Thursday, February 01, 2007

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #211: February 1, 2006

Content summary: Vote for FIR at Podcast Alley; Boston bomb scare is bad marketing not bad PR; IABC launches new brand identity; Hill & Knowlton’s David Ferrabee asks what is internal communication?; prepping employees to be company bloggers; Dan York reports on FeedBurner blog network to aggregate RSS feeds, Ikea video contest, Podcamp Toronto; YouTube isn’t the only type of digital video gaining steam; listeners’ comments discussion; FIR from Atlanta next week; the music; and more.

[Messages from our sponsors: Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir. Online meetings made easy with GoToMeeting: try it free for 45 days - use promo code “Podcast”.]

Show notes for February 1, 2007

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 62-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and almost live from Rochester, Minnesota, USA.

Download the file here (MP3, 28MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Listen to this podcast now:

In This Edition:

• #211 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address); or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Monday February 5…

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Conversational marketing survey is online. Please take it!

I love it when I can play connector and bring together people who have never met to do something meaningful as a team.

Joseph Jaffe is writing a new book, “Join the COnversation.” Joe’s the blogger behind JaffeJuice and the podcaster behind the new marketing podcast, “Across the Sound. He’s also the president (and “chief interruptor”) at crayon, the new marketing company that now employs me.

For his book, Joe needed a survey to show the status and perceptions of converastional marketing. For the survey, two things were required: an organization to sponsor the survey and somebody with the expertise to draft an effective survey instrument, host it online, and produce a comprehensive report of the results.

For the sponsor, I turned to the Society for New Communications Research; I’m a research fellow and member of the advisory board. Luckily, Executive Director Jen McClure told me the Society, which is pretty new, was looking for a good research project to support. For the survey work, I contacted my old friend Tudor Williams who, along with his son, Ryan, runs TWI Surveys. Tudor told me he has been pondering ways to expand the visibility of his company beyond the employee communications business.

Man, the stars must have been aligned just right for all these elements to come together at the right time.

So Joe and some other crayonistas worked with Jen and the SNCR advisory board and Tudor to draft a survey. It’s online now at the TWI Surveys site. If you work in marketing or organizational communications, I’d be grateful if you’d take 10 minutes to complete it:

Social Media Marketing Survey

The results will be presented in Las Vegas March 7-9 at the New Communications Forum, and more comprehensivley in “Join the Conversation” when it’s released later this year.

Online spending increases at expense of traditional channels

An annual survey of projected advertising spending reveals that the online world will attract 20% of the advertising dollars spent in 2007, up from 18% last year. Meanwhile, spending on TV, radio, and movie ads will drop 3.5%. (I’m especially glad to hear this about movie ads. I hate spending $10 to get into a flick only to have to sit through a commercial.) Print advertising, on the other hand, is expected to hold steady with 40% of advertising spending in the U.S.

Not everything is rosy for all online advertising. Pay-per-click is expected to drop 1% over concerns about click fraud. Nearly half the advertisers participating in the survey say they’ll reduce their investment in pay-per-click. Things are brighter for cost-per-action advertising, which should rise 8% while online sponsorships are expected to jump 12%.

The survey, conducted by Outsell, was reported in ClickZ Stats.

More than just signifying advertisers are growing more enamored of the online space, the increase in online ad spending at the expense of traditional channels suggests that TV, radio, and the like simply don’t work as well as they once did, while advertisers are seeing better results from their online efforts. The move away from pay-per-click suggests advertisers are assessing exactly what does work best and making adjustments based on those results.

Monday, January 29, 2007

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #210: January 29, 2007

Content summary: New Media Release podcast posted; using citizen journalists to cover mainstream news; Adobe wants to make the PDF file format an international and open standard; cybersquatters taking over abandoned blogs; comparing Google Analytics, Statcounter and FeedBurner; Lee Hopkins reports on YouTube, race hate and crisis communication, Edirol R-09, Ted Demopoulous’s new book; David Phillips takes a critical look at the recent blog ROI report from Forrester Research; listeners’ comments discussion including commentary from Carmen van Kerchove on the Celebrity Big Brother racism kerfuffle; reminder about the New Communications Forum in March; FIR Frappr community (non)update; how Sonny Combs pitched us for today’s music; the music; and more.

[Messages from our sponsors: Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir. Online meetings made easy with GoToMeeting: try it free for 45 days - use promo code “Podcast”.]

Show notes for January 29, 2007

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 59-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Download the file here (MP3, 27MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Listen to this podcast now:

In This Edition:

• #210 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Thursday February 1…

GoDaddy’s “any reason whatsoever” policy creates PR problems

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been registering all my domain names at GoDaddy. The domains are dirt cheap and even cheaper if you use a promo code from the hundreds of podcasts the domain registration service sponsors. They have great technical support. They offer a range of related services and are pretty good at them.

