I caught this parody of news reporting over on Kevin Roderick’s L.A. Observed. Check it out, then tune into any of the national evening news reports and see how closely they hew to this tired formula. God save us from by-the-numbers hack journalism.

photo by robert couse-baker

Going postal over the letters to Santa program. The secret behind a truly great brand. Chicken soup in the cold remedies aisle. A look at why Twitter followers without engagement is worthless.

These are just some of my most popular tweets during the month of November. No surprise in today’s jobs-challenged “recovery” that the top tweet was a post concerning my search for a communications manager (still under way, tell all your friends).

If you missed any of these when first we tweeted, be sure to check them out now. Lots of good stuff here for what ails you.

Now Hiring: a Communications Manager

The Secret to Making Your Brand Truly Great

The Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care

Confused Stock Boy … or Brilliant Product Placement?

Let’s Play 20 Questions to a Solid Strategic Plan

Is Social Media a Marketing Thing?

Content-ment: Curation Vs. Aggregation

Postal Service Limits Letter to Santa Program

Top 20 Tweets in October

Why Facebook Continues to Suck

25 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women in Social Media 2009

Why Nonprofits Should Be on YouTube

Five Things Brand Marketing Can’t Do

Writing Errors That Make You Look Stupid

Location is the Missing Link Between Social Media and the Real World

Email Campaigns That Work for Nonprofits

Beth Asked a Question

American Red Cross – Nonprofit Social Media Marketing Example

Top 50 Journalism Blogs

Ten Things Social Media Can’t Do

photo by fotodawg

I don’t remember who I first borrowed the idea from, but I really love reviewing my top 20 tweets each month. My approach to twitter is as editor/curator: I look for posts I think will appeal to those who follow me in the areas of marketing, communications, social media, journalism and related subjects, especially as they relate to nonprofits and small business. I of course liberally tweet my own posts since those happen to be the subjects I tend to write about.

What is particularly interesting is what my highest-performing tweets tell me about my followers on Twitter: they’re a fairly discerning bunch interested in real substance, not fluff. I can always tell when I’ve missed the mark, and it helps me quite a bit when considering what to blog about.

Here’s what was most popular in October. I encourage you to check out any you may have missed when first we tweeted. It’s all good stuff. Even my stuff (I think).

No More Excuses for Crap Communications

If Marketers Today Created the Stop Sign

Social Media and the Paradox of Choice

Why Every Communicator Should Blog

The Dangers of No Content Strategy

Your Communications Plan: What It’s Really For

Small Business: Get in the Social Media Pool

Why Nonprofits Are So Good at Social Media

All You Need is the Story

Results of the Fourth Annoying PowerPoint Survey

Build a Social Network for Your Business

Why Uncensored Blogging is the Future of Corporate Communications

Blogging is Dead, Long LIve Journalism

A Tagline is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Is Philanthropy Ready for the New Consumer?

Five Reasons Corporations are Failing at Social Media

My Five-Year-Old’s Future in Marketing

Hyatt: Managing the Boston Aftermath

Debating Seth Godin’s “Non” Slam

Small Business, Social Media Not Mixing

In case you missed any of them, here are my 20 most popular links (in order of popularity) tweeted during the previous month. I think I post somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 or more links via Twitter each month, and these garnered the greatest response. They serve as my monthly reminder that there is some truly superior content out there to assist you in your own communication efforts; you have only to surf (or follow me).

Letting Nonprofits Act Like Businesses: One Foundation’s Brave Act of Leadership

Social, Global, Ubiquitous, and Cheap

50 Content Ideas That Create Buzz

Katya Andresen on the Six Most Miserable Mistakes of Social Marketing

Are We Breeding Social Media Ne’er-do-wells?

Social Media and the Paradox of Choice

Are You Antisocial in Your Social Media Efforts?

In Advertising, Stupidity Can Win You Awards

Communicate as You Wish Others Would Communicate With You

Five Steps to Building a Successful Social Media Strategy for Your Nonprofit

Your Story Doesn’t Move Me

The Basics of Social Media for Nonprofits

Sometimes It’s Best to Kill the Ones They Love

70 Percent of Journalists Use Social Networks to Assist in Reporting

Social Media Listening for Nonprofits

Shredding Some Misconceptions About Social Media (Part I)

Your Communications Plan: What It’s For

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers

Why Seth Godin Is Wrong

Tips, Tricks & Tools From 140 | The Twitter Conference

As we mourn the passing of TV news anchor Walter Cronkite, I can’t help but wonder what kind of social media practitioner he would have been had he come into his professional own today instead of four decades ago. After all, he was considered to be “the most trusted man in America” by most Americans during the height of his career in the 1960s and ’70s.

When we talk about social media, issues of trust, credibility and authenticity are always key to the conversation. Walter Cronkite had all these in spades. In today’s media circus, it may be hard to imagine a television newscaster having this kind of trusted public profile, but for those of us who grew up watching Cronkite, it’s hard to overstate his role in making the CBS Evening News must-see TV for anyone who wanted to understand what was going on in the world.

