Parenting disrupted, reinvented

December 21st, 2011

As many more learned than I have claimed, the Internet weakens top-down authority by scattering formerly protected or hard-to-access knowledge sideways to everyday people. In the decades that followed Gutenberg’s printing of the Bible, a quote among the clergy noted the “the Jewel of the elites is in the hands of the laity.” So it is increasingly today.

JP Rangaswami wrote that “the web makes experts ‘dumb’ by reducing the privileged nature of their expertise.” Jay Rosen noted that the Internet weakens authority by overcoming what he calls “audience atomization.” The result is “The Great Horizontal,” and it’s changing everything. “One of the biggest factors changing our world,” he wrote, “is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number.” And then there’s Rishad Tobaccowala’s great quote from 2004: “We have entered an empowered era in which humans are God, because technology allows them to be godlike.”

Make no mistake. This is and will impact every hierarchical institution in the West, as long as it is allowed to continue, and that’s a pretty big “if.” Those organizations that benefit from the status quo are doing and will do everything in their power to stop it, and it’s going to get very ugly before we arrive at a reinvented culture.

One area of hierarchical authority that’s being almost unnoticeably transformed is parenting. Every generation’s teenagers go through a period when they’re convinced they know more or better than their parent’s generation, but this time, it may actually be true. Armed with knowledge at their fingertips — and the fearless ability to find it — it’s a useless proposition to try and BS any teen today. Reasoning must be backed up by facts, because kids can challenge any justification for behavioral limits aside from the sheer weight of authority. The flip side of this, however, is that they can also see and read about real dangers that only parents could impart in days gone by. Poking your eye out, face freezing, going out with wet hair, running with scissors, the bogeyman, and a hundred other older methods of making children mind are now subject to a simple Google search.

This has vast political ramifications, too — unintended consequences — that will redefine how we make things work in the West. Young people learning to search and follow links also learn the associative nature of everything. Unknowingly, as Peter Lurie wrote in an important 2003 essay — “Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks” — they’re participating in the postmodern practice of deconstruction, and “a community of citizens who think like Jacques Derrida will not be a particularly conservative one.” One of social conservatism’s core principles is respect for authority, but in the world to come, that’s going to have to be earned, not assumed.

Young people eventually take over the world, and it will be interesting to see what today’s current crop will come up with for tomorrow. Absent interference from the status quo, it will most certainly be different than what we have today. It’s unlikely to occur during my lifetime, so I encourage my fellow observers to keep an eye fixed in this direction. There will be tweets and status updates and blog entries and media accounts and books and videos and movies and TV shows on the subject.

Education is also going to have to deal with this easy spread of information and knowledge, and that, too, will demand reinvention.

Who will teach parenting in 2050? Who will write the book for dummies? Perhaps a new institution will arise, but one thing’s for certain: it’s going to be a bumpy ride between here and there.

Posted in Culture | No Comments » |

2012: Finding Our Edges

December 16th, 2011

Here’s the latest in my ongoing essay series, “Local Media in a Postmodern World.”

2012: Finding Our Edges

This is my annual look at trends and a key piece of advice for the coming year. This is a business strategy, not a content strategy, because I don’t think content is going to fix what’s really wrong with mass media.

2012 is a dangerous year for all mass media, because decay in our core competency will again be hidden by record revenues (in some cases) due to what promises to be a huge political year. Despite advances in communications’ methods, politicians fall back on the tried and true during elections, and that means big money for an industry that’s struggling. The money will distract us from the real issues, and before you know it, 2013 will be here. It’s time to do something completely different.

May each and every one of you have a joyous holiday season.

Posted in Essays, Reinventing Local Media | No Comments » |

A Broadcaster’s Christmas Carol

December 15th, 2011

We’re ten days out from Christmas, so it’s time, once again, to pull out my 2004 effort at modernizing the Charles Dickens’ classic. Please enjoy…

A Broadcaster’s Christmas Carol

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » |

And the insanity continues

December 14th, 2011

While not surprised, I’m deeply saddened and angry this morning about two dimensions of the same evil being perpetuated in the name of God in the U.S. Both mask the ugly underbelly of the Evangelical Christian church in America, where good intentions (I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt) produce very unChristlike behavior.