But that may not be enough to keep me loyal to GoDaddy in the wake of the news that the company suspended a domain name based on the content of the site. According to a story on Domain Name Wire, the suspension resulted from the discover that SecLists.org was publishing MySpace user names and passwords on its site. SecList’s MySpace profile was also suspended.

SecLists, a security-oriented site and newsletter, archives security-oriented mailing lists. The service apparently archived the MySpace list as part of another newsletter it archives; the list of user names and passwords had already been published in a variety of places and “The bad guys already have the file, and anyone else who wants it need only Google for ‘myspace1.txt.bz2’ or ‘duckqueen1’. Is MySpace going to try and shut down Google next?” asks Fyodor, who owns the list:

...everyone has this latest password list now, and it was even posted (several times) to the thousands of members of the fulldisclosure mailing list more than a week ago. So it was archived by all the sites which archive full-disclosure, including SecLists.Org. Instead of simply writing me (or abuse_at_seclists.org) asking to have the password list removed, MySpace decided to contact (only) GoDaddy and try to have the whole site of 250,000 pages removed because they don’t like one of them. And GoDaddy cowardly and lazily decided to simply shut down the site rather than actually investigating or giving me a chance to contest or comply with the complaint.

Fyodor’s full response is here.

In response to the suspension, GoDaddy General Counsel Christine Jones offered these comforting and reassuring words: “(GoDaddy) reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever.”

Is anybody counseling this organization on the PR ramifications of this position? “Register your domain with GoDaddy. You’ll never know why or when we might shut it down.” There is already some hubub over the situation in the blogosphere, not to mention some mainstream media coverage. I doubt they’d shut one of my domains down for no reason, but I’m not certain of that in light of this ill-advised statement.

I don’t think my blogs or sites will ever deliberately violate any rules, but who knows what comment might be offensive enough to qualify under the “any reason whatsoever” rule? I plan to take my registration business elsewhere. I’m also pretty sure I’ll also turn down GoDaddy offers to sponsor my content.

IABC opens advocacy initiative

The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) has revisited the notion of advocacy every few years for a long time. I remember serving on a three-person committee about a decade or so ago trying to devise a means by which the association could serve more of an advocacy role. Nothing much came of it, though.

IABC is not alone in the absence of advocacy from the portfolio of services it offers members; none of the communiations-related associations do much of it. Other associations do. I remember speaking with an officer of an association of Radio, TV, and Film professionals. That group’s board had sent a delegation to Washington to lobby against new rules that would put restrictions on the use of contract employees, a staple of the video production world. I was jealous that my association wasn’t set up to do something like that for me and my members.

Well, IABC is addressing advocacy again, only this time it seems to be going somewhere. The association today launches the The IABC Advocacy Commons, a blog designed to open the dialogue about advocacy to the entire membership (and beyond) as a work group headed by Pennsylvania-based communicator Michael Zimet works to flesh out the concept. In the blog’s opening post, Michael writes:

Advocacy is about promoting the communications profession and raising our profile among such audiences as business leaders and organization staffs. It’s also about the role communicators can play in addressing a broad spectrum of social, economic, ethical and professional issues.

In an email to me, Michael notes that additional posts will be forthcoming over the next few days as fodder for members and other to react to. Advocacy will be the focus of an article in the March/April issue of IABC’s Communication World magazine. Focus groups were conducted among IABC chapter and region leaders at the recently-concluded Leadership Institute in San Diego. “We’re getting new ideas and support every day, and there’s a real sense of excitement about it,” Michael told me. “So we’re now entering the period of not only coming out of our self-imposed closet, but engaging, building support and ideas, and making things happen.  Still a long way to go, but we’re gaining both traction and momentum.”

Michael will most likely be a guest interview subject on an upcoming “For Immediate Release.” In the meantime, if having an association advocate on behalf of your profession seems like a desirable asset, head on over to the Advocacy Commons and start sharing your ideas and thoughts.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Where trust resides

Stowe Boyd posted an item responding to the citation of a Telecom Express survey cited by the BBC, but says, “I will continue to contend that more American are finding information on the Internet more credible than conventional media sources. It looks like TV and print journalism are falling dramatically in their credibility.”

Stowe may want to revisit that conclusion.

The Telecom Express item revealed that 66% of the Brits responding cited national television as the most accurate and was trusted as highly as family and friends. “National, regional, and local newspapers were chosen by 63% of respondents, and radio was chosen by 55%. Only 36% of respondents rated websites and 24% rated blogs.”

Stowe notes “It’s unclear what a representative sample of 1000 in the US would say.” But the Telecom Express survey is not the same one I cited, which did include US representation. That survey, called “Trust in Media,” was conducted jointly by the BBC, Reuters, and the Media Center. Its methodology included 1,000 people from the US, in addition to respondents from nine other countries. Even with the U.S. factored in, the results are pretty similar:

National TV was the most trusted news source overall (trusted by 82%, with 16% not trusting it) - followed by national/regional newspapers (75% vs 19%), local newspapers (69% vs 23%), public radio (67% vs 18%), and international satellite TV (56% vs 19%). Internet blogs were the least trusted source (25% vs 23%) – with one in two unable to say whether they trusted them.

