Goodbye Portable Design

Came out of by antihistamine fog just long enough to see an email from John Donovan at Portable Design.  It's the latest in the casualties of the media world restructuring.  Yep.  Portable Design is gone. The pub was purchased from Pennwell along with a few other properties by the RTC group.  Considering how broad the portable electronics market is, this is a sad state of affairs.

John Donovan is on the street looking for work and I recommend considering him for video interviews.  The ones he did on the Portable Design site were quite good.

Wow, now there's a thought

Today on Bloomberg.com, Rosabeth Moss Kanter made what might be a revolutionary statement.  

Ms. Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.  Her article, entitles "In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing" She says the way out of a recession is marketing.  Specifically, she says,

"Start looking for new markets now. Companies dependent on a few large customers are particularly vulnerable to changes in their customers' fortunes, but all companies need the flexibility to move quickly into promising markets. In uncertain times, managers should increase efforts to identify additional uses for company products and additional sources of customers for the future.

"Creative thinking can find opportunities to offset losses from current customers. Starting research now on less-familiar industries or parts of the world will help prepare managers to move quickly when conditions improve. This might involve sales calls, tests of a new channel, postings on Web sites targeting new areas or industry segments, sending more people to speak at industry conferences and cultivate relationships - good investments even if they seem like the first candidates for cutting. During slow times, employees who might otherwise be idle could be deployed to gather information by discussions with end users. If travel costs are too high, the telephone can be augmented by Internet research."

What?  You don't think that's revolutionary? Do you know any companies in your sector that are doing that?  That's why I think it's revolutionary. Not very many companies are.

More interesting data on marketing operations... and the lack thereof

Attended a seminar at Stanford University last night and listened to several speakers, one of which is in the market research business.  He quoted statistics from the European Society of Market Research that more than $26 billion is being spent on market research in the world .... and almost nothing on implementing the data gathered.

Everyone says they want market data.  They want leads.  They want information.  But no one seems to know what to do with the information once they get it.

There are tools and services out there that help interpret and implement programs, but it requires an investment.

Like that's going to happen.

More on IT, communications and marketing

My postings on where the communications budget lies has prompted a discussion on the Linkedin Marketing Operations Future Forum and a consultant in the field, John Merritt has posited that whoever owns the analytics owns the budget.  And according to John, finance and marketing finance owns those budgets in many tech companies now.  This actually makes sense.

The reason marketing can't get avoid budget slashing by finance is because they can't justify their existence to the CFO.  However, if the CFO holds the analytics from IT, he has the justification already, he just doesn't know what he's looking for.  The question is, does marketing know enough of what to look for that they can point it out to the CFO.

This is getting more and more interesting.

IT and marketing budgets: a clarification

Last week, I made a rather revolutionary statement that communications should be taken out of marketing as a responsibility and put into IT.  There's a simple reason for this leap of logic and it is tied up nicely by Willy Sutton's reason for why he robbed banks.

"Because that's where the money is."

In a perfect world, marketing needs to control communications and messaging.  The process of hearing from the market and translating into what engineering and sales needs is the traditional way of life in business.  And when you are selling laundry detergent, that is the way it is.  But in the tech world, life is not perfect.  In the tech world, marketing budgets are being slashed.  People who understand communications theory are being replaced by engineers who understand, well, engineering.  These are the same people who say that engineers are "immune to marketing" so why do we even need marketing. And yet, they still want the inflow of information from the market to properly establish messages and develop product.  

It's a Catch-22 scenario.  They don't want to fund the process to get the information, but they don't want to stop the flow of information.  Ten years ago, it was actually possible to get exactly that.  Big companies were funding analysis and media, providing small start-ups with all the market data they needed.  When things got tight, they could always cut marketing budgets and still gather market information, virtually for free.  And using basic publicity techniques, they could send out their messaging for very little investment.

