How much are you worth online?
According to JP Morgan, you are worth $24.00 to Google and $4.00 to Facebook. Of course, Facebook begs to differ; in their IPO filings it thinks that you worth $120.00. And here is another number for you to ponder: if Facebook has 845 million users and they are worth $120.00 a piece to the company that is a total market potential of, drumroll please, something north of $101,400,000,000.00. Let's just say that's a really big number.
It's no secret that many shoppers use brick-and-mortar stores to window shop products before they purchase them online usually at a fairly significant discount. It's often helpful to peruse the shelves, checking out features and benefits before making a purchase. Who hasn't walked into a retail store, looked at a bunch of flatscreen television sets and then headed home to make the purchase on Amazon? Heck, that's the reason Borders bookstores went out of business.
Not surprisingly, this behavior carries over to the personal life to corporate purchasers professional roles. A colleague of mine, a top seller who used to deliver lectures on sales, always noted that he was rarely part of an RFP that he didn't help to write. What he meant was, long before the purchaser calls to talk to about your products, they narrow down the field of potential vendors.
These days, the sales cycle starts by an anonymous visit to your website. Only if they like what they see there, do they engage a salesperson. What are those anonymous shoppers looking for? They want to see the obvious things, features and benefits of course, stability, and your market presence. But more and more, especially as companies use technology purchases to gain a competitive advantage, purchasers want to know that you share a common vision for the future of their industry.
The most effective way to demonstrate thought leadership is through a company blog. Yet, recent research shows that while Fortune 500 companies remained steady in their use of corporate blogs, blogging among the Inc. 500 has declined.
In part the decline in blogging has been offset by a rise in Facebook and Twitter use, which are significantly more interactive. Both social media tools provide a frictionless method for companies to engage directly with their customers. That being said, sometimes it takes more than 140 characters to say what you have to say.
Blogging represents a frictionless way to tell your customers that you understand the problems and share their concerns. Also, blogging shows how your thinking has evolved, or not, over time.
In the not too distant past, though eons ago in the technology age, Big Yellow meant something, just like Big Blue still does. In its day, Kodak, a.k.a. Big Yellow, was one of the strongest and most profitable companies in the world. The company that George Eastman built by telling people that they needed to preserve those family memories on film used to be justifiably proud of the high dividend it returned to its shareholders year after year.
In the beginning of this month, Knowledge@Wharton detailed some of Kodak's many failings. In short, Kodak failed to commoditize their research or intellectual property and was unwilling to introduce new products that would cannibalize the high margins they were getting from film.
Today, search for Big Yellow on Google and you find listings for taxicabs, phonebooks and songs by Joni Mitchell. The digital age deleted Kodak from the S&P 500 as neatly as someone throwing out an old shoebox of photographs. Just as you can create a need from nothing, look at Starbucks's five dollar coffee drinks, tastes change. Companies that failed to adapt perish.
Dunkin' Donuts got rid of Fred the Baker when the company realized that it was in the coffee business and chose not to highlight its freshly baked doughnuts. The company shifted its doughnut making operation from baking all goods on premises to centralized baking.
Some who follow Kodak suggested that they should have shifted some of their R&D facilities to Silicon Valley. Kodak started in the Northeast, in Rochester with Xerox to be specific, and chose to keep its R&D close at hand, ignoring the obvious that while there are great colleges in the Northeast, most of the great companies are now out West.
In the shift to digital, Kodak fell into the trap of homeownership. Tied to mortgages, property owners tend to stay put even when all reason suggests they would find better prospects in a different location. If Kodak were going to compete in the digital world it would have been better for the company to relocate at least part of its brain trust to sunny California. Recent evidence suggests that proximity matters in research. The closer researchers are together geographically, the more likely they are to come up with good ideas. By not moving to California, Kodak missed an opportunity to collaborate with some of the new generation's greatest digital minds.
By the way, venture capitalists invest in companies that have great ideas. Facebook is headquartered on the West Coast and not in Boston because the company was unable to get venture funding here and had to look for it out West. Investors like to keep a close eye on their money.