Stowe, however, refers to a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that asserts the Net is becoming the primary source of news and information about science. While I’m not sure how that would help a company making an announcement about a recall of dog food, let’s move on.

The word to pay attention to in Stowe’s note is “becoming,” since even Pew notes the Net is second “only to television” for news and information about science.

But Stowe cites another report, this one from The Pew Research Center For The People And The Press. In this instance, he says “media credibility in general is dropping.” I agree with this, but dropping is a far cry from “dropped,” which means it cannot (yet) be ignored. This Pew report does not provide comparisons to online sources, yet still is enough for Stowe to believe that “more American are finding information on the Internet more credible than conventional media sources.”

This report, Stowe notes, cites an increase in the use of the Internet. What Stowe doesn’t mention is where online these folks are going. The study notes that the primary online sources of news are:

• AOL or Yahoo! News (the highest ranked and populated heavily with press releases)
• Network TV news websites
• Local TV/paper websites
• National newspapers websites
• Online magazine/opinion sites (the lowest ranked)

In each of these cases except the last, the source of the news and information would be the same for the Net as it would be for the print publication or TV station: traditional, mainstream media. Only the delivery mechanism is different.

Again, Stowe and I agree more than we disagree. Trust in mainstream media is declining…and with good reason. But there is more research than the Telecom Express and BBC/Reuters/Media Center studies to support the notion that most people still rely primarily on mainstream media. I’ll cite two:

• The recently released Edelman Trust Barometer found “Traditional media sources such as newspapers, TV, and radio remain more credible than new media sources such as a company’s own Web site and blogs.” This was the result of a survey conducted by StrategyOne with respondents in 18 countries, with the US representing more respondents than any other.
• Lexis-Nexis conducted a study that that also confirms most trust resides in mainstream sources: “LexisNexis asked consumers which news sources they are more likely to trust for information about the news that interests them the most. On average, consumers are four to six times more likely to feel that traditional media is more trustworthy than emerging news sources for news they feel is most interesting.”

Even the Pew Research Center for The People and the Press—the study Stowe cited—notes:

Americans’ news habits have changed little over the past two years. Network and local TV news viewership has been largely stable since 2002. Daily newspaper readership remains at 42% (it was 41% two years ago). And the percentage of Americans who listen to news on the radio on a typical day is virtually unchanged since the last Pew Research Center media consumption survey (40% now, 41% in 2002).

The Net has increased, as Stowe points out (from 22% in 2002 to 25% today) and cable is declining. But national and local news is holding steady, as are newspapers and radio.

There are even studies that carry this conclusion to demograhically-defined groups. Take The Parenting Group’s 24/7 MomConnection study, which concludes, “Newspapers and magazines are moms’ most trusted sources of information, followed by web sites, radio, TV and doctors’ offices.” In terms of media moms consume,

100% of moms have watched TV, been online, listened to the radio or received a direct mail promotion; 91% of moms shopped at a retail store; 88% of moms have read a magazine; and 86% have used a cell phone. And, moms are using emerging media, but not on a regular basis - in a typical week, only 33% have watched video-on-demand, 32% have read a blog, and 17% have listened to an iPod.

There are a lot of companies out there—perhaps not Sun Microsystems, but nevertheless—who need to reach moms.

Finally, since everyone is likely to agree that citing statistics is a dicey proposition, it’s worth pointing out that there is even research to suggest trust in news delivered on the Net is declining. This comes from the “State of the News Media 2006”:

Yet for all its obvious advantages, access and interactivity may also be part of the Internet’s Achilles heel as an information source. Last year we reported that even as the Web was becoming a ubiquitous and accepted news source, there was evidence that trust in the Internet was declining.

And new survey research shows that the trend continues. In 2004, the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School found that the proportion of users who believed that most or all of the information on the Internet is reliable and accurate had declined for the third consecutive year, to just 49% — a steep decline from 58% in 2001.

News Web sites are as trusted as traditional news media, according to the data. A majority (68%) of those who go online say they believe “almost all” or “most” of the content on their primary online news site, according to survey research done by Consumer Reports. That level of trust is about equal to those who trust newspapers and television news.

So what does all this mean? At one level, Stowe and I agree that the Net is becoming a more important resource for news. What that means to organizations communicating those things they need to communicate, though, will probably continue to be a source of disagreement. I still believe professional communicators need to use the channels that are most credible. That is not the web alone…or even, to date, primarily. It also means that “the conversation”—vital and critical as it is—is not the be-all and end-all of communication today, and the idea of formal, institutional communication occurring by “just blogging” (Stowe’s original assertion) continues to strike me as just as preposterous as it did when this whole kerfuffle began.

You don’t have to like it. (You can imagine how thrilled I would be if I could counsel all my clients to conduct all their communication through conversation-based channels!) But you do have to accept it.