Friday, June 13, 2014

The newMeetia Blog Hit Parade

Below are our greatest hits.  Your humble blogger is writing now about turning good information into good politics and public policy at CivicDecisions.com - its a natural evolution given the great clients we've served.  If you have any questions or think we might be able to help you achieve your objectives, don't be shy! Call Roger Wilson at (781) 729-8611 or send an email to rwilson (at) civicdecisions.com.  In any case ENJOY!

Headline News: CONFERENCES MAKE MONEY!

Media Outlets Embrace Conferences as Profits Rise was a business page story the NYT saw fit to print on Monday between a stories on the pending Twitter IPO and Gawker gossip regarding the sexual preferences of media personalities.
When you see a “GOLD DISCOVERED IN CALIFORNIA!” headline you can be sure somebody somewhere is going to make some money.  But being one of those somebodies doesn't mean just rushing in with a shovel.  Face-to-face will be fundamental forever.  Live events will be hot when our current tablets are dead museum pieces.  However, events are no easier as a business than other communication medium.

David Carr Wonders:
What Are We Thinking?

The New York Times Media Equation columnist David Carr may be stumbling toward your humble blogger’s conclusion of last month that Fear in the Fourth Estate is Good.

Carr reports with wonder, the rancor establishment journalists clearly feel for the likes Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who brokered the publication of Bradley Manning’s purloined information, and Glen Greenwald, the Guardian Columnist who broke Eric Snowden’s NSA revelations.



The Face of Terror;
Terrorists as Cover Boys

 










Keep Paddling ‘Til You Hit the Beach

‎A state government executive, serving for an effective Governor, once told your humble blogger that the Governor continuously urged his cabinet to “run through the tape” with their initiatives.  Your humble blogger recently summoned his aquatic version of this track aphorism, learned in kayak racing, which applies to event production.

Let's Have Fun:
Businessweek Angle on the Hedge Fund Story

‎When your humble blogger pulled this week’s Bloomberg Businesweek from the courier’s sheath (an unheralded development in print distribution), my first thought was “This is what happens when the boss goes on vacation.”


Why Fear in the Fourth Estate is Good

‎There a was a remarkably feeble defense of freedom of the press in the “Media Equation" column by David Carr, in the New York Times this Independence Day week, juxtaposing journalists, whom Carr defines as people “responsible for following the truth, wherever it may guide them” and activists whom he defines as people dedicated to “winning an argument.”





Content Ain't King...But...

Your humble blogger got hooked by the subject line of a recent email from Target Marketing Magazine: “Why Content Isn't King.”  The linked article was a disappointment but it prompted your humble blogger to examine why I bit on the subject line bait.



Four Types of "Conference Hurt"

Where does it hurt?” your humble blogger asked fellow attendees at the Specialized Information Publishers Association Conference this week in DC.  I was collecting conference pain stories to use in my roundtable on “Conference Pain Relief; Developing or Fixing Business Models.”

As I suspected, the conference pain fell into four categories:

Surfing the Next Wave of Social Media

The tide of social media, which swept in as the recession was hitting, has recently receded a bit.  Some of the mighty waves of expectation and overblown rhetoric have crashed on the rocks of media reality. Here are a few data points among the flotsam and jetsam:

The Simple Science of Business

‎Years ago your humble blogger was intrigued when one individual, a leader in a third-world conflict who espoused and practiced “scientific revolution,” switched sides and changed the course of that war.  Your humble blogger felt compelled to investigate.

The science turned out to be pretty simple, when your humble blogger finally located the writings and reports of this obscure, young, third-world General (no easy task, pre-internet).  The key to winning a war, according to the General, was to know:

Face-to-Face is Fundamental

‎The event slice of the media pie is growing again according to sources recently cited by BtoB and Media Business.  Events have been part of the communications mix since before clay tablets. Now we’re all atwitter about tablet computers and smart phones.  New technologies are absolutely transforming communication.  But events will still be important when we are looking at tablet computers in the museum beside the displays of “micro computers" of the late '70s, fax machines and telegraphs. 

Learning from Your Mistakes - by the Numbers

‎ There are good lessons in mistakes and “natural experiments” in events and across the media business. The lessons pose both emotional and conceptual challenges. That’s why running the numbers right is highly instructive.

Mistakes in the moment in any live media generate tension – you run low on food, cues are missed, wiring is wrong, the award that was supposed to be at the front of the room was left in the back – whatever. Somebody miscalculated, didn’t practice, didn’t plan or didn’t execute the plan.

Why Your Audience Wants to Talk About Your Content


You can’t assume your audience wants your information only for themselves.  People seek information to share and trade, primarily in conversation as was discussed at the Inbound Marketing Conference last fall.  This primal hunt is especially vital to event curation.

