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The answers many polls offer make you question their value

It is impossible to read a paper these days without encountering citations of polls, survey results, or focus-group findings. Increasingly, organizations and their PR advisers are commissioning their own research in an attempt to make a point or generate favorable notice. This is risky business and, as a recent example involving the American Medical Association (AMA) shows, it can easily backfire.

The AMA “Spring Break” survey of 644 women ages 17 to 35 produced headlines across the country, including “Girls Behaving Badly” (Louisville Courier-Journal) and “Girls Go Wild for Booze, Sex” (Boston Herald). Unfortunately, the questionable methodology of the survey led the president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research to say, “[The poll] has no scientific basis… it is silly and should never have seen the light of day.” In his Washington Post media column, Howard Kurtz reported on the flap, noting, “This poll had zero scientific validity.” Helped along by the Mystery Pollster blog, the fallout from the story continues to grow.

This was not the first time the AMA used some dubious polling results to promote a laudable cause. In 2001, it commissioned a survey on “college binge drinking” that asked if respondents agreed that “we should stop holding young people solely responsible for heavy drinking and put some of the blame where it belongs – on the alcohol industry.” (Two-thirds agreed, by the way.) However, helpful hints, such as “where it belongs,” have no place in serious polling.

On that question, and many other “agreement” items, respondents had choices of “strongly agree,” “somewhat agree,” or “disagree” – giving them two ways to agree (including the middle option, which is usually “neutral”) and just one to disagree.

I ran across this “research with an attitude” in a broader review of publicly available survey research on alcohol issues. (Disclosure: My firm has several alcoholic beverage clients.) Here are some other interesting, if not bizarre, findings. Just 6% of Americans admit to “drinking regularly both on weekends and during the week.” Is it a coincidence that 6% also admit they’ve “lied to [their] doctor about the amount of alcohol [they] drink”? Seventy-three percent say they do not regularly drink alcohol with dinner, while 4% drink wine, 8% drink beer, and 4% are “not sure,” suggesting they drink too much of something.

Nine out of ten adults say they are concerned about “underage alcohol abuse.” Yet 79% say it is unrealistic to expect “that a teenager will not drink alcohol until they are 21.” Ten percent of Americans admit to having driven under the influence of alcohol in the past three months. When asked, “How often do you drink alcohol and drive – constantly, frequently, occasionally, seldom, or never?” 91% say “never.” Not surprisingly, no one admitted to “constantly” drinking and driving presumably because, sooner or later, they have to stop for gas and/or more alcohol. To make matters worse, those who said they “never”drink and drive were asked a follow-up question:“Why don’t you drink and drive?”

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Blogs just a reflection of overall consumer empowerment trend

Blogs will transform PR. Blogs will democratize the marketplace. Blogs can kill your brand. Blogs will set you free. Blog… blog… blog. OK, I’m late to the blog party. Like a lot of you (you know who you are), I’ve spent more time talking about how important blogs are than I’ve spent reading them. So I decided to catch up. Here’s what I found.

First, the numbers: There are about 37 million blogs out there, 10 new ones started since you began reading this column, 75,000 new ones each day, a new one each second (like dot-com IPOs in the 1990s), half of which will be inactive within three months. About 50% of blog writers are under 30, and 57% are male – a reversal of the gender balance three years ago. The largest number (37%) are in Japanese, and about 30% are in English. Only one in five US consumers has ever read a blog, and half that many have read one in the last week. But, significantly, 67% of journalists say they read blogs at least weekly, and about half of those say they get story ideas from blogs. Next, the experience: I spent several hours romping through many of the top 100 blogs as rated by Technorati, the premier guide to the blogosphere, and here’s what I learned.

First, I just wasted several hours of my life that I’ll never get back. It’s like reading raw FBI files… no filter, no judgment, lots of inflammatory hearsay and opinion. This is why newspapers invented editors. Second, blogs aren’t for everyone. For example, they’re not for people without vast amounts of time (on average, blog readers spend 20% of their waking hours online – twice that of the non-blog reader). And they’re not for people who don’t think all opinions were created equal and that everyone is not only entitled to one, they are entitled to post it on the Web. Third, if you’re not interested in news and politics (43% of the traffic), technology, Asian languages, or weird stuff (like pictures of cats dressed in strange costumes, www.stuffonmycat.com), there is little to interest you in the top 100 blogs.

