State of the Media

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.

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.

How's your weasel doing?

Thanls Scott Adams!

There's media and then, there's media , Part 3

Contributed articles became a very big deal during the Web 1.0 boom.  Suddenly, print and online publications had a huge need for new content.  Not only did publications start running news releases, verbatim, but they started asking companies to write opinion and analysis about their own industries.  Public Relations companies were flying high organizing the rush of opportunities.  Then the boom busted.  Publications started disappearing, mostly print but several online publications as well and both journalists and PR folks started looking for other means of income.

That did not, however, stop the demand for contributed articles.  The publishing world found that they could fill a lot of space, especially on line, with opinion, white papers, technical documents and presentations that they didn't have to pay for and could cut their newsroom budgets even more.  When webinars came around, they could actually charge companies to put their crappy power point presentations on the publication websites when they couldn't get them to buy advertising space.

Much of this material was managed by sales/marketing/pr departments and it is considered "earned media" because it doesn't directly sell products or services.  It isn't, though.  It's still owned media and edges into purchased media more often than not.  It is two steps up from advertising, one step up from press releases and it still doesn't reach into the realm of trustworthy media.

Moreover, it probably gets read/viewed less than press releases, according to many senior editors I talk to.  Most contributed articles get significant engagement, judging from the comments that follow publication online, but the publications say very vew people are actually reading them.  Those that do are mostly the author, the people that work for the author, the PR firm hired to place the article, the marketing department of the company the author works for, and the competitors who want the publication to run a rebuttal.

So to wrap up, before we get into truly trustworthy content, Websites, marketing material, press releases and contributed articles are all owned content, even if they make it to a third-party site.  They are viewed as slightly more trustworthy than advertising, but not by much.  To be trustworthy, content must be created by and published by a third party that is specifically engaged to be as objective as possible.  That will be the next post.

There's media and then there's media, Part 2

 Last post we looked at "suspect content" that is distributed over owned and paid media.  It's suspect to the audience because it is highly controlled and partisan.  Today we look at the "trustworthy content" that is found in earned media.

 Social and earned media content is seen as truer because it is uncontrolled and has the perspective of the third party.  Whether it comes from a known journalist or from the comments on a Facebook post, the readers know, in the least, that the author is not on your payroll.  That provides a level of objectivity and even integrity that doesn't exist in an advertisement or corporate website.

 A lot of marketers will put the press release in the earned media content bucket, but they are completely wrong.  Now, I know Paul Miller at UBM will take issue with this, because UBM magazines and websites, as well as those at Hearst, Penton, Advantage, et al, publish a myriad of news releases on their pages.  Paul will claim that because they appear on their news engines it gives the information believability.  But then UBM also owns PR Newswire which is the "cash-cow" press-release distribution service the company owns. so he has to say that.  The viability of press releases is the cornerstone of most earned-media strategies in the corporate world.  But trust me, press releases do not equate with real earned media.

 Press releases are owned content, even when they appear in third-party print and online sites.  The content is determined and controlled by the source.  It's distribution is paid for by the source and no one believes the content except those already predisposed to believe it.  I've written a lot of press releases in my career and I have been tracking the readership for more than a decade.  I have discovered that almost all of all the true readers of press releases (excluding impressions caused by web-search spiders) consists of people employed by the company that issues the release, or employees and executives of the competition of those companies.  The percentage of journalists that read those releases off the wire is almost unmeasurable.  It's not that they don't want to read them.  They can't.  There are thousands of releases flooding through the wires every hour, so they are no help to the journalist trying to follow an industry or trend.  

 This is what creates earned media:

1. A journalist/blogger's assignment
2. A journalist/blogger's curiosity
3. A journalist/blogger's personal relationships
4. A journalist/blogger's field of vision and/or hearing

 That's it.  All four of those are intertwined.  There are some journalists I know that won't accept emails from sources they don't already know.  There are some that don't accept emails at all.  There are some that can only be reached through direct message through Twitter.  There are some that you can only contact by knowing where their favorite Starbuck's cafe is and hanging out there for a week.   They may go to tradeshows, but only stay in the sessions and avoid the show floor.  Some only go to the show floor and quickly walk through to see if anything grabs their attention and turn their badges around to make sure no one knows they are media.  They all have subjective filters they place in the way of information just to keep the flow to a dull roar.

