Communications Basics

Custom content and complaining about the weather

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.

Related articles

You can't hold back the tide. Media is changing.

Old vs. New PR, and What Offers Better ROI

What constitutes journalistic independence?

State of the Media in the 21st Century Report

This blog actually began in 1995 as the State of the Media Annual Report to our clients in 1995.  In 2000 as media started to contract and editorial staffs were cut, it came out twice a year, than quarterly.  Then we started this blog, Communications Basics to make distribution easier and to expand into discussions about how corporate communications was changing best practices. 

In 2013 we are seeing a solidifying of the media industry around several disparate niches and have discovered how media will work for the foreseeable future. We are in the process of compiling our observations into a white paper on the State of the Media in the 21st Century.  The focus is primarily on the electronics and embedded software industry that we have served for many years, but the concepts are applicable in multiple industries.

But instead of giving it away as we have in the past we are asking for something in return.  We want to talk to the people who are in a position to make the changes needed to succeed.  If you are that kind of person, fill out the form on this page and, after we evaluate what you say about yourself, we’ll send it to you at no charge, with the understanding that we may be contacting you about doing business together.

If you don’t want to go through the evaluation, or if you don’t qualify we offer two options: Either pay a fee for the report, or give us the contact information of someone in your organization who does qualify. We will send it to them and they can share it with you.  Sound fair?

You can sign up at our website or fill out the form right here.  

 

The filters of good content

Continuing on with our discussion about good content, I've come across some fascinating data regarding how customers in the world of semiconductor design are consuming it and what it means for social media.  Let's start with a poll taken by a company I've been consulting to in recent weeks.

The company wanted to get some attention from a select segment of customers.  The company estimates that their entire customer base consists of a few thousand people worldwide and they only need to reach a small part of that to be successful.  So they were looking into ways to best reach them.  Good content was a given in their estimation, but how to create that content and how to deliver it most efficiently was the question.  They had an assumption on what would be the best path that I questioned so I asked them to do something: talk to your current and potential customer about where they get their information.

I've asked my clients to do this for many years, but no one has ever done it.  They preferred to stick with assumptions.  I was stunned when this new company took me up on the idea.  And they went about it with a scientifically significant sampling.  What they discovered verified what I was telling them about the media but also came up with some surprising results even for me.

What was not surprising (to me) was that the publications they thought about target with their content barely registered or did not register at all with their audience.  What was also not surprising was that EE Times and EDN were a virtual tie for first. I generally lump these two together since they are both UBM products and generally serve the same audience though for different purposes (more on that later).

What was mildly surprising was that Chip Design and Design-Reuse.com came in tied for third and that John Cooley's DeepChip did not register at all.  I actually thought that the three would be much closer, but as I thought about it, what Chip Design and D&R focus on is generally a much higher level in semiconductor design.  That's a significant bit of information (more on that later, too.)

What knocked me out of my seat, however, was what came in a solid second.  

Linkedin.

I've been following Linkedin for quite a while.  In fact, it was the first social media platform I ever got involved with.  However, until the past couple of years, it just kinda sat there in my browser bookmarks.  That changed in 2010 when I was able to help a client make a contact with a significant potential customer using my Linkedin contacts.  In that process I discovered groups and now belong to and, in some instances, moderate 31.  Some people have called my involvement scattered and can't imagine being able to follow that much, but the results of this survey showed my Linkedin involvement is not that remarkable.  The respondents stated they get their dose of news and opinion from 20 or more different groups.

But none of that information is actually original content.  It's based on content that group members have screened and found valuable... from places like EE Times, EDN and Chip Design.  

In my last post I said that readers are using social media to filter content.  This is a perfect example of how they are doing it.  They are relying on peers and trusted sources to scan through the content and then endorse it.  Most of the groups have moderation filters in place (people like me) who look at suggested content first before allowing it to be disseminated.  The content comes from other trusted sources (like Chip Design and EE Times) and then can be commented upon by members.

And because Linkedin has carefully adopted the image of a businesslike site, you don't get a lot of socio/political spam.

Linkedin was, at one time, the realm of HR managers and job seekers.  It still is very much that, but it has morphed into much more.  It has become a curation site for business information and, as a result, has become an increasingly important channel for  organizations that develop trusted content.  

