Nugatory News

Pottingers, Wikipedia, & WikiLies

2011-12-16T08:10:00.000-08:00

Last week, The UK newspaper The Independent revealedthat Bell Pottinger, a leading PR agency, had engaged in the covertmanipulation of Wikipedia entries related to some of its clients. Usingmultiple, anonymous accounts, staff at the agency had eradicated negativeinformation, inflated positive references, and altered the facts of numerousWikipedia entries. It also became apparent that agency executives routinelypitched to clients and prospects their ability to alter Wikipedia entries aspart of their services.

I propose that henceforth we name an entry in Wikipedia that has been willfully manipulated a "Pottinger" in their honor. I challenge readers to create the "Pottinger" Wikipedia entry.

Your immediate reaction to this story might reasonably bethis – how stupid can you get??? My reaction was a little different: I’m amarketing professional with over 15 years’ experience running PR programs forbig organizations, and I must confess to having altered Wikipedia entries too.

A few years back I started a new job at a well knowtechnology company, and on my second day got a call from the CMO: Could I cometo his office immediately. When I got there he showed me the Wikipedia entryfor a senior executive. I was shocked. The entry had been altered by severalanonymous people and contained openly slanderous statements. Some of thechanges seemed downright bizarre. I had a Wikipedia account (I’d created anumber of entries years ago), and I worked to get the changes removed anddetails corrected. It was an uphill struggle because I didn’t disguise who Iwas, but eventually things were made right (then right again, as the entrycontinued to be changed). We made no attempt to catch the perpetrators – that wastoo complex and time-consuming.

Of course, unlike Bell Pottinger, my actions didn’t breachany of Wikipedia’s guidelines (that I know about) or hide any truths – in fact,the reverse. And I’m not alone: I know of many instances where companyemployees or agency staff altered entries related to their employer or client,almost all correcting wrongs, adding missing information, or providing context.Wikipedia is a crowdsourced entity, open to anyone; laudably democratic, butripe for abuse, neglect or simple error. Fixing things can feel unnecessarilyarduous and often frustrating.

Needless to say, none of this excuses the stupidity of BellPottinger. They’re dolts, with a historyof ethical issues.

However, you can’t argue BP is a unique case, or evenout-of-the-ordinary. Far from it.There’s a long history of Wikipedia abuse. WikiScanner,Wikipedia Review and others havecatalogued many examples over the years, and others have pointed to theinherent problem with a trust-based, crowdsourcing model for gatheringinformation. Indeed, Wikipedia deletesover a thousand entries every day.

In general, crowdsourcing anything should invite scrutinyand skepticism. We certainly shouldn’t assume that Wikipedia is the bastion ofunalienable truth. And unfortunately, nor should we think of Bell Pottinger asan anomaly – expect continued revelations of WikiLies as Wikipedia, already thesixth most visited websiteworldwide, gains in significance.

Fortune 500 Lag in Social Media Adoption, To Their Great Cost

2011-12-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

At the end of last month McKinseypublished the results of their fifth annual survey on the waysorganizations use social technologies.

For the most part, the results are a snooze: The adoption ofsocial media tools, from Twitter to Quora, is steadily rising; measurablebenefits are steadily if slowly increasing; and the sophistication in the wayorganizations use social media has seen significant gains. All good, althoughhardly ground-breaking news.

But wait. The McKinsey people aren’t anything if notthorough, so they also tried to show a correlation between adoption of socialmedia and self-reported organizational performance (that is, market sharegains, operating margin compared to competition, and being first in industrymarket share). To my surprise, on the latter measure – showing a link between marketshare leadership and adopting social tools – the correlations are mostly negative. This suggests that theadoption of social media is adverselyassociated with being a market leader, a counter-intuitive and strangeresult. If it were so, then the good people at McKinsey should be telling thetitans of industry to flee Facebook, ban blogging, and terminate Twitterpost-haste.

But wait. The researchers’ explanation of this is that “whilemarket leaders may use social media technologies within the organization, theymight be less inclined than market challengers to push for a full range ofbenefits [and use social media externally].” So, according to McKinsey, theysuspect that market leaders as a group are actually under-utilizing social media.

This sounds plausible. Indeed, very detailedresearch by UMASS Dartmouth shows that for blogs, about 23 percent of theFortune 500 (large, market-share leaders) have corporate blogs, compared towell over 50% if the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing companies compiledby Inc. magazine. There are similar results for corporate adoption of Facebookand Twitter – the Fortune 500 lag the rest of industry, especially thefastest-growing companies.

Put these two pieces of research together and we have strongdata suggesting that large, market-share leaders – think companies like WalMart, Exxon-Mobil,Proctor and Gamble, Hewlett Packard, Boeing and Dow Chemical – are collectively failing toextract value from the social media revolution. These findings play into thestereotype of the lumbering, bureaucratic multinational that often enjoy amarket-share lead but fail to take first-mover advantage of new innovations.

And the research clearly shows that the price of lateadoption of social media is very high indeed.

Latest Update: A Definitive List of Social Media Measurment and Monitoring Tools

2011-12-05T06:59:00.001-08:00

Way back in April 2010 I compiled what I boldly claimed was a definitive list of social media measurement and monitoring tools. Since then, I've updated the list a couple of times and critically reevaluated my 'definitive' claim: Most likely, I've missed a lot of solutions and have certainly struggled to keep pace with the constant changes in the evolving social media measurement market.

My latest update saw numerous changes, reflecting increasing competitive pressures in a very cluttered marketplace. A half-dozen companies have disappeared completely, and several others have moved on to provide different solutions only tangentially related to social media metrics. There's also been a small number of acquisitions, most notably Salesforce.com buying the market-leader Radian6 in March this year. The net result is that the total number of solutions has fallen, although the quality of the survivors is very high.

If you're looking to buy a social media measurement solution there's a few important takeaways from all these changes:

It's a Buyers Market
Despite the predicted consolidation, there's still an abundance of companies supplying solutions. Companies are eager to get your business and you should be able to cut a deal for the right solution.
Buyer Beware!
Expect the consolidation to accelerate over the coming year. Be cautious about companies that aren't able to demonstrate good market traction, supply a full list of references, or just seem too desperate; they may well be gone in a year or two.
Understand Your Requirements
There's a broad spectrum of solutions out there, and every day new features are being added. Make sure you have a strong understanding of what you need to do and how a tool will help you do it. Take a look at the guides from many industry analysts (mine is here).
Recognize that the Market is Still Maturing
There is no perfect solution out there. Sourcing data, avoiding spam, providing adequate filtering, integration to marketing automation systems, providing easy-to-configure dashboards and reporting, alerting for your customer services folks... these are just a handful of important issues that are still being worked out.
The Giants are Coming
Finally, we 're still waiting for the obvious market giants... Google, Microsoft, maybe Facebook... to really enter this market. There's been ongoing rumors that Google was going to release a full-blown media monitoring solution; if they ever do, it could upturn the market and put an end to many of the companies I list. Stay tuned...

Any Ideas What Public Relations Is?

2011-11-22T07:59:00.001-08:00

When you’re in the business of managing the image of othersit’s a little embarrassing to acknowledge you’re suffering from an identitycrisis.

This week, the good people at the Public Relations Societyof America (PRSA) beganan effort to better define what “public relations” is. This isn’t theirfirst attempt: Two previous tries at a definition, in 2003 and 2007, ended infailure.

A perfectly reasonable question to ask is ‘why doesn't a workingdefinition for public relations already exist?’ After all, the modern discipline of public relations was pioneered atthe turn of the last century by Edward Bernays, Ivy Lee and others; the PRSAitself was formed in 1935. Isn’t it fairly obvious what PRis about? And you don’t see physicists, lawyers, or dog trainers agonizing overwhat their chosen profession is all about, so why the debate with PR?

One answer is that PRand Corporate Communications are enduring monumental change. The economiccollapse of conventional journalism has permanently altered the way news iscreated and shared. Opinions are formed and reputations altered through alabyrinth of social connections. Managing a public image has become more complicated,and the role of a PR pro less clear.

Another, less palatable reason is that most things in theworld of marketing and communications are badly defined. If we were to take Voltaireat his word – “if you wish to converse with me, define your terms” – then adiscussion with marketing pros would be very abbreviated indeed. As aprofession, we bandy about overloaded terms like “brand”, “image”, and even “marketing”itself with only a fuzzy and shifting sense of what we mean.

So the PRSA, in an act of either abdication or inclusion, depending on yourperspective, has asked forcrowd-sourced inputs on what a definition should be. In my view, they’re askingthe wrong question.We know full-well what PR is. The issue is how to make PR effective.

Bernays, the grandchild of Sigmund Freud, was very blunt inhis assessment of what PR is about and itsunderlying intent, with his notion of “engineered consent” being rooted in ideasborrowed from propaganda. Ivy Lee was gentler:

"In brief, our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalfof business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and public…promptand accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interestto the public to know about."

Modern PR hovers uneasily between the two truths offered byBernays and Lee. Not much has changed at this level. The PRSA is thoroughly confused;we don’t need a new definition of what PR is, but rather we need to understandhow to make PR more effective in a new communications landscape. The goals of PRare the same; the mechanisms for reaching those goals are changing and uncertain. The PRSA’senergies would be better spent on addressing these real challenges.

Marketing by the Numbers

2011-11-17T08:53:00.001-08:00

One of the side-effects of our always online existence isthat everything has become visible and measurable. As we all rummage around inthe virtual world, we leave behind a trail of digital detritus that others canfind, accumulate and sequence: What we do, where we go, who we are and what wethink can all be discovered and refactored with unnerving ease. This has raisedmany alarms about privacy and security, but has also introduced opportunitiesfor marketing professionals.

I’d argue that the new world of digital marketing is upendingthe whole marketing profession.

Marketing used to be a largely subjective,qualitative, artful enterprise. For sure, we could do research, conductelaborate focus groups, and painstakingly gather data to inform decisions anddiscover the impact of our marketing activities, but all this was arduous andoften ad-hoc. We’ve moved from an environment of information sparcity toinformation overload. Instead of ‘mining’ for data, we’re dealing with theavalanche.

Today, data-driven marketing is becoming the norm. Expectationsof what marketing can achieve are changing. Most important, there’s a new levelof expected accountability.

Some years back I got a Ph.D. and as a result accumulatedmore knowledge about statistics and research methods that I thought washealthy, or useful. Turns out, my old stats texts are the books I’m referringto most. I’ve been interviewing for a new job and a common ground forquestioning is “how do you measure the effectiveness of what you do?” I’ve evenseen job descriptions that single out the ability to conduct A/B and multivariateanalysis of campaign data. Being able to read data – and to conduct marketingfrom a data-driven perspective – is a vital skill today.

Of course, data isn’t wisdom, as Wharton ProfessorGeorge Day has pointed out. According to him, the amount of data a companyfaces is doubling every 18 months, while our ability to sift and assimilate thedata is remaining pretty much static. Day and his colleagues advocate ‘adaptivemarketing experimentation’, an approach to marketing that fosters data-drivendecision-making by continually testing variations on different solutions – a fail-fast,discover-quickly methodology. Their views are informed by a recentIBM research report created from interviews with over 1,700 CMOs. Theleading issues for these CMOs: data overload, social media, channelproliferation and shifting demographics.

Professor Day’srecent article is a great read. And after you’ve finished, see if you canfind those old statistics textbooks in the attic.

Klout, Qwikster, and Mob Marketing

2011-11-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Klout, a tool that attempts to measure anindividual’s online social influence. As with all scales that try to quantifyindividual prowess – think IQ to SAT – there’s a healthy debate about the basicvalidity of what Klout purports to do: After all, what exactly is “influence”?

I’d hazard a guess that whether you’re a fan or a foe ofKlout has a lot to do with how well you score on their 100-point scale, thoughI may be being overly cynical. But whatever you’re opinion of Klout Ithink we can agree that finding some way of articulating relative influence is abig marketing problem we need to solve. We desperately need a way to sort the wheatfrom the chaff, because in our noisy online world there’s an awful lot ofchaff.

Personally, I don't see Klout as a permanent fixture of the social media landscape. Klout thinks it is selling a solution when they really only have a feature: Most social media monitoring tools of any worth have in them a way of determining salience, aka influence. Most search engines will get there soon too. This is where this "feature" belongs, in a context that has some value.

But there’s another problem, neatly exemplified by thewell-publicized and stock-shrinking antics at Netflix. To recap, after doing agreat deal of research with users, Netflix decided to split the company’sidentity in two, and launched Qwikster so they can focus on their rapidly growingsteaming media business. About the same time they also changed their feestructure. Within days the online hordes were screaming foul, droves left theservice, and as of today thestock price is down about 70 percent from its high this year. A quasi- apology was made.

There are many complex financial and business issues at play here, and there's no question that Netflix management failed on many levels. There's also a consensus that, from a strictly business standpoint, Netflix was making the right decisions. All that aside, my questionis this: Given that Netflix did extensive research and consulted with theircommunity of users before they madeany changes, why was the subsequent reaction so profoundly negative?

One answer gets at the root of the real problem with Klout,which measures an individual’sinfluence. Often, this is the wrong unit of analysis. I’d argue that Netflix,like many brands before it, fell victim to a mob – a highly vocal minority thatindividually may have no clout at all, but collectively exert enormousinfluence. Worse, this vocal and passionate minority may not even represent thefeelings of the silent majority of users, but they exert a disproportionatecontrol.

Mass Marketing is passé. Welcome to Mob Marketing.

The communities that care about a particular brand ororganization are diverse – they’ve always been so. What’s changed is the levelingeffect of our online world: Everyone has equal voice, which means that amid allthe babble it’s very hard to discern whomatters individually and collectively. And it’s almost impossible toguard against a loose coalition of marginal naysayers once they’re mobilized.

What to do? Here's some suggestions:

First, make sure you are engaged with all constituents ofyour brand. Listen widely, respond selectively. Make sure that your communitiesfeel appreciated. This is the responsibility of everyone in your organization.
Remember that all change attracts enemies. No matterwhat you do, it’s likely someone will take offense. Remain in control and have the courage of your convictions. Recognizethat, despite what believers in crowd sourcing may say, giving over decision-makingcontrol to an unfiltered community may be unwise. Consult, inform and listen.
Make sure you understand what the valuable – and oftensilent – majority want and do everything you can to get them involved. Activatingyour core base is critical: The weight of their collective opinion is the bestdefense against a marginal mob. Find ways to amplify their views and championyour brand.
Finally, learn to recognize the marginalfanatics. Don’t overly invest in trying to change their hardened views – your energiesare better spend cultivating and engaging your loyalists, and attracting newfans and supporters.

Brand America

2011-10-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

In these fractious and partisan times it’s interesting how U.S. politicians of all stripes are eager to distance themselves from their chosen profession. Democrats and Republicans alike, no matter their actual tenure, are all suddenly Washington “outsiders.” Many have also developed a newly found appreciation for how businesses are run, and think government could learn a trick or two from corporate America. We don’t need a President, they seem to be saying, we need a CEO.

Government-as-business is an interesting concept, which got me thinking: Why not elect an American CMO, a kind of Marketer-in-Chief?

The question isn’t as facetious as it might seem. Lots of countries actually do elect or appoint someone – often a “president” with limited legislative clout – to represent their country without having any overt political baggage. Truth is, in Europe that’s what royalty’s for.

America desperately needs a Marketer-in-Chief. America the Brand isn’t so brave anymore. You don’t need to conduct an audit to see the signs of dwindling brand loyalty and a confused brand identity. A good CMO would have read the signals long ago: The latest Rasmussen Poll shows that only 16 percent of likely voters think their country is “heading in the right direction,” while only 35 percent think America’s best days are to come. This is Quickster bad. The truth is, behind all the Tea Party bluster and Take Wall Street theatrics, there’s a shared disquiet that the US has lost its way and compromised on some ideals.

Overseas, Brand America is being bashed as bad as tainted Tylenol or New Coke. A couple of foreign wars certainly don’t help, and a worldwide financial pandemic is also souring the mood. Interestingly, Obama’s reputation abroad remains strong – his personal brand is relatively unscathed.

But Brand America has dealt with crisis before and come through, so, what’s the problem now? I blame the politicians. As some famous American once said, “a house divided cannot stand,” and Brand America has some deep-sea-trench divisions on strategy and values. No self-respecting CMO would stand for this. It used to be that the country coalesced around a universally accepted brand promise: Liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness, etc. This was considered enough. Now, while we might agree on the brand promise, we dogmatically disagree on how to deliver on that promise. Even the role of government is being questioned. Meanwhile, as our fearless political leaders seem to encourage polarization, we flounder dealing with looming competitive threats from Brand China and the rest.

As any CMO knows, brand equity is a fragile commodity, hard to earn and too easily lost. However, in the case of Brand America, I think the gloomy prognosis is overstated.

A couple of months ago I was sworn-in as a US citizen, along with 260 others from over 30 different countries. It was a moving and sobering experience – I sat next to a Somali woman and a Nigerian man, both with harrowing stories of lost relatives and exile. An Indian man told me about the Pharma start-up he was creating – in the US. That same week, I listened to American scientists from the Kepler project describe discovering the first planets from other solar systems. And this year U.S. citizens netted seven Nobel prizes. On the global stage, America is still a place of invention and promise. The old cliché is true: American is a land of opportunity.

All we need is a Marketer-in-Chief to sell it better.

Is social media saturating – and what are the implications for marketing?

2011-10-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

According to the latest data from Nielsen Researchand ExperianSimmons, the adoption of social media in the US has skyrocketed to 80percent of those with online access, or over 40 percent of the overallpopulation. Putting this in perspective, among those 35-and-younger, theadoption of social media is approaching that of UScar ownership. Safe to say, it is clearly foolish to think of social mediaas something new or novel – it is an everyday part of most people’s lives.

Collectively, Americans now spend almost a billion hours amonth exchanging news, information and gossip at social media sites. Last Ichecked there are still only 24 hours in a day: As you look at these stats,especially for the college-age set, the use of social media starts to look like borderline addiction.For many teens and tweens being connected online is an umbilical necessity forsustaining life. You wonder if Facebook and the rest shouldn’t carry warninglabels, like cigarettes: Using Social Media Is Not A Substitute For Food, SleepOr Reality.

More seriously, as social media adoption becomes mainstream,what are the consequences for marketing?

First, marketing pros should understand that media useoverall is usually a zero-sum game: If we’re all spending more time online withsocial media, it usually means we’re doing less of some other media activity.There’s evidence to support this view, with online activities eating away ateverything from watching television to reading. Second, we should anticipatethat the use of social media is saturating. The amount of time we spend onsocial media is cresting, especially among those 35-and-younger.

This is a familiar scenario for marketing folks who havelived through other communications and marketing revolutions. I can rememberwhen email marketing was a novelty, with response rates for well-targetedcampaigns routinely reachig 3-5 percent (I’ve seen similarly impressive stats forthe novelty-of-the-moment, QR codes). As social media saturates we shouldexpect it to become harder and harder to create and sustain relationshipsbetween prospects and our brands. Saturation equates to clutter, attentionswane, and people become weary and guarded.

We should also remember that social media got that name fora reason – it’s a tool for staying in touch with friends and family, notprimarily for finding your company, not matter how lovely it may be. Understandthat social media is only one part of an integrated marketing program. Have realistic expectations - and make sure you communicate these to your management teams. As you work with social media, be trueto yourself and your brand. Thefundamentals of good marketing have not been re-invented: Be engaging, becredible, be trustworthy, and be unique.

Sales and Marketing May be Better Aligned Than We Think

2011-09-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

When I was asked by Bob Johnson at IDG to be on a SMEI panelto discuss the divide between sales and marketing, I had a strong feelingof déjà vu: I can remember ten years ago being invited on another panel todebate the exact same issue. That event had been in London, hence there was anopen bar before the panel convened; I recall the discussion getting very heatedindeed.

As I prepared for the SMEI panel I began to wonder if themarketing/sales feud had improved much in the intervening decade, so decided topull together a short survey to find out. Using social media I got just under 100responses from an assortment of friends, followers and colleagues – certainly not a representative sample, butdiverse nonetheless.

Q: Over the last 5 years, do you think the relationshipbetween sales and marketing has:

Grown Worse:                                                 24%
Stayed about the same:                                   33%
Grown Better:                                                 43%

The results surprised me; I’d guessed that as we endure a drawn-outrecession, relations between sales and marketing would have become more frayed.I was wrong, and by a large majority the audience at the SMEI event alsobelieved sales and marketing were getting along much better these days.