The first is the belief that Mormonism is a cult and that Mitt Romney – simply because he’s a Mormon – isn’t fit to be President of the United States. As a guy who used to be in the thick of this activist and evangelical stuff, I can testify with certainty that this IS the belief of the Christian right. Newt is a good guy and Mitt is an evil guy, because, well, he’s part of that *gestures with elbow* cult. This is a pathetic and self-serving myth that perpetuates the mockery of all people of faith and further alienates the right from the mainstream. Ironically, this is precisely where they want to be, because a persecuted faithful is a literal promise of the Bible, from their perspective. What bothers me most here is that Christian leaders don’t speak out against this, and so it is beamed abroad as representative of Christianity in the U.S.

The second issue that’s really bugging me is the treatment of a bridge-building television program on The Learning Channel – All American Muslim – by these same Evangelical Christians. I’ll spare a rant on the details, because you’re already aware of them, except to say that this Florida Family Association speaks only for a highly ignorant, hateful and bigoted fringe, and yet – due to the same silence from Christian leadership – it, too, is beamed abroad as representative of the whole. By remaining silent, all of us give up the right to criticize Islamic leaders for not speaking out against those who use terror and murder to preach their own form of hatred and bigotry.

To my beloved Muslim family in Jordan, forgive us for not speaking out. This is NOT the stuff of everyday Americans. It is the rantings of lunatics who exploit fear in the name of self-promotion through a media system that feeds on controversy. It is also demonstrative of the impotence of a once-proud religion that is so divided that it allows lame self-promoters an unchallenged platform to preach their own self-righteousness and their hated for the rest of the human race. May God have mercy on their souls.

Posted in Culture, Islam | 13 Comments » |

Big ad money shifting to promotions (and away from media)

December 7th, 2011

Advertisers are now media companies themselves, and as I tried to point out in my last essay, we now find ourselves actually competing with them. The evidence of this is everywhere, but media companies simply ignore it, because the only thing we can see with advertisers is, well, advertising.

For as long as I have known Gordon Borrell, we’ve both been saying that the ad category to watch — due in large part to the disruptive nature of the Internet — is what Borrell calls “Promotions,” the spending of marketing dollars on things other than traditional advertising. So dramatic has the growth been in this category — and what’s projected to come — that the gouge it takes out of advertising budgets won’t be a small bite.

“This was no boating accident; this was a shark!”

Borrell Associates is a research and consulting company that’s driven by data. Once each year, the company produces major trend reports and then tracks those quarterly. Its latest data about the Promotions category is incredibly revealing, especially as it relates to growth.

In an email exchange with Kip Cassino, Borrell’s research guru, he noted that for some time, far more has been spent on promotions than intermediated advertising and that this trend is not only continuing but accelerating.

Most of it is money — five cents off a can of peas at the supermarket, or $2,000 off the next new car you’ll purchase. Discounts, deals, couponing, loyalty programs all share one thing in common: they are vehicles for enhancing sales with the promise of savings.

Promotions have another thing in common as well. Their ROI is immediately apparent. If a store owner puts a coupon on his website or in the daily paper, he knows exactly how much business it brought him — no guessing about “engagement,” or reach and frequency. This appeals to most businesses, especially the smaller ones.

Online promotions have lagged online ad spending, but Cassino says that is changing as well. “With the burgeoning popularity,” he wrote, “of mobile devices — the phones and tablets — online promotions will see massive growth during the coming five years.”

He noted that most businesses don’t separate promotions from advertising, so spending on a website or social media strategy is just “advertising” to them. The ramifications for media companies are stark.

“As overall spending on the intermediated (ad) side of marketing continues to decrease,” he wrote, “these media outlets will either have to learn how to gain revenue from the promotional side or face growing competition for a shrinking revenue pool.”  The result, he added, will resemble “a continuous game of musical chairs.”

