My Conversation with Steven Waldman, Senior Advisor, FCC

Tony Uphoff

Have you ever sold your home?

Charles McCurdy
Charles McCurdy

Don’t Trust This Blog Post (And How to Write Posts that Can Be Trusted)

Jeff Sweat

Don’t Trust This Blog Post (And How to Write Posts that Can Be Trusted)

By | June 20, 2011 at 6:46 pm | Post a comment
Comparing Apples to Oranges

The first thing you should know when you read this blog post is that you may not want to trust it.

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.

Love Is Good Business

Steve Farber By | at 6:37 pm | 2 comments
Heart

The emotion of love is considered to be out of place or simply inappropriate in business—especially in the technology world. Many believe that good business people keep their hearts out of their work. But, it’s the heart that brings the fire of creativity to bear on the day-to-day. It’s the heart that inspires drive, loyalty and leaps of innovative brilliance.

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?

LinkedIn. A Little Bubbly?

By | May 20, 2011 at 8:56 pm | Post a comment

The LinkedIn IPO has generated a ton of debate in Internet, investing, technology and media circles. Some like stock analyst Jim Cramer think the nearly $8B + valuation is “ridiculous” and “outrageous”, and potentially a sign of another “Internet Bubble”. Others like business writer and former analyst Henry Blodget think the rapid rise in LinkedIn’s stock price is an example of wildly under-valued initial pricing by the bankers. These debates are what make markets. As someone who focuses on creating value in business as opposed to defining and setting value I’m not sure I can really add to the debate on whether the LinkedIn valuation is high or low. As is often the case, righteous is likely somewhere in between and ultimately the market will determine the level. I do think there are some things we can learn from the buzz and energy around the LinkedIn IPO however that are worth reflecting on:

  1. The Shift from Search to Social. The astounding growth of both LinkedIn and Facebook reflect a profound and significant shift in web behavior and traffic. This shift can best be described as the shift from search to social. People today are far more interested in what their friends, family colleagues and peers are doing, thinking, reading and talking about, than they are in “searching” the web. We think this is also driving a return to brand as more and more web users turn or return to brands they know, trust and enjoy, as opposed to searching for information that yields increasingly poor quality and or conflicting search results.
  2. LinkedIn is a Media Business. A review of LinkedIn’s numbers shows revenue’s of $243.1M for 2010. They have 3 categories of revenue: Hiring Solutions, Marketing Solutions and Premium Subscriptions. Hiring Solutions is their largest revenue category but they are clearly growing quickly in marketing solutions. LinkedIn has become both a platform for engagement for other media companies to leverage as well as a competitor. This type of “co-opetition” is not new in technology. It is still somewhat nascent in media however and something that the media industry is going to need to understand and ultimately harness and leverage.
  3. This Isn’t an Internet Bubble. The LinkedIn IPO will be remembered as a seminal event that perhaps ushered in the next phase of the Internet economy. The largest Internet IPO since Google, LinkedIn has clearly received a tremendous amount of interest. An analysis of their current numbers would suggest that this interest is based on future potential as opposed to current revenues and profits. That being said, LinkedIn is not an example of a “build it and revenues will come” approach. Nor are Facebook or Groupon examples of non-revenue based business models. Web 2.0 is simply the acknowledgement that the web is the computational platform. As a result we are seeing companies that are building scalable and sustainable businesses online. We are now seeing a large number of B2B online media businesses that are growing and scaling. At the risk of sounding overly promotional our own UBM TechWeb chief amongst them.
  4. What Does the LinkedIn IPO Mean for B2B Media? Forbes this morning ran a post titled: “With linkedIn IPO, B2B Marketing Gets the Spotlight”. The writer Russell Glass suggested that the LinkedIn IPO “…makes B2B…well sexy. Yea I said it sexy!”. Couldn’t have said it better myself. The LinkedIn IPO validates the power of B2B markets and marketing. The Internet economy is alive and well in business to business media. And the companies who have transformed their culture and infrastructure to become digitally centric, regardless of the platforms they work in, will be the beneficiaries.

Let me know your thoughts. How do you view LinkedIn’s IPO and what impact do you think it will have on B2B media and marketing?

