Society and business in the 21st Century
One of the new models for journalism is being sponsored by corporate interests.
This works well until the news turns against the corporate sponsor, as Australia’s ANZ now discovers.
For companies there are many good reasons for to have their own media centres, but to pretend they are twentieth century style Washington Post, Watergate journalism is probably hoping for too much.
The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.
Yesterday the Search Engine Land website broke the news that Google Authorship is dead.
The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.
Google Authorship was a subset of the company’s Google Plus service that let writers and journalist claim their work.
For authors Google Authorship was a useful tool in the battle against the verminous ‘content scrapers’ whose business lies in stealing other peoples’work. It was also a good way of building an online portfolio.
Google benefited from a huge improvement in the quality of its data as its algorithms authorship made it easier for the algorithm to identify original sources.
Using Google’s Authorship tool wasn’t easy, like many of the company’s services it was cumbersome to setup, opaque and subject to arbitrary rules.
Many journalists, bloggers and writers went through the process however as they saw the benefits and trusted Google to maintain the service.
Trusting Google to maintain any service is risky with the company’s well deserved reputation of axing services the moment management’s attention turns to the next shiny thing.
Which is exactly what’s happened to those who’ve invested their time in Google Authorship and they join the disillusioned masses who’ve been burned by the company previously with services like Google Wave.
The lessons from Google’s dropping of Authorship shouldn’t be lost on those working hard to build Google Plus profiles.
Right now, despite the propaganda for those with a lot invested in the service, Google Plus is not travelling well and it’s in a dangerous zone within the company with the departure of its internal management champion Vic Gundotra earlier this year.
The risk of investing too much time on Google Plus is clear, however it would be unfair to single Google out as being alone in presenting this risk.
Every social media service and publishing platform carries the same risk.
Those spending hours creating Facebook communities or carefully crafting LinkedIn or Medium posts need to remember they are only their by the grace and favor of the service.
Nothing replaces your own website as an online property. Your mission is to drive as much traffic to it as possible. Social media platforms can help you do this, but they are not your friends or business partners.
Don’t forget this.
“The New York Times is winning in journalism,” starts the newspaper’s much discussed internal Innovation Report. Then in great detail it goes on to describe how the audience is being lost to upstarts like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.
Given the number of digital forests that have been felled discussing the report in the last week, it’s not worthwhile giving an in depth analysis of the study – particularly given Nieman Labs’ comprehensive dissection of the document.
What does stand out though are a number of over-riding themes that apply to almost any business, not just struggling traditional media outlets.
A constant mantra in the NY Times report is about being ‘digital first’ – if you’re thinking about that today, then you’re probably too late in your industry.
Every industry is now digital: If you’re designing widgets, you’re doing it on CAD system; if you’re selling real estate, you’re listing online (one of the great killers of the old metropolitan newspaper model) and if you’re selling doughnuts, you’re placing your suppliers’ order electronically and maybe 3D printing your icing patterns in the near future.
There isn’t one industry that isn’t being radically changed by digital technology.
One of the areas that’s been most resistant to digital change, and yet is the most threatened, is management.
Silos within organisations are a triumph of management power and make it difficult for a business to be dynamic when it’s necessary to negotiate with different fiefdoms just to change the colour of paperclips.
Those silos are fine when industries are cosy and there’s little competition but when disruptors enter the market those management empires become a dangerous, and expensive, weakness.
The New York Times study spends a great deal of its pages discussing how to break down silos within its own organisation and this is something every business owner or manager should be exploring.
With modern communication, information management and workplace collaboration tools many management roles are no longer needed.
For smaller businesses, this is the greatest strength when competing against larger corporations as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Business Insider have shown in stealing the market from the New York Times.
One of the toughest conclusions from the NY Times study is that the quality of content actually doesn’t matter in the marketplace; The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed do an excellent job of taking the NYT’s work, repackaging it and redistributing it in a way readers prefer.
That might be a transition effect – it’s hard not to think that should original content creators like the NY Times be driven out of business then Buzzfeed will have to start employing more journalists and Arianna paying her writers – however right now gloss beats quality.
Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post are attracting audiences because their stories are easy to find online and their headlines almost beg you to read them.
For non-media businesses, the lesson is you need to be found; you may be the best restaurant, electrician or accountant in town but if you’re on the fifteenth page of Google in search results for your industry and suburb then you’re doomed.
