Death Watch

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.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Death Watch: Feeds are important, but widgets still work

Twitter and Facebook’s rising popularity have altered the online habits of more than a few people. Given the volume of information that comes our way through the tweets and status updates of those we follow, many are now convinced that the news finds us.

Certainly I discover a lot of interesting news by way of shortened URLs embedded in tweets, and the recent use of Twitter to direct Central Texans to the site of a hospital treating victims of the Fort Hood shootings exemplifies the ways Twitter increasingly is being used as a news delivery vehicle. But given the speed with which tweets fly by, I’m bound to miss a lot of news if I’m not watching my monitor at just the right time. To get a comprehensive overview of the news in which I’m interested, I still need other channels.

These other channels include widgets, which continue to thrive despite a growing chorus insisting that the web widget is dead.

The argument for the demise of the widget is best articulated by Socialvibe president Joe Marchese, writing on MediaPost. Marchese writes,

What marketers need to understand is that the feed killed the widget. Feeds, like Facebook’s news feed and Twitters status update, have made the portability of content nearly irrelevant.

The web, in Marchese’s view, is a world of people “programming content for friends, co-workers and total strangers,” one in which a destination (like a website) is increasingly irrelevant. A marketer’s goal, he says, is to get people to program your branded content into the information they’re feeding to others via their tweets and Facebook status updates.

I agree with Marchese—to a point. But, does this mean the widget is dead? Hardly. In fact, with startups like Sprout building entire businesses around widgets, building and maintaining high-quality widgets has become easier and cheaper than ever. The only question seems to be whether anybody will ever again visit a web page where these widgets are housed.

If you buy into Marchese’s assertion that the feed has killed the widget, then you believe that traffic to destination websites is trending to zero. There’s no question that unique visits to destination sites—even those that historically have done the best job of attracting traffic (think Nike, for instance)—are declining. But the loss of thousands—even tens of thousands—of visitors still leaves sites with thousands—even hundreds of thousands—who still drop by. As attention shifts from static sites to the real-time web, some attention will continue to focus on sites. (If the widget is dead, then isn’t on-site advertising dead, too? Don’t tell sites like TechCrunch or any of the top mommy bloggers, who seem to be getting enough page views to be profitable with advertising.)

Traffic to traditional sites is declining, not disappearing. There will always be reasons to visit a destination website even as most of our attention shifts to content produced through social channels.

Consider tweets that contain a shortened URL. That URLs takes you somewhere, often to a blog post or a news story. That content appears on a web page, and on that page you can find all kinds of other material that may serendipitously reveal even more content in which you were interested. After all, the blog’s theme guided the blogger to write the post that motivated someone to include it in a tweet, so why shouldn’t the material that orbits the blog’s posts—including widgets—be equally interesting?

Marchese’s post also assumes that widgets contain only the kind of content that is now communicated via tweets and status updates. A widget I created contains an audio player that, when activated, presents the latest episode of For Immediate Release, the podcast I produce twice weekly with Neville Hobson. So you click a shortened URL in a tweet, follow it to a web page to read the recommended post, and while you’re there you see this intriguing widget with an audio player. Curious, you click the play button and are introduced to FIR. Many of our listeners have shared FIR with people visiting their blogs by embedding the widget on their sites.

Widgets can also contain video, images, contests, fundraising activity (the American Red Cross has made excellent use of fundraising widgets during times of natural disasters), polls, and all manner of other content. They can serve a variety of purposes, like the fundraising/CSR widget below (feel free to embed it on your site):

It doesn’t even take a shortened URL to bring someone to a web page. Despite the fact that there are multiple channels through which our community can listen to FIR, our statistics tell us that most people use the Flash media player directly from the FIR website. Why not provide additional communication-related resources for them to look at while they’re there? Knowing that people do visit our site gives us the ability to provide them with more relevant and useful content they can serendipitously discover—and maybe even embed on their own sites. Then there’s the Twitter widget, letting people who visit your site know about your Twitter activity and, possibly, resulting in the addition of one more follower.

And then there’s Facebook, where many people go to read their feeds. Services like Sprout make it as easy to create and deploy a widget for Facebook as one for a standard web page.

