Weight, weight! Don't tell me! Why willful ignorance will put Weight Watchers out of business

"Pay no heed to that 'wireless' warning. It is my fundamental belief that tools alone will never reach the levels of success that are possible when they are combined with human engagement.”

It looks like apps are going to be the death of Weight Watchers. Not appetizers—software applications, specifically free online fitness apps. These apps that “suggest diets, count calories, and track progress” are carving heaping helpings from their profitability, according to a recent Washington Post article.

To be fair, competition from apps is not necessarily a death sentence. A lot of companies have survived technological disruptions by adapting to the new environment. But it looks like Weight Watchers is not going to be one of them, if recent comments by WW’s CEO Jim Chambers are any indication.

On an analyst call last year Chambers said, “We do not believe that free apps will solve the obesity epidemic. [But] I see now that the situation we are facing as a business and organization is more difficult than it originally appeared.” An honest admission and a good base to build on.

But then, during an analyst call this past July, Chambers said something that only Captain Edward “Those Icebergs Ain’t So Big” Smith could appreciate. “It is our fundamental belief,” he said, “that tools alone, technology alone, food programming alone will never reach the levels of success that are possible when they are combined with human engagement. … The strength of the Weight Watchers brand is and always will be in the human connections that make a weight-loss journey more successful.”

Unfortunately for Weight Watchers stock holders, Chambers is dead wrong about the technology. Apps don’t operate in a vacuum. The folks who share their app-derived weight-loss data on Facebook and other social media platforms enjoy the same support and encouragement as those who hop on a scale in a church basement, only on a much wider … uh, scale. The same goes for recipe-sharing, step-counting, and tearful binge-eating-confessions.

Chambers isn’t alone. History’s highway is littered with the wreckage of blue chippers who ignored the "paradigm shift ahead" signs posted whenever a game-changing technology alters the landscape.

How about you? Is some new technology willful blindness threatening to make your organization obsolete? How about your industry? Especially you, my association associates, is there a valuable service you provide that could be replaced by technology? Are there any services that can’t be?

Everything you need to know about communicating in the Interactive Age (part 4)

"It's simple, Patrick. If you wanna be heard we're gonna need less of you and a whole lot more of me."

As Edward "Smoke 'em if you got 'em, ladies" Bernays said, social media has brought us full circle to “an earlier age [where] a leader was usually known to his followers personally; there was a visual relationship between them. Communication was accomplished principally by personal announcement to an audience.”

It's true. Social media allows us to create millions of self-selected communities comprised of people who have common experiences, common interests, or shared values … and sometimes all three.

Their online conversations are by their very nature “personal announcements to an audience,” (sometimes a bit too personal). More often than not there is a visual relationship between them even if they’re on the other side of the globe. And to the degree that these communities have leaders, they are certainly well known to their followers and—more importantly—they are approachable, unlike the leaders of the 20th century.

These communities are strong and insular. You won’t reach people through advertising. They’re not listening to outsiders anymore.

It's going to take work. You are going to have to find the communities of people who share your values. Then you will have to listen and learn before you speak. And when you do speak, you need to give more than you receive, at least at first. In short, before they're going to want to hear anything you have to say, you have to be welcomed into their community.

So how do you do that? Simple. You have to stop radiating like a star and start absorbing like a quasar.

To be a success in the 20th century was to be a star. Whether a movie star, a rock star, a political star, or an NBA All Star, your job was to shine brightly and be worshiped by “the little people” below you. Interaction with the masses was carefully scripted and strictly limited.

Then the Internet—which prefers dialogues over monologues—gave birth to a new celestial model of success: the quasar.

Unlike a star, which only radiates, a quasar has an enormous black hole at its core that sucks matter and energy in while simultaneously emitting more light than any star in the universe. This two-way flow of energy is the foundation of successful communication in the Interactive Age. Monologues are out; thoughtful and empathetic dialogues are in.

QuASAR also happens to be a handy acronym for the method that will make you a more thoughtful, empathetic, and successful communicator. And it is the QuASAR Method that holds the secret to being heard in the Interactive Age.

Up next: Get to the point already!

Everything you need to know about communicating in the Interactive Age (part 3)

"Lung cancer? Hell, the
fluoride'll get you
long before that."

As scary as social media may sometimes seem, it isn’t forcing us to learn a whole new language or adopt unfamiliar customs. It is actually reintroducing us to the way we humans have communicated for more than 10,000 years.

Successful communication in the 20th century boiled down to this: “The one with the biggest megaphone wins.” But that was an aberration caused by the convergence of two powerful forces—the rise of mass communication and the birth of “public relations.”

Back in the 1920's, Edward Bernays, known as the “father of public relations,” asked in his essay Propaganda, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”

The answer was yes, as he soon proved. Bernays was an expert at manipulating people. That gift was literally in his DNA. His mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister his father's sister married Freud. And Bernays really loved his mom, which bugged Freud no end. ... No, that's not true. I made that up. But the other stuff is true. Can you imagine those family get-togethers?

Bernays also knew that the mass media infrastructure of the 20th century was ideal for the “manipulation and opinions of the masses.”

“The United States,” he said, “has become a small room in which a single whisper is magnified thousands of times.”

The rise of PR coupled with a mass media network never before seen in human history conspired to profoundly change the way we communicated with each other, whom we trusted, and what we valued.

The most obvious effect of “regimenting the masses” was the homogenization of the American way of life.

Our experiences were the same. We lived in identical homes in identical subdivisions. We went to identical schools and sat at identical desks lined up in identical rows. And our parents identical cars to and from work at exactly the same regimented time.

Our interests were the same. We loved baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. We loved blond-haired, blue-eyed baby Jesus, hated commies, and every Sunday night at 7:30, we all sat down in front of the TV to watch The Wonderful World of Disney.

