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You would think it would be a clear-cut answer, right? The one that wins the most delegates through the two-tiered election process wins…

Yesterday CNN announced “Texas Caucus Win Estimated” (for Obama), the New York Times today is still talking about Clinton’s big win in Texas (they do not even specify that the win was in the Texas primaries, which would technically be correct), and the Boston Globe keeps talking about her big win in the Texas primaries as well (as late as Monday). Yet as early as Thursday of last week it looked like Obama was going to win Texas with more delegates than Clinton – a ratio that even party officials were agreeing would hold through the ongoing tally for the caucus part of the election.

If a simple story, which can be backed by straight calculus, can get distorted to the point of confusing readers and voters by some of the best known media outlets – how do you think you are ever going to control the message around your worldwide innovative feature-rich, robust and scalable widget?

Let’s face it marketers, you just cannot count on people to retell a story the right way… It’s not just that you are not in control of the message (which is not a new thing) – you have to plan for it going seriously wrong.

There are some great lessons to be learned in the world of politics!

Confirming a recent survey from Arketi, a new survey commissioned by Brodeur from Marketwire found that:

• Blogs are a regular source for journalists: Over three-quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue
• Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis:
• The majority of journalists said blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested – except news quality.

Note to PR people – an increasing share of reader attention is moving to social media, and that is why you need to engage in the social media space. Two recent surveys now show that if traditional media is still your main goal, then an increasingly effective way to influence traditional media is by engaging with social media. So one way or the other, you can no longer ignore social media!

Oh, one more point – creating anemic, corporate-speak-laden, CEO blogs does not count
(via Marketing Charts)

Many companies are still confused about what role social media should play in their PR strategies – wondering whether social media impacts buyers or whether social media strategies can help with traditional PR efforts.

The first question relates to the information consumption that leads to buying decisions – and nobody will question that there has been a tectonic shift from traditional media to consumer generated media in this area.

The second one relates to how traditional media writers and journalists source their information. And a new survey from the Arketi Group shows that the role of social media in influencing traditional media continues to grow as well (via Shel Holtz – granted, delayed, but we never claimed to be a news service).

Some interesting tidbits from the survey:

• 84% of journalists say they would or already have used blogs as primary or secondary sources.
• 54% of journalists report to get their story ideas from blogs, 51% from RSS feeds
• 60% of journalists say they spend more than 20 hours on the Internet

So it sounds like if your company does not make a conscientious effort in trying to engage with social media channels today, you will likely find yourself the winner of an award in stealth marketing in a few years time – an award given to companies that manage to make their companies totally invisible in the marketplace.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath wrote an interesting article in the Harvard Business review this month about the “curse of knowledge” (requires subscription).

The curse of knowledge happens when your language, which is based on your level of knowledge, cannot be understood by others. So an executive who uses language like “achieving customer delight!”, or “unlocking shareholder value”, phrases that have real meaning to him based on his years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, will sound like a person who has a love affair with vague strategy statements to frontline employees who may not be privy to the underlying meanings.

An interesting experiment done at Stanford University in the early 90’s proves that point rather nicely. In the experiment they assigned people one of two roles – “tapper” and “listener.” The tapper would pick a well known song, such as “Happy Birthday” and tap it out on the table. The listener had to guess what the song was. Before tapping the song the tapper was asked to predict the probability that the listener would get it right – and they predicted 50%. When they actually tapped the songs, the success ratio was a whopping 2.5% – out of 120 songs, only three songs were guessed correctly. So what sounded like the perfect tune for the tapper actually sounded like some kind of weird tapping code for the listener.

One way to avoid this is by “translating” your message in very simple language, and one company that does this right according to the article is Trader’s Joe. They actually develop their messages for the imaginary unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.

This is a great reminder of the power of using real and actual scenarios in doing business. Not only can real detailed scenarios with real people help you with messaging, they will also help you with the design of better products and and the development of better customer interaction processes.

[Tags: messaging corporate speak marketing]

A new agency – Hubbub – founded by Giovanni Rodriguez and Rebekah Mitchell, launched last night (disclosure: I am an advisor to the company).

One of the truly interesting aspects of this new agency is that they will attempt to create a community-based PR agency – meaning that they are creating a global and “open” community of communications professionals to assemble in teams for customer projects.

The company seems to be off to a good start and already has a nice roster of clients.

Good luck Hubbub PR!