Marchese is right about the trend toward feeds, but there’s a vast difference between disruption and destruction. There’s no doubt that newspapers are in decline, but more than half a million people still subscribe to The Washington Post, and the Post has the fifth largest subscriber base in the U.S. With millions and millions of people still reading paper newspapers, it makes no sense to abandon them as a means of getting your story out. With hundreds of millions of people still viewing websites, it makes no sense to abandon them, either, as a channel for reaching people.

Ultimately, widgets work. They’ve been widely adopted and they have tremendous reach, according to ComScore numbers analyzed by Terra USA Research:

It’s worth pointing to the widely reported decline in traffic to Twitter; use of the site dropped 27.8% from September to October, according to Nielsen, leaving the service with 18.9 million unique visitors. While many of those are influencers, it’s still a fraction of the total online population. Widgets can still prove useful in reaching the rest, whether they’re reading blogs, websites, or Facebook.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that much of the buzz around widgets has to do with the nascent market for interactive TV widgets and widgets on mobile phones.

And it’s more than a little ironic that Marchese’s post proclaiming the death of the widget was accompanied by two common blog widgets—a “related articles” widget and a “most read” widget.

Are you using web widgets and, if so, do you continue to derive benefit from them?

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Death watch: Static destination websites

I understood Jonathan Schwartz’s enthusiasm when he suggested, during a talk a couple years ago, that a Sun Microsystems intranet really wasn’t necessary with so many employees blogging. It still didn’t make any sense to me, though. Would it really be easier to find benefits information on employee blogs than on an intranet benefits page? And how, exactly, would an employee enroll for benefits on a blog?

The same kinds of thoughts cross my mind as I hear all the claims that static web sites are dead. The rise of social media and the real-time web has certainly shifted the focus of the online community. There is no question: The era of the destination website is ending, if it’s not already over.

But we’re talking about the end of an era, not the death of a tool. The era of the destination webiste has been one in which organizations pumped most of their online efforts into their dot-com sites; their strategies were focused on driving traffic to those sites. With the time people spend online shifting to real-time and social content, companies do need to rethink how (as a post on digitalbuzz put it) they deliver digital experiences to their customers and other stakeholders.

This is one of the reasons lifestreaming could become important to business. A company can publish many forms of content to one place, which in turn distributes it to appropriate channels: photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, commentaries to Twitter, and so on. Microsoft is the first business I’ve seen to launch a Posterous lifestream for its new retail stores. The site owners easily send photos from their phones to the site, where they can in turn be added to a Facebook fan page or just about anywhere else.

This doesn’t mean Microsoft has no need for a destination website, however.

The use of a tool is based on the use to which it’s being put. Yes, a lot of content that has been cloistered on company dot-com sites will—and should—shift to distributed venues where people are spending their online time. But there’s still a need for static content that’s housed in one place. I can’t imagine a time when that need will vanish.

When seeking certain types of information, people will continue to go directly to a company website rather than hoping they can find it somewhere in the social web:

• Contact information
• Investor resources
• Product/service listings
• Company history
• Jobs

In fact, the static company website has a new purpose. More and more organizations are using their website as the home for a directory of links to their Facebook pages and groups, Twitter accounts, blogs, Flickr streams, and YouTube channels. Why hope people will stumble on your content when you can direct them to it?

The idea that the social and real-time web will completely kill off static sites is hardly strategic. Far too many organizations are still focused on driving traffic to their dot-com sites, which will become an increasingly frustrating and unrealistic goal. But having those sites available when they prove to the best resource for the kinds of information to which they lend themselves will remain a pillar of a company’s online presence.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

One role for print: making dull messages stand out

Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.

Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one of a few messages being broadcast to employees. Back then, the role of communications was to produce one-way, top-down messages to ensure employees knew what they needed to know (like, for instance, not missing the benefits enrollment deadline). With communicators acting as gatekeepers, it was easy to maintain a flow of content that the average employee could digest.

Today, communicators produce only a fraction of the messages through which employees must sift. Depending on the dgree to which the company has embraced the Web 2.0 concept internally, employees consume messages from communities of various stripes, employee blogs, internal RSS feeds, updates on enterprise social networks, employee-generated videos, internal presence networks like Yammer, the list goes on.

Not that this is bad; in fact, it’s great. The more employees can network with each other, the more quickly they’ll find the information they need to do their jobs, get answers to question, connect with others with whom a relationship is beneficial and form ad hoc teams to tackle problems and jump on oportunities.

