Archive for April, 2009

Before I started my first job, my Dad told me that ‘common sense never went out of fashion’ and the same could be said for the Cluetrain Manifesto ten years on. I had signed up to blog about one of the theses (number 83) in the book via this site.

Ten years later and providing the media with preferential treatment in comparison to consumers seems more ridiculous. My friend Paul Armstrong’s Twitter feed @themediaisdying chronicles the slow death march of traditional news media.

According to ReadWriteWeb the US newspaper industry suffered a 16.6 per cent decline of advertising revenue during 2008. A recent panel of senior media executives at the McGraw Hill Media Summit couldn’t even agree on what the nature of the disruptive problem the news media is even facing, let alone come up with an effective solution.

If you want a clearer definition of the problem the news media is facing then American academic and writer Clay Shirky has an excellent analysis on his blog entitled Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. paidContent recently featured former WSJ.com editor Bill Grueskin outlined what kinds of content that news media could make money from (and are therefore more likely to create in the future in order to pay the bills):

—Daily emails with actionable information, like the best-and-worst traffic routes during rush hour.

—Sites that offer real-time intelligence about the real-estate market.

—Survey sites that accept user submissions about the best-and-worst teachers in local markets.

—In-depth coverage of local government, including publishing bills and video.

This is all non-news content which runs an end game on traditional media relations from a PR perspective.

Contrast this with how companies have performed when they have directly engaged with audiences.

Robert Scoble was christened Chief Humanizing Officer for Microsoft by The Economist back in 2005, who described him thus:

Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.

Former FT journalist Tom Foremski put it on a more commercial perspective:

Mr Scoble created many millions of dollars in positive publicity for Microsoft, on a salary of less than $100K. I don’t think WaggEd could have done a fraction of that, for 100 times the payment Mr Scoble received.

Through his blog Scoble spoke directly to customers, replying to their comments, empathising with their problems and becoming their advocate internally at Microsoft.

Dell has managed to move on from the ‘Dell Hell’ debacle through a more proactive stance in social media engagement and its use of a Salesforce.com CRM Ideas platform (a prediction market infrastructure) to power Ideastorm - a way of listening to consumers and allowing them to have a direct impact on product decisions. In the first week, Dell had 500 ideas from customers, this had grown 2,500 within the first month.

JetBlue managed to change the media agenda following its Valentine’s Day 2007 crisis by having CEO David Neeleman address customers directly via a video on YouTube. Disintermediating the traditional media allowed JetBlue to move the debate on, from how bad the problem still was as the airline recovered; to what JetBlue was doing to rectify the problems. Many US news channels ran the YouTube video on their coverage.

More recently, Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s Pizza was obviously paying attention to the JetBlue debacle and wasted no time going on camera to apologise via YouTube directly to consumers over the ‘bogie sandwich’ video created by two (now ex-)employees of the fast food chain.

So when Becky and I recently met with a client, the counsel we provided them was: in order to future-proof their marketing in a time of disruption, community needed to be their marketing, because as the title to this post says an organisation needs to take its millions of stakeholders as seriously as a prominent news journalist.

This is cross-posted at my personal blog renaissance chambara.

So, the budget has been announced; what was widely reported as Alistair Darling’s greatest test, his biggest budget, the one he daren’t get wrong.

Or was it?

There was the usual figures on growth (or for this year, the lack of it), the usual predictions of annual growth (from 2011) and the tapering of public sector borrowing but where was the real meat of the budget? What was the Chancellor actually setting out?

Well, one thing was clear, he wasn’t setting out a rescue package for the economy, he wasn’t looking to make an example of the banks either, or any other sector. Rather, this was a very careful, steady, conservative budget.

With the economy in the state it is in, you would have thought the Chancellor would go to great lengths to emphasis the Government’s strategy to re-invigorate the economy and get the country back on track.

Yes, I know he said that but the budget didn’t deliver that and as always, it is what he didn’t say that is just as important as what he did say.

But before second guessing the Chancellor and exploring the dark and Brown recesses of his thinking, let’s reflect on what the budget did say.

Some pretty standard, expected increases in progressive taxes, consumables (alcohol, tobacco etc.) and the new upper tax band were announced. These had been pretty well leaked in advance, so no surprises there.

