I'm starting to wonder about how long EBNonline.com is going to last. Brian Fuller was named editor in chief in February and left in April. I met the new guy at Design West and before I could remember to look for his card to put him in the contact list, I heard today that they've hired someone from CNET to take over. On top of that, they've cut back their flow of paid blogger content by half, meaning a cut in freelance expenses. I talked to a couple of them today and they are already looking for other publications to supplement the loss in revenue.
In the meantime comes word that the former EiC Bolaji Ojo is launching a new publication, Electronic Purchasing Strategies, and is actively looking for sponsors for a launch in the fall. He's joined by another EBN refugee, Barb Jorgenson.
There was time that I thought the new focus on EDN and EBN spelled trouble for the EE Times brand, but it looks like the latter is much stronger.
Time for my annual review of spin metric from the Design Automation Conference (DAC), this year held in Austin, Texas for the first time. Last year I called the conference attendance as flat. I'm calling the same for this year.
This was a controversial decision and caused many companies in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry to stay home from the exhibit. But the final news release put on a big smile and said the event "exceeded expectations." That it did. Most everyone I talked to said it would be a "ghost town." "deader than a doornail" and other less than happy predictions. It was not as bad as people thought. It was not as good as some people say.
It is unfair to compare Austin's effort to San Francisco's last year. It's better to compare it the San Diego the year previous because of the similarities in logistics. San Diego and Austin are a lot cheaper to put on a large conference than San Francisco, but actually getting to the venue is about as tough. Not a lot of options for people out of town to get there and from overseas, there are at least two layovers.
With that comparison in place, this is what we have:
Exhibit-only attendance was 2364, up between 8 and 11 percent (depending on which report you read).
Conference-only attendance 1589, down 9 percent.
Exhibit staff 1998, down 9 percent
Overall attendance 5951, down 9 percent
I also counted the number of booths available in the exhibit and noted that the plans were for the same number as were at San Francisco (could not find a floor map for San Diego). There were more than 20 unoccupied booths which matched up with the participation drop in exhibit staff.
Overall you might consider those number disasterous, but you have to keep in mind that there was a fairly significant psychological resistance to the venue that was unfounded in reality. Austin is NOT that bad a place for a conference. It's a great city. Factoring that in I call it a wash compared to San Diego.
The reaction I got from exhibitors from the Big Three (Mentor Graphics, Cadence and Synopsys) was quite positive. I had my partner Joe Basques walking the floor with an iPad giving me real time views and we both could see that all the activity was in those areas. In the cheap seats, with the startups and smaller players, there was more dissatisfaction with booth traffic. A few said the numbers were smaller but the quality was higher in leads, but most were not happy with what they got for the price.
For comparison, lets take a look over at DesignCon 2013. Everything was up 8 percent across the board. The number of exhibitors was just a couple dozen under the total for DAC Austin and I heard nary a derogatory word from any exhibitor. What's the difference? It's in the same place every year. The exhibits are smaller overall so the cost is less. It is easy to get to from the east coast and overseas. It's not in a peak travel/vacation time.
And here's the real problem: People only talk about the exhibits, floor traffic and parties. They don't say anything about the technical sessions. I actually had to ask people what they thought about them and universally it was "Oh, they were as good as ever."
DAC needs to consider all of that. In today's world of CDN Live, SNUG, NI Week, Design West and all the online events that compete for attention and attendance – smaller is better. The days when DAC was drawing 10,000 attendees is long gone. It's strength has always been the technical program that was funded by the exhibits, but it's the exhibits that create the most cost. It's time for DAC to go back to those roots and decide where they want to put them down.
Girish Mhatre was at one time the Grand Poobah at EE Times (editor in chief, that is) in the publication's print heyday. He's made some valuable comment on this blog this year regarding the trend toward content marketing and branded content. He dropped me a note today that serves as an excellent introduction to a new series we are developing here called "Why CEO's should be scared s(p)itless about their content. I offer Girish's observations without comment... for now. ;)
Girish Mhatre, journalist and wine enthusiast
Hi Lou, prompted by a conversation with you, I’ve conducted an informal survey of company content strategies. Here are some observations: I must say that I don’t get it. If this is the state of the art in content marketing by tech companies, then it’s not very effective -- with one exception.
Cadence: I am hugely unimpressed. Perhaps Fuller hasn’t got his arms around a strategy yet (Note: Girish is right. Met with Fuller this week and, he says he's still trying to get his arms around it.), but, as it stands now, it’s simple, straightforward, uninteresting reporting, one step above “backgrounders” that might accompany press releases. The best thing that could be said about this section is that it is inoffensive. And, there’s not a single reader comment on any of their articles. I kept wondering why this section even exists.
