With the news that Hachette Filipacchi Media is shuttering Metropolitan Home magazine,
we've come to a turning point, I think, in what used to be known as the "shelter books" -- magazines focusing on interior design for the home.
In an environment where home foreclosures continue to mount up, the
potential readership for decorating tips has other things on their mind.
In fact, a lot of people seem to renovate these days only to spruce up their homes to make them more marketable. I know someone who had put off updating their kitchen for year because they thought they might move, and now are moving -- but not before investing $10,000 to update their kitchen appliances. And that's even though they know any buyer will rip out those improvements to more completely renovate the kitchen. (My friend is also lamenting that they didn't spend the money years ago to enjoy the new appliances.)
I'm not saying that's the only reason or only time these days that people are renovating or updating their homes. But it does seem true when I look around at friends and colleagues.
The advertisers and publishers seem to recognize that fact. After all, they've pulled the plug on at least six other shelter pubs: nStyle Home, Cottage Living, Blueprint, Country Home, O at Home and Domino.
True, there are still a lot of other shelter pubs out there, like Better Homes & Gardens and Elle Decor.
But I think people interested in interior design magazines may be shifting their reading habits, and won't be interesting in annual subscriptions to those magazines. Like readers of bridal magazines, these will be interested buyers, looking for tips and ideas before they actually decide to update the look of their homes. They'll buy a couple of issues, and be done.
Besides, they can always look online at the weekly home sections still published by many newspapers. Of course, the graphics on newsprint aren't as impressive on high glossy magazine stock, but it's more convenient.
And while our clients usually are not interested in shelter pubs, one reason I'm interested in this change is that the high resolution graphics necessary for shelter pubs was one reason I thought they -- along with bridal and high-end travel magazines -- would survive without having to shift to an online-only business model. Because the graphics are so important to the end product.
For the moment, it seems only bridal and high-end travel magazines may be able to resist going online only. And even their future is far from assured.
The US Chamber of Commerce, which proclaims itself to be "the world's
largest business federation representing more than three million
businesses and organizations of every size," has a big problem on its
hand.
High-profile companies have been quitting the Chamber, a
virtual Who's Who of top businesses, including Apple, PG&E, Nike,
and Exelon.
The reason: the US Chamber's opposition to the Waxman-Markey climate change bill.
The
US Chamber points out that "ore than 96% of U.S. Chamber members are
small businesses with 100 employees or fewer" and that "As the voice of
business, the Chamber's core purpose is to fight for free enterprise
before Congress, the White House, regulatory agencies, the courts, the
court of public opinion, and governments around the world."
But its members seem to feel that the U.S. Chamber is not listening.
And,
as a member of my local Chamber of Commerce, I've been upset about some
of the positions staked out by the US Chamber: they didn't truly seem
to help small businesses.
I had mentioned something to my local
chamber, but it turns out that local chambers of commerce are not
necessarily members of the US Chamber -- which is a branding problem.
For both the US Chamber and local chambers.
I'm
a member of a local chamber, but have no input on what the US Chamber's
policy making function. Yet I was upset enough to consider quitting my
local chamber, which has nothing to do with the US Chamber.
Meanwhile,
the US Chamber seems to be responding to the news that more big-name
members are quitting, seemingly each day, by sticking to its guns.
I'm sure that the US Chamber is losing smaller companies, too.
Yet
as a call-to-action for prospective members, the Chamber says, "The
Chamber understands your needs and protects your livelihood as if they
are our own."
It's not a matter of them being "as if they are
our own." As a membership-based organization whose mission is "to fight
for free enterprise," its members' needs and livelihood are their own.
So, the lessons learned:
You
need to listen to your members. It certainly doesn't seem like the US
Chamber is doing this. I'm sure the US Chamber conducts surveys of its
membership to help determine the direction and policies to support. But
when even energy companies are quitting because they have deep concerns
regarding the US Chamber's position on climate change, that's a problem.