But if you really want to follow the money and brain drain from the Eastern seaboard, don't stop in Silicon Valley. Keep going west until you reach China, the country that is set to become the world's largest economy. Not content with merely being a source for cheap labor and holders of American debt, China is poised to become an intellectual powerhouse. A scant few years ago none of the top 20 business schools was located on the Asian continent. Now the region has four of the best business schools in the world, and there is no reason to think that number will not continue to grow. As we've seen before, proximity and collaboration provide inspiration.
While we are justifiably proud of our colleges and universities, it may be time to rethink how we do higher education before we fall behind. Former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers wrote a piece for the New York Times detailing six steps in how to improve higher education. I don't want to provide highlights for you because I think the piece is worth reading if you care about the future of America. Our current education system was built to handle the needs of the industrial age when most people didn't have high school diplomas let alone attend college.
As people moved from farms to factories, the educational system taught them to read and write so they could become productive members of society. Those blue-collar factory jobs have moved offshore and they're not coming back. The jobs that are here, and there are plenty of jobs for people in the IT industry, require education that simply is not being taught in this country. We can point a lot of fingers as to why that is, but I would argue that the biggest crisis in America is not the national debt, it's that we are no longer providing our children with the skills they need to survive.
It is interesting that while there is a political debate about how to bring down unemployment, very little has been said about how to train American youths for the job of tomorrow. If we as a country, don't tackle that problem, which is to say how to make technical literacy as important as Shakespeare, the US could become like Europe, a once great power forced to live in the shadows of others.
In an odd story that most consumers will bypass this morning comes the news that Apple, RIM and Microsoft recently bought a block of patents from the once Internet darling now defunct Nortel networks. Why should we worry? Well, many are concerned these companies will use the patents to thwart Google Androids attempt to take over the wireless market. Already, more smartphone run on the Android platform than any other smartphone technology.
Remember the company that held RIM hostage with a vague but eventually enforceable patent and the U.S. government had to step RIM from being shut down. Expect more patent suits rather less in wireless space. See here for more background on mobile patents and who is suing who.
I bring this up because we are headed for an era where patents are being used to protect turf in dubious ways that do not benefit the consumer. Usually consumers lose out in these battles as companies try to use patents to block the rise of technology not foster it.
One thing consequence of moving music to the cloud, fewer of us will own music. That is a fundamental change in how anyone in their post-teen years looks music ownership.
Not too many years ago, though eons in the internet age, most people thought that when they bought an album (or collection of songs), they mostly could do what they pleased with the tunes. Listen to music, make tapes for their friends, lend the album so their friends could make tapes; I think you get the picture.
Then came Napster and digital music. Followed by the RIAA and of course the lawsuits.
There is no need to rehash that drama, except to say that it spawned iTunes and the iPod, which made Apple famously wealthy. For the sake of brevity, I have skipped a few steps, but that's the way it happened.
As a consequence of Napster and iTunes, we no longer needed to own the physical album. When consumers gave away that right, they gave away the right to own the music. So, you can listen to your music, but you can't give it away.
Moreover, it's going to cost more. Apple has already raised prices on its most popular tunes. As the current pre-teen crowd grows older, we will have a generation of kids who have always bought music online. Once they get locked into a service, price increases will follow. Look at Netflix most recent price increase. When you have a monopoly, you get to tell people how much they need to pay the piper.
You don't believe me. Check out this HBR blog: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/07/why_im_not_going_near_spotify.html
If you want to know who has power, follow the money. According to a recent Gartner survey, CFOs now authorize 26% of IT investments. When you consider 70% of IT spending is of the keep the lights on variety, you realized that CIOs are becoming less and less responsible driving IT innovation.
The first thing you have to realize about "SPIN Selling" by Neil Rackham is that it's a book for selling to large accounts, written before anybody else was writing books about selling to large accounts. Yes Virginia, selling to large accounts is different than selling to smaller ones. To begin with, you cannot close the sale in one day; as a result, opening the discussion by trying to closing technique is counterproductive.
Besides, in major sales, the salespeople usually are not in the room when most of the important decisions are made. It's the salesperson's contact who needs to sell within her organization. It's the job of the salesperson to arm his contact with enough information to make her an effective influencer.
