Kristine Lowe

How MSM and Marketers can curry favour with bloggers

Cory Doctorow has 17 excellent tips in Information Week (via Bloggers Blog) on how to get bloggers to write about you – which could be just as useful for news sites.

Now, let me first take a moment to say that I've never understood journalists and editors complaining about parasitic bloggers and how they feed off mainstream media (MSM). To my mind, the world wide web is a conversation, or more precisely a cacophony of small and big conversations, and the day people stop talking about your newspaper that's when you should start getting really worried. Besides, blog buzz = link love = traffic, and I can't see how blog-traffic is less valuable than other traffic.

But back to Doctorow. In short, his advice adds up to "link, link and link some more":

Have a link. Have a permanent link. Have a link for everything. Use real links. Use links that go to pages. Flash sites stink (no way to link direct to specific page, no way to copy), PDFs stink (or, as Greenslade once suggested PDF = Pretty Damn Futile) etc ...Anyway, go read in full, got to run now....

Bloggig is about identity, not brand

A blog gives you a chance to build your own identity, which is miles better than brand. It allows for a mix of trivial, serious, thoughtful and sometimes stupid.. just like the human being behind it. That is the authenticity that companies would like to infuse their brands with. Alas, it's like with androids. Close but not quite. And often, not even close...

Afraid I don't have the direct link for this quote, but I'm sure it's something I copied down from Adriana ages ago (I can just hear her voice when I read it:-) ). I came to remember this quote just now, thinking about a question Paal Hivand asked yesterday about how long you can get away with pure marketing and sales on a blog or twitter acoount before readers get fed up. For my own part: my time/attention is precious, and I get fed up straight away if there's nothing in it for me... Just gave up on following BBC News on twitter because they don't provide direct links (in which case follwing them via my news reader would be far superior, but that's too much of a commitment)...

Managing change in the newsroom - and in the marketing department

To my mind, News is a conversation, for the most part written by Steve Smith, the editor of Spokesman Review, is one of the most interesting newspaper blogs around because it gives you a marvellous insight into how a regional newspaper is grappling with change: trying to involve its readers more, be of better service to them and working to become more transparent.

I started following this blog after I met Steve at a seminar he gave in Oslo last autumn (I covered his talk for Journalisten, in Norwegian). Among the things he mentioned back then was how he'd sent his local editor, Carla Savalli, who at that stage was one of his most change-resistant staff members, on a five week trip across the US to investigate the future of journalism.

"She is now the most radical agent for change in the newsroom," said Smith, so it was very interesting to read Carla's account of a conference she had attended on "Managing Change" recently.

Here's an excerpt, check out the full post for the bit about the marketing department (the main point being that newspapers were concerned their commercial arms hadn't figured out how to promote "the new journalism"):

1. How can you change workflow and content unless you go back to the readers? Too many newsrooms still insist they know what readers want, which is why they are endlessly experimenting and not 'landing on' a formula.

2. Strategy has to drive structure, not the other way around.

3. Journalists are appallingly dysfunctional.

4. Citizen journalism is less gimmick than it is changing the frame of reference. It's asking a different set of questions, assuming a different set of assumptions. It's not going to save us. It WILL make us more relevant. The sooner newsrooms get over themselves and bring these readers into our tents, the better off we'll be.

The only other item that sticks with me came from a business consultant (figures). He goes into workplaces of all kinds to teach adaptive change. You can institute top-down change, he says. And he supposes sometimes that is necessary when times are urgent and there's no room for democracy. But collaborative change has the potential for the greatest lasting impact. The first time an organizations goes through it is the hardest. Lay the foundation and each successive change is easier and eventually expected.

But this is what struck me: For rank and file, how you institute change is ultimately all about "justice." Who you talk to, who you include in task forces, who gets the opportunities, who gets an assignment change, is about power for the powerless. Managers have to be aware of that, and if it matters to them, try to talk to a cross-section of people - both horizontally and vertically - before imploding a structure.

Other than that, we're doomed. Hierarchies die hard in newsrooms. The best we can hope for is that the business side will catch the same entrepreneurial spirit of newsrooms and that we innovate something before the next Craigslist puts us out of business.

Ryanair: We fight for women's right to undress

Ryanair has launched a calendar with a number of its perky stewardesses posing in bikinis, and, towards the back, a somewhat less flattering picture of a stewardess supposed to represent its main competitor, Air Lingus.

