Clear Communicating | The MarketFarm

‘The King of Pop is Dead’ social-media time trial

Who was first to report on Michael Jackson’s death?

It’s just after 9:30 p.m. EST on Thursday, June 25 — the day of Michael Jackson’s death.

The first tweet from my admittedly small ‘follow’ list came at 5:24 as a retweet from Daniel McCarthy, who I don’t actually know, but rather stumbled across him in a retweet from a former boss for whom I have a lot of respect. McCarthy’s tweet was a retweet of a source that claimed Michael Jackson died from a sleeping pill. Suicided, accidental overdose, adverse reaction?

C’mon, it’s 140 characters. Ambiguous to be sure. Call it an unfortunate aspect of the medium. Or the fog of war/celebrity reporting.

The next tweet with the news from my list came in 5:45 p.m. (+21 minutes from the first report/+19 minutes from the event) from TimAmikoff in Tehran, Iran (if I thought it was true, I’d ask if he doesn’t have anything else to do. And how did he end up on my follow list anyway?) TimAmikoff’s was a retweet from CNN Breaking News, linking to a CNN story online that cited the LA County Coronor as the source, with the death declared at 2:26 p.m. I’m considering that to be the original primary source. It said nothing about cause of death, other than a third-party quote from one of Jackson’s brothers that he had collapsed in his home. I’m inferring (because the full story was vague) the state times were local, which would be time of death of 5:26 p.m. EST — two minutes AFTER I received the very first tweet announcing his death.

Let’s say my computer clock is off two minutes. Practically a probability.

So while CNN’s story took about 29 minutes to make it’s way to my computer via Iran, the news was out to at least one source within a minute or so of Jackson’s declared death.

That’s the one I got from Daniel McArthy, who was retweeting Wierd News, which linked to a Top News Stories site owned by Global Associated News — which seems to be an empty logo used by Fake-a-wish.com — a spartan website unencumbered by “About us” links — that in its entirety seems to be a dynamic content generator about fake celebrity news. Seriously.

The story said Jackson had died from a sleeping pill (later elaborated to “cardiac arrest after consuming more than two-dozen sleeping pills.”

At the bottom of the Wierd News Page was this disclaimer: (this story was dynamically generated using a generic ‘template’ and is not factual. Any reference to specific individuals has been 100% fabricated by web site visitors who have created fake stories by entering a name into a blank ‘non-specific’ template for the purpose of entertainment. For sub-domain info and additional use restrictions: FakeAWish.com.)

Can it be a coincidence that FakeAWish would generate this story even as it was happening? Or is somebody sabotaging FakeAWish by placing real big breaking news on it — within seconds of it becoming available, and then updating it?

At 6:22 (+58), CNN Breaking News tweeted that Jackson was in a coma — +37 from first reporting he had died.

At 6:30 (+1:06) TimAmikoff cited the LA Times as confirming Jackson’s death. CNN Breaking News followed within a minute, confirming from multiple sources.

A 6:42 (+1:18) the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he had been rushed to the hospital.

At 8:37 (+2:53) The Onion tweeted “The last piece of Michael Jackson dies.”

What it all means is that I still don’t know where the news really comes from. Except I didn’t get it from any of this. I was busy elsewhere. When I looked, it was all there, preserved by my Tweetdeck utility. But I learned the whole thing at about 7:00 in a phone call from my brother-in-law.

Real social impact from social networks

If you doubt the potential of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, read this recent column by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times. The depth of meaning here is amazing. Twitter is an outlet for the voices of freedom in Iran; the ongoing human rights situation in China creates the impetus for incredible cyber innovation; and the United States could help, but doesn’t necessarily have to do anything except watch quietly.

Social media is not just the latest iteration of the Web; it’s already embedded in world-changing events.

Selling what your customers want v. what they need

Content marketing guy Newt Barrett turns around conventional wisdom, suggesting that instead of working to develop a unique selling proposition, you develop a Unique Buying Proposition. This is more than a semantic turn. The UBP forces you to think like your customers. It changes the question from “Why should they buy from me?” to “Why do they WANT to buy from me?”

You can read Newt’s complete case here.

Would you do a better job buying this...

In the meantime, I’ll add this thought on selling: People will spend more to buy something they want than something they need. The corollary is that they’ll do whatever they can to avoid buying what they need, whereas they enjoy buying things they want.

So even if you’re offering business-to-business products or services, there is a benefit to communicating in a way that helps people WANT to buy what you’re selling.

... or this?

If they feel the product has value-added benefits, some kind of cache, or is exciting and transformative, they’ll buy more readily (and tend to be more pleased) than if they buy something because it has the lowest price or simply fills an urgent need.

That’s the beauty of Newt’s concept of the UBP: It helps your prospects to see your product as something they WANT to buy.

Most small biz doesn’t qualify leads or track marketing ROI. Surprised?

