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.
Showing posts with label mass media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mass media. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Viral Marketing and the Short Tail
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.
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.
Friday, May 6, 2011
What is Viral Marketing?
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:
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.
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.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Does the Mass Media Matter?
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Feeling Listless
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:
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.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
The Optimistic Economist
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Does the USA need a BBC?
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.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Sentimental Software
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 --
If anyone knows of good sentiment detection software, let me know.
Friday, September 12, 2008
PR Measurement is giving me a headache...
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.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
What are we talking about?
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.
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.
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