Yesterday, traveling home from Thanksgiving with family, we stopped at a Ghirardelli Chocolate outlet store on the side of the freeway. I checked in with foursquare, and this “Check-in Special” appeared on the screen:

I ordered ice cream sundaes for the three of us, and as the clerk was ringing up our purchase, I showed her the coupon on my iPhone. She told me, “I’m sorry. That only applies to chocolate. Our fountain drinks are already below regular prices.”

You can see the entire coupon above. The statement “Check in now to receive 15% off your total purchase,” says I can take the discount off everything I buy. Nowhere does this coupon indicate any limitations on which products are eligible.

My first reaction was to add a cautionary “Tip,” a foursquare function that allows a user to add a suggestion to someone else who might visit the location. I did this, and I wrote that the coupon was misleading and Ghirardelli had been deceptive in its use.

I then noticed a “Flag” option at the lower right corner of the screen. I clicked it and again left a note that the offer was deceptive. (By the way, I don’t expect to hear anything back as a result.)

Within a certain range, I don’t really care how much I pay for chocolate or ice cream. That’s not the point. What I do care about is being deceived. I don’t like it when any brand, especially one I know, makes an offer and then back pedals, for whatever the reason. If an offer doesn’t make business sense, don’t make the offer. And if you make an offer, honor the terms and treat consumers with respect.

We are in the early days of hyperlocal marketing and location-based offers. If large, established brands act like shell game hucksters when they use these techniques, what little trust exists today will be gone in an instant.

Tags: Ghirardelli, foursquare, deceptive offer, flag, consumer trust

I was reading an article on Pravda’s web site, and this window popped up:

When I was in journalism school there was still a thing called the Soviet Union. The two Soviet house newspapers were Pravda (The Truth) and Izvestia (The News). The old joke was “There’s no news in The Truth, and no truth in The News.” It took a lot of changes to get where we are today, when the Pravda web site asks visitors “Will be connected on the Social Web?” Never mind the slight grammatical slip. I find this really interesting.

When Pravda suggest you follow its Twitter account and like its Facebook page, it’s hard to say your organization is too conservative and old-fashioned to get into social media.

Tags: Pravda, Izvestia, Twitter, Facebook

In a recent Forbes article, Vinod Khosla’s Five-Second Slide Rule, with contributions by presentation expert Jerry Weissman, venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder talks about his five-second slide rule. At first I thought he meant one of these:

Apparently, though, Khosla tests presentations slides to ensure they are not dense:

For each of them, he applies his five-second rule: he puts a slide on a screen, removes it after five seconds, and then asks the viewer to describe the slide. A dense slide fails the test—and fails to provide the basic function of any visual: to aid the presentation.

Interesting coming from an alumni of Sun, where PowerPoint was banned for many years (eventually we got StarOffice), and slides were not popular.

I understand and totally support the intent of this exercise, but sometimes I think we develop these kinds of guidelines as a way to assist the presentation designer who lacks common sense and communications skills instead of teaching them to communicate effectively.

I also know that no presentation stands alone, so five seconds with any slide, regardless of density, is unlikely to tell the whole story. If it did, we wouldn’t need the presenter.

Other versions of popular slide guidelines include Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule (probably the best of them) and Carmine Gallo’s Present Like Steve Jobs.

These guidelines can be quite useful, but the key is to use them as just that - guidelines.even if you apply them religiously, you may end up with a lousy presentation.

What’s more important is to use such guidelines, and everything else at your disposal, to:

• Create a presentation that visually supports the speaker’s objectives
• Build a story, not a batch of slides
• Don’t create a brochure that can be projected on the wall. Use graphics to illustrate concepts
• In keeping with these guidelines, minimize the amount of information on each slide
• Keep font sizes readable (see above)
• Keep slides simple (See Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen)

These are just a few ideas, but the key is to remember that a presentation is a communications device, not a stack of documents. Your speaker has objectives. Design the presentation to meet them. Your audience is giving you their time. Make it worht their while and move them to do something that benefots everyone.

Tags: Vinod Khosla, Jerry Weissman, Guy Kawasaki, presentations, slides

The recent global (and nearly instant) publication of the gruesome photo of Muaammar Gadafi’s body has set off many conversations about the ethics of distributing these kinds of images.

