Consumers may be wising up to the reality that cheaper not only doesn’t usually mean better, but it also can mean unsafe. China, which is manufacturing just about everything sold in American chain stores these days, is proving itself to be a less-than-trustworthy supplier as far as consumers are concerned. That has been providing opportunities for domestic manufacturers who have been beaten up rather badly in recent years because of the U.S. dollar’s exchange rate and China’s lower production costs.

A couple of years ago, I avoided a fire when I noticed that some Christmas lights, made in China, that I had strung along my wooden fence in my front yard, had overheated and begun to burn the fence. The lights had the Underwriters Laboratories seal of approval, but failed. I returned the relatively inexpensive lights to Home Depot where I purchased them, and chose to take a refund, rather than to get a replacement set. After all, why take another chance?

Who doesn’t know about the chemical, melamine, that contaminated at least two ingredients used to make more than 100 brands of dog and cat foods? China shipped melamine-tainted wheat gluten, corn gluten and rice protein concentrate to North America and South Africa. The contaminated products led to the deaths of many U.S. pets.

This week, the Chicago Tribune reported on an investigation it made into the continued sale of toys manufactured in China that have been recalled because they contain unsafe levels of lead. One test completed for the Trib found lead in a spinning top toy to be 40 times the legal limit.

These examples are a different sort of issue than the trouble that Japan had a few decades ago. I can still remember hearing about “cheap Japanese junk” that broke too soon or didn’t perform as well as U.S.-made products. But safety wasn’t raised as an issue then. It certainly is one with some Chinese-made products.

As the Tribune article states, U.S. consumers are actively looking for toys manufactured domestically, because they refuse to take a chance with the health of their children.

Unless China shows some remarkable progress in its product safety, it will lose business to more expensive, but reliable and safe, manufacturers from other countries.

In addition to my full-time position as an internal communications manager, I volunteer to guide communications at the church that my family has attended for 12 years. I’ve probably faced more challenges in terms of developing communication strategies and obtaining resources of people and budget there than in any of the “professional” jobs that I’ve held throughout my 27-year career.

That’s one of the reasons why I was excited about participating in a communications workshop offered on July 30, 2007 by the staff of Granger Community Church in Granger, Indiana (USA). Granger is a solid example of how the Gospel message can reach people who have become disenchanted (even downright hostile) with “organized religion,” and who aren’t attending a church because, according to Granger leaders, they see church as too boring, intimidating, or irrelevant to their “stressed-out, hyper-speed lives,” and/or “they felt unworthy, unloved and unlovable.”

Following the communications workshop, I interviewed Kem Meyer, Granger’s communications director, along with some workshop participants. I posted the discussion on CommaKazi Speek. It was my second recorded conversation with Kem; here is the first one.

As one of the workshop participants points out in our recorded conversation, Granger has become known as a leader in effective communication to today’s tech saavy person, who may also be wary of any hype coming from institutions–including organized religion. So how has Granger reached and retained members? How has it grown from about 10 people meeting in the living room of Senior/Founding Pastor Mark Beeson and his wife, Sheila, to several thousand people worshiping in a large, modern space that also features:

• a casual atmosphere
• friendly people who’ll help you find your way around
• contemporary music, powerful dramas, high-impact media presentations
• an innovative children’s space and
• a Starbuck®-esque café?

Communications played an important role. Although Meyer was quick to credit the terrific speaking skills of the church’s pastors, she also provided practical tips for church communications staff and volunteers.

Bad communication is when you are trying to change someone’s “world view,” Meyer said. Good communication is when you speak respectfully to a world view, even if you disagree with it. Instead of trying to send “the right message” to your audience, you need to develop communications that release “the right response.”

Meyer defines “world view” as the bias that affects the story we tell ourselves to make it easier to live in a complicated work. Examples of world view include:

• A home-cooked meal is better for my kids
• Church is boring and is for sissies
• Organic food is “better”

During the communication workshop, Meyer presented five “communication myths” and four “best practices.” The five communication myths are:

• You (the communicator) are in control
• The more choices (products, services, message), the better
• Advertising creates interest and reinforces the brand
• It worked before, so it’ll work again
• People care about what you have to say

Although I don’t have time to unwrap all of these myths, I’ll cover a couple of them. People mistakenly believe that advertising creates interest and reinforces the brand, when at best, advertising creates awareness, which is not, in and of itself, a motivating factor. Meyer pointed out that cancer creates a sort of powerful awareness in people–but that doesn’t mean that people want it. Brands are built on experiences, she added.

People remember, on average, 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 40% of what we do and about 100% of what we feel, Meyer said. Emotion is the “on/off switch” for thinking.

The four best practices discussed by Meyer were:

• Know your audience (psychographics as well as demographics)
• Remove barriers to entry (is that tri-fold brochure and over-friendly approach to visitors attracting people–or repelling them?)
• Reduce the noise. Life is hard enough; we shouldn’t make it harder on people trying to get our message.
• Tell one story at a time. Act as an air traffic controller, and let the ministry leaders fly their own planes. You simply direct the flow and keep them from crashing together.

