commbasics

    Last week we looked at how journalism, as we have known it (pretty much free) has died because no one was willing to support it through advertising anymore.  Today we cover what it means for us. There are two primary issues to be concerned with.  First, as a consumer of content, you will be responsible for the financial support of the media you consume. if you don't want to pay for it, you will be subjected to an unending stream of commercial material created by marketing teams, not actual information. So while the money for that information may come out of a company, you will pay for it by watching advertising 24-7. If you are willing to pay for it through subscription, you will end up putting out about $500 a year to get a variety of content from specific sources (at $99 a pop).  There wills till be ads surrounding the content, but the content itself will be objective.  However, you will also be enlisted to market for the publication e...

By Lou Covey, Footwasher Media CEO   Yeah, I mean you -- the readers, the advertisers, the management of the industry and the journalists .  We’ve all played a part in killing it.  This is not just my opinion.  Just two weeks ago the Tow Center for Digital Journalism issued an exhaustive report on the death of the industry .  Last week the 40-year-old EE Times announced they were dropping the free print edition of the publication and would only offered paid subscription to the EE Times Confidential.  This week, the Washington Post announced their online content would now be offered through a pay wall.  But when it comes to my opinion, I’ve been predicting this for 10 years, and in the specifics, since I started this blog in 2006 . Communications Basics has been watching the demise of the industry for a long time and not with glee but pragmatism.  The web and social media were instrumental in this outcome but our lack of understanding how all th...

By Joe Basques, Vice President Footwasher Media I had a very interesting experience last week. It was both disappointing and exciting. It turned out to be a great learning experience. And it turns out to be a nice wrap-up of this current series.  I’ve often heard the staff at Footwasher Media  say, “We want to work with companies that want to change the world.” I never really thought about what that actually means. I always thought, “Yeah, ok, every company wants to change the world, or they wouldn’t be selling their stuff.” My experience this week changed my mind and showed me what “world changers” are and what they do. I met with a potential sponsor regarding a series of content surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly referred to as Obamacare. This potential sponsor has a series of products that could be leveraged to save individuals money when this program comes in to full effect. (In the interest of fair disclosure I have not ...

Following our current theme on the importance of storytelling we interviewed this week Scott Aughtmon, a content marketing consultant in the Silicon Valley.  Turns out there is a physiological reason a good story can make your communication more effective.  Look for the link to Scott's webinar at the end.     Related articles The Lost Art of Great Story Telling

By Joe Basques, Vice President Footwasher Media  In the new movie, Lincoln, there is a scene where the Great Emancipator is meeting with his cabinet debating about whether they should move forward on the amendment abolishing slavery.  In the middle of the heated argument, Lincoln starts telling a seemingly unrelated story and one of the cabinet members exclaims in frustration “Oh God, not another one of his stories.” But no one leaves the room.  They all are struck silent as he weaves the story into an important defense of moving forward with the legislation.  The story is so compelling that no one can argue against whether to move forward. The desire for a great story is engrained in our very DNA.  Since man started scratching pictures on cave walls, people have had a burning desire to tell the story of their history, inventions, ideas, and  great adventures.  Cave paintings to campfire stories to hieroglyphs to the written word, communication ...

Just read an interesting post in ReadWrite about Mark Cuban deciding to abandon Facebook because of the algorithm change forcing corporations to pay exorbitant fees to get play on the social network.  Frankly, I think he's wrong to do it, but Facebook is finally doing something right. The great thing about Facebook, as opposed to Google, was that companies could get a lot of good exposure if they could get their customers to talk about what they thought about products.That's why I was an initial FB booster rather than press releases on Google  as a means to reach an audience. It was true public relations, not companies gaming the SEO of Google for a higher page rank.  In the beginning, it worked well.  Then companies got lazy, and so did Facebook, by creating corporate pages and finding ways to game the community attraction, just like Google allowed.  I was really getting sick of having to completely reorder my FB feed to keep the crappy fa...

Trade shows, especially trade shows in the technology world, have been the bane of my existence for a couple of decades. I hate them and think they are a terrible waste of money. That doesn’t mean I think they are useless, but how companies use them makes them so. I almost think there should be a minimum entrance requirement. In the past couple of years there have been some changes that give me hope. One is the introduction of social media into the effort and the other is specific focus. UBM seems to have discovered that secret. UBM’s Design West conference in 2012 served as an umbrella for seven different conferences, ranging from Android development to sensors. Attendees could focus directly on their interest, rather than wander about over several days trying to figure out what to do. The recently concluded ARM TechCon, run by UBM and heavily sponsored by ARM, broke up the three day conference and expo between semiconductor design and software/systems design bringing in compl...