commbasics

Wow.  I've been getting an earful for several weeks about the changes in B2B media,especially in the embedded, semi and electronics industry.  One might think it's Armegeddon. One PR maven just came out and said that the efforts of companies like Cadence, Intel and Altera to produced independent content is a smoke screen and that they are "clearly" not objective.  And yet when I've heard the same thing from others, no one can produce any CLEAR evidence that the content is anything but objective... at least as objective as a human being can be. Like climate change, humans have had a significant hand in creating the current environment and, like climate change scientists, there are those who say it needs to be reversed and those (like me) who say we need to adapt.  Why do I take that position?  Because no one knows how to reverse it. Let me be very clear, here: unless advertisers decide to quadruple their ad buys, like, tomorrow, noth...

Contributed articles became a very big deal during the Web 1.0 boom.  Suddenly, print and online publications had a huge need for new content.  Not only did publications start running news releases, verbatim, but they started asking companies to write opinion and analysis about their own industries.  Public Relations companies were flying high organizing the rush of opportunities.  Then the boom busted.  Publications started disappearing, mostly print but several online publications as well and both journalists and PR folks started looking for other means of income. That did not, however, stop the demand for contributed articles.  The publishing world found that they could fill a lot of space, especially on line, with opinion, white papers, technical documents and presentations that they didn't have to pay for and could cut their newsroom budgets even more.  When webinars came around, they could actually charge companies to put their crappy ...

I have been a professional communicator for almost 40 years now and have seen a lot of stuff come and go.  One thing I have learned is that there is no sure thing in a communications program, but you can increase your chances of succeeding in an uncertain world.  What is success?  The bottom line is always, increasing the bottom line. Your communications program should either get you more sales or additional funding. Failing that, it should get you more exposure in the available press, beyond just a repeat of your press release off a wire service.  If you get neither of those, then your effort was a failure. When I go into a company, I can pretty much determine if they can get where they want to go with what they have put into place and what they need to improve their chances.  After more than 20 years in the PR and journalism business I have made some mental calculations that I employ to reach my conclusion. Over for the past few weeks, as I have been gett...

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...

I've had several people point out an article in the New York Times from last week that talks about how social media is changing the way publicists do their work. The article points out that the day when deadlines, launch parties, press tours, news releases and getting the "right editor" to cover the news is long gone.  What the article doesn't mention is that very few companies want to put in the time and effort to do that kind of work, much less pay for it.  Most of them have gotten used to being able to crank out a cookie cutter news release, put it up on a discount wire service for a couple hundred bucks, hire a desperate publicist to make a couple of phone calls for about $300, and wait for the clips to come rolling in.  Of course they don't anymore so it's all the publicist's fault. What the Times article is describing is a much more labor intensive process.  Now publicists have to deal with hundreds of bloggers and social medi...

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?  

We're all dealing with the changing paradigm of mass communication forced on us by economic forces and the potential of the Internet.  No one has an answer to the question:  "What the heck to we do now."  Correction: Lots of people have answers, but none of them actually work yet. What gives me comfort is my knowledge of history.  I sit back and see what is going on and know that we have gone through it before.  To prove it, I'm going to take us on a walk over the next few weeks on the history of mass communication.  Let's look at ... Cave Drawings This might be the first form of mass media that we know.  It predates effective language and was used to record what small communities considered to be historic events and preserve some sense of progress among primitive man.  During this time, individual artists rose up within family groups, not unlike leaders that Seth Godin speaks of, who developed their skills for the be...

Just when you think that the paradigm has shifted, you find out that it has fallen flat on its face. Today, a report comes out of the Associated Press about how a Irish sociology student tested the journalistic integrity of traditional journalism, the blogosphere, and Wikipedia.  Guess what?  Journalism and blogger failed and Wikipedia passed. Shane Fitzgerald posted phony quote on Wikipedia, attributed the the recently departed French composer Maurice Jarre on March 28.  The fiction went almost directly to blogs around the world and several newspaper websites. The quote had no form of verification on Wikipedia, which is always a red flag, but the bloggers leaned on their belief that if it is on the web it must be true and lifted the "quote" directly.  In fact, it is still floating around the world as being true, even after being expunged from Wikipedia. Only The Guardian in the UK has owned up to the research error, while others are blaming Fitzg...

Came out of by antihistamine fog just long enough to see an email from John Donovan at Portable Design.  It's the latest in the casualties of the media world restructuring.  Yep.  Portable Design is gone. The pub was purchased from Pennwell along with a few other properties by the RTC group.  Considering how broad the portable electronics market is, this is a sad state of affairs. John Donovan is on the street looking for work and I recommend considering him for video interviews.  The ones he did on the Portable Design site were quite good.