Among the practical examples of how Granger’s communications staff uses this knowledge, Meyer talked about how the church looked to attract visitors who could be hostile to Christianity and church. The church staff developed a message series titled, “The Most Irritating Things About Christians.” That series attracted people who were looking for affirmation that certain things about Christians can be seen as being irritating. Pastor Beeson was able to shape his messages to address those irritations, while affirming the reasons why Christians may act in a seemingly irritating way.

I’ve only skimmed the surface of the workshop, and haven’t talked about the practical advice for improving the communication process, adding volunteers and determining the ways to reach a particular audience or demographic. I’ll be sharing more with my church’s leadership, and may find other tidbits worthy of posting here.

If you’ve seen any of the trailers for the third movie in the Jason Bourne series, you’ll know that “The Bourne Ultimatum” promises a big heap of the ingredients that made the first two movies successful: Action, drama and mystery. It also includes a strong dose of paid product placement, just like so many modern movies.

As an employee of VW Credit, Inc., the finance subsidiary of Volkswagen of America, that paid product placement is okay in this case–because it led to me and 500 coworkers enjoying a pre-release viewing of the new Bourne thriller Thursday night in a Chicago suburb. Several VW vehicles can be spotted throughout the movie–including a lot of action involving an Audi and a VW Touareg 2 in a climatic chase scene near the end of the movie. Without spoiling the movie, let’s just say that the vehicles’ residual value (resale value) after the chase dropped significantly. That Jason Bourne must pay high insurance premiums.

It was fun to sit with my wife and coworkers and look for VW products, while enjoying one of the best movies released so far this summer. I would rate this installment on par with the first Bourne movie (The Bourne Identity) and well above the second (The Bourne Supremacy).

In a move toward statistical sanity, Nielsen//NetRatings, a global Internet media and market research company, announced on July 10, 2007 that it added both “Total Minutes” and “Total Sessions” metrics to its syndicated Internet audience measurement service.

This decision is an example of a research company’s efforts to provide reasonable and useful data on website traffic. Although “total minutes” and “total sessions” still don’t slice visitor data in a way that sheds a complete light on visitor demographics, they will provide more useful data than the now almost universally disparaged “page hits.” Read Robert Niles’ July 13, 2007 post, “Hits, page views and other garbage we pass off as audience metrics,” for a nice perspective on the topic. Niles is editor of Online Journalism Review, connected to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Nielsen//NetRatings states:

the new metrics deliver greater perspective on total engagement across sites. Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies like AJAX and streaming (both audio/video and other content like sports scoreboards and live stock quotes) have greatly enhanced the consumer experience, yet pose special challenges to Internet audience measurement. AJAX refreshes content without reloading entire Web pages and streaming provides dynamically changing content within a single page or a media player. While a page view metric under-credits such engagement, the total minutes metric provides a common denominator for user behavior that is independent of site design. “’Total Minutes’ is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications,” said Scott Ross, director, product marketing for the NetView service.

Nielsen//NetRatings data show that the difference between time spent and page view metrics varies by Web site category. Among search providers, the time spent and page view ratios are similar. For example, the ratio of total minutes spent on Google Search versus Yahoo! Search is 3.3 to 1 (see Table 1). Their page view ratio is 3.1 to 1.

The time spent ratio is 3.6 to 1 between social networking sites MySpace and YouTube, Nielsen//NetRatings finds, but the ratio of page views is much larger, at 10.4 to 1. YouTube visitors spend more time per page than MySpace “because they are primarily watching videos, requiring fewer page refreshes. While MySpace may be able to serve more ads because of its number of page refreshes, the time spent ratio is an important comparison of audience engagement on the two sites.”

As OJR Editor Niles stated in his post, “Over the long run, third-party traffic data, survey results and advertiser testimonials can help show potential advertisers a more accurate picture of our websites’ ability to attract readers and deliver them to an advertiser than another salesperson’s spin will.”

While waiting for a flight to Chicago after the 2007 International Conference of the IABC, I spent some time recording a conversation with Ned Lundquist, ABC. Follow this link to the podcast, and enjoy a 9-minute conversation that touched upon the IABC conference, observations about New Orleans, Ned’s Job-of-the-Week email newsletter and website, and the current job market for communicators.

One correction to my recorded introduction: Ned now is with Alion Science and Technology.

I’m a member of the International Association of Business Communicators, and a new member of its advocacy initiative, led by IABC member Mike Zimet.

We could debate a long time about the meaning of “advocacy” and how IABC could address it as an organization. I’m dividing the subject into three distinct parts, two of which have been discussed in Mike’s most recent post and all of the subsequent comments. I personally feel compelled to support the third part of advocacy, along with other interested IABC members. The three parts are:

1) Advocacy focused on our profession. Who has ever attended a communications-related conference or seminar without hearing someone say that communicators need a “seat at the table” where the decisions are made? This part of advocacy would help to raise the awareness of the role of effective, strategic communications within an organization or other operating entity.