I then asked was might be the root cause of any conflict:

Q: The main cause of conflict and disagreement betweenmarketing and sales is (pick one):

Lack on alignment on goals and objectives:        43%
Resource allocation:                                          11%
The quantity and quality of leads:                       23%
No clear demarcation of responsibility:                4%
Lack of processes to coordinate activities:         12%
Lack of professional respect:                               8%

By a wide margin, most respondents think that conflict iscaused by a lack of alignment around goals and objectives. This view was echoedby my fellow panelists, Ann MarieBeasley from CA and MarkBlessing at Bright Computing.

I discussed how the most common model used for engineeringalignment across sales and marketing – the ubiquitous marketing funnel – may belong overdue for an overhaul. Whatever model you use, successful alignment across the twoorganizations starts with a candid discussion on joint KPIs and metrics.Measured accountability, agreed and shared, is the root to success.

Marketing and Sales: Closing the Great Divide

2011-08-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to have been invited to speak at the Sales and Marketing Executives International event here in Boston on September 14th. The subject is a perennial favorite -- Marketing and Sales: Closing the Great Divide.

I'm interested in your views - over the last five years has the relationship between sales and marketing improved, grown worse, or stayed about the same? What causes friction? Leave me a comment -- or better yet, take 30 seconds to complete this three-question survey.

I'll share results of the survey in a later post. Thanks!

The Science of Marketing?

2011-08-23T19:50:00.000-07:00

Reading recent headlines and watching the gyrations of the stock market it’s easy to see why economics earned the epithet “the dismal science.” But is marketing any better? Indeed, is there any science to marketing at all?

Usually not.

Take social media as an example. Normally, marketing treats social media data in the same way that air traffic controllers treat blips on a radar screen – as signals that require careful help in landing, or emergencies demanding evasion on interception. The only difference is we marketeers attempt to land customers and intercept naysayers, rather than planes. Don’t get me wrong – marketing needs radar – but this hardly qualifies as science.

Data by itself isn’t science: Marketing pros usually have an excess of the former and very little of the latter. A scientific approach would require proposing a hypothesis to explain observations or ideas, then devising an experiment to test the hypothesis. It requires the rigorous definition of terms and ways of quantifying things. It demands objectivity.

Tom Webster gets at this distinction is his recent blog post, and argues that we’ll always need a mix of qualitative and quantitative information. It’s tempting to agree with Seth Godin and others and say marketing is both art and science, but this feels like a cope-out to me.

What we can say is that marketing is getting much more quantitative. This is a good thing. I can remember from my teaching days that marketing undergrads hated even the most rudimentary classes on quantitative analysis and statistics – today, they’d be well-advised to take these courses very seriously indeed. Science or not, the future of marketing will clearly move toward a more disciplined and measured approach. But the real gains will be with those organizations that go the next step, and apply more scientific rigor to their marketing investments.

Brand Potter: What Harry Can Teach us about Marketing

2011-07-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

This month, at midnight, I took my daughter and a gaggle of her friends to the opening night of the final film in the Harry Potter franchise. Dressed as favorite characters – Luna, Bellatrix, McGonagall and Hermione – we arrived an hour before the show to find the movie theatre packed and transformed to a mini-Hogwarts. “Wingardiam Leviosa!” exclaimed our would-be Luna to the ticket guy, to which he responded brightly “Diffindo!” as he ripped the tickets. It was another world. And when we left the theater at around 3am it felt more like mid-afternoon on a busy weekend – the parking lot was packed and another crowd of Dumbledores, Snapes, Rons and Ginnys were piling in for the next show.

JK Rowling published her first book in 1997: Seven novels, 4,000 pages and eight movies later, Harry has become a pop-culture phenomenon unparalleled in modern times. A whole generation of kids – including my daughter and most of her friends and cousins, not to say her parents – have grown enthralled by a fully-realized world of magic. Commercially, the Potter phenomenon has no equal: Over 400 million books sold in every language imaginable, a worldwide movie gross over $7 billion, and even a theme park in Florida. How on earth did this tale of a boy wizard going to school become so successful?

There is no question that Rowling’s vision – and her near-flawless execution in her books – was the core of the success. She created wonderful characters, embellished her plot with great imaginative touches, and had a story in her mind that she knew would hold an audience across a decade of reading.

But Rowling did more than that. Famously, she demanded great control over all things Harry, from franchising to having full creative control over the movies and their scripts, even selecting actors. She also remained true to her readers – she was almost possessive of them – and communicated directly to young fans in her blog and elsewhere. My daughter talks about “JK” as if they’ve met recently and are close friends: This is remarkable. Rowling also embraced the runaway success that Harry enjoyed. She has said that Harry and his world felt almost independent of her, and there must have come a point where the pop-culture juggernaut also felt outside her control. Despite this, there is a fidelity to the world she created that has never changed despite the movies, the fanzines, the endless media hoopla and the passage of time. Among her many other talents, Rowling has expertly managed the Harry brand. Her focus and fidelity to a vision is something we all could learn from in marketing.

Marketing and Me

2011-07-11T10:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, after three great years, I left my job running corporate communications for a large software company.

I was very fortunate – I left of my own accord, and I had plenty of time to think about the transition. Even so, I had two contradictory reactions to being gainfully unemployed: a feeling of delight at having oceans of time; and a feeling of mild panic at having no viable income. It’s hard not to oscillate wildly between indulging in projects and activities I’ve put off for years, then frantically job hunting.

I’ve worked almost all my career marketing, mostly in the high tech world but also for professional services firms and some consumer brands. In the last few weeks I’ve learnt that marketing feels very different when the subject at hand is You. Thinking about Brand You does a lot to focus attention on the fundamentals. Here’s some observations:

Know Thyself!
It’s easy to have an instinctive understanding of what your professional value is, but I found myself having to work hard to organize my search. What are my target markets? What is the current demand in that market? What’s my professional objective? What differentiates me from the many other candidates? Like any other marketing program, answering these fundamental questions is Step One.
Resumes Revisited
For many decades the basic tool – the promo piece – for advertising for work has been the resume. Nolonger. I’ve found that many conversations start because someone “found me” at this blog, because of press coverage I’ve appeared in, or via some other online imprint. Increasingly, our online resumes – our brand – is a diffused collection of activities. Managing these properly is critical.
Networks and Friends
The influence of word-of-mouth on brand perceptions is well understood, but the reality comes sharply into focus when you’re searching for work. A recruitment consultant told me that over 75% of jobs are found through an individual’s immediate network of friends, colleagues and family. We often forget that the same is true for how most people make decisions about what brands to trust and invest in.
Social media works – and doesn’t
A recent Pew Research study showed that fewer than 10% of “friends” on Facebook have never met in person. Social media is a wonderfully efficient way to maintain connections to our extended network of friends and colleagues, but it’s not so efficient at broadcasting beyond that network. Once or twice removed, the signal seems to get attenuated.
Professional networking and career sites can work
I’m using Ladders, LinkedIn, Indeed and the rest, and they are remarkable. One reservation – moving to a premium, fee-based service on some of these sites has only a marginal benefit. The basic service is often enough, raising questions about the business models for some of these companies.

One other thing – I’ve come to realize how much I enjoyed the ‘Company of Friends” I worked with over the last few years. Good luck to you all!

The Graying of Social Media

2011-06-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

A popular myth about social media is that it's a fancy of youth, something endemic in the teen set but largely ignored by those well past their college years. If there was any doubt that this is a fallacy, read the latest Pew Research report.

According to their numbers, 47% of American adults have used some kind of social networking site, close to double the number recorded in 2008. The average age of users has shifted up from 33 to 38. On first blush this may not seem like much, but it's significant: Those 50 to 65 accounted for only 9 percent of social network users in 2008 and today they account for 20 percent of users. The numbers tripled for those 65 and over.

There's no question that the Early Adopters of social media were largely young, but we've long moved past the early stages of adoption. Social media is a part of the online landscape for most everybody.

What astonished a jaded marketeer like me was the response to the question “most people can be trusted.” Be honest – you'd expect a healthy majority to lean towards a “Nah” on this question – and indeed there is a majority, but far less than I'd thought. Forty-one percent of adults are trusting, and this actually increases slightly to 45% for social media users (non-Internet users are a gloomy bunch, with only 27% being trusting).

What emerges is that active users of social media are far more engaged, open and have more social support that non-users. Stating the painfully obvious, social media is about being social. It's about sustaining existing relationships (only 9% of Facebook “friends” have never met in person) and rekindling old friendships.

The implications for marketing pros are clear. First, the days when social media was a playground for consumer-facing youth brands are over. But we've known this for a while. What may be more important is that social networks are focused around trusted relationships that preexist. For marketing to engage with these close-knit communities will require creating a persona – a brand – that can feel familiar, that is already a part of the extended social network, and that can instinctively be trusted.

Viral Marketing and the Short Tail

2011-05-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

Viral marketing has very little to do with marketing – or so I argued in my last post. I also suggested that we've done a pretty poor job of defining what the term “vital marketing” even means.

Being viral is mostly a function of a product or idea, not of the tools and tricks employed by marketing pros for promotion. That said, being viral is also about the vectors that transmit and pass on information about the product or idea – that is, the people involved. Said another way, certain people are receptive to an innovation, others are not. And some people are better equipped to retransmit and amplify the viral effect – the are better connected themselves, and better respected – and are thus more coveted targets for viral marketing.

This all has echoes of an old mass communications theory – adoption of innovation, championed by Everett Rogers. He's the guy that gave us familiar terms like Early Adopter and Late Majority to describe groups of people that characteristically are receptive to new ideas and are viewed by others as trusted sources of information.

Many of the today's models for viral marketing focus on the medium – Twitter, Facebook and so on. This is a mistake. Some enlightened folks start by looking at the product or idea itself. Very few also consider how audience targeting can influence viral marketing.

There's a lot of chatter in marketing circles about long tails – a statistical reference to the fact that the total sales of relatively unpopular items often outweigh the combined sales of very popular blockbuster items. An oft-cited example is book sales at Amazon, where cumulative niche sales of The Bagpipe Maintenance Book and its ilk far outstrip Potteresque blockbusters. If the warehouse and distribution costs can be managed, then marketing to the long tail can be very lucrative.

The reverse logic applies to viral marketing – we are short tail marketing. To see what I mean, consider the frequency distribution of Twitter followers, Facebook 'friends' and Facebook 'likes', all of which are more-or-less classic power distributions (that is, the kind of distribution people refer to when they think about long tails and marketing):

Ask yourself: who do you want to target when you consider attempting viral marketing? The answer, of course, is the most influential, and all other things being equal this equates to the very few people with the most followers, likes or friends – the short beginnings of the distributions in the graphs. (This effect is also self-fulfilling – we tend to crowd around the already crowded, follow those that have a lot of followers. We see this effect in social media and we see it in high schools, politics and the entertainment industry.)

Of course when I say we should target based on influence I'm stating the very obvious, but this all seems lost on many marketing pros when they think about viral marketing and new media.

The arguments get even more complicated if there's any real audience targeting to be considered. The undifferentiated masses that haunt social media aren't a target for anyone unless you happen to have a social media product to hawk. For the rest of us, we're interested in influencers and buyers, and we usually have some ability to describe these folks in at least broad demographic ways. Virality only matters if it impacts these few. But even if we're interested in created gross awareness we should think about the short tail.

What is Viral Marketing?

2011-05-06T19:19:00.000-07:00

When we think of cloud computing we don't envision winged mainframes sitting angelic on fluffy cumulus, yet too often in marketing a clever metaphor morphs into a definition, leaving behind empty buzzwords. Such is the case with viral marketing.

What is viral marketing really? Go to Wikipedia and you will leave none-the-wiser; the page has become the battleground of an ongoing dispute about who originated the term, but provides little insight into what it really means. Other attempts at a definition vier off at two tangents – either getting lost in epidemiology or waxing rhapsodic about social media. Or we revert to the “I know when I see it” school, which ladles out a stream of ex post facto cases-in-point that illustrate the effect without enlightening us about what is taking place.

Arguably viral marketing is nothing new. If you look at early research into the effects and efficacy of propaganda, the mechanisms by which mass media impact ideas, or the ways that innovative ideas are adopted, they all suggests ways that messages and ideas are disseminated through a population. The concept of viral marketing is really a restatement of these old theories, adapted to the new communication tools of today.

A good theory and definition of viral marketing would provide an explanation based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning. It could be tested and confirmed and would help explain and predict the way some markets work or how some products become popular. It would build on what we already know from propaganda, mass media and public relations. What we've got instead is a lot of sound a fury every time a YouTube video gets a boatload of views, without any reasoning or insight.

At least, that's what I thought until I came across this blog post by David Skok. David applies some simple math along with a useful concept – the K factor – and provides an abstract model of how viral effects work. He also derives some very useful variables to consider, and some principles describing what makes viral marketing viral. To take one example:

Virality is not a marketing strategy that can be executed by the marketing department. It has to be built into your product right from the beginning. This is a function that needs to be thought through by the product designers and developed by the engineers.

This is not how most people think and at first it appears counterintuitive, but he's right. Marketing may play a role in amplifying a viral effect, or reducing the time cycles on virality, but it can rarely be the prime mover in making a product “go viral.” There really is no substitute for a good idea well executed.

Radian6 Sells for 10X Revenues to Salesforce

2011-03-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

There's over 100 tools available to measure or monitor social media traffic, but ask the average marketing pro for a product by name and they're most likely to mention “Radian6.” Whatever you think of their products – and there are detractors – the Canadian company has done an undeniably phenomenal job at marketing itself.

This week, we learned that Salesforce has acquired them for $326M in cash, plus $50M is stock. In interviews, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claimed Radian6 has annual revenues of about $35M, so he paid a handsome 10X multiple. Why so much, and why now?

Despite the cruddy economy, there's a nascent bubble emerging in social media-focused companies. Evaluations are skyrocketing even for start-ups unencumbered by income of any kind. Radian6 is on the peripherary of this market, but no doubt the evaluation reflected some of this hype.

Second, Radian6 has attracted a large pool of the kind of customers attracted to Salesforce's core CRM technology. At between $400 and $600 per month, Radian6 was priced such that SMBs could buy-in. The company also did a great job at selling through influential intermediaries – advertising and PR agencies.

Finally, the company ate its own dog food. The social media outfit worked the social media world tirelessly. Anyone remotely connected to their world, even lowly Uninfluentials like me, have been contacted by them.

Did Salesforce pay too much? Maybe. Certainly the hopes of many competitors will have been raised, and rightly so: expect more consolidation over coming months. Arguably there's also a new opportunity for these other companies to take up the position Radian6 held, and become the “leading independent” in the category. For sure, this is an early-stage market. Radian6 is a good company, but there's plenty of room to improve on their technology, and I speak from experience.

Is the Public Relations Bubble About to Burst?

2011-03-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back the good people of the Publicity Club of New England invited me to speak on a panel with journalists from TechTarget, InformationWeek, and Mass High Tech, as well as a director from the PR agency Weber Shandwick

Ostensibly, the subject at hand was advice on launching a new technology product, but as is often the way with these kinds of events the conversation got tangential and we talked about a host of entirely unrelated topics. Things really got interesting when the journalists discussed the harsh realities of their working world. We all know that journalism is getting a beating these days and that the underlying economics of the news business stink, but hearing firsthand how threadbare tech journalism has become was shocking. The pool of professional journalists is evaporating fast.

Nor are new professionals entering the field. Earlier the same day I'd gone for lunch with an industry analyst, an old friend from my days teaching at university, who told me that journalism undergraduates are openly questioning what career future they have in an environment that places little value on professional news gathering.

None of this is new. What struck me, however, was the apparent nonchalance of the PR professionals attending the event. I'd argue that the wholesale destruction of professional journalism will have profound repercussions for PR pros, yet I don't see much concern.

The Hack/Flack relationship is symbiotic: If one disappears then arguably so goes the other. PR professionals, and especially PR agencies, need to rethink what value they deliver and how they fit in a new ecosystem for information gathering and sharing. Some thoughts:

The Content Kingdom?
If journalism is crumbling, where will authoritative content come from? The question seems ridiculous, given that we're all drowning in a sea of conversations, a Babel of social media banter. Everyone's a journalist, right? The reality is more complex. Increasingly, creating credible, trusted content – developing a voice that is a part of the social media landscape – will be a critical part of PR. To my mind, this requires a degree of authenticity and originality that places a new burden on PR professionals to do what journalists have done.
How does news get transmitted?
The age of mass media is dissolving so that most of us are exposed to numerous different sources of news and information, rather than a few monolithic and ubiquitous news organizations with formidable reach and influence. How information gets transmitted – and retransmitted – across a web of social connections is a problem that will plaque PR pros. In the old, massive media days, it was easy to operate within a limited network of gatekeepers, or push press releases out to a waiting audience. With this gone, PR pros need to think about how they can influence awareness and drive information transmission.
How do you measure success?
One of benefits of our always on, always online world is that everything becomes visible and hence measurable. This is a boon to PR pros, who can make themselves more relevant and more effective by taking accountability for more meaningful business outcomes. Gone are the days when PR could measure activities and feel that is enough. And measuring nebulous levels of “awareness” is only a step in the right direction. PR pros need to meet real business goals – and take actions now to figure out how they can hold themselves accountable.

Book Review: Social Media ROI by Olivier Blanchard

2011-03-21T17:55:00.000-07:00

Search on “social media” on Amazon books, and you get an astonishing 1,300 titles – you'd never know there's a crisis in the publishing biz judging by this embarrassment of riches. For those seeking guidance on social media, this overabundance makes it a struggle to sort the wheat from the chaff.

First-time author Olivier Blanchard's book initially caught my attention because of the brevity and bravery of the title; many writers may have been tempted to appended a question mark after Social Media ROI, but Blanchard is fearless. He is trying to address the key question being asked by many in marketing, public relations and the media, and he does so with clarity and without dodging the complexity.

The book is especially good at rooting social media in a recognizable marketing landscape. Readers familiar with marketing principles, strategy, goals and objectives will quickly understand Blanchard's arguments and frame of reference.

The book is refreshingly straightforward in determining what a meaningful ROI should be, and realistic in how to attain returns. I'd have liked to have seen more real-world examples (and less of the now tired case studies from Dell and the like). In places the book labors the obvious.

The book is not for those looking for tactical details on how to use Twitter, Facebook and the rest, or indeed an understanding of the tools and techniques for measuring ROI – Blanchard defers to others on these details. Rather, this book will help marketing pros understand how social media can play a role in programs and campaigns, and suggest ways of using social media that are results-oriented and driven by common-sense business objectives.

I'd specially recommend the book for marketing managers.

Is “Ethical PR” an Oxymoron?

2011-03-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

It's very hard to conjure up a sentence containing the words “ethical” and “public relations” without inviting ridicule and invective. In the popular imagination the whole point of public relations is to flex the truth, to manipulate and obfuscate the facts of things in the self-serving interests of a client. In the war between Hack and Flack, most often it's journalists who come off as the protectors of truth's virtue, and PR pros as grubby low-lifes. They make Oscar-winning movies about investigative journalists; I can't think of a single movie that has a flack as its hero.

This all came to mind when I read that Cambridge-based consulting firm Monitor Group had taken on Moammhar Khadafy and Libya as a client, their brief being to somehow rehabilitate the dictator's image and “generate positive news coverage of the country.” Yuck. Then today Kirk Hazlett, writing on behalf of the Public Relations Society of America in the letters page of the Boston Globe, felt inclined to point out that (a) Monitor Group is most definitely not a public relations agency, and (b) organizations like the PRSA have a code of ethics designed to deal with just these sort of nasty situations. Needless to say, Hazlett's letter was greeted with the ridicule and invective mentioned above.

So, what's the truth here? Are PR firms – and their employees – a bunch of unscrupulous peddlers of lies, damn lies and even more damn lies? Are they turning a blind eye to obvious evil in exchange for a retainer contract plus expenses? Do they meddle in political affairs and do business with dictators?

Well, sometimes.

