For those inquiring what’s going on in Sri lanka, here are some perspectives:
US-Lanka joint naval exercises
Visit of Assistant Sec. of State
London Times on the Galle attack
Media
Sun dives into Second Life
Jonathan Schwartz may be the first Fortune 500 CEO to blog, but he did one better. Sun Microsystems yesterday announced it had held its first virtual press conference in Second Life.
As Sun’s Chief Researcher puts it, working in SL syncs with what Sun has been after in networking: communication, sharing and community-building.
This is indded a company to watch. In other news, as has been reported in the Hobson and Holtz Report, Schwarz has asked the SEC to approve of the use of blogs to satify Regulation FD requirements. Meaning, he’s seen blogs as doing the work of a press release. Aparently, Reg FD doesn’t recognize the Internet, let alone blogs. Sound familiar?
I suggested to a marketing and PR director that press releases belonged to the push era, and should be at least supplemented (if not replaced) by blogs, but she had never heard of such a preposterous idea, and filed it under "Hmmm, that’s interesting." I didn’t bother to even mention Second Life.
As Schwartz puts it, he was far less worried about what he was saying in his blog, than where he was saying it. Read his very thoughtful piece about the "anachronistic press release" and it gives us a glimpse of where communications whether it is for legal or news dissemination purposes is headed.
I believe, that the future of communications is going to be driven by a few people who may not even have Marketing and PR in their title. They live in this bubble, doing what they’ve always done, while their audiences, and even the media have moved on. Gotta give it to Jonathan Schwartz for pricking that bubble. Just for the record, even the once the staid old Beeb, rented an island for a show in Second Life, and at least one PR agency, Text100, has opened an office there as well. Not surprisingly, Text100 also has a blog.
YouTube news spreads fast
YouTube, being bought by Google has become a water-cooler conversation, and a bullet point in business presentations. How did this come to be? People who have barely been on YouTube are talking it up. Great piece by SG Entrepreneurs, on how the blogosphere, because of feedreaders, RSS, and new media consumption habits propelled this story.
Marketing has left the building
I had to tell someone the other day that truism that’s worth repeating: ‘marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department’. It sounded like I was trying to unduly ruffle feathers –ours, as we are the marcom department. But it’s true. What marketing does can only be as effective as the inputs we get. Client servicing has a better handle on what their customers are thinking, and what resonates with them than anyone else.
Marketing is indeed a different animal today. or I should say different ‘insect -considering this article by Tom Asacker, at marketingProfs. He says:
The marketplace of old resembled a mass of caterpillars hanging around the tree of traditional media, venturing down the branches of mass distribution, and consuming the offshoots of brand advertisers. No more. The masses have escaped their pupae, spread their distinctive wings, and are fluttering around fields blossoming with an abundance of colorful and succulent offerings. A fleeting glimpse is all one usually gets of them.
Josef Jaffe, ponders such questions on Across the Sound, his podcast that often talks about consumer generated content, and where creative ideas may come from. He has very interesting opinions about it. In his book, Life after the 30-second spot, he put it this way:
"When talking to the new age marketing zealots, I dance on the 30-second’s grave and sing hallelujah," and is very, very optimistic about the future of advertising, now that this old format has lost its grip.
Why should press releases be boring?
I came across a good article in Beaupre & Company’s newsletter, on why the lead paragraph of a press release should read like a journalistic piece, not an announcement. There is a fine line between crafting a press release to sound like news (which it ought to be) and a memo to all. The worst thing that can happen, the article says, is to hit the reader with abstractions, opaqueness and ponderous inward-directed claims.
They cite a typical example of press release-ese, and a version by a law firm that wriote it with the hook in the headline. So I checked some company press releases, and needless to say they all seem to come off the same template. Some examples:
"At a launch event yesterday evening at the ……….in New York City, Company X introduced the first mass appeal, talk programming format expressly for women, by women."
"Company Y today launched a spin-off communications agency called …….. that will operate as a boutique firm specializing in marketing communications and brand-building campaigns. Headquartered in…"
"The nation’s largest wireless carrier is growing its network and meeting the need for enhanced coverage in the greater Memphis area. Company Z today announced that it recently added four new cell sites in the area, ensuring West Tennessee and North Mississippi customers stay connected."
It’s almost as if direct marketers refused to send anything but 6 x 4 mailers. Or all copywriters continued to write in the stilted ad-copy style replete with puns. It’s easy to fall into the we’ve always done it this way’ mentality. But press releases should be leading the charge for change, since they aren’t simply dumped on a web site or sprayed off a nozzle of some automated PR distribution engine. They compete for attention of journalists and analysts in an on-demand world primed by –and determined by social media tools such as RSS, Del.icio.us and Digg.
A good example of how companies now compete with user-generated ‘stories’ can be seen on Digg. Apple’s press release on iTunes 7 talks of the new way to download movie and stream them via the upcoming iTV device. But on Digg, that piece of news got some 75 Diggs at the time this was written. Getting 619 Diggs was a story of ‘First impressions of buying a movie from the iTunes store." A Gizmodo story got 3109 Diggs. (Another one with some 1500 Diggs was a comment by a Digg user who posted this cover of Jobs on the phone with Gates, which to a journalist would provide an unusual perspective for a story, and this sort of thing could never come from a press release.)