But now, the free lunch is over.  Big companies are funding their own market research and keeping it all for themselves.  There is not enough media and information available for free to get a clear view of what the market is saying.  Sales are dropping and companies are investing less and less in the marketing process.

But they are gearing up their IT budgets.  Better websites, blogs, video, social media bells and whistles.  The problem is, they don't have anyone in IT OR marketing left who can ask the right question about what kind of information they need to gather and the marketing departments are not getting any more budget to get that information.

As I said, in a perfect world, communications is a marketing function, but we live in an imperfect world.  For marketers ... and even CEOs looking for where to get the budget to get the answers they need to succeed, IT might be looking you in the face (apologies for the visual pun).

What's missing...?

Just got the latest DACezine providing insight regarding what's coming for the next DAC in San Francisco.  It's got two articles/viewpoints from vendors about how important ESL tools are for the future of the EDA industry, a directory of ESL tools, an editorial from the DAC chair on the importance of EDA, a guest editorial from an EDA marcom consultant on how important it is to go to DAC, and some news about what is going on at DAC.

But where is the input from users about DAC, it's relative importance, and customers of ESL tools?

If you think you are a leader, look behind you.  If no one is there you are just taking a walk.

But what does it do?

Let's say you are one of those people who have never had a
cell phone and have decided to check out what all the hoopla is about.  You go down to T-Mobile, pick out a
basic phone.  Charge it up and put
it on your desk to see what happens. 
But you don't let anyone know that you have a cell phone, you don't call
anyone, you don't set up your voicemail… you do nothing with it but put it on
your desk and wait for something to happen.

By the end of a week, would you wonder what all the big deal
was about?  Would you cancel your
service and toss the phone away? 
Probably.

That, in a nutshell, is the description of how many
marketers view social media. 
"That's stupid," you may say.  I say, however, that it's conditioning.

There have been some interesting conversations about social
media all over social media for the past few months.  One occurred on Harry Gries' blog where he posted a tweetup
regarding the new community site, Xuropa. 
One of the statements was, "Do we need YASN (yet another social
network."  Of course there
were both sides presented, but the upshot of the discussion from the
recalcitrants was, what does Xuropa do?

That brings me to another analogy.  A piece of paper doesn't do anything.  But you can use it to jot notes on,
print a flyer on, write a letter to someone, make a "No UPS"
sign.  You can even make an origami
crane out of it.  But in itself it
does nothing uunless you decide what you want to do with it.  Just like the phone is an electronic
brick unless you turn it on and start calling people.  That's why they are both considered "media."  By their nature they serve as an
interface between people and each person can use it as they see fit…or not at
all.

Same thing with social media.  It does whatever you want it to do within the parameters of
the format.

But most of the technology world isn't conditioned for
that.  To them, media has always
been automatic.  Wake up in the
morning, open the door, pick up the paper and read it.  Turn on the radio and listen to the
news.  Fire up the computer and get
the Google news feed.  It just
happens, right?

Then on the marketing side, it's no less automatic.  Hire a publicist to write a news
release and put it on the wire, and it shows up on your computer when you do a
search.  Cool.  Maybe an article appears about your
company.  No sweat.  But that's not the way it works, is it?

Most technologists don't know anything about the
communication process.  They don't
know what journalists need, much less what the customer wants to hear.  They only know what they want to
say, and because the process of
producing news and information is completely transparent to them, it seems
automatic.

But as traditional media has collapsed over the past decade,
they don't realize that the infrastructure that supported the transparent
process is no longer transparent, it has evaporated.

Social media is the replacement for the infrastructure.  It can reach very select audiences
rather than the shotgun approach of mass media.  It can be responsive to the needs and wants of those
audiences.  It can be very
informative and entertaining.  But
it doesn’t do it by itself.  You
need to learn how to communicate to make social media effective.  It doesn’t "do"
anything.  You do.  Let me give you two examples from New Tech Press.