The New York Times faces its own unique set of challenges, as do the publishing and media industries, many of the lessons though from the NYT Innovation paper though can be applied to many businesses.
Data journalism is one of the buzz words of the media industry as it deals with its own issues of extracting information from the flood of data swamping business and society.
One of the media organisations leading the move to data journalism is The Guardian who have an excellent video on what a data journalist does.
The question though is where are the data editors? Like traditional journalism and writing, a good sub-editor is essential to clean up copy and check that the story makes sense.
With data, it’s even more important for other pairs of eyes to look at the numbers.
Last week I was asked by an editor to check a story that lots of number – and those numbers didn’t make sense. In fact, the numbers as they were presented argued against the writer’s point. Had the story run, both the writer’s and the publication’s would have been damaged.
Many news organisations are cutting back on their sub editing teams and the resulting drop in quality is hurting their publications.
Poor checking of data is even more risky and it’s going to be interesting to see if media organisations start devoting scarce resources to editing their data driven stories.
It’s necessary to tell compelling stories with the aid of big data and smart algorithms McKinsey’s Joshua Goff told a conference in Sydney two weeks ago.
As part of the recent ADMA Global Forum, the head of McKinsey’s Asia Pacific Consumer Marketing Analytics Center spoke of importance of story telling, big data and personalisation for marketers meeting the challenges of today’s connected marketplace.
Goff sees three disruptions to the current marketing industry – a proliferation of channels, a mountain of raw data to deal with and a hyper-informed consumer. These are challenges which businesses and marketers didn’t have to face in previous years.
To counter these disruptions Goff proposes five actions; develop a four screen strategy, build a content supply chain, broaden personalisation, understand big data isn’t just about data and forget your current marketing mix.
“Spending on digital media and non-traditional media is soaring,” says Goff. “We’re recommend to some of our clients to double or triple their spending on these channels.”
Goff showed ASICS’ Support Your Marathoner campaign as an example of how innovative marketers can create digital campaigns that look beyond banner ads and popups. Campaigns like this are critical to building advocacy around a brand.
The four screen strategy is essential as consumers are changing how consumers behave, something that is going to accelerate as more screens like Google Glass appear on the market.
“If we have multiple screens is it not reasonable to think when you turn on your TV – and I count the TV as a screen – that they see the same information?” asks Goff. “But recognise that different screens offer different experiences.”
One of the key problems for marketers is feeding content to these screens, which means world class editorial teams will be essential to getting customers’ attention.
“Content is going to be king going forward,” says Goff. “Content is going to be a source of competitive advantage.”
In this mix, user generated content is a key factor as well. One of the examples Goff gave was Disguised Lighting, surprisingly a business to business operation which proves that getting fans as advocates is not just restricted to consumer brands.
“If you give the customer in return, they will give you the information you want,” Goff states. “Start solving your customer’s problem.”
Personalisation is more than just email, it now means delivering personalised goods and configurable services. The physical experience, such as a Japanese vending machines that tailors the drinks available based on the demographic segment the system identifies the customer as being in.
Data is worthless without the algorithms and the APIs required to understand and distribute the information. To do this well, Goff sees data scientists and software engineers as critical which means the global race for talent is going to be particularly acute in these areas.
As an example of big data, and cloud computing, Goff showed Sberbank’s lie detecting ATM machine that issues personal loans based up the applicant’s voice patterns. The device brings together a number of technologies to deliver a personalised experience for customers.
“We can’t afford to wait wait,” warns Goff. “There’s a lot of change and it’s complicated but there are successes and we need to start our own stories.”
At the heart of Goff’s presentation is the fact we live in a noiser world and for brands wanting to cut through that noise they have to offer something more than what has worked in the past.
Yesterday I had lunch with a group of retirees who aren’t particularly connected to technology. It was a contrast to the previous three days spent with startup and media companies talking about social media and the internet.
One thing that really seemed to disturb them was the idea that printed daily newspapers may not be around in a few years time.
Which makes Elizabeth Knight’s Media Rivals Facing a Brave New World this weekend a timely read in the contrasting strategies of News Limited and Fairfax.
From Knight’s report it’s hard not think News Corp CEO Robert Thomson is deluded;
”Print is still a particularly powerful medium … 43 per cent of Wall Street Journal readers are millionaires.”