Like any good book on sales, Rackham has methodology, in this case a four step questioning process. In fact, the book gets its name from the four types of questions asked: Situational, Problem, Implication and Need Payoff. Rackham says the key to sales is understanding where you are in the sales cycle – he identifies The Preliminaries, Investigating, Demonstrating Capability and Obtaining Commitment – and only to asking the kinds of questions that get you to the next level because sales in large accounts follow a specific sequence over a long timeline.
SPIN Selling process
Situational questions set the context for asking Problem questions that reveal implied needs, like the desire for a more accurate billing system. Asking Implication questions about how many ways a more accurate would help the end-user's company lead to Need-Payoff questions, which help the buyer focus on solutions and benefits.
Speaking of benefits, Rackham notes that benefits come in two varieties: those that can help any customer and those that address your customer's express need. He differentiates the two types of "benefits" by calling the former an Advantage and the latter is a real Benefit. Advantages help close small sales, while Benefits, which address explicit buyers needs, help land big deals.
Yes, the book is dated. Written 1988, it doesn't take into account that your customers already know a fair amount about your product from the Web. At least somewhere in the questioning process, you have to determine how much your customer already knows about your product, if only to dispel mistaken assumptions. Additionally, while the book is very strong on tactics, it mistakenly assume you will only sell to someone lower in the company's organization. It does not provide tactics on how to use the SPIN method to move up the company's organizational ladder, trying to get closer to the person who decides what projects get funded.
All of that being said, nearly 25 years after the book was published it is still a foundational book on large account sales. While the information available to customers has changed, the process for moving a customer through the sales cycle has not.
When the book was released, readers found that its theories ran counter to conventional wisdom because it deemphasized closing techniques in large sales. At the time, most sales books focused on closing. Actually, most sales training focused on closing because, as Rackham points out, closing used to be the one place in the sales cycle that had an understandable and quantifiable result.
But Rackham's studies show that trying to close too early alienates professional buyers, the very person who is almost certainly on the other end of the sales call at a large account. Instead, the SPIN method relies on asking questions to tease out problems and help the client understand how the seller's solution can tip the value equation to the buy side of the ledger.
The foundation of the book is rests on research conducted by Huthwaite corporation's 12-year $1 million research project into sales effectiveness, not just one excellent salesperson's career experience This means the results of the book can be applied across a wide spectrum of businesses and industries, making a great starting point for learning about major account sales.
Now on the other hand, if you want to read anything about closing the quick sale, let me point you to either Tom Hopkins or Zig Ziglar.
Enterprises deploy major technologies to address a pressing need. But studies show that a majority of change efforts fail, expensively. Salespeople lose long-term credibility when their proposed improvements do not take hold. As a technology seller, it's helpful to understand how leaders implement change. Additionally, sales account leaders will often be forced to change how their teams operate. Many of the principles behind change an enterprise processes and a small team's operations are the same.
John Kotter's "Leading Change" is one of the foundation books in the field of change management. First published in 1996, the book's eight stage process for leading change still forms the backbone of many change efforts. Kotter, a Forbes top 50 business guru, is one of the world's well-known experts in writing about leadership and driving change.
This book is about leading change, not managing it. There is a critical difference. Almost by the definition, IT managers are responsible for managing change. C-level executives, the people in an organization to whom top sales people want to become a trusted confident, lead change. The material in this book is directed at executives charged with leading change, especially executives in highly structured companies. Understanding Kotter's eight step change process with help salespeople understand the changes their c-level executives are facing as they attempt to deploy HP solutions.
In a well-structure book, Kotter lists the eight steps in the change process in the first chapter:
Where Kotter shines is in the simplicity of how he lays out the process. Anyone leading change can easily understand what course of action needs to be followed and in what order. His book is meant to be a read as a field guide for leading change.
Throughout the book, Kotter lays out the steps need to make each stage of the process successful. The book is with filled with practical examples of how to complete each stage, and what not to do. Also, early in the book, he lists cautionary tales of what happens when a company does not successfully complete each stage. For example, when Kotter writes about communication the change vision, he mentions a rule of thumb, "Whenever you cannot describe the vision driving a change initiative in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are in for trouble." It's time to go back to the drawing board and get things right.