Some additional projects and money to help the unemployed, the housing market and the environment were unveiled, which should be well received but no big shocks, no big bang.

I did wonder why he was going to such great lengths to not really say very much and I started to think about those things he didn’t say.

The real message from this budget is that there is a general election next year.

By the content of his announcement today, the Chancellor all but confirmed that there will be time for a give-away election budget. This would mean, given the timescales needed for this budget to take effect, that there is unlikely to be an election this year.

Darling’s great gamble in this year’s budget was that the effects of this budget will help him to deliver in the next budget in time for the greatest gamble of all - the timing of the General Election.

Michael Vaughan is delighted at being made to go on Twitter

English cricket is not known for its innovation and dynamism, on or off the field. Our lack of cricketing prowess will be demonstrated to the world (again) in the Twenty20 World Cup this summer and as much as I’d love England to win the Ashes the chances are at best slim.

Yet I was strangely cheered this morning by news that the England and Wales Cricket Board are to use Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as part of a wider marketing initiative this summer. With no football tournaments and no Olympic games, cricket has a chance to engage with a much wider audience than it does usually and it is encouraging to see such an austere and conservative organisation as the ECB willing to branch out and use social media for this purpose.

Cricket definitely has a perception problem with many people incorrectly assuming it to be stuffy, boring and only followed by old men. This is emphatically not the case and any steps to engage with a younger audience are to be applauded - if the ECB can use social media then so can anyone. I just hope they get some of the players involved as I’d love to read the thoughts of @KP “I wouldn’t have done it that way Straussy”, @vaughany “@Vaughanny is disappointed to have played at that wide one” and @belly “given it away again, gutted”

Well, it has happened, the first big UK political name has been brought down by British bloggers. I won’t go into a detailed discussion on the events because if you are reading this post, you will likely know the story (here is a good synopsis here in the Telegraph).  But to quickly recap, Damian McBride, a senior figure within Downing Street, albeit behind the scenes, has been brought down by the power of blogging and it looks like another senior Labour character, Derek Draper, is also losing in the battle of the bloggers between his blog, Labour List and Paul Staines, who runs the conservative blog, Guido Fawkes.

The point I want to make here, instead of getting into the history of “Emailgate”, is that both Labour and the Tories are seemingly struggling to understand how to campaign online and their efforts seem all very ad hoc with no real direction. Draper himself admitted only in February that he didn’t know the difference between “my RSS from my elbow” and from my standpoint, there has very little positive interaction with the voting public so far. While Guido Fawkes, as the name suggests, is just trying to bring down the Labour Government, although his aim is to replace it with a Conservative one and doesn’t have the anarchic goals of his namesake.

Its obvious Labour has set up their web presence to try and get some kind of Obamaesque traction on the blogosphere and from voters, after all, I may be cynical, but it is an awfully big coincidence that Draper and Co. devised Labour List in November, around the time of Obama’s victory. And as I have mentioned in a previous blog, the Conservative’s seem to be behind in this regard.

However, Labour List, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, another high-profile Conservative blogger, seem to just snipe and battle each other from across the political spectrum. While this is interesting from the point of view of a political junkie like myself, Becky McMichael, a colleague and fellow blogger, put it perfectly - they are just preaching to the converted.

There is no real engagement, no real message, no grass roots campaigning, no real harnessing of support from people who don’t already support either party.

There is a new post on Labour List by Mark Hansen titled “Labour is gaining fast online: Don’t let Guido wreck it“, where the author states “Just ten days ago a ragbag group of Labour bloggers and campaigners was gathered (organised by Derek Draper) to offer ideas as to how to build the resources on Labourlist and make it more useful to Party members at constituency level. How to build this Labour-minded community.”

Mr Hansen has summed up Labour’s and the other party’s problem quite succinctly without knowing it - they are trying to engage with Party members and registered supporters. These people won’t win you an election, it is the swinging voters who get you elected, any student of electoral politics will tell you that.  They must deliver their message outward, not just inward.

Peter Mandelson wrote in his first blog on Labour List about new media and the fact that “we have to recognise that the days of command and control are over. Instead we need to learn to embrace and engage.” I guess they are still learning.

Cross posted with my personal blog.