In B2BOnline, Christopher Hosford reports on a study by the Sales Lead Management Association that indicates “nearly 63% of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs.” And 56% say they don’t qualify their leads before sending them to sales. SLMA observed the prevailing attitude among marketers that sales should qualify their own leads.

The survey was conducted online, B2B writes, and of the 140 respondents, all had fewer than 250 employees and three-quarters had fewer than 25. The conclusion of the study: these companies are allowing sales and marketing to operate independently of each other without aligning their objectives.

I’ve observed it myself at one industrial business after another over the past decade, when interviewing marketing teams as part of the media sales process. The vast majority will say that leads remain their primary metric for measuring the effectiveness of their work.

And yet, they will also admit to doing nothing with the leads because:

They aren’t very good;
Their distributors don’t follow up on them anyway;
There is no mechanism in place to qualify leads for sales.

What a cynical way to do a job: on one day demand that your media partners provide more leads to improve your ROI, and on the next day hide that “ROI” into the bottom drawer, pulling it out only when your boss comes around and asks, “What exactly do you do around here?”

It was just such a prospect who once told me, “I don’t think our marketing efforts are half bad.” Now armed with an actual benchmark, I could now reply to him, “Actually, they’re 63% bad.”

On the art of ‘followership’

In his dependably brief and insightful blog, marketing guru Seth Godin writes about this video of a spontaneously developing community at a dance festival: “My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement. Initiators are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Guy #3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Guy #49 is irrelevant. No bravery points for being part of the mob.
“We need more guy #3s.”

There are lots of lessons you can take away from this. The one it most illustrates for me has to do with starting a business or launching a new product. More than once I’ve found myself dealing with a leading-edge product that I thought was brilliant. Too often, the response from the target market was, “Interesting. We’ll wait and see.”

The first copycat to come out with a similar product validates it, and makes it easier to sell. The next competitor helps flip the switch among customers from “wait and see” to “hurry up and buy.”

One’s an innovator; two’s competition; three’s a movement.

More than ever, the medium is the message

At the time, he was talking about the fast advent of TV. But if you want to see the truth of his statement in action, you’re already in the right place: online.

A message in Twitter is 140 characters long.
A message on 12seconds.tv is, well, 12 seconds long.
You get about 400 characters to express your thoughts on Facebook.
LinkedIn is businesslike; you can’t get as lost as you can on Facebook, and the variety of activities in more limited.
Squidoo lets you type in original content, but it’s really about packaging other content — yours or somebody else’s — under a single thematic umbrella.
A blog is unlimited, but is accepted as “good” only if it gets updated frequently.

There are at least dozens more kinds of electronic media where you can place your messages. I know people who market themselves online using all of the above media and more. But if you want to get people to pay attention to what you’re writing, you can’t just cut and paste your blog post onto Facebook and Twitter and Squidoo, etc.

In some cases, there are limitations such Twitter’s infamous 140-character limit. In all, there is the simple and unarguable feedback from the market. If you do it right, people will pay attention. If you do it wrong, they won’t.

Doing it right means integrating strengths, weaknesses and peculiarities of the medium into whatever it is that you’re writing, videotaping, podcasting, etc. If you want to give a lecture, don’t bother putting it on YouTube unless you have strong visuals to go with it. And don’t simply post the transcript of your lecture as a blog if you want anyone to say anything nice about it.

Today, as newspapers face their toughest economic environment ever, they’re trying to figure out how to get people to pay for content online. When I ask people about this, the usual response is that they aren’t sure they’d find an electronic newspaper to be worth reading, let alone paying for.

But they’re imposing their view of newspapers as a print medium on the coming reality of newspapers online.

To be sure, some publishers will make a mess of it. They’ll try to do exactly what they’re doing now — but without the paper costs. And they’ll fail.

Others will figure it out. The paper of the future may provide headlines to your cellphone in the morning, with updates all day. On a Smartphone, the headlines may link to the full story. You may have the choice whether you want to get one section (world news, for instance) in-depth, and another (perhaps sports) on only a cursory basis. The website might offer configuration and search tools, letting you scan for all articles containing a specific keyword, or filter out stories from the opposite side of town. It could give you Tweets as news breaks, video clips of big events, or full context about ongoing, longterm stories. It may led you contribute news in the form of short video and photos. You might be able to read it on a Kindle, on screen or hear it through your ipod. And somewhere in there, they’ll figure out how to not only collect a critical mass of paid subscribers, they’ll also figure out how to serve advertisers.

In other words, newspapers will survive. But they won’t look like they do today, and they won’t DO what they do today either, because they’ll come to us not just through the same old medium, but through a Dagwood sandwich of media.

So McLuhan’s old saw really is more important than ever. When he wrote it, he was dealing with print, TV and radio. Today, because the medium is the message, it means the message changes many times a day depending on where you happen to be when you choose to accept it.

Marketing, or just anti-social networking?

