New Media

Whatever "new media" is at the time, this is where I cover it.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Death Watch: Marketing and advertising have an important place in the complex media ecosystem

We have a tendency to assume that a law of physics applies equally to the media world. In physics, according to Newton’s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

This odd assumption crossed my mind to me as I was reading last night. In the he book I was reading, the author argued that, thanks to the Internet, geography doesn’t matter any more. Under Newton’s law, this makes sense:

Action: The Internet has given us access to everybody everywhere all the time.
Reaction: Geography is no longer a factor in our interactions.

In truth, though, our complex and messy world does not abide by such clear-cut rules. Without question, the Net has certainly broken down geographic barriers beyond the extent to which the telephone (and the telegraph before it) did. But on the other hand, the geography has everything to do with the relationships I have established with people who belong to the same synagogue I do. My wife and I are still friends with parents of kids who went to school with our daughter. And I have strong ties to some of the people who work in stores where I shop (notably the local computer repair business).

It’s not likely I ever would have met any of these people online. And if I hear someone breaking into my house at 2 a.m., I expect I’ll get much better results calling the local police than I will jumping into an online law enforcement community.

The exaggerated death of marketing and advertising

The same book also argued that traditional marketing doesn’t work any more now that people are able to engage one another on the scales afforded by Facebook and Twitter. Yet many of the same people who decry the ineffectiveness of traditional marketing can’t wait to see the next “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercial. (Super Bowl Sunday represents the height of the “reverse-TiVo” phoenomenon, when people record the game so they can fast-forward through the football and watch just the commercials.) Denny’s drew 2 million people to its restaurants for their free Grand Slam breakfasts on the strength of its Super Bowl commercial. And who hasn’t heard of Las Vegas’ marketing campaign, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”?

Give it a few minutes and you can probably come up with a dozen advertising or marketing campaigns that captured your imagination—or at least your attention.

Good marketing and advertising are still good. The fact that they’re not as effective as they once were is not a sign that they don’t matter any more. Rather, the increased number of channels available means consumers have more options. A marketing campaign is no longer the sole source of information about a brand, product, service or company. Because we tend to simplify things, viewing them as black and white, many social media purists fail to see complexities and intricacies of the media landscape in which each piece plays its role and supports the others. In this environment, the role of marketing and advertising has changed more than it has diminished.

Multiple relevancies and the media ecosystem

Communicators and marketers have to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world of multiple relevancies. It’s not a zero-sum game. The rise of the Net doesn’t automatically signal a decline in the value of traditional channels.

This represents more than just an additive situation in which new media get piled onto old media. The media ecosystem that has evolved. In an ecosystem, the organisms within the environment interact with and are dependent on all the other habitat’s occupants. In the business-consumer ecosystem, advertising and marketing often create the awareness that fuels the conversation within the social media space.

That’s not to say organizations shouldn’t engage with customers and other stakeholders at an organic level. Companies need to already have a trusted presence, such as the one Dell has established with its cadre of tweeting communicators or the Comcast customer service team that finds and responds to online complaints. No marketing is required to initiate these conversations. But the organic presence of company representatives engaged in conversation with customers kicks into higher gear when an advertising or marketing campaign creates broad, simultaneous awareness of an issue about which customers want to talk.

Domino’s Pizza provides an excellent example of this ecosystem. The pizza chain’s decision to put its vulnerability on display by discussing consumer criticism in a series of television commercials gained widespread attention. Table Group founder and president Patrick Lencioni discusses the power of these ads in the current issue of BusinessWeek:

...the most fascinating application of volunterability is in marketing and advertising. It’s so rare that it packs a strong punch, as long as companies mean it. Go ahead and try to think of other corporate examples of humility and naked honesty. There aren’t many to choose from.

But advertising and marketing campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum and Domino’s—a company that learned the harsh reality of social media the hard way—was prepared for the conversation that ensued. On its Facebook page and on Twitter, the company engaged in conversation prompted by the advertising and marketing. The company added a four-minute video to YouTube that went into greater detail about its turnaround and invited comments.