You
need to respond to your members. The lack of response to the companies
leaving seems to indicate that the US Chamber doesn't truly care about
what its members think. In fact, according to Fast Company,"Why Did Apple Quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?"
"Apple's move probably won't change any minds in the Chamber of
Commerce--Eric Wohlschegel, a spokesman for the organization, shrugged
off the mass exodus by explaining that some companies have more to gain
from the Chamber's stance than others." Seems like that's not acting as
if members' needs and livelihoods are "our own."
You need to
realize that, whether you think it's one or not, there's a crisis.
Shrugging off "a mass exodus" is not a way to manage a crisis. There is
a message from the president of the US Chamber about its climate
control policy, but it's dated Sept. 29, and a lot of the high profile
membership resignations have occurred in Oct. They haven't even issued
a press release this month, as of this morning,
Oct. 7, to present their side of the issue. And there are no current
op-eds on the site with data that supports a controversial policy.
You
need to engage your members. The first step could be to say, we realize
that our current stance on climate control may be unpopular but we
think it's the right one, but we're willing to meet with members to
explain our reasons. Town Hall meetings have a bad tone these days, but
why not set up events to talk to and hear from members? Why not show
the level of membership support for the current policy? Yet we have no
idea of how many members surveyed agree with the policy. So far the US
Chamber has not done a good job here.
You need to reach out
to prospective members. Considering that the US Chamber needs to
continue to recruit members, they need to use policy positions that
will encourage prospective members to join. Doesn't seem like fighting
against climate change would generate new members.
Meanwhile,
I'd have to say that the local chambers seem to be ignoring the matter,
too. They may operate independently, but a lot of people may not
realize that. There's bound to be a lot of people and local businesses
upset, and that could leave them with negative feelings about all
chambers of commerce -- which is not what you want right before renewal
season. I know it's not the local chambers' battle, but they need to
let their local members know they're not part of the US Chamber.
In an interview in BtoBObline, Marcy Shinder, VP of Brand Strategy and Marketing at American Express OPEN, offered up these tips (in a different format);
A downturn is a good time to identify ways to transform a company.
A lot of companies look at delivering better customer service as a differentiator. (For service organizations, this can be a challenge since your competitors are likely to be trying the same things. Instead, think about what improvements would deliver the most value.)
Companies need to stay relevant. (In other words, think about the problems customers buy from you, and make sure that what you provide truly solves their problems.)
Provide tangible value. (We have a client with a fascinating vision of the future of technology in their sector, but we've advised them to make that game-changing vision a secondary message because their first goal is to sell product. So they need to focus on ways they provide real value to their customers. A compelling vision of what's to come is good, but that doesn't always help customers when deciding to buy now instead of putting off the purchase for later.)
Companies need to market differently from the day of the 30-second spot. They need to provide insight, inspiration and advice during every customer interaction.
Companies need to answer what they can do for their customers.
But I think the news-consuming public, to a significant degree, is saying that it doesn't really want balance.
That's especially true when it comes to blogs, with people self-selecting those whose views validate their own.
And it's also true when it comes to TV news. Because people seem to self-select the sort of news they want to hear/watch.
That's the entire premise of Fox News, after all, which says it has the most viewers (compared with CNN). And that embrace of things more liberal is one reason MSNBC has seen its ratings improve.
Now Fox News' tagline famously says it is "fair and balanced," but after watching Fox News side-by-side with CNN this morning, I have to say I think Fox's definition of "balanced" means "when averaged in against other
broadcast outlets."
Both Fox and CNN covered many of the same news items -- namely the election and the financial crisis. How could they not?
But there was a significant difference in how the two outlets approached the news. Fox News' "Fox & Friends" had a former Wall Streeter-turned-author on to talk about the underlying cause of the current economic crisis. His point was that politicians on both sides of the aisle are to blame. One of the first questions from Fox tried to tie blame for the current
crisis on the Clinton Administration for allowing deregulation to occur (irony alert: that's something conservatives usually champion).
