Perception Skills Pt. II

A few posts ago, I mentioned how improving your perception skills improves your overall communication skills.

The first steps of the perception process have to do with selecting (choosing what to focus on) and attending (the actual act of focusing). Here’s a funny, and informative, video with which you can test your own perception skills.

Are you voting for James Bond or Jack Bauer?

In a recent article, ADWEEK reports on survey results linking the two major presidential candidates to various brands and fictional characters.

To find out which candidate is AOL and Ford, and which is Google and BMW (the results may surprise you), click here to read the whole story.

The "Power Ties" that Bind: Dressing for Success

Nonverbal communication is not limited to eye contact and gestures. What communications scholars call “artifacts” (things we put on our bodies, such as clothes, perfume, piercings, accessories, hairstyles, etc.) may say more about us than any fleeting glance or nod.

According to a story in PR Week, what we wear at work is affected by many factors, including location, corporate culture and client base.

The bottom line is that “business casual” ain’t what it used to be.

Read the Whole Story.

The Prince of All Media: Howard Stern Trades Relevancy for Revenue

The self-proclaimed King of All Media now reigns over a smaller empire. Shock Jock Howard Stern, who left the serfdom of terrestrial airwaves to relish the riches of satellite radio, now plays for a smaller audience at the palace.

According to a story in the LA Times, the move may have cost Stern up to 10 million listeners, and the power and prestige that go with them.

The Times quotes Tom Taylor, executive news editor at Radio-Info.com as saying "It's like Howard went from playing Madison Avenue to playing an upscale off-Broadway concert hall for a lot of money. He got everything he wanted in terms of money and not being bothered by the FCC, but he lost the bulk of his audience."

Of course losing listeners is only the first domino to tumble. What follows is losing movie deals, book deals and quality guests. The story points out that Stern’s one-time stable of A-list celebrity guests has been replaced by reality stars and names from the past.

The story even suggests that Stern might consider a return to the land of regulated airwaves once his current contract expires in 2010.

Stay tuned. Nobody else is.

Read the enitre story by Greg Braxton.

“How’m I Doin’?”

Improving your perception skills is a valuable step towards improving your overall communication skills and, thereby, your employability.

A simple way to do this is with a process called perception checking. With indirect perception checking, you just raise your awareness level and look for nonverbal hints to see if what you think is going on is, in fact, actually going on.

For example, an employee may perceive that his supervisor is upset with him. To asses this, he may watch how the supervisor acts around other employees. With direct perception checking, the employee would approach his supervisor and come right out and ask how he’s doing?

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that younger workers are not only resorting to direct perception checking…they’re embracing it. The Journal states that this shift towards seeking out feedback is “forcing some employers to rethink how they discuss employee performance.”

The story cited a survey that showed 85 percent of Gen Y employees believe their age-group peers want "frequent and candid performance feedback.”

Read the whole story here.

McNews You Can Use

This morning, the Internet was buzzing with images of monkeys waiting on customers in a Japanese sake house. I call this type of story Fast News. Much like fast food, which entices us with lesser versions of homemade fare, Fast News tempts us with easy-to-consume facsimiles of real news. After a while, both leave us feeling empty and wanting for more.

Fast News is appearing everywhere we look and unfortunately many confuse ubiquity with quality, and availability with desire.

In his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman maintained that Morse’s telegraph, which removed time and distance issues from the information-sharing process, “erased state lines” and “collapsed regions.” This happened, Postman wrote, at a “considerable cost.”

Postman quotes Henry David Thoreau, who stated in “Walden” that “We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

In other words, just because we can share information almost instantly over a great many miles, does not mean this information is necessarily worth sharing.

Yet the purveyors of Fast News share away, one after the other. Monkey see, monkey do.

Extra! Extra!

Gawker.com spins an insightful, if depressing, take on landing a job in journalism. While the piece may be a little heavy on the gloom and doom, there are some very practical tips for both new and experienced journalists.
Read all about it.

Citizen Journalism Update #3: Dumb and Dumber

When it comes to citizen journalism, we’ve seen the sordid (cell phone videos of some candid PR blunders), the scandalous (uploads of porn to citizen journalism “news” sites) and now, the stupid.

Apple stock recently took a beating based on an unfounded story that CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack.

The citizen journalist who posted the story now faces possible jail time (“Dumb”). Much of the outrage is coming from Apple stockholders whose portfolios took a hit based on the fictional story (“Dumber”).

It’s unclear if someone is posting these bogus blurbs for recreation or compensation. Should someone be shorting the stock and manipulating prices via erroneous stories, heads may roll.

Anyone graduating high school must pass basic math and English courses. Can we please add media literacy to that list?

Read more at Wired.

Putting the "Arrr" in PR

The Jolly Roger…bottles of rum…buried treasure. These are the things that come to mind when one hears the word “pirate.” Now it looks like we need to add “spokesperson” to that list.

It seems that pirates pillaging off the coast of Somalia have an actual spokesman to deal with media inquiries. One such flack recently explained the pirate’s mission to a reporter from the NY Times.

To read PR Week’s account, click here.
To learn to talk like a pirate, click here.

Porn to Run

What do CBS and the Broadway musical Avenue Q have in common? They both know that the Internet is for porn.

The musical knew it back when it opened in 2003 (the show contains a song called “The Internet Is for Porn”). CBS discovered it only recently.

In an attempt get in on the trend toward citizen journalism, CBS encouraged the public to upload visuals to its grassroots news site CBSeyemobil.com. Upload they did. Taking photojournalism to a whole new level, many of the site’s “reporters” added images of a sexual nature.

"We've been posting user-generated content since April, and this is the first known incident along these lines," a CBS spokesperson told Ad Age. "It was removed promptly and we will redouble our efforts in this regard."

Read the story.