State of the Media

Maybe engineers need to grow up

When you've been in the communciation game as long as I have, you want to run, screaming, from the room when a marketing guy says, "We really don't need much media coverage.  Our customers are engineers and they all talk to each other.  So we just need to reach a few of them."  I swear, if I had a dollar for everytime I heard that I'd be an angel investor (who could fire a long of marketing guys).

So when UBM TechWeb CEO Tony Uphoff tossed out a Facebook link to an article on word-of-mouth marketing I was immediately drawn to it.  I was surprised to learn, however, that the age group most influenced by word-of-mouth marketing are teenagers, while adults will use word of mouth early on in their shopping process but rely more heavily on media when they make their decision.

That immediately brought to mind the axiom above.  If it is true, that engineers make buying decisions based on what their peers tell them, without benefit of third-party input, than engineers have the research skills of high-school students.

I'm sure that's not what the marketing guys are implying.  At least not what they wanted to imply.  Maybe they should go talk it over amongst themselves.

Does Facebook actually work? Depends...on you

There was a significant kerfuffle last week as General Motors' pulled their advertising from Facebook, with prognosticators pointing to the failure of Facebook as a marketing tools.  Having been recently in the market for a new car, and having bought a GM car in the end, I can say with certainty that GM's use of Facebook advertising really sucked.  And Ford's was much better.

Once I started online research for my car I started noticing ads for car manufacturers popping up on FB.  I noticed that GM ads were pretty standard.  Essentially, they said, "buy our car."  I was not impressed.  Then there was this one ad I found that didn't even mention who it was from.  It was a link to an article about the raw materials that go into electric vehicles.  I was considering EVs so I clicked on it.  It took me to a another manufacturers site, but not an ad. it was actually an article about the raw materials used in EVs.  And that gave me and opportunity to go check the specs of an EV for that manufacturer.

The bottom line was I was engaged in what the other manufacturer offered as content and I considered their offering for an EV.  Now, in the end, I chose a GM car because of other reasons, but I was not helped by what GM tried to sell me through Facebook.

That's the issue with social media.  Using it like a typical advertising platform will end in failure. Using it as a promotional tool alone will end in failure.  Offering real content that helps people make a decision succeeds.

If your social platform is not delivering results for you, don't blame the platform.  Get someone in with some perspective and look at your content

Bolaji Ojo is tired. Be interesting

In a continuation of my effort to catch up, EBN EiC Bolaji Ojo tipped me over the edge again bolstering my position, tangentially, my last post.

Ojo, and his partner in crime at EBN, Barbara Jorgensen addressed the product of not doing social media right: Site Fatigue.

"Each week," he wrote, "I receive a deluge of requests to Like companies on Facebook, follow tweets on Twitter, or be LinkedIn with others. Don't ask me to follow your tweets if they aren't worth following. Don't ask me to tag or recommend you if I can't justify the investment of my time."

Which has been my point for many years.  Social media is not about mass marketing communication.  It's about building relationships and trust.  If you are posting links to poorly written and repetitive press releases and marcom material (that's pretty much everyone) then you are not using social media properly or even efficiently.  You're just pissing people off.  And in the case of Bolaji and Barbara, those aren't people you want to annoy.

The problem is most marketers and engineers don't really know how to do anything else.  They are ensconced in their technology, absolutely sure that what they are doing and saying is completely unique and superior than it is to everyone else.  Most in-house communicators and the publicists they hire have no idea what is actually unique to their product.  It takes someone with objectivity and a broader world view to figure that out.  Someone, like, a journalist.

The problem is that journalists are so bombarded with extraneous, unusable content that they lack the time and resources to filter it out.  As Barbara commented, "Barbara chimed in with a comment to Bolaji's piece.  "I think there is opportunity here for anyone who is willing to be a filter. Not just a random filter: an educated, balanced filter." 

As I've pointed out in my series on earned media, some companies are hiring laid off journalists to manage their in-house publication efforts, which is a great first step.  But that effort doesn't really reach outside of the corporate wall and is, therefore, suspect to potential customers.

We seem to have reached a significant pain point in media.  My company, Footwasher Media, saw it coming many years ago.  Welcome, pilgrims.  Time to give us a call.

 

The social web is not what you think it is. It probably never was.

My Brit pal and partner in "crime," Peter van der Sluijs just did a brief post on whether "old web is dying."  His post was actually referencing a similar piece by his social media consultant Brendan Cooper waxing wistful over the death of the freewheeling (and free) social web.