2) Advocacy focused on our association. Mike Klein summarizes this by highlighting the need “to find more and more effective ways of promoting what our members bring to our clients and communities’ respective tables.” We must raise awareness of IABC, both from a leadership spokesperson perspective and as professionals within the organizations that employ our services. In the same recent post on the IABC Advocacy Commons, Kristen Sukalac makes an important distinction between an association and/or its members “speaking out” and “taking a position.”

3) Advocacy focused on social responsibility. I spent a lot of time at the recent IABC International Conference in New Orleans passing out information about the IABC Advocacy Initiative and talking with IABC members. I received the most enthusiastic responses when I talked about using our communication skills and experience to “make a difference” globally and locally, as we would support charitable organizations and causes, and allow them to “Be Heard.”

The vision that I discussed with Mike Zimet includes working with local IABC chapters throughout the world, helping them to identify local causes or organizations that need the kind of help that chapter members could provide on a pro-bono basis. This could:

• Enhance the professional image and personal self-esteem of individual chapter members who volunteer for pro-bono work in the local community. Want proof? Ask anyone who swung a hammer or carried lumber at the Habitat for Humanity project in New Orleans. Better yet, ask to see the video of the project that was shown at a general session during the IABC conference. Imagine how we will feel when we give back to the community using our greatest skill: The ability to communicate.
• Boost the image of local chapters by offering something tangible to promote in addition to the monthly networking luncheon.
• Enhance the image of IABC as an association, as it benefits from the many acts of service done by IABC members and chapters.

A beautiful part of this is that it can develop organically, without the need for micro-management by the IABC Executive Board, staff, or the heads of the Advocacy Initiative. These efforts would benefit from some way(s) to share ideas, resources, information and success stories. At little or no expense, that would be easy using various forms of social media, including wikis, blogs, instant messaging, vidcasting, and digital image storage–most of which is available right now from free-to-join social networking sites including The Communicators’ Network and MyRagan.

It is exciting to see the progress being made in different pieces of the advocacy initiative. I will be working on the social responsibility piece., and would love to hear from anyone interested in helping to make it happen. Contact me through this blog or by sending an email to tomATcommakazispeekDOTcom. (Substitute the @ symbol for AT and a period for DOT in this email address.) [UPDATE July 9, 2007] I’m deleting this invitation to contact me about the social responsibility portion of the IABC Advocacy Initiative because I don’t want to appear to be working apart from the IABC Advocacy team, led by Mike Zimet. A social responsibility subcommittee has been working under the IABC Advocacy Initiative group for several months. For now, your interest in participating is enough; we will hear more from the SR subcommittee about how to help in coming weeks.

My family leaves Saturday morning for a driving vacation to Mount Rushmore and the surrounding area. Should be a great time, and I won’t be checking this blog or any of my other usual haunts. It will feel great to be unplugged (cellphone excluded).

I regularly head over to the PR Conversations blog, because the authors provide great ideas and information. The latest post by Frank Ovaitt, “Linking Trust and Transparency,” provides some new research that further supports the evidence of the link between trust and transparency.

Well worth a read.

This is a short post that I’m typing with one hand while packing my suitcase with the other. Before coming to New Orleans for the IABC International Conference, I decided not to spend a lot of time blogging. I wanted to aborb as much of the environment and sessions as possible.

I’ll be adding posts here within the next couple of days. The “Quick ‘n Dirty New Orleans” answer to whether my experience has been positive is: Most definitely!

I can’t compare today’s New Orleans with the place some of you experienced pre-Katrina. This was my first visit. Some things are different; how couldn’t things have changed in the aftermath of that huge of a catastophe? But the things that matter to most of us outsiders: The accommodations, the entertainment, the “touristy things to do,” and–most importantly–the people–did not, and will not, disappoint.

More to come. I hope that also is what we can tell the New Orleans office of tourism.

I’m in New Orleans for the annual international conference of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). I’m going to be busy attending the conference and conference-related events, as well as meeting up with colleagues as much as possible.

I expect to have a lot of content for blog posts, but may have to keep them short until I return home.

I have recorded two very short podcasts that I’m calling “Quick ‘n Dirty New Orleans.” These will be unedited podcasts recorded during my stay here in the Big Easy. My work computer doesn’t have any audio editing software installed, and you have to be an administrator to do so–which I am not.

But what’s wrong with spontaneity and a rough edge?

If you are in New Orleans, leave me a message here, or at the IABC Message Center. I’d like to meet as many of my readers as possible. Maybe we’ll record a podcast together?

UPDATE: I’ve posted some newer podcasts, including one regarding a fundraiser for the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center. If you read this on Saturday, June 23, head over to the CAC for a fun adult event.