When I heard about the college kids who are making money by advertising products with temporary tattoos on their foreheads, I knew it wouldn’t be long before something like Wrapmail came along. As reported in Inc. magazine, Wrapmail is a service that puts an ad in every outbound e-mail sent from your place of business. Inc’s example was pretty benign: a guy who sells copiers is using the service to promote his own products on e-mails sent out by his employees. I can’t really see very much wrong with that.

But it’s not really welcome, either. And how long will it be before the matchmakers step in — paying individuals and small companies to advertise national brands in their outbound e-mails? My guess: within the next 10 minutes, if it hasnt already started.

We all know: The Internet tends toward cesspool. Every time there is an uplifting addition to the amazing things this medium can achieve, there is someone who finds a way to just as quickly coat it with a certain amount of stink. I’ve learned to live with that, even embrace and enjoy it.

Which is why I’m writing about Wrapmail (which, incidentally uses equally intrusive pop-up chat technology as soon as you open their website). I’m impressed someone thought of it. I’m also depressed someone thought of it.

And if they want to get the word out, they might consider tattooing it on someone’s forehead. Because on principle I’ll delete the e-mail I will undoubtedly receive from Wrapmail after writing this post.

A shocker about ad budgets – and why

According to a consortium of advertising agencies, ad budgets are down this year. Who woulda thunk?

Seriously, according to B2B, a survey of 40 ICOM agency members indicated that more than half the agencies have seen client budgets drop at least 21% this year.

That seems to have translated directly to the magazine sector. The Seybold Report cites data that consumer magazine pages were down 25 percent in Q1, with a corresponding decline in “rate card revenue” (that is: it’s just a calculation) of more than 20 percent.

According to the Magazine Publishers of America, this is just more of the same; pages were down about 12 percent in 2008. And various reports put them flat or down slightly in ’07. So this isn’t just about the recession.

According to Seybold, more than half the respondents to the ICOM survey agreed with this statement: “Budget cuts and new challenges have served as catalysts for clients to come up with new ideas and experimentation to market their products.”

Again, this isn’t just about the recession. This is about businesses deciding that their marketing departments can and should play the role of publisher.

I started observing this bypass about 10 years ago, as my biggest and most sophisticated advertisers literally started publishing their own magazines. Since then, it’s become easier and less expensive; today you can become a publisher with a website, a blogger and some folks who are really good with Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook: eyeballs, China and deja vu

Is it possible to have two deja vus at the same time? Or is that simply schizophrenia?

According to Venturebeat, Facebook is raising money to buy back stock from its employees. It hopes to borrow $150 million to buy back 15 million shares at $10 each. These shares have been given to employees of the private company over the past few years, and those employees have the right to sell up to 20% of their holdings, according to the article.

And now that the market for IPOs is so rotten, this is apparently the only way the company can help them cash in anytime soon.

That’s where the first case of deja vu comes in. Just 10 years ago, during the first Internet boom, people couldn’t cash in quickly enough on their foundation-free stock. Yes, Facebook has an astounding number of users, but I’m not so sure about its business plan. The company will undoubtedly go public some day, but I simply don’t believe it’s monetizable to the same extent as Amazon, eBay and Google.

Facebook really has only one asset: a bigazillion eyeballs. Which is impressive in itself, and there ought to be a way to make money from it. But with ad markets drying up and Facebook’s genuine incompetence when it comes to figuring out how to let businesses participate in a way justifies their spending money, I don’t know what the company is going to do to pay back this next $150 million that it borrows — let alone the previous $460 million it’s raised, according to PaidContent.org.

Facebook is undoubtedly an 800-pound gorilla in the white-hot social networking arena. But there were scores of 800-pound gorillas a decade ago, whose names I can no longer recall, that went bust because they couldn’t figure out how to turn eyeballs into cash.

I’m not predicting Facebook is going to go under anytime soon. In fact, I’m sure it will be around to cash in on an improved IPO market sometime next year. But if I were an employee and could get $10 a share for stock that I hadn’t paid for, I would sell as much as I was allowed at the first possible moment.

Here’s another deja vu-inducing part of the story: Facebook can’t get the money from its usual investors, so according to the reports already cited above, some portion of the money is coming from Asia. I remember when Japanese investors bought (and overpaid for) Rockefeller Center in the late ’80s. At the time, it was assumed to be a disheartening sign that U.S. economic dominance was ending.

It’s clear to me that, no matter how strong and innovative the U.S. may be, the world is becoming a more competitive place; any perception that we are falling probably has more to do with the fact that others are rising. Still, do we need to make it easy for them?

It’s always bothered me when people complain that we’re losing our mojo as a world power, but they don’t seem to make a conneciton between that observation and our willingness to let Asia — China in particular — lend us the money to finance our foreign wars and deficit spending.

If China comes to own a third or more of Facebook, do you think these people will notice? Do you think they’ll care?