There have been a few articles recently talking about the fiscal value of Linkedin over Twitter and Facebook.  Part of it is that Linkedin doesn't just get revenue from advertising, but also from subscriptions and job listings, keeping the overall cash flow positive. But the fact that it has proven valuable to business more than developing casual acquaintances has also kept it's stock value high (106 for LI vs 21 Facebook at this writing).  It has kept is focus much narrower and is therefore more broadly valued.  In that point let's go back to the issues of EETimes/EDN and Chip Design.

Fractured vs Focused Readership

The survey showed, as I said, that EE Times and ECN were in a dead heat for readers, which doesn't bother UBM at all, but the respondents said something interesting about EE Times: they approach the massive amounts of content in many different ways.  Some read the newsletters only, some just one or two DesignLine pages, some the weekly digital version, some the videos, some the online front page.  One even mentioned EE Times Confidential.  The audience for EE Times is highly fractured.  They can claim total readership in the millions but with so many channels, the chance that the content about your company will reach the eyeballs of your target audience is just a crap shoot.  Not so much for EDN, however.  The driving number of EDN readers say they go directly to EDN.com for their content and move from there.  So getting front and center there means you get more potential readers for your material.  The downside is it is tougher to get through the editorial filter of EDN than it is for the multiple channels of EE Times.

That being said, channels like Chip Design and D&R give access to a much more select audience focused on issues more specific than EE Times and EDN, and the name of the game in media for high tech is not quantitative but qualitative (Point of order, the survey showed that everyone who reads Chip Design and D&R also read UBM content).

Companies need to look at media non-exclusively. You can't rule out the big media names and you can't assume that just because you like a style of writing that everyone else feels the same way.  My consultee was considering putting all its eggs in a single media bucket because they assumed that the bucket was the best possible choice.  A careful consideration can demonstrate that obvious choices are not necessarily good choices and the best choices are those that take time and effort to foster.  Social media can help, in a big way.

There's Media, then there's media, part 4

 We come now to a discussion of earned media, which we will attack in two parts.  Today were going to look at search results as earned media.

 We've touched on this in earlier discussions.  Not all search results are earned media, especially if you've paid for placement, but they can be considered earned if you've put the effort into making your content accessible through proper SEO practices.  

 One of the main ingredients in proper earned media is effort.  Earned media takes more effort to get than paid or owned media, but is an order of magnitude more valuable than the others because people tend to trust it.  As I've said earlier, the aspects of search that can be paid for (keywords, SEO gaming and outright pay for placement) have lessened the value, but if done right, it can be very beneficial to your communications program.

 For now.

 A few months ago, Google announced that it was changing the way in approached search and while a few people have made pronouncements of doom, few people who have actual responsibility over search have expressed any concern.  Which tells me they are clueless or just ignoring the problem.

 In short, Google has realized that search as they created it has been gamed out of its value.  They are revamping the way they do it to diminish the importance of keywords in search and increasing the importance of what people do with information on the net.  That will include what they consume, what they buy, who they are friends with, who they share with and what they share.  In other words, social media is going to be the key.

 I don't want to get into whether this is good or bad.  It just is.  And combined with the next point in this post, it will take SEO search out of the realm of earned media almost completely. Now, point two.

 We've recently survived what could be the death of a free internet in the US over the PIPA and SOPA legislation that died in Congress last week, in no small part to the widespread online protests.  But even if those kind of laws never come back to haunt us, we still have the virtually unknown ACTA that has snuck in on us internationally.

 In short, ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is currently before the Senate and EU for ratification and is essentially the same as the PIPA and SOPA laws... only we don't get a say in how it is enforced.  It gives international governments the right to shut down websites for the alleged theft of intellectual property.  That means all someone has to do is level a charge of theft against you.  That means trouble for a lot of sites that feature contributed articles.

 I've been involved in developing contributed articles for corporations for many years and realized how deep the problem was when an article I wrote for one corporation showed up in a major electronics trade publication under the byline of an executive of another corporation, who never worked for my client, 10 years later.  Doing an internet search I found the same article three times attributed to three different authors.  PIPA, SOPA and ACTA mean an end to that practice.  Companies will have to create original content for their sites or face having their websites shut down.

 A hallmark of a successful social media strategy is sharable content.  If you fill your sites with plagiarized material you not only face the possibility of being shut down, but you end up with a site that no one will share with others.  Original, interesting and focused material keeps you safe from copyright infringement but starts you on a path to creating real earned media.