A testament to the processes outlined in this book is how well the concepts have held up over time. The book pre-dates the rise of the Internet, but is still a foundation book for leading change. In part, this is because Kotter anticipated that in the 21st century the business climate would change dramatically, moving from a period of calm and stability into our current era of rapid and volatile change. He understood that large enterprises have difficulty responding quickly to change and, accordingly, he wrote a future guidebook. "Leading Change" helps organizations adapt by giving them a means to go from identifying change targets to making the completed solution a permanent fixture in organization's corporate culture.
Others have amplified Kotter's positions. Specifically, Michael Beitler's excellent "Strategic Organizational Change" has a chapter that reviews Kotter's principles, but "Leading Change" is probably more relevant today than it was when was first written.
Although the book is meant to be read by executives leading change, the eight step process can be adapted by anyone leading change, including sales managers. In that way, the book has two benefits for sales managers:
If you ask 10 people to recommend five books on leadership, one of John Maxwell's books will be on every list. Of those books, most people cite "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" as his best work. It's certainly his most well known. Concise, Maxwell dictates the 21 laws a leader must follow to get others to follow the leader. Using numerous examples drawn from a variety of people from Mother Teresa to the founders of McDonalds, Maxwell show how people have either used the laws successfully or ignored the laws and failed.
Most of the laws are obvious, for example number 14, The Law of Buy In, states that people buy into the leader and only then do they buy into the vision. That makes intuitive sense and has a practical application in the real world. Early stage technology investors often bet on the jockey, not the horse.
Some readers have dismissed the book because the laws are easy to understand. These critics miss two significant points about the power of the book:
Many books on leadership are long on theory but don't help the reader understand how to put the theory into practice. Maxwell does not fall into that trap. At the end of every chapter, he lists three activities you can do to apply the law to your life. For example, after Law 13, The Law of the Picture (people do what people see), Maxwell asks his readers to:
Not every leader will have a proficiency in all 21 Laws. Maxwell admits that a few laws where he does not grade out perfectly.
In Appendix A, Maxwell presents a quick leadership test to help you understand your strengths and weakness as they relate to the laws. Completing the evaluation will help you understand:
Even you don't read the entire book, filling out the evaluation and understanding your strengths and weaknesses will help you reach your potential as a leader and manager.
Because "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" is well written and well organized, it can be read in three ways:
Books on leaderships are plentiful, often with competing visions because leadership is more of an art than a science. But Maxwell notes that as with any art, leadership skills can and should be improved through practice. Its evaluation guide in the appendix and chapter endings on applying the laws in your life will help you understand the state of your current skill set and help you plan for growth.
Justified, FX's brilliant show based on an Elmore Leonard short story, has only two rivals for best show of all time, The Sopranos and The Wire. Very good company tied together by a the common link—violence. Which, it's that surprising given that a recently, Harper's noted that eight of the ten most popular televisions shows feature corpses. Nothing fixates the human mind more than matters of life and death.
But while show violence in the three great shows, violence is ever present. Not only do the main characters live comfortably amongst the litter of spent shells, but they purposefully usher in the fear that accompanies violence. The shows' producers know that except for sex nothing engages a television audience more than fear and unlike their European counterparts Americans standards bodies are happy with bullets than breasts.
Tom Boswell, the great Washington Post sportswriter, once said there are two kinds of people, those who watch batting practice and those who don't. And the latter will never amount to anything, because if you don't pay attention to the little things in baseball, the game becomes a series of reactions to batted ball. Most people happily hours spend at baseball games, waiting for the reward of brief violence when bat strikes ball setting players in motion. They are missing the inner game.
Television is different than baseball. Its inner meaning sets the guidelines for the violence. Viewers, lured into a television show by the violence will not stay if the violence does not have a purpose, a greater meaning. Usually this gets played out in the cop procedure or detective shows, cops and robbers. In the days since the sets were in black and white, the good guy always won by the final credit. The hero cannot take the fall and gun fights only matter if you care who is left standing when the smoke clears.