New Tech Press goes out to the audience the sponsors what it to go to.  That's it.  We did a video report on a company.  The marketing guru at the company took the video link and sent it out to their contact list.  The video went viral and the company got 1.5 million views of the video through their website.  They took action using social media as an engine.  We also did a story on another company.  Pretty good story actually and we got a few comments from other publications about it.  But the sponsor didn't send any of the links to the story to it's contact list.  They didn't even post the story on their website.  Guess what?  No one even knew the story existed.  New Tech Press got about 700 reads (more than 5 minutes on the site) and there was some pick up at the media partner sites.  The sponsor took no action and nothing happened.

The problem is most technologists have spent their life
learning how to communicate only with college professors using an archaic form
of English in document formats only college professors appreciate.  They have never learned the difference
between a preposition and a proposition (which can cause real problems when you
meet an English teacher in Copenhagen). 
They don't know how to use a medium.  What do they do?

Stay tuned for part two

Who do you trust now?

Been thinking about lots of stuff this week as I took off three days.  First time off in about 5 years.  Need to do that more.  One of the things that popped up was what to trust in media now that traditional media has shrunk to the point of irrelevance on tech industries.  This is what I came up with:

Don't trust anyone with more than 30 percent market share.

Yeah, it's a riff off of the hippie adage, "don't trust anyone over 30."  But I think it fits.

When the economy is strong, having stable market leaders is a good thing.  Markets grow.  The leaders follow basic competition concepts.  Everyone is happy.  But when things turn bad, leaders hunker down and do whatever they can to kill innovative competition so they can avoid losing market share.  And when those leaders are doing their own thing media-wise (social media, private conferences, etc.) they do everything they can to control market conversation.  

I've been watching this trend for some time.  The market leaders are starting to take to social media and are gathering a big lead over tech startups and smaller players who are still holding back.  They are laying down riffs about how the world is and, surprise, they know the way.  Just buy their stuff.  There is no discussion, no objection to the market leaders' positions.

But guess what?  the market doesn't want to buy their story.  The customers know things suck.  They just need someone to lay dow some truth.  When times are bad, people want revolutionaries, not the status quo.  The emperor is buck nekkid.

You may say that a startup has the same motivation to spin truth as the market leader, but that's not really true.  The interloper has everything to lose and nothing to gain by lying to the market.  the market leader has everything to gain and nothing to lose by hogging the conversation.  The market is ready for you.  Are you up for the challenge?  Or are you going to let the market leader set the tone?

Facebook Fiasco or the end of free media?

Back in the 60's and 70's a lot of young people got around
the country by hitchhiking.  For a
long time, that was considered a cheap way of getting around the country, but
in the mid 70's some people started requiring hitchhikers to pony up some of
the expense.  There was a popular
bumper sticker that spelled it out.

"Gas, grass or ass.  No one rides for free."

This week there has been a controversy simmering over
Facebook's revision of it terms of use, which essentially states that any
content you post on your personal Facebook pages becomes the property of
Facebook.  That includes the
pictures of your kids and vacations, your essays (notes), and the information
you share about yourself.  Lot's of
people are pissed off about this and are considering quitting Facebook, but
they can no longer pull the content out of the Facebook servers.

The concern has to do with not only content ownership, but
privacy issues.  Over the past two
decades, we've gotten kinda used to the idea that the stuff on the Internet was
free to us, except when it came to our own stuff.  I'm here to tell you today is: that time has passed.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all the other social media
stuff started with the idea that they could make money by selling advertising,
primarily, and by providing large blocks of data about users to companies for
marketing purposes.  Two things
have made all that wash away in the economic flood. 

First, internet advertising doesn't work the way everyone
thought it would.  Not enough
people are clicking through on the ads and buying stuff, so companies are
cutting back on their web advertising. 
Second, Supreme Court rulings regarding privacy that stem from the Bush
wiretapping programs (that automatically reviewed telephone calls from
suspected terrorists to private citizens in the US) stopped the sharing of the
REAL valuable information about social media users. 

