Meat + Poultry - October 2009 - 99

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

a couple of minutes perusing the news
could divert attention away from a situation that needs immediate attention.
Executive routines in the industry reveal the time-stress. A survey
conducted this year by Meat&Poultry
shows that more than one-third of
those surveyed, 34 percent, spend
less than one business hour per day

casts - just 10 percent of those surveyed said they do. The percentages
for visiting a video, social or professional networking site in the past week
go from 24 percent (YouTube) down
to four percent (Plaxo). Thirty-eight
percent say they hadn't visited any
such site in the past week.

Does it matter where it
comes from?

"The bad thing is I don't
have the time to really
do any analysis on the
information."
online - and that's for all online activities, including time spent on company
Intranets and on password-protected
food-safety and labor-management
sites, that not just reading the news.
Just 27 percent spend one-to-two
business hours per day online - which
means that more than 60 percent of
those surveyed spend two hours or
less per day online.
But among those who do spend a
little time online each day, what do
they read? Eighty-three percent say
they read industry-related news and
feature stories, while 54 percent say
they read general news (including
sports, entertainment and fi nancial
news). Just 20 percent read industryrelated blogs, and only 19 percent
watch industry-related videos, not
including Webinars and Webcasts,
which attract 17 percent of those surveyed. Almost no one, it seems, has
time at the office for listening to pod-

Russell says he sees some generational differences in online use by NMA
members. Unsurprisingly, younger
executives who tend to be more computer-literate than their older peers
more easily integrate online use into a
daily routine. The association's weekly newsletter, "Lean Trimmings," is
now distributed electronically, but as
a service to older and emeritus members NMA still prints out and mails
about 200 hard copies. "It's a courtesy
to them. Some of them still don't have
computers at home and will never get
one," comments the NMA communications director. "More often, though,
what's happening at some companies is
someone prints out the online newsletter and distributes a hard copy. People
have personal styles and preferences
when it comes to reading material."
At the American Meat Institute,
one staff member sorts through daily
news from dozens of sources, including industry newsletters, the Washington Post, New York Times, other
association newsletters, scientific
journals and press releases, among
others, to compile a daily list of 10 or
12 key news stories for the day, which
is forwarded to AMI executives. This
kind of news-aggregating happens a
lot at meat companies, says Russell.
"You've almost got to have someone
on staff now who does this kind of
sorting and weeding out," he comments. "At our association, that's me.
The dilemma for top executives is that
they can't afford not to know something, but they don't have the time to
read everything."
He notes that "RSS feeds" - "really simple syndication" or, sometimes,

100 * Meat&Poultry * October 2009 * www.MeatPoultry.com

"rich site summary" are great. "The
more that information is targeted to
my specific needs, the thinner the
slice, the more helpful it is." At the
same time, "Exclusivity equals inconvenience. It's as simple as that.
If a piece of information is available
from one source and one source only,
chances are I'm either going to miss
it in all the other stuff I get or I'm not
going to get it at all. But if a story is
picked up by other sources or by blogs,
I'm defi nitely going to see it."
This begs the question: How important is the source of the information? Is an original source better
than a one- or two-steps-removed
source or even a blog? "What it really comes down to is this: I need
the information," Russell says. "And
I don't care where it comes from."
He quickly adds, however, that there
have been times when he's read
something important in a blog but
there's no site or link for the original
source and no clues that he could use
to search for the original source on
his own. "That's really frustrating,
but at this point there's really not
much that can be done about it. If
it's important information I'm going
to do the best I can with it."
He notes, however, that in his experience with "Lean Trimmings,"
maintaining reader loyalty in an age
of thundering, deafening information noise means providing readers
with information they can't readily
fi nd elsewhere. "It's the unique news
that we create that they wait for," he
emphasizes.

Provider and consumer
Being an information provider as well
as a consumer puts him in an interesting position. Even as Russell struggles
to surf the ocean of information tidally sweeping into his computer every
minute, he works on ways to make
NMA's information and news more
accessible to more members. When he
joined the association in 1997, NMA
had a single Web site, www.nmaonline.org, which is still the organiza-

http://www.nmaon http://www.line.org http://www.MeatPoultry.com

Meat + Poultry - October 2009

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