Old media and new media. The labels have grown old
Very soon we’ll have to ditch the labels ‘old media’ and ‘new media’ as companies who grew up in the broadcast/mass media/I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony world shift gears to work in evolving media formats. Numerous studies and reports about cross-platform media are coming out to ‘prove’ this –like we need any proof– but we still see some pushback. The moment someone mentions the potential for blogs in the marketing mix, with or without examples like this, eyes still roll. For too many, it means venturing out of the comfort zone, as I wrote before.
The study by Universal Mccann and Knowledge Storm (cited in Marketing Vox) has some powerful findings. 53% of respondents (a survey of 4000 business and IT people) say they read blogs and that blogs influenced purchasing behavior. I was shocked by these findings: 46% said blogs had the same credibility as white papers. This in a B2B environment!
So I think we’ve gone past that old media/new media dichotomy. The real problem is between old marketing and new marketing types!
A modest proposal for the dis-comfort zone
Josef Jaffe puts it well when he describes podcasting as an opportunity to be daring; a way for marketers to plunge into the experimentation of emerging media. "The rawness of it, the humanity of it, and the ability to do something that’s never been done before," he says is very important for marketers. I was reminded of his comment when I saw the news of WB launching into an experiment called Studio 2.0, a short-film division where ad content would integrate with programming.
In one of Jaffee’s podcasts (#49), his guest Adam Curry discusses how agencies took a long time to recognize that there was a better way to deliver content. Curry and Ron Bloom were streaming content way back then before broadband, using CuSeeMe (does anyone remember that?) which was the genesis of their new media company today.
The point, to be taken from all this is that engaging in risky business should be integral to marketing, or else, we will be doing something other than marketing. It’s about getting out of our comfort zone. But i meet dozens of marketing or communications people whose main complaint is that their bosses or their clients are totally risk averse, and slap them on the wrists for even trying something outlandish. Others want to wait until ‘the idea has been fleshed out better’ for fear that it would get shot down. That perfect time never comes, and the opportunity vanishes –in the direction of the competition.
So it’s about time we began rooting for the things that focus groups don’t tell us, the ideas that 8 out of 10 people (often in the office) say will surely fail because it’s way too risky.
So let’s re-instate the discomfort zone. Let’s put all the old-media platitudes about branding and synergy on hold, and experiment with some ‘raw’ material. Making mistakes is a better indicator of creativity than scoring hits. I don’t believe Apple would have created the iPod if they had not also made the Newton, the PDA than bombed more than a decade ago. They made a few mistakes but never stuck to the comfort zone. That’s my spiel for this week!
Shel Holtz on Social Media
Attended an IABC Phoenix workshop conducted by Shel Holtz this morning on technology communication. Brilliant stuff. Listening to Shel is like catching up with everything that’s important –and around the horizon– in marketing, media and communications. I’m sure he shocked a few people about his indulgence in Second Life, and how some businsses are getting it. This, while still fielding questions such as "are blogs web sites?"
Memorable quotes:
"People are sick of listening to sales people reading off three-ring binders with stuff that we have created."
"Employee directories need to become corporate MySpaces."
"Blogs are hi-tech wall paintings"
Amazon’s video ups the ante
Amazon’s got the brand recognition, and the marketing savvy to own the digital video space. It’s a very crowded playing field in the digital download business when you consider iTunes, Zune (the Microsoft answer to the iPod) Urge, and not to mention YouTube, and DivX (a Google partner)
AdAge looks at it as "the digital version of the Netflix rental model."
Having watched the FishBowl experiment on Amazon, I can see how they’ll find some very creative ways market their service. Apple, meanwhile is rumored to have a larger video iPod, so suddenly it could be a battle between not just like-minded services, but service provider vs technology.
Businesses that blog –the more authentic voice
Should every CEO maintain a blog? That’s a question being asked more often now, with the rise in popularity of CEO blogs such as new evidence on how much businesses lag on the blogging front is reported today in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily. Only 5.8% of the top Fortune 500 companies have blogs.
In a recent article I wrote for CW Bulletin, I noted how communicators, and the PR department in a company may want to blog, and even the CEO may be tempted to start his own blog, but there’s another department that usually frowns on such endeavors: the legal department. The Jonathan Schwartz and Bob Lutz blogs for Sun and GM respectively, may not be enough to tip the scales of corporate blogging. What it might take is for a lot of smaller companies to prove its value, and create a bottom-up momentum.
Take a look at Munjal Shah’s blog about Riya, a small company with a big idea –a visual search engine that uses face and image recognition to search the web. He says things no corporate communications person would dare say anywhere, apart from on a blog. Commenting on one reviewer of his service, he observes:
While I disagree with some of their UI comments (especiall because they wrote it before I blogged the new search strategy), from an SEO perspective, Riya is a disaster. We haven’t done even the most basic things like good meta-tags.
That’s right, the CEO calling his product a "disaster." How often do you see that level of frankness in product blogging? The ability to say things minus the spin is what makes company blogs more credible. There’s the approved company voice on its web site, and there’s the true voice on its blog. If you were a customer, which one would you return to?
Hoipolloireport 