And our values were the same. We were all in pursuit of the American dream, which also meant we had to work hard to earn the money needed to buy the products that would help us keep up with the Joneses.

But this homogenization came at a heavy price.

We were becoming more isolated from each other. Time that was once spent sharing stories was now being squandered watching TV.

And through this isolation, we also lost our sense of community … a community that evolved from genuine interaction with people who shared our unique interests, our unique experiences, and our core values.

But then social media came along and brought us full circle to what Edward Bernays described as “an earlier age [where] a leader was usually known to his followers personally; there was a visual relationship between them. Communication was accomplished principally by personal announcement to an audience.”

Bernays meant that derisively. But it’s actually a very good thing.

Up next: You don’t have to be a star, baby … in fact, you really shouldn’t be if you want to be heard.

Everything you need to know about communicating in the Interactive Age (part 2)

No matter how creative you are, no matter hard you work you will never get more attention than a video of a cat stuck in a hamster ball. Let that one sink in.

The exploding cigar moments that signaled the end of the old way of communicating were just one-half of the painful transition for the movers and shakers of the 20th century.

Young people were now using the Internet to rally the masses for causes they cared about. And they weren't running it by legal.

Anthony Hardwick, a part-time cart jockey at a Target store in Omaha, got over 200,000 signatures on his online petition demanding that Target not open their stores on Thanksgiving night just to get a jump on “black Friday.”

And Molly Katchpole—a part-time nanny who launched a petition drive against Bank of America for charging people $5 a month to use their own debit cards—not only got hundreds of thousands of people to support her cause, she got BofA to back down and drop the monthly fee.

These two kids were among thousands of social-media savvy activists, musicians, writers, videographers, artists and muckrakers who are redefining what it means to inspire, to encourage, to lead. In short, they are redefining how we communicate.

Now, as you can imagine, to a lot of people (mostly those over 40) things were changing much too fast.

• Teenagers are becoming millionaires overnight by selling programs that they don’t even understand.
• A video of a cat stuck in a hamster ball is getting more views than everything they’ve ever posted—or ever will.
• Their communication efforts keep getting less and less effective making them feel like strangers in their own land.

These people are struggling to remain firmly rooted in the 20th century where they understand the customs and the language.

But their fears are misplaced. The 20th century wasn’t the norm. It was the anomaly.

Up next: What the hell is he talking about?

Everything you need to know about communicating in the Interactive Age*

"You don't like it? Don't listen to it!"

* ... but were afraid to ask.

Yesterday, U2’s lead singer, Bono, apologized to the world for force-feeding their latest album to Apple iPhone users.

Why? He cited a “deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years might not be heard. There's a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it."

If Bono is working harder to break through the Internet noise, it’s pretty clear we need to step up our game as well.

We can show you how.

Over the next couple of days we are going to explain how social media has profoundly changed the way we communicate and why this change has made it so difficult to get your story heard by the people that matter.

Then we’re going to show you exactly what you can to break through the Internet clutter and get your story heard in the Interactive Age.

But in order to understand how to communicate—how to be heard—in this brave new world of interactive communication, it’s important to understand where we are today and how we got here.

Let me take you back to January 2012. This was the tipping point when communication officially went from the old way of doing things to the new.

On January 19, 2012—after 124 years of being the first name in photography—Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Kodak was simply too slow to embrace digital photography, despite the fact they invented the technology used in today’s digital cameras back in 1975.

Instagram—an online photo sharing platform—did embrace digital photography and was scooped up by Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock soon after Kodak went belly up.

On January 20, 2012—exactly one day after Kodak declared bankruptcy—Chris Dodd, former US Senator and newly minted CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, had his own Kodak moment when his signature legislation—the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA—got shot down following an outcry from us “little people.”

Dodd had sunk millions into lobbying SOPA on the Hill and its passage was expected to be a slam-dunk. But the Internet-using public had other plans.

And after anti-SOPA activists effectively shut down the Internet for one day in protest, the bill got pulled.

This stunning defeat prompted Dodd to publicly threaten his former colleagues on the Hill, saying “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay attention to me when my job is at stake.”

This honest assessment of “how things work in Washington” resulted in an online petition calling on the White House to investigate Chris Dodd for bribery.

Just over a week later on January 30, Robert McDonald, the CEO of Procter and Gamble—which just happens to be the largest marketer on the planet with a $10 billion annual ad budget—announced that P&G would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, because he finally “discovered it’s free to advertise on Facebook,” as Business Insider put it.

McDonald “retired” a few months later.

Cigars have been exploding in board rooms around the globe since social media really got traction. It’s just that there were so many cigars exploding in 2012 that it sounded like someone was making Jiffy Pop popcorn.

These embarrassing moments were just part of the painful transition from the old to the new for the 20th century movers and shakers.

Up next: "Get off my lawn, ya goddam kids!"

A Shout Out to Ukraine: Ви , хлопці , здорово

I've got readers from more than 90 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. But after the US and
the UK, I get more visits from you guys than any other nation. (Yeah, even more than you, Russia.) And it's not like you've got nothing else keeping you busy. But through it all, you guys keep coming back.

So I want to take a moment to say thanks and to highlight one of your greatest gifts to this planet: Your beautiful women. Now before the rest of you get your knickers in a twist about this being "a sexist remark," let me say three things--

1. Ukrainian men are beautiful, too, I just don't appreciate their beauty as much.
2. Many of the women I've highlighted here are highly accomplished in their respective fields and several of them are world leaders.
3. It is a sexist remark. You want PC, follow Christopher Hayes' blog.

If you guys have a minute, drop me a line in the comment box and tell me where you're from. Until then, YPA!