Some of my colleagues and friends have called me ‘paranoid,’ ‘crazy,’ and ‘apocalyptic,’ but I continue to stick to my guns on the issue of America’s intellectual decay. Our economic and cultural dominance has always stemmed from our ability to attract and retain the best-of-the-best intellectuals from around the globe, and our ability to nurture and grow our own base of talent. Our military dominance is also clearly predicated on our economic and intellectual superiority. In short, we can out spend and out gun all others because during the Twentieth Century we built the world’s greatest base of knowledge and talent.

Quite some time ago our ability to cultivate our own internal talent began to fade (witness the poor state of our primary and secondary educational systems), and over time (especially since 9/11) we have failed to garner the rest of the world’s best, largely due to immigration regulations. We are just starting to see the effects that this will have on our competitive advantage in the global marketplace. If nothing changes, we will see a rapid and painful descent into economic mediocrity and a marked decrease in the average standard of living. (more…)

Despite the rain here in Washington, the dreaded April 17th Tax Day has been pretty uneventful. The line at the post office near us isn’t remarkably long and no one looks particularly panicked. Most people I’ve spoken to have used some form of tax software to prepare their returns. I was going to use one myself, but decided that doing it by hand might be educational. I simply printed the forms off the Internet and asked any questions I had online and on the phone. This morning, as the postal clerk affixed postage to my manila envelopes, I wanted to ask her why I couldn’t mail them for free? Then I started wondering, why can’t I just file them online without using a software program I would have to buy? What about a software program developed by the IRS?

According to the Public CIO Blog, Treasury Secretary John Snow had a few thoughts on this matter already:

“We aren’t tax preparation people. We’re not software development people,” Treasury Secretary John Snow told a House Appropriations subcommittee last week, according to the Associated Press. “There’s a private market out there that does that and does it well.” (Truman Lewis of ConsumerAffairs.org reminded readers in his article that Snow chose to ignore “the fact that IRS runs a huge data processing operation” as it is.) (more…)

As a practitioner and researcher in the arena of marketing accountability, I am impressed with the latest articles in PRWeek, and other places, about the industry’s growing stress on measurement. It is clear that PR must be concerned about accountability measurement if it is to retain its proper share of corporate budgets.

While a recent guide to measuring the impact of PR on sales (Council of Public Relations Firms, 2005) has helped establish some informational groundwork, the buzz around complex statistical approaches to measurement is evident. Having career-long experience in measuring marketing effects, I would like to outline the strengths and limitations of emerging tools.

Market Mix Modeling (MMM)

This approach came to us from economists. It is actually a form of linear regression, a basic technique used in many industries for years. It works by looking at a number of potential variables that could impact something (e.g., sales) and simultaneously considering their individual contributions. (more…)

The following Yahoo stock graph speaks for itself. Over the last two years Apple’s stock has soared, increasing by nearly 400%. Microsoft’s has barely budged. One’s a growth stock, the other a value stock — like a utility, I’m told. With Microsoft’s market capitilization ($286 billion) being about five times that of Apple’s, and its revenue last year ($40 billion) nearly three times the iTune maker’s, I had a strange thought. Why doesn’t Microsoft buy Apple? Certainly has the money to do it. Seems I’m not the only one with this ’strange’ idea. See this article at TechNewsWorld.

Two quick thoughts on the new Google Finance secton that is being discussed so much online:

(1) After seeing Google Finance for the first time, our lead developer sent out an email pointing out that the stock graphs are fantastic. He’s right. Being able to drag the graphs, a la Google Maps, is a great step forward, as is the identification of the news stories that drive the peaks and valleys in stock price. Well done.

(2) The listing of blog entries related to the stock you are reviewing is a great idea, but the execution isn’t there yet. The fundamental problem is that Google is searching blog entries based on the full company name, in this case “Toyota Motor Corp.” How many bloggers are going to type out “Toyota Motor Corp” instead of “Toyota” or a simple “TM” when posting an entry? This is a blunt instrument at this point.

I’ve been around PR a bit. Saw how to use focus groups and surveys to come up with messages, and ways to frame/talk about them.  Learned how direct mail could drive results depending on presentation, and how advertising, especially political, could set an agenda.  I marvelled at the intuition of the best PR pros.  And they used to lament that there was no real science behind all of this, but there is.  It’s relatively new, it’s called behavioral economics, a hybrid of psychology and economics.  Here’s a story about it in The Harvard Magazine, called “The Marketplace of Perceptions,” by Craig Lambert.

Money quotes:

Good — “. . . that the ways in which alternatives are framed—not simply their relative value—heavily influence the decisions people make.”

Better — “The difference in impact between two broad policies may not be as great as differences in how each policy is framed—its deadlines, implementation, and the design of its physical appearance.”

Bingo — “Economists and others who engage in policy debates like to wrangle about big issues on the macroscopic level. The nitty-gritty details of execution—what do the forms look like? what is in the brochures? how is it communicated?—are left to the support staff. ‘But that work is central,’ Mullainathan explains. ‘There should be as much intellectual energy devoted to these design choices as to the choice of a policy in the first place. Behavioral economics can help us design these choices in sensible ways.’

I cherry picked some quotes, the article is a great read overall.  So PR and communications follks, you’ve been vindicated.  What you do does really matter and Harvard can prove it.