Answering the flurry of complaints from the usual suspects, Wilhelm Hamilton, Ryanair's head of North European operations told Dagens Media: "We're going to continue to fight for women's right to undress," adding that any proceeds from the calendar, sold on board Ryainair flights and online, would be donated to charity.

Interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if some fifty per cent of the world's non-religious population would support that fight, but will it sell airline tickets?

Now that I don't have any clients in the travel industry anymore (check my about section or Linkedin profile), I'm free to say I feel Ryanair is the airline industry's equivalent of public transport: I've often marvelled at how it has made the most colourful cross-segment of ages, professions and ethnic groups take to flying. No other airline has quite as diverse a group of loyal frequent flyers.

I can see how the 'campaign' will go down well with the two rows of rowdy football supporters usually seated in the back of the cabin, but I'm not convinced about the Imam and his family filling up the six middle rows; those excited souls part-taking in the pensioner association's first foreign excursion in the four front rows, nor the families with screaming kids seated inconveniently where they can't but help be the centre of attention.

In essence, I wonder if this 'campaign' isn't a bit 'off-target', but we all choose our battles in life, don't we Wilhelm?

Disclosure: I've helped Ryanair promote its route from Torp to Liverpool – taking care of the press side of staging a Beatles event in Oslo - back when I was a not-so-secret agent for the British not-so-civil service.

Update 15:55pm: Talking about the civil service, Spain's government-run Women's Institute is considering to take legal action against Ryanair, 'not so much because the pictures are sexual, but because there are no men in the calendar', writes Gridskipper (via Wikio)....

At what point does pitching a blogger become spam?

Today's required reading for all PRs and marketeers who want to get a handle on how to approach bloggers: I mean, I've done my bit of PR-work in the past, and I'm embarrassed on a daily basis on behalf of all the PRs who send me press releases that should never have seen daylight. And that's just the stuff I get as a journalist, an ABC in PR here, but the press releases and approaches I get as blogger are even worse, if such a thing is possible - I wouldn't have thought it took too much research to figure out that I'm not likely to write about e.g. baby food. So three cheers for Hans Kullin's top 10 blog pitch pet peeves. Enough said, go read.

All free, at the modest price of your privacy

Targeted marketing comes in so many forms these days. And to think I was a bit worried about this trend when there's services like Pudding Media (from Valleywag, via Adriana's Furl feed):

There's a new Skype competitor, dubbed ThePudding, on the Web. And ThePudding is completely free*. All you have to do is agree to let Pudding Media listen in on your calls. To compensate users for the breach of privacy, the company claims, "ThePudding uses breakthrough technology that makes your conversations fun and interesting." In other words, anyone using ThePudding will be served contextual ads based upon topics overheard in your conversation! It's like Google's Gmail, but for talking. Remember when we were freaked out by the idea of Google scanning our email to pick out relevant ads? And how we all got over it?

That's what Pudding Media CEO Ariel Maislos would have you believe, anyway. He explains, "The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world." Besides the firm is targeting youths, who judging from their MySpace and Facebook habits, aren't concerned with privacy. In other words, targeting the young and the weak.

Company tables lawsuit to remove online comments by what is believed to be unhappy customers

Gee, the mind-boggling lawsuits this brave new world of ours throws up:

An Australian accounting software developer blames a "severe downturn in sales" on people who bad-mouthed its products in online user forums. It wants a judge to muzzle their comments. The company is also seeking about $125,000 in damages from the operator of the website which hosted the forums (full story here)

Yes, people do (shock, horror) talk together online, and, yes, it often has ramifications for brands, reputation and ultimately earnings. Too many companies have yet to wake up to the fact that the Internet enables people to have the conversations they once had in the pub or coffee house online: leaving permanent electronic footprints which enable disenchanted customers to find each other and exchange experiences regardless of geographic locations or distances.

And then of course, when commenters do wade into the minefield of 'infringing' on a product's reputation you get these interesting discussions of how we can be sure that these folks are who they claim to be, have reasons to say what they mean, or mean what they say, or... how did that one go again?

Not to mention all the challenges of distributed conversations. As for this story, I got it from Adriana, who got it from Leo, who by the way happen to be the man behind this blog's banner (based on a shot from Muswell Hill, where I shall be returning next week).

Next Thursday's lunch:

Disclaimer: I would of course never dream of writing
a 15-word long headline in any of my day jobs.

Schibsted moves in on UK ad market

Schibsted, the ambitions Norwegian media group who, some would say, operates in a different league than most other Scandinavian media companies, aims to take a slice of the international ad market by setting up shop in London (via Dagens Media, in Swedish).