Most media companies, Cassino noted, simply ignore the situation. “They note incremental growth on the ad side,” he wrote, “and see no reason to look at where most marketing growth is really occurring.” This is true, he noted, for both legacy and online players. Education, said Cassino, is the first step.

Promotions are not merely an extension of advertising. They have been invisible to many media outlets for decades, because they are primarily tactical tools — the province of the brand or product manager. They are top-line, not bottom line, oriented. Almost any media can find a good spot in promotions, but to do so requires a thorough knowledge of how and when it makes sense, and how it is best applied.

The invisibility is most obvious when it comes to the online world, where, as noted, we’re now competing with the people who have the money. More and more companies are spending promotions dollars on social media, for example, because it really delivers for them. According to Borrell’s latest SOCIAL LA$R™ (Local Ad Spending Report) research, businesses use the following metrics to determine success in this area (in this order):

1. New Customers
2. Additional Fans, Friends, Followers
3. Increased Visits to Business website
4. New email contacts
5. Increased Sales volume
6. Increased Visits to Business Social Network pages
7. Lead Generation
8. Increased Tweet Responses

National advertisers are way out ahead of local businesses, as the below graph shows, which ought to look like a big, fat opportunity to everybody.

When you examine these numbers, it’s pretty clear that businesses — remember, they’re the ones with the money — are now functioning exactly as we function. They are using tools that used to be ours alone, and the energy powering the movement to personal media (which includes businesses) is both abundant and renewable. Our goals are virtually the same as those of business-turned-media-companies, but the problem is we’re still counting on them to support ours. That is not going to last forever.

The opportunity we’ve always had is to use our knowledge and skill to advance this phenomenon and find our new value therein. There’s growth written all over this, and it begins with eyes to see it.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read my latest essay, Social TV and Second Screens: To What End?.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, Newspapers, personal media, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

Social TV and Second Screens: To What End?

December 5th, 2011

Here’s the latest in the ongoing series of essays, “Local Media in a Postmodern World:”

Social TV and Second Screens: To What End?

This one is for broadcasters and broadcast companies. An awkward situation is brewing for broadcasters in the world of social media. As advertisers continue to spend money on themselves that used to go to advertising, they’re discovering the value of so-called “second screen” experiences and, in some cases, tailoring their TV ads to jump start the process. The problem is that the TV industry is doing the same thing, and in so doing, competing with the people who pay the bills. This is doubly problematic, because we already know that this “second screen” activity can and does take place during the very commercial breaks that pay those bills. If you haven’t explored the world of unintended consequences in this area, I urge you to read this essay – all the way through.

Posted in Broadcasting, Reinventing Local Media, Social Media | 5 Comments » |

Clearing away the confusion

November 23rd, 2011

It’s all so confusing to traditional media folks, this thing called “new” news. Permit me the chance to provide a little clarity.

Mathew Ingram (The future of news and why Digital First matters) points to a piece by Seattle Times associate producer and blogger Lauren Rabaino with nine questions:

The big questions I see popping up in newsrooms like my own are:

1. Do we tweet if we don’t have a link to direct users to?
2. Do we send an email alert if we don’t have a link to direct users to?
3. When do we write a story as a blog post vs. a web story?
4. When do we append an update to the top of a post vs. writing a new post?
5. When do we stop writing blog post updates and switch over to the print story?
6. After switching to a print story, do subsequent updates go to the print story or in the blog?
7. How do we update the blog posts to direct users to the newest information in the print story?
8. How do we institutionalize the act of adding hyperlinks within previous coverage to newest coverage?
9. How the hell do we make this all make sense to our users?

To begin with, these questions become easier to answer if we separate our thinking into two streams: continuous news and finished product news. These are two different animals entirely and require different kinds of thinking. If we’re a newspaper, our finished product is the paper and our brand-extension, traditional website. Our continuous news efforts (Web, Twitter, Facebook) are separate, because the nature of the medium suits them better than finished product news. Most importantly, we must not assume that the business model for each is the same. This assumption is the mother of all online mistakes (and confusion) by traditional media companies. I’m not sure we’ve found the right business model for continuous news just yet, but we’re working on it here at AR&D. A traditional media company can do both, but the point is that they must be approached differently.