Finally, I got some feedback from two experts in this space: Pete Snyder, CEO of New Media Strategies, and Todd Zeigler, SVP of The Bivings Group. They tell me that while blogs can hurt a brand – bloggers love to tell the story of how Jeff Jarvis’ rant about Dell’s customer service sent its stock price south – they present at least as much opportunity as risk.

Surprisingly, staid old GM is taking more advantage of this than most other mega-corporations (http:// fastlane.gmblogs.com/). And, they counsel, don’t confuse the medium with the message. Blogs are just the current manifestation of a much bigger and more important trend: (technologically) assisted empowerment of the consumer. The technology will continue to evolve through RSS, video blogs, podcasting, etc., but the underlying social and consumer trends will remain the same: consumers participating in virtual communities, demanding more information, better service, and more transparency from business, and a continuing seismic shift in the balance of power between seller and buyer.

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Reporters should reveal real reason for unnamed sources

Bob Dylan once sang, “But I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side.”

Turns out, he did. At least that’s the way he tells it in the Gospel of Judas, a 1,700-year-old codex the National Geographic Society just released. According to that manuscript, Jesus asked Judas to leak his whereabouts to the Romans in order that his “Passion” and the world’s redemption might proceed as planned.

Also last week, we learned that former Cheney aide Scooter Libby explains that his illegal leaking was done at the behest of his leader, President Bush. All this rationalization of leaks revives some interesting questions about how communications professionals should be dealing with unauthorized disclosures.

Here in Washington, we understand that this city could not function without leaks – we’d rather give up indoor plumbing. But lately, the national newsmedia have been agonizing over how to deal with leaks. The consensus, so far, is that when an anonymous quote appears in a story, the reader deserves an explanation. Understanding a leaker’s motivation can help a reader evaluate the credibility of the leak.

Is it public-spirited or merely self-serving? Does the leaker have an incentive to “spin” the leak one way or another? Is the leaker likely to profit financially, politically, or otherwise from the leak?

Reporters’ rationales for quoting anonymous sources range from the banal to the bizarre. We are told that some leakers wish to remain anonymous out of “fear of reprisal” or “due to the sensitivity of the issue” or “because the information has not yet been made public.” Well, duh.

Why not tell us the real reason a leaker wants to remain anonymous. These would sound more like “because she would be fired” or “because this is an act of extreme disloyalty” or “because the source is really not in a position to know much about this issue.” But obviously, such candor would create other problems for reporters.

In fact, the anonymous leak serves everyone’s interest (except the target). The public gets information that it would otherwise be denied – like the existence of an elaborate domestic spying program. The reporter gets a story – often an exclusive – that could never be had “on the record.” And the source, well, here’s where those rationales come in again… the source also gets something of value. It may be as innocent as seeming in-the-know to a big-time reporter. It may be settling an old score or killing a program the source doesn’t like. Or, it may be darker than that – like ending the career of a political opponent.

Whatever the reason for the leak, however, it is unlikely to be as boring and innocent-sounding as the ones being offered up these days in our daily press. In the interest of honest journalism and, frankly, in the interest of spicy storytelling, let’s start demanding that reporters tell us the real inside story about why their sources are so shy.

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Katrina disaster shows value of restoring FEMA’s status

Twenty-seven years ago, while working in the Carter White House, I directed the reorganization project that gave birth to a new federal agency: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). While the idea of a single agency to coordinate the federal preparation for and response to natural disasters seems obvious now, forging political consensus behind the plan was tough.

We had to pull from more than 30 different government fiefdoms – including the Defense Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The resistance was fierce. And, because we insisted that the agency be independent, report directly to the President, and have ex-officio Cabinet status, we faced another hurdle: the need for congressional
approval, which could have been avoided by tucking the agency into a larger department.