Cronkite was recruited to CBS News in 1950 by Edward R. Murrow. They coined the term “anchor” for the role he played at the 1952 Democratic and Republican Conventions. And when he became anchorman of the CBS Evening News in 1962, he began his transformation into an American icon. No TV anchor has had the impact Cronkite had on the news, and none will.

So what does Walter Cronkite have to teach us about social media? Talk about someone who epitomized old-style mass media, you think. But even a cursory examination of his career suggests that here was an individual who would have done quite well had he begun to make his mark today.

He knew his stuff. Unlike so many of the talking blockheads dominating what passes for TV news today, Cronkite was a skilled journalist, having distinguished himself as a war correspondent for United Press International during World War II. Anyone who watched Cronkite’s anchoring of more than a dozen political conventions and elections  could see this. I know it’s in vogue among some to encourage others to jump into social media despite a lack of writing ability, critical thinking skills or anything interesting to share, but Cronkite is a potent reminder that talent and expertise are far more interesting than the lack thereof.

He was a great explainer. One of the traits of a great journalist is the ability to take a complex issue and explain it in a way that anyone can understand. Cronkite had strong editorial chops when it came to clarifying the news. CBS didn’t break the Watergate scandal, but Cronkite’s 14-minute report on Oct. 27, 1972, explaining what happened and putting it into context is widely credited with making it a national story.

He was trusted. With apologies to Chris Brogan for misusing his phrase, Cronkite was the original trust agent. Opinion polls in the 1970s and ’80s repeatedly identified him as the most trusted public figure in America. He was the benchmark pollsters used to gauge public trust in presidential contenders. Those of us who grew up on Cronkite’s nightly broadcasts still remember how he closed the news with “And that’s the way it is.” If Cronkite said it, then that’s the way it was. No one in TV news today has that kind of credibility.

He was authentic. Cronkite would be the first to criticize himself for those rare moments when he let his emotions slip out from behind the objective anchor facade, but those were the moments that will be most mentioned in the countless news reports, remembrances and appreciations. The most famous of these were his reporting the death of John F. Kennedy and the Apollo moon landing. Cronkite’s obvious sorrow in reporting the former and awe at the latter were shared by millions of viewers. His commentary in 1968 that the Vietnam War was a lost cause was notable because of the lengths Cronkite usually took to appear an objective reporter of the day’s events. When he departed from this approach to weigh in on Vietnam or Watergate, his influence was all the greater because of it.

For some, the passing of Walter Cronkite may be just another marker along the path toward a very different media landscape. For me it’s a reminder of the traits that we’ll need to be successful in this increasingly complex new environment.

photo by ehnmark

I try to tweet daily links to content I’ve run across that I think is worth your attention. Thought it might be a good idea to post the most popular of these in case you’re not following me on Twitter. Here are the 10 links I tweeted in May that attracted the greatest attention:

8 Key Elements for Effective Internal Communications (courtesy of Nancy Schwartz, whose Getting Attention blog is one of the top nonprofit marketing reads)

Twitter a Bigger Threat Than Bloggers to Newspapers? (an op-ed by Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University)

Why Communicators Don’t Get LinkedIn (by Geoff Livingston, a PR strategist whose blog should be on your reading list)

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business (a great list by social media expert Chris Brogan)

Twitter: A Marketer’s Duct Tape (both are incredibly simple, flexible, available and cheap, says Harvard Business blogger John Sviokla)

Nonprofit News (the American Journalism Review takes a look at the trend in investigative and enterprise journalism funded by foundations)

Social Media Marketing Example: National Geographic (one in a series by Lisa Braziel of Ignite Social Media)

Push vs. Pull in Media Relations (at Journalistics, a great blog tracking trends in journalism)

15 Steps to Small Business Online Marketing Success (from Joe Pulizzi, one of the leaders of the content marketing revolution)

Developing Social Media Policies (actually fourth in a four-part series on SM policies)

Each of these is well worth a read. Check them out.

Polish newspaper designer Jacek Utko thinks it’s worth a shot. Take a look at this great (short: 6 min.) talk he gave at a TED conference in February. He argues that innovative design can reconnect readers with newspapers, and has the stats to prove it. The Eastern European papers he’s redesigned have seen circulation increases of up to 100% in three years.

But Utko understands that a great redesign has to start with a reconceptualization of mission and content. He asked the kinds of questions about business objectives and operations that, frankly, many designers tend to neglect.

Design is more than looking good; the design process can (and should) spur a news organization to rethink all processes, from what news is gathered to how it’s gathered to how it’s synthesized into final product and delivered. Great design can help drive an entire reimagineering of the who, what and why.

Too bad newspapers in this country have so much invested in the status quo that they lack the courage to shake things up the way Utko has abroad. As he puts it, what do they have to lose at this point?