But still, with all this content, how prominent can you make an email or intranet item on those drab-as-dishwater messages that still need to get out?

The solution is to go analog. While this won’t work where employees are scattered and working from wherever, but for those organizations whose employees still gather in office buildings and manufacturing facilities, analog communications can stand out from the sea of digital messages.

Who’s going to miss a brightly colored poster on an easel by the elevators, in the lobby and in other high-traffic areas? How about table-tent cards in break rooms and the cafeteria? When I worked for ARCO back in the early 1980s, Employee Communications Manager Dave Orman drew attention to a 401(k) plan by hanging mobiles all over the ARCO Towers and other facilities; each of the pieces hanging from the mobile reinforced the enrollment message.

Even a print publication can get attention. One communicator I spoke with several years ago had ceased publication of a company magazine, moving all content to the intranet. But when a critical issue arose, she produced a special print issue that was distributed to employees’ desks. The reaction from employees was, “Wow, if they’ve gone to the trouble to print this, it must be important.”

I remember one boring message that was printed on movie theater-style popcorn boxes, then filled with popcorn and distributed on cafeteria tables for employees of one big manufacturing company. That was a message that employees not only remembered, but talked about.

Not only is print not dead, it’s a means of getting mundane messages to stand out.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Serendipity: A strength of print

I was thumbing through my Sunday newspaper earlier this week when I came upon a full-page feature that, despite the dullness of the topic and my own lack of interest in government finance, drew me in. “State Budget 101” featured a cartoon professor walking you through a plain-English explanation of the key issues underlying California’s budget crisis with simple-to-understand charts and graphs. Here’s what it looked like:

It struck me, as I dug into the feature, that this is the kind of thing that newspapers should be doing. Enough innovative, useful material like this could entice a lot of people back to reading the daily dead-tree version of the news.

The same information can, of course, be found online. In fact, this same feature is available on the Web in an interactive format:

But here’s the main difference between a print newspaper and an online feature:

I would never, ever, click a link to “California Budget 101: Making sense of the state’s financial meltdown.”

My eyes would skip right past it as my brain subconsciously noted that it has something to do with budgets and finance, not my strong suit nor a focus of interest. But when I turned the page and saw the feature there, all in one place with its appealing graphics and a promise of simplifying something complex, I paid attention.

That’s serendipitous discovery of content.

As I noted a few weeks back, rather than introducing more and more compelling content like this, most newspapers have grown timid. Turning a page means finding more AP and Reuters coverage of stories you’ve already read on some news site because you learned about it on Twitter. With that kind of content, it’s no wonder people are abandoning newspapers.

But turning a page and seeing something you didn’t expect, something you never would have looked for, but that makes you go “wow,” that’s a capability that newspaper publishers need to exploit. And as long as I continue to find content like that in the Bay Area News Group’s newspapers, I’ll keep subscribing. (Incidentally, this is also a strength to be leveraged in internal communications, helping to simplify complex issues for employees that they would never click to view on the intranet.)

One suggestion, though. While the interactive, online version of the feature included a PDF of the print version, there was no link to the interactive page in the newspaper. Tighter integration between print and online will only bolster print’s value.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Deathwatch Case File #2: RSS

In a post on November 17, 2008, I created the Death Watch list, a rundown of various media whose death has been widely predicted. This is the second in a series of posts that takes a deeper dive into these.

A meme suggesting that Twitter is poised to replace RSS has been swirling through the social media space, but I largely ignored it as preposterous until Steve Gillmor reiterated and expanded on the suggestion in TechCrunch IT post. Gillmor, a contributing editor to ZDNet and host of “The Gillmor Gang” podcast, offers perspectives that bely a remarkable depth of insight into social computing, making his observations worthy of attention.

On this one, though, Steve and all those who came before him claiming Twitter has rendered RSS obsolete, just have it wrong.

Gillmor’s argument boils down to the fact that, as he puts it:

Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

The basic premise—that other social media channels are better at some of the uses to which RSS has been put—isn’t wrong. But it ignores the fact that RSS is still used for much, much more.

RSS has never gotten the respect it deserves. Always considered too geeky for widespread adoption, RSS appeared to be getting a boost when it was built into all the major browsers (except Google’s Chrome, a massive oversight on Google’s part) with Microsoft going so far as to scrap the “RSS” moniker in favor of the simpler-to-understand “web feeds.”