The only way Facebook can share that data is by getting
implicit approval from the users to share that information, so they have
changed their rules to say, anything you put on our servers is ours to do with
as we wish.  That way, Facebook can
start a revenue stream not only by selling the information, but now they can
sell the content.  They can gather
the best of what you share to your friends and sell it to others.

Now you may say that is wrong.  Your stuff is your stuff, you say.  Well, there is a simple way to take care of that.

The next step is for these social media platforms to charge
a fee for you to store your private stuff on their servers.  They can't use it, but you have to pay
for the right to keep your stuff there.

Let's say both of these are unacceptable to you and you
decide to quit the platforms.  That's
fine, too.  By stepping out of the
picture altogether, you now provide more valuable data to the platform.  Advertisers, content customers, and
data miners now know who is more likely to participate in the Internet
marketplace.

Let's say you still want to be able to see stuff on the
platform, but not share your content. 
Get ready to pay for that right, too.

For social media---any media for that matter---to survive,
there has to be someone to pay the bill. 
It has to come from advertisers (who are less willing to advertise) data
miners (who want more accurate information), the sale of cost-free content
(that's New Tech Press, BTW) or from subscription (that's you).

Like
the bumper sticker said:  Gas,
grass or ass.  No one rides for
free.  Not any more.

Hope, part 3: Looking for Prince Harry

As I said in the last post, our hope lies in our willingness
to move outside our circle of comfort. 
What blows me away is that most people are less likely to make that move
when their circle is putrefying around them.  The news is filled right now with the hope that whatever the
federal government does with the stimulus package will solve the problem.  At the same time, no one believes it
will.  So the nation's hope is in
an organization no one has any faith in. 

I've been peppering these posts on hope with pithy quotes
from past presidents and now seems to be a good time to pull out this one.

 "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what
you can do for your country." -- John Kennedy

In a time when we are invoking the names of people like
Kennedy, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, we aren't spending a whole lot of time paying
attention to what they actually stood for, and that is the individual responsibility to not give into fear and selfishness.  Here's another quote from a more recent president that says it well.

"The success of our economy has always depended not just on
the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on
our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity,
but because it is the surest route to our common good."

Do you know who said that?  That was Barack Obama in his inaugural address.

Everything we do, from this point on, has to be for the
greater good and not our individual survival.  We can't hope in someone else to do it for all of us.  That's a quick trip to despair.  We have to put our own hands to the
plow.  We have to put our time and
resources into the effort. The federal bailouts are Bandaids on gaping
wounds.  The real help can be seen
in the mirror closest to you.

I've received lots of kind words of consolation regarding
shutting down my PR practice, and I really appreciate the good feelings, but
let's be very clear.  My PR
business didn't go away.  I quit.

I don't care what anyone thinks, PR in the B2B world no
longer works.  It is only an
exercise in futile gamesmanship. 
It's for the marketing executive to show the CEO that their company's
name is somewhere on the Internet. 
It's for the CEO to show the board the fake Internet clip reports.  It's a waste of time, money and
effort.  Press relations isn't a
bad thing, but frankly, you can achieve all you need to do without a proactive
program.  If you do it right, they
will come to you.

So I killed my PR business and I did it happily because I
know there is a better way.  What's
more, I've seen it work.  But
nothing is going to change for you until you decide to take the path less
traveled. 

Sam Diaz wrote an article on ZDNET today about the stimulus package and what it could mean for tech, which he thinks is quite a bit.  But he ended the piece along the same lines as I am thinking.

"For the longest time, Silicon Valley wanted some
respect and attention in Washington. That day has finally come. Now, it’s time
for the tech industry to step up to the plate and prove to this country that an
investment in tech can go a long way."

I know not everyone will be a hero in the battle we are
in.  Only a few people will catch
the vision.  Some of us will be
crushed in the process and others will be enriched and storied.  I hope I'm in the latter part of that
statement, but I would not give up the opportunity to be part of it.

Just
call me "Harry."