To start with, the London office will employ two media sellers primarily selling ad space for Schibsted's Swedish websites, such as business site E24.se. The site is in the process of beefing up its high-end lifestyle section and recently advertised for two new journalists with 'expensive habits' (not that they were prepared to offer a salary to match those habits though).

In the long run, the group, which also owns leading newspapers and websites in Norway, Estonia, France and Spain, plans to expand both the size and scope of its London office, and will try to convince international media buyers to buy into a range of other products.

London luxury beckons
(picture from lovely Petersham Hotel)

Not "too big" to listen to our customers

Fascinating story from The Financial Times today (behind pay wall): HSBC has reversed its decision to take away students’ interest-free overdrafts as soon as they leave university after it suffered a consumer revolt by graduates on Facebook. The bank said it was not “too big” to listen to customers.

Wow.

Now, why am I with NatWest again?

Blogs beat banners for advertising

People largely ignore display advertisement on websites. A more successful, albeit unethical, approach to grab attention is to make the ad look like content, reports Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box.

These findings (via David Black) reminded me of a recent survey by Director A/S which showed that the click-through rate (CTR) for professional blog posts was 5-6 more times effective than for advertisement banners. The survey even found that those who read commercial blogs buy more than those who arrive at a company's website via advertisment banners (via Berlingske.dk)

I'm in two minds about this survey: of course blogs can be a much more effective way to communicate with people you want to reach, but there's blogs and there's blogs, if you know what I mean – the genuine ones, and those that read like press releases. I'd hate to see this survey cause an inflation in the latter.

This, however, is a no-brainer:

"Even when we did record a fixation within a banner, users typically didn't engage with the advertisement. Often, users didn't even see the advertiser's logo or name, even when they glanced at one or two design elements elsewhere inside an ad."

Weird marketing from Amazon

I've been beset by so many technical woes over the last few days that I've almost felt this must be some sort of big cosmic conspiracy, part of what's kept me from blogging, but here's a marketing ploy that really, really puzzles me:

Twice now I've received an email from Amazon telling me how I might be interested books that will be 'released 23 August 2007' and are part of a series of which I have bought other volumes from Amazon.

The funny thing is, these are OLD books. I have the entire series, and the books Amazon are trying to tell me will be released this week are actually almost a decade, or at least half a decade old. So is this a new marketing ploy, or what? I'm amazed to get something like this from a company that's usually quite smart about its marketing – and no, I normally don't mind too much this kind of targeted marketing, based on previous purchases, that would have been illegal in Norway, had the company been based here, due to privacy laws.

But this ploy, trying to make a fan believe that an OLD book by one of his or her favourite authors is being released for the first time this week, seems like the ultimate folly. Is Amazon letting its Interns run the marketing department for the summer? There might of course, be some small print that I've overlooked here, but in any case I can't RVSP to the emails, and my Internet connection this week is much to sloow, thank you very much Netcom, for me to bother to go over to the Amazon site and find somewhere I can leave meaningful feedback. And yes, I've given myself a standing order never to blog when I'm really cranky mood, and there's nothing like Internet problems to induce that in me, but there you go...

Sun gets green light for web-first corporate news

As of next Monday, 30 July, Sun Microsystems will start releasing key corporate news over the Internet, via the company's website and RSS-feeds. It's thought to be the first time a US company has been allowed to use the web as it's main channel for price-sensitive information and follows protracted negotiations between Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz and Christopher Cox, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman – made public on Schwartz's blog.

Financial Times has the background story. Here's Schwartz on the implications:

Referencing a dialog we've established with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, and its Chairman Cox, this will place, for the first time, the general investing public - those with a web browser or a cell phone - on the same footing as those with access to private subscription services. In effect, driving an open dialog directly with investors, rather than routing information through proprietary sources. Open is as open does.

I believe this change will increase the transparency of our business, fulfill our desire to disseminate information on a fair and equitable basis, and allow the network to be used for what it's intended - connecting people and information... I wonder how far off we are from ceasing to issue traditional press releases altogether... after all, no news agency could possibly suggest they reach a greater portion of the planet than the internet.

Watch out for a brave new future where you get your press releases via RSS-feeds you subscribe to, rather than as a nuisance clogging up your email box. Okay, lots of companies are already using RSS to distribute press releases, but being able to distribute price-sensitive information this way: now that's a milestone.