But for good to exist, we need villains. Except for the flying nun, they don't set television shows in convents. Without the devil, God, or god, is a lonely and unnecessary creation. These days, sometimes it's the villains who are more interesting, more worthy of our attention.
Yes, Virginia we can love a villain, especially if we understand the why. In No Country for Old Men, Woody Harrelson says about the villain portrayed by Javier Bardem that he operates under his own code, one where lives are decided on a coin flip. Good bad guys are endlessly more fascinating than good good guys.
We loved Tony Soprano because we understood his fictional mobster code, and know that Tony understood it. The Sopranos worked as a show because it was always about the entire family's struggle to stay true to the duties that mobster code forced on them.
The Wire stopped being interesting to mass audiences when the villains became the nameless and faceless culture that gave rise to the drug lords, not the drug lords themselves. Woman openly wept when Idris Alba died. Evil needs a face we find.
On the face of it, Justified is driven by its lead character Marshall Raylan Givens, a good cop, fast on the draw and good with words. He once talked a convict into giving up a hostage in exchange for fried chicken and a shot of bourbon. Jim Beam is a big sponsor. But in truth, the show gets its direction from the supporting characters, who like Tony Soprano are family man and women, born into their lives, playing roles have been handed down through generations. There is very little room for improvising.
Families and cultures have their own gravity. In Justified, the pull of family is almost inescapable. Except for Raylan, the characters are defined by their birth rights.
Having gone to college and seen some of the world, or at least the U.S.A. before returning home to Harlan County, Kentucky, Raylan is at once an outsider and insider. He betrays a part of his heritage and disowns his father. That father is scheming and lawless scoundrel, aligned with Bo Crowder, the head of Harlan's biggest enterprise, manufacturing and distributing crystal meth. If that weren't enough for family entanglements, a young Raylan worked the coal mine with Bo's son Boyd, an explosives expert.
Towards the end, Rayland was willing to put a bullet in his father to prove to the world where he stood, though is father pulled first so Raylan was justified.
Boyd, on the other hand, returned to the house and eventually the bed of his dead brother's wife. The wife killed the brother by the way, and Boyd had always coveted his brother's wife. Yes, it's complicated, in that small town kind of way. It's actually complicated in a family way, but this isn't time to talk about the Givens generations old feud with the Bennetts, criminal rivals of the Crowders.
The show may be about Raylan, but Boyd drives the action. Boyd, a former white supremacist, tries the straight life, but no one quite believes his conversion to God or the pure life. In Season Two, Boyd does try to make an honest life, going back to the mines to work an honest day for honest pay, but nobody believes him, again. No matter how hard he tries, there is no path for redemption for Boyd. Resurrection perhaps.
Raylan shot and killed Bo in the original pilot episode. But fortunately, the reports of Boyd death were premature. Bo tested well with television audiences and the bullet to the heart didn't find any vital organs.
In a commentary on the same pilot episode, the producers claim that they show is driven by Raylan's anger, but I don't buy. It's driven by Raylan's sense of justice or duty to uphold the law, Boyd's attempt to escape from the bonds of the Crowder family and interplay between the two men. Boyd's scenes with Raylan during his redemption period are magical as both man verbally thrust and parry, like poker players skillfully slowplaying very good hands.
Philosophers and psychologist may debate if people can change over time. In the eyes of the writers of Justified, the answer is no. No matter how far we travel, when we come home we shed our clothes and play our roles. Raylan is an exception, but few of us can escape the pull of family.
What does it say about Leonard's writing that the network could create a whole series from one short story? It says that if you create compelling characters and put them in interesting situations, you have appointment television.
There is nothing wrong with PowerPoint, except the way people use it. PowerPoint is a visual media but presenters insist using PowerPoint as a text document. It's not.
Think about the best presentation that you have ever seen. It was image rich and text light.
Most PowerPoints fail for three reasons:
1) Presenters fail to deliver a compelling narrative
2) We can read almost twice as fast as a person can talk
3) Presenters don't understand how the brain processes information
Notice that I did not mention too many words on a slide. I think we all know that's a common trait of bad presentations. Just because you have a lot of words on the slide doesn't mean anyone is reading them. A little more on this bit later.