Altera: Ron Wilson’s bailiwick at Altera seems better defined. “We hope to bring you the latest thinking on the key challenges in the real world: defining system requirements, making architectural decisions, planning for implementation and—especially—verification, and estimating and measuring system performance.”
All to the good. Ron writes in-depth, dense, technical analyses, as is his wont, but there’s no indication that it’s being noticed. (Ron used to call it as he saw it, so I wonder how he likes hewing to the company line.) Again, there are no user comments. I suspect that in both these cases, “engagement’ remains elusive. (At least as measured by reader comments.)
Digikey’s been adding custom content from Publitek and Electronic Products. But it is buried so deep within the site that I doubt it’s doing any good.
Also looked at OracleVoice on Forbes (Alex Wolfe now writing there) and the IBM sponsored content on The Atlantic. The IBM thing is slightly more interesting because it is more expansive. The Oracle thing is simply weird; I found it superficial boosterism: “Isn’t-technology-wonderful-especially-if-you-are-an-Oracle-customer” kind of thing,
Question: where do these company editors reside within the corporate hierarchy? In marcom, or elsewhere? Also, how are their contributions (effectiveness) measured? Perhaps it’s too early to establish.
Now for the exception: Qualcomm Spark (http://spark.qualcomm.com/) is going in the right direction. This is a real, apparently well-funded effort to create something informative, engaging and valuable. It needs to be edgier, though.
It’s not as if content marketing is new. It’s been around since the dawn of time, spanning many generations of media technology. But it’s not a matter of hiring a couple of journalists. There has to be a content publishing strategy, no?
Yes, Girish, there needs to be a strategy. Working on that for next week. Stay tuned for Why CEOs should be scared s(p)itless about content.
Following up on yesterday's post on manipulating the press, this article shows how easy it was for Edward Snowden to move the press in ways beneficial to him... and he isn't a big corporation. Just one guy.
Interesting story on CNN today on how the "objective" press is manipulated by people with a particular axe to grind. The story reveals how whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, have sought out journalists that have a reputation for dislking certain political extremes for the purpose of gaining public sympathy for their actions. For Snowden, his use of The Guardian'sGlenn Greenwald have paid off handsomely with offers of political asylum from countries like Iceland.
I'm not passing judgement on anyone here, I'm just opening the curtain on the myth of absolute objectivity in the press.
I've been a journalist for several decades now and for most of that time, I've bought into that myth... but since the advent of social media, my belief in that myth has eroded into virtual non-existance. I worked very hard on maintaining objectivity in everything I did in the early years and discovered something uncomfortable. The closer any journalist approached a story with real objectivity, the less likely that journalist would have a career. The more they were able to artfully inject their opinion into a piece, the faster their career rose.
The Guardian, for example, is the only British publication that has a web presence specifically targeted at US news and audiences. It is also an unabashedly liberal publication politically and takes great pleasure in reporting news that is damaging to the US government... no matter who is in charge of it. They make a lot of money doing that and that's specifically why Snowden leaked the information to them. That left the US media scrambling to catch up and take on varying positions on the issue. For example, Fox News has been braying about Obama's involvement in the secret surveillance and MSNBC has been just short of calling for Snowden's head. So far, I have not seen ANY reporting that could be close to being called objective.
This is, however, nothing new. Even the most objective journalists I know have subjective methods for determining what should or should not be covered. One well-known journalist told me years ago that he has stopped taking calls and emails from any PR person that he doesn't already know and has worked with. Another will only accept direct messages from Twitter (and you can't reach him unless he has connected with you. I've also talked with journalists who say that when there are five companies that are involved in a particular technology issue, and all are saying virtually the same thing about the issue, she will only include the input from the largest company of the five, because it's better for the SEO of the publication (not to mention that the largest company is an advertiser).
Speaking of advertising bias, I've had several journalists (all very good and very respected) who have sworn up and down that advertising doesn't affect their reporting, bitch and rail whenever they come back from an interview with a company that never advertises in their publication... or any other. Yes, those journalists, to their credit, still write up the interview, but does anyone actually believe that the coverage is not affected by their anger?
It is not just important, but absolutely necessary for a journalist to be as objective as possible in reporting news... but in today's day and time it rarely happens, nor does anyone really believe it does unless the reporting agrees with their particular position. Then it's absolutely fair and balanced.
How do we move the needle back towards reality? It's not the job of the journalist for the most part. It's the job of the source of the information. Objectivity and truth are the responsibility of everyone today.