Content that bears repeating is valuable to people.  Providing “remarkable content” is touted as a way to generate online social media conversation that potentially “goes viral” (dirty secret: it rarely happens without a big boost from mass media).  But if information is your product rather than a means to sell something else, you still should think about what your audience will want to share and trade with others.

Good News from Egypt: “Less than 1,000 People Died”

‎“Eighty-five million people live in Egypt and less than 1,000 people died in this revolution,” said Wael Ghonim, according to Monday’s New York Times. Ghonim, a 31 year old Google executive, is credited with a key role in the on-line social media campaign that helped topple Hosni Mubarak last week.

Gauging the grief of 1000 families as good news is a legitimate political-economic calculation. But it underscores the seriousness of the business Ghonim and his colleagues have undertaken. More broadly the calculation underscores the seriousness of the business of belief which is at the heart of media in all forms.

Gaining Leverage on Life-Time Value

‎You know engagement sells.  That’s why you should take a look at a new analysis of customer engagement.  It is consumer-oriented but your humble blogger found lessons for B-to-B marketers about engagement elements, channels, and measurement in the report.

Buyers aren’t seeking engagement for its own sake.  They are looking to fulfill a need.  But they consistently judge the key elements of engagement across channels according a study offered by Razorfish.  Buyers want to feel valued.  They want efficiency and they want to be able to trust the seller. 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
at the Inbound Marketing Summit

‎We wanted to share the smartest and the dumbest things we heard at the Inbound Marketing Summit last week – fortunately there was stiff competition for the former. We were one of the sponsors of the event under our newMeetia initiative and we found plenty of value for marketers at the two day event along with a little malarkey and lots of stuff that was just plain fun.

Clearly, online social and content marketing is now main stream. While some speakers valiantly jousted against straw-man “old marketing” enemies the best presentations were about integrating new online marketing with the old, “inbound”(online-inquiry) with “outbound” and online media with offline. And the rants against self-discipline were more than offset by practical advice about how to measure and manage online marketing.

Bigger is Better: Why The Media Loves Facebook Stories

It was another big weekend for Facebook stories.  “The Social Network,” won four awards at Critics' Choice Movie Awards last Friday and four more at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday Night.  The movie, which has grossed over $200 million so far, has, according to the LA Times   “won the majority of critics honors this year, including the Los Angeles Film Critics Association., New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics.”

Meanwhile, Facebook was given a starring role in the overthrow of Tunisia’s long ruling President, Zine el Abidine Ben.  The LA Times coverage with the head "Tunisia protesters use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help organize and report" was typical.  

2011: First Impressions

‎The seers poking at the messy entrails of economic data are seeing good signs.  Albeit with varying degrees of trepidation, they are forecasting noticeable recovery.  Based on anecdotal evidence, your humble blogger agrees. 

As some of the “old media” bounces back we’ll be able to more accurately tease out the long-term secular trends, set in motion by new online and mobile media, from the shorter-term economic cycles that the seasoned among us have seen before.  

What it Takes to Make A High-Performance Event Team

‎“You can’t begin early too early and you can’t communicate too much,” admonished a savvy collaborator at a post-event debriefing. Your humble blogger had taken some lumps after running what he’d thought had been a good team effort. But the maxim to became a motto.

Event production is a test of group intelligence. Events of any size take a team to execute. And the effectiveness of the team is not simply a function of the individual intelligence of people on the team.

Zip Ideas:
Three Lessons from the CEO of Zipcar

Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, recently offered key lessons learned in the his seven years in the driver's seat of the company.  Zipcar is trying to “redefine the way people think about transportation.”  Giffith’s "Zip Ideas" could apply to media companies in a time when the way people think about information is rapidly changing.



Navigating through a New Media World

‎“Human API(application programming interface), mobile platforms, new platform entrants, and of course, iPad apps were among future hot topics tagged by speakers at the SIPA UK Online Publishing and Marketing Summit last week.  This year’s event focused heavily on the mechanics of new product launches, marketing automation, and web analytics

Seven Quick Ideas on Event Curation

‎Most people associate “curation” with the art of museum management. Some might mistake it for a method of meat preservation. But curation is now is the term de jour for the process of selecting organizing and presenting content in media and, more broadly, merchandise and even food. Lately it has been used to ennoble the process of making any set of choices that create an experience.

The Vision Thing - 
It's Not About Selling Content like Hamburgers

"The Dawn of a New Age, Second Encounter” was the promoted theme of the Second Annual Personal Computer Show held in Chicago, around this time, thirty-two years ago. Your humble blogger was reminded of that show as I wrote about the Inbound Marketing Summit recently. The online/smart phone media business keeps reminding me of the PC business in its early days. But I was surprised to find that my memory was WRONG in key respects. And I realized I owed a personal debt.

