The Sam Whitmore Sampler

The Day Before Irene

The day before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, I wrote this column for Forbes.com. (It never ran.) Unforgettable were the local New Orleans politicians and citizens bravely facing historic destruction on camera. WWL-TV broadcasters were subdued and responsible. It was authentic media coverage like I had never seen.

On this, The Day before Irene, you might want to search the Internet for local TV stations along the Eastern Seaboard and watch their live streams. If you live in the storm's path, tune in directly. As Irene weakens, that's where you'll hear the truth. Just say no to the hysteria-peddling Weather Channel. As winds diminish and pressure rises, TWC will not rejoice. It is not happy for us. Its announcers warn us not to be fooled: this remains "a monster storm." It never was. Stephanie Abrams tells us that a Category 1 storm in the North is more dangerous than a Cat 1 in the south. Huh? It's because of "the vegetation and other factors." Really?

Trust local stations. They'll be here tomorrow. The TWC carpetbaggers will not. 

 

The Road

Always loved the road. Nine days after college graduation I left Salem, Mass. with a book of traveler's checks, an atlas and a sleeping bag, and drove about 45,000 miles in 14 months. Saw southern Canada, northern Mexico and three dozen U.S. states. Kept a daily journal, recorded cassette messages and mailed 'em back to family and friends. When money ran low, at various times, I picked apples, worked as a tool peddler, and worked the graveyard shift at a Circle K convenience store. On the way back east, a loose slot belched gas money from Vegas to Knoxville. 

Always dreamed of reliving those days. Lately those dreams have been intensifying. Did you ever travel like that? Would love to hear your stories.

Our Craigslist Experience: Selling the Dishwasher

Ever sell anything on Craigslist? This is our first time. We're trying to sell a dishwasher. Response has been amazing: five prospects in the first 36 hours. But we still haven't sold it.

A woman called to ask whether it had a black face plate. Yes, I said. "Too bad," she said. "That won't match my decor."

Last night A guy who lives 40 miles away asked for a photo of the dishwasher. In my laziness, I never did post one in the Craigslist ad. So I took a couple last night, in our dark garage. They came out crappy. I e-mailed them to the prospect. He never wrote back.

This morning a guy named Jasper e-mailed to ask what the model number was. By mistake I sent him a serial number. Jasper never wrote back.

At lunchtime an older guy named Henry came over today to look at it. He hemmed and hawed. "In my research," Henry said, "I discovered that 37 percent of people with this model had complaints about it."

"What do you for a living, Henry?" I asked.

"Insurance broker," he said. Henry understands risk. I offered to drop the price $25. He said he the price is already fair. He just was afraid to buy because it might break later. He said he was going to go home and talk it over with his wife. Henry hasn't called back.

Tonight a guy called and asked whether the dishwasher had a child-lock on it. "I don't think so," I said. He asked to come over and see it. I said it was getting late and that he should try getting here within an hour.

"Oh, I'll be over before 6, no problem," he promised. Ten minutes later he called back. 

"Um, I can't make it there by six. Will you be there tomorrow?"

"All day."

"OK, well, um... I'll talk it over with my wife and if we're interested I'll give you a call."

"OK," I said.

Craigslist can deliver the prospects. Only the seller can deliver the sale.

Scoble and Hoffman, Separated at Birth?

What do you think?

The Humbly Noble

 A guy came over to the house today to repair an ottoman we just bought. He works for a subcontractor that repairs furniture for several chains here in the Bay Area.

"How's business?" I asked him. 

"Good for my bosses, not so much for me," he said. "I'm not paid enough. And there's no company vehicle... I have to use my own."

"Do they give you a mileage allowance for all the driving you do?"

"After 30 miles they do," he said. "Let's say I drive 35 miles from my house. I get an allowance for the last five miles -- but not the first 30."

"I'll bet they deliberately rig it so that you drive less than 30 miles a day."

"That's about the size of it, yeah," he said.

"Do you have another job besides this one?"

"I do carpentry. But I can't find any work these days. So I make do with this."

As he walked to the door, I noticed his stocking feet. He had left his dirty shoes outside. 

"This isn't Japan," I teased. "You could have left your shoes on."

"Oh, that's all right," he said. "I do that at home, too."

I'll probably never see this guy again. So, here's wishing that he -- and all the humbly noble like him -- have a prosperous and satisfying 2010.

Happy Thanksgiving

In my high school freshman-year religion class, a fellow student asked the teacher, Brother Linus, why he was so sure God existed.

