Category: media-general

By Posted on Posted in media-general, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

I read a very interesting article called “How to Weather a Twitterstorm“–and one of the most interesting parts was the comments, which included a whole lot of people who basically said that Twitter, Facebook and other social media are a marginal part of the overall audience, and kowtowing to them is a mistake.

I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Twitter, et al. They have influence beyond their numbers, and there’s certainly precedent for stories leaping out of niche social media into the mainstream, with major consequences. Just ask Dan Rather about the fake memo about Bush’s military service that cost several key staffers their jobs and forced Rather into premature retirement. I have been a deep critic of Bush (and a fan of Rather), but when I saw the memo reproduced online, I knew there was no way it could be authentic. It was done on a modern word processor.

In my view, the article’s author, Abbey Klaassen, is more on target. she offers strategies to evaluate, contain, and appropriately respond to online criticism.

The point is critical that you want to acknowledge and contain the problem, and do so rapidly. And Twitter can be a great tool for this. Smart companies are finding ways to build their brand on Twitter, and one of the best is to be open to criticism while finding effective ways to defuse it. The Twitter page for Comcastcares is a great example of this. It’s all about customer service for cable TV customers with technical problems.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Publishing Tagged with , , , , , ,

Interesting piece in the Washington Spectator, noting that the Anniston (Alabama) Star seems to be doing reasonably well, even as big-city papers around the country move to Internet-only or shut their doors entirely. Even the Boston Globe is teetering.

In my own area, I read the Daily Hampshire Gazette, published in Northampton, Massachusetts for over 200 years. Northampton is a town of about 30,000; the whole county had only 152,251 in the 2000 census.

Yet, despite a proliferation of local online advertising channels and a tough economy, the Gazette seems to be doing well also. The parent company has even acquired several newspapers recently, and the Gazette also publishes a growing number niche magazines.

Early on, the paper decided it would not cannibalize print with its web edition; many of the stories (especially the local news stuff that would be hard to get elsewhere) are behind a firewall, available only to paid subscribers. Oddly enough, I notice that the link to the Spectator story is also subscriber-only. Hmmm–can this model work? The Wall Street Journal abandoned it, but clearly traditional print journalism is not doing well in a world of free content from professional journalists.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Four years FedEx took over the Kinko’s copy and office services company, the Kinko brand was dropped entirely in 2008; those services are now grouped under FedEx Office.

When Marketing Sherpa interviewed FedEx’s Director of Global Brand Management, Gayle Christensen, she outlined eight steps the company took to smooth the transition in the public eye and retain/acquire market share. (Note: Sherpa’s content goes behind a barrier, for purchase, after a few days. “Norman,” referred to in the quote, is Eric Norman, of the marketing strategy firm Sametz Blackstone Associates,)

What caught my eye was “Step #6. Set up interviews with bloggers”:

High-profile people (e.g., new chief executives) should do interviews with bloggers, trade publications, and other media outlets to address weak speculations and preclude skepticism, says Norman. “You have to engage folks who are writing about you,” he says. “If you are not engaged, you concede the control of the message to them.”

Find out who’s talking about the merger on social media outlets, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or niche online forums and blogs. Search for the merging companies’ names or set up an email alert, such as Google Alerts, for the company and brand names.

Make a point to comment on blogs or social media sites talking about the merger, especially if something is false.

I’m fascinated that setting up interviews with bloggers warrants a main headline, while traditional media is mentioned but glossed over in the paragraph. It shows how far we’ve come that bloggers are considered opinion molders, while traditional journalists are barely noticed. This is a growing trend, I think, and it has many implications for how we (as a society) deliver and digest news.

I’m a big believer in citizen journalism, including the blogosphere (I’ve blogged since 2004, after all), and participate actively in social media.

Still, I question the decision to pretty much ignore the mainstream press. There’s also a place for the trained and skilled journalist, who knows how to ask deep questions, has a really strong BS detector, and understands the importance of telling a story that encompasses multiple points of view. I, for one, am not ready to give that up just yet.

But I also note that for many years, some “mainstream” journalism outlets have had a very clear point of view, and have thrown objectivity out the window. While in recent years we’ve seen this very dramatically with, for instance, the strong right-wing bias of Fox News or the somewhat less strong liberal tilt of NBC, even during the golden news decade of the 1970s, there were news outlets such as New Hampshire’s Manchester Union-Leader that were unabashedly partisan and sharply opinionated.