The Bad and the Ugly at the Inbound Marketing Summit

Last week your humble blogger shared some of the smartest things we heard and some of the fun we enjoyed at the Inbound Marketing Summit which we sponsored under our NewMeetia initiative. But I promised the Bad and the Ugly along with the Good.
The dumbest thing I heard at the conference was “Scale and media buying power are no longer a decisive advantage.” The speaker was David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist, Freshspot Marketing, who, to his credit, was also the source of some smart commentary about "Real-Time Marketing" and some good fun, including the donning of a tie-dye t-shirt (under his sport coat) to flog a book he and Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot have put together about “Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead.” But the notion that new media negates scale is wishful thinking.

A Winning Formula: Preparation + Technology + Exhibit Floor Time = Sales

Yves Matson, Senior Account Executive at Active Conversion, knew he had a big opportunity earlier this year. The Global Petroleum Show was coming to Calgary where he is based. From his experience as an exhibitor in a previous job, he knew his lead monitoring and demand generation system could serve some of the more than 1000 exhibitors. So how did he capture this opportunity in only nine simple steps?

Why the “Junk Web” is Getting the Action

It’s not the media but human nature that shapes marketing principles. That’s why so much of the current web environment feels like “junk mail,” a medium developed by tracking response.






Urgent! Pass It On: Three Big Secrets About Going Viral

Myths about going viral are part of the regular fare offered by new marketing gurus. “You create great content, and show it to ten friends who show it to ten friends and pretty soon it goes viral and a million people are looking at it.” Too bad the real world doesn’t work this way. So, what are the true secrets?



The Web Ain’t Dead - The Long Tales of Chris Anderson

“Ludicrous” is how a savvy reporter of media trends describes Chris Anderson's latest big idea: “The Web is Dead” advanced recently in Wired.  People like Anderson have made good careers by generating plausible and interesting “big ideas.” But they are not producing reliable knowledge about the world.







Marketing Impressions Still Matter 

The current faith in our new media and new information technology tools seems uncomfortably like the faith in “smart bombs” early in the second Iraq war. The new technologies are formidable to be sure but they hardly “change everything.




     

New Study: Digital Dazzle Won't Last Without Results...

Virtual media is being quickly adopted by event marketers, a new Center for Exhibition Research (CEIR) study indicates. But the measurement of investment results is lagging in virtual and other types of Digital media the study finds. The findings are based on an online survey, now in its second year, of show producers, corporate marketers and advertisers.

Solution to Media Overload: Make Every Day Independence Day

We hold this truth to be self-evident, that free people must think for themselves.  While I have written about the positive impact of Way Too Much Information (WTMI) others see media overload as a problem.




A Customer is a Terrible Thing to Waste 

The notion of using new media to move prospects into and down the “sales funnel” has been repeated ad nauseam lately (often with the same thin anecdotes as “evidence”). It is refreshing to have the argument turned upside down.



What Publishers Can Learn from the Platypus

Live events are a “huge” part of “content that you can experience," according to Larry Weber, author of Marketing to the Social Web and a new book, Stick & Stones. Real-time, experiential and rich media, he says, are parts of a new “World 2.0” spawned by today’s communications technology.

The Future of F2F: How to “Save” Events

Event spending is under attack. The purveyors of “inbound marketing,” SEO, and various forms of lead-generation and tracking, are advocating reallocating event marketing budgets to fuel online growth. New simulated or “virtual” events offer information seekers and marketers some of the benefits of events at lower cost. 

Non-profit Fund Raising: The Warm Fuzzy Formula

Keep influencers in mind, make the benefits emotionally appealing and be systematic if you want to motivate adults to come out and donate money to your cause. As a board member of a local non-profit, I saw how an event promotion on a tiny budget executed by volunteers could work like a charm.  

Media Strategy: Dot Com Déjà Vu?

Are you feeling Dot Com déjà vu? You are not alone among media and marketing people if the current wave of Next Big Things is making you queasy.

A little skepticism is in order. Nobody really knows how all this Great Stuff will work or what will survive. This early in the economic cycle we have room to maneuver and try new things, but most of us still have a business to run and bills to pay. Five quick thoughts: 

Got Content? Seven Ideas for Monetizing with Events

The current lingo for pounding coin out of content is monetizing. The old term was making money. However you phrase it, new events are a key opportunity for old and new media alike as the economy begins to turn.  Monetizing sounds sanitized but making good content profitable is usually a messy muddle. Events could be your best way to package your content for a price. Here are seven quick thoughts to help you succeed: 

Attn: Media Entrepreneurs, Don’t Take Risks!