With that in mind, let’s address these nine questions.

1. Do we tweet if we don’t have a link to direct users to? Yes, of course. Always. We’re in the news business, not the linking back business. Linking back is a finished product strategy. Remember: separate the two. Speed is what matters in the net. Don’t wait until you have a link. That can come later. This is especially important during breaking news events.
2. Do we send an email alert if we don’t have a link to direct users to? Not unless it’s the second coming, because you can provide a link to your Twitter or Facebook stream. Link to continuous news.
3. When do we write a story as a blog post vs. a web story? The question assumes it’s either/or. The answer is both, and to the extent that blogs are a part of your continuous news strategy, then the blog would come first.
4. When do we append an update to the top of a post vs. writing a new post? It’s always, always, always a new post. Google news doesn’t “see” updates, but it sees new posts and ranks you accordingly. Software can handle “full coverage” — a link to all the pieces relating to a topic — so don’t worry about updating. Save the finished work for your finished product(s).
5. When do we stop writing blog post updates and switch over to the print story? Watch traffic to your efforts during the day, and your own users will tip you as to when this “should” occur. Again, I don’t view this as either/or, because it all depends on the situation. The time for finished product online stuff increasingly appears to be late evening (see the chart from comScore) while the continuous news audience is mostly a daytime phenomenon.
6. After switching to a print story, do subsequent updates go to the print story or in the blog? Again, the answer is easy if you view these as two separate services. This is especially important when the story originated in the continuous news service, so the correct answer is both.
7. How do we update the blog posts to direct users to the newest information in the print story? You don’t, as long as you view the services as separate with separate audiences.
8. How do we institutionalize the act of adding hyperlinks within previous coverage to newest coverage? This kind of question flows from the earlier traditions of “guiding” readers/viewers (because they’re too stupid to guide themselves). I’d argue that this is unnecessary, as long as you separate continuous from finished product. Where it is necessary, let software do it for you.
9. How the hell do we make this all make sense to our users? Again, I think they make sense of it easier than you think, and the question itself is actually pretty insulting. Regardless, clients of ours who practice continuous news AND finished product news find that the most important thing to emphasize is a commitment to “if it’s happening now, we’ll bring it to you.” The rest is intuitive or requires a very short learning curve.

Just remember that these are two separate forms of serving the community. Continuous news precedes finished product news, because it is actually the news-gathering process made public.

Posted in Continuous News, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

Stop complaining and do your job!

November 22nd, 2011

I was surprised in two ways when I read bureau reporter Gary Sinderson’s editorial “Why The Penn State Scandal Stayed Secret” in TVNewsCheck this morning. Surprise number one was that Mr. Sinderson’s employer, Cox Media Group, would permit this, and the second surprise was the cavalier manner in which he excused not doing his job.

In a nutshell, the piece is defensive rubbish about how he got scooped by a Harrisburg newspaper writer (Sara Ganim) and how tough it is to work as a TV guy in a restricted environment such as Penn State University. The key graph for me comes as Mr. Sinderson is congratulating Ms. Ganim while at the same time acknowledging that he had basically the same information.

We compared notes on the Sandusky issue. She did fine work and deserves the boatload of awards that will probably be coming her way. We both knew the truth of the story was in Harrisburg with the grand jury. The Patriot-News, to its credit, gave her the time necessary to work on the story.

Why couldn’t I report it? I didn’t have the time to get the needed verification to move the story ahead or to convince my bosses it’s not a rumor, but a real story. It’s just the nature of my particular job. I’m a one-man band, expected to crank out several stories a day. I may get a day or two to work on a large story, but not the time afforded to Ganim.

Let me say, as a veteran news manager in “the biz” and now as an observer of media trends that this is nonsense designed to shift blame to managers who either didn’t believe him or wouldn’t give him the time and resources he felt he needed. It also taps into the misleading and empty jargon from certain industry types who (perhaps even sincerely) believe that more resources is the solution to the problems of TV news. It’s the greedy corporations or the demanding producers who just don’t understand what it’s like out here. Poor me.

