Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Adam Levine (Maroon 5) covering Bill Wither’s Lovely Day. Kids these days!

lol

But seriously, how do you take a song so sweet it threatens to teeter any second into schmaltz and render it as honest . . . it’s got to be his voice, he has so much control and stops himself from overdoing. Right? Dunno. But it works for me . . . otoh maybe I’m just a goof :-)

So this August 10 Rasmussen poll says that 57 percent of voters nationwide oppose  single payer health care.

Yet all these stories have been popping up today, claiming that a substantial majority support it.

The source, apparently, is a new SurveyUSA (Moveon) poll.

This Think Progress article is an example of how the new poll is being covered by left-leaning websites. It quotes from a Huffington Post article as follows:

A new study by SurveyUSA puts support for a public option at a robust 77 percent, one percentage point higher than where it stood in June.

What gives? How could one poll’s findings be that different from another’s?

Turns out it’s a matter of wording — click through to the full HuffPo article to see. The poll results change depending on whether you ask people if they support single payer as a “choice” — or whether you just ask them, straight up, if the government should be creating a single payer system.

Earlier in the week, after pollsters for NBC dropped the word “choice” from their question on a public option, they found that only 43 percent of the public were in favor of “creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies.”

Splains it.

In the Think Progress comments, one person noted this clarification and cited it as evidence that the second poll is “skewed.”

I disagree. Neither poll is skewed; they’re asking different questions.

If anything, the word “choice” could skew results — it’s a word laden with value, like “free” or “love.”

It’s hard to come out against “choice.”

Here’s the thing. This from the Rasmussen article linked in my first paragraph:

Data released earlier today shows that 51% of voters fear the federal government more than private insurance companies when it comes to health care decisions.

Americans are largely skeptical about the government.

But when online venues like Think Progress publish information that isn’t precise enough — and in the loss of precision, essentially misrepresent a critical fact –  it does a disservice to its readers.

Another commenter, for instance, reacted with “YES – this just confirms that the screaming crazies are in the MINORITY!”

Only they aren’t.

I don’t care what side you’re on. It doesn’t serve anyone to have people who support Obama’s plan persuaded that they hold a majority view. Because then, should a different majority view prevail, they won’t have a constructive way to process it that turn of events. It won’t gibe with their version of reality.

Unless you don’t care about them, and your only goal is to whip them into a frenzy in the hopes that their passion and enthusiasm will somehow turn the tide of public opinion . . .

And what to do about it.

From the article — quote from Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal:

[W]e’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.

The hardest thing about life as a human being is that we get trapped inside our own minds.

As Sousa’s research shows, there’s a biological basis for this.

So if you’ve hit a high-stress patch in your life recently, you have to assume — assume – that your capabilities in the area of “executive decision-making” and “goal-directed behaviors” are impaired.

And then, for your own good, you have to do something about it.

It’s the only way out of the trap.

(The worst part being, of course, that people who are in the trap don’t know it . . . and that when you’re under stress is when you most need the very skills that you’ve lost.)

As promised, here’s another installment in my fantabulous extradeliscionary mini course: Top Notch Customer Case Studies.

I introduced the series here if you want to read that. Short version: I’ve been doing this for a long time, I know what I’m doing, and I’m ready to perform the ultimate brain dump ;-)

If you’re looking for the basics, however, this isn’t the place for it.  I’m assuming that you are already a decent writer. The closest you’ll get to the basics is in the first installment, here.

So let’s get started.

Today’s lesson is

Make value your story’s lodestar.

Definition of a lodestar, from Princeton’s Wordnet:

guiding star; a star that is used as a reference point in navigation or astronomy.

Your story’s lodestar is the reference point for every element of the story — every thread you develop, every subtopic you introduce.

So how do you make value a story’s lodestar?

Let’s get to that answer by first considering what customer case studies are: stories with a purpose — tools intended to move prospective buyers along a sales process.

And why do people buy a product or service?

Because they get some kind of value for their money — something that, to a customer’s mind, is worth more (hopefully much more) than what they had to spend.

