commbasics

Have you noticed that your web traffic seems to have fallen in the past month?  If not, you're lucky.  If so, don't blame Google's major overhaul of it's search algorithm , "Hummingbird." Blame your content instead.  And if you're and SEO expert, this might help .  As I've said about previous upgrades, Panda and Penguin, Hummingbird is less concerned with keywords as it is with context.  But the first two are focused on the engagement searchers have with content.  Hummingbird is all about context. (I find this remarkably coincidental that The Age of Context , by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel came out this month in time for this announcement from Google.  Well Played guys.)  So what does "all this context stuff" have to do with you?  Here's a brief explanation from Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com. "Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may bett...

Ben Elowitz made a case for how brands should become publishers in Ad Age this week  by saying they should NOT become publishers. For the most part, we agree with him because not ALL brands SHOULD be publishers but ALL brands should create content as though they are. Elowitz points out that publications are hard businesses to run because you can't always maintain objectivity or take a stand and still get the stuff passed the marketing department.  Totally agree.  That's why we maintain that to truly have a successful content operation you need to keep content strategy separate from marketing and sales.  Here's why: For any company to be successful in its promotion, all communication has to have a foundation of trust.  That has been provided by an independent press over the past half century.  The independence and ability of the press to provide that trust has eroded significantly over that time to the point that 80 percent of the American...

Bill Barron from Hearst dropped me a email this morning about yesterday's post, because for some reason Typepad doesn't like it when he comments.  So I thought I'd reprint it here to see if we can continue the conversation. "No matter what new buzz phrase we use to describe what is happening, perhaps the conversation is most interesting for readers when it comes from other readers or peers? We have seen tremendous growth of readership, engagement and membership signups on  www.eeweb.com  with this model. Although I may be mistaken, I believe this is partly the strategy EETimes is copying but with some traditional ‘editors’ shepherding the effort vs. just letting the readers go at it. In turn we’ve employed some of these tactics as well on our venerable brand Electronic Products and seen reader and traffic growth here too. There certainly is more than one way to skin this cat. At the end of the day there is room for many approaches as long as readers...

Cadence Design 's Brian Fuller dusted off his personal blog on Journalism last week and asked a question he's asked before: Are journalists/editors necessary? The question comes on word of two major personnel losses at EE Times -- Dylan McGrath and Peter Clarke -- and is one that I answered in the affirmative several months ago.  But as I read his piece I was struck by one particular graf. "But there’s a sense of unhappiness in our ranks. We can crank out that content all day long, but if there’s no one to validate it or call B.S., then we become an industry of echo chambers." If that's the way veteran journalists respond to the changes in the industry, then we should despair.  But I think, now, that Brian's asking the wrong question.  Are independent publications necessary?  My answer is, not as much as in the past. This is something I've said in other ways in the past, but I think journalists have lost a bit of spine in the past ...

By Joe Basques Footwasher Media Vice President For the past several weeks we’ve been promoting a webinar on the flaws in corporate communication strategy and we held it last Thursday.  It was sparsely attended, which was disappointing, but incredibly insightful at the same time.  We got into the second slide and the whole thing came apart.  We never even finished the presentation... which is a better outcome than we expected.  The focus of the event was to encourage a market conversation .   And that's what we got in spades. Here's a brief excerpt:     The CEOs in the session said they don’t worry about their communications plan because they have hired a VP of Marketing with an impressive pedigree that they trust to do the job.  The only time a they look at the plan is when key numbers have been missed or there is a fire to be put out.  In other words, the CEO isn't involved.  But one CEO said: "We'r...