With huge budget cutbacks, bean counters making policy decisions, and corporate ownership sometimes casting a pall over the selection of stories and the decisions about how much resources to use in pursuing them, the future of professional news gathering looks a bit shaky from here. I hope it pulls out in the clutch. It’s an important perspective, despite its flaws, and we’d be poorer for losing it.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Want to know why right-wing pundits far outnumber those on the left in mainstream US TV? Bloggers Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald shared a theory on Bill Moyers Journal: having someone like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now would interfere too much with the construct disseminated by US mainstream media that the US government and major corporations are our benevolent friends, and they don’t want to air views that might help explain why the US has enemies abroad.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, those preachers of hate, are OK in their view because they are simply putting out a more vitriolic version of the Reaganite “mainstream.” But the soft-spoken, highly articulate and very well informed Goodman (who I consider one of the best interviewers in contemporary journalism) is considered a threat!

Of course, this doesn’t explain how another articulate and well-informed progressive,
Rachel Maddow, gets air. But it says a lot about the nature of today’s corporate media.

In the “know your enemies” department, fans of intelligent TV must read this brief transcript or watch the video. It’s a shocker.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media

Anita Bruzzese’s post on what bloggers can learn from traditional journalists is must-reading for anyone in the social media space. As someone who has done journalism, PR, and blogging (among other kinds of writing), I agree with at least 90 percent of her column.

I especially liked her section on rewriting:

When I wrote my second book, I spent three months writing it and three months editing it. I put on five different hats when I read the copy: 1) as writer I made sure the copy flowed easily; 2) as a reporter, I made sure the copy included solid facts and sources; 3) as a copyeditor, I made sure I used proper grammar, correct spelling and looked for ways to tighten the copy so that it was concise; 4) as a workplace/career journalist, I made sure I was giving people information they wouldn’t find elsewhere; and 5) as a reader, I made sure that even if I knew nothing about the subject, it was still clear. (By the way, don’t try and put on all these hats at once. You’ll lose focus and get confused.)

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Publishing

A wonderfully snarky Op-ed in the New York Times by Timothy Egan, called “Typing Without a Clue“–basically attacking Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin for the book deals they’re expected to ink, and saying writing should be left to the many talented but unappreciated writers out there and not sold off as if it were junk bonds by those in the 14th minute of their 15 minutes of fame.

He has a point, certainly–but I’m actually rather fond of the democratization of writing, music making, movie making, etc. There’s still plenty of third-party validation available for those who want to judge these works by some kind of standard–but there’s also an openness, an ability to disseminate a message, that I could never have dreamed of in 1972 when I published my first articles (in an underground high school newspaper published, oddly enough, by conservatives–they ran my liberal stuff with disclaimers). From these mimeographed samizdats–already more accessible than traditional media–to the disintermediated world of blogs, e-zines, Tweets and, yes, hundreds of thousands of books every year is an amazing leap.

Now all we have to do is find time to read one-millionth of it, ha ha ha.

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

Lostremote.com has an astounding post: a traditional print journalist ranted that a TV station allowing its viewers to select one story for the nightly newscast was the death of standards. The station, in best-practices Web 2.0 fashion, invited him on the show to debate the issue publicly.

And this is how the journalist responded:

“I’m told that this multiple-choice reporter has called me out with a public invitation, on her blog or her twitter or whatever, to debate her before her ubiquitous Web camera with its on-line audience of literally dozens of voyeurs and three or four lonely, misfit bloggers who spend all their time communicating only with each other. I need not lend my experience and credibility to draw her a crowd.”

Talk about clueless! This kind of arrogance might have worked for The New York Times 100 years ago, but it sure doesn’t work now for an unknown journalist working for a newspaper in Arkansas! What he doesn’t get is that he has no credibility with the audience he’s rejecting (other than he apparently writes a blog on politics)–and that his appearance on the show might have built credibility for his position, and might have gone viral, being seen by tens of thousands.

Now, mind you–I am trained as a traditional print journalist. I have enormous respect for people who follow the old principles and standards–who do research before they write, who understand the importance of objectivity, and who try to tell the important stories that are very hard to find on mainstream broadcast media–and I’m horrified by the decline both in journalistic standards within a story and in the general willingness to go after a tough (and expensive) but important story. That failure in part led us to the Iraq debacle. Journalists absolutely need to ask hard questions, grapple with the answers, and filter the world for their public. In an era where we all have far too much information and limited ability to process it, we still need traditional journalists as intermediaries. Citizen journalism is vital, but it’s not the whole thing. Professional journalism is crucial, still.