Of course, Domino’s could have tackled the issue one customer at a time, but kick-starting the conversation with commercials and other ads makes far more sense. Domino’s—utterly clueless when it came to social media a short time ago—has come to understand the media ecosystem far better than many of the pundits who insist there is no longer room for traditional advertising and marketing.

BestBuy is another useful example. The consumer electronics retailer used traditional marekting and advertising techniques to build awareness of its Twelpforce, the thousands of employee volunteers responding to customer queries via Twitter. It would have been a much longer process to create that awareness at the organic level. (To date, the Twelpforce has sent nearly 23,000 tweets, virtually all of them responding to mostly technical questions about the consumer electronics products it sells.)

John January, senior vice president and executive creative director at Kansas City-based ad agency Sullivan Higdon & Sink (and co-host of the all-too-infrequent podcast, “American Copywriter”), told me a couple years ago that advertising is evolving into a gateway to social media activities. Based on this understanding of multiple relevancies, I would argue that Pepsi made a mistake reallocating every nickel of its Super Bowl ad budget to social media. How many more people would have participated in Pepsi’s social campaigns if they had learned about them on Super Bowl Sunday?

Smart marketers will figure out how to take advantage of the interdpendencies that exist in the media ecosystem. Figuring out how multiple relevancies can improve the outcomes of your social media efforts will take a lot more work than simply shrugging off traditional marketing and advertising as outdated techniques displaced by social media.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

What are you willing to barter in exchange for content?

Back in 1984, Stewart Brand uttered the words that have become the slogan of the free content movement: “Information wants to be free.”

Those who advocate free content, however, are taking Brand’s statement out of context. At the first Hacker’s conference where he made the statement, he was talking about the tension between the value of content and the vanishing cost associated with distributing it. Here’s what he actually said:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

While the free content movement has embraced the latter part of Brand’s quote, paid content advocates haven’t adopted “information wants to be expensive” as a motto. Maybe they should. At the same time, maybe they should argue that compensation for that content doesn’t have to assume a monetary form. In the world of barter, there are things besides money that have value.

KPMG, the professional services firm, has found—in the UK, at least—that Internet users are willing to tolerate a brief delay in getting to otherwise free content to watch an advertisement. In its third annual Consumers and Convergence study—produced by the company’s Communications and Media practice—KMPG found that more than 60% of British consumers said they were willing to receive the Internet ads as long as the reward of free content awaited them at the other end.

If people are willing to pay for “free” content with their attention, you have to wonder what else they might be willing to give up. Contact information? Participation in a brief survey?

Ultimately, it’s a question of convenience. The free content movement has a point when they argue that there’s so much free content available that nobody has to dig into their wallets to get at it. But there’s plenty of free music available, too; yet people seem more than happy to give Apple (or WalMart or Amazon) 99 cents rather than go through the hassle of finding and downloading illegal music via Bitorrent or Limewire. Convenience makes it worth the 99 cents.

The same concept can easily apply to other kinds of content. Sure, if I dig around long enough, I might find an alternative source for the information I need. But if getting to the easy-to-find, original, authoritative document only costs me my name and email address (for addition to a lead list), four answers to questions on a poll, or 20 seconds with an ad, I’ll be happy to enter into that bargain. It’s more convenient than starting a new Google search and assessing the quality of the resulting links.

In the survey, only 16% of respondents said they would rather pay for the content and avoid the ads. This suggests different views of what it means to pay. Money is the issue, not other kinds of exchanges. Of course, this is the UK we’re talking about. Worldwide, more than 40% said they’d rather pay than receive ads. That’s a lot more than 16%, but it’s still a minority.

Tudor Aw, KPMG’s convergence partner, said, “This willingness to view adverts in exchange for free content is good news for advertisers and is perhaps a pointer in the ongoing debate over whether advertising or subscription is the right revenue model.”

Ultimately, this could be one of those rare cases of having your cake and eating it, too. Content can be free and yet you may still be able to extract something of value in exchange for it.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Live Twittering and the 140-character news cycle

The recent (and very civil) disagreement between Thornley Fallis CEO Joe Thornley and CBC Producer Ira Basen over live Twittering of a talk Basen gave has led me to recall my one and only brush with sports reporting.