The best media entrepreneurs don’t take risks. They take what other people think are risks. Bernie Goldhirsh, the founder of Inc. Magazine and a quintessential entrepreneur, was one of the most risk-adverse people I’ve ever had the privilege of working for.

Better, Faster and Cheaper Events

I met the CEO of Kaon Interactive, Gavin Finn, the other day at Mass Innovation Nights (a great local event) and immediately found yet another reason to get excited about the future of face-to-face events.

Are You Hungry for a Sale?

Some people think “selling” is a dirty word. That’s why a phrase caught my eye as I scanned the posts of an online discussion group: “People are hungry to be SOLD,” asserted Dwight Ingram, an experienced direct-marketing pro.
Business starts with a sale.” was my motto in the early days of my event business. A savvy event guy told me I had it wrong. “Business starts with value,” he piously insisted. But I’ll stick to my guns. Until you get someone to buy, creating value is a hobby.

Events for Love and Money, Book Review

For IT consultant and computer science professor Adrian Segar, the journey started with a bad conference experience. Determined to do better, he set out to create an event that would truly serve him and his peers. Now, seasoned by years of experience and research, he has written a book: Conferences that Work, Creating Events that People LOVE. It’s a good practical guide for running participant-directed conferences.  

If You’re Spinning Out, “Gas It!”

“Gas it! Gas it! Gas it!” radioed a spotter to the lead driver as the car went into a sudden spin coming off a corner. It was the final lap. Under full power, the open-wheel, rear-engine race car did a full 360 but somehow emerged from a huge cloud of tire smoke headed in the right direction. The driver held on to win the race. After I happened to see this spectacular save on TV, I posted a little card in my office as a reminder of the vivid lesson it imparted: If you’re spinning out, “Gas it! Gas it! Gas it!” 

In 2010, Think About the Political Economics of Information

You might say it started with event-magic in 2004, the year Facebook was founded. On a cool, damp July night in Boston, a tall, handsome, (secretly) cigarette-puffing University of Chicago professor-turned-politician, skilled in the ancient art of oratory, delivered his first nationally covered speech.

Sez Who? Will WTMI Cure Gullibility? 

Being bombarded with way too much information (WTMI) may help us learn to be more skeptical and ask more frequently, “Sez who?” The constant barrage of WTMI could push business and consumer information users to rely more on personal connections, develop critical judgment of sources of information, and revive relationships with trusted brands. 

Sorry but in Media, Size Does Matter

Some mavens of new media see a nirvana of social networks and small media entrepreneurs replacing big bad old media. The visions get romantic, with the media equivalent of microbrewers toppling the giants.
In reality, we could soon see massive consolidation of new media into new giants. It’s impossible to predict the timing of such a consolidation, but the implications for B2B are huge. 

Success with Your Business Model - It’s Not Just About Money

Our advice is the same across platforms: if you are trying to build, rebuild or tune your business model for an event or any other media product, first figure out what you want to say, and then figure out how to make it pay. Use this approach and your satisfaction is guaranteed. 

What We Can Learn from Loyal Attendees

“I don’t take notes at a conference, I write a to-do list,” a company president and regular conference attendee told me. “I get started on execution while I’m still at the event,” he explained. You can improve your retention rate by learning not simply why your loyal attendees return but also how they achieve the benefits that draw them back. 

There Will Always be a Place for Face2Face

The panic in traditional media today is painfully evident. The watchword of the day is “digital.” Old marketing and media assumptions are being tossed out. It’s not just a cyclical situation. It’s a secular change in the sense of a long-term, large scale phenomenon as big as the advent of radio or TV or even movable type. So why am I sure that events aren’t going the way of print media?





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Friday, November 1, 2013

Headline News: CONFERENCES MAKE MONEY!

Media Outlets Embrace Conferences as Profits Rise was a business page story the NYT saw fit to print on Monday between a stories on the pending Twitter IPO and Gawker gossip regarding the sexual preferences of media personalities.

When you see a “GOLD DISCOVERED IN CALIFORNIA!” headline you can be sure somebody somewhere is going to make some money.  But being one of those somebodies doesn't mean just rushing in with a shovel.  Face-to-face will be fundamental forever.  Live events will be hot when our current tablets are dead museum pieces.  However, events are no easier as a business than other communication medium.

One has to take NYT stories like this one with a grain of salt, given the patterns of pillow talk and mutual grooming that influence the way the media cover stories about themselves.   But the reporter, Leslie Kaufman, cites some remarkable facts about consumer media branded events:

  • Atlantic Media now puts on over 200 events a year;  their leading brand, the Atlantic attributes 20% of its revenue to events
  • The NYT has expanded from one conference in 2011 to 16 this year
  • Fortune's event’s business is “growing at 60% annually
  • The non-profit Texas Tribune pulled in $800,000 through events in  2012 vs. “Corporate gifts” of $1 million 

Kaufman also notes that the Huffington Post is getting into the game and that so-called "digital-only" sites consider events to be “critical to their plans.”  The American Press Institute is “studying the profitability of the events business,” according to Kaufman.