Spam season and the (il)logic of spam

I guess I'm lucky, or have been, to receive very little spam on this blog, just the odd trackback, but this month spam's been a daily nuisance - mostly in the form of trackbacks, but also comments. What's struck me though, is that most of it links to real products, like Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses or book reports. So, is this a new, absurd product advertisment strategy, or just pranksters with a bizarre kind of humour? Where's the business model in spam?

Now, blog spam, at least the kind I get, comes in three differents forms: 1) when someone writes gibberish and links to a product website: seems like an obvious prank, I mean, who would click on a link like that? 2) says "I've found the ultimate solution to xx" and links to a product website, why would I care? 3) says something intelligent that relates to the topic of my blog and links to a product website. If it's intelligent enough I might let that pass as it could be the beginning of an interesting conversation.

But the whole business of spam really is beyond me: you spam 10,000 blogs, get 5,000 or less hits - how big a percentage is actually stupid enough to buy your product? Try to advertise sunglasses via a trackback on my media blog, huh? That is almost as widely off the mark as the spam emails I get about available Russian chicks and European casinos. Talk about untargeted marketing...

Here's an interesting blog post (in Swedish, via Henrik Torstensson) about sites spamming Swedish blogs with links to 'link farm like' catalogues. Again, the business model escapes me....

Sophisticated Bullshit: why advertising is dead

... this is rather sophisticated BS, which the author could have got away with before the internet. Now people just share how crap a product is and no amount of advertising projection is going to have psychological impact. And that is why advertising is dead - it doesn't have the same function it used to but it's still sucking out money out of companies. What the author is missing is that the 'informational' role of advertising is now fulfilled by other customers, i.e. markets. The demand side supplying itself...

Quintessentially Adriana (commenting on a Financial Times opinion piece about the benefits of advertising), from her Furl feed.

Monetising Blogmonitoring

A recent 'seminar' on blogging by media intelligence company Cision left me somewhat baffled. The talks, by Richard Gatarski and Alexander Mason, were inspiring enough, but Cision used the seminar to launch its plans to offer new, and no doubt expensive, blogmonitoring for its clients.

This didn't make much sense to me: why would I spend a lot of money on something I can do in a few minutes for free with the help of technorati, google, newsreaders etc? As a journalist for instance, I subscribe to technorati searches for all the companies I follow via my newsreader. It takes me very little time keep up with, and could, for one, tell me that there was a lot of Dutch blog buzz around Schibsted's recent launch of its E24 concept in Holland.

So Cision's move puzzled and annoyed me as it seemed to be a blatant attempt to make money on people's ignorance. I was heartened therefore, when I discovered this vibrant conversation around another new blogmonitoring service, this time from PR Newswire and Umbria (via Adriana):

Media monitoring services still play an important role in supporting PR, but this old school model comes from a day before the Internet where national media monitoring via a third party was essential, simply because there wasn’t an alternative, and in many cases, for print, radio and TV there isn’t an all inclusive alternative today. And yet blogs and consumer generated media are the children of a new age, an online age where information is accessible online anywhere in the world at the touch of a button.

Many PR Professionals contact and read TechCrunch so perhaps we can get some answers: is it that some PR Professionals cant type “Insert Clients Name here” into Technorati or Google Blog Search?

How difficult is it to set up feeds from services such as Google News, Yahoo News and Topix which deliver results based on corporate brand names? Isn’t the whole point of engaging with and participating in a Web 2.0 world one to one communications, removing the middle tier of information dissemination?

"Occasionally I come across proposals from such agencies to my clients," writes Adriana: "I always show them how to do it themselves. That's the whole point - disintermediation can work for companies too, not just individuals. Go figure. "

Many of comments on this TechCrunch post are superb (go check it out in full), and gave me many useful perspectives on why we see these new blogmonitoring services popping up. A valid point is of course that blog monitoring can be time-consuming for big companies with products that generate a lot of buzz, but here's a few of my favourite comments which supported my gut reaction to the news:

Comment from Unjournalism
I do the Technorati/Google/Topix/Etc.-to-RSS free monitoring and then — wait for it…THINK about what the results mean. Then spend the savings on gadgets and whiskey

Comment from Kevin Bourke
There are a few reasons why I’m not surprised at the launch of a service like this:
- PR agencies (and even internal PR departments) are often put in the “justify your existence” position; develop a weekly, monthly, quarterly report that demonstrates your value and reminds the executive team why we spend so much on PR. PR people, unfortunately, tend to justify their existence by generating gobs of reports — the more ‘hits’ the better you must be. And in today’s Web 2.0 world, the pressure for more comprehensive results is that much greater. In my view, it’s unfortunate, because this defensive mentality actually devalues PR, and makes PR people forget where their true value lies.