Lets first agree that if your client is Rwanda, Uganda, Kazakhstan or Sri Lanka, you're doing business with folks that have reputation issues that go well beyond your usual brand management challenges. These countries, and others like them, engage in torture, corruption and murder of their own citizens on a grand and well-documented scale. And they've all had representation by PR firms, including major names like Hill & Knowlton. Edelman represented Yugoslavia in the 1970s, and even today the Brit PR agency Bell Pottinger is representing Bahrain. Rehabilitating third-world despots is a thriving business.

So, whatever the PRSA may say, plenty of PR firms do deals with devils. But is this sufficient to damn a whole industry?

Of course not. The other side of the flack coin is that many agencies do wonderful work for organizations that are fighting the most to make changes in these dictatorships. Amnesty International, UNICEF, Oxfam and others have all relied on agency support.

The problem, I suspect, is in the toothless declarations made by organizations like the PRSA about “codes of ethics.” We should ask ourselves what consequences arise if these ethical codes are violated, and to what extent the PRSA and others police agencies to ensure compliance. It's interesting to note that whenever a TV shows attracts the ire of public watchdogs, as MTV's Skins has recently done, advertisers vote by removing their financial support. I don't see many clients of PR agencies taking a similar view, and this too should be questioned.

Why Apple is like WalMart and Content is Still King

2011-02-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

Image: Apple Corp.

It was Sumner Redstone who famously stated that “content is king,” a thesis being sorely tested these days. At the time he said it Redstone was running the family business, the movie theater chain National Amusements, which he parlayed through a series of acquisitions into the media giant Viacom. Redstone believed that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms, and so sought out content producers such as Paramount, CBS and MTV. It made him one of the hundred richest men in America.

Reading the news these days, it feels like we've come full circle. Today, the focus of attention is all on the devices that are delivering information, be they iPads, 3D Televisions or the latest 4G phones. In many ways they are the modern-day equivalents of the National Amusements movie palaces.

This doesn't feel right. It's as if we all suddenly became fixated with the copper pipes in our house, and forgot about the clean running water. Don't misunderstand me – there's no question that this plumbing is very sexy. My iPad feels like a sleekly engineered work of art, in the same way that a 1960s Ferrari does. And the ergonomics are so intuitive that my 6 year-old is an adept user, killing me at Angry Birds. But this isn't enough.

There's a fight going on to control the information supply chain, to become the new gatekeeper. This explains the move by Apple to make iTunes subcription billing mandatory; they want to become the focus of the relationship with consumers, relegating the content providers. In a sense Apple is emulating WalMart, with their relentless focus on supply-chain and market control. The difference is, WalMart is selling plastic crap from China, while Apple is trading on everything from the latest Black Eyed Peas hit to the news that informs an electorate.

Then I saw the news from The Huffington Post and AOL, along with the launch of News Corps' The Daily. In case you missed it, the ailing AOL put-down $315 million to buy the fast-growing Huffington, and pledged to continue to invest in new and original content. And News Corp released a new newspaper specifically for tablet computers, to be quickly followed by Yahoo's Livestand.

Seems like the news is all about the news; how it is created, distributed and consumed. Its not clear to me who will wind-up winning this war of words, images and ideas. I tend to think Mr. Redstone had it right all along and that content is still king, and not just royalties to the likes of Apple. After all, the iPad and its ilk are otherwise tabula rasa.

New Update: A definitive list of social media measurement and monitoring tools

2011-02-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

It's been over ten months since I originally published my list of over 80 social media measurement and monitoring tools, and I continue to get a lot of updates. Many thanks to everyone for the corrections and additions.

This is my second round of edits and changes. This time, I've seen a handful of companies disappear (Intelligent Technologies, Kaleidico, Net Equity and Scanblog among them), as well as a few changes in business model or products offered. I've made updates to about half the listed, including Meltwater, Dow Jones, Appinions, Lithium, and Millard Brown.

You can find the complete and updated list here.

I remain confused by the different capabilities and use-cases these products support -- am I alone?

Please let me know any omissions or errors.

What CMOs want from Social Media

2011-01-31T13:52:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago The CMO Club published a short whitepaper titled CMOs on Social Media Plans for 2011. The report is a continuation of research begun in 2009 and gives a longitudinal view on how marketing leaders are thinking about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest.

So, what's the Cliff Notes summary? The research is a classic example of a glass half-full or half-empty, depending on your preconceptions. Take the question “What social marketing activity brings you the highest return on investment?” The glass half-full answer is that for most social media tools, the percent of CMOs that believe they provide “average to significant” ROI has more than doubled. In contrast, the glass half-empty answer is that well over 50% of CMOs either don't know or see no ROI for the vast majortity of social media activities.

What explains this? Certainly not a lack of data on which to draw an ROI conclusion – under 20% of CMOs have no way of measuring the value of social marketing. But the majority are measuring activities rather than outcomes, by which I mean things like site traffic, number of mentions, or number of posts. This is the More School of Marketing, who's thesis is that if we do more things, and we see more things happen, then we must be doing more things right. This is, or course, wrong.

Only a small minority of CMOs report measuring increased sales, or order size, or reduced call volume – all things that can be tied directly to a real ROI. Why so few? Because it is so hard.

Despite the abundance of data that comes with much online-based social media, there's very little insight into how social marketing really impacts the bottom line that isn't anecdotal. Take the example of a typical corporate blog: it is trivial to measure-to-death the traffic on the blog, and even to understand visitors feelings and dispositions. Blog comments and the migration patterns of visitors might give you richer insights. But unless your Zappos selling shoes or Amazon selling books, its tricky to equate all this traffic to a purchase, a sales problem solved, or a repeat buyer. For most of us in marketing, the trail from social media activity to eventual ROI is convoluted, long and indistinct.

Despite this, my glass remains half full. Saying that social media has value to marketing is like saying the sky is blue; saying that social media has ROI for business is hardly controversial either. What is difficult is quantifying where the value emerges and how much value can be gained. This is what CMOs want to know. The report is silent on these questions, and for most of us the answers will remain elusive.

Does the Mass Media Matter?

2011-01-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Dunblane, Hungerford... and now Tucson. The recent, dreadful news from Arizona has energized an old debate about the root-causes of apparently mindless violent acts. The usual suspects – lack of gun control, healthcare for the mentally ill, and a caustic political environment – have all been suggested as “causes” for these terrible crimes.

And in this current debate, as in the past, the media have also not escaped blame. This time, it's the highly partisan, charged nature of the current news media that is held partly responsible, as if a lack of civility has somehow energized a clearly deranged individual. In the past, the focus has more often been on the violent content of the media, which is thought to desensitize viewers or encourage copycat acts. In both cases, the media is seen as articulating violence across our culture.

Is there any evidence to support the belief that the media can have these dramatic effects?

There's certainly no lack of research on the effects of violence in the media – the American Psychological Association claims an astonishing 3,500 research reports – but there's nothing like a clear agreement on the results. Both the APA and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, do claim that all this research does clearly show a link between exposure to violent and inciting media content and an increased propensity toward violent feelings and actions. Indeed, the link between media violence and violent behaviors has been said to be as significant as the link between smoking and lung cancer.

In all likelihood this is a gross overstatement and a wild oversimplification. I wish it were otherwise.

When the well-respected media researcher George Comstock looked across 219 examples of media violence research, he did indeed find a modest link between exposure and actions (the researchers found that the vast majority of the “3,500” reports cited above failed to meet basic methodological criteria or had not been properly reviewed or even published). However, Comstock (and later others) also pointed out that the so-called “file drawer” effect (where inconclusive or negative findings go unreported), as well as significant problems defining and measuring aggression, probably account for any remaining effect. The American Civil Liberties Union argued these points well. In other words, if there is any link between watching violence and acting violently, the link is superficial at best.

Most research suggests that the media is not as powerful as you might think, at least in terms of altering human behavior. Researchers talk about so-called “small effects” on audiences. In one example of this, dubbed agenda-setting, the media is shown to be very unsuccessful at telling people what to think, but rather good at telling people what to think about. Said another way, the media raise awareness and create a public conversation about a subject they highlight, but rarely impact actions or alter attitudes. Advertisers, take note.

Would that life be so simple that dramatically limiting violence and aggression in the media would somehow dramatically limit violence in the real world. The answers for Columbine, Virginia Tech and now Tucson are more complex and deep rooted.

What does Twitter and a Charles Dickens novel have in common?

2010-12-31T20:37:00.000-08:00

Answer: Both have 140 characters.

2010 may well be the year remembered for marking the watershed between old and new media. After all, this is the year in which the odds-on favorite movie to win the Best Picture Oscar is about a a bunch of geeks writing social media software. It's also the year were the WSJ among others foresaw a social media bubble emerging. But whether Twitter, Facebook and the rest are really worth their extravagant evaluations is almost beside the point; it is unlikely that by the end of the next decade we will have any US daily newspapers, and the conventional information economy will have been reinvented.

But that isn't why I'm writing on New Year's Eve. This fall my eldest daughter was in the school play Oliver!, and this encouraged me to reread the book. It is a dark tale world's away from the jaunty musical, though many of the significant characters like Bumble, The Artful Dodger and Fagin are similar and true. It's a great, long novel (originally serialized in monthly installments) full of the usual Dickensian cacophony of character and plot. Over the holidays I also started Paul Murray's new and excellent Skippy Dies; at over 600 pages, it too is packed with character and plot, humor and tragedy. So my question is this: Is the sea-change in the media world ensuring the end of this kind of rich, detailed and thoughtful discourse? Nick Carr thinks so, and he's not alone; his eloquence had me convinced. And truthfully, what passes today for "news" in the new media world fills me with dread.

But I'm no longer to pessimistic. My eldest daughter is also an addicted reader, and The Hunger Games series got to her. It's on my list to read too, but I'll be doing this on our ipod. There is a real social media bubble, and it will burst. But new media has already destroyed the conventional economic model for how mass media works, and how we get information, art, entertainment, even friends... But there is plenty of room for 140 characters, be they Bumbles and Fagins or A and Bs. Information of value, stories that sell... the content itself will likely not change much at all. McLuhan's prophecy is at best only partly true; the medium is rarely the message.

FTC's “Do Not Track” Proposal is a Victory for Online Privacy and a wake-up call for Marketing and PR

2010-12-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a landmark report proposing new guidelines for guarding online privacy. Among a wide range of suggested options the most concrete and far reaching is a recommendation to develop and mandate a “do not track” system. This system would allow users to prevent websites from collecting any information about their identity or their online behavior without first getting consent.

This is great news for advocates of online privacy and a blunt wake-up call to marketing and PR professionals.

Increasingly we all live online lives – we shop, socialize, entertain ourselves and conduct our business via the Web. And increasingly, our every move online is being tracked and recorded, building up a rich composite picture of who we are, what we do, and how we act. At worst, this results in gross invasions of privacy or the loss of personal information; at best, it allows website owners to customize experiences to our liking and even anticipate and predict what we're searching for or what might interest us.

For marketing pros, the news is mixed. We've all become accustomed to being able to gather – usually anonymously, usually without consent – a lot of information about how customers and prospects act online. This helps tell us which campaigns and offers work, how people navigate around our site, and even when someone returns to us and starts to show behaviors that would indicate they're moving down a sales process. These data make it possible for marketing to create an almost closed-loop measurement of a prospect lifecycle, and have created a whole new industry for tools that help aggregate and process this data.

If the FTC has its way, much of this could go away.

This is not a new problem. Back in the day, when direct mail was the cutting edge of response marketing, the Direct Marketing Association waged a bitter fight to ensure any “prior consent” legislation never made it through the US Congress. Similar fights have waged around “do not call” lists and telemarketing.

But with the Internet, the stakes are higher. There are too many unresolved security issues and too much latitude in what information is being taken from us. The FTC proposal is the right idea and should be supported.

Feeling Listless

2010-11-30T14:23:00.000-08:00

December looms, the Month of Lists and prognostications. For example:

Five essential tips for traveling with your dog

Five vital components to succeed in business

Five things to consider when choosing an eating disorder cure

Conspiracy Theories: Top Five List

And there's a whole sub-genre just for social media:

Five ways social media will change journalism

5 Tips to Bring Out Your Inner Social Media “Kung Fu”

Five ways social media can save you money

5 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Help Your Business

5 stages of a blogger's life

5 Ways to become a Better Blogger

Keep in mind, this is just a recent sampling of the “Fives” -- Ten seems to be the preferred list length, Letterman-style. But whatever the length, the List Blog Post is getting very tired. In fact, if I were to list my Top 5 Things I Dislike about Social Media, Lists would be on the list. And solely in the interests of completeness, here's the other four items:

Authenticity
There's a lot of unnecessary punditry claiming a greater authenticity in social media; A belief that somehow bloggers, Twitterers and the rest are encouraged by the form to exercise greater veracity and to hove closer to the facts of thing. Apparently, it just doesn't do to overtly sell, blatantly misinform or pretend to be other than who you are. Why social media should change a long media tradition of peddling falsehoods eludes me. Not that I'm advocating this, mark you, just that I have a more realistic expectation of what people do. And indeed, are doing. Social media is no more authentic than any other medium – in fact, the form invites some invention and evasion. While it might be theoretically best to be authentic and open, the evidence suggests social media hasn't changed basic human nature much at all.
unNews
More is often less. There are 20 zillion bloggers and countless online news organizations, but there really isn't any more news in the world. Almost everything we read online is regurgitation, the retreading of actual news from other places. What social media has done is given everyone the right to express an opinion; A noble thing, but often confusing and sometimes an obfuscation to the facts of the news.
Paradigm Shiftiness
I'm tired of reading how social media is changing the known universe, reinventing marketing and altogether turning our world upside down. The shifty characters peddling paradigm shifts have some well-argued points to make, and there's no question that the media landscape has forever changed. It's also true that many of these experts stand to make money if we all buy into their paradigminess.
Polarizing Bears
When Sarah Palin talks about her Momma Grizzly Bears, she could more accurately be referring to Polarizing Bears. Especially in political circles, social media has become hostage to extremes. Instead of encouraging dialogue it encourages division. It has become the home of the zealot and the fringe.

The Barcelona Declaration

2010-11-19T15:13:00.000-08:00

When you're in the business of buzz it's very easy to get an enlarged sense of self. Marketing and PR types are professionally prone to ego-inflation; it just comes with the territory.

This came to mind when I heard about the recent Barcelona Declaration, an initiative from the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) and others that attempts to provide standards for public relations measurement. What initially stuck me wasn't the ideas presented but the name chosen, with its evocation of a great place and a hardly accidental allusion to other great places and monumental ideas: Yalta, Camp David, Reykjavik. It sniffed of self importance and grandiosity. It made me think of Churchill chomping cigars and dividing up nation-states, not dudes in suits thinking of clever ways to find the value in a press release.

Well, its clear from the IPR's introduction to the Declaration principles that I have this wrong. If anything, these guys are underselling. See if this doesn't quash your expectations:

The [Declaration] language may not yet be perfect - and on the surface, some of the principles may seem obvious - but this is a credible attempt by some 200 people from more than a dozen countries to address the need for clear standards and common approaches to measuring and evaluating public relations results.

Let me first agree that most of the principles are indeed obvious, but this doesn't mean that they're not valuable. We might all agree that goal setting and measurement are important, or that measuring both quantity and quality is critical to good measurement. Hardly the partitioning of Berlin, but it needs to be said.

Later principles talk about outcomes-over-activity and the need to link PR (and marketing) to business outcomes. This is where the Declaration gets serious and meaningful.

My question is, why now? The answer, I suspect, is because now we can. The advent of online technologies, social media and advanced CRM systems make finding the complex equations that link activities to business success (sales, in my world) possible. Traditionally, a lot of marketing value was linked to ideas of awareness and familiarity, but rarely beyond that. Today, we can see how marketing campaigns play a role audience actions. And this means measurement becomes critical.

Is it really time to bury the marketing funnel?

2010-11-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

Last week, Forrester's Steve Noble wrote an excellent blog who's title pretty much says it all: It's time to bury the marketing funnel. In marketing circles this is the rough equivalent of John Boehner telling Congress that, come to think about it, tax hikes just make a whole lot of sense. The Funnel is a matter of marketing doctrine and woe betide anyone who says otherwise.

Lest we've forgotten, The Funnel is the way marketing tracks raw awareness and the subsequent conversion to consideration and eventual sale. Critically, The Funnel serves as a way of tracking leads and provides a handover to sales. It is also the usual way for marketing to justify value to the business: Various metrics around opportunity value are common and give a gage of the net return campaigns generate. Sales management tools all use some variant on The Funnel as a way to instill discipline and process around marketing and sales. The Funnel has been around for eons almost unchanged. It works well, by and large.

So why change things? Why muck around with success?

Noble has some good arguments: Customers exist in a lifecycle; marketing isn't a conveyor belt process; the model ignores complexity; it's really geared toward a volume sales model. All true. And Noble proposes a new model that is indeed a lifecyle. I like his proposal but I'm still reluctant to leave The Funnel behind... Here's why.

First, I think there was always an acknowledgment that the classic Funnel was a simplification. Real life is convoluted and nonlinear and irrational. Customers don't behave is a fixed pattern. We all tend to behave differently in high and low involvement purchasing situations, we're fickle and have changing attitudes and desires. We suffer from buyer remorse. But these complexities have been known for a long time and arguably one of the benefits of The Funnel is it irons all this complexity out, and provides a neatened way to track meaningful outcomes.

Second, things definitely have changed in marketing - customer behavior may have changed. For sure, that behavior is more transparent and measurable in our always-online world, which also draws attention to certain attributes of prospects and customers that may have been hidden in the past. I definitely agree that this new insight should be used to inform marketing better, but does this mean we flush The Funnel?

All this said, Noble's right to focus on the marketing model. Marketing is undergoing a noisy revolution, provoked by technology, changing consumer behavior, and a renewed interest in refining processes to more accurate reflect our complex world. Getting the model right will inform everything else: process, programs and metrics.

Secrets and Lies

2010-11-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that there's no secrets anymore. We all live untidy online lives and leave behind a trail – little pieces of information, small actions, and fragmented facts – that others can too easily follow to reconstruct a whole picture of Who, What and Where.

Secrets come in many flavors. Google's Eric Schmidt boasts about his company's ability to identify our predilections, better to serve content and advertising. An amazing 5% of the US population was a victim of identity theft in 2009, accounting for $54 billion in fraud. Popular computer repair outfit The Geek Squad have become the new best friend of the Feds, discovering and reporting illicit content on computer hard-drives.

The newest fertile ground for uncovering our secret selves is social media. Technorati calls social media a “playground” for ID thieves. A friend who advises High School kids on how to stay out of trouble has one big admonishment: if you think it's risky, don't photograph it, don't post it, don't IM it. Everything is evidence. Loose lips used to sink ships; now they sink careers, reputations, and lives.

Social media have long been active in this newly capitalized muckracking. Twitter, Facebook and the rest need to make money, and this means that they need to infiltrate our online identities, and use or sell the information they gather. This can be as innocent as matching anonymous demographic information to placed advertising, or as nefarious as data mining exquisite details about our finances and friends.

And now, social media metrics tools are being put to the same end, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that Nielsen and its social media business BuzzMetrics opened an account at PatientsLikeMe, then began to siphon off information about participants on discussion groups. So, even if social media sites themselves provide safeguards or permission barriers around your personal information, monitoring and measurement tools can still scrape data about you.

It may be too easy to find our secrets, but it is often impossible to isolate the truth of things. In this month's Atlantic magazine, Michael Hirschorn reports on how online discourse allows all sides to invent their own set of facts, and that this has pernicious consequences. Twelve percent of Americans believe their president is a Muslim, according to the Pew Research Center. An amazing 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was foreign-born, which if true would make him ineligible to be president. Opinion has always blurred facts, but increasingly it's impossible to take anything on face value – even so-called news.

In an old post I'd borrowed the old joke, “on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog” to illustrate how easy it is to mask reality online, and how vital it is to establish authenticity and source credibility. This is true, but things are also more complicated: It's hard to reconcile that our personal identities – the facts of who we are- are being strip mined, yet at another level it's all too easy to propagate patent lies.

There is so much information today, and who controls it matters.

Questions to ask your prospective social media listening, monitoring and measurement vendor

2010-10-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

Last I checked, there are an astonishing 88 products that claim they can support social media measurement. When shopping for a solution, this overabundance renders most marketing types catatonic. We're confused by this surplus. The vendors themselves don't help us; desperate to differentiate themselves, they claim increasingly improbable capabilities and use clever obfuscation to suggest they are somehow unique and better than anyone else.