Similarly, I left out a few other obvious remedies to improve PowerPoint presentations, like remember the audience and rehearse the heck out of it, because, well because they are obvious.
Here's a quick, but by no means definitive set of ideas to improve your PowerPoint presentations. It's a mix of science and common sense.
One note, the suggestions that follow are meant to help people delivering live presentations. If you will not be on hand to deliver the audio track for your presentation, this isn't for you.
Set Expectations
Like a movie, you'd what to know if you are going to see romantic comedy or Transformers sequel. Telling the audience what to expect helps them make connections with information they already possess, easing the burden on working memory.
Develop a narrative
If you go into a bookstore, you'll notice the shelves are stocked with novels, biographies, and history. What do they have in common, they tell a narrative story. Human beings love stories. Use that to your advantage. Give your presentation life by creating a story line.
Start writing the presentation in outline form
Remember when you first learned how to write an essay. The teacher insisted that you write an outline first. There was a reason for it. It created structure and helped you tell a better story. For PowerPoint, the outline is slide sorter view. Begin you presentation not by diving into the normal view but lay out the outline of the presentation by writing in the titles in the slide sorter view.
Write titles in headlines form
Studies show that writing titles in headline form increases retention. A well-written headline sets expectations in the reader. Before you start talking about the image or text on the slide, the reader knows the theme for the slide. Your audience will get used to seeing the main thought the headline and be ready for you to explain it. This reduces the strain on working memory.
Use one main thought slide
People don't hate lots of slides in a presentation. They hate slow presentations with lots of slides and there is a big difference. Your slide should communicate one idea, one concept. Use the slide images and words to reinforce that idea.
People can read 400 words per minute
Speakers talk about 200 words a minute. This means the audience has read the entire slide before the speaker has gotten half way through the slide, which really means your audience is bored before you get through slide one.
People process words as little pictures
Text heavy slides impose a double burden on the audience. They have to spend a lot of mental energy process the little pictures and not listening to you. Wouldn't it be better to give them one picture and explain what it means? By the way, marrying a relevant image with a verbal track increases retention.
Human beings get bored every ten minutes
Nobody knows why. But it's true. This means that every ten minutes you need to give them a compelling reason to listen to you. One of the best ways to do this is change your teaching style every ten minutes. If you have been lecturing for ten minutes solid, introduce an anecdote, use a role play, poll the audience. It also helps if you introduce new topics every ten minutes.
Be consistent handling text and graphics
Do not make the viewer work to understand each slide's structure. Most companies have corporate slide templates used for handling graphics and text. Rather than viewing the templates as confining, look at them as liberating. You no longer have worry about where to place the picture and your audience doesn't have to think about why the text is larger on some slides than other.
Read the experts
Like anything, if you want to get better do your homework. In this case, I suggest the following books:
Buried deep in Sport Illustrated senior reporter Peter King's most recent edition of Monday Morning Quarterback (a must read for any fan of good journalist), he tells the tale of being a beat writer and spending two hours with Bill Parcells, visiting the notoriously cranky coach's childhood haunts.
King notes that he can't imagine any beat writer having that kind of access to a pro football coach these days. The pressures have changed on both sides of the equation.
Those pressures mean less time less time to develop the relationships that lead to that kind of access. While the shrinking outreach of the media has change some parts of how media relations, it does not mean the industry will follow the way of the Dodo. Good PR can still repair images and grow bottom lines.
For Exhibit A, let me refer you to the media barrage Tiger Woods's PR machine has stoked up ahead the Thanksgiving weekend that lead to his fall from nationwide billboards. Tiger's troubles began when it turned out that his family man image was a sham. Restoring Tiger's image as the face of American marketing starts with recreating his family guy image. In the past week, we have been subject to a round of "Tiger Woods the World's Greatest Dad" stories.
Brilliant as a strategy but ineffective as a quick look on Google finds plenty about affairs and divorces but nothing on the good dad Tiger.
Of course, returning to his ways as the most dominant player in golf would do more to reclaim his corporate image than any series of father knows best articles.