There have been several much more hyperbolic articles on this over the past few months (and I've been waiting for the right push.  This was it.) about how Google and Facebook are doomed; about the corporational takeover of the web; about how it's all falling apart, blah, blah, blah.  It was actually nice to read a couple of reasonable view about how things are changing.  I especially liked Peter's pithy assessment:

"It’s easy to hyperventilate about the next big thing and whether or not Blogs / Twitter / Facebook are too yesterday for words.  If you do that, you miss the big picture."

That, in a nutshell, has been the problem with most social web approaches.  The frustration about the web for too many marketers and communicators is that it doesn't seem to return the same kind of results as traditional mass marketing.  They want hundreds of thousands of new customers to buy their stuff.  In some cases, when the company pours a bunch of money into a full fledged marketing program, they do get results.  The promise of the social web, however, was that it would cost much, if anything to get the kind of results a million-dollar ad campaign would get.

The problem is -- and I keep saying this -- is that the social web is not a mass marketing platform.  Some people get lots of readers on their blogs.  Those people are actually really good communicators that have an expertise in an area that a lot of people care about.  But if you don't get the same kind of following that Robert Scoble gets it doesn't mean blogging is dead.  It means either you don't write well and/or you are writing about something that not a lot of people care about. It can also mean that the few people that read what you write don't know how or don't like to share content.

The social web is, primarily, a tool to reach people that matter in your world with information that matters to them.  If you don't know what matters to them, you are not going to be successful.  That applies not just to blogging but to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Pinterest and every other platform.  There are people and companies out there being very successful with all of the "old web" stuff.  There just aren't that many.  That so many are unsuccessful is not an indication that the social web has failed.

To do it right requires getting out of your comfort zone and letting other people talk about you, then listening to what they say and making adjustments as necessary.

Here's an example of an experiment I did in blogging.  I built a free site to write about local politics.  I sent a link to three or four influential people who started following what I wrote.  They, in turn told a few others.  Within a year I had 12 regular readers.

Big deal, you say?  The readers included three members of the city council, two county supervisors, 4 senior executives of major corporations in town and my original group.  At the end of that first year, I would regularly get invited to functions that I've never been invited to and the movers and shakers in town started asking my opinion on policy.  Last year, I was asked to move my blog to a media site and was recently told that my posts are one of the most read and most engaged sections of the site.

I have never tried to get a large audience because my experiment was not about "how many" but "who". That's a big part of the big picture Peter was talking about.  Engagement and dialog with the right people the keys to successful social media.  Whether Google and Facebook survive is absolutely irrelevant.  You can be successful with any platform as long as you keep that im mind.

Dealing with reality vs. infographics

Over the past few weeks I've been wrapping up the beta project for our new business model and, as a result, I've been putting off a lot of writing.  So for the next few posts I'm going to be cleaning up the flotsam and jetsam that's accumulated on my desk.  First off, Infographics

The recent web fad of reducing an argument to a trite graphic is really irritating to me... especially when the position taken is so poorly researched that it negates the senders' credibility. I usually only comment directly back to the sender about the error, but back in March I got an unsolicited email (from someone who did not identifiy what axe they wanted to grind but I was able to discover it anyway) asking me to comment on it in my blog.  Here's my comment.

What a load of crap.

Here's the infographic.

 

Via: Open-Site.org

Right from the beginning the hucksters pushing this information start out with a prevarication: that Wikipedia forced Encyclopedia Britannica to leave print.  It's not true.  It's not even sort of true.  Encyclopedia Britannica did announce it was leaving print this year, but not because of Wikipedia.  It did it because it can more easily update its information on line than it can in print.  Print sales of the EB were declining for years before Wikipedia came on the scene simply because people could look up information.  The company is actually doing quite well.

Now every other piece of information on the graphic could be correct, but by leading with something that is so blatantly false it makes it difficult to believe anything else.  That's where I have so much difficulty with this kind of information dissemination. 

The internet is full of crap, just as every other form of media is full of crap.  But what makes the 'net so different is that it is relatively easy to find out if the crap you are reading or viewing is true or false.  That's why I love social media and the internet.  I don't have to believe anything.  I can check everything.  That's also why a lot of marketing people and entrepreneurs (outside of web-based businesses) really prefer to avoid doing their work on the web.  Static printed graphics can make outrageous and/or vague statments without potential customers checking up on them immediately.

Now the publishers of the above crap added a bunch of url's to try to add and image of veracity to their stuff, but since they can't be clicked or copied it's difficult to check up ont heir sources.  This, too, is part of the practice: Give the illusion not the reality.

So, that's what I think of the infographic from open-site.org, a company looking to replicate Wikipedia's success by disseminating poorly researched information.  I would highly recommend avoiding their practice.