From Chasing Customers to Creating Customers

By | April 23, 2011 at 1:00 am | 1 comment

The last several years lead generation has been the driving force in online marketing. From basic click-through to registration based programs, the majority of web marketing has simply been direct marketing. We are starting to see online marketing shift into a new phase however. A shift that combines the efficiency of direct marketing with the power of brand preference marketing. This shift is being driven by several factors:

  1. Lost Brand Identity. By focusing almost exclusively on lead generation it’s clear some companies have lost the power of brand. The decline of brand clarity and preference, takes away one the biggest advantages major brands have. Take a look at the recent market share drop at Pepsi as an example. The lack of brand awareness for newer or smaller brands makes it very difficult to stand out, gain traction and ultimately revenue growth and profits.
  2. Content Has Become Advertising. Marketers are developing content based marketing that contextually resonates with customers and prospects. This type of branded response marketing creates a strong two-way dialogue that can be sustained and adjusted as brand, customer and market dynamics change.
  3. Brand Scales. An unbranded lead is just that, unbranded. And like generic brands and goods they have limited value. A branded lead however, scales. It’s like an introduction by a mutual, trusted friend versus a cold call to a prospect who has never heard of you.
  4. Installed Base Matters. People and organizations who have purchased in the past are the best prospects for future purchasing. This is most acutely true in business marketplaces like technology. The companies that buy the most technology are the ones that have already made a commitment to technology. Facebook wasn’t a great prospect for expensive servers when it was an early stage company. Once they had a good sized installed base however, they became a very good prospect and now buy 1,500 servers a month on average. When dealing with an installed base customer, brand and the roadmap behind that brand matters. A lot.

The fusion of direct and brand marketing is enabling companies to shift from chasing customers to creating customers. Brand marketing and demand generation are being redefined in this new phase of online marketing. Perhaps this shift is a sign that online is maturing as a medium. Or perhaps we as marketers are.

Content Wants to Be Created. Not Farmed

By | April 19, 2011 at 5:34 am | 1 comment

There’s been a ton of debate over the value, or lack thereof, of  “content farms”. The company Demand Media has served as a lightning rod in the debate drawing both ire and praise from media pundits and investors. If you’re not familiar with Demand Media and other content farm operations, the model is based on generating cheap content and stressing optimization to drive search results. The approach requires a large amount of traffic, generates questionable audience loyalty and demographics and obviously lives and dies based on the ability to consistently game out search engines.

Huffington Post and other AOL sites are in the discussion too, as some people see them as nothing more than dressed up content farms. It’s a fascinating debate. At the core of it is the value of content; to audiences, to media companies and to search engines.

Content is a value game. Always has been, always will be. I’m not attempting to take some intellectual high ground here, nor ignore the obvious power and value of search equity. Regardless of the genre, sustainably successful content becomes so based on delivering high value to audiences. No matter how savvy your SEO specialists. The content farms I’ve studied are generating very low value content and over working search algorithms to generate high value search rankings. As more and more people turn to content that their friends, family, colleagues, trusted sources and leading brands guide them to, rather than “searching” the web, I think content farms may be hit by a drought.

So you tell me. Am I being too much of a purest here? Is the future about farming content or creating it?

The Wonder Wall Part II

By | April 15, 2011 at 3:54 am | Post a comment
Last summer I wrote a post called “The Wonder Wall” where I mused about the future of pay walls for content sites. Since then The New York Times and other sites have launched pay walls  to great fan fare. How are they doing?  It’s tough to tell given the scarcity of public numbers on pay wall revenues.  Posts and analysis from insiders suggest that the NY Times spent a robust $25 Million creating their pay wall.  I think it may be a good long while before they see a return on this investment.

Some sites with pay walls have seen their audiences shrink as readers previously able to access advertising supported content for free, now balk at being asked to pay. Less page views means less ad revenue, which puts even more pressure on the pay wall. “The good news is we generated paid subscriptions! The bad news is our traffic dropped and so did our ad revenue…”. Wonder Wall indeed.

One of the things people pay for when buying a newspaper or magazine, is the functionality. In the case of web based content however, readers have already paid for the functionality. Their computer provides that. So readers now have to determine whether in addition to the cost of a computer and online access, the cost of content is worth it. In the case of online newspapers and magazines, so far they seem to feel it’s not. In my mind the question isn’t whether web audiences will pay for online content. The real question is will online audiences pay for newspaper and magazine content with increased functionality?

