commbasics

Had a real surprise this weekend when I got the New Tech Press web metrics for the past week (yes, it's doing quite well, thank you).  I got to the end to see where most of the referrals came from and had to sit down for a minute. About 30 percent of the traffic on NTP comes from referrals, like blog posters mentioning the article or the site and, of course, web searches.  For most of the past year, most of the referrals came from Google, which is no big surprise.  That changed after Microsoft launched Bing last month.   I started noticing that more and more visits were being referred to NTP through Bing almost immediately, but last week, the final result was that Bing referrals were twice Google's. I have no idea why this is so, but I do know that the searches are for subjects in my metatags and keywords and when people are searching for news on EDA, semiconductors, green technology, they are being referred to NTP through Bing, more often than through Go...

I have relationships with a lot of industry analysts and, like journalists, their existence is hanging by a thread because very few people understand what they are for. Take the redoubtable Gary Smith, a long time analyst for the EDA industry.  Gary worked most of his career for Gartner until that organization decided to stop covering the industry because... well... no one in the industry was supporting the effort, just like they weren't advertising.  Gary struck off on his own after the layoff and founded Gary Smith EDA and continued the good work.  He's making a decent living but people still don't understand what he is doing. Long before the layoff, Gary started putting out a wall chart on the industry; what companies were in it and where they fit.  Over the years, as the industry grew, Gary started making more wall charts for different segments.  I think there are three now.  You need an magnifying glass and a comfortable seat to read...

Jeff Bier at BDTi just posted a column at InsideDSP about how companies make a mistake when cutting back and skimping on communications.  What a relief that someone in a marketing role recognizes that. Just this week I was talking to a company that said they really don't need to make an outreach to their customers because they are "all on board with our technology."  Really.  He said that.  He believed that every possible customer; every person who has direct decision-making authority in signing the check to buy the product in each customer, has signed off.  The only problem is, none of the customers have agreed to let the company say who the customers are, nor have they actually delivered a check. Several years ago I was working with a semiconductor company that believed they had their cash cow -- a computer company named after a fruit -- completely nailed down.  They didn't need to promote any more to get into that customer's...

OK I know you're probably getting sick of this but I been reading through the newly revived Wiretap at John Cooley's ESNUG and there is a definite trend I'm seeing:  Companies, organizations and events that have been declared DOA are coming back to say they are very much alive and active.  But the "word on the street" was that they were dead. So let's define "word on the street."  The reason a lot of people in the engineering world say that losing the media is not a big deal is because "engineers talk to each other."  Well, guess what?  I talk to engineers too and what I write about generally comes from them.  And since there is no other source of information to verify what they are saying is the media that no longer exists, what else are you going to believe. Yes, when engineers talk about engineering problems, they are a great source of authority.  But when they discuss business, current events, in...

There's an interesting interchange between John Cooley and Gayatri Japa of the India Times on John's Wiretap today.  Seems Mr. Japa takes exception to the implied independence of Apache's is a violation of "honour" since the site is dedicated to pushing Apache's products and technology.  He points out that while companies like Synopsys, Mentor and Cadence have their own blog sites, they clearly identify themselves as being financed and promoted by their host companies. I'd like to agree with Mr. Japa because it does make my skin crawl a bit to see a blatant lack of transparency, but then I am reminded of something that happened to me in the past year with New Tech Press.   A company I was talking to about the program, when they learned that at the bottom of each article is a statement that says who the sponsor of the article is, said they didn't want that statement in their article.  "Just say that it was sponsored by New T...

There was an interesting post in PC World recently, by Robert Strohmeyer about  social media charlatans  who try to sell companies on the magic of social media.  He has a point.  A lot of consultants and experts make it sound like all you have to do is learn the technology of social media and it will do all the rest of the work for you.  And that's simply not true. A lot of the experts have dome out of my field of public relations and advertising who spent most of their careers force feeding the dreck posing as communication from their clients into the mechanism of the media.  Magically it seemed that the offal was turned into trusted information. These same people have learned how to shove that stuff into social media engines and the clients see that now they can read exactly what they put in.  There is no more filter.  Of course everyone thinks that's better. It's not really. What social media really does is put t...

For the past year, I've had a problem with statistics on New Tech Press.  We knew we were getting a lot of visitors, because I could see how many were coming into my other blogs from New Tech Press, but we couldn't get the data out of the actual site.  My web guy finally worked it out this week and the data started coming in... We get 2,000 to 5,000 unique visitors every month.  Even when don't have anything new for a couple of months.  Of course, new stuff always kicks up the number but I was figuring we had, at most about 2,000 visitors total. I'll be damned.  The silly thing actually works.

When I got the journalism bug back in 1971 I actually believed that our tradition of media objectivity dated all the way back to the Bill of Rights.  But over the years I've done a lot of study on the subject of the press, especially in the past 10 years, and discovered that the US press from about 1750 to 1950 was anything but objective.  In fact from the end of the the Revolutionary War through World War 1, the tenor of the American press had a greater resemblance to Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olberman than Woodward and Bernstein. The early American press was primarily anonymous.  Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin wrote scurrilous pieces about public friends and office holders that would be considered actionable today.  And they did it all under pen names. Jefferson blasted his "best friend" John Adams simply as "Anonymous" and Hamilton under the name "Brutus."  Hamilton took on both Adams, Jeffeson ...

I'm not in the habit of promoting products and services here, but I had a demo yesterday of a PR database tool that really caught my attention. Most PR database services are still working in the paradigm that there are lots of journalists and analysts working at lots of publications where they work for many years and actually have focused beats.  That's no longer true.   Today's journalists are mostly freelancers, bloggers and those still getting a paycheck are wondering if they are going to have to clear out their desks at the end of each day.  Plus, they have to cover multiple beats and generally have to back up what's left of the staff.  So it does no good to have a database that's updated annually, quarterly, monthly or even weekly about the personnel on any publication.  And new blogs are popping up everyday. I stopped subscribing to these services a few years ago because I started realizing that my personal database was ALWAYS in b...

Last week, I closed with a mention to the invention of moveable type as a devastating technology.  And it was.  It was the beginning of true mass media.  Quoting from Wikipedia: "Compared to woodblock printing , movable type pagesetting was quicker and more durable for alphabetic scripts. The metal type pieces were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, leading to typography and fonts . The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible (1455) established the superiority of movable type, and printing presses rapidly spread across Europe, leading up to the Renaissance , and later all around the world . Today, practically all movable type printing ultimately derives from Gutenberg's movable type printing, which is often regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium. [2] " So I'm not the only one who thinks so.   Moveable type made it possible for the middle class to afford to own a library.  In f...

Brian Fuller came out of the blocks today with what I consider devastatingly good news.  Apparently the Federal Trade Commission has taken a look at the state of the media and decided that both bloggers and companies are going to be libel for claims made in blogs and websites when they are not covered in traditional media.   In the past, companies could use the "buyer beware" defense because it was possible, in the days of a vibrant media, to do enough research to know when companies were ringing the BS bell.  But now, companies and bloggers will have to prove their statements unless they can show that there was objective coverage available to the market.  If they can't and the product doesn't work as stated, the customer can sue. Can you imagine what this is going to do to news releases?