commbasics

Many companies either shy away from video altogether because they look at the cost of professional-grade production or they drop thousands of dollars into equipment and staging that is completely beyond current web capacity. "You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel!" Proverb describing doing stuff the hard way  Over the past few years we have found remarkable success developing video content that engages customers and drives sales, but we're still finding that companies tend to focus on the wrong issues when it comes to producing content for online videos.  They still think, in my opinion counterproductively, it's television advertising... but that's another story.  What I want to talk about today is the technical aspects of online video and why most companies are overspending on tech while ignoring content. Digital camera technology has advanced faster than semiconductor tech over the past 10 years to the point that what was professional grade ...

 We come now to a discussion of earned media, which we will attack in two parts.  Today were going to look at search results as earned media.  We've touched on this in earlier discussions.  Not all search results are earned media, especially if you've paid for placement, but they can be considered earned if you've put the effort into making your content accessible through proper SEO practices.    One of the main ingredients in proper earned media is effort.  Earned media takes more effort to get than paid or owned media, but is an order of magnitude more valuable than the others because people tend to trust it.  As I've said earlier, the aspects of search that can be paid for (keywords, SEO gaming and outright pay for placement) have lessened the value, but if done right, it can be very beneficial to your communications program.  For now.  A few months ago, Google announced that it was changing the way in approa...

I've been considering and reading about all the changes in the data-eating industry that Google, Facebook, et al are enacting and one big theme is starting to arise in my head: Search and search engine optimization are virtually worthless now.  (That's gonna piss some people off.) It used to be that people kept their browser start-up page on Google because they went on the interweb tubes to look for stuff; sometimes with a purpose but most of the time just to do it.  That's not the case anymore.  I know very few people that fire up their laptops, tablets and smart phones and immediately go to the browser.  now they got to Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in, Flipboard or any other application that allows them to get input from their social circle.  I know I'm one of them.  My browers (I use several) are set to open on publication sites like The Economist, SFGate and Electronic Products .  That, too, is not unsual as I see many people re...

The recession for PR folks actually began in 2000 when non-marketing professionals figured out that by posting a news release on a wire service, they could show tons of "clips" to their bosses that stated, verbatim, the corporate crap in the releases.  They no longer needed press relations budgets and had become their own "news outlets."  Google did that to the PR profession. But recently, Google did a big favor for the hacks when they changed their algorithm to cut out hits on content farms .  This, effectively, eliminated the budget benefit of bad-press-releases-on-wire-services strategy.   I haven't done any press releases for companies for a while because they are really useless exercises, but I got roped into a contract with a company, after getting promises that they wouldn't have me do the same old thing, that forced me into that really bad strategy once again. I noticed very quickly that when the release hit the wire, It showed...

Wow.  Judging from the response (in the blog comments, emails and phone calls I got) to the earlier post I think I hit a nerve.  Nobody in semiconductors or EDA likes to be told they are not innovating.  But the VCs that responded, as well as some people in EDA, where generally in agreement with me.  I think it may come down to the definition of the term. I did some looking and found a blog that actually puts it in a way that meets my definition.  It's called Broken Bulbs .  Simply put, it is the  "the profitable implementation of ideas." That's where I think the semi industry is missing it, because they have not been profitable in a long time.  The reason it isn't profitable, from the top end custom chip all the way down to the EDA tool, is because they are not concentrating on innovation.  They are patching holes and it may be time just to throw the cloth away. But let's look at the profitability iss...

I want to write something about Twitter... and a lot of other stuff, but before I do I have to establish a concept that I've come up with. This blog has always been about the concept of mass media: what it is, how it's used, where it's going.  We all pretty much know that mass media is information sent to large groups of people and we identify it in traditional forms of broadcast and print.  Sometimes we look at Google, Yahoo, Bing and any other kind of search engine as a threat to mass media, but in reality it is just another form of it.  Google still pushes out a bunch of information to a munch of people so it is still mass media. What makes online mass media the same as traditional media is that the goal is to get a response from 1 percent of the audience.  For example, in EDA, if you sent out a bit of communication to an audience of 10,000 people and you got 100 leads and maybe one sale, you would have more than paid for the effort. But social net...

News yesterday in the SF Chronic that Google is buying billboard space to sell it's apps.  Just wondering if that means everyone is going to start advertising now that Google is.