All this came to mind this week when I attended the Monitoring Social Media event in Boston. Various vendors and consultants – and sadly, not enough end-users – presented their views on how best to listen, measure and respond to social media activity. Whether you decide to use free tools or invest in a commercial solution, here's my takeaway on the key questions to ask vendors about their products:

Sources:
The output of any social media tool is only as good as the inputs. Verify exactly what primary social media properties the tool monitors, and the depth that it can reach on each. Find out how blogs are monitored, and how you can add sources and if that's easy.
Also ask how much history the tool supports – how long is content archived? Finally, ask about foreign language capabilities, and to what extent the tool supports non-English content.

Search/Monitoring:
To make a tool useful you need to tell it what interests you, so it can retrieve and sort content. Usually, this is done using familiar Boolean logic, not unlike with a Google search. Check how sophisticated and granular the search and monitoring capabilities are. Ask about other ways to search, train or query the system – some support so-called natural language searches, for example.

Filter:
My colleague Tangyslice has endured agonies with a commercial social media tool that failed dismally to effectively filter-out spam and duplicate information. A manual attempt to do this couldn't keep pace with the innovation of spammers, who seem to mutate and multiply constantly. Check that a tool can filter effectively.

Measurement:
This is where most people initially focus. Find out what the system can count. Can the system find relationships between data? How does it determine the salience of a source or other data? Can it detect sentiment, and for what? What about the valence of information or sources (in other words, how 'importance' or significance)?

Reporting & Alerting:
How are you going to present the data? What actions do you need to take with the information? How can you automate reporting, or send alerts to the right people in your organization? Its easy (at least for me) to get seduced by snazzy reporting engines that generate gorgeous graphs and charts, but often simple alerts and custom dashboards are a better approach. Think this through.

Connectivity:
Do you need to connect the system to others tools – say, a CRM solution, or another data mining product? Does the system easily support this?

Services:
Some systems are designed as self-service solutions that require the customers to drive and tweak. Others require a layer of professional services to make the tool work and to customize it. Think about what fits your needs.

Cost:
There's a lot of free stuff out there, and its possible to cobble-together a pretty good reporting system using Google, Tweetdeck and a few other tools. Beyond that, there's a layer of product in the $50-$100 a-month range that many tell me aren't very useful. Beyond that, expect to pay $400+ a month for a sophisticated product that covers a wide range of sources, can be customized, and will cover most company's needs (prices are for a single initial user).

Good luck! Let me know what I missed.

It's not social media, it's social me.

2010-09-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

Some days, my Twitter feed seems like nothing more than narcissism. And Facebook, MySpace, YouTube – even the names seem designed to inflate egos. As for blogs, the typical post can be conveniently summarized thus:

Me me me me. Me me me me. Me me, me me me me me me me me. Me me me – me me me me me. Me me me me. Me me me me. Me.

For all the talk, all the conversations, all the to and fro, is anyone really listening?

This all came to mind one night, working late. I happened to look at the Twitter feed of a self-professed Famous Social Media Guru, a man who actually claims “inventions” in the field and runs a successful business telling people that unless they engage with social media right this second their brand, their careers, and possibly the world will all come to a sticky end. His Twitter feed is a relentless stream of self-promotion, self-aggrandizement and unalloyed self-congratulation. He claims to follow over 2,500 people on Twitter, an impossible task and a transparent technique to amass as many of his own followers as possible. His heavily trafficked blog is an unaccompanied Variation On A Theme Of Me, with occasional intermissions in which he pays tribute to other Gurus in a virtuous cycle of ebullient backslapping. He's not alone; there's a whole boatload of these characters. It makes me grind my teeth and want to go to a distant Trappist Monastery with a vow of silence and not even a dial-up connection to the Internet.

And it isn't just egos that are getting over-inflated. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that investors are bidding up Internet and social media startups to levels reminiscent of the last Dot-Com boom. As straight-up, lets-make-money businesses, you have to wonder about the prospects of these social media outfits. We are, to paraphrase Gartner Research and Charles Dickens, at the peak of inflated, bubble-bursting, Great Expectations.

But wait. Might we be throwing out the proverbial baby here?

Can social media make business sense? For sure. In my day job, we use it very effectively to communicate with key stakeholders, and we've made major public announcement over our blog, with great success. It gives us transparent access to our customers, partners and fellow workers, and we get direct, fast, and unvarnished feedback in a way that was impossible with other media.

Can we link social media to real business outcomes that matter – say increased profits, happier customers, or lower overhead? Anecdotally yes, but we've still a long way to go. And lets face it, anecdotes don't count. This is why I remain convinced that measurement is the problem to crack. Measure the right things, and the right result will follow. In the meantime, see you at the monastery.

Update: A Definitive List of Social Media Measurement & Metrics Tools

2010-09-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

Back in April this year I created a list of currently available tools that support social media measurement and metrics. I found 82 products on the market but confessed that I was pretty sure I'd missed things. I was right, and I got a flurry of comments and emails with corrections and additions.

The list has grown to 88 product. I've added MBlast, MediaHound, Meltwater News, PRMetrics, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon (taking the heavily contested award for the Most Esoteric Name), and UberVU. Sorry I missed you all, my oversight. I've also removed a couple of entries and made a bunch of other corrections.

You can find the complete and updated list here.

Sorry it's taken me this long to update the list. As always, keep your updates and corrections coming.

The Naked Enterprise

2010-08-31T12:31:00.000-07:00

This morning, I listened to an excellent panel discussion chaired by Harvard Business Review's Eric Hellweg, with Novell CMO John Dragoon, Forrester's Andre Pino, HP Hood's Lynne Bohan, and Evan Falchuk from Best Doctors. The topic was The Impact of Social Media.

What became immediately obvious was how social media is laying organizations bare. Nothing is hidden. As barriers to communication have fallen, so has the ability to obfuscate, to hide, or to forestall. It also means that everyone in an organization has a megaphone, so everyone is involved in the message. This is a good thing.

PR has become a team sport. Increasingly, PR teams need to subsidize news creation and increasingly own content and news output. To do this they'll need expertise. And to be effective in today's media environment they will need a chorus of voices all on key, all singing from the same tune. This requires the active support of much of the organization – marketing, sales, HR, product development, support, and executive leadership – all on the front lines, all participating and engaged with the myriad conversations taking place.

This will involve PR relinquishing some of the control we're used to – we need to give a wide network of people in our organization the skills, confidence and ability to work directly with media and with key audiences. We need to harmonize this process. As a result, PR will take a more strategic role in the marketing organization.

These changes will also involve us cultivating talent inside our organization so they can participate. For me, this is one of the hardest steps in creating a successful PR program that adds real value to the organization. Getting engaged with new and social media can often appear to be “free”, but actually soaks up considerable time, and hence resources. Persuading often overworked colleagues to engage with social media can often be difficult.

This is just one reason that building-out “observing” capabilities is such a crucial first step. By listening, monitoring, measuring and reporting on the conversations taking place about your organization, brand or product, you can start to understand relationships, influence, and salience, and focus on where and how to get involved for maximum impact. You can also monitor how effective your activities are in driving involvement and participation from audiences – and all this will help justify the resources needed to sustain a long-running social PR program.

Starting with “observing” is also the first step towards engaging with the larger marketing organization in a meaningful, data-driven way. The strategic value of PR can be measured and articulated, and we can show this value at every stage of the sales process – from driving awareness to helping close a deal, and on to cultivating ongoing loyalty to a brand.

This is the level at which we need to think in PR – of course we need to understand the technologies that are enabling new media, or the techniques to attract the right audience to your corporate blog. And of course we still need to do what we have been doing well – crafting a tight message, sending our the release. But too often the level of conversation is about whether to use a conventional press release or a so-called social media release. This is a tactical discussion that has merit, but PR has the potential to engage in a strategic discussion about how effective communication, as a critical component of marketing, can drive meaningful business outcomes – sales, better customer satisfaction, greater profitability.

The Reflex Dilemma

2010-07-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

I've just finished listening to an excellent series of presentations on social media hosted by Vocus, and among the speakers was the justly famous (at least in marketing circles) David Meerman Scott.

In suitably rapid-fire fashion David talked about, to quote from his book blurb for Real-Time Marketing & PR, the “opportunities (and threats) inherent in today's always-on, 24x7, instant business environment” His latest opus is all about speed, being first, tempus fugit, etc, etc. Watching him rush about the stage as he presented, you can't help but admire his embodiment of the message he's delivering.

No question, speed is of the essence in marketing and PR: News cycles, product development cycles, sales cycles... they're all shrinking. To illustrate his argument for PR pros, David talked about United Airlines and their infamous PR fiasco over Dave Carroll's broken guitar, as well as Amazon's Big Brother antics pulling Orwell's 1984 off Kindles. He argued – correctly no doubt – that both companies took a geologic era to respond to events that unfolded in hours, and that their reputations were thus badly and unnecessarily damaged.

Lets look at a couple of other, recent anecdotes. Shirley Sherrod, anyone? No question, the White House, the NAACP, Fox News and pretty much every media outlet in the country acted damn fast on this one. And you'd think that many of these politicos would have learned their lessons from the BeerGate nonsense from last year. In both cases, everyone rushed to judgment, desperate to get into the news cycle and desperate to appear to be responsive. Both times, reputations were badly and unnecessarily damaged.

Speed has a price. Reflex PR is a high risk game.

Is social media good business?

2010-07-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

Lets compare a couple of stats --

A few months back, audited circulation data showed that subscriptions to the New York Times had fallen below one million for the first time in living memory, and declined a whopping nine percent year-over-year. Around the same time Mashable reported that Twitter traffic was growing at a hyperbolic 1300 percent year-over-year, with over 1.2 billion tweets a month.

Numbers like these are thrown about all the time to illustrate an undeniable shift in the way we consume information, news and a whole load of gossip. The economic consequences for the Dead Tree News Business is dire and well-documented, but what about the business prospects for the social media upstarts that seem to be precipitating all this change? Are they making boatloads of cash?

There's no doubt that the main revenue stream that drives the information economy – advertising – is seeing a shift towards online spending:

Forrester Research data for online advertising revenues.

Looking at the Forrester Research numbers, overall online advertising in the U.S. is expected to have a CAGR of about 17 percent over the next few years, which aint too shabby. Within that, social media advertising will be a rocket ship, with 34 percent CAGR, reaching an impressive $3.4 billion in 2014.

All very nice, but does this all add up to big profits? According Reuters, Facebook made a whopping $800M last year, or about two bucks for every user (let me repeat that – over a full year, Facebook made all of $2 for every active account). Small potatoes you may say, yet this was enough for the company to eek out a $10M profit, at least on paper. Facebook's revenue growth has come as the number of users on its website has exploded: the company started 2009 with the January announcement that it had reached 150 million users and by December that number had swelled to 350 million.

What about Twitter? Bloomberg reported that even on a sliver of revenue from Google and Microsoft, a mere $25M, Twitter is also profitable. They have about 58 million users, so they're getting about 40 cents a user. Poor MySpace, owned by News Corp., has something like 111 million users and made about $360M last year (down from $460M the year before), or about $3.50 per user.

None of this could be described as printing money, in my opinion, and there's a very healthy debate about the long-term viability of social platforms as self-sufficient, profitable businesses. Here's Charles Hugh Smith writing on the investor site Benzinga:

Facebook will never be very profitable, for it is a utility which will never be able to charge its users. Its free functions are more valuable to marketers than its advertising, hence it will never generate big ad revenues.

Bo Peabody in the Washington Post thinks social media outfits will always be “crappy businesses”, while Henry Blodget at BusinessInsider thinks Facebook et. al. are the next Google. They can't both be right, but they could both be wrong.

Most likely, some social media properties will figure out a way to make advertising and other revenue streams pay their way. Some will have frothy IPOs. Most will die slow deaths. What I'm sure about is that none of these companies will duplicate what the New York Times does, nor should they. Whichever way you cut it, the vital statistics for the news business remain terrible.

What is Buzz?

2010-07-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

iPhones do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it...

Buzz, that is. But in the iPhone sense – the cool-hype sense - what is Buzz? How do you measure it, and when do you know you've got it?

In marketing terms, we know that “Buzz” is composed of awareness, preference and – with due apologies to Cole Porter – even desire and love. People crave their iPhone, they are quite literally passionate about them – the brand-as-device has become a part of their identity and is valued beyond its intrinsic usefulness. This is a hallmark of Buzz: in some sense it goes beyond logic and reason – it is emotional – and this is why Buzz is so hard to define and to measure.

Most people agree that Buzz originated as a word-of-mouth phenomenon, a kind of groundswell, but beyond that definitions get fuzzy. In her much-cited 2000 HBR article The Buzz on Buzz, Renée Dye calls it “explosive self-generating demand” which doesn't strike me as particularly useful or specific (another takeaway from her article is how faddish Buzz is – her examples of buzziness include the long forgotten Pokemon, Beanie Babies and the movie The Blair Witch Hunt).

Not that others have got more specific since then. In her book Buzz, Mariam Salzman gives us this:

...buzz marketing is...organic; it is centered on conversational value; it is peer driven; it is strategic; and it spreads outward from trendsetter to trend spreaders to the mainstream.

Mark Hughes riffs in a similar vein:

Buzz marketing captures the attention of consumers and the media to the point where talking about your brand or company becomes entertaining, fascinating or newsworthy.

Both these books have a lot of good things to say, but like many other social media tomes they don't really give us a crisp definition of the fundamental commodity at hand. In social science speak, they certainly don't get us to a point where we can operationalize “Buzz” and thus measure it effectively.

This is a failure. How on earth can we have a conversation about Buzz, and all that it entails, if we can't agree on what it is? In many respects, this has echoes of past marketing conversations around another slippery concept, The Brand.

So, Buzz is elusive in nature and elusive to define. This hasn't stopped a boatload of companies claiming it and even naming products after it – Google Buzz, BuzzMetrics, ThoughtBuzz, BuzzTrace, BuzzGain, BuzzFeed and even BuzzLife. Buzz is Buzzy, I guess.

Let me know your ideas on what exactly buzz is...

Jim Sterne's Social Media Metrics

2010-07-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading Jim Sterne's new (ish) book, Social Media Metrics, How to Measure and Optimize your Marketing Investment, published by Wiley. I recommend it. “We are what we measure” may be a tired cliché, but Sterne nevertheless brings a fresh perspective to the subject and drives home why measurement may be the foundation for building a successful social media program.

The book does a great job of linking social media metrics to things that matter in business, what Sterne describes as The Big Three Goals of increasing revenue, lowering cost, or improving customer satisfaction. These goals may sound lofty or even unattainable to some, but Sterne is, well, stern in his views: If social media can't make a meaningful impact on the business, why bother at all? This tone distinguishes the book from the many volumes of fluffy nonsense written about social media.

From here, Sterne constructs the book around the logical steps necessary to attaining meaningful business results. At each step the book suggests ways to measure activity and drive toward a desired outcome. I was glad Sterne wasn't afraid to address the real costs associated with a rigorous social media program, and take this on as a metric (borrowed from Avinash Kaushik).

The book has its faults. It could have done with an edit, and I wish Sterne had talked more about the practicality of measuring things, and the tools that can support ongoing measurement. I also found issue with some of the discussion around “identifying influence”, but these are small gripes. If you've ever pondered how to measure the meaningful impact of social media on your business, this is a good book to buy.

Google and the news

2010-05-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

This week, The Atlantic Magazine's James Fallows wrote a cover story titled How to Save the News, about Google. He might more accurately have titled it How Google is the News.

Google has been an unavoidable focus of news for most of the last decade, but things have really heated up over the last year or so. Google has enjoyed cover stories in pretty much every news magazine in the US, and lead stories in the business and financial pages of the dailies on a regular basis. Type “Google” into Google, and the news hits are 28,000 for the past month alone. By comparison, “Obama” gets 44,000.

Frankly, I'm all Googled out – we went well beyond saturation coverage a long time ago.

Of course, Google is the news is another sense: they have become the way that most people find stories, or aggregate the information they consume. In the process, they've also become the totem for all the online ills that plague the old-school news media. The thrust of Fallow's story is that Google recognizes the value of a healthy Fourth Estate, etc. etc., and that the company has plans to make good on keeping journalism healthy and vibrant. Right. Forgive my skepticism.

The US media's love affair with Google is perverse, or ironic or maybe just weird. Fallow's has fallen victim to it. Google is adored not so much because they're fighting for information freedom in China, or because they build very cool and totally free stuff we can all use, or because their search engine is a simple work of genius: The US media loves Google because it is a phenomenal financial success. This trumps everything, and makes them infallible in the way Microsoft was in decades past. Google prints money. They may be a one-trick pony, but the trick is very lucrative.

A year ago, The Atlantic ran another cover story on Google, although much less flattering. Is Google Making us Stupid? was written by Nick Carr, and the title pretty much says it all. I think Carr has a very level-headed view of the social issues with new media and online economics, but you could argue that he too has fallen prey to the Google hype. We should remind ourselves that this is a company that makes bundles of money selling advertising atop a search engine; everything else is window-dressing. They aren't going to democratize China, make us stupid, or save the media biz. They're just going to continue to make a lot of cash.

A definitive list of social media measurement & metrics tools?

2010-04-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

(Updated December 2, 2011)

Last week Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group, along with his colleague John Lovett, published a nice report on social media analytics. It's a very useful framework for thinking through how to measure the rights things, which in turn will focus attention on the right kinds of activities.

But how to measure? Way back in 2006, Owyang took a snapshot of the companies that offer tools for social media metrics, and came up with a list of forty-two firms. In the last week I've trawled the web to update his list (and thanks to Ken Burbary for a nice wiki list of different tools), and come up with an astonishing 82 firms that offer some kind of social media measurement solution. And I'm pretty sure I've missed a bunch.

Help me update and correct the list. Please send me your additions, along with any other comments on these tools, and I'll post an update. If there's enough interest, I'll also try and categorize these solutions better -- there's certainly a lot of diversity in this list.

SOCIAL MEDIA MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Updated: February 11 2011

Company	Comments
Alterian	SMM
Appinions	SMM
Andiamo Systems	SMM
Attensity	SMM
Attentio	Multilingual
Beyond Analysis	Gone
Beevolve	SMM
Biz360	Acquired by Attensity.
BrandIntel	Gone
Brandwatch	Brand monitoring
BurrellesLuce	SMM
Buzzcapture	SMM
BuzzGain	Meltwater Group Product
BuzzLogic	Now TwelveFold Media
BuzzNumbers	SMM
CIC Business Consulting	BI tool Chinese market
Cision	SMM + other tools
Collective Intellect	SMM
ComMetric	Mapping to financial data and stock tickers
Converseon	Agency with some tools
Cover-All Technologies	No longer supporting SMM
Crimson Hexagon	SMM
CustomScoop	SMM
CyberAlert	SMM
Cyveillance	Brand monitoring, QinetiQ company
Cymfony	SMM + other tools
Dow Jones & Company Insight	SMM + other tools
EchoMetrix	Gone
eCairn	SaaS metrics solution
EmPower Research	Custom technology solutions
Ethority	SMM
Evolve24	SMM
Jive	FilterBox product.
HowSociable	Free gadget
Imooty	SMM
Infegy	Brand monitoring
Integrasco	SMM
Intelligence Technologies	Gone out of business
JamIQ	Asian languages
J.D. Power and Associates	acquired Umbria
Jodange	See Appinions
Kaleidico	No longer supporting SMM
Kaava Corporation	Marketing services, some SMM
KDPaine and Partners	No tools but strong analysis
ListenLogic	social CRM?
Lexalytics	Sentiment detection
Linkfluence	French language
Lithium	Social CRM
Market Sentinel	Brand monitoring
mBlast	SMM
MediaBadger	Consulting firm with tools
MediaHound	SMM competitive intelligence
MediaMiser	Media monitoring
Meltwater News	Media monitoring
MetaTale	Gone.
Metrica	Multilingual, part of Gorkana Group
Millward Brown	Precis
Moreover technologies	SMM
Netemic	SMM
NetEquity	Gone.
New Media Strategies	No longer supporting SMM
Nielsen Online	NetRatings
Onalytica	SMM
OneRiot	Gone.
PRMetrics	Free customizable social media portal
Radian6	SMM, acquired by SalesForce.com
Relevant Noise	See Zeta Interactive
Report International	Brand monitoring
RepuMetrix	Brand monitoring
ReputationHQ	Gone
SAS	Business intelligence tool with SM
SamePoint	Gone
Scanblog	Gone.
ScoutLabs	See Lithium
Sentiment Metrics	Not just sentiment
Socialarc	SMM
SocialMention	Social search engine
Statsit	No longer Relevant
Synthesio	Multilingual
Sysomos	Business intelligence tool
Tealium	No longer relevant
ThoughtBuzz	SMM
TraceBuzz	SMM
Trackur	SMM
Thomson Reuters	BuzzAnalytics and OpinionAnalystics
UberVU	Now Crimson Hexagon
ViralHeat	SMM, Free API
Visible Technologies	SMM
VMS	Gone
Vocus	SMM
WaveMetrix	SMM
Zeta Interactive	Relevant Noise product for SMM

What's wrong with this picture?