Kaufman portrays the newspaper business as particularly hungry having seen advertising revenue drop 55% from 2016 to 2012.  She reports of gold in the conference hills.  Kaufman quotes Ned Desmond of TechCruch about a single large conference bringing in “eight figure” revenues, (translation: over 10 million dollars).

There is more than just money in conferences according to Kaufman.  She cites editorial and strategic marketing benefits such as attracting new segments of customers.

Conferences are now “another social platform with Twitter, Facebook and online video” writes Kaufman.  Suddenly journalists see being on stage as “live journalism.”

The power and profitability of events is not really news to those of us who have been mining the event vein for a while.  And there will always be a place for face-to-face.  But if everyone is rushing in, selling shovels may be a better business than digging for the gold.

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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

David Carr Wonders: What Are We Thinking?

The New York Times Media Equation columnist David Carr may be stumbling toward your humble blogger’s conclusion of last month that Fear in the Fourth Estate is Good.

Carr reports with wonder, the rancor establishment journalists clearly feel for the likes Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who brokered the publication of Bradley Manning’s purloined information, and Glen Greenwald, the Guardian Columnist who broke Eric Snowden’s NSA revelations.

In his previous column on this subject, Carr tried to distinguish between “journalists” and “activists.”  Now he posits an “emerging Fifth Estate composed of leakers, activists, and bloggers who threaten those of us in traditional media.”  These taxonomies are important to Carr because he continues to cling to the notion that journalists, as members of the fourth estate, are a special, legally protected class.

The Fourth Estate is a class of people and institutions with an important but unofficial role in governance.   The fourth estate derives its power from independently supplying citizens with information they want, including information about government which government may wish to withhold.  Originally defined by the technology of printing, the class has expanded to radio, film and TV mediums.  Carr feels he has to invent a Fifth Estate because he is not yet ready to admit Internet upstart leakers, activists, and bloggers to his class.

But Carr feels conflicted.  He quotes Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame as saying “With Snowden in particular you have a split between truly independent journalists and those who are tools- and I mean that in every sense of the term – of the Government.”  Carr suggests that establishment media would win Pulitzers and Peabodies for breaking the same stories that sent Manning to jail and Snowden into comrade Putin's free-press-loving embrace.

At the root of Carr’s dilemma is a common misinterpretation our constitution, which states in its first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We have conflated "the press" as a communication technology with 'the press" as a particular class of people engaged in journalism.  “The press” in context of the first amendment is a means of expression, like speech and assembly. It seems unlikely that the authors of the amendment would have penned a reference to a specific class of people between general references to speech and assembly.

Thomas Paine wrote in, “Common Sense,” his pamphlet of 1776, "a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."  Our long habit of conflating a communication technology, “the press,” with a political class of people who employ the technology has left us unprepared for the implications of a new communication technology.

When John Peter Zenger, a newspaper printer, was charged, in 1734, with seditious libel for printing stories of corruption involving the Royal Governor of New York, his defense was that he had printed the truth.  According to the Judge, such a defense had no standing in law, but the jury ignored the judge and found Zenger “not guilty.”  Similarly the Judge in the Daniel Ellsberg case made the extra-legal judgment that Ellsberg could not be convicted for telling the truth about government lies.


What are we thinking?” asks Carr at the close of his column.  But he has already answered his own question.  He portrays an establishment press that feels comfortable with government restrictions but threatened by more courageous competitors.

The cold and harsh reality of the political economic equation is this:  The people’s desire for truth about their government can only be met by a press that is willing to defy their government in order to get it.  Ironically, the only protection the press can have, if it is to function as the fourth estate, is the politically potent power to persuade large numbers of fellow citizens and fellow journalists to stand on the side of truth.

True journalists have to make common cause with truthful leakers, activists, and bloggers. The hacks can serve only as government tools.

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Friday, July 19, 2013

The Face of Terror; Terrorists as Cover Boys










Friday, July 12, 2013

Let's Have Fun: Businessweek Angle on the Hedge Fund Story

When your humble blogger pulled this week’s Bloomberg Businesweek from the courier’s sheath (an unheralded development in print distribution), my first thought was “This is what happens when the boss goes on vacation.”
This cover turns the famous Rolling Stone campaign
on its head, comparing the flaccid reality of hedge fund
performance with its robust reputation

But still, as I chuckled, your humble blogger quickly opened the magazine to the “Cover Trail” which purports to cover the cover development every week.  The “Cover Trail” is a humanizing element, showing what the boys and girls at Businessweek are thinking.  One might assume they are all boys as one can almost hear the puerile laughter at Bloomberg HQ -  there is no masthead to be found but the credits posted on CoverJunkie .com include women.