I was an intern at the Thousand Oaks News-Chronicle (now defunct, folded into the Ventura County Star), a six-day daily (no paper on Saturday) with a three-person sports staff led by Steve Springer (who, in addition to being the world’s master of puns, went on to cover sports for the Los Angeles Times and write several books).

I was sent to a high school football game with a pocketful of dimes; Whenever the score changed or an interesting or controversial play occurred, I called it in so a story could be assembled based on my reports. The end of the game coincided with the paper’s deadline, so my report of the final score came just in time to craft a lead and slot the story into its spot in the sports section.

In 1974, this was as close as you could get to real-time reporting unless the sporting event commanded TV or radio coverage (which this Conejo Valley high school contest did not). The technology in play back then was pay phones; we operated in a 24-hour news cycle.

The 24-hour news cycle died years ago with the rise of electronic media and, more recently, the Web, but even that has continued to evolve. We live today in a 140-character news cycle. That is, news has the potential to break as quickly as someone can communicate it over any of the real-time group communication channels. This is mainly Twitter—which certainly has the mindshare—but would also include the likes of Qik and Utterli.

I emphasize “potential” because not every news item tweeted is first reported on Twitter and because not every item first reported on Twitter reaches the tipping point that makes it news. It’s easier to predict the next California earthquake than which Twitter meme is going to reach that tipping point, or when. It’s worth noting that the Twitter surge around Chris Brogan’s sponsored K-Mart post occurred about a week after the post was written and the MotrinMoms surge kicked into gear almost a month after MacNeil launched its advertising campaign.

The point is that people who are interested in what’s happening right now no longer have to wait until tomorrow morning, the 6 p.m. national newscast, the top of the hour, or even the time it takes to produce a blog post to stay updated. As soon as someone can tweet it, it stands the chance of becoming a headline regardless of whether it qualifies under anybody’s definition of news.

For this reason, like it or not, live Twittering is here to stay. Those who are offended by it, find it rude, believe it unfair or incomplete, or otherwise don’t like it simply need to get used to it. Your complaints and arguments—and their validity—don’t matter. The insatiable thirst for personally relevant information, coupled with the desire and ability for anybody at all to provide that information, is the core fact with which we need to come to grips

These tools certainly can—and have—been used as a news reporting tool by professional journalists. It makes sense as part of a continuum, as during the Spokane Statesman’s coverage of the Joseph Edward Dean murder trial. The reporter in the courtroom sent tweets in real time, blogged during breaks to flesh out the tweets, then wrote a thoughtful, analytical report for the newspaper at the end of the day’s proceedings.

How is it any different if I live-tweet what a speaker is talking about at a conference? (I personally prefer CoverItLive because there is no 140-character limit, but I also lose almost all of my potential audience by opting to live-blog instead of live-tweet. Life is full of compromises.) I would hope that anything I live-tweet will be followed up with a blog post that offers my assessment of the entire talk or event, but time gets away from me and I probably won’t make good on that expectation 100% of the time.

In a world where anybody can cover anything in real time, some people will do it well and some badly. Some will try to be objective and fair, others will strive to be opinionated. (This is true of anything, including professional journalism and the craft of public relations.) Ultimately, though, there is nothing anyone—not a speaker, not a company, not a government—can do to stop it. Instead, the possibility of a Twitter surge about you or your organization reaching that tipping point is something that must be factored into today’s communication planning.

There is one objection to real-time coverage that I do want to address—that by live-tweeting (or blogging or whatever), you’re not honoring a speaker by giving him or her your full attention. I can’t remember who it was who told me about a study proving that students learn better when they take lecture notes cold, without class notes or handouts, because taking notes without more of the brain. The University of Eastern Illinois offers these reasons for taking notes during a lecture:

• Professors share information not available in textbooks, and they make connections.
• Notes are a storehouse of information for later use, e.g., when you take more advanced courses.
• We remember more when we write things down.
• Taking notes helps you to listen attentively and to think critically.
• Note-taking is a skill required in many jobs.
• Studies show that people may forget 50% of a lecture within 24 hours, 80% in two weeks, and 95% within one month if they do not take notes.