 The press release that so many companies put so much concern and effort into is only for their reference once you have their attention.

 Getting earned media is not formulaic.  It is not free but it is less expensive than what owned and paid media costs.  But it takes an enormous amount of effort over a long period of time to attain ... unless you have an effective social media strategy.  What you probably think that means is not what what it really is.

 But before we get into that, we're going to talk about contributed articles.  That comes next.

 

There's media and then, there's media

 Happy New Year and welcome to our first series of the year.

 Anyone in marketing knows the three primary buckets of media: paid, owned (or controlled) and earned.  Many in marketing know that social (or shared) media is a hybrid of owned and earned. Over the past year since we launched our inaugural strategic media program, however, I've come to realize that, while many companies engage in the various forms of media, very few know they should interrelate and even fewer understand how they interrelate.  Let's see if we can fix that for some of you.

 Footwasher Media approaches media and content on a scale of trustworthy to suspect.  On the trustworthy side of the scale is earned, followed by social.  On the opposite end of the scale is owned and paid.  In this post we're going to focus on the latter.

 Owned is content you create and distribute directly.  That includes collateral material, trade show efforts and even your website.  Because it is wholly owned and managed by you it is the most controllable and measurable.  You may bring third parties into the creation of the content, but generally the real expense is in the building of the delivery mechanism in the form of web design, SEO and graphics.  You are the sole arbiter of the content and success is wholly dependent on your ability to attract an audience and get them to accept what you say as true.

 Paid media is generally advertising or pay-for-play media, paid for by you but distributed by a third party, generally a media engine, like a magazine, news website or email service.  It is much more expensive than what you would put into owned content, but if it fails to produce expected results it is easier to blame the delivery medium and the creative agencies you engage.

 Both of these forms of content are highly suspect by your audience/customers for the very reason that they know it is one sided.  You are trying to get them to buy your product or service and you are fudging the data to your benefit, even when you completely believe that the data you are offering is legitimate.

 Of the two, paid content is the most suspect and unlikely to convince someone already doubtful of your argument.  Paid content is most successful when targeted at customers that have already made up their minds to send money your way.  It reinforces and justifies their decision creating the opportunity for a repeat sale... unless you really screwed up.  

 Owned content is also suspect but it is much more passive than paid content.  A magazine or banner ad on a third-party website is intrusive, but a potential or current customer chooses to come to your website or show booth because they want to know more.  They are already inclined toward deciding for you by this choice.  Whether they make the commitment, again, will be based on the persuasiveness of your argument.

 In our next post, we'll look at trustworthy content.

Communication and media strategies... and me

Been away for a while, deeply submerged in our new collaborative business model, re-engaging with my journalism roots, and gaining new clarity on tthe intricacies of modern media strategies. Today I'm going to be speaking to a group of European entrepreneurs on how to develop communication strategies in the US market and what I've come up with will be the basis of a new series that I will crank out over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you'd like to see what I've been up to for the past three months, click on over to New Tech Press, the Element14 news page, Electronic Products, Chip Design, ECN, Embedded Computing... Footwasher Media is all over the place now.

Sylvie Barak Joins EE Times

Just got the OK to say that United Business Media has hired Sylvie Barak as the West Coast Online Reporter.  Who says being a social media maven isn't a good career move?

What? Never heard of her? That's probably because you are still on the trailing edge of social media.  Barak made her bones as a reporter for the Israeli Army news service and moved steadily through other online sites, including the UK's The Inquirer.  With her move into EE Times, she's not going to have as broad a subject pallette to work from but the good news is what she produces might actually convince the stodgy electronics industry to boost their marketing budgets to include effective social media programs.

Yeah, it's a long shot, but hope springs eterna,.