2010-04-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

If you've read a magazine or newspaper over the last few weeks its been hard to avoid the iPad advertising. My favorite appeared on the back cover of The New Yorker:

Wait a second.... Here you have a print advertisement for the iPad, inexplicably promoting the New York Times, a newspaper which has yet to figure out a way of making any money from distribution via said iPad.

Clearly, the Apple gang have no sense of irony.

The Optimistic Economist

2010-04-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

When an internationally known economist bets his career on social media, you pay attention.

I first heard the Michael Mandel speak in February 2009 when, as he put it, “the economy was stone dead.” At the time he was chief economist for BusinessWeek and had authored more than 50 of the magazine's cover stories. What I liked about him then – and what I enjoyed again last week when I heard him speak for a second time – was his rational, resilient optimism.

Back in 2009, Mandel showed reams of data giving a historical perspective on how bad the current recession was (answer: very bad), how we got here (answer: greed and deregulation), and how we can recover (answer: innovation). Mandel is a big fan of innovation as the engine that drives the US economy. He's consistently argued that the only way to dig-out from the current recession is to find ways to generate growth through innovation. As he put it, saving your way out of a recession “takes forever”. Over the past decade, he contends, too much innovation has failed to mature and become commercially disruptive.

Last week, Mandel pointed out that the current recession is so deep any recovery will likely be slow. However, describing his job as “divining the shape of economic booms from weak signals”, he sees early optimistic signs in a few market sectors, chief among them being media and communications. He's especially bullish about the online sector and its disruptive effect on everything from journalism to advertising, although he sees massive changes ahead for the entertainment industry, too. He pointed out that in 2010, about $62 billion will be spent in online advertising (about 15% of overall advertising spend), and this will climb to $146 billion by 2020.

None of these insights are especially original but Mandel has, as he put it, bet on his own predictions: Last year he left BusinessWeek and founded his own online venture, Visible Economy. He's pretty blunt in his opinion of old media – while many argue that the business model for journalism is in question, he contends the problem is more fundamental. For Mandel, conventional journalism is broken, and no longer delivers what people want, when and how they want it.

He could be right.

Yet another redundant and ill-informed opinion on Apple's iPad

2010-04-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

It seems like everybody has something to say about Apple's iPad, so in the interests of complete redundancy I thought I'd chime in.

I should say up-front that I've never seen a real, live iPad, have only a vague idea of what it can do, and have no intentions of buying one. In other words, I'm much like all the other ill-informed pundits out there.

So let me begin with a confession: I love books of the dead tree variety. I actually collect books (I've just finished reading a first edition of Steinbeck's The Moon is Down), and I'm currently wading through all of Dickens' novels after buying a used set from the 1900s. So the iPad phenom got me thinking: what if things got reversed, and in a parallel universe the iPad came before the invention of books?

I get that the iPad can stream video, host a bewildering range of applications, and can make pretty good buttered toast. It's a multi-functional device, but its primary use-case is to provide a new platform for books and book-like content. The ability to meld multimedia content is pretty cool, as is the ability to bring the conventions of Web content to the format of the book. But as a portable tool for conveying a linear narrative, it has a bunch of issues. There's the bed-and-beach problem (you want to read a skinny computer in either location?). There's the drop-and-dry problem (I might handle my Steinbeck carefully, but a paperback is pretty indestructible). There's the share-and-sell problem (I'm not enthralled by some of the lock-in issues around the content I might buy). And have I mentioned battery life? In my parallel universe, if you had an iPad and no books, I think some latter-day Gutenberg might invent them anyway.

I know I'm a Luddite on this. My guess is, the current iPad will be a complete flop but some later incarnation will be a wild success. And books will become history. I have no idea how this will change what we read - would Steinbeck and Dickens exist in an iPad age?

Say Nothing

2010-03-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

The mathematical definition of zero is X + 0 = X. The marketing definition of zero is “no comment.”

For the last few weeks I've had the great pleasure of delivering “no comment” to a great many people. Its been tough going. Marketing types like me hate to say nothing. We're genetically unequipped to keep quiet. We love the sound of our own voice. We like to expound, we revel in expressing a view. If Marketing were a author, we'd be more Henry James than Ernest Hemingway. If we were a band, we'd be Yes rather than The Ramones.

When the goal is not to score, playing the game can seem plain wrong. Over the last weeks I've learned a lot about the fine art of keeping schtum, and while I wouldn't say I'm expert I do have a few pieces of advice:

When you're saying nothing, less really is more
It's very tempting to elaborate, be erudite and try and be clever. When The Famous Reporter comes calling (the same guy who usually never returns your calls), we shouldn't disappoint him, right? Wrong. Better to to be straightforward.
Saying nothing can take a long time
Doing a regular interview with the press can sometimes take a very few minutes. Perversely, when the aim is to say nothing of import, the delivery time can be very long. The same question which you can't possibly answer is often asked in many different variants. Or the unanswerable question is secreted in a long, rambling monologue in the hopes that it won't be recognized. Saying nothing requires patience.
Nothing can sometimes mean something
There really is no substitute for “no comment.” Anything else – even “I can't answer that question” - can be examined in minute detail and found to hint at something.
When you're saying nothing, be nice
Always remember – the journalists are just doing their jobs. They have to ask. Be courteous.

It's also worth remembering that while saying nothing is generally a novel experience for most in marketing, asking clever questions to us dopes is what journalists do every day. They're really, really good at it.

Who's using social media most?

2010-03-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

There are now more Facebook profiles than the entire population of the United States, Canada and the UK combined: it seems like pretty much everyone is busy blogging, tirelessly tweeting, or fiercely friending.

But who is most active with social media? Forrester Research has done a nice job of explaining the demographics of online participation, based on a taxonomy they created for the popular book Groundswell. Using their handy online tool you can see how online partication differs between men, women, age groups and geographies. What Forrester doesn't do is explain the types of people that get involved – their mental, emotional and social characteristics, as well as their motivations. What compels people to blather online? What traits do they have in common? Are the most active participants – what Forrester refers to as “Creators” - different from the lazy bums who do nothing with social media (what Forrester acidly calls the “Inactives”)? More to the point, what assumptions can marketing and communications professionals make about the people that actively engage with them through social media?

There are many competing and largely incompatible theories on this question, but lets look at two of the front runners:

The Wisdom Of The Crowd thesis

Advocates believe that the great mass of people that haunt social media and the Web are wise, well-intentioned, motivated and overall a pretty good facsimile of the population at large. They give us unfiltered access and insight into our customers, employees, voters, or other publics. True acolytes of this theory believe in an almost mystical ability of crowds to accurately guide opinion and decision making, an argument borrowed from the work of James Surowiecki who wrote the popular Crowdsourcing book back in 2004. Ask a crowd of kids to guess the number of jelly beans in a large jar, and the while individual answers will vary wildly, the average of all answers will be extremely close to the true number (I know, I tried this at a school fair).
The Madness Of The Masses thesis

There's a whole stack of theories penned by lofty thinkers like Freud, Tarde and Bernays that see crowds as irrational herds, spawning Orwellian DoubleThink or manipulated GroupThink or all sorts of other Thinks. But you don't need to wade through all these turgid academics tomes, just read the comments on an average blog. A great deal of the blogoshere and social media seems to attract rabid extremists and flat-out nutters. It just sounds mad.

Both theories can't be right. The Wisdom thesis seems to argue that the most active social media participants are reasoned and can fairly represent underlying populations, which is why crowdsourcing advocates argue they can be co-opted by marketing types to help develop and test products, ideas, messaging and so on. On the other hand, the Madness thesis argues that social media activists are just that – at best unrepresentative, at worst a herd led by extremists, zealots, and the marginal. If the Madness thesis is right, marketing types would interact with the social media Creators in a very different way. So, which thesis is correct?

Lets start by explaining crowdsourcing, which will require we look at some statistics and probability theory. Imagine you are faced with a question for which there are only two possible answers – say, who will win in an election, Democrats or Republicans. There are numerous factors that might determine the result, and any given individual will only have a partial understanding of those factors. Lets suppose that given all the factors people comprehend, that each individual has a 51% chance of being right in selecting the election winner. On this basis, if you were to ask one person for their pick, there's an about even chance they'd get it right – you might just as well flip a coin. However, ask 10,000 people for the answer, and the majority selection will be extremely accurate. The same statistical logic applies when you have complex problems with many possible answers, like the jelly beans in a jar problem, and you apply it to a group of smart 5^th graders who can make a well-reasoned guess. Ask enough 5^th graders, and the average answer you get will be weirdly close to the real jelly bean count. This is called the Condorcet Theorem, but here's the rub: if the individual group members are less than 50% likely to be correct in their selection, then as you increase the group size the probability that the answer will be correct starts to approach zero.

Condorcet has important implications for crowdsourcing. First, it explains the otherwise mystical ability of some crowds to make very good average guesses. Second, it suggests that we should never rely on the wisdom of a crowd if we know or suspect they are poorly informed or biased. In fact, these people will lead us away from the correct answer. At the very beginning of his book, Surowiecki gives a classic example of a crowd that is well informed and unbiased – attendees of a county fair guessing the weight of a cow. Can we say the same about Forrester's social media Creators?

I think there is some evidence to suggest that social media Creators are likely a self-selecting group of activists, passionate evangelists or committed detractors. The comments I get on my corporate blog or in response to an informal online survey are not going to be representative of the underlying population of all customers. Borrowing from Condorcet (and breaking with strict statistical logic), the opinions I see online are not going to approach some kind of truth – they are just as likely to head in the opposite direction. And the more people I interact with through social media, the more they may lead me astray.

Or at least that's the risk. Truth is, we don't know enough about social media mavens and we could do with some good research as a complement Forrester's Technographics.

We in marketing should be careful to understand who is active in social media – what is driving them, what motivates them, and to what extent they are outliers and unrepresentative of our target audiences.

Brand Identity

2010-02-12T14:23:00.000-08:00

There's a long history of corporate brands being strongly associated with people. Indeed, many corporation brands are eponyms: Ford, JP Morgan, Bloomberg, Kellogg, Johnson & Johnson. And many brands that don't bare the founder's name have nevertheless become very tightly aligned with a founder or with subsequent leadership: Oracle and Larry; Apple and Steve; even Ben and Jerry. Getting a brand wrapped up in the identity of a founder or CEO can have problems, as we've seen with the ailing Steve Jobs and with Microsoft post-Bill. When brand equity accrues to a human it needs to be carefully managed.

In the new world of social media, the tension between the corporate identity and individual identity is getting stronger. We're seeing it most in knowledge-based markets, where IP is often intrinsic to individuals. This has always been a dynamic in publishing and entertainment: several decades ago we saw this dramatically in the movie industry with the fall of the studio system and the rise of the cult of celebrity star or director. It's happening again in the news business with the rise of celebrity news anchors and the co-opting of personalities like Sarah Palin (I give her six months at Fox, but that's another story).

Social media has removed a significant communications barrier to creating the eponymous brand. Suddenly, anyone with half an idea can become well-known and command attention. This gets knowledge-based companies very jittery. Take Forrester Research, who recently got into trouble when it leaked that they'd put heavy restrictions on allowing their analysts to have personal blogs. They're not alone – most analyst firms have imposed some kind of restriction on blogging. From the company perspective, this is simply protecting their intellectual property; from the individual analyst's perspective, this is a muzzle on their rights to express themselves.
What's clear is that the constitution of corporate brands is changing. Increasingly, corporate brands will be made up from the brand identities of employees and management. This is a huge opportunity. Companies that can find a balance between promoting their leaders and innovators under a corporate banner have an opportunity to create a true 'company brand' that will have strength and definition as a collective. I hate sports analogies, but an obvious one exists here in the way sports teams define themselves.

Smart companies will start to foster individuals that can command a presence in the social media world. Done right, this will only help define the corporate brand. And increasingly, effective public relations will be about managing these individual brands as a whole. And smart agencies will see an opening here – how to craft a branded online profile for company executives.

The Price of Free

2009-12-16T09:48:00.000-08:00

One of the peculiar things about the software industry, and by extension the digital economy, is that the cost of manufacturing stuff is effectively zero. Once you've created one copy of a software application, MP3 file, online news story, or video, the cost of creating a million duplicates is close to nothing. This isn't true of any other industry I know, with the possible exception of financial services, where the commodity (but not the service itself) is also virtual.

This peculiarity can have strange consequences. Take the open source software model: the premise here is that an army of dedicated individuals can pool resources to create a piece of software they can all use and maintain with no license costs. The model presupposes large numbers and common interests, so works best on ubiquitous or commodity applications – web browsers, word processors, operating systems. (I'm writing this using OpenOffice running on Linux and the experience is faster, better and definitely cheaper than Word on Windows.) Stating the obvious, there's never going to be an open source car, or loaf of bread, or pair of socks; we could readily design one, possibly agree that it fits the needs of a very large number of users, but you'd then have to manufacture and ship it, so what's the point?

Open source works for another reason – producers are are also consumers. People that contribute to open source almost always have some self-interest as users of what they create. In fact, most contributions to major open source projects such as the Linux operating system are employed by companies that use it heavily or are engaged in offering it as a product with paid-for support services. This is communism as the dictionary originally defined it, put to the service of capitalism.

Over the last few years we've seen more and more of our lives get translated from our analog reality to the digital otherworld. In the process, there's been a huge shift in how we consume news and entertainment, and the peculiarity of 'no manufacturing costs' has come into play. Trouble is, most people conflate this with “free.”

At the heart of this debate is an argument often reduced to the aphorism “information wants to be free.” In the political sense we might all agree with this, but in the dollars-and-cents sense it's hard to see how this would work. In the dollars-and-cents sense, most useful information has a real cost. When a composer writes a tune, or a journalist a breaking news story, there's often considerable resources involved. It takes work, and inspiration, and training. Yet in much of the digital world today, the presupposition is that everything can and should be free. In a recent BBC interview the director Steven Soderbergh argued that this was an attack on the notion of the professional, something echoed by Nick Carr. In my view, free only makes sense when you have a model close to that of open source software – where consumers are also providers, which liberates information from having real ownership. Otherwise, you gotta pay if you want anything of real value.

Bloggers need an Ombudsman

2009-11-25T09:16:00.000-08:00

Ask any First Amendment lawyer and they'll tell you that the press have the right to be wrong. Journalists can and do make mistakes all the time, and in the vast majority of cases the usual recourse is to print a correction after the fact, usually unsatisfactorily buried somewhere at the back of the newspaper. But what happens when this isn't enough, when the law is broken, or when there's a disagreement about the facts of the issue?

Enter the Ombudsman. Almost all major daily newspaper and most magazines employ someone to act as a referee between the publication, its editors and reports, and external parties. The Ombud* works off a code of business ethics and the existing laws that protect against libel, slander and the like. They will vet a complaint and try and arrive at a fair outcome. They exist as a recognition that the mass media command a loud megaphone, and the subjects of which they write usually do not.

Often, the Ombudsman is trying to balance contradictory ethical and legal issues, such as with the New York Times' coverage of the Duke University rape case. Other times, they're dealing with issues that can seem entirely absurd, as with criticisms leveled by Fox News at producers of the kids show Sesame Street, which did a very funny parody of cable news shows, including Fox.

Ombudsmen exist in other walks of life too, including politics. Even the large industry analyst firms employ them. And if you blog at a reputable publication's website, the ombudsman will pay attention.

Many blogs now purport to be legit news outlets, and a lot live up to the billing. But to be credible, they need to be accountable – and most fail at this. And having the ability to post a comment at a blog does not in any way constitute a retraction or formal correction.

What bloggers need is an Ombudsman of their own. They need an independent third-party that will provide redress when bloggers get it wrong. Recent FTC rulings could be enforced, along with much broader issues about conflicts of interest. One approach would be to have someone like the Organization of News Ombudsman (ONO) take on the role, possibly by certifying blogs that they work with and providing an Ombudsman that could deal with complaints across their member bloggers.

Credibility is one of the hallmarks of great journalism, and independent bloggers will struggle to gain this level of trust with their readers until they are more accountable.

*(apparently a gender-neutral and politically correct reference, although to me it sounds like something you'd plant in your yard)

What's in a Name?

2009-10-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

Shakespeare clearly hadn't heard about branding. The name of a thing, be it a product, company or even a person, is seen by branding professionals a critical step in driving perception, value and success. Marketing consultancies make a lot of money devising names-as-brands, something that's been in my mind a lot lately: in my day job, we're sweating over the naming of some new products we're launching. Of course, the names of things matters outside the world of branding, and we marketeers can learn a lot here.

A few years back the author David Lodge wrote a wonderful essay about names in literature and how they can have either connotative or denotative meaning. To understand what he means here, think about the discount home goods chain “Lowes” (connotative of their pricing and value) and their arch-rivals Home Depot (denotative, it says what they are). In literature all names are fair game for manipulation. Dickens particularly understood how names drive character: think the diminutive, contracted “Pip” and and the frightening Miss Haversham from Great Expectations (saying “Haversham” out loud, one syllable at a time, will extract the connotation). Nabokov famously made his eponymous heroine's name physical: Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. J. K. Rowling has great fun with her magical names: Mad-Eye Moody, Severus Snape, Fudge, Malfoy. In fact, names are so powerful in fiction that their absence can be used to great dramatic effect, such as the unnamed narrator in Du Maurier's Rebecca or the man and boy of McCarthy's superb The Road.

So what about tech world naming? Intel and Oracle are two very different companies, but judged just on the intended connotation of their names they have the same lofty aspirations. Microsoft and IBM are contractions and acronyms, and take the say-what-we-do approach. Google, Amazon and Pandora all have obscure origins and associations, but you really wouldn't extract much meaning from the names by themselves. The current trend in tech company names is to murder ordinary words – Flickr, Digg and Zune are good examples – probably in an attempt to land a decent domain name and get a watertight trademark. TheNameInspector has a very good list of IT company names.

In my day job the chore is to avoid the three-letter-acronym (which of course has its own acronym, TLA) product naming trap. It's challenging, although I try to remember that Shakespeare probably did have it right, after all: If the product's any good, who cares what it's called? Meaning follows naming and there's no short-cuts to the laborious process of creating a real brand.

Are Gartner, Forrester and IDC like Moody's, Fitch and S&P?

2009-10-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

Word is, we're getting over the current recession and things are going to be just peachy any day now, so naturally it's time to name the guilty and hold them accountable for the fine mess they've gotten us into.

Who to blame? Rarely at the top of the list of black-hearted, no-good, fat-cat swindlers who made all our 401Ks vanish are the ratings agencies: Fitch Ratings, Standard & Poors, and Moody's. But they played a key part in the financial meltdown: these are the organizations that assign credit ratings on banks, companies and others that issue debt obligations such as a bond issued by the State of California or a mortgage-backed security issued by Lehman Brothers. The agencies got into all sorts of trouble this year because of an obvious conflict of interest: agency analysts are paid by the same firms they rate. There's a bunch of hearings going on where various ex-employees of the agencies are saying they had all sort of pressure placed on them to overestimate the worth of otherwise dodgy and unintelligible financial instruments like credit default swaps.

Hmmm.... conflict of interest by analysts paid by the firm they rate.... sound familiar?

Industry analysts the world over derive a good chunk of their revenues – in many cases all of their revenues – from the very technology firms they then write about. When Gartner rates vendors on a Magic Quadrant or Forrester does the same in a Wave, there's a good chance that the majority of the vendors they judge are paying clients.