Live-tweeting (and blogging) simply adds a sharing dimension to note-taking. So the fact is, you’re listening better if you’re live-tweeting (or blogging) a talk.

But I don’t want this to distract from my overall point. Go ahead and love or hate real-time reporting, but deal with it. The 140-character news cycle is a fact of life.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Two new media conferences for your consideration

In the world of new media, there are huge conferences that try to be all things to all people, unconferences and camps in which attendees set the agenda, and small events that focus on specific issues and interests. All three have their place, but I’m a particular fan of the latter. Sure, they charge fees, but that allows the organizers to invest in the conference.

Two such events are coming up. In these economic tough times, with training budgets slashed and restrictions placed on travel, these may not be on your radar. But both are worth your consideration. By way of disclosure, I’m speaking at each of these.

The Society for New Communication Research is hosting its third annual Research Symposium and Awards Gala in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Friday, November 14. The “research symposium” makes it sound dry and academic, but the results of SNCR’s efforts lend credence to a lot of the ideas that are simply proclaimed by speakers at other conferences. The session I’m most looking forward to covers social media adoption by Fortune 500 companies, presented by SNCR Executive Director Jen McClure and Don Middleberg. I’ve already seen Francois Gossieaux present preliminary results from the study Deloitte sponsored on the tribalization of business, focusing on the value of online business communities; it’ll be great to see the final results. (I’m working to set up an interview with Francois for FIR.)

The awards gala should be fun. The whole point of the awards program is to produce best-practice examples of how business is using new media. (More disclosure: I’m one of the judges.)

The one one-day session is a bargain, as these things go: Only $395 for SNCR members and $495 for non-members. The Boston locale is an added bonus. Boston has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to social media—C.C. Chapman, Todd Defren, Christopher S. Penn, John Wall, Doug Haslam and Chris Brogan, to name a few—and I’m hoping to get there a day early to catch up with as many of them as I can.

The second conference worth looking at is Ragan’s Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World. This 2-1/2-day event takes place on the North Carolina campus of SAS October 14-16 (the first day consists of pre-conference workshops that cost extra). SAS,  Software company SAS is regularly listed as one Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for. This is the third time Ragan has hosted a conference on a company’s campus—Southwest Airlines and eBay were the first two. This makes it easy for representatives of the company’s communications department present multiple sessions, giving participants an in-depth look at the organization’s aproach to communications. SAS communicators will present a total of five sessions covering both internal and external communications. In addition, presentations are on tap from communicators with the CDC, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Sun Microsystems, the Mayo Clinic and Dell, among others.

It isn’t cheap—$1,395 per participant—but the caliber of presenters and presentations makes it money well invested.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

SNCR award deadline approaches

When you’re well-connected to the community of communicators applying social media to their companies’ and clients’ communication challenges, you come across a lot of truly excellent case studies. If you’ve produced such an effort, why not get recognized for it?

Recognition does far more than boost your ego. When honored for a program you executed that some in your company don’t understand, the fact that an esteemed group of judges deemed it worthwhile can elevate the value of the program in the eyes of company decision-makers. The more exposure of award-winning strategic applications of social media, the greater the number of converted leaders who will see the benefit of getting their own companies similarly engaged.

Put it this simply: I recently got an email from someone who was reading about the means by which social media channels can improve communication but lamented, “I can’t find anyone, anywhere who really wants to use these impressive tools.”

As competitions shine the light on the truly brilliant uses of these tools, that attitude should change.

A couple opportunities to show off your work are on the horizon, beginning with the Society for New Communications Reseach’s (SNCR) Excellence in New Communication Awards. The deadline is a week away—September 8. Awards are presented in six divisions—corporate, government, media, nonprofit/NGO, academic and technology innovation (focused on vendors and suppliers of social media tools).

There are seven categories in each of the divisions, ranging from online reputation management and internal communication to blogger relations collaboration and co-creation.

The entry fees shouldn’t be an obstacle for anyone—$70 for non-members and free for SNCR members. Winners will receive their awards in Boston on November 14 at SNCR’s annual Symposium and Awards Gala (which I’m planning to attend).