Winning drives decisions in the NFL too. In 2010, season tickets sales fell for the third straight year, and three teams that moved into spiffy new homes for the new 2010 season are on the hook for very high construction costs. Even though the television rights paid to the league have climbed faster than basic cable rates (in 1986, the networks combined to pay the league $420 annually while the current contract calls for a shade over $3 billion annually), winning puts fannies in the seats, especially the expensive comfortable ones with licensing and VIP parking.
This season two head coaches lost their jobs in mid-campaign, an unprecedented event in the NFL. Normally conservative owners prefer to clean house at the end of the year. But we live in unusual times and importance of image management is paramount. Ask Tiger's management team.
Many have discounted the power of PR, but in billion-dollar commercial enterprises PR folks have engaged in media relations programs that because they think it will drive top line success.
Over the weekend, Robert Scoble asked the reoccurring question: why do we need the tech media? If you skip down and read iSocialize's metrics of what works and what doesn't, you understand how the media recognition drives sales. Even Scoble acknowledges that Apple watches the media buzz to see what companies to promote, making PR an effective use of marketing dollars for the successful companies.
I read another piece on the death of news and thought really? That story has become a cottage industry of its own.
There will always be a place for unvarnished information, if only because people will pay for it. But with a wall of information out there, readers are trying to prioritize their information flow. To do that, they are relying on trusted names, who more than likely share their world view. It's always been that way. Go back to the turn of the century, not this past one but the one before it. Read a respectable news paper. You'd be surprised how strongly the publication's slant shows through. Fox News is only today's version of the Hearst Empire.
Yes, investigative journalism is dying. It's expensive and we no longer think there is a public need. The shame is that without investigative journalism, corporate malfeasance and government corruption will go undocumented as baseless claims fly unchallenged
From a PR perspective, that's not a bad thing. We realize we have the power to communicate directly with our audiences. Media provides third party validation, but the power of media to inform is being sapped by the new methods of delivering content: websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. The media may not be happy about it, but the direct link to our users makes public relations, well easier.
When most people are asked to conjure an image of a social media user, they reflexively think of teen or pre-teen posting pretty pictures on MySpace and Facebook. But that demographic mental picture is in stark contrast with reality.
According to some nifty research published by Brian Solis, it's the 35 and older set who are burning up the bits and bytes staying in touch with classmates from our younger years.
What does this mean for brands and their marketers? The social Web's audience is older, like CBS. So, maybe you can sell insurance and retirement planning via social media, instead of the latest Skecher's design.
In real life, it means there are a lot of people who are using social media to cut across geography to stay in touch. You get older and staying in touch with anyone out of you physical neighborhood gets a lot harder. The social Web lets you tackle friendships on your own time. And isn't that what it's for?
My extended family numbers greater than 100 people. We have a newsletter. I haven't seen it. Every few years, there is a family trip to Barbados, the land of my ancestors. I know nothing about the trip. Folks wanted to make sure the Burnham Family Tree is up-to-date with profiles and such. I don't contribute.
Communication is to blame. We don't share a common communication platform.
The Web and Facebook would be perfect platforms to share this information, but much of my extended family isn't online, or if they are, it's only surface deep.
Some of this is because people are old. While more and more people go online it's important to note that 30% of adults over 50 don't use the Internet, according to Pew research. (That's the baby boomer generation by the way in case you are keeping score at home.) When you get to Americans over 65, well, Internet usage falls to under 40%.
It also helps to remember that the less money you have, the less likely you are to be on the Internet. My family is not poor, but few are wealthy.
What I am saying is that a great tool for social organization will miss a great many African-Americans.
Here is why this is important: 63% of teens get their news online. If we don't have a presence online to educate the young would radicals, then what the teens are learning won't come from our mouths. The Web, which can be a great leveler for mass communication, doesn't serve the needs of the African-American community, precisely because we are not there. As of 2008, fewer than 50% of African-American were online, and that number skews toward the young.
My point? If I want to learn about my extended family, I'd better pick up the phone and find out who is in charge of the mailing list. If my family wants to reach the next generation, they are going to have to use Facebook. Which do you think is more important?
Posts
All Comments