But I think you can have both journalistic standards and an openness to listening to your readers/listeners/viewers. You can have deep investigative journalism and a viewpoint, even in nonprint media–look at the amazing radio/TV show, Democracy Now, if you want an example. And you can have dialog without threatening your position. I think this journo was extremely short-sighted.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media

The post directly above this one, about the death of traditional journalism, has a very interesting provenance. I thought I’d share it with you and provide a look into the mindset of one blogger choosing one story–because as someone who was raised on newspapers, I’ve obviously come far in my information patterns.

PR guru Peter Shankman started a service less than a year ago called Help A Reporter Out; it matches journalists seeking sources with over 40,000 readers seeking news coverage. The venture is free, and advertising-supported. It started as a Facebook group, an I’m proud to say that I was the sixth member.

Today, Peter ran this ad:

This HARO: Cinterim. Cinterim is technology marketing like you
never seen it before, time-sliced marketing: only what you need,
when you need it. They’ve termed it Marketing as a Service: From
Chief Marketing Officers and market-driven business strategy to
complete outsourced marketing services. But they don’t have any
clients or accounts, rather, they serve as a partner to every
company they work with, whether helping a start-up to focus or
turning a later stage or public company’s strategies and execution.
Cinterim is fully invested in each partner’s short- and long-term
success. Make Cinterim your secret weapon. Find them at
www.cinterim.com. And be sure to check out co-founders Lisa Arthur
and Michael Bloom’s hard hitting blog, www.fearofmarketing.com , a
prelude to their book-in-progress, Fear of Marketing, Why the
companies that connect people are disconnected.

Now, I’m not someone who clicks on ads a lot, but I do read Peter’s sponsorship notices, and have followed several of them. I went to the blog. And found this very intelligent and thoughtful article about GM’s troubles (I’ll forgive the sloppy proofreading–lord knows, I’ve certainly been guilty of that!). I even put in a comment, about market share not necessarily being what it’s cracked up to be.

And then I glanced at the blogroll, which only had four entries. I saw three blogs I knew and respected, and this intriguing-sounding one called Lost Remote. So I clicked over and found the story I blogged about.

In fact, I sent my assistant a note asking her to add both Fear of Marketing and Lost Remote to both my own blogroll and my personal blog-reading widget that notifies me of new posts.

Of course, the problem with this kind of journo-voyeuristic ADD, which I get a lot, is that my goal for the last hour was to lower my inbox from 997 to 950.I got it all the way to 996. Yeah, my inbox is so crowded because I’ll get a mailing from Huffington Post or Marketing Sherpa or dozens of others, and I start following a lot of the links, and then at some point I have to do paying work. Oh well, next time!

And if you haven’t read my post on the death of journalism, please scroll up. It’ll be right on top of this one.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Wow! Mashable reports that the Pulitzer Prize people have opened up the award to online journalists without a print publication, if they meet certain criteria. That means bloggers, e-zine/webzine publishers and perhaps others are seen as legitimate journalists.

As a blogger, publisher of four e-zines, and publisher of five webzines, I welcome this.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that I heard this news on a social media site: Twitter.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Politics, Uncategorized

How come we’re not hearing about this in the mainstream press? An on-the-scene blogger (and an articulate one who obviously has some journalism training) called it “the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state.” She’s got photos and videos on the link, too (as well as over 1000 comments, so give it some time to load)

Yet, all three pages of unduplicated results of a Google for “AK Women Reject Palin” (the name of the rally) brought up 24 blogs and one story–it’s unclear whether it’s a staff piece or a hosted blog–at washingtonpost.com. And in the Post story, I learned the delicious irony that the anti-Palin rally was held in front of the public library. Nice!

By contrast, the first page of a search for “Welcome Home” “Sarah Palin ” brings up a different, cheerleader story in the Washington Post, as well as a mildly critical story in the Boston Globe, and coverage in the L.A. Times and Miami Herald. In all, 59,200 results versus 113 for coverage of the protest.

Of course, in sparsely populated Alaska, whose entire population is about equal to Boston’s, that only took 1400 people. Still, it dwarfed the 1000-attendee pro-Palin “welcome home” rally held the same day.

And I find it hard to believe that such an important event could be completely ignored by the mainstream media. Yes, we have free speech in this country (if you don’t get too close to convention halls/corporate events and your skin is the proper color, and you’re not identified as Muslim)–but the media censors the message.

Earth to mainstream media: stop feeding us “Soma” (to use Aldus Huxley’s term) and start reporting the news!

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