Your humble blogger thinks this one will go viral for the usual reasons although only briefly.

The bigger story of Businessweek is about effective design (especially heavy use of charts) and good writing. Your humble blogger recalled recently, as I experienced the anticipation of opening this magazine, that I had felt the same sensation years ago, at the sight of Bernie Goldhirsh’s Inc. Magazine poking out of my mail box before I had the privilege of working for Bernie.  Ironically, Bernie's passion for competing with Business Week probably lead to one of his more costly mistakes, Business Month Magazine.

This is a fun business.  Every once in a while it is good to let it all hang out.

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Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Why Fear in the Fourth Estate is Good

There a was a remarkably feeble defense of freedom of the press in the “Media Equation" column by David Carr, in the New York Times this Independence Day week, juxtaposing journalists, whom Carr defines as people “responsible for following the truth, wherever it may guide them” and activists whom he defines as people dedicated to “winning an argument.”

“Taxonomy is important,” he writes “…because when it comes to divulging national secrets, the law grants journalists special protections that are granted no one else.”  Mr. Carr cites no law which your humble blogger believes may be due to the fact that no such law exists.  Shield laws in quite a few states favor journalists, but it is through political power not legal code that the press avoids prosecution for disclosure of classified information.
A journalist is simply
“a person engaged in journalism"

A journalist used to be defined as “a person whose occupation is journalism,… the collecting, writing editing and publishing of news or news articles through newspapers or magazines “(per your humble bloggers  hard-used 1969 copy of the American Heritage Dictionary).  Today,  Merriam Webster defines a journalist as “a person engaged in journalism,… the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media”

By higher authority than David Carr, the intent to find truth has not been added to the definition but "occupation" has been broadened to "engaged," "publishing," to "distribution," and "newspapers and magazines" to "media."  In further discussion "news" is also broadened to include “related commentary and feature materials.”

Truth only enters the definition of journalism as a conceit of journalism schools, the University of Minnesota in Mr. Carr’s case, and the marketing position of media such as Mr. Carr’s employer, the New York Times.  What Mr. Carr is apparently trying to do is parse, on the basis of intent, an argument against The Guardian’s reporting by Glenn Greenwald of  Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA’s use of telephone and internet data.

The NSA revelations are making many in mainstream media uncomfortable.  No one is questioning the truth of the NSA revelations – only the right to voice them.  Mr. Carr’s contortions (although he pretends to concede the point in the column) have to do with claiming, for the New York Times and establishment journalism, the authority to use their own (well-intended and well-informed) editorial judgment about what should be public information while denying the same power to competitors or mere citizens who dare to exercise their own (misguided and argumentative) judgment about what should be public.

The NSA revelations highlight an uncomfortable, larger truth about the modern media equation.  Private speech, personal movement, and media consumption used to be difficult to monitor and relatively simple to protect.  Now, with new information technology, it all has become much harder to defend from prying eyes.  Increasingly we are relying on the good intent of our government and the private companies who can peer into the patterns of our lives.

The broader political-economic equation however, remains grounded in human nature.  Good intent is a weak factor in political-economic calculus whereas self-interest is paramount.

To avoid squirrelly twists like Mr. Carr's, we are better off placing the enlightened self-interest of media elites squarely on the side of free expression, open competition, and a balance of powers.  When it comes to divulging state secrets, members of the media must fear the same risk of prosecution as any citizen activist and be willing to fight for their own and thus everyone's freedom.

It is citizens and journalists, as citizens, that have the responsibility for following truth.  And freedom of public speech, although subject to some limitations, belongs to us all.

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Thursday, June 27, 2013

Content Ain't King...But...

Your humble blogger got hooked by the subject line of a recent email from Target Marketing Magazine: “Why Content Isn't King.”  The linked article was a disappointment but it prompted your humble blogger to examine why I bit on the subject line bait.

Target Marketing Magazine knows their readers.   I clicked through seeking support for my beliefs.  I've argued (and posted regarding “Curation”) that “Content ain’t King, content is noble.  Cash is King.”  This was a way of saying that success, for most enterprises, is measured in currency.  Currency, not content, rules.

People in direct response who read Target Marketing are probably sick of hearing “Content is King.”  But my subsequent research helped me appreciate an alternative view.
Bill Gates is often credited with coining “Content is King” in a remarkably prescient essay in 1996, (The year the Conference Department started business).  It appears that others advanced the phrase before him but Bill Gates had the power to project the message.