Watching the saga of FEMA’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, I’ve wondered what went wrong with such a good idea. The easy answer: leadership. Unlike James Lee Witt, President Clinton’s FEMA director who came to the office from a career in public service and disaster work, Michael Brown, FEMA director during Katrina, was the former head of the Arabian Horse Association, with no disaster experience. But there is another, more important explanation of what went wrong that says a lot about managing change in large organizations.

When we created FEMA, we knew that, to be effective in coordinating the assets and activities of multiple federal agencies, it needed independence, stature, and direct access to the President. President Clinton understood this and further elevated FEMA to full Cabinet status. When Witt called upon officials throughout the bureaucracy to pitch in on disaster relief, they knew he spoke with Clinton’s authority. In contrast, President Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, downgraded FEMA’s status and made it a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an agency more concerned with terrorism than with more frequent – but less dramatic – natural disasters.

Large bureaucracies, whether government agencies or private companies, are not built for extraordinary effort. They thrive on routine. When their leaders or circumstances call for the extraordinary, they resist – sometimes massively. Leaders like Jack Welsh and Lou Gerstner have seen this when trying to reinvent GE and IBM, respectively, and President Bush got a taste of it after Katrina. The difference: Welsh and Gerstner knew that there is no chance for success unless it is clear that orders are coming from the highest level.

What does all of this mean for FEMA’s future? Simple. Take it out of DHS, and return it to independent, Cabinet-level status. If the next disaster requiring massive federal mobilization is a dirty bomb or biological attack instead of a hurricane, FEMA will be there to respond, and that response will be more effective if the agency has the independence and clout that it needs to get the job done.

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Google’s defiance could be its downfall if it isn’t careful

Vladimir Lenin famously cited the principle “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” to justify creating a Utopian society through bloody revolution and dictatorship. For seven decades, the Communists broke a lot of eggs without producing an omelet.

But Lenin was right – to drive change, you have to break some rules and, often, some laws. Consider Google. The company is under siege by publishers for digitizing and distributing copyrighted work, and by the Bush administration for refusing to turn over individual search histories. The former is probably illegal and the latter a dangerous challenge to a President who thinks he’s Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.

Ironically, while breaking the rules in the US, Google is timidly observing China’s rules of wholesale Internet censorship – the so-called “Great Firewall of China.” Next time you visit Beijing, try Googling “democracy,” and you’re likely to get the same result as placing a collect call to Osama bin Laden from New York City. Apparently, Google thinks it can make an omelet in China without breaking the yolk.

The inconsistency of these policies – one bold and rebellious, the other compliant and complicitous – says a lot about Google and the relationship between change and rule-breaking. Google’s mission statement – “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” – is high-minded and populist. If information is power, Google promises “power to the people.” The company further cloaks itself in righteousness with its motto of “Do no evil.” For Google, “Do no evil” isn’t the same as “Break no rules.” If society’s rules are designed to screw the little guy, Google is happy to pursue a high-profile, defiant rule-breaking strategy – in line with its commitment to avoid evil-doing and illustrative of its corporate persona as a populist defender of the common man.

But Google needs to be careful. Rules help preserve the power of the powerful, and when challenged, those interests are fierce defenders of the status quo. Ask Napster’s Shawn Fanning. While Google has plenty of economic and market power of its own, there are only so many times it can stick its finger in the eye of the ruling elite with impunity. The company is already finding that, despite its positive buzz and soaring market cap, it can’t find a well-connected Republican in Washington willing to represent its political interests. It should ask Bill Gates what being an outsider in Washington can cost a company in legal bills alone.

And Google, like a self-righteous politician (think Tom DeLay), could easily become an overstuffed political piñata for competitors, politicians, and the media. The hypocrisy of its China policy looks like the big bull’s eye on that piñata’s butt. Google is in its corporate adolescence – big growth spurt, lots of testosterone, moral certitude, and flagrant disdain for authority and rules. But adolescents who don’t learn when to play by the rules become obnoxious and, ultimately, unsuccessful adults.

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