So do yourself, your profession, and business in general a favor: Dust off your best social media effort and submit it as a SNCR entry.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Tagged! How I keep track of most of it

Mitch Joel has tagged me (and several others) after responding to a query from Kevin Behringer, author of the Fly-Over Marketing blog. Here’s Kevin’s question:

How do you manage it all?!?

You read a lot of books, blogs, etc. How do you record it all or track it to actually use it? One of the things I’m struggling with right now.”

The easy answer is that I don’t manage it all. Undoubtedly, stuff falls through the cracks. I’m not aware that I’m letting them fall untilI try to recall them later and can’t find them archived anywhere. As a result, I either spend too much time tracking them down or just give up.

That’s the exception, though, and not the rule. Here’s what I do to keep track of, if not all, most:

FeedDemon

Mitch offers his unqualified support for the Google Reader. Despite regular pressure to adopt it, I remain a committed FeedDemon user for RSS feeds. I haven’t found anything Google Reader does that FeedDemon doesn’t; then there are the benefits specific to FeedDemon, mainly the synchronization feature. I have a copies of NewsGator’s software on my desktop and my laptop. I maintain a NewsGator Online account. And I have a copy of NewsGator Go! on my Sprint Mogul. Whenever I do anything to my account on any one of these platforms, it automatically updates the others. I’m also able to select items to include in my link blog and can store others in a bin that will remain available, exclusively for my eyes, for as long as I want to be able to refer to them.

Evernote

I’m becoming more and more hooked on Evernote, which is like having a memory that doesn’t fail. Anything I want to remember—a web page (or a snippet from the page), an email, an image, a note I create myself, you name it—goes into Evernote which I can access from a web interface or an even more useful app on my computer. Want to make sure you don’t forget anything? Evernote’s the answer.

del.icio.us

The big drawback to any feed reader, whether it’s the Google Reader, FeedDemon, or some other utility, is that you can only manage items in the feeds to which you subscribe. What do you do with links you find elsewhere? For me, del.icio.us is the answer, primarily because of its tagging foundation.

Jott

While the tools above are great when you’re on your computer, what do you do when you want to remember something and you’re nowhere near a computer? I call the note into my Jott account, which is programmed into my cell phone. I hear something on the car radio or read it in a book while sitting at an airport terminal, I just call Jott and dictate what I want to remember. It shows up as an email reminder right away, so I can then save it to del.icio.us.

The Bat

For a variety of reasons, I gave up on Outlook some time ago. The Bat is a simple, fast, clean email client that still gives me the ability to create folders and subfolders to manage the flood. Three key folders for me are REPLY NOW, RETAIN, and READING. Their functions are exactly what the labels suggest.

I Want Sandy

The Bat, as great an email client as it is, has a lousy calendar/scheduler. But that’s okay, since I use I Want Sandy anyway. Sandy gives me my day’s agenda and reminds me as appointments are coming up. Sandy also stores my to-do’s, all of which can be accomplished by sending Sandy an email or CCing her on an email to somebody else. I can even forward my Jott reminders to Sandy and they show up in the right list. Couldn’t be easier.

Cell phone notes

Finally, I keep about a dozen notes on my Sprint Mogul, items to which I may need to refer from anywhere. For example, I have all the login information to the two servers I manage, and the sequence of actions for addressing a database meltdown on my primary server.

Passing the tag along

Since Mitch tagged me, I feel obliged to tag others. So, how do you keep track of it all…

• Pete Blackshaw
• Neville Hobson
• Dan York
• Katie Paine
• Mike Manuel

Friday, June 13, 2008

Who you gonna call? Expert or amateur?

I’m on a real “new media doesn’t kill old media” kick this week.

There has been a lot of interesting commentary in the wake of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s announcement last week. (Disclosure: Britannica has been a client.) In case you missed it, Britannica is broadening its collaborative features, allowing both experts and readers to contribute content without diminishing the authoritative, edited content at the core of its offerings.

One post I read has had me thinking about the issue of experts versus the crowd. Tim Bulkeley, writing in Sansblogue, says…

This reads to me dangerously like the tyranny of “experts” that every successful totalitarian regime in the 20th century ensured. Give me the “cacophony of competing and often confusing viewpoints” over the bland, expert unitary point of view - but then I believe truth is more important than “standing.”