Many companies tell us wondrous numbers about how many hits they get on their site, all produced by their amazing SEO program. But when I ask how many of those hits are real people and how many are spiderbots and how many are RSS reads, they have no idea what I'm talking about. All they know is their site gets a lot of traffic. That is not necessarily a good thing
When you need to sell a bunch of products to a bunch of people. SEO is your number one web tool. You need to reach a lot of people and making it easier for them to find you on the web is a great idea. But if your business is selling a few products and services to a small number of companies, those customers are not going to base their decision on how high up you show on a web search. It's not even likely that those customers will do a search at all unless they are looking specifically for your company. They are going to make the inquiry based on what thought leaders say about you and your business.
That won't be affected by SEO. As the article states, that is all about the content.
Unfortunately, determining if you have thought leadership is hard to measure in web analytics. it can be, but you have to look for it and then you have to optimize your analytics to give you the data. One way is time spend on site and time spent on page. Most tools I've encountered give you that data if you dig but it's not easy to get. And when you do, you generally have to do the calculations yourself.
Most companies I've talked to, though, don't make that effort. In fact, when I do an initial consultation with them, their eyes glass over when I ask how much time to people spend on their site and content. So let me say here, especially if you are thinking about getting one of our free consultations, you might want to have that data available before we get there. It's incredibly important if you are concerned about thought leadership.
If you get a hit from, say, googlebot, that means you got pulled up in a general search for a term. That doesn't mean you actually got a human being to your site. If it comes from a specific URL with 0:00 minutes of time on the site, that means you probably got picked up in an RSS feed, but it doesn't mean it got read. If it shows that the eyeball spent a few seconds, that was a scan-and-go. But if it says they spent a minute or more on the page, that meant they actually spent some time reading or viewing the content. The latter one is the only thing that matters when it comes to thought leadership.
That's what most people don't measure. It is possibly more important for you than SEO.
At Footwasher Media, we spend a lot of time studying that number. It determines what we write about hear in Communications Basics, and at New Tech Press, and on the Footwasher Media corporate site. in many cases, we can trace it back to a specific audience member, or at least the department they are in. for example, we know that someone in the executive suite at Newscorp reads this blog regularly (Hi, Rupert!).
Thought leadership can be measured by the number of Facebook "Likes" or Linkedin connections, or Twitter "follows" but none of those measurements really determine if you are leading thought. The time spent on the content, however, is enormously important. You can determine more about your audience and what they really want, need and value easily.
The problem is that number is infintesimal compared to the number of hits and RSS links, which means your marketing and web teams are going to want to avoid talking about it. It's not as impressive to the undeducated. So that's why I thought it would be a good time to do some education. As I've said before, the value of social media is not whether you reach a lot of people. The value is in reaching the right people.
Here's Google's Matt Cutts on how to increase that time-on stat.
Alex Wolfe, who left UBM Tech a few weeks after Design West in San Jose, has taken a position as director of strategic communications at Oracle. Most bets were on him moving to Intel, but I wasn't really sure that would have been the greatest move for either Wolfe of Intel. The chip company already has several journalistic enterprises underway. There's no word on the details of his new position but I think we'll see Oracle jumping into the corporate journalism world with Alex leading the charg.
This as a very positive move for Oracle and a good one for Alex. He seems to think it's "not so dark" being on the corporate side, according to his comments on his Linkedin page.
Wow. I've been getting an earful for several weeks about the changes in B2B media,especially in the embedded, semi and electronics industry. One might think it's Armegeddon.
One PR maven just came out and said that the efforts of companies like Cadence, Intel and Altera to produced independent content is a smoke screen and that they are "clearly" not objective. And yet when I've heard the same thing from others, no one can produce any CLEAR evidence that the content is anything but objective... at least as objective as a human being can be.
Like climate change, humans have had a significant hand in creating the current environment and, like climate change scientists, there are those who say it needs to be reversed and those (like me) who say we need to adapt. Why do I take that position? Because no one knows how to reverse it.
Let me be very clear, here: unless advertisers decide to quadruple their ad buys, like, tomorrow, nothing is going to go back to the way it was. Why quadruple? Because that's how much the advertising budgets have been cut since 1999. To make up for that loss, media companies have had to identify new forms of revenue. Sometimes it's in the form of selling placement of news releases in a box on the online page. Sometimes it's in the form of selling space for "contributed" articles. Sometimes it's in events. Sometimes it's in custom content.
And here's the thing: Marcom and PR folks are MORE than willing to promote companies that way. They are NOT willing, however, to quit working for companies that prefer NOT to by ad space.
Make no mistake, display advertising is what made journalism, PR and marcom effective for several decades. But when it became possible to get news releases distributed "for free" on the internet and media companies started accepting brochures in the form of "contributed articles" in pay-for-play programs, the effectiveness of it all became questionable.
So we are faced with two possibilities: either force corporations to start advertising again and let other people be concerned about ethics, or learn how to adapt to the current environment that REQUIRES individual commitment to ethics.
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