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In a recent posting we discussed the importance of framing the debate and empowering stakeholders as opportunities to defend modern agriculture.
The U.S. livestock industry has been vocal in its response to stories which recently aired on the CBS Evening News. Two six-minute reports by Katie Couric attempt to link the use of antimicrobials with MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and positions Danish swine production – which has restricted the use of antibiotics – as a model for the U.S.
As Ron Hays noted on a recent Oklahoma Farm Report, comparisons between U.S. and Danish pork production miss a larger point. Hays quotes Dr. Lyle Vogel of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) in testimony before a U.S. Senate Committee.
“While the total quantity of antimicrobials used in food animals in Denmark has decreased by 27%, the increase in disease has resulted in a 143% increase in the quantity of antimicrobials used for therapeutic purposes,” Vogel says. “And the antimicrobials now used more frequently are in classes which are also used in humans, such as tetracyclines.”
Click here for more on the AVMA’s Senate testimony.
This is an excellent example of framing the debate by discussing how the strategic use of antimicrobials helps prevent and control disease.
A new Web site introduced last week by the National Pork Producers Council will also help. The site – http://www.porkcares.com/ – highlights the industry’s “We Care” initiative and puts a face on modern agriculture by allowing individual pork producers to tell their story in their own words. An important part of this strategy is that it’s targeted not only to consumers but also to other channel partners – i.e., packers, retailers and food service organizations – to empower them to discuss the benefits and safeguards of modern agriculture.
Who’s doing a good job of helping agriculture tell its story? What works and what doesn’t work? Join the conversation.
Teenagers, that valuable and highly sought demographic, might not be the über-users of the Web that most of us thought they were, at least according to a recent Pew Internet study. The fact is that teens are ignoring Twitter, forgetting their blogs and aggregating around social networking sites.
While 73% of teens are members of social networking sites, the study found that:
Even their activity on these sites is shifting from just a year ago. For instance:
Some social-media commentators have noted there’s a tendency towards brevity, and away from substantial content creation. They note that teenagers still post images and comment on them, send IMs and text messages, and leave notes on each other’s walls – all ways of socializing that don’t involve significant effort.
Lacking any real insight, I’ll throw in my two cents’ worth of conjecture here. Teenagers, almost all of whom were born after the introduction of the first Web browser, are the true Internet generation. Like television and radio, the Internet is an appliance or a utility to them. They don’t crack it open, hack it or tweak it. (That was the role of the early adopters who are now the tech-savvy, device-hungry young adults of today.) They take it for granted.
Social networking sites aggregate all the functionality a young user needs. With apologies to Albert Einstein, these sites make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Mind you, it could also be that teenagers are turning away from socializing via computer and more towards texting on mobile phones. (Did you know that 58% of 12-year-olds have mobile phones? This from the same Pew study.)
So what do you think? Is this shift a significant trend? Or are teenagers finding other ways to socialize? Let me know what you think in the comments below.
“Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world,” said Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution.” Borlaug, who passed away late last year, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in fighting world hunger by developing high-yielding wheat crops and bringing agricultural improvements to developing countries.
In a complex purchase decision process for highly engineered products or services, your prospect’s journey from awareness to purchase may not occur with uniform speed. We often assume that this path is a straight line, and we invest our resources uniformly based on this uniform assumption. But greater insight into your customer’s buying experience may yield some surprising results. “Information hurdles” may exist in places where they were not anticipated.
So how can technology help – or hurt? In today’s hyper ebusiness world, your customers will interact with numerous ecommerce technology touch points. Another important, yet often overlooked, part of this buying experience is how your internal teams interact with your internal-facing technology such as CRM, Reporting Tools, Internal Portals etc., and how those interactions can benefit or frustrate the efforts of your team to create great experiences for your prospects. Continue reading →
A wise man once said, “Sometimes it’s not about being better, it’s about sucking less.” In the world of marketing, often it is not the smartest one who wins - it’s the one who screws up the least. Here are five mistakes to avoid so you don’t get beat before you start.
“Branding,” at its highest level of practice, is an art. Certainly, it draws upon a teachable understanding of the processes of meaning – how meaning is created and reinforced in the imagination, how meaning is negotiated in social groups and how meaning can be transferred from elements of the culture to the signs, products and concepts of corporations. But while the process is reproducible, the product of the best branding work is not.
We often find many marketers tend to think they need huge budgets and a lot of customers involved to obtain any useful feedback on their products or services.
Today’s Marketing Automation technologies give us unprecedented visibility into who are visiting our websites and what they are looking at, all in real-time. Marketers and Salespeople leveraging these new demand generation technologies face an interesting new question though: To pounce or not to pounce?
It has been almost a year since Google rolled out their SearchWiki features, but with their Sept 09 integration of these features into the Google Toolbar (now called SideWiki) it means that millions of Google users are much more likely to post public comments about your web properties. Google went a step further days ago when they launched a SideWiki bookmarklet that works in all browsers and does not require you to have the Google toolbar.
There are so many tools out there for social media monitoring and reporting - it seems there’s some new offer in my inbox every day. Sometimes I’m asked for my opinion as to which product is best and the usual answer is (you guessed it) “it depends.” Mainly it depends on what data is most important to your social media efforts. With any type of ongoing report that will be shared within an organization, the challenge is not providing enough data, but limiting the data to the metrics that matter most.