 Stay tuned.

 

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.

Dragging Social Media into the 20th Century

Regular readers of this blog know I'm a very big proponentn of the communication benefit of social media, especially it's innate ability to raise the level of communication above that of typical marketing bullshit.  You just can't control the message in social media.

Or so I thought.

In a recent tweet, Tom Foremski, the Silicon Valley Watcher, he dug out a 4-year-old Tech Crunch post from a Stanford engineering puke about how to get videos to go viral.  The author stated, quite frankly, that his methods violate the intent of sites like YouTube and provide several layers of misdirection to get views in seven figures for his clients.  In other words, he lies about the content to force viewers to see things that they really don't care about and wouldn't normally download.

In the past few months I've come into contact with services to guarantee app downloads of 100,000 or more; payment for forwarding tweets (I tried it to see what they were talking about and got disgusted after the first offer); and the ubiquitous SEO services that guarantee more web traffic.

So the basic method for marketing of the 20th Century is being force fed to the communications engine of the 21st. That's not a good thing, especially for companies that are attempting to follow that path.

The primary rule of sociual media is: "Don't @#$% with people."  You will be found out and it will be on display everywhere.  I've heard it said that the best way to ensure ethical behavior is to increase the likelihood you will be caught doing something unethical.  The problem is there is no ethical standardfor social media as yet.  There isn't even a dominant social media industry organization.  And when you have a vacuum like that, bad things happen.  Like lawyers and legislators.

I wrote earlier this week about good legislation that actually helps the industry int he long run, but when people unfamiliar with the basics of an industry get around to writing laws about the industry, lots of bad things can go wrong very quickly.

Don't be a marketing putz.  Learn the value of social media and don't try to cram it into your 20th-Century marketing box.  If you don't know how, hire someone who does and keep out of their way.

What are the chances your launch will succeed? I'll tell you.

I have been a professional communicator for almost 40 years now and have seen a lot of stuff come and go.  One thing I have learned is that there is no sure thing in a communications program, but you can increase your chances of succeeding in an uncertain world.  What is success?  The bottom line is always, increasing the bottom line. Your communications program should either get you more sales or additional funding. Failing that, it should get you more exposure in the available press, beyond just a repeat of your press release off a wire service.  If you get neither of those, then your effort was a failure.

When I go into a company, I can pretty much determine if they can get where they want to go with what they have put into place and what they need to improve their chances.  After more than 20 years in the PR and journalism business I have made some mental calculations that I employ to reach my conclusion. Over for the past few weeks, as I have been getting email after email and phone call after phone call about helping companies with trade show announcements I decided to do a matrix. 

I went back over my records and notes of the past 10 years (which is when everything started to change) and looked at what companies that succeeded have done, and where they have failed, and combined them with my own efforts of success and failure.  I discovered what seems to be a very simple and effective way to provide percentages on what your chances are of a product or company launch succeeding.

So here's what I'm going to do.  I'm going to give you a list of yes/no and multiple choice questions in this post.  Send me an email at lou (at) footwashermedia dot com with your answers, and I will give youthat percentage. No charge.  If you want more detailed analysis, we can talk.  Here are the questions:

Budget

Do you have a marketing budget? (Yes or No)

Is that budget more or less than 2 percent of your finding/revenue (More or Less)

What percentage of that budget is devoted to:

• Trade shows
• Sales
• Third party agencies or consultants
• Public relations
• Social Media
• Advertising
• Collateral
• Salaries

Personnel 

Is the person in charge of marketing...

• C-level?
• VP level?
• Director level?

Is that person also in charge of sales? (Yes or No)

Does that person report to sales (Yes or No)

What education does that person have

• Engineering degree
• Communications degree
• MBA

What is their experience in marketing?

• 10 years or more
• 5-10 years
• 1-5 years
• Less than one year

 Infrastructure

 Is marketing communications handled internally? (Yes or No)

Do they have purchasing authority? (Yes or No)

Do you have a communications agency under contract? (Yes or No) 

Is their work by project or retainer? (Yes or No)

Is their primary activity...

• Development and execution of communications strategy
• Development and execution of tactical plans
• Produce and distribute press releases on corporate direction
• Distribute press releases developed internally
• Press relations

 

Social Media Failure? Don't blame the tool. Blame the workman.

