Lots of folks refer to multiples, of cash flow or revenue or whatever, as a way of determining future value.   You project the expected future performance of the company, factor in the cost of capital, and calculate a price.  Excel does this very well.

But any such formula for pricing a company relies on a degree of certainty about the nature and value of what the company does. At media industry conferences the overwhelming sense is one of uncertainty about this. Will print finally go away?  To what extent will search be supplanted by social?  Are apps replacing the browser?  Will virtual events supplant or enhance live events?  How media products are consumed and used has become entirely unpredictable.  There’s plenty of agitated debate, much of it legitimate, but none of it conclusive.  The only thing anyone can agree on is that the media business will have to continue to adapt.

So, how can you value a media business today?  Any valid projection of future value of a business requires you to make good assumptions about the shape of that business six months, a year, and five years from now.  That’s pretty hard to do in the media business.

While I’m not about to throw away the spreadsheet, I think any valuation of a media property these days needs rely on qualitative factors:

• What are the attributes of the market served?
• How deep are the relationships between the media company and the audiences/content consumers and suppliers/advertisers?
• How plugged-in and adaptable is the talent pool of the company?

I happen to believe that strong, innovative media companies will take advantage of this state of continual flux.  They will adapt and prosper. Weaker, more static, media companies will go away. Figuring out which is which can’t be done in Excel.

I want to take these conversations to the next level. With this post, I welcome you to the new and expanded Uphoff On Media. Based on feedback from colleagues, friends, family and the UOM audience, we have enhanced the site, adding additional contributors, social media functionality and a new design. Several friends of mine, who also happen to be experts in their fields, have kindly agreed to participate. Charlie McCurdy, CEO of Apprise Media; Jeff Klein, Founder of 101 Media, ex-LA Times executive and currently professor at USC’s Annenberg School; Jeff Sweat, director of B2B marketing and social media for Yahoo! and the editor-in-chief of the Yahoo! Advertising Blog; and Steve Farber, Author of the book “The LEAP” and former CEO of Tom Peters Inc, will all be regular contributors. We will be adding additional voices over the next few months as well.

Please let me know what you think of the new site. UOM is still focused on the initial goal; experience and learn about social media and create a place to capture discussions with thought leaders in media, marketing and technology. The site remains a personal labor of love. We look forward to your thoughts on topics and issues you’d like us to cover and as always please feel free to join in.

And, every gawker has a subtlety—or completely–different view of the very same house.  What they love or hate, what they’d keep or change.  If you could see a mind-video of how each person imagined your home, it would be a disorienting experience.  And someone steps up and pays the highest price and creates their own dream house.

Have you ever sold your company?  The one you’ve honed to top performance, with every competitive edge?  We went through this process last summer with Canon Communications.  The buyer, United Business Media, saw an opportunity for continued growth, but from a very different perspective, and they’ve remodeled the company to address that opportunity.

So, now I’m one of those gawkers scouring the listings, knocking on doors, imagining my “dream company”. And in this period of rapid change, finding the most appealing features of a company isn’t the way it used to be.  Imagine looking at a home during a period of rapid global warming—a waterfront property may be much less appealing than a house a mile inland!  Those wood-burning-fireplaces may be worth avoiding!

I’d like to keep you posted on my progress.  Unlike homes for sale, the process of selling a company is often kept highly confidential, so I’ll have to keep pretty non-specific and talk at a fairly strategic level.  But, maybe that will make the discussion more fun…

I used to be a journalist—the very first online reporter for Tony’s InformationWeek, in fact—and now I edit the Yahoo! Advertising Blog. I’ve had plenty of time to think about the differences between journalism and brand journalism, another term for corporate blogging.

And I think that brand journalism is… well, not journalism in any form. That term needs to banished. But no matter what it is or what it’s called, it can still bring its readers content that matters. It can also help turn readers into customers, which is why marketers should get it right.

