Getting the New Media Landscape

Although I try to keep my blogs separate, I'm going to point to an entry I did in WriterBiz, which is about the freelance writing business and intended for freelance writers. For those who don't want to make the jump, it refers to a post on Reflections of a Newsosaur. In short, sometimes web sites that you'd swear must be obscure can generate more interest and attention, and direct more readers, than even sites of the largest traditional media outlets - we're talking BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and so on.

This matters to business because it's about communication - with customers, employees, stockholders, business partners, and so on. Many companies make the enormous mistake of thinking that a mention in major media, or placing an ad there, is going to do wondrous things for their businesses. That may happen, but it doesn't have to. Talk to people in PR, for exmaple, and if they will be candid, they'll acknowledge that prominent treatment in even a publication like the Wall Street Journal might do exactly nothing in terms of driving sales or interest. I've heard the same from some book authors who found that mentions on specialized blogs coudl sometimes get them many, many more sales than traditional media.

The world is changing, and if you want to be successful in communicating, you have to start understanding how the new media work. Send the assumptions out the window and start exploring things without a guide whispering in your ear, "This one is important ... that one isn't." Chances are that the tour master has never been off the main streets and has no idea what the real dynamics are. Forget about the ego trip of appearing in Important Places, and figure out what will actually work.

Slippery Slope of User-Generated Content

There's an amusing piece in the New York Times about companies looking to customers to create ads and the pain of the experience.

This is a concept that I think is flawed because the companies generally aren't approaching it the right way. You aren't going to get a professional spot from the vast majority of consumers. The writing, production qualities, and acting are more likely than not going to be bad. There's a reason people make their livings doing this sort of thing. If everyone could do it, you'd see much better marketing on television.

You also aren't going to get a whole bunch of spots that sees your product the way you'd like to see it:

One of the most viewed Heinz videos — seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times — ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan Thaler [an advertising executive not involved in the Heinz consumer commercial competition] saw it, she wondered, “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?”

Yup, often people will mock your brand, your product, what part your product plays in life, and your reasons for looking to consumers for your advertising content.

But companies like Heinz could learn something by removing the ketchup-tinted glasses. Forget for a second that you would hope to get a useful commercial out of this. Why not use it as a window into what consumers are thinking. How do they react to your product? What associations do they make subconsciously that come out through the work? You've essentially asked for an admittedly self-selecting set of customers to hold forth on what you do. For a company, this is the value that the Internet really provides - not using the web to promote your own view, but seeing how you are perceived and how people perceive themselves. Look for archetypes, themes, and associations that might help you talk the customer's language. That makes a whole lot more sense than hoping to find the advertising needle in the haystack of would-be funniest home videos.

When Copyright Protection Meets Users, Guess Who Wins?

Today's New York Times story about Internet users spreading a key anti-piracy code from Blu-ray and HD-DVD disks offers a number of business lessons. First, the quick background: people have been relentless posting - in some ingenious ways - a secret code found on high definition video disks since it was unearthed in February. An industry group - the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, which has such members as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Disney, and Warner Brothers - decided to stop things in their tracks and began sending cease and desist letters, claiming that publishing the code was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

That was about as effective as putting out a fire with jet fuel. People put the code up everything and in forms including lyrics of a song and hidden within the information of a digital photograph. Even though such actions are against the law, there are so many people doing it that the industry hasn't a practical prayer of going after anyone legally. This is the nature of the Internet hydra: for each user you legally smite, dozens more pop up.

Now to the lessons. One is that if command and control attitudes didn't ultimately work with employees, what made anyone think that it would with customers? Another is that companies really out to learn from experience, as the same thing happened when hackers broke the copy protection on DVDs. Third is that when you try to maximize your profits and customers perceive that it's at their expense, they will be unhappy and find ways to make you unhappy.

The Internet has changed business, but not in the way most managers understand. The real difference isn't speed or global distribution, but rather a leveling of the communication playing field and the ascendancy of ideas that the communications can transmit. Company value is in intellectual property (ideas), though few act as though it is. Customers can talk to each other using an electronic megaphone that is largely out of the control of corporations, and the ideas they express can have demonstrable impact on companies. Treat the customers with respect and you may get it returned. Try strong arming them, and the attempt is likely to blow up in your face.

Blackberry Outages and R.I.M. Points the Finger

R.I.M. has finally blamed insufficiently tested software on the Blackberry outage that cause such executive outrage. You'd think that the managers would have been happy to have a short period in which they didn't have to jump through hoops. But the story may be a bit more complex. I heard an albeit second-hand explanation/rumor that R.I.M was warned the that software wasn't ready to go live, but that no one listened.