But the full power of RSS has never been genuinely appreciated. Dave Winer, who developed RSS into its current state, laments in a comment to Gillmor’s post:

It would be interesting if one of the industry conferences invited me to speak about RSS someday. It’s never happened. This is the 10th year of RSS (and) we’ve learned a lot. I would love to share some of it, but this industry has never wanted to hear what I have to say. Or so it seems.

Indeed. It has often struck me that the slow adoption of RSS is as much a lack of enthusiasm by those who do grasp its technical nature as confusion by those who don’t. My feed of Google News items on RSS hasn’t contained any worthwhile nuggests in well over a year. But, as Winer notes in his comment, RSS has become part of the Web’s infrastructure. Whether somebody is adding a portlet to iGoogle or Netvibes or viewing the latest news in a widget someone has embedded on their blog, RSS is at the core of this functionality.

But wait. There’s more. A staggering number of customized feeds have been created with Yahoo Pipes, a simple-to-use tool that lets you mash up feeds. Dozens of feeds have been created in Pipes just to simplify access to Boxee video offerings.

But Gillmor’s argument fails mostly around the notion that a river of news updates is the only reason for using RSS. First, while the news updates I get from those I follow on Twitter are often interesting, but (a) I don’t see all of them and (b) they simply cannot include everything in which I actually have an interest.

My core use of RSS is to stay current on topics about which I need to be conversant. I need to see all of the recent posts to blogs like Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineLand and Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog, among hundreds of others. I can’t rely on the tweets that fly by covering everything I need to know. For instance, I want to know about every new post by the PR and communication bloggers I follow. I’ll determine whether to read them or not based on my own judgment. I’m not willing to leave it to those I’m following to alert me to all of those new posts because, well, they won’t.

I also use RSS to set up listening posts so I can be aware the appearance of important content that has something to do with one of my clients. I sure as hell can’t count on tweets providing that kind of intelligence.

Besides, you have to figure the folks at Twitter knew what they were doing when they included an RSS subscription functionality for every Twitter account (so you can catch the tweets you would have otherwise missed from any given individual), as well as the results of a Twitter search.

Gillmor concedes (it’s hard not to) that RSS still exists, “casually subsumed as the transport for 140+ content into the social stream. There, RSS items are fed into aggregators and husked for their behavioral signals, packaged as Tweets and sold for pennies on the whuffie dollar.”

But, as Christopher S. Penn has noted more than once on the “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast, Twitter can be a dangerous play if you decide it’s the basket for all your eggs. After all, like Facebook, it’s a closed system and privately owned. Should it run out of money or be shuttered for some other reason, it’s gone—along with your followers and all the networks they represent.

RSS, on the other hand, is dependent upon no single entity. Like HTTP, it’s an open standard that can thrive regardless of the roadblocks that could be thrown in its path.

It’s my fervent hope that, rather than accept the “RSS is dead” meme as fact, the industry recognizes its long-term value and starts listening to Winer and other RSS experts who can help us tap into his full value. Whether the industry goes down that path or not, however, RSS is far from dead. It’s just becoming part of the plumbing.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

What’s a comic book geek to do?

“Print is dead!” shout the digital fanboys. “All tangible media will be gone by 2012,” proclaims Steve Rubel. If you listen carefully, you can hear the anguished screams of comic book geeks.

Well, not really.

Comic books—and especially graphic novels—are one form of print media that hasn’t made the transition to the Web. You can’t put an unread comic in a plastic sleeve marked as “mint.” You can’t smell the ink when you crack open a new issue, or gaze lovingly at the art and the inking that just wouldn’t look the same on a monitor. (I’m not into comics, by the way, but my wife has one hell of a collection.)

Consider the Marvel comic book that just hit the stands in which Spiderman saves the Barack Obama inauguration—with a little help from the candidate. By all reports, this will fly off the shelves and become another collector’s item. (There are no online collector’s item, since the ability to find content any time precludes the need to collect anything beyond bookmarks and Delicious links.)

Comics and graphic novels represent a form of tangible media that won’t be going anywhere. If you look hard enough, you’ll find others. For example, there’s the brochure you can pull from a display at the booth where you buy your tickets for Alcatraz tours. Will these be replaced by 2012 with a data file I can have beamed to my smartphone? Don’t hold your breath.

This is part of what I mean when I suggest there will be a market for print even as more and more content goes digital.