Bias? It ain’t so bad

Journalism, in my rosy view of journalism, depends on the ability to report facts as objectively as possible despite the biases of the reporter.  Bloggers, on the other hands, wear their biases on their sleeves. And that’s OK—if readers know what the biases are and can embrace them, they’ll find stuff that’s worth their while.

On my blog, for instance, you’ll find lots of great advice for advertisers (so says my bias), some plugs for Yahoo!, and not very many plugs at all for our competitors. You also won’t see many digs at our competitors because it’s bad PR and it’s just the way I was raised.

How to win trust

If you want to give people a shot at looking past your bias to the content beneath, you have to find ways to build their trust. The ways I do that are borrowed, not surprisingly, from journalism.

1. Tell the truth. *Sigh* I shouldn’t really have to spell this out, should I? Don’t lie. Don’t even spin. If you can’t figure out how to say something without making yourself look bad, just don’t say anything.
2. Be suspicious of adjectives. I’ve banned adjectives like “innovative,” market-leading,” and “world-class” from my team’s communications. They don’t mean anything and, honestly, what else would people expect you to say about your own products? I make my writers show me why we’re innovative, not just say that we are. You have to earn your adjectives.
3. Do some reporting. Just because you bought the megaphone doesn’t mean you can shout out anything you want. If you’re trying to make a controversial point (Like my look at Twitter as a marketing tool), do some research, interview experts, and try to show a counterpoint.  (I’m not offering a counterpoint because I hope this is common sense.)
4. Be useful. My goal with our blog is to have 25% of the stuff about Yahoo!, and 75% of it content that helps our advertisers do their jobs. Does talking about something other than yourself make you more trusted? I think so. But it certainly makes you less boring.

I’ve done a lot of work with engineers, scientists and technologist over the years, so I’m well aware of the left-brain stereotype: “I’m an engineer; I don’t do that people thing. Keep the people out of the way so I can get my job done around here.”

But that’s all it is: a stereotype.

After listening to me speak about The Radical Leap (cultivate Love, generate Energy, inspire Audacity, and provide Proof), a network specialist emailed me to chime in on the LOVE thing.

“I’ve been a manager for 10 years,” he said. “And what you said about Love being a critical part of business is right on.

“I’ve told my technicians to make the customer absolutely love you. Take-you-home-to-dinner love you. Meet-the-wife-and-kids love you. Because if the customer loves you, you can blow up their building and they’ll say ‘accidents happen.’”

We should all know by now that customer satisfaction doesn’t cut it any more. Nowadays, our customers have to love doing business with us—that’s where the loyalty, world-of-mouth, and retention comes from. (And the forgiveness factor, too, as our friend the network specialist is telling us.)

Striving to create an environment that people love working in will lead them to create products and services that customers love spending money on.

There’s nothing touchy-feely about that; it’s just damn good business.

What do you think? Does love play a part in the way you lead at your company?

Immediately after the first attack people started posting news, updates and information to Twitter and other social networks. These updates came from multiple spots in Mumbai as well as from afar as people offered their thoughts and prayers. As a reader it was difficult to tell the difference. For the most part the posts lacked context so trying to get a sense of the “who, what, where, when and why” was difficult if not impossible.  As my colleague Alex Wolfe noted in his blog post “Twitter in Controversial Spotlight Amid Mumbai Attacks” so much data was created but with limited insight or perspective. There were also some posts that appeared to be giving sensitive information about real time police activity in response to the attacks. The Mumbai authorities took the extraordinary measure of Tweeting, asking people to stop providing updates on sensitive information.

There is no question that applications like Twitter have irrevocably changed the media landscape. Like all applications however the power of the technology can overwhelm the value if there is no discernment between data and information. There have already been stories criticizing the journalistic virtue of Twitter and other social media, used by the general public. My take is the social media coverage of the Mumbai attacks will serve as a tipping point in the debate on “responsible journalism” versus “personal journalism”. The reality is traditional journalism has gone through similar growing pains as new technologies allowed for real time coverage, that in some cases turned out to be flawed in hind sight. Perhaps this is a coming of age moment for social media and our use of it as a means of accurate and responsible communication.