For sure there's differences between industry analysts and the financial rating firms. First, for most industry analysts, fees paid by technology vendors aren't ear-marked specifically to fund a “ratings report”. Especially for the bigger analysts like Gartner, Forrester and IDC, any fees paid by vendors are for general access to written research and advisory services. Second, most reputable industry analysts have a strong account base among end-users of technology – most large companies around the world have subscriptions to industry analysts so that their IT staff can get informed opinions on products and services. This means that only a fraction of their overall revenues come from vendors – in the case of Gartner and Forrester, perhaps 30-35 percent. That said, a lot of smaller firms are almost entirely reliant on vendors subscription fees to be in business.

All this came to mind when I read Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman's excellent rant on how his integrity is often questioned. Bittman points out that in 14 years as an analyst he's never let vendors unduly influence his reports, although he says he “understands” why the marketplace has the impression that “analyst firms can be bought.”

Responding to Bittman, the good people at Sage Circle, an advisory firm for vendor analyst relations professionals, point out that you don't need to be a Gartner client to get a very strong rating, and that the correlation between payment and judgment is very poor. Shamus McGillicuddy at IT Knowledge Exchange points out the inherent conflicts analysts face when they take money from vendors and consumers.

The problem is that Bittman's argument is little different than the defense made by the ratings agencies. In both cases, no matter the integrity of individual analysts, there is the clear appearance of a conflict of interest. As Bittman himself states, the marketplace will always believe that it is harder to criticize a paying client than a non-paying one.

The ways Social Media is changing the news

2009-10-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

Stating the painfully obvious, social media is completely changing the way news is gathered and shared. It's also rewriting the economics of the news business. But because of social media, is news itself changing? In other words, is news new?

I can see some obvious ways that social media is changing the substance and character of the news:

Velocity – The news business has always been about first-to-market advantage. Getting the scoop and being first was always the goal, and social media is clearly a news accelerator. Social media makes all news almost instant.

Volume – a side effect of social media is that the shear amount of news that we get is becoming overwhelming. It is repetitive, overlapping, redundant, contradictory and endless.

Veracity – A recent Pew Research report showed ratings for press accuracy had hit a two-decade low. The straightforward factual accuracy of a lot of news – in fact, the paucity of anything approaching a fact in a lot of news reports – makes this finding unsurprising.

Validity – It's getting harder to take news at face value. It's difficult to know if a news source is always credible, and almost impossible to verify.

Value – the real dollars-and-cents value of a lot of news is plummeting, a victim of over-supply. The news market is saturated and the barriers to entry as a news source have fallen away.

What have I missed?

What if Marshall McLuhan was alive and on Twitter?

2009-09-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

Marshall's Diary Sept 19 2009

Dear Diary:

If anyone had really bothered to read any of my books and paid attention they'd know that so-called “social media” is (a) a disagreeable tautology and (b) my invention.

Just today I came across a new example of said social media, hideously described as a “new invention” (tautology!) and named, in typical twee fashion, Twitter. The chattering classes are now the twittering classes, and everyone is aflutter about how this is revolutionizing the way we communicate.

Reluctantly, I need to join the flock. I need to make it plain that if it wasn't for my genius, foresight and erudition we'd all still be licking stamps and twiddling the rabbit-ears on the tops of our television sets, or something like that. I'm the Global Village Guy, goddammit!

My start with Twitter was not auspicious. When I tried to register as “Marshall McLuhan” I discovered that a namesake had already taken my identity, complete with my photograph (not too bad, actually). The impostor has the gall to be quoting me as me (tautology?). I took this as a considerable affront, especially since some of the material wasn't exactly in context, if there is any context to be “in” on the Internet (Note to self: Is there a book in this idea? Maybe the OuterNet???).

I tried reaching the owners of Twitter to no avail (employees of Twitter are Twits, I presume, har-har). I later found out that when it comes to having an identity crisis I'm in very good company: also on Twitter is Albert Einstein (rambling), Charles Darwin (literally rambling, he seems to have restarted his journey on The Beagle), and even by good pal Marty Heidegger (who pretty much out-rambles anyone I know).

Anyway, after extensive clicking I discovered I was relegated to “MarshallMcLuhan2,” which is humiliating to say the very least. Now that I think about it, this Global Village thingy has a way of humbling you. All the world is within my reach and I feel as small as an ant.

But now to work. I need to regain myself. And most important, I have to set the record straight on why I nailed the whole social media thingy way back in 1960-something, before even The Beatles and when computers ran on rolls of paper just like my dear mother's Player Piano, and when newspapers actually made money. But I digress....

I thought a pithy first post might be this little zinger:

MarhsallMcLuhan2: In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.

Captures the whole idea nicely I think. Not too obvious, straightforward or dare I say it, even intelligible to anyone who hasn't pondered my opus for some considerable time. Then this happened:

MarshallMcLuhan2: In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms...

Turns out, Twitter assumes we all have an attention span of the average newt and limits posts to a meager 140 characters. A Dickens novel has more than 140 characters! “Existential angst” has 16 characters alone!

Crap. Ah, to hell with it:

MarshallMcLuhan2: The medium is the message.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself. Anybody moving into a new world loses identity...So loss of identity is something that happens in rapid change. But everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody. This is what's called the masked man. The masked man has no identity. He is so deeply involved in other people that he doesn't have any personal identity."
-- The real McLuhan, quoted in Forward Through The Rearview Mirror

Social media, the Associated Press, and row boats

2009-09-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

In the early 1800s most news came to America across the Atlantic aboard ships, and arrived weeks old. Old perhaps, but still valuable: news of wars, politics, and commerce commanded a price. Thus an enterprising newsman named Harry Blake, working for the Boston Courier, came up with a clever idea and began haunting the wharfs of Boston to scoop stories, eventually venturing out in a small boat to meet ships before they even berthed. Over time news organizations got competitive and began sending schooners as far as 200 miles out to sea to meet boats and get copies of newspapers and reports from sailors. By the late 1820s David Hale, who had recently taken over the failing New York-based Journal of Commerce, reinvented news gathering:

It will be a primary object to render the Journal a first rate commercial paper, worthy of the city. To this end an extensive correspondence will be maintained, the most ably conducted periodicals will be taken, and no pains nor expense will be spared to procure authentic reviews of the markets, prices current &c. It will be necessary to maintain a boat establishment for the collection of marine news; and this must be done at our individual cost, as the public and our establishment will be benefited by competition...

- Journal of Commerce, September 1, 1828

By setting out to sea Hale was able to gather information about European crop harvests, the prices of goods , the fortunes of nations, and a world of other information that could be traded on for profit. But he didn't stop there. In 1849 he pooled resources with several other newspapers and started running a boat and pony express network to quickly get news to New York from the inbound mail steamers that first docked in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This was the birth of the Associated Press.

Fast forward to 2009. RavenPack is a small New York-based company that “provides dynamically tagged news feeds and analytics that meet the accuracy and low latency requirements of today’s markets.” Translation: RavenPack's software automatically sifts through news to very quickly decide what a story is about, and whether it is positive or negative. “Very quickly” in this context means processing hundreds of stories a few thousandth of a second after their publication. RavenPack sells the system to financial companies who use it to help make trading decisions. The company claims that in 90 percent of cases the information they provide can be used to profitably decide which stocks to buy, sell or hold.

I'd argue there's very little difference between Harry Blake rowing across the Boston harbor and RavenPack racing through terabytes of data: they are both in pursuit of news, and they both understand the value of getting the scoop. From a strict news perspective, all that has changed is the technology, velocity and volume.

And when we think of social media, we should see it for what it is – an improvement over a row boat. Social media is just a new means of delivery.

The Influence Game

2009-08-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

Anyone working in IT knows the power and influence exerted by Gartner, Forrester, IDC and the rest: Industry analysts can create markets, shape buying behavior, and even determine the fate of entire companies. They have a direct and measurable impact on the way organizations and individuals buy and use technology, from ubiquitous consumer products to esoteric emerging technologies.

I'm employed by an enterprise software vendor, and working with the analyst community is a central element of our marketing mix. Analysts are uniquely positioned to provide a highly informed yet objective view of our ideas, strategy and product development plans. But more importantly, they also act as valued advisers and translators for consumers of information technology, aka our customers and prospects. And as a breed, analyst can be delightfully quirky individuals that are fun to know. (They can also be infuriating, pig-headed and far too enamored with themselves, but I digress...)

I've run AR programs for a handful of companies, and recently I inherited the AR brief in my current job. It's been a couple of years since I talked to analysts on a regular basis and it feels like the landscape has changed. If you've got experiences you can share – or resources you'd recommend – please get in touch.

Social Media Makes Money?

2009-08-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

A lot of people, including me, have made fretful bleating noises about the dismal economics of conventional media. Not so many have made the same bleats about social media, even though these businesses aren't exactly printing cash.

Just today the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube owner's Google are “aggressively pushing new ad formats and ramping up deals with media companies” in an attempt to make some money from the popular video site. Google acquired YouTube over three years ago and has struggled to make it pay.

Google isn't alone. In 2005 News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million, only to see the site's popularity wain as Facebook adoption exploded. Earlier this month News Corp. announced a quarterly loss of $205M, citing MySpace as a big cost-sink. Not that rival Facebook is exactly rolling in cash itself – the company hopes to get cash-flow positive by 2010, even as the number of subscribers spirals above 250 million. In March this year Facebook let go of its CFO, and in May sold stock at an evaluation well below the price Microsoft took when it bought into the company back in 2007. Meanwhile, the social media darling Twitter is enjoying a kind of celebrity and ubiquity that seems to eclipse even famous users Obama, Kutcher, and the Iranian nation state, yet the company has essentially zero revenue and is fumbling for a business model.

This is an enviable problem to have. As more and more of our lives drift into the ether, many of these companies are becoming invaluable. Most will find a way to extract payment – directly or indirectly – from us all. The usual default model – advertising – might well work, although I remain skeptical that over the long haul this alone will be enough. And without a doubt some of the social media giants of today will wilt and disappear: People are fickle, fads change, and the very success that many social media sites enjoy will make them less appealing to users who's time and attention become stretched thinner amid all the clutter and noise.

All these services are turning the Internet into a modern-day Babel. The real money may be in technologies that keep all this information at bay, and offer ways to filter, find, manage, and assimilate content, or mechanisms for presenting and preserving our digital indentities in a coherent and controlled way. We need protection. Social media services may not charge a dollar but they ain't free -- they cost us all way too much time.

Source Credibility

2009-08-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

At the end of last year Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, described the Internet as a “cesspool where false information thrives.” He advocated that “brands are the solution, not the problem.” While many saw great irony in Schmidt's comments, it's hard not to agree: most of what passes for information on the Internet is at best regurgitation, and much of the rest is vapid opinion or self-serving nonsense.

In the good old days, before said Internet, it was pretty easy to know who was saying what and why, and to form a reasonable opinion on how credible the information was. Back then, the media that mattered were massive, and they had a brand, and they had a certain credibility: ABC, New York Times, BBC, NewsWeek, NPR. They even had handy signposts to indicate when they strayed into overt opinion – the Editorial Page, for example – and they published retractions when they screwed up, which they did a lot. They had editors, even. And Ombudsmen. Really.

Now all that's shrinking away, and many say good riddance. We now have the wisdom of the crowd and we certainly have a more democratic media. Everyone has a voice. The problem is, we don't know who to believe and who to trust. As Peter Steiner cartooned it, “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.”

This isn't a new problem, it has just got a lot worse. Back when I was teaching Mass Comm classes it was labeled “source credibility” and was something academics studied and organizations strived towards. Public relations professionals aspired to be seen as wise, informed, trustworthy sources of news. Hack and Flacks traded on news as a commodity.

Today, the burden of being a credible source lies not with massive news organizations but has fallen back on the PR professional and the organizations they represent. This is where Schmidt has it right: more than ever before, PR is about brand preservation and about creating a voice for the brand that can be trusted. It is about providing valuable information. PR needs to assume many of the responsibilities that used to be the function of the mass media, and let the new social media do what they do best – express opinion and be a critic. To paraphrase Steiner, “On the Internet, everybody is a watchdog.”

Names

2009-04-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

Early settlers of the northeastern states must have been either homesick or very uninventive: they moved from England to New England, and named their settlements Boston, Cambridge, Dedham, Canton, and Milton, all old England towns they left behind. It's amazing many of these names survive, given the War of Independence -- wouldn't you think the victors would have renamed things like the Charles river, given the associations? It's the Saint Petersburg-Leningrad effect, or the reversion of Anglophone names like Bombay to the original Mumbai. None of this took hold in the former English colonies.

Sherborne in Dorset, England is a sleepy, picture-perfect village. Sherborn, MA was originally Boggastow, the native American name for the Charles. Today it's a leafy, wealthy suburb of Boston. And in June, it'll be my new home. I'm moving from Natick, named for the native American tribe of the area, the so-called Praying Indians. I have a Natick dictionary at home, transliterated from the Eliot Bible that was translated to the native language. There's a wonderful 1930s mural in the town Post Office showing the terrible persecution the Natick Indians endured. American history may be short, but it's complex.

Homeless

2009-04-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the worst recession in living memory, everyone told me that selling our suburban Boston house would be challenging: within four hours we had an offer over asking and within a day we had two more. We've just passed inspection and will close in June.

On the other hand, everyone also told us that it was a buyers' market and we'd have our choice of bargains. We missed our 'dream house' by hours, and after trolling the real estate market over the last week have no other prospects. Nothing. Our real estate agent says she's sold 5 homes in the last few weeks.

This is backwards.

Does the USA need a BBC?

2009-04-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

Most weeks I listen to the BBC podcast of From Our Own Correspondent, a series of dispatches from their reporters around the world. The show was first broadcast in 1955 and growing up in England I used to listen to it every week on the radio with my Dad. Later, when I traveled in Asia, it was a great thrill to tune-in on shortwave to the BBC World Service and hear the same show in Burma, Nepal, or Thailand.

Recently I've listened to a BBC reporter recount giving evidence at the Hague against war criminals in Kosovo, and another from Madagascar talking about a simmering civil war. In the last few weeks journalists have joked about jokes being banned in Morocco and the bewildering experience of taking a very sick child to a U.S. hospital. The reporting is uniformly excellent.

Meanwhile, US journalism is falling apart. The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer are in bankruptcy, as is the Tribune Group. Denver's Rocky Mountain News and the Christian Science Monitor closed, and the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe are both at risk of closing soon too. The New York Times, saddled with enormous debt, had to borrow even more money to stay afloat. Along with all this, most newsrooms are shedding hundreds of jobs: 200 at the Miami Herald, 150 at the Atlanta Journal, 90 at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, is being asked to find $20M is savings but even this won't make it a profitable enterprise. The economics of conventional print journalism nolonger work: most major newspapers loose money. The Gannet News group, which owns the nation's largest circulation daily USA Today, recently saw revenues decline 50 percent in 2008. The online model can't sustain labor-intensive news gathering, and other ideas for creating a sustainable business model sound, at best, far-fetched.

All this might be good for the environment (newsprint consumption is down from an estimated 12 million tons in the 1990s to about 7 million tons now), but it's terrible for everything else. At the risk of sounding like I'm hyperventilating, this is terrible for democracy.

Will online media take up the slack? Some think it's perfectly fine for the dead tree publishing business to die, arguing that the new openness and community-driven nature of online news will create a more democratic, more participatory journalism. Others disagree. David Simon (best known as the writer behind The Wire and other TV shows, but also a longtime Baltimore reporter and author of the excellent Homicide), sees conventional beat reporting dying, and not being replaced. Nick Carr, in a blog post titled “The amorality of Web 2.0”, talks about the cult of the amateur:

"The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media." Here's O'Reilly: "While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls 'we, the media,' a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."

Some people see the wisdom of the crowd, others see the madness of the mob. I don't think there's any doubt that so-called new media is not a like-for-like replacement of old media. It is different, and it is probably poorer. In the first place it is largely parasitic: it feasts on news from other places, rarely creating anything truly new, never mind newsworthy, itself. It is opinion-driven. It narrowcasts. Much of it lives off esoterica, or thrives in an echo-chamber of point-counterpoint with no end, and with very little purpose. In encourages specialization, which can quickly slide into division. It plays to the home crowd, the convert, the zealot.

Or at least it can seem this way.

So, what's the solution? My premise is that good journalism is a civic necessity, and it's a view shared my many countries. The British Broadcasting Corporation is funded by a tax on all television sets, and is essentially a government-run entity. The Brits aren't alone: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are the same. These non-commercial public broadcasters aspire to lofty goals; the BBC's royal charter includes “sustaining citizenship and civil society.” The BEEB runs several televison channels, a handful of national radio stations, and a multilingual website that is one of the most trafficked in the world.

The idea of taxpayer-funded journalism may seem entirely un-American. But as I watch US journalism collapse, I wonder if it isn't time the USA had a BBC.

Selling a house and a home

2009-04-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

A few month's back we decided to sell our old Victorian house in Natick, MA. It was a tough call; we bought the place as a renovation project 8 years ago and have spent a lot of time and energy bringing it into the 21st Century. A while back we pulled the deed history and found that only 3 other people had owned the place before us, and the house was built in about 1885. It still has most of the original features, and every time we pull a wall down we unearth layer upon layer of old wallpaper over the horse hair plaster. In the back yard we've dug up old patent medicine bottle from the 1890s. It's a great old house and I'll miss it.

If you know anyone that's looking to move to the western suburbs of Boston, here's the link.

email@twentythousandfeet.com

2009-03-10T07:33:00.000-07:00

This is old news but a first for me: I'm writing this at about 20,000 feet somewhere over Ohio, on my way to SF. The Virgin Atlantic plane has the same smell as my new car, and comes with wireless for $13.

Maybe I'm a Luddite, but I preferred the wireless world of flight and the tranquil sanctuary of six uninterrupted hours in a window seat with a good book. Oh well, back to email...

John Mortimer

2009-01-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

Growing up in England I was a big fan of John Mortimer, who died today at 85. Most people know him through the Rumpole TV shows, but he also wrote some great books -- Voyage Round my Father and Clinging to the Wreckage being two examples. He was an erudite, upper-class lefty who hated Thatcher and as a barrister defended obscenity cases brought against the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover and later the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks album. He once said "I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print."

Sentimental Software

2008-12-09T14:45:00.000-08:00

Software generally isn't sentimental.

Ask a software program to find everything on the Web that talks about Barack Obama or Flat Panel TVs or Interocitors and it does pretty well. It doesn't matter how simple or obscure, how abundant or scarce, computers are very good at finding stuff.

However, ask a software program to find everything on the Web that says nice things about Obama, TVs or Interocitors and the program gets queasy and confused and apparently random in how it responds. Humans may understand nice, nasty and neutral in astonishing detail, and pick up on the slightest nuance in how things are expressed, but computers don't. We understand plain spoken feelings, we laugh at a joke, we grok sarcasm. Said another way, humans feel things, computers can't.

Lots of people have tried to make computers more sensitive creatures by writing elaborate programs that attempt to disentangle the tone of what humans write. They usually start by trying to get computers to understand written expression in the way we do, grammatically, syntactically and lexically. It's tricky. Stuff my three year-old understands in I Love You, Goodnight might be obvious to most software programs that try and detect tone, but my nine year-olds' Harry Potter would be a real stretch. And my New York Times would bamboozle most sentiment detection systems a lot of the time.

A lot of people are working on this problem, because there's a lot of commercial applications (Wikipedia has a nice summary of the technology, the business potential and some of the companies that are trying to solve this problem). It has great potential in automated trading applications, brand management, PR, politics... the list is long. Today, automated tone or sentiment detection is often built into media monitoring systems, but most companies selling these products acknowledge the results can be erratic and instead rely on human readers -- now there's a really, really interesting job . In my day job, I'd love an application that could accurately assess the nice-nasty-neutral tone of the stories my company gets. And I have to believe there's a great start-up opportunity in this space, especially serving some vertical market sectors.

If anyone knows of good sentiment detection software, let me know.

Obama in Hong Kong

2008-11-05T05:55:00.000-08:00

Newspaper headline in Hong Kong daily: America Changes Color, next to a picture of Lincoln on the left and Obama on the right.

Living another man's dream

2008-11-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

I'm in Hong Kong this week with work, the first time I've been here in over 20 years, and all eyes are on the US.