That said, customer case studies can’t be too obvious as marketing pieces. I’ll cover that in more depth in a future installation of this course. For now suffice to say: you’re ghosting a third party endorsement, not writing a marketing brochure.

Big difference. With straight marketing pieces, value — the product or service’s benefits — is always front & center. A marketing piece is a kind of argument for value; it intends to be overtly persuasive.

Case studies are narratives. You’re juggling more elements. You’re using inputs from customers — people whose experience of a product or service might not gibe exactly with the company’s messaging. The structure of the piece is driven by the story itself, not by somebody’s marketing plan.

That’s why case study writers have to be more deliberate about keeping an eye on the lodestar. Make sure you know up front what the messaging is supposed to be. What is the company’s idea of the product’s value? How can the customer’s story be synched up with the “official” value proposition? Can  the customer’s story include any fresh insights into that value?

When your approach is guided by these kinds of questions, the story will naturally display internal cohesiveness as a marketing piece.

And it will serve its overarching marketing objective: to influence decision-makers who are considering those same products or services.

New post over at my Golfolicious blog. My remedial driving range session this weekend. Plus a link to a youtube tip on how to fix a slice that you need to see. If you slice, of course. Which we all do from time to time, don’t we?

:-)

“The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.”

– Carl Jung

Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. Spot on.

Yes, we need to take care of our poor. But we can’t do it at the expense of our overall standards of care and, equally important, our standards of healthcare service.

Click through & read the piece to see what I mean. From someone who’s actually experienced healthcare services in both countries.

And consider this. As noted in this 2007 Congressional report comparing healthcare costs and outcomes among the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):

The United States has the third-highest percentage of the population that reports their health status as being “good,” “very good,” or “excellent.”

(Perhaps Washington should have considered that before it proposed swapping out our system for one that would require some pretty significant trade-offs?)

And as for our healthcare spending, from the same report:

90% of the variation in health care spending across the 30 OECD countries may be attributable to GDP per capita.

Yes, the U.S. is an outlier, the report notes. Our spending is even higher than would be expected, given the GDP per capita factor. (Although with a sample of only 30 countries, being an outlier might be statistically meaningless . . . ?)

But even so:

1. We spend what we do because we are rich enough to be able to afford it. We have the money.
2. Being a relatively free market economy, we’re permitted to spend money as we wish.
3. And we’re happy with the results: we consider our health status good to excellent.

To me, that sounds like a system that is working pretty well. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, individuals sometimes have bad experiences. Yes, it doesn’t force the majority to kick in yet more money to care for people who are less well off, who don’t have legal status, etc.

But one of the reasons people are getting so upset is that the vast majority of us are satisfied with what we have.

Washington has overstepped. It’s misread the problem. It’s misread the needs and character of the American people.

Let’s hope this becomes a teaching moment that will result in a truly fundamental change in the relationship between the federal government and this country’s citizens . . .

Okay, I went a bit overboard, wouldn’t you say? New background, changed the column background from white to pale green . . . yes, green’s my favorite color. But this is a bit over the top. I feel like I’m peering into a dish of lime Jello. (Is there an award for greenest blog btw?)

Trouble is, there are always little issues that come up. The theme is basically Kubrick, modified — if you’ve ever installed Wordpress, you’ll know what I’m talking about . . . over the years, I’ve tweaked it in various ways. But right now, with these latest changes, I can’t get the .widecolumn to match up to the header exactly, and I can’t get the bottom margin of .widecolumn to match up with the bottom of the sidebar.

For the header, what I really need is help from a designer. Blurring out the photo helps make the title pop, which is a good thing, but it’s plain ugly typeface, which is not a good thing. Unfortunately my tools are limited, and so’s my time — we might have to live with it for awhile.

That said,  y’all come here for the scintillating prose, not how pretty it looks, right?

:-)

Don’t like it. Needed a change, this isn’t it, but will have to do for now . . .

And why we should care. John Stossel in Reason.

When people succumb to the progressive impulse to support centralizing power, they cede control over the very industries they hope to reform.

Lets hope we get that before it’s too late.