(Note: Bulkeley cites Britannica President Jorge Cauz’s post when referencing the “cacophany of competing and often confusing viewpoints.”)

The phrase “tyranny of experts” is what I’ve been stewing over. I’m not sure when experts—people with special knowledge or ability who perform skillfully—became tyrants, absolute rulers wielding oppressive and unjust power. But enough of dictionary definitions.

In a recent episode of his excellent podcast, “Managing the Gray,” C.C. Chapman resisted being labeled a social media expert, insisting that we’re all still learning this stuff. I sent him an audio comment arguing that, because he focuses full-time on the use of social media for business, because he studies it, that he has special knowledge and ability that allows him to perform skillfully. You’re more likely to get solid, measurable results working with C.C. than with somebody who has a blog and a Facebook profile. C.C. should fly his expert flag proudly. Why else would anyone want to hire him?

Similarly, I wonder with Mr. Bulkeley would feel comfortable driving the first car over a suspension bridge designed by the cacophony of competiting and often confusing viewpoints. I bet he’d be a lot happier driving over a bridge designed by an expert.
In his wonderful new book, “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky suggests that , most of the time, “the internal consistency of professional judgment is a good thing—not only do we want high standards of education and competence, we want those standards created and enforced by others of the same professional, a structure that is almost the definition off professionalism.” Whether that professional is about to perform surgery on you or repair your television, the fact that he or she has special training increases our comfort in their ability to do the job right.

This is not to suggest that experts always have the answers. Shirky makes the point that professionals often have a worldview that gets in the way of the truth, pointing to the music industry’s professionals as an example. Today, he says, “the problems of production, reproduction, and distribution (of music) are much less serious. As a consequence, control over the media is less completely in the hands of professionals.”

Companies like Wikipedia—because of those same issues of production, reproduction, and distribution (of knowledge, in this case)—was able to ensure that experts provided content that was reviewed by other experts and subjected to rigorous editing before publication. The Net and social media have enabled anybody to publish in Wikipedia, which means control of knowledge is, as Skirky says, less completely in the hands of experts.

Which is fine. Great, in fact. In his post about Britannica’s move, Cluetrain author David Weinberger notes, “Editing and expertise add value. They slow things down and reduce the ability to scale, but Wikipedia’s process makes it possible to read an article that’s been altered, if only for a minutes, by some devilish hand. It all depends on what you’re trying to do, and collectively we’re trying to do everything.”

In other words, the fact that knowledge is less completely in the hands of experts does not mean there is no value in knowledge produced by experts. Wikipedia’s any-anonymous-source-as-contributor model has enabled the encyclopedia to grow to 2.5 million articles in English, including one (as one blogger noted) about the Klingon language. As Weinberger suggests, you won’t find such an article in Britannica because the editing-and-expertise model requires decisions about the topics on which the encyclopedia should focus its resources.

But those topics that Britannica has included are being opened to the crowd. Britannica is opening its model so that readers can contribute to the body of knowledge. It’s not a wiki; contributions are still subject to editing and will be clearly differentiated from the official content, per the screen shot below, in which reader-added content is included by clearly identified as such with the name of the contributor included:

The fact that we have both the experts-and-editors model and the everyone-can-play model is a good thing. I can get information on the Klingon language from Wikipedia and learn about neurology from Britannica. Sure, there’s a neurology section in Wikipedia, but I have no clue who wrote it. The article may have achieved neutrality—the holy grail, in Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ view—but that neutrality may have been brokered among a group of contributors none of whom have real expertise in the subject. Because they’re anonymous, we’ll never know. They could all have agreed to a muddled explanation of the science. And a good editor, as I’ve noted before, can only improve a document’s readability.

And, to return to the point, I just don’t see how having a person who has received special education, acquired special skills, and is able to perform professionally, becomes a tyrant by virtue of those desirable characteristics.

So which model will win? Both, I suspect; they will co-exist nicely in a world that is rarely black-and-white, either-or. (Contrary to some commonly held beliefs, Britannica is doing just fine, thanks.) Why, in some people’s minds, the world of knowledge must become entirely amateur-driven is an idea that eludes me.