On Nathan Road and in Central they're selling Obama t-shirts, and the local papers are filled with the rich prospect of not if he'll become president, but what he'll do when he gets the office. No more White House is a joke I heard on the Star Ferry.

He's living another man's dream, voiced over 45 years ago. Just when you completely loose faith in American politics and values, this happens. If it wasn't for an exquisite confluence of events it would never have happened at all, but it is happening and I never thought it would. Amazing.

If this doesn't get Obama elected, nothing will

2008-09-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

CNN Money: Biggest Government Bailout in History.

PR Measurement is giving me a headache...

2008-09-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

I've spent most of my career in marketing and lately have been concentrating on PR, which I manage for a publicly-traded company.

To say that PR and the media business have changed in the last few years is a bit like saying Bill Gates is comfortably well-off, or Neil Armstrong is a seasoned traveler, or Sarah Palin is low key; it's really hard to overstate the turmoil in the media business, and as a consequence the upheavals in PR (for a great take on how this has impacted tech publishing, see Tom Steinert-Thelkeld's blog).

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the media measurement business. I'm old enough to remember when clips really were clips: pieces of newsprint cut-out from a magazine or newspaper by some exceedingly patient, far-off reader, then painstakingly collated, annotated and mailed to me in a big bulging brown envelope. Today, almost all the news is online and much of it doesn't come from a traditional news outlet, yet most media metrics and coverage monitoring still function as if in an ink-smudged era.

For sure there's a bunch of new companies that have addressed the new media reality, and focused on social networks and brand management: Biz360, Cymfony, BuzzLogic, Vocus and RatePoint are some examples. They all essentially follow the same formula of aggregating digital news using some kind of search and filter system (you can still get the pieces of paper if you need them, but each little clip will cost you more than the newsstand price of the whole publication). The algorithms at the heart of these systems are usually based on fixed keywords (company name, ticker symbol, product names, etc.) then some additional processing based on either rudimentary rules of grammar and syntax or or a series of logical operations, and is often called natural language processing (NLP), since it tries to emulate how humans read and understand text. The results, based on my limited experiences, range from the amazing to the bizarre, and most systems need human intervention to get at subtle things like tone.

In an attempt to add value and differentiate themselves from free services like Google News, these companies also have a vast array of reports and dashboards that slice and dice data to show share-of-voice, on target messaging, competitive coverage, salience and on and on. Again, result may vary from those advertised...

Pricing does not seem to vary much: all cater to a similar audience of complex multinationals, usually in the financial services, pharma, or legal businesses, and costs are high. Or at least they seem high to me.

This complexity has spawned a lot of blogs. K.D. Paines is excellent on PR measurement, although recent posts suggest a level of complexity in getting truly comprehensive metrics that is daunting and might account for the high costs. Ed Moed has a lot of good stuff to say, too (although Ed, I think “What's so funny...” was written by Nick Lowe), and intelligent measurement has a lot to say about social media.

But at the end of the day I get a headache. It should be easy. It should be straightforward. It should be inexpensive. And it isn't. If anyone has ideas on how to crack the PR measurement problem, let me know.

Novel Novels

2008-08-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

In 2007 there were a staggering 50,071 new works of fiction published in the US, or about a book every 30 minutes. This reminded me of the famous Kurt Vonnegut quip that there’s really only two plotlines in existence – ‘man falls in hole’, and ‘boy meets girl’ – which if he’s right would make for an awful lot of repetition.

More than anything else this might account for the increasing, willful absurdity of a lot of modern fiction. Even in the last few years we’ve had books narrated by a murder victim (Lovely Bones) and an autistic teenager (The Curious case of the Dog at Night Time), both very successful, and both upending ideas of the ‘unreliable narrator.’

All of this came to mind as I read for the first time Nabakov’s excellent Pale Fire, published back in 1962. It’s a great example of a novel novel: a twisty tale masquerading as a definitive, annotated edition of the last work of a (fictional) famous poet. I guess Nabakov was teaching at the time at Cornell, and he has great fun skewing academics and the academic interpretation of literature. The poem of the title, which is at the heart of the book, alternates between gorgeous, haunting imagery and great jokes, and the daft annotations that follow are laugh-out-loud, like Lolita. I feel I’m missing 90 percent of the references, but this is still one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

Not many writers can pull-off literary tricks like Pale Fire, but here are a few other novel novels that derive a lot of impact from pulling apart the conventional narrative structure.

Time’s Arrow is probably Martin Amis’ best book, and mostly overlooked. It starts from an end, and end with a beginning: the books is entirely in reverse, following the death to birth passage of a man’s life, a Nazi war criminal who from old age moves back through youth and to Germany, where in a concentration camp he brings back to life millions of Jews. The book works in a lot of different ways, not least as a comment on redemption and atonement.

Vikram Seth, like Amis, was the golden boy of literature for a while, and wrote Golden Gate just before the fame hit. The whole novel, set in contemporary San Francisco, is written in iambic pentameter. At one point midway through the book Seth breaks down the “fourth wall” and directly addresses the reader – not as some postmodern trick, but out of exasperation with having to invent more plot with the right meter.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell got raves in the UK but far less adulation in the US. Some of the criticism has merit, but this book is still wonderful. Here the multiple narrators begin their tales then suddenly switch mid-sentence, and the six stories are dovetailed together in an ascending and descending sequence, each written is a distinctive style and voice that is utterly convincing.

And lastly, I read the latest Bond opus, Devil May Care, written by Sebastien Faulks writing as Ian Fleming. This is a hoot, and Faulks really is writing as Fleming here – pitch perfect, sexist, racist, and with a subtly subversive plot perfectly preserved in some early 1960s world that never really existed at all.

Skin Deep Politics

2008-07-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

American politics can often appear shallow, but who would have thought it was only skin deep.

Last week the New York Times, in conjunction with CBS News, published their latest poll on the US presidential race. And Oh, what a shock:

After years of growing political polarization, much of the divide in American politics is partisan. But Americans’ perceptions of the fall presidential election between Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, also underlined the racial discord that the poll found. More than 80 percent of black voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama; about 30 percent of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of him.

On the other side, about 35% of whites have a positive opinion of McCain, compared to only 5% of blacks. Layer on this more research showing that about 30% of Americans admit to feelings of racial bias.

Then this week John McCain, who has a history of melanoma, announced that he's had a spot removed from his face, which is undergoing further testing. In a speech yesterday, McCain urged all Americans to use sunscreen and stay out of the sun if possible.

Both presumptive candidates have skin in the election game, literally. For one, it is about race, and for the other, age.

National Insanity

2008-07-01T05:43:00.000-07:00

In 1790 the population of what is now the USA was about 3.9 million, or 41/2 people per square mile of settled territories. About 2.3 million were immigrants, and about 20% of that population was African (but rising to 43% in slave states like South Carolina). Indigenous native Americans still represented a substantial part of the population, mostly in the west. The life expectancy at birth was less than 40 years. Possessions of colonists were few, but in a study of estate records from the time, as high as 70% of households had a firearm, compared to only 25% who owned a Bible. Most guns had a flintlock mechanism for firing, and required hand-loading with shot and powder.

In 2008 the population of the USA is about 301 million, or about 85 people per square mile. Almost all the population are descendants of immigrants, and about 16% are African American. The native American population has all but vanished. Life expectancy at birth is well over 70 years. Possessions are many, with about 35% of households reporting owning a gun and as high as 90% owning a Bible. There are something close to 200 million licensed firearms in the US (households with firearms typically own more than one), of which about 65 million are handguns capable of carrying up to 10 rounds that can each be fired in quick succession.

At the end of 1791 the Second Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified providing a right to bear arms. This last week the Supreme Court decided that the amendment provided individuals with these rights, and made it very difficult for states to pass legislation limiting the ability to own and carry guns.

I'm not expert on American political democracy, and as a Brit I'm more familiar with the parliamentary process and common law (we have no constitution providing fundamental rights and obligations). And the idea of enshrining 'unalienable rights' for the individual seems very American to me. All that said, has nobody noticed that things have changed around here??? At what point do you acknowledge that laws passed hundreds of years ago are irrelevant and need to be reexamined?

There are a lot of complex arguments about this issue, and there's a mountain of research that provides supporting evidence for all sides. But take this, from an NRA-sponsored report:

The United States has the highest male teen homicide rate in the industrialized world (23.0 per 100,00 among males aged 15 to 19 in 1996). A 1997 study that compared firearm death rates in 26 industrialized countries among children less than 15 years old found that the firearms homicide rate among U.S. children was nearly 16 times higher than the rate among children in the other 25 industrialized countries combined.32 In 1996 the rate of firearms homicide was highest among males aged 20 to 24 (30.3 per 100,0000)—more than five times the firearms homicide rate for all Americans (6.0 per 100,000).

What typically follows in any debate about the facts above is largely abstract, and centers on ideas of individual liberty. This is a national insanity. The focus of the debate on guns should not be on any sense of individual right, and we should instead be pouring all our resources into creating and enforcing strong federal laws that seriously limit access to all firearms. Because I'm sick of reading things like this. And this. And this.

The New Frugalist

2008-06-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

Although England has a reputation for heritage and retrospection, judging by the national daily papers it's pretty enthralled by fad and fancy too. When I was in the UK last week I tried to read a couple of papers a day, and they were filled with the usual blink-and-you-miss-it celebrity froth, pop-culture impulse and political nonsense.

One thing did catch my eye – the new Frugalism. I say “new” Frugalism because the idea has been talked about a long time before now, in the context of Victorian industrial economics. But according to the Independent, today's Frugalist is motivated by more complex concerns. This is a blend of economic imperatives, green values, and a desire for a simpler, less consumer-centric life. It seems to me that it's the economics that is really new – with oil pushing $140 a barrel, with global food shortages, and with globalization accelerating, Frugalism may simply be a new way of expressing a modest, middle-class discomfort in the wallet, while for others it's a more brutal slide into poverty. I also think it's an expression of anti-globalism, and a falling back on regionalism: when you can't afford to travel, or to ship things long distances, it encourages a natural set of parochial values.

Around the same time in the same newspaper I read an excellent article by Rupert Cornwell about the implications of the oil crisis on the American way of life. One thing that strikes visitors to the US is how much the car is king, and how a sprawling suburban life is fuelled by cheap gas and endless miles of highway. Car culture is real and engrained, and is central to everything from urban planning to entertainment. All this could crash pretty soon.

Frugalism may just be another fad. But it could also be the first wave of post-consumerism.

London

2008-06-16T06:56:00.000-07:00

I've just got back from a week in England, mostly for work but also a couple of days of visiting family in London and Newcastle.
I arrived in London on a gorgeous sunny day, and the city shone. I took a long walk from the Edgware Road through Hyde Park and over to the West End and Soho to see Ralph Fiennes in God of Carnage, then walked down Shaftsbury Avenue, through Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to the river (Flickr updates to follow). The whole city was alive, vibrant. I loved it.

Tuned Out

2008-06-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

There was a time that I'd go listen to live music any chance I got -- these days, I rarely have the time or, I confess, the inclination. Sadly, this is more a reflection of my age than of the quality of music being played, but might also reflect the changing digital dynamics of the music biz.

I went to see the Raconteurs this week in Boston, a band dubbed oxymoronically an 'alternative supergroup'. An uneasy spotlight fell on Jack White, with the rest of the band playing second fiddle to his manic guitar. The Raconteurs new release has got a lot of press for the music, but just as much because it's a pressing on vinyl. For White, it's the tangibility of the object, in the sleeve, and the experience of playing a two-part story in music. White's music sensibilities hark back to the blues, punk, and an era when singles and albums formatted songs acoustically and physically. An album could hold about 30 minutes of music a side, a single maybe 7 minutes, and this condensed things. And albums tracks, the artwork, gave a new release an indentity that a CD or MP3 download can't get.

Before the Raconteurs, the last music I went to hear was Elvis Costello at a small club in Boston, where he played a long retrospective set interspersed with covers ranging from Bacharach to The Beatles. He's just released a new album, Momofuku, that is also on vinyl, but even the CD has a "side one and side two" listing of the tracks, which he recorded in a low-fi studio in a couple of weeks.

Costello and White are looking back for a lot of reasons, and I suspect one of them is a hankering for a time when music mattered, especially live music. The digital economics of the music industry are a mess, but it's also turned music into an solitary ibudded experience. It's a shame, because seeing White belt-out guitar solos, hearing Costello scream The Beatles' "Hey Bulldog", it's what it's all about.

LSD RIP

2008-04-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

You may not have heard of Albert Hoffmann, but without him Lennon & McCartney would never have written Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Timothy Leary would be unknown, and a lot of bad art and incomprehensible poetry would never have seen the light of day.

Hoffmann was the chemist who first synthesised LSD, in 1943, and died this week at age 102, suggesting acid may not have the life-threatening impact we'd imagined. He didn't just discover the drug, he was also the first to (accidentally) ingest it. The resulting trip led him to believe that acid could help with psychosis and an understanding of how the brain works, all of which echoed Freud's earlier hopes about cocaine. Both got it exactly wrong, but if you've ever read Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception or anything about Synesthesia you wonder about how much the world you and I perceive is anything like the world others see, hear, or smell, and how fluctuating and subjective things are.

Snap on Schmap

2008-04-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

My HDR photographs just get worse, but Schmap.com picked one of my pictures from a trip to the Boston Harbor National Park for its guide to Boston.

HDR Photography

2008-04-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

I started using Flickr last year and while cruising photographs of my home town Newcastle Upon Tyne came across some startling pictures of the quayside. The detail in the pictures was amazing; rich blue sky with tendrilled vapor clouds, and yet the details in the shadows of buildings was just as rich, giving the impression you could see every individual brick.

It turned out they'd been shot using high dynamic range imaging, something that's been around for a few years but somehow I'd missed. There's a bunch of different groups on Flickr: the main HDR group has over 20,000 members and more than 120,000 pictures. There's many others, and this group has a collection of winning pictures voted on by Flickr members. Some landscapes can we startling, like this picture taken in Germany, others looks entirely unreal.

Pete Carr has a great beginners guide on HDR that uses Photomatix software to create the HDR image and do the tonemapping. Ryan McGinnis has a nice post too. There's other software you can use - Panotools has a nice wiki summary. I downloaded the free trial of Photomatix and have produced a couple of images - terrible, but you can see the potential. I've set my Nikon D50 to bracket at +/-2EV and used the three images to generate the HDR. I also had to lock the ISO rating at 200 (the lowest setting), and now realise I'll have to work in apeture priority mode to get around depth-of-field issues. Even at ISO 200 I can see noise artifacts, and Photomatix can quickly generate its own artifacts as you adjust settings. But even at default settings the resulting image has amazing tonal depth.

If anyone has advice on software, techniques or how to get the best results with HDR let me know.

PR for PR

2008-03-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Puerto Rico - it was awesome. We stayed with friends at the Copamarina Resort near Guanica, in the south of the island. You can read my review here, and see pictures at Flickr.

Citizenship

2008-02-13T13:45:00.000-08:00

Although I was born in England, I've lived most of my adult life in the US, but never as a citizen: I'm a Legal Permanent Resident with a 'green card', married to a US national. Last week, after a decade of internal debate, I made the decision to start the citizenship process.

Why? You can blame Obama, Clinton, McCain and the rest - the primaries have mostly infuriated me, but they've also made me realize that I can't be a passive critic anymore. And last weekend I found myself outside the local post office encouraging people to vote for a tax override to fund the school system - and I couldn't even vote myself. And my eldest daughter has dual citizenship, but my youngest is just a Yank. And so on...

So I visited the INS website and downloaded the mammoth forms I need to complete. It all reminded me of my original application for permanant resident status over 20 years ago: I was surprised they still asked "if you are, or have ever been, a member of a communist party." Seem a little anachronistic to you?

I also discovered I need to get a move on. I want to vote in the election this year, but I've been told the process can take 6 months to complete. And cost $600. And I have to pass a test.

I'll keep you posted on my progress - and let me know if you've experienced this firsthand.

Heathrow Sucks

2008-02-05T03:15:00.000-08:00

I'm traveling in the UK this week and despite my best attempts I'm flying through Heathrow thrice.

I agree with many others - Heathrow pretty much sucks. Too big, too busy, and too disorganized. Even the bits that work well, like the train shuttle to Paddington in central London, doesn't really make traveling easier. Paddington connects with the London Underground, where you quickly grind to a dimly-lit halt somewhere short of Kings Cross.

I'm so glad I don't commute in London anymore.

Murder Plots

2008-02-01T05:53:00.000-08:00

Last entry I ranted about the hapless New York Times' reports on the murder rates among Iraq veterans, and about the overall murder rate in the US.

All of which brought me to the NationMaster website, which collects national statistics on everything from population density to levels of happiness. On the murder front, they rank the US at #24, far and away the leader among western democracies. They also show what correlates with the national murder rates of all countries, implying that abortion, oil wealth, and early mortality are all associated with murder. Now pointing out that early mortality is linked to murder might be the same as pointing out that a lack of food is related to starvation, but the rest is worth review.

Correlation is not causation, of course. To say that murder and oil wealth are positively correlated, simply means that they vary together: as overall oil wealth rises, so often does the murder rate. There’s no way to know if either one causes the other to occur, or if there is actually no causal relationship. For example, it’s entirely possible that some underlying third variable is ‘causing’ both these variables to change. And there’s no guarantee that the correlation infers a linear relationship between the two variables – they could easily have a much more complex relationship. Isolating two things and seeing how they work together is interesting but usually artificial, and ignores the complexity of real life.

Then there’s the whole problem of measurement. How do you get a uniform reporting of “murder” across nations as diverse as India, Columbia and France? And Abortion? Looking at these correlations, you begin to wonder how much is masked, and how much measures of abortion, education, life expectancy, and female literacy are surrogates for a measure of oppression, poverty, and division, things far harder to quantify.

Dead Data

2008-01-21T18:58:00.000-08:00

I usually find myself sympathetic to the editorial content of The New York Times (The paper's politics are only slight left of dead-center, but in the US this passes for radical), so when I read the recent series of articles about how Iraq war veterans are committing killings I was initially shocked.

The series began will detailed counts of recorded killings committed by Iraq veterans who'd returned to the US, and many of them were profoundly tragic. But as the articles wore on, I kept asking myself -- what evidence suggests that the rate of fatal crimes among returning military is any worse that other groups in the US? Our fair-minded friends at MAF ran the numbers, and found the murder rate by Vets is lower than the national average by a wide margin. The Times had narrowly discussed the Vet murder rate in terms of year-on-year growth, an alarming number for sure, but hardly noteworthy when compared to the frenzied killings committed year after year by the general public.

The Right has rightly raked the NYTs over the political coals. Too bad, because the bigger issue the NYT raised is the terrible treatment many vets receive on their return to civilian life. We've all seen the reports about poor medical treatment, but the care of mentally scared Vets is no better.

Even worse, no real analysis is offered of how absurdly high the US murder rate is. In the international league or murderers, the US ranks 24th (for the curious, Columbia, Jamaica and South Africa top the list). Mexico and Russia offer good competition, but the next nearest first-world, western democracy in #33 Portugal with a murder rate almost half that of the United States. All this is an old saw debate, but it's also a national insanity that reasonable gun control laws can't be passed. The aforelinked NationMaster website also has a bunch of stats on what correlates with murder rates - wonderful and potentially misleading stuff that I'll look at later.

HNY

2008-01-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

My company, probably for tax reasons rather than anything altruistic, shuts down over Christmas week, so I enjoyed an enforced but welcome break. I took the opportunity to read, and got lucky with two books – Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which came out in 2001 and won all sorts of awards, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was similarly lauded in 2006.

Two very good and very different books – John Updike said that Atonement could not have been written by an American, and the reverse could be said of The Road – it felt absolutely American in style, tone, and narrative.

The Road, a post-apocalyptic story that defines ‘bleak’, may not be the kind of book to read at Christmas by the fire, but it has stayed with me. A lot's been said about McCarthy’s style, which is perfectly suited to the terminal, desolate world he creates. For no reason I can think of it reminded me of Steinbeck.

Atonement has all the trappings, at least initially, of a classic English novel: the old mansion house, an off-kilter family of wealth and connection, the extended cast of servants, cousins, village folk. McEwan keeps the romantic story moving, but the novel slowly departs from the E.M, Forster-ish origin, as stories become embedded in stories. The way he decomposes the whole novel-narrative felt a bit like the way Fowles worked in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but his redemptive intentions are very different.