SEO: it should be about who, not how many

This week I've been getting bombarded with SEO consultants wanting to link their sites to New Tech Press.  I've dutifully gone to their sites to see what they are all about and have been thoroughly disappointed in what I see.  They are filled with poorly written, unconnected, bland content that provides absolutely no value to their audiences.  They are designed only to drive search traffic.

What makes it all the worse is some of these sites are for well-known corporations.  And, no, I won't tell you who.

I understand the value of good SEO.  It's important to give people making random searches on the interwebs a chance to hit on your site, regardless of its value to the searcher.  That's how lots of marketing people justify their investment in the web.  And when your objective is to gain new customers without concern to the needs of those customers, getting 100,000 hits is more likely to turn into one real customers than getting 100 hits.

But what if you could get 100 real customers instead?  It's possible if you actually care about the customers.  

It is hard to find companies that actually do care.  In the decades I've been doing this 90 percent of the comments marketing and sales people make about their customers is not very complimentary.  I completely understand the feeling.  Sometimes their obstinancy and budget decisions are enough to drive you crazy.  And their willingness to go with an inferior choice because it is cheaper is similarly maddening. But whatever business you are in, you initially chose to go in this direction because you thought you could solve some poor schmuck's problem. 

What's missing from most company websites, or at least what is craftfully hidden, is that very reason for being.  Companies hire SEO consultants who have absolutely no understanding of the market for the companies' products and just jam the web traffic with random hits from spiders, which makes everyone feel good until you look at the sales figures for the year.

I have yet to hear a pitch from an SEO consultant that says, "We aren't going to increase your web traffic.  We are going to bring you customers."  Why is that? Because most people are still stuck in the 20th century of mass marketing.  A 1 percent return is acceptable.  It's like seine net fishing but no dolphins are killed in the process.

Does that mean SEO is a useless enterprise?  No, it is a part of your marketing process, although one that is getting less and less important.  What is increasingly more important is finding the right audience for your message and keeping them coming back to your site, getting them to promote your business and treating them like you actually care about them.

There are lots of consulting companies doing this, like Badgeville, Shoutlet and CrowdFactory but before you call them, be prepared.  They speak a much different language from most marketers.  It's focused on meeting your customers' needs, not your president's ego.  And you may have to cut into your SEO budget to get them to work for you.

There's media and then there's media, Finale

In our last post in this series I stated that earned content isn't a sure thing no matter how much effort and cost you put into it.  That's because earned content -- news coverage that is beneficial to your cause, product or company -- has too many variable in the form of timing, resources within the news community and the interest of the general reading public.  Because of that confluence of variables, most companies don't approach public relations strategically but keep it in the tactical menu.  That's also why most PR efforts fail to impress the people that pay for them.

 That is not to say that earned media cannot be a strategic effort.

 Over the past decade, more and more companies have been pursuing a strategic earned media strategy by hiring laid-off editors and freelancers to run internal media efforts.   Some of the editors were not laid off but left because the money was just too good and others had been laid off for several months before the companies picked them up.  For example, Cadence, Xilinx and Altera have all hired editors that once worked at United Business Media and Reed publications.  This is a very good thing because these companies have recognized the skill and integrity of these journalists and want them to apply those attributes to their internal publications.  But there are two problems with these types of programs.

 First, most companies, however, cannot afford to make the expenditure of putting someone on salary and building an infrastructure around their work.  Second, the audience for the work is captive, existing behind the firewall with limited outreach. Furthermore, as much as the journalists creating the content are trustworthy, because the audience knows that this content is fully under control of the sponsoring company, it's trustworthiness is still suspect.   

 Remember that true earned content has to come from a third party.  Independent publications from media houses, like UBM, still carry the cachet of trust and therefore are more valuable. Even contributed material, like opinion pieces and press releases, can boost their integrity a bit by appearing in one of these third party publication... but they are not as trusted as the content created by an independent journalist.  That's still the holy grail for content... and it can be planned for and executed.

 For the past six months, Footwasher Media has been running a strategic earned media program for a public company.  In those six months we have created more than 60 pieces of content, with input from but independent of the sponsoring company, using the services of experienced and known journalists in the tech community.  That content has been shared with partnering media companies and published close to 200 times internationally.  The articles and videos have been viewed on the sponsor's site by more than 27,000 unique viewers (that's real people, not spider hits) and the partner publications have driven more than 4500 qualified leads to the sponsor.  The sponsor has stated that the content published has raised the visibility of the company among the international press to the degree that they have seen a serious increase in the number of unsolicited calls from the press in general.