The iPad, iPhone, Droid and the application marketplaces demonstrate that people will pay for content with increased functionality. And the genius of the recurring revenue marketplace model of Apple becomes more and more impressive every day. Apple has announced their newspaper, magazine and book publishing marketplace strategy and given the initial steep 30% share, early publisher reaction was mixed. My sense is that even with the revenue split concerns, this model will become scalable and attractive to newspaper and magazine brands. Especially once they start to feel the pinch from cutting their audiences in half by instituting pay walls.

Let me know your thoughts. Are you seeing pay wall strategies that work? As a reader are you paying for online access to daily newspapers and magazines and if so which ones?

Running Media

By | March 28, 2011 at 4:40 am | Post a comment

This month marks my 10th anniversary as a runner. In March of 2001 while walking around a mall in New York with my family I wandered into a running store. On a whim I bought a pair of running shoes. At the time I played tennis regularly and was reasonably active. I had bad knees from basketball though and had never thought they would hold up to distance running. For some reason I decided I’d like to give running a try. That first day I laced up my shoes and took off for a jog around our neighborhood. I ran for a total of 20 minutes. 10 minutes out, a brief rest and 10 minutes back. I measured the distance later with my car and I had covered 1.2 miles. Since then I’ve run over 7,950 miles. Yes, I’ve counted them. First in running journals and then via digital watches and running logs. I’ve tracked a few other stats along the way too:

  • I’ve run in 7 countries
  • 15 states
  • Through 27 pairs of running shoes, 6 running watches and countless t-shirts and shorts
  • Run in 36, 5K races (3.1 miles)
  • The best 5k time I’ve run is 23:23 (never said I was fast!)

I’ve run in 20′, snowy weather and 100′ desert heat. I’ve run through hills in Northern England and trails in the middle of Oregon. I’ve run on a treadmill in a hotel in Mumbai, India and along the beaches of Maui, Hawaii. I’ve run in a park in Dublin, Ireland and around an artificial river in Las Vegas, Nevada. 3 years ago on my birthday I ran 5 miles in Beijing, China in the morning, flew to Los Angeles crossing the dateline and ran another 5 miles on the same day. Then slept for 18 hours!

So right about now you’re wondering what running has to do with Media, right? Well in taking time to reflect on 10 years of running I realized that I do a fair amount of thinking about media while running. At some level, I’ve thought about most every significant media trend, strategy, decision, creative idea, competitive step, presentation, speech or organizational move I’ve made in the last 10 years while running. It also hit me that this 10 year period happened to be one of the most transformative periods in the history of the media industry. Running media indeed.

Today on a 4 mile run along the coast on a beautiful day in Los Angeles, I couldn’t help but reflect on the changes in media over the last 10 years. While the Internet is still a disruptive force, many media companies have harnessed it’s power and built sizable web based businesses. New advances in social, mobile, location based technology and information design are opening up new avenues for media as well. And we are seeing a natural integration of media as audiences combine on and off line information and interests. I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will bring. See you on the road.

Has Charlie Taken the Sheen Off of Twitter?

By | March 11, 2011 at 1:35 am | Post a comment

Charlie Sheen has become a one man, always on, global media platform. From television to radio to newspapers and magazines to online, Sheen has become a constant presence in the media. Are we watching the mental breakdown of a talented actor before our eyes? Or are we witnessing a clever self promoter set himself up for his next entertainment venture?  Either way, what is indisputable is the fact that Sheen’s media mayhem has been fueled by social media:

#winning, #tigerblood indeed. So what do Sheen’s numbers teach us about social media platforms like Twitter?  Some are suggesting that Sheen has shown Twitter has more in common with traditional news media than initially thought. Anything to drive more viewers and the more sensational the better. Given that Sheen is also working with the celebrity endorsement social media company, Ad.Ly some argue that Sheen is demonstrating the revenue potential of Twitter as a marketing platform. There is clear evidence that Twitter has benefited from their association with Sheen. CNBC estimates that Sheen’s impact has increased the value of Twitter by over 30%.