Gate's message, 17 years ago, was that the Internet provides a new distribution system for information and that the value of the Internet system will be derived from the value of the information distributed, the content.  What he predicted was that countless opportunities would be created by the technology, to sell information in new ways (thanks to Craig Bailey et al for tracking this down).

Utility then is at the essence of the phrase.  Like new communication and transportation networks before it, postal services, canals, railroads, telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, etc. the value of the Internet is in what it conveys to and about the users.  Your humble blogger, a committed media utilitarian, can hardly argue with the point.

The problem comes when the phrase is misused to imply that content or “great content” will do all the work; that “great content” is your key to success in selling content or using content to sell something.  It is like saying what you need to succeed in the restaurant business is “great food.”  Great content or great food is a small piece of the puzzle.

Dethroning content has been your (now humbler) blogger’s way of putting the focus on the rules of the game.  It is not that I don’t care about content.  My personal motto, for years across all media, has been “First figure out what you want to say, then figure out how to make it pay.”  The payoff is usually in currency but it could be in votes or some other metric of success.

What we used to call editorially-driven media products are often the most effective because the editorial commitment tends to make the product more valuable for customers.  However an “editorial success” is an old euphemism for something that doesn't make money.  Without a rich patron, an editorial success will die young.

So content is noble.  King Currency cannot rule without the support of his noble court.  Turning good information into good business is like assembling a puzzle – in the future your humble blogger will be more careful to observe that noble content is a key piece of that puzzle!

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Friday, June 14, 2013

Keep Paddling ‘Til You Hit the Beach

A state government executive, serving for an effective Governor, once told your humble blogger that the Governor continuously urged his cabinet to “run through the tape” with their initiatives.  Your humble blogger recently summoned his aquatic version of this track aphorism, learned in kayak racing, which applies to event production.

http://erikruthoff.com/
Everyone is paddling hard at the start of the event
With the MyRWA Herring Run & Paddle finish line in sight, I reminded myself “Keep paddling  ‘til you hit the beach!”  I knew that that the end looked closer than it was and that I might be able to pick-off a competitor or at least knock minutes off my time by keeping up my pace and focusing to the finish.  I came so close to passing three guys that even though I was exhausted after racing for 12 miles, I was wishing for a longer race!
Every event is a show and in show business, you can’t stop performing until your reach the finish.
  • Plan to end strong.  We've all had fiascoes at the start of an event and any pro knows about the importance of detailed planning, drills and rehearsals to make sure the first experiences of a live event are good ones.  But too often people let events fizzle by failing to apply the same level of attention to the final impressions.
  • Make sure your contracts fit the plan.  Your arrangements for venue, permits, onsite services, and transportation need to be checked against your final plan.  You don’t want to have your grand finale cut short because the buses are leaving.
  • Keep it crisp.  Even if your event involves participants relaxing at the end, keep all program elements tightly scripted and well supported.
  •  Keep the body heat up.  If your venue is outdoors make sure it is not going to be uncomfortably cold.  Don't let your participants feel lonely - adjust your venues for the normal declines in numbers toward the end.
  • Keep the spot light on your program.  Don’t neglect lighting especially in outdoor venues.  Don’t allow distractions like a noisy breakdown operation to mar your conclusion.
  •  Keep testing all equipment.  Your tech. crews may be thinking about the big job of breaking down but everyone needs to focus on the more important job of ending right.
  • Don’t let your team go home early, in spirit or in reality.  If you are presenting or sponsoring an event make sure your visible representatives are still visible at the end.  At the end of a conference I advise my team, and especially the most senior people to be right at the door thanking participants and encouraging them to return again. 
  • Keep selling as long as you see a customer.  Take advantage of event magic as long as you are face-to-face.
  • Don’t schedule a debriefing too early.  Nobody (least of all your humble blogger) wants to hear what went wrong right after the show.  Instead keep thanking everybody for what went right.

Congrats to Andrius Zinkevichus won the 12 mile race with a time of
1:36:47 which is an 8:04 minute per mile pace!
Ending well is one of the most important parts of any communication or experience.  Let me end by reinforcing that I am here to help.  If you have any questions about moving hearts and minds with events give me a call at (781) 729-8611.

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Thursday, June 9, 2011

Four Types of "Conference Hurt"

Where does it hurt?” your humble blogger asked fellow attendees at the Specialized Information Publishers Association Conference this week in DC.  I was collecting conference pain stories to use in my roundtable on “Conference Pain Relief; Developing or Fixing Business Models.”

As I suspected, the conference pain fell into four categories:
  1. Lost opportunity; the nagging failure to grow a conference business
  2. Lost sleep; anxiety and overwork associated with a conference or line of conferences
  3. Lost dollars; events that cost more than they took in
  4. Lost reputation; events that damaged the brand

Losing opportunity or losing sleep were the primary complaints of the publishers who admitted to experiencing conference pain .  Few said they actually lost money but several said their margins didn’t seem consistent with their efforts.  Damage to the brand was mentioned as a fear but not as an experience.