For one, let's see if Cision's wonderful blog search engine picks up on this post....

Politicians Not Welcome

It's tough being a politician in Second Life. Despite the allure of a fabulous new and PR-friendly marketing platform, it's not quite the controlled environment they are used to, where policemen and security guards swiftly can be called in to deal with 'undesired elements'. Hell, it's unlike any other environment most politicians are used to, and many have found that 'interacting with digitial users' didn't take on quite the form they had bargained for:

At the start of this week, The Guardian reported how 'Italians seeking respite in cyberspace from the surreal world of Italian politics were fighting plans by a minister to build a campaign headquarters in there.' A more unpleasant surprise awaited US Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards at the start of last week, when his Second Life HQ was vandalized by Republican Second Lifers and haunted by a feces spewing obscenity. Then of course there's was Le Pen's brand new HQ in the virtual world that was bombarded with flying pigs a while back (still, it must have compared quite favourably to Le Pen's frequent experiences of being bombarded with rotten eggs in real life).

John Edwards' Second Life HQ vandalized

"This is the modern-day equivalent of hippies freaking out the squares. You see countless news stories about this, over and over again: the gray humourless drones of political parties or corporations rushing to establish a presence in Second Life because it's the thing to do, only to find themselves staring directly into the collective Goatse.cx of the Internet's soul," wrote John Brownlee in Wired's Table of Malcontents, but one of his readers put it more bluntly in the comments:

"The way I look at it is that political idiots entered a realm that they do not and care not to understand. This would be like jumping in to World of Warcraft and expecting people to care about your political agenda... we just don't care."

Of course, politicians are neither the only ones, nor the first, who have met with 'violet' protests in this virtual world. CNET takes a closer look at Second Life 'grassroot activism' here.

The message is dead, long live the messenger

"Repeat after me: 'the message' is dead, gone and not coming back. Blogs are conversations, conversations are social interaction and social interaction is about your relationship to a person, not a statement. Cornelius Puschmann in a comment on Suw Charman's post Edelman: must try harder" (via Adriana). Here's two of my favourite quotes from Charman's post on her disappointment over Edelman's dabbling in fake blogs, or flogs, on behalf of Wal Mart, but do check out the full post:

For a long time I've felt that Richard [Edelman] is indulging in the zooification of bloggers - collecting and displaying them the way that rich people used to do with exotic animals. I worry that this makes him feel that he's got a better understanding of the phenomenon than he actually has.

Kevin [Anderson] frequently talks about how he sees big media trying to adapt blogs to their business model instead of adapting their business to blogs, and Edelman are making exactly the same mistake - trying to use blogs for PR, instead of trying to adapt PR to blogs. Having a blog isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix anything. The magic comes from transparency, openness, honesty and engagement. As Kevin says, that's the cluetrain, this is just clue-fucked.

More people positive to Denmark after the Mohammed crisis

At the end of October last year the Danish government set aside 110m DK to improve the country's image in the wake of the Mohammed crisis, but it seems by then people's perception of the place was already recovering, if not improving. A survey from the third quarter of 2006, shows people in Muslim countries like Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt and Malaysia actually are more positive to working and living in Denmark now than before the Mohammed crisis. "It's to be expected that things return to normal after a crisis, but that people are more positive than before is surprising," Simon Anholt of Anholt Nation Brands Index, a survey of 36 countries' image, told Berlingske (in Danish).

PR Newswire links up press releases to Technorati

PR Newswire will start linking individual press releases to Technorati so people can find out which blogs are linking to them (via Bloggers Blog). "Press releases have the power to initiate and inform important conversations in the blogosphere, while many bloggers are great accelerators and influencers of public conversation and opinion," Dave Armon, chief operating officer of PR Newswire, said in the press release announcing the deal.

Hmm... welcome to the brave new media world. It's great to see the blogosphere recognised as an important source of public perception and debate, but PR and marketing departments might want to consider retraining their staff to get rid of the corporate jargon and marketing speech that surely will only backfire in the realm of human conversation.

A bleak future in store for 2007

Over at Media Culpa, Hans Kullin has gazed into the crystal ball and come up with a few irreverent predictions for the media year ahead, both for Scandinavia and the world at large, including this thought-provoking vision: Mainstream media are pushing the citizen journalism trend so far that reporters are quitting their jobs in order to be just 'ordinary people'. "This is the only way that I will be able to get anything printed nowadays", says one columnist at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, who prefers to be anonymous.