The author pointed out that Republicans controlled Congress during the Clinton administration, and that they had pushed for deregulation. He then repeated his statement that it's a bipartisan, systemic problem in part due to lobbyists and donations to politician's campaign funds. The Fox co-anchor agreed, pointing out that Obama and Biden had accepted PAC funds. When the author pointed out that every politician, including
McCain, accepts money from lobbyists, the Fox co-anchor made a
distinction between PAC money and other kinds of donations. The segment
appeared to end abruptly when the author disagreed, saying it is not
accurate to blame one party over the other.
The Fox segment seemed neither fair nor balanced.
Meanwhile CNN featured interviews with apparent experts who tried to provide
context about the current financial crisis. I did not see any attempt
at finger-pointing on the part of the anchors, reporters or guests.
Next up on both networks was the claim that political ads are negative and
filled with lies. Fox interviewed an editor at the conservative
National Review, who said that after studying one of the ads (about sex
education) and talking to a politician who helped draft the bill (no
mention of her political affiliation), his conclusion was that the
truth was more ambiguous. Probably more truth than not, according to
the National Review. The segment did not look at Obama ads, so no
attempt to be balanced there. Just felt that editorially it was okay to
have a conservative review McCain's ad to say it was actually mostly on
the mark.
That would be like asking someone in Boston who's been
the better team over the past decade: the Yankees or the Red Sox. Yeah,
the Yankees, having a terrible year, have been to the playoffs almost
every season during that time but the Sox have won two World Series --
that would be fair and balanced. But there's no doubt someone from
Boston would always say the Sox was better. Just as there's no doubt
someone from New York would say the same about the Yankees.
Meanwhile, CNN's segment on the candidates' ads included someone from
FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the
University of Pennsylvania that says it accepts no funding from
business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying
organizations or individuals. The segment included a look at an ad from
both campaigns.
Fox claims it is more balanced than CNN, but a random 30-minutes' look at both Fox and CNN showed that Fox did not live up to its tagline.
From what I know, "balance" in journalism has not always been valued highly. Accuracy is clearly important, but many newspapers in other countries are open about their
political bias. That was true in the U.S. as well. The Watertown (WI)
Leader started off as the Watertown Republican in 1860. The Sonora (CA) Union-Democrat has been the leading newspaper of
the Mother Lode since 1854. Objectivity in journalism is a recent
change. I get my balance by reading the New York Times' editorial pages
-- and the Wall St. Journal's editorial pages.
Here's where balance doesn't make for good journalism: a politician's attack
ad may contains lies -- but the news media will give a he-said/she-said
quote, which gives the attacking politician the chance to rebut
accusations that the ad contains lies. In the need to appear objective
and nonpartisan, the media diminishes its role as serving as a
check-and-balance to misstatements. (As a teenager, I once tried to
characterize a lie to my parents as a misstatement. They didn't buy it
-- and neither should we.)
If a politician is lying, the media should report it; give him/her a chance to rebut, but then provide objective facts that the statement is a lie, and call it as such.
And if news media can connect with readers by taking a particular political
stance -- I think they should. After all, if the only newspaper in a
city starts tilting right or left, it may find more readers who are
more passionate about the paper. If readers don't like it, even in a
somewhat less free-market economy, I bet someone else will decide to
publish a paper that tilts in the opposite direction.
Perhaps the future of journalism in regard to balance should tear out a page
from journalism's past. Be biased but be upfront about that bias.
Update: After I posted this article, the New York Times' Patrick Healy wrote
about the use of the word "lie" in politics in an article entitled, "Let’s Call a Lie a Lie ... Finally. Check it out.
There have been separate discussions about whether the news embargo is dead.
JeremyWagstaff, a former Technology ColumnistatThe Asian Wall Street Journal and Wall Street Journal Online, and Stephen Baker, a senior writer at BusinessWeek who writes the Blogspotting blog, both say the news embargo is dead. (Check out my previous blog on the topic here.)
I
think that except for embargoes for peer-reviewed articles at top
publications like New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the
American Medical Association (JAMA), embargoes are dead.