Today on Bloomberg.com,  Rosabeth Moss Kanter made what might be a revolutionary statement.   Ms. Kanter  holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.  Her article, entitles " In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing "  She says the way out of a recession is marketing.  Specifically, she says, "Start looking for new markets now.  Companies dependent on a few large customers are particularly vulnerable to changes in their customers' fortunes, but all companies need the flexibility to move quickly into promising markets. In uncertain times, managers should increase efforts to identify additional uses for company products and additional sources of customers for the future. "Creative thinking can find opportunities to offset losses from current customers. Starting research now on less-familiar industries or parts of the world ...

Attended a seminar at Stanford University last night and listened to several speakers, one of which is in the market research business.  He quoted statistics from the European Society of Market Research that more than $26 billion is being spent on market research in the world .... and almost nothing on implementing the data gathered. Everyone says they want market data.  They want leads.  They want information.  But no one seems to know what to do with the information once they get it. There are tools and services out there that help interpret and implement programs, but it requires an investment. Like that's going to happen.

My postings on where the communications budget lies has prompted a discussion on the Linkedin Marketing Operations Future Forum and a consultant in the field, John Merritt has posited that whoever owns the analytics owns the budget.  And according to John, finance and marketing finance owns those budgets in many tech companies now.  This actually makes sense. The reason marketing can't get avoid budget slashing by finance is because they can't justify their existence to the CFO.  However, if the CFO holds the analytics from IT, he has the justification already, he just doesn't know what he's looking for.  The question is, does marketing know enough of what to look for that they can point it out to the CFO. This is getting more and more interesting.

Last week, I made a rather revolutionary statement that communications should be taken out of marketing as a responsibility and put into IT.  There's a simple reason for this leap of logic and it is tied up nicely by Willy Sutton's r eason for why he robbed banks. "Because that's where the money is." In a perfect world, marketing needs to control communications and messaging.  The process of hearing from the market and translating into what engineering and sales needs is the traditional way of life in business.  And when you are selling laundry detergent, that is the way it is.  But in the tech world, life is not perfect.  In the tech world, marketing budgets are being slashed.  People who understand communications theory are being replaced by engineers who understand, well, engineering.  These are the same people who say that engineers are "immune to marketing" so why do we even need marketing. And yet, the...

About three years ago I attended a financial conference where a big VC stated, categorically, that the reason they were not investing in semiconductor or EDA startups was because there was a lack of informational coverage to validate research.  In other words, because media coverage of the industries had significantly degraded, they couldn't afford to pull the trigger on investment. This same VC firm has invested heavily in Web 2.0 and green technology over the past three years and you can see why.  There is lots of coverage on those areas.  There is pretty much nothing but coverage on those areas.  The only coverage on semi and EDA is negative. You might say that that is the media's fault because, after all, the semiconductor coverage is all about the economics of the industry, not the technology so it's naturally going to be bad.  But I would like to point out that the the green Web 2.0 industries has yet to turn a profit, yet the media contin...

Just got the latest DACezine providing insight regarding what's coming for the next DAC in San Francisco.  It's got two articles/viewpoints from vendors about how important ESL tools are for the future of the EDA industry, a directory of ESL tools, an editorial from the DAC chair on the importance of EDA, a guest editorial from an EDA marcom consultant on how important it is to go to DAC, and some news about what is going on at DAC. But where is the input from users about DAC, it's relative importance, and customers of ESL tools? If you think you are a leader, look behind you.  If no one is there you are just taking a walk.

Let's say you are one of those people who have never had a cell phone and have decided to check out what all the hoopla is about.   You go down to T-Mobile, pick out a basic phone.   Charge it up and put it on your desk to see what happens.   But you don't let anyone know that you have a cell phone, you don't call anyone, you don't set up your voicemail… you do nothing with it but put it on your desk and wait for something to happen. By the end of a week, would you wonder what all the big deal was about?   Would you cancel your service and toss the phone away?   Probably. That, in a nutshell, is the description of how many marketers view social media.   "That's stupid," you may say.   I say, however, that it's conditioning. There have been some interesting conversations about social media all over social media for the past few months.   One occurred on  Harry Gries'  blog where he posted a ...

Been thinking about lots of stuff this week as I took off three days.  First time off in about 5 years.  Need to do that more.  One of the things that popped up was what to trust in media now that traditional media has shrunk to the point of irrelevance on tech industries.  This is what I came up with: Don't trust anyone with more than 30 percent market share. Yeah, it's a riff off of the hippie adage, "don't trust anyone over 30."  But I think it fits. When the economy is strong, having stable market leaders is a good thing.  Markets grow.  The leaders follow basic competition concepts.  Everyone is happy.  But when things turn bad, leaders hunker down and do whatever they can to kill innovative competition so they can avoid losing market share.  And when those leaders are doing their own thing media-wise (social media, private conferences, etc.) they do everything they can to control market conversation....