I’ve personally worked with “one-man-band” bureau chiefs who’ve worked tirelessly to uncover deep and provocative misdeeds while at the same time maintaining the daily needs of the content machines. These people never complained. Never. They felt it was a privilege to hold such a position, and they worked their butts off to prove it. In a bureau where you’re the Lone Ranger, you’re also the king. You are the master of your own reputation, more so than in any other job within the TV news industry. On behalf of all of those hard-working people everywhere, I deeply resent Mr. Sinderson’s suggestion that he was somehow blocked from this story by his institution or the difficulty of finding people to go “on the record” with him on such a story.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in the news business in Milwaukee in the 70s. We had a major who refused to talk to the press and a police chief with dictatorial powers who designated the chief of detectives as the only person who could speak with the media. Being seen speaking with a reporter, whether on duty or off, was grounds for dismissal. It was impossible to do our jobs without determination (never take “no” for an answer) and ingenuity, of which we had bundles. It all depends on how badly you want it.

That was then, and this is now, but the principle is the same. Cox might want to look into its resources in State College but not to “give more time” to what it already has in place.

Posted in Broadcasting, Journalism | No Comments » |

Marketing in the Net

November 17th, 2011

One of the things I love about the Internet is the access it provides to utterly transparent, unvarnished and fully-rationalized crap. If you have a point-of-view — and who doesn’t? — then you can find both validation and nullification on the same good old Web. Sometimes, the validation is complete, while other times it’s very subtle and partial. Same with opposing viewpoints, but the beauty here is that when it’s complete nonsense, it’s an amazing and hilarious thing to behold.

One human being’s obvious truth is another’s crap, I guess.

Much has been written here over the years, for example, on the topic of authenticity. Among other things, it’s one of the new values of journalism. People want to hear from those directly involved in the story or to be taken as close as possible to the scene/source, so they can judge for themselves. Authenticity is also smart for 21st Century businesses, because in the network, it’s much more about what you do than what you say. That’s because the other participants in the market conversation — the people formerly known as the consumers — not only see through BS, but they’re capable of calling it out in such a way that others can see it. You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into, as Steven Covey says.

Which brings me to Lisa Barone, Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer of SEO consulting firm Outspoken Media. I don’t know Ms. Barone, and I can’t even remember how I found her piece at Blogworld. She’s a marketer, and the article is called Why Authenticity Is A Lie (Bad) Marketers Tell.

…What your customers want is the best version of you. The version of you that allows them to see themselves, where they want to be, and which helps them achieve their goals.

That’s what marketing is — Using yourself to show people their desired outcome. Even if that outcome is just your customer with a finally-working dishwasher.

As a marketer, you provide that experience by giving up the hokey authenticity act and creating a characterized version of yourself that exudes who your audience wants to be.

This is utterly astonishing to me. It’s trickery and manipulation. “What your customers want is the best version of you.” Huh? And if that best “version” is false, that’s okay — even desired — by customers, because a “characterized version” is better than the “hokey authenticity act.” Really? How does Ms. Barone know what customers want? Most marketers know a lot about what “works” for them but little about what people really want. This is gimmickry, all of it, and it’s a lame relic of the mass marketing fed industrial age.

What I love most about this is the authoritative nature of its advice. Marketing is defined as “using yourself to show people their desired outcome.” Right. Show white teeth instead of tooth decay. I get that. But it’s as if she’s quoting scripture in her effort to belittle authenticity. Hell, maybe what she’s talking about needs belittling, because if the best you can offer is this “authentic self” meme, I think you’ve missed the point on authenticity. We’re hyperconnected, in the network today. There is no (zero, zip, nada) demand here for messages that “show the desired outcome.” What people want is the truth, not sales pitches.

The advertising industry must be very, very careful about this kind of stuff, because anything that smacks of manipulation will have automatic and drastic consequences in the network. What’s proposed here is a very slippy slope, that the wearing of masks is acceptable in a horizontal world. I don’t object to picking and choosing the best character traits, if that’s a choice, but the line must be drawn at pretending, and I’m not convinced that this is something companies can resist when it comes to profit.