Both great reads. Happy New Year.

Retail Values

2007-12-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve just started reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with my 8 year-old: she stumbles over the Victorian locutions, but she’s enthralled by Marley, Scrooge, and that wonderful, enveloping atmosphere that Dickens created.

We’ve come a long way since 1843, when Dickens wrote his morality tale and in many ways reestablished what “Christmas values” should be. The grinding poverty that existed in Dickensian London and elsewhere, which Dickens experienced personally during his time in the blacking factory when his father was in debtors prison, has largely vanished. At least, from the western world.

You have to wonder what CD would think about the modern, commercial enterprise that is our Xmas, Dickens’ ‘Christmas Yet To Come’. In an earlier post I talked about how Orwell’s message still resonates when we read about modern-day Burma, and there’s a parallel with Dickens and the retail values we express during a celebration like Christmas.

Negative Brand Equity

2007-11-27T12:12:00.000-08:00

In my last post I picked an easy fight with WalMart and their crappy PR. A lot of others joined in the fun, from Mother Jones to The LA Times.

I argued that this is a moral failing, not a PR blunder. And so it may be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be quantified as a costly business mistake, and measured in terms a stock holder would understand outside of any wishy-washy ethical dimension.

Brand equity, so we’re told, is the net gain a branded entity brings to an organization, compared with an unbranded counterpart. In other words, what is a punter prepared to pay for a branded product, above and beyond the price of a competitive product/service of roughly equivalent function? An iPod costs a lot more than an equivalent generic mp3 player, and the difference is seen to be accrued brand value or equity.

In theory, brand equity cannot be negative, or so says Wikipedia. Some disagree, including me. The problem is brand equity is a fuzzy concept that’s very hard to really quantify.

In contrast, good and bad publicity is getting easier to measure, because most media is now available online, and search technologies exist that can give a reasonable indication of subjective content. Such a media barometer could be a strong tool to ascertain true PR equity, especially if we link this to other tangible measures of business health – say a company’s stock price. A clear correlation between the two would be a strong weapon for PR professionals.

Academics have worked on this already. At an extreme, Rao and Hamilton have shown a clear correlation between unethical (read quasi-illegal) behavior and stock indicators, but you’d expect this because the behavior is very likely to have direct financial consequences – lawsuits, and so on. The Phelps Group, an integrated marketing agency, looked at the wider literature and found studies that showed less than 10% of a stock value was accounted for by brand equity. A boatload of methodological issues go along with all this research, but they’re a start. There’s probably more studies I’ve missed, let me know if you’ve seen some.

The value of PR?

2007-11-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

Over the last year of so Walmart has gone from being a Wall Street darling to the embodiment of everything that is bad about Big Business. Alright, so maybe I'm overstating things, but their reputation has been keeping good pace with their sinking stock price, and they seem to take every opportunity to accelerate the decline.

Case in point: Today's Wall Street Journal ran a nasty cover story on the preditory practices of healthcare providers who increasingly are suing accident victims for access to their legal damages settlements. They led with the case of woman hit by a truck who barely made it out of intensive care, and who eventually won a settlement only to be sued by... you guessed it, her employer Walmart. They wanted to recoup the $440k+ they'd paid out in insurance coverage.

Now legally, there's no doubt that Walmart and their healthcare provider have a right to the cash. But ethically, morally? And if they have no ethics, don't they think through the ramifications and cost to their business? They're approaching the retail holiday bonanza with PR that is beyond bad, that will drive off shoppers in droves, and which shows Olympic levels of business stupidity.

Given my profession it would be easy for me to label this a public relations failure, but it really isn't: This is a moral failure that has PR consequences. The Walmart spokesperson rightly stated that they have to protect the interests of all their healthcare plan members and their investors, a stock answer in every sense that displays no sense of proportion, probity, anything.

Maybe this argues for a moral dimension to PR, or is this oxymoronic (or just plain moronic) ?

The chicken was first

2007-11-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you bump into a website and rediscover why it's called the World Wide Web, and why it's cool. Ask500People is a relatively simple mashup/social computing site, but it's oceans of fun. Ask a (relatively) random sample of 500 people anywhere in the world a simple question, any question, and see the answers stream in real-time, with location information and voting patterns. Is Hillary going to win? Ever smoked hash? Is marriage archiac? Can you calculate the mean of these five numbers?

And it's official: the chicken came first, but only just.

What are we talking about?

2007-11-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

A while back I blogged about Adoption of Innovation research, and I’ve also talked about how blogs might generously be described to have a symbiotic relationship with conventional media, and uncharitably be described as vampiric.

Back in the day when I studied this stuff, one of the few theories that seemed to have merit was Agenda Setting theory. The theory is oft summarized with the axiom “the media may not tell people what to think, but they do tell people what to think about.” The theory goes that media outlets focus on an agenda of items that are considered newsworthy – these can be enduring news values, or specific news events. For example, proximity is an enduring news value – the closer the ‘news” is to the reader, the more newsworthy it becomes (hence, as happened with The New York Times some years back, a front page story might describe a local car crash where a dozen people died, while buried on page three is a squib about a train wreck in India with over 300 casualties). A specific news ‘event’ might be immigration, or avian flu, or the lead in children’s toys, to name a few of the moment.

There have been mountains of research to show that there is a causal relationship between people’s agendas and what the media is highlighting. This is one reason why politicians are always trying to create an agenda that favors their views or corners their competitors.

Agenda Setting works when you have a fairly monolithic media, with a few controlling interests commanding considerable public reach: This was the case pre-Internet, but has rapidly eroded. Today, most people get their news from many sources, not just their local paper. Today we have blogs.

Does this change anything? Probably, and possibly not for the better. Journalism.org reported that when the mainstream media focused on Iraq and immigration, the alternative media focused on iPhones and game consuls. Blogs do the same thing, as I noted in a past post where nerd-level subjects like Web 2.0 outdo mainstream discussions of President Bush.

Tobias Escher at the OII is doing research in this area, as has Kaye Sweetser and colleagues: Early days, but blogs seems to have some influence on overall news agendas. The effect seems to be indirect – again, an amplification process, rather than establishing agendas.

Blogs exist in subcultures – narrow, divisive, tribal, and often contumacious. They accentuate some abiding news values and usually have a very narrow agenda of interest. In this sense, blogs represent the opposite of mass media – the media of division.

1984 Circa 2007

2007-10-22T06:42:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in a past post how Christopher Hitchens, the author of Why Orwell Matters, claimed in an interview that sales of Orwell's books always rise in times of strife and conflict, because his message in 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia is perpetually relevant. When I looked online at Amazon ranking for 1984, I was disappointed to find this wasn't true.

Over the weekend The New York Times ran front page story on the current situation in the country, and Orwell made an appearance in the third paragraph:

“It’s not peace you see here, it’s silence; it’s a forced silence,” said a 46-year-old writer who joined last month’s protests in Yangon and was now on the run, carrying with him a worn copy of his favorite book, George Orwell’s “1984.” “We are the military’s slaves. We want democracy. We want to wait no longer. But we are afraid of their guns.”

This prompted me to recheck sales of the book over the last few weeks, and they indeed have risen. Hitchens may be right after all, which feels like good and bad news.

The pseudonymous Emma Larkin, author of Finding George Orwell in Burma, has been writing a lot about current events, and was back in-country recently. There's an interesting thread here too.

Stupid Statistic of the Week: Spit Swapping

2007-10-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

A quick, cheap, and simple way to manufacture news is to create a survey and publish the results.

Quick, cheap and simple it may be, but it is definitely not original: I counted 230 surveys on Business Wire just over the last 24 hours. My favorite this week is from the American Dental Association that shows 44% of Americans "are swapping spit" by sharing their toothbrush, some kind of national calamity it would seem. Apparently, 54% also report they'd use their toothbrush even if they dropped it on the floor. The same ADA also reported medical research suggesting how E.coli gets on a toothbrush and thence multiplies and is transferred to your mouth - disgusting stuff, I'll save you by omitting the link.

The PR goal here is presumably to enhance the public's understanding of oral hygiene, but this conflicts with the journalistic goal of manufacturing an amusing and titillating headline. The consequent news coverage can work in the right setting, but too often undermines the intended objective or diminishes the other, more serious intentions of the organisation behind the news.

More stupid stats in later posts - please send me suggestions.

Powerpointless

2007-10-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Gartner ITExpo is over, at last. Some 6,000 blameless IT professionals have sat through hundreds of presentations on every conceivable aspect of IT. All these different presentations shared one thing in common - all were delivered using Powerpoint. It's very hard to imagine any presentation being delivered without Powerpoint today - it is ubiquitous. As a result there's many blogs discussing how to make your PP decks better: Creative services offers how-to hints; Indezine takes a design-centric view; Dave Paradi seems to have a broader perspective on presenting effectively with PP.

Death by Powerpoint is a real phenomenom, and PP isn't a very flexible approach to presenting any information, on any subject, as the excellent Edward Tufte makes clear. Often, I'm not even sure what it adds - many presenters seem to use slides as memory crutches, or read directly off the slide as if it where a script. Most slides add little additional information. All this is a shame, because many good analysts presenting at the Gartner event stood in front of gigantic, 20 foot screens that delivered miniscule value and which overshadowed what they actually had to say.

Without question the best presentation of the show was the (ironically) Powerpoint-less interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, well summarized in Deal Architect (and a podcast review here). He has an audience of a few thousand, and everyone was paying full attention. Ballmer famously dismissed social computing (aka Facebook and everything down to this blog) as a 'fad', although his recent pronouncements shows a more nuanced view. Microsoft clearly wants to take on Google, the darling of the analyst and Wall Street set: Based on what I saw, I wouldn't want Ballmer after my business, even if he is the guy behind Powerpoint.

Agenda Setting

2007-10-09T14:17:00.001-07:00

I started this blog commenting on blogs, a kind of involution, I know. Anyway, commenting on hype brought me back to the subject. What is hype, anyway? From the wonderfully indispensable dictionary.com:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This
hype1 /haɪp/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[hahyp] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, hyped, hyp·ing, noun Informal.

–verb (used with object)

1. to stimulate, excite, or agitate (usually fol. by up): She was hyped up at the thought of owning her own car.

2. to create interest in by flamboyant or dramatic methods; promote or publicize showily: a promoter who knows how to hype a prizefight.

3. to intensify (advertising, promotion, or publicity) by ingenious or questionable claims, methods, etc. (usually fol. by up).

4. to trick; gull.

–noun

5. exaggerated publicity; hoopla.

6. an ingenious or questionable claim, method, etc., used in advertising, promotion, or publicity to intensify the effect.

7. a swindle, deception, or trick.

[Origin: 1925–30, Americanism; in sense “to trick, swindle,” of uncert. orig.; subsequent senses perh. by reanalysis as a shortening of hyperbole ]

Modern hype, in the Britney Spears sense, is a shameless, at-any-cost grab for media attention. In the Princess Diana sense, it’s something that is thrust upon the subject, no doubt with only nominal resistance, but is nevertheless persistent and audience-driven (she’s dead, remember, and ain't looking for any more publicity herself).

Blogs fuel hype – it’s all part of their amplification role. But don’t be fooled into thinking that the amplifier isn’t selective, as you can see from the attached chart from BlogPulse. I’ve graphed the blogging counts for SOA (nerd alert: service oriented architecture is a new movement in IT), for Web 2.0 (similar nerd alert applies), and George Bush (democracy alert on this one). Now, whether you think Bush is God’s gift to political life or a plaque on American values (correct answer is the latter), he is undoubtedly more significant, more known, more in the news than, say, Web 2.0. But you’ll see this is not reflected in the blogosphere: Web 2.0 is getting more attention than Bush.

Did anyone notice there’s a war going on?

Hype Cycle

2007-10-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

This week I’m attending Gartner’s ITExpo in Orlando, you can read more about it at their blog. I arrived at the hotel a few minutes ago – it’s strange to see thousands of middle-aged guys milling around with the 2 year-old Mickey Mouse set.

Gartner’s a strange beast, the 200 pound gorilla of the IT industry that can make or break markets, companies, and products. They started out in 1979 and now have almost 4,000 employees, of which about 1,200 are analysts. Forrester and IDC are the only other companies that really compete in terms of size and influence. IT is complex, and there’s not doubt that these companies add a lot of value by providing insight and context on how to make technology effective and productive. And from a marketing perspective, these firms are hugely influential.

Gartner has a concept called the Hype Cycle, which they apply to IT trends and new technologies, but which I’d love to see applied to diets, cars, bands, or movie stars. What’s strange about the Hype Cycle is that is can become a self-fulfilling prophecy – the very act of Gartner placing something on the curve elevates it and gives it new buzziness. Forrester famously got into trouble when the Internet bubble burst, and the Wall Street Journal showed how they’d fuelled positive forecasts for companies and markets right up until they’d collapsed. Some are seeing similar over-hype around the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, which is a major theme at the Gartner event.

Soap Opera

2007-10-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve worked in technology marketing for most of my career, and have always harbored a lingering envy for my consumer brethren. After all, they get to play with bongo bucks in the mass media, peddling aspirational lifestyles to young moms to sell soap. I get to drone on about SOAP message headers to Web services developers to sell SOA governance applications. It just doesn’t seem fair.

But over the last few years technology companies have wised-up to the wishful aspirations of even the geekiest of IT professionals, and have tried borrowing a page from the consumer marketing playbook. The results in press releases, whitepapers, and corporate reports are mostly painful and embarrassing – just visit the average software company’s homepage if you’ve doubts. Better yet, try Andrew Davidson’s marketing gibberish generator for a few simulated paragraphs of the stuff I’m referring to. Dack’s has a pithier version of the same.

Why does this happen? I think it’s a simultaneous desire to inflate value, combined with a wrongheaded notion that good marketing is monolithic. But more on the diagnosis later – for now, lets cut straight to a cure. A few years back Deliotte Consulting developed software designed to test for gibberish before it hits the wire or website: bullfighter. Give it a try.

Burmese Days

2007-09-28T08:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve always liked Orwell, not as a great writer but because of how and why he wrote. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote Why Orwell Matters a few years back, captures this well.

Orwell was born in India and served in the police force in colonial Burma. He wrote Burmese Days about the experience, as well as the famous and wonderful short story Shooting the Elephant, and he inevitably comes to mind with the recent, terrible news from the country.

Hitchens once said that sales of Orwell always rise in times of strife and conflict, because his message in 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia is perpetually relevant. Not so, apparently.

I visited Burma a decade ago, during a brief window when access to the country was opened. At the border they forced westerners to exchange $300 equivalent for FECs, a foreign exchange currency, at a rate fixed by the Junta. FECs could only be redeemed for official Burmese Kyats at state-run banks: On the street you could get about 300 Kyats to a dollar, when the official exchange rate was under fifty. Guilt at entering the country intensified when you saw the constant presence of soldiers and jeeps. Yet I have no regrets about the visit – seeing Rangoon, spending time with the saffron-robed monks, traveling down the Irrawaddy river, visiting the fabulous temples at Pagan, this was unforgettable.

Most western countries have already imposed sanctions, but China, a major trading partner, refuses to take action. Lets hope recent events aren’t a repeat of 1988.

Life on Mars

2007-09-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

After hibernating for much of the Martian winter, the NASA Rovers are starting to move again. The images they've captured are amazing. The Rover Opportunity is about to make a descent into Victoria Crater, which promises to be spectacular.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Meta-Analysis

2007-09-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been interested in how statistics are used in social sciences and the popular media. It was Mark Twain who famously said “there’s lies, damn lies and statistics,” but of course statistics never lie, only people. Business Week recently reported on an arcane branch of statistical analysis, meta-analysis, that is being used more and more to justify claims about new drugs, herbal remedies, educational systems and just about anything else that is a popular field of study and can easily be reduced to a set of numbers. It’s definitely contributing to the ‘statistics lie’ debate.

I’m no statistician, but here’s my understanding of meta-analysis. There are many fields of study where research is repeated, either to attempt to verify or replicate existing studies, contradict findings, or get a richer or slightly different understanding of a question. Medical research and educational research are good examples – there’s been numerous experiments done to test the efficacy of vitamin C as a cold cure, for example. Often individual studies aren’t conclusive, or seem to disagree: but what if you could pool the research results of multiple studies and get an aggregated, summary set of findings? This would be very cool, especially if you’re an impoverished PhD (are there any other kind?) with no budget but access to a well-stocked library: all you do is judicially sum reported results from a handful of published papers, with no fieldwork required. Even better, the results of meta-analysis should increase the power of the overall conclusions – you can discern smaller effects, based on bigger sample sizes.

All well and good, but two problems emerge. First, very few research studies are conducted identically. Questions are asked in a slightly different way, to a slightly different population, under slightly different circumstances. Sometimes these differences can be reasonably ignored because they are small or insignificant, but most often this is a judgment call. Make the wrong call, and you are comparing apples and oranges. A second problem is what is often called the file drawer effect: research that is inconclusive isn’t likely to be published, and so goes unreported, potentially biasing meta-analysis. This can result in exaggerated effects being reported.

This helps explain why we see heated debates about the impact of standardized school tests, allergy remedies, or the impact of violent TV on real-world violence.

Sometimes I wonder if blogging is simply meta-comment, or meta-news, or meta-babble. In the same way that meta-analysis is data from data, or more accurately statistics calculated from other statistics, it feels like blogging is derived, secondary, imitative. It has all the power of meta-analysis, and all the pitfalls.

More Blogoganda

2007-09-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

Following from my last post, the New York Times is again reporting an attempt to influence blogdom, this time by the US government. The front page story describes a small department being created to haunt and post on Muslim blogs, providing pro-US views. In this case, they do identify their affiliation - and seem to be having mixed responses.

What would Edward Bernays have to say about this blogoganda?

Corn and Chasms

2007-09-21T13:26:00.000-07:00

Theories of mass communication come and go, but one that has enjoyed some longterm success is the diffusion of innovation work made famous by Everett Rogers. You may not have heard of Rogers, but you have heard of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, which drew heavily on Rogers’ work and which remains hugely influential.

It all started with corn. Everett Rogers grew up on a farm in Iowa and studied at Ames, an agricultural school. He was drawn to research that investigated why some farmers had adopted hybridized corn, which had much better yields and was drought resistant compared to other varieties. His interest was personal: his father had resisted the innovation, and his farm had failed. In 1962, after studying other examples of adoption, Rogers wrote his famous book, The Adoption of Innovation. From this came all the terms we’re familiar with: innovators, early adopters, the late majority, and so on. He postulated that mass media fostered awareness, while interpersonal interactions were the primary way people made decisions. He went on to characterize innovators and early adopters, and his work was used to spur foreign aid missions, market new drugs, and eventually inspired countless business plans.

All this came to mind when I read a wonderful interview in the New York Times with the great Rick Rubin. He’s trying, in his fashion, to rescue Columbia Records, which like all major labels is watching lucrative CD sales transform into lucre-less downloads. And he’s figured out that teenage hip-hop fans behave a lot like Iowa corn farmers: they are influenced by word-of-mouth. And so, following Big Business logic, Columbia formed a “word-of-mouth” department:

The "word of mouth" department will function as a publicity-promotional arm of the company, spreading commissioned buzz through chat rooms across the planet and through old-fashioned human interaction.

An interesting question: can you apply a kind of covert propaganda to influence the Chasm Crossing process? And is this ethical, expressing paid-for opinion as freely voiced fanaticism?

But more importantly, does any of this blogophonics really work? A critique of diffusion theory is that it doesn’t really take a good marketing view – it doesn’t organize around attributes of the innovation and the organizations or people adopting them. In other words, anyone can be an early adopter if the product fits. Said another way, good tunes sell, period.

One in 15 Million

2007-09-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

According to Technorati, there are over 15 million bloggers in the world today. That's a lot of people talking about their cat, their job, their day. To put it in perspective, there's more bloggers than the combined populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.

Which begs the question: Why add one more?

There's a school of thought, popular with old-school journalists, that bloggers don't really create any news, or advance any agenda, or add much to the world at all: instead they selectively amplify what's already being discussed in other spheres. This is partly true. It's also true that fewer and fewer people read newspapers. Or write and mail letters. Blogs are certainly an effective way to chatter, chatter, chatter...

...But are they good for anything else? The reality is, most blogs go blessedly unread. Maybe mine will have the same happy fate...