?”

Anything you can do to demonstrate a faculty for achieving top shelf results with very little in the way of monetary resources is one that will set you apart in a hurry. The good news here is that you’ve probably been involved in student organizations, and these groups rarely have a lot of money to work with. So your undergrad experience may provide you with quantifiable proof points that will impress a hiring manager.

5: Understand the big picture. At the entry level we’re asked to do small tasks and they may not always make sense to us. But somewhere, hopefully, there is a guiding strategy that provides a context for everything an organization does. Or most of it. Some of it, anyway. Anyhow, your ability to succeed at the entry level and to progress up the career ladder will be helped immensely if you’re able to understand the organization’s overarching strategic goals and where the work you’re doing in the trenches fits in.

People who can do this become leaders. Those who are more at home focusing on tactical executions are going to spend their lives in middle management. This is fine if it’s what you want - and a company with weak mid-management is in dire trouble no matter what - but if you want to lead at a high level, work on understanding the big picture and the long term. (By the way, good middle managers have some strategic grasp, too, so your ability to succeed at this level will require you to understand as much about business drivers as possible.)

This isn’t a comprehensive guide to success, by any stretch. But a recent grad who’s smart, works hard and gets these five concepts will have a big leg up in the interview process and will likely outperform his or her entry-level colleagues.

Best of luck, even if you didn’t go to Wake.

In anticipation of getting a new iPad2 I migrated my MobileMe over to iCloud. It’s hard to have a definitive idea of what a new service is going to do until you get your hands on it in earnest, but I had read about iCloud, asked some Apple types who knew more than I did about it, and felt like I had a fair idea that it was going to help me solve some problems I’ve been dealing with in the course of managing the logistics of my business.

I was wrong. Mostly, anyway. I knew I was in trouble when the guy at the Apple Store told me do not migrate, sweet gods, for the sake of all that’s sacred do not migrate!! Okay, that’s not exactly how he put it, and I won’t repeat the words he actually did use (which weren’t much much better), but suffice it to say that staff was finding iCloud to be “suboptimal.” I explained that unfortunately I had already moved over. He sighed, then said he’d heard there might be a way of moving back but he wasn’t sure. After some Googling last night, I’m sad to report that if there is a reverse-migration path I can’t find it. But I’m still a relative Mac novice, so maybe I’m just missing something.

In any case, I’m not 100% in love with iCloud. A brief cruise through some Mac user forums last night suggests I’m not the only one, although: a) people do seem to be slowly getting the hang of it, b) I’m not seeing people with my exact complaint, and c) in fairness, I’m getting a better sense for how to use the new service as I wrestle with it more today.

Still, iCloud is a long way from what it could have and should have been. Here’s what I was hoping for:

• Full-spectrum automated online backup, a la a Mozy or Dropbox type service…
• …driven (logically) by Time Machine.
• Integration for all my devices so that I can reach into the cloud, grab what I need, whenever, wherever, then save it back, seamlessly, etc.

Honestly, this vision seems like it would be easy enough for Apple to produce, doesn’t it? All the pieces already exist, it’s just a question of putting them together. You could have tiered data levels (first 5G free, scaling up to 100G or more for $75-100 a year, which is more than Mozy, but a price I’d gleefully pay for that sort of integration). I’m not an engineer, but this doesn’t strike me as the sort of task that a company like Apple would have any trouble pulling off.

With luck, the folks in Cupertino are thinking along the same lines and the issue isn’t that they aren’t going to give me my dream cloud, just that they aren’t there yet.

Fingers crossed. In the meantime, I’m underwhelmed, which isn’t how I’m used to feeling regarding new Apple rollouts.