As Reuters described it (and the aftermath of his death), “Muammar Gaddafi’s body, bloodied and half-naked on a filthy mattress in a meat locker, is the latest spoil of war hauled back to Misrata by its exuberant fighters, confident they are Libya’s fiercest revolutionaries.” A bit sensationalistic? Interesting that it’s the lead for the story, and Reuters chooses not to publish the photo here, but to describe it.

The issue of whether to publish a graphic photo has been with us as long as photography. Underlying this issue is of course the decision to take the photo in the first place, particularly while “standing idly by” watching someone suffer. Taken after his death, the Ghadafi photo does not come under this heading, but the point is worth looking at in an ethical context.

Illustrative of the ethical issues surrounding highly disturbing photographs are the incidents of self-immolation (suicide by burning one’s self) by Buddhist monks protesting the Vietnam War. Photojournalists were faced with the decision to take a dramatic photo or intervene and possibly prevent a death.

Generally journalists have not intervened in these cases. The reasoning is interesting. The thinking has often been that the journalist’s obligation is to objectively document the news, and not to be a participant in it. During Vietnam, we were still largely in the era of objective journalism (with some notable exceptions). A photojournalist might have chosen to continue taking pictures rather than intervene in order to maintain objectivity and not interfere with the outcome of a story. It’s a little like a scientist not wanting to influence the outcome of an experiment because of the way the experiment is conducted. (Understandably, some find this a very controversial philosophy.)

Once a graphic photograph, or one with the potential to offend or disturb, is available, there are many considerations in connection with its publication. A journal (online or offline, paper or web site) would consider:

• How newsworthy is the photo?
• Is the photo being published because it adds significant information to the story, or is it done to attract attention or provoke a response?
• Will anyone, such as a relative, be deeply offended by the photograph?
• Is publication of the photograph a violation of the deceased’s religious beliefs?
• Is it typical for the publication to make this kind of image available to readers?
• Will our competitors publish it and will me look uninformed for not doing so?

I suspect there are two reasons for the fascination with Ghadafi’s photo. The first is what we’ll call the “Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia” syndrome. People want proof that evildoers are dead.

In earlier times, the display of the corpse or head of a dead criminal was a big attraction, which would often go on the road, with tens of thousands of people viewing the remains (such as they are).

Here for example is a poster advertising the exhibition of the head of the Mexican bandit Joaquin Murietta, which traveled the country in a jar of alcohol. Note that tickets were $1, a princely sum in 1853, and even without adjusting for inflation, much more than people are paying today to see a picture of Ghadafi.

Another reason for the urge to display the picture of Ghadafi’s corpse is a kind of sick American pride. Whenever a Hussein, or Ghadafi, or some other depraved dictator is finally tracked down, it’s our way of saying, “Look, we got the bastard. You can run but you can’t hide.” It’s understandable that some people want to do this. When someone like this is killed, it is almost an immediate reaction from some quarters that the killing was faked, that the person didn’t really die, that some conspiracy is afoot.

What has happened today, however, defies the laws of traditional journalism. In the Web 2.0 world, we grant tangible reward (likes, pluses, comments, retweets, shares, etc.) for attracting as much attention as possible. Sometimes this attention (unfortunately) is gained by the posting of cat videos, or jokes, or news items of great interest. But other times it is captured through outrageousness, which is one of the driving forces behind the growing troll movement.

Today, traditional news outlets are faced with two sources of competition that might scoop them on a headline: other news outlets and everyone else in the world. So the professional photo editor will probably decide to go with the Ghadafi photo because he/she knows that most competitors will, and millions of Facebook and Twitter users will, so to not publish it would be to opt out of a highly visible and talked about opportunity.

Ultimately, then, the photo of Ghadafi’s grisly corpse is the new journalistic viral video, as “successful” as Rebecca Black’s Friday.

I posted a slightly different version of this piece on Quora.

Tags: Gaddafi, Qaddafi, Gathafi, Ghadafi, Kadafi, Gadafy, photojournalism, ethics, journalism, death, body

Content is worthless, or at least a lot of it is. The next time someone tells you “content is king,” or, “we need someone to create content,” show them this picture and remind them that this yellow drum contains content.

Quality Content

In fact, content is a noun meaning “something that is contained” within something else. Would you want the content of this drum in your home or office?

Content is a neutral word. It is inherently neither good nor bad. And therein lies the problem with this term. The word has lost its meaning but so has the idea of producing interesting, relevant, well written information for the web. Because some people aren’t thinking about messages, audiences, style and tone. They’re thinking about content, something that might as well come in a yellow metal drum. Which one are you producing?