However, that doesn't mean "advanced looks" are dead.
Mark
Harrison of Abraham Harrison said that giving bloggers a heads' up to
news before it hits can be a good approach. And Stevie Wilson of LA Story
has posted a comment to this blog that touches on the value of getting
a heads' up so that bloggers are not at a complete disadvantage.
The
difference is that when you give reporters and bloggers an "advance
look," you don't mind if they immediately post information about the
news. With an embargo, you want all coverage to hit after the embargo
time: news that hits before 11:10pm, for example -- bad; news that hits
after 11:11pm is good.
Is that clear?
Now, back to the topic based on the headline: what's the deal with press releases in a Web 2.0 world?
I read Mad Magazine as a kid, years ago -- the exact number of years ago is not relevant; most of the usual gang of idiots from when I read it are still alive and still writing for it. (How's that for a career plateau?) And now they have a website.
As well as a bit of controversy because a Circuit City employee saw the spoof, and didn't like it, and decided to respond.
How?
Apparently 40 Circuit City stores also sell magazines, including Mad Magazine. The company could've just pulled the issue, but instead, an employee instructed all 40 stores to "remove" and "destroy"all copies of the offending issue.
That email got out, and the spoof turned into an incident. Ultimately, a Circuit City "PR guy," James Babb, wrote a self-deprecating letter of apology, noting that he had written to the editors of Mad Magazine, explaining that "As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting Powerpoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts, graphs and company action plans."
The result: Mad Magazine got a significant boost because no one really has paid any attention to the magazine. (Some online posts mentioned being surprised that Mad Magazine was still publishing.) Circuit City, on the other hand, is taking a hit for not having a sense of humor and for mishandling the situation. And way more people know about the Mad spoof than would have seen it or would have talked about it if Circuit City had done nothing.
This is known as the "Streisand effect," defined by Wikipedia as "a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples are attempts to censor a photograph, a file, or even a whole website, especially by means of cease-and-desist letters. Instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes quickly receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks.[1][2]"
(The term was coined after Barbra Streisand sued a photographer who had taken and posted an aerial photo of her house in a publicly available database.)
We can see the Streisand effect at play recently with Boing Boing,
when Xeni Jardin, a contributor to the site, "unpublished" -- a nicer way to say deleted -- "all references to a blogger named Violet Blue," according to a New York Times article, "Poof! You’re Unpublished." The mere act of "unpublishing" became known, and had the opposite of the intended impact.
So, here are four variables to consider about managing corporate reputation:
What's being said?
What kind of reaction is being generated by readers?
Where is the statement appearing?
Who wrote it?
By evaluating each variable, you can make the decision as to the appropriate way to respond. What's important to keep in mind is the need to keep a sense of humor and the need to take emotion out of the process (this is the first mistake Circuit City made).
For example, we had a client once about whom someone was posting very negative statements. We looked at those variables, and determined:
What was being said was very negative and had no basis in fact. The company
could have sued, and would've have had a decent case.
These posts were not generating any attention, buzz or links. In part, it may
have been a topic that most people didn't understand or care about or because the rants were rambling and incoherent and filled with typos and bad grammar.
These posts also were published on obscure sites, with dubious credibility.
The person was writing deeply-felt pieces but had no credibility.
This last factor is not always important, however. For example, a New York Times article this week, "On Wall St., Reputation Is Fragile"
by Andrew Ross Sorkin, wrote about the downfall of the lesser known of the two Steven Rattner working on Wall St. The reason: posts with all kinds of allegations about Rattner were written by the ex-husband of the woman with whom Rattner had had an affair several years earlier;
the posts also contained inaccuracies, according to the Times. Yet because the posts were so widely available, Rattner, who had been called a rising star, instead resigned from his job.