Regardless of what you think of Charlie Sheen or his antics, the impact of social media in his crusade is amazing. He built a large owned audience, in real time, in scale, with a self-published unedited narrative. My sense is that like the Pet Rock “Charlie the media platform” will have a short shelf life. A friend of mine suggested that the sure sign that Charlie has jumped the shark is interest from Mark Cuban in creating a show with him. Perhaps the circus will move on but the impact of social media will continue.

Rupe Was Robbed. Tales From The Front Lines of the iPad App Economy

By | February 12, 2011 at 7:32 pm | 2 comments

If you were launching a daily newspaper today $30m would not be an outrageous sum of money to be spending. What would be outrageous is that you were launching a daily newsPAPER. Spending $30m to create an iPad newspaper application is ludicrous. With substantial fanfare, Rupert Murdoch recently launched The Daily an iPad and tablet based newspaper. He has also spent a ton of dough, a reported $30m and counting. Heck even with the house ad rates a sister division at News Corp might enjoy, the Super Bowl ads had to run some $5m. Frankly they were kinda weak too….but I digress.  Simply put Rupe was robbed. While clearly a true media visionary and uniquely successful businessman, Rupert Murdoch’s approach to the iPad and application based media revolution reflects an old media approach to what is now a new and very different media world.

The Application Economy is being driven by the fusion of information design and mobility. At the risk of alienating my open source and Android pals, the core manifestation of this is the iPad. What is unique about the Application Economy is that from it’s inception it was designed and built on an ongoing service business model. In other words you download or buy an application and part of the value is that the application will be updated on an ongoing basis. In developing applications you need to consider that user engagement and interaction dictate how you evolve and update the application. While perhaps a simple concept, this is still a huge cultural shift for broadcast media companies like News Corp. They are used to the “build it and they will come” methodology, where you pour huge money into a launch, creating a massive barrier to entry and hope to realize a profitable return years down the road. Movies, daily newspapers and television make up the vast majority of revenues and profits of News Corp so this approach has served them well. The application economy operates very differently however and requires the ability to manage an Application as a Service.

Will Rupe realize a return on his investment? Hard to say. I certainly wouldn’t bet against him or News Corp. His first foray with the iPad however would indicate that he doesn’t yet understand the model and still thinks massive investments will create audience value and a competitive barrier to entry.  No matter what your point of view the build out of the iPad App Economy will be exciting and fascinating to watch play out.

Search to Social to Schmidt to Page

By | January 22, 2011 at 7:06 pm | 3 comments
The shift from Eric Schmidt to Larry Page as CEO of Google is more than simply a change of leadership. It represents the broader shift in the center of gravity of the web from search to social. The surprising announcement in the change at the top of Google this week has created all sorts of conjecture. Google feels the heat from Facebook and needs to reignite the passion and focus. Google has become like Microsoft a large monolithic company that still generates considerable revenues and profits but where vision, innovation and passion have died. The Microsoft comparison is the most interesting one. You could make the argument that Bill Gates stepped down as head of Microsoft as the PC lost it’s power as the center of gravity in computing. The dominant company in computing for the previous decade, Microsoft’s business and culture started to change as the web became the computational platform. No longer the straw that stirred the drink Microsoft saw an entire generation of talent either retire to pursue philanthropic or personal interests, or leave to start their own companies or join new ventures. As with Bill Gates and Microsoft you also have the dynamic of mega-wealth in the change at Google; where a still active, capable CEO in Eric Schmidt may have interest in what he can do for the broader world and how he might use his wealth and position to have a positive impact on society.
Great brands and companies evolve. Google, like Microsoft, will go through market changes and leadership changes and if the core of the company and it’s culture are as strong as we think, it will not only survive it will thrive. In 1997, there was a similar market shift and Steve Jobs came back to Apple as CEO. A friend who worked on Wall Street asked me if I thought Apple Stock was a good buy. I told him I would wait and see. A $1,000.00 investment in Apple stock at that point would be worth $1,000,000 today. It will be fascinating to watch Larry Page take center stage at Google and lead the next phase of the growth for the company. The shift from search to social has clearly created new challenges for Google but as with all transitions will also create new opportunities. One prediction is for certain, the battle for supremacy in technology is only going to get more interesting and the real winners will be the users of the extraordinary new applications and tools that will be the result.
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