Conferences have been my least favorite but most profitable line of business,” confessed one publisher.  Fear of risk, distaste for the demanding nature of the business, and lack of resources were the primary road blocks to starting or growing a conference line.

Clearly however, conferences are worth getting right.  Several publishers said their conferences were critical to their business and very profitable.

The future growth of events was reinforced in a general session when panelists John Suhler, CEO of Veronis Shuhler Stevenson and Don Pazour, CEO of Access Intelligence both strongly endorsed conferences and trade shows as paths to profits.  Face-to-face is a fundamental medium.

Pain is the symptom of a flawed business model.  The central point of your humble blogger’s roundtable was that there are countless ways to adjust a business model to your specific niche and that there is a profitable and relatively painless solution available to almost any information company.

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Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Surfing the Next Wave of Social Media

The tide of social media, which swept in as the recession was hitting, has recently receded a bit.  Some of the mighty waves of expectation and overblown rhetoric have crashed on the rocks of media reality. Here are a few data points among the flotsam and jetsam:

Your humble blogger heard Harvard professor Nick Christakis in a webcast of the Healthways Wellbeing Summit (select his session to view) the other day taking about influence.  Note to event people:  the setting was interesting; a conference seemly staged more for internet broadcast/replay then as a self contained event.  The production was TV-like with two cameras actively zooming in and out and panning across the scene.  The set was more elaborate than the typical conference set and TV-style audience, small but animated was sprinkled around the room in couches and easy chairs, probably because the numbers were lower than originally expected.

One of Christakis’s topics was the relatively weak influence of internet networks vs. “real networks.”  Online networks have the most influence when they reinforce relationships which also exist off-line, according to Christakis.

The moral neutrality of networks was another topic Christakis touched on, asserting that “networks magnify whatever they are seeded with.”  Evil ideas can be transmitted as effectively as good ones according to Christakis, in contrast to the many apostles of social media who give it some kind of crowd (mob?)-sourced moral superiority.

The number of households with TV’s in the US declined for the first time since in 20 years. Nontheless Americans jumped from the little screen to the big screen upon learning of the recent killing of Osama Ben Ladin in Pakistan.  President Obama got the biggest TV audience of his presidency for his announcement of the raid that resulted in Ben Ladin’s death.

The New York Times reported yesterday about the next wave of social networking services for smaller more specialized networks most notably Path which raised $11 million in VC money and GroupMe which raised $10.6 million.  According to the report these services “do a better job of mimicking offline social networks” than Facebook or Twitter.  Your humble blogger has opined before that access to capital is a profound competitive advantage for an early stage company – we can expect to hear more about at least these two.

Meanwhile LinkedIn is hoping to raise $274.4 million in their IPO announced Monday According to the NYT, the major VC investors are holding on to their interests which means the “smart money” thinks the best is yet to come at least for the big players in the field.

So while the tide has receded, as they say in the earthquake zones, don’t run down on the beach, the really big waves could still be on the way.

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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Simple Science of Business

Years ago your humble blogger was intrigued when one individual, a leader in a third-world conflict who espoused and practiced “scientific revolution,” switched sides and changed the course of that war.  Your humble blogger felt compelled to investigate.

The science turned out to be pretty simple, when your humble blogger finally located the writings and reports of this obscure, young, third-world General (no easy task, pre-internet).  The key to winning a war, according to the General, was to know:

  1. How many fighters you have
  2. Where and when their last action was
  3. What the outcome of that action was
By focusing on these factors, one man changed the balance of power in his country.

Facts have power.  Early in my business career, I learned how to be influential in corporate meetings.  I found that if I brought one relevant fact to a typical meeting, I was often one fact ahead of most everybody else in the meeting.  If the fact helped solve a problem, I could be of true value to the organization.

There is of course truly deep science underlying many businesses; material science in manufactured products, biological science in pharmaceuticals and agriculture; information science across many industries; chemical science in countless industries.  There are many specialties beyond the grasp of most people.  But basic science is something we can all practice.

This week, is the 150th anniversary of the world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chartered by the Commonwealth to further the “advancement, development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.”  Thinking of the wonders that have emerged from MIT, it is worth noting that the science of business for most of us is still basic.  It has to do with focusing on certain key facts and marshalling those facts logically and creatively to solve problems.

“How many, where, when?” and “What happened?” remain key questions of scientific inquiry in business.  While our business environments are flooded with all manner of assertions and suppositions, often pushed by strong egos and interests, simple science can usually win.

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