In the case of Circuit City, the "who" didn't matter. I'd say the fact that it appeared in Mad Magazine also counted against taking any action; that might be different if Mad targets the ideal Circuit City customer. If Andy Borowitz wrote something similar in his "Next Month's Business News" column in Conde Nast Portfolio, I think that could be different
if only because Portfolio readers could be investors or shortsellers of Circuit City stock. (However, I would have advised against taking action, even if the spoof had been published in Portfolio.)
As for evaluating the reaction the spoof generated, Circuit City could have done a number of searches to see if there were any. But disposing of a few copies from 40 stores was far from being the right call.
There are steps companies and people can take when the media gets the facts wrong. But you can't do anything with humor or with opinion.
The cassette is survived by the CD (which is not doing well) and the LP
(which has recovered because audiophiles prefer their sound).
The death of the cassette follows the death of 8-track tape in the 1970s, and the 45 in the 90s.
Apparently, new music is not released on pre-recorded tapes anymore or barely
anymore. Just 400,000 pre-recorded tapes were sold in 2007. And new
cars rarely have factory-installed tape players; just 4% of 2007-model
year cars had cassette decks as compared to 23% for the 2005-model year.
According to the Times, the only interest in cassettes has been to make mix
tapes, to listen to those mix tapes, and to listen to books on tape.
One of the best things about books on tape is the ability to listen in
your car, pop out the tape to listen to at home, and be able to pick up
at the same place -- something CDs can't do.
But that wasn't enough.
Last year, sales of cassette tape players fell to 480,000, down from its peak of 18 million in 1994.
For some clients, the real question isn't whether or not you should use Twitter, establish a
Facebook page, etc. and maintain a corp. blog, but how to measure the
investment and return on the use of resources necessary to generate any
kind of "traction."
A good social media campaign takes as much, if not more, time to generate results. For example, you might get followers on Twitter and visitors to your blog, but that same time could be used for media relations that could secure an article.
The people you're most interested in targeting may not read blogs. Or they may not read newspapers.
The answer of the most effective means depends on who you're trying to reach and what media they consume, how they consume it and where.
We've been telling clients to consider repurposing content across different channels. But recently, a client said he never listens to podcasts -- which actually led us to an interesting discussion. In some corporate settings, computers don't have audio cards and don't have iTunes loaded
on them, so they can't easily download podcasts.
The question -- whether to allocate resources to a social media over media relations or
vice versa -- comes down, for now, to a "it depends."
Of course, last year, the answer was mostly media relations.
What will next year bring? Let me know your thoughts.
I think Jason Calcanis' now-famous proclamation that blogging is dead is wrong for one specific reason: he thinks the replacement for blogging is an email distribution list.
Here are reasons I think email is dead:
Email is slow -- other technologies provide instant access and response.
Email
is unreliable -- your messages might not make it through to the
recipient. I regularly get and receive calls to make sure an important
email has arrived.
Spam -- like college tuition and the price
of oil, spam increases, despite new so-called solutions to fight spam.
I don't think we'll ever win the war on spam. But other communications
tools, like instant message and contact via social networks, can reduce
--- but not eliminate -- the quantity of spam. (Case in point:
TwitterSpam: people who select thousands of people to "follow" on
Twitter in the hopes that people will "follow" them in return in the
hopes they'll check out whatever it is the TwitSpammers are trying to
sell.
Email tends to overwhelm "in boxes" with information
users didn't need. A much better way is to subscribe to RSS feeds,
resulting in less clutter, less guilt.
Email, for most of us, is less likely to have significant impact beyond our immediate friends and family. And every time someone forwards the email, the meat of the email gets pushed lower and lower on the screen, formatting changes, etc., diluting the impact it could have.
The other reason I think blogging is not dead yet is that you're reading this on a blog, not from my email distribution list.
Jason Calcanis has famously (at least in the blogosphere) proclaimed that blogging is dead. He's using email instead to commuinicate to a community of friends, associates and others. He think email is a better tool to reach and build a community.
I agree that blogging is not intimate.
But I think email is dead, and am compiling reasons.
Let me know if and why you agree or disagree that email is dead.