This is not the old world where you can say one thing and do another, because the barriers to entry into the communications world are so low. Anybody can challenge anything, and as Umair Haque so brilliantly notes, in the 21st Century, it’s all about the product you produce, not what you say about that product.

Authenticity is the most misunderstood value of new media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that marketers have mistaken it for a hokey gimmick that makes their sophisticated gimmickry look good. Authenticity is hard for businesses who’ve spent lifetimes perpetuating “the best version of you,” because the unintended consquence is you end up believing your own crap. Hyperconnectivity exposes this, and the only option is to be real.

Insofar as sports is an analogue of war, marketing draws its language from the arenas, stadiums and fields of the world. Ries and Trout’s popular and influential books, Positioning, The Battle For Your Mind and Marketing Warfare suggest that sellers of anything are engaged in a real war with customers and potential customers. Likewise, John Man’s popular book The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan puts business leaders in the shoes of a barbarian conducting war on his neighbors. At stake in this analogue is money, big money gained through market share. It’s all there in black and white: kill your competition, enslave those you conquer, and live on with the spoils of victory. It’s the stuff of pride for anyone with an MBA.

There’s just one small problem that the world of Mad Men overlooked: unlike toy soldiers (or real ones) on a battlefield where one is defending the land and the other is trying to take it, this battlefield doesn’t belong to either, and the owner of the playing field today has the power to say, “Get lost!” When this happens, marketers are trained to ignore the signals, because they feel they have an inherent right — an entitlement, if you will — to play where they don’t belong.

This illusion is what’s being dismantled by technology, because, when given the choice of shutting down the battlefield, guess what? We do it with vigor.

It used to be that, if you had enough money, you could tilt the scales of believability in your favor. That was the gift of mass marketing, and it made a whole bunch of people rich. In today’s increasingly meritocratic culture, performance and product are what count, and this has only begun. “Marketing” is a dirty word in the network.

This is why authenticity is neither hokey nor a gimmick; it’s the narrow path to success in the 21st Century.

Posted in Advertising, Networked World | No Comments » |

Driving traffic (that doesn’t want the ride)

November 14th, 2011

The new Pew study revealing that media companies use Twitter almost exclusively for spreading links to their own content comes as no surprise.

…mainstream news organizations primarily use Twitter to move information and push content to readers. For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.

Back when Twitter first came along, I predicted that media companies would immediately become big users, because they could easily see it’s one-to-many functionality. It’s what we know and what we practice. The strategy became:

1. Get a lot of followers
2. Feed them breaking news and weather
3. Feed them promotional content
4. Feed them stories, many stories
5. Put a link in everything

Twitter is a terrific notification system, so it’s hard to blame media companies for this practice, but it points to a serious weakness that media has today: its mission can’t help but come across as hypocritical. What appears to be one of disseminating information and being society’s watchdog is actually a commercial mission to make money. There’s nothing inherently evil about that, but think about it. If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web. When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else.

Using Twitter this way is easy, but it’s also lazy and sells short a tool for newsgathering and news dissemination. When I talk to clients about Twitter, the stumbling block question is always “How many people do YOU follow?” The answer is simple — none or very few. This means that Twitter is to them, in fact, nothing more than a notification system.

However, some individual employees of news organizations use Twitter in a myriad of ways, including to participate in its unique discussions. These employees seem aware of the new reality that their personal brands are everything in the world that’s ahead, so they participate in social media. These smart people may include links to their work as well, but that isn’t necessarily the sole purpose of their accounts. It gets very tricky for some media companies when they try to control the personal accounts of employees, because they cling to the notification system paradigm and the ethical (and profitable) mechanism of an opinion-less stage.

Twitter is also very useful on mobile device, so the practice of only spreading links — that then lead to a fully-packed website and not an HTML5 landing page — is ultimately self-defeating. This is a different playing field with different rules, and we risk our own relevancy by insisting that it’s best used to drive traffic to our advertiser-fed websites.

And nobody ever asked to be driven to such a place in the first place.

Posted in Technology, Twitter, Unbundled Media, Uncategorized | 3 Comments » |