 So how is it happening?  First, Footwasher Media has cultivated relationships with the press management over decades allowing a frank and open discussion of what is and isn't independent content.  We have dedicated ourselves to a standard of ethics that goes beyond lip-service and puts it in writing.  That creates a perception of trustworthiness in our relationship with them.  Second, our content is not behind a firewall, it's in the open and available to an audience larger than the  sales base of the sponsor.  Third, we work with the sponsor openly and honestly.  We tell them when something will or won't work in the program while remaining open to their suggestions.  We treat them as a source, first and foremost, not just, a source of income. Fourth, and finally, we act as a true intermediary in the discussion between the sponsor and the traditional press making sure both understand the needs of the other, not advocating for either.  Let's look at it graphically.

 In the previous post I showed the relationship of earned, social, owned and purchased media, along with the levels of cost, effort and trustworthiness.  In this chart I add strategic earned media to the mix, placing it between social and tactical earned.  A strategic effort takes a bit more effort that tactical and costs more, but it drives up the creation of tactical and reduces the cost and effort that goes into tactical.  As a result, social, owned and purchased all get dragged closer to and in some case into the trust zone.

 We live in a world that lacks both barriers and trust.  While the rest of the world watches and shares what the corporate world and press produce, most of the producers are still trying to put some level of control on it.  That is not going to change.  Someone has to stand up and tackle the problem from a different angle.  That's what we are doing.

 It is a different way of looking at the exchange and dissemination of information to the world.  That's what it takes: open, honest, transparent and independent communication.

 And it works.

 

There's media, then there's media, part 5

We've looked at content for purchase content, owned content and social content in the previous posts and we're getting close to the end of our series.  Today we look at the reality and difficulty of earned content.

This is why earned media is so valuable.

The chart indicates relative costs and effort that go into the various forms of content and how the market audience views those various forms. Paid content (advertising) is the most expensive of all media and requires the least amount of effort but is the least trustworthy.  Owned content costs less and takes about more effort but us not viewed with the same level of suspicion, generally because there is a level of human contact involved.  Social content takes more effort but even less cost than owned because you can do it even without a website. Social begins to cross the trust barrier because objective third parties may have the opportunity to state their position... if social is done right.  Most of the time it isn't, which is why it is still in the untrustworthy realm.

Earned content alone resides primarily in the trustworthy realm.  Even people who don't trust the press will refer to a magazine, newspaper, broadcast on online site for information before they will visit a corporate site or advertisement.  As we have said in previous posts, press releases are not earned content, nor are rewritten press releases even if they are published.  The best they can be are owned and owned isn't trustworthy.

Earned content is the most valuable of all content in your communications arsenal.  You don't produce it, you don't control it and you pay relatively nothing for it.  Earned content is created by journalists, no one else.  It is as objective as a human being can be, it is independent, it is the most trusted of all, and it takes enormous effort and/or time for it to become reality because it require developing trusted relationships with the third party journalists.

However, because you can't control it, it can't be considered a strategic effort.  A press release that goes through the marketing effort is packed with cliches, buzzwords and superlatives and, with some luck, may include a nugget or two of information interesting to a journalist.  It may or may not stay in his files or floating in the back of his head until he has enough information to put together an interesting story.  Or it may or may not get rewritten into a small blurb on his publication.  In the least, the publication may just post the release in it's entirety.  You won't know what will happen for sure until you see it published.  It is hard to build a strategic plan with all that uncertainty, but why is it so hard?

Because most companies and publicists really don't understand how a journalist's mind works.  Most companies are nose-deep in their own marketing committee discussions and cannot see beyond their own messaging.  They may think they have looked at all the possibilities and come up with something unique, but the journalist they are trying to reach really does see more than the marketers do.  And even with their perspective, most of them are just taking educated guesses as to what the reality is, simply because they have far too much information to process and not enough time to do more than they already are. 

So while earned media is the most valuable content you can get for your company, it can be harder to find than gold in the Sierras, which is why so many companies never even attempt to make a decent effort to get it.

 That doesn't mean, however, that getting it cannot become a strategic effort.  And that's what we will talk about next.

Penton Drops Print

Penton Publishing, Electronic Design's parent company, is ceasing print operations, making them the first electronics trade press publisher, historically print-based to go entirely electronic.  UBM, Hearst, Advantage Media, etc. still have some print pubs.  The good news is, no one loses their jobs... except for the printers.

Penton has come a long way since the media revolution began.  They were one of the last to "get" social and have become one of the better users.

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Thanls Scott Adams!