The teacher walked to the open classroom door and craned his neck to the right.

 "As you can see, the corridor on this floor bends about 60 degrees to the right," Brother Linus said. "Let's say you began sprinting down the corridor at top speed. What if, just around the corner, a furniture crew was moving a big heavy desk just out of your sight -- and there you were... sprinting top speed right for it? You'd never know until it was too late.

"Now imagine a benevolent God seeing all this unfold, and removing that furniture crew, and that big heavy desk, just before you rounded the corner. You'd never know He did it. It would never occur to you that He had done his work." 

I'm not especially religious... but on this Thanksgiving Day, I express my thankfulness for all the furniture crews and all the desks that disappeared from my path without my knowing it.

Water

Which is more valuable to business -- oil or water? 

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé (Arrowhead, Poland Springs) and other multinationals might give us a surprising answer. Without water, their businesses would crater.

Marc Gunther this week calls attention to McKinsey's newly-released report on the rising water crisis. Quoting here: 

By 2030, more than a third of the world’s population will live in severely water-stressed areas. We therefore expect water to grow from being a marginal issue to one that is central to all parts of the economy.

Only indirectly does the crisis concern drought or global warming. The central issue: governments continuing to give businesses all the cheap water they want, irrespective of all else. 

To date, they have. McKinsey's report suggests those days are coming to a close.

Paul Kedrosky writes frequently and eloquently on this topic.

Is Social Media Killing PR?

That was the name of last night's panel at Horn Group San Francisco. I enjoyed moderating. We did a pretty good job of asking and answering that question. Short answer: no. Here are posts from all three panelists: Jeremiah Owyang, Kara Swisher and Susan Etlinger. Here's the Tweet stream keyed off the event.

A question left unexplored was, can PR as an industry preserve its primacy (and pricing power) in an age where publicity and media relations are worth less, and speaking directly with constituencies is worth more?

For what it's worth, the PR industry needs to reconstitute its collective skill set. Agencies should employ verbal, visual and kinesthetic learners in equal measure. Most are far too word-heavy right now. Pitching "influencers" should be no more than 30 percent of an agency's value proposition. The greatest potential lies in enabling clients to tell their own stories and helping them to measure their impact. If that means senior PR executives should step aside, or go to night school for a marketing degree or MBA, or hire fewer (cheap) kids and more (expensive) 40-somethings, so be it.

PR budgets, traditionally defined, won't be rising anytime soon. When the economy comes back, opportunity will look different. It already does. Look at Federated Media with its "conversational marketing" initiatives. Look at BzzAgent and its WOM initiatives. New elements are emerging. They're not killing PR. But they're casting a shadow. How to step out from it might make for a good follow-up panel.

Jackson Browne

Christy and I caught Jackson Browne's concert this week in Portland, OR. "In '65 he was 17," and "in '69 he was 21," so that would make him 60 today. He didn't look it or sound it. The show was great. He's touring with a seven-piece band including two powerful female back-up singers, Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills, and they could have carried the show all by themselves.

Abridged song list: opened with "On the Boulevard." Love that guitar riff. Song 4: "Fountain of Sorrow." Uptempo version sans the pathos. Lots of material from the new album, titled Time the Conqueror. Ended with "The Pretender" into "Running on Empty," which he and the band genuinely seemed to enjoy playing. For the encore, Browne skipped the usual "Stay" in favor of the seldom-heard "I Am a Patriot."

Browne kept the political discourse to a minimum and let his powerful music do the talking, to the delight of a packed house. If he's heading your way, catch him. Here's a review of the recent New York City show, with the upcoming itinerary included.

Twitter 50, FriendFeed 50

Radio station program directors assemble playlists from all the music available to them -- and they rotate their playlists as time marches on. I've decided to do the same thing with my Twitter and FriendFeed subscriptions.

From now on I'll subscribe to 50 Twitter feeds and 50 FriendFeed feeds. That's it. Over time I'll go back and add in folks I used to subscribe to, and add some new ones, too. Just like those program directors, I'll rotate out a commensurate number of choices, and the process will repeat every couple of months.

It got to the point where I didn't even know who I was subscribing to. I never noticed when someone went silent. Speaking only for myself, I prefer voices who post occasionally -- not too frequently and not too seldom. I also am trying to monitor voices from many segments of the tech industry -- media, PR, investors and so on.

Is less really more? Let's see how this grand experiment works out. Here's my current Twitter and FriendFeed lineup. Whom should I add?