Old millionaires. Like the people I had lunch with yesterday.
The problem Thomson has if this is indeed the strategy of the New News Corporation then he’s locked into a dying, declining market.
A bright spot for both News and Fairfax are the digital properties that evolved out of their old classified and display newspaper advertising, specifically the real estate sites Domain and realestate.com.au.
These sites don’t involve substantive news reporting or journalism beyond regurgitated realtor media releases, although if you take the attitude that newspapers were really only advertising channels with some news to attract an audience then this is a natural development.
For journalists, and those who want to be informed about the world around them, that view is a problem as it doesn’t answer the question of how do you pay for news.
With earnings expected to be 30% lower this year compared to 2012, this is something concentrating the minds of Fairfax’s management given they don’t have the profitable Pay-TV revenues of News.
The problem for the legacy news operations is that the focus is on cost cutting while denying the reality that expensive printed newspapers are dying in both readership and advertising revenue.
Desperately hanging onto the daily printed newspaper model threatens to consume resources needed make both Fairfax and News successful online.
Which makes the venues of the investor events that Knight describes a interesting counterpoint to the ruthless cost cutting going on at both News and Fairfax.
Sydney’s Mint and the Four Seasons Hotel are lovely venues and no doubt the executives and analysts enjoyed some nice canapes and drinks after their briefings.
But genuinely cost conscious management would have put their status to one side and held the meeting at their own premises and, if the analysts were nice, offered them a cup of tea and a biscuit, just like shareholders get.
At time when fast, responsive and small management is needed to make fast decisions in rapidly changing markets it seems the companies most threatened by change are those with the most inflexible, and entitled, managements.
It may well be that Fairfax or News discover the magic formula that makes digital media profitable, but it’s not going to happen while they deny the realities of today’s market places and a radically changing economy.
Not that this will worry the older executives of over-managed businesses who will spend their sunny days of retirement enjoying nice lunches and wondering what happened to the days of the printed newspaper.
Peter Kafka of the Wall Street Journal’s All Thing D blog has been closely following Google’s attempts to position YouTube as a successor to television.
Key to that success is getting advertisers on board to spend as much money with online channels as they do on broadcast TV.
To date that’s failed and most of the online ad spend has come at the expense of print media – the money advertisers spent on magazines and newspapers has moved onto the web, but TV’s share of the pie is barely changing and may even be increasing.
The challenges facing web advertising is discovering what works on the new mediums.
McDonalds Canada Behind The Scenes campaign is touted as one of the success stories of YouTube advertising, although Kafka isn’t fully convinced.
McDonald’s modest ad tells a story, flatters viewers by telling them they’re smart enough to go backstage, and still ends up pushing pretty images of hamburgers in front of them. That’s pretty clever advertising sort-of masquerading as something else but not really.
We’re trying to apply old ways of working to a new technology something we do every time a new technology appears.
Probably the best example of this is the movie industry – if you look at the early silent movies they were staged like theatrical productions. It took the best part of two decades for movie directors to figure out the advantages of the silver screen.
Shortly after movie directors figured out what worked on the big screen, the talkies came along and changed the rules again. Then came colour, then television, then the net and now mobile. Each time the movie industry has had to adapt.
It isn’t just the movie and advertising industries facing this problem; publishers, writers and journalists are struggling with exactly the same issues.
Most of what you read online, including this blog, is just old style print writing or journalism being published on a digital platform. Few of us, including me, are pushing the boundaries of what the web can do.
David Sarnoff figured out how to make money from broadcast radio and television in the 1930s with a model that was very different from what the movie industry was doing at the time.
Sarnoff built Radio Corporation of America into the world’s leading broadcaster and the modern advertising industry grew out of RCA’s successful model.
Today both the broadcasting and advertising industries are applying Sarnoff’s innovations of the 1930s to the web with limited success. Just like movie producers struggled with theatrical techniques at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Figuring out what works online is today’s great challenge. Google are throwing billions at the problem through YouTube but there’s no guarantee they will be the RCA of the internet.
We may well find that a young coder in Suzhou or a video producer in Sao Paolo has the answer and becomes the Randolph Hearst or David Sarnoff of our time.
The future is open and it’s there for the taking.