Last week a blog post popped up last week on the Ad Contrarian about the "massive failure" of the Pepsi "Refresh" campaign.  The author, Bob Hoffman of the redoubtable Hoffman/Lewis add agency, was claiming this proved that social media didn't  work.

Let's not point out that the advertising effort Pepsi was putting out before they tried social media wasn't helping them gain market share, which is the reason they went to a social media effort.  Because that would just prove that advertising doesn't work, using Bob's logic. Instead, let's take a page out of Bob's own book.

Bob says: 

1. Advertising is most productive when it is focused on changing behavior, not attitudes.

2. Advertising messages should be created for, and directed at, the heavy-using, high- yield customers in your category.

3. We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand; we get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product.

Now let's point out that all three of those points are also the effort of a good social media campaign.

Finally, let's point out that Pepsi's campaign did none of those things.

The Refresh Project asked Pepsi users to tell Pepsi what their favorite charities were and then vote for those charities in a contest to get some $20 million donated to those causes.  At the end of the project, Pepsi lost 5 percent of their market share.  How did that happen? All the people whose causes did not get picked got pissed off, that's how.  

When you have a product that is not ABSOLUTELY necessary to the everyday life of your customer, then you have to be careful what you say to them.  The Refresh Project did not tell Pepsi anything about the junk food/drink perception of any current or potential customer.  It did nothing to change attitudes of non-customers, nor how to keep current customers. It didn't target major outlets of soda pop distributors.  It was the result of a bunch of clueless people within Pepsi sitting around a table and making stuff up.

And it was primarily an outbound marketing effort... and social media is ALL about the inbound.

So it wasn't a failure of social media as a means to improve market share. It was the failure of Pepsi to use it properly.

Anyone getting this?

 

UK imposes new "quality requirements" for the web

My buddy and business partner in the UK, Peter van der Sluijs, finally launched his own social media presence recently (way to be late to the party, Peter) but is making up for it by posting some really interesting stuff.  Specifically is the most recent post on the new regulations imposed by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority enforcing honesty on the web.  It used to be that the ASA only monitored traditional advertising, but an extension of that power has given it the purview of web content as well, including commercial websites and social media.  As Peter put it:

"Reputable businesses would want their advertising  and PR to be ‘legal, decent, truthful and honest’ anyway, though it is possible to be caught out if you make claims you can’t back up.  Common examples are phrases like ‘the world’s leading…‘ or ‘the top…’. If a complaint is made to the ASA (commonly by a competitor) you could be fined and made to amend the page if you can’t provide a basis for the claim."

The use of empty phrases to boost your corporate ego has long been a bugaboo for real PR professionals, but in the UK, at least, they have legal backing to tell clients, "if you can't prove it, you can't say it."

Think of all the companies that claim they can save customers time, money, design respins, etc. but have no real documentation of the claim.  If they do business in the UK, they will no longer be able to copy and past content from competitors.  They are actually going to have to do some real market research and benchmarks to make their claims true.

Makes me want to live in the UK.

Churches are getting it. Are you?

Just sat in a webminar on the use of social media in churches, hosted by TheCity (a division of Zondervan).  I wasn't as impressed by the product as I was by the representatives of churches talking about how they are using social media to reach their "market."  

Churches have a pretty captive base market in the congregations.  A church of 130 regular attenders knows they are going to reach that 130 people, plus potentially another 6-10 people every week that the attenders interact with.  So that church, weekly, has a reach of 1300 people.  That's without social media.  Factor that in and the number goes to 13,000 very easily.  Put 10 churches like that into play and you are covering a small city.  But not all churches are doing that and for good reason.  It takes focus.  That's what the churches involved in the webinar were. Focused.

Each one had a single person, either paid staff or committed volunteer who's only duty was to monitor, measure and manage their social media program.  As a result, their churches were growing, connected and involved in the larger community.

I run across few companies, much less churches, with that kind of focus on reaching their market.  Social media is always something they know they should do, just as soon as they can get around to it.  Same with public relations, market research. lead development... everything needed to make a company grow.  Those efforts are always poorly funded (if funded at all) afterthoughts to the process of product development.  And when it's really crucial, There is no time to do it right.

Churches, like companies, have faith that what they have is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  If someone would just walk through that door, they know they can prove it.  The problem is, no one can find the door in all the noise of our lives.  Don't you think it's time to start pointing people in the right direction?