Journalism at a crossroads and corporations are a valid direction

A corporation has a vested interest in growing the trust of their customer base. Without an independent voice outside of the company (as in the semiconductor industry) they can’t survive in the market with their typical marketing BS. They need to provide trusted content.

The tech media world is all atwitter (pun intended) over the collapse of GigaOm yesterday. Yes, it was a loss. The site was one of the first of the tech blogs, it was among the most respected in a world filled with self-aggrandizing click baiters (e.g. The Verge, Venture Beat and Tech Crunch), and it offered what may be the deepest, most thoughtful coverage of the tech world, from semiconductors to gaming. But it could not make enough money to stay alive, much less give back some of the $22 million it took in from investors.

Above the wailing laments of the reading public is a steady drumbeat of independent tech journalists claiming they have discovered the secret of profitable journalism in the tech world. Among them are John Furrier, CEO of SiliconANGLE, a site hyper focused on cloud and big data.  Furrier says business is booming for him. I’m certain it will continue to be… as long as the industry he covers booms. Once it starts flattening out or going south, his readership and sponsorship will drop accordingly. 

SiliconANGLE was early to adopt near real-time coverage of events through video and maximized his site for video, something few online media sites have done and it gives him a differentiator. He also claims he is an independent journalist, but his multiple, interconnected enterprises rely heavily on outside sponsorship. He is a man of integrity and I believe him when he says he is not unduly influenced by that sponsorship. Several media companies are attempting similar models and they are surviving by staying relatively small, focused on a single technology niche and supported by a few large sponsors. It’s when they try to grow beyond that niche, like GigaOm, that things get dicey because as soon as you expand coverage, you stop covering your sponsors’ issues as comprehensively and money starts to dry up.

So small, niche oriented media is a good way to go if you are an independent, but it isn’t providing the broader, balanced coverage the industry needs. That’s why I think that coverage is probably going to come not out of corporate sponsorship, but out of corporations themselves.

A few weeks ago I published the results of a study Footwasher Media did on media readership in the semiconductor industry. Unlike Furrier’s coverage of the cloud and big data, that industry is dead flat. There is very little profit and very little investment in media sponsorship. Total sponsorship funding from every company totals less than $10 million that is doled out to less than a dozen online sites and print publications covering the news. Most of this enterprises are losing money on the news business with a few exceptions (e.g. semiengineering.com and techfocusmedia.com). But our study learned that those sites and publications share the exact same readership, engagement and content. If you have read one, you have read them all. What’s more, they are all supported by the same handful of companies large enough to have marketing budgets.  Right now those niches are doing all right financially and are helping those media companies pay the bills and grow a bit. They will not be so lucky of things get bumpy.

But what came out of the study that was so fascinating was the rise of corporate journalism. Lots of people, mostly journalists, say those two words are self canceling. They want to say that corporations cannot possibly be objective enough to be called journalism in any definition and that readers know the difference. And yet, looking at the results of the survey, Corporations that have employed former “independent” journalists ranked higher in readership, engagement and original content. In fact, the number one source of trusted industry news is cadence.com 

Trusted? How can it be trusted? Because the numbers show that the site has more page views per visit, longer time spent consuming the content, and SHARED more often then any three independent media sites together. People don’t share content they don’t trust.

Cadence Design is one of the big three in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. It has a vested interest in not promoting any competitor in their semiconductor industry niche. And yet you can find frank discussions of their strengths and weaknesses against those competitors in their content. This is due to the efforts of Brian Fuller, a respected former editor in chief of EE Times and a lifelong journalist going all the way back to the days of United Press International. Other companies int he niche, including Xilinx and Altera also have former “independent” journalists (some of whom called me crazy for promoting the idea of corporate journalism 10 years ago) that have raised their employers trustworthiness with their approach to content. It is a growing trend and will continue to be, because it makes sense. A corporation has a vested interest in growing the trust of their customer base. Without an independent voice outside of the company (as in the semiconductor industry) they can’t survive in the market with their typical marketing BS. They need to provide trusted content.

There will always be room for well-run independents, but they can only do so much Corporations need to step up and start doing it themselves for their own survival.

Why do you exist?

I've written on this subject before but it bears some repeating.

Explaining what you do, who you are and how you do what you do is not as important as being able to explain why you exist as a company. That seems fairly simple but I find very few companies that can do that well, if at all.

Of course you know why your company exists. You've been eating, sleeping and bathing in the reason for a long time. To you it is fairly obvious now. The problem is, you are not explaining well enough it to the market. Before anyone will care about the who, what and how, you have to explain the why in terms they understand.

We've been working with several companies dealing with this issue. They are not seeing the sales or leads they expected from their program. They blame the sales automation program, or the marketing department or "the stupid customers." In reality, when you take a look at their content, they are ready to work with people who have already bought their product or services, but there is nothing about why potential customers should consider using them, instead of whoever they are using now or someone else.

This sets up a crap-shoot decision for the customer and the vendor only wins if the customer roll a hard eight.

It all boils down to the quality of your content. The moment you decide that the reason you exist is obvious, you are ready to take that first step to insolvency. Focus on the why. Everything else will come out of that.

Drop me a line if you want to know more.

Don't make your content meaningless

 I love words. Always have. And this week, after reading several articles that use words badly I’ve come to understand why.

 Words have clearly discernible meaning when used correctly, while finding meaning in life is often very difficult even in the best of circumstances. When used incorrectly, words lose meaning and that makes me feel a little lost and frustrated.

 This line of thought began earlier this week when the redoubtable Brian Solis wrote an article on VentureBeat that was headlined “14 Startups That Will Change Our Everyday Life.” 

 Brian is high on my list of trustworthy people so whenever he posts something or I find he has written something, I generally read it. Don’t need a lot of hyperbole to encourage me. And Brian doesn’t engage much with hyperbole anyway, which is why the headline bothered me at first, but I read it. The article was about 14 companies with interesting products and services for specific market niches, but there was nothing in any of the companies that I found life-changing for me or pretty much anyone I know.  It was a good article and I enjoyed reading it, but that headline…

 So I asked Brian about it publicly and we took the discussion offline. That’s when I found out that the original article he wrote was titled:

 Here are 14 startups you should know about

 That was accurate, clear and engaging to me. But the editorial staff at VentureBeat decided it wasn’t enough so they pumped it up beyond all reason. That’s called click-baiting. You see it all the time from disreputable online publications and in print from publications like the National Enquirer. The practice is designed to get people to click on a link to the article and it works. But here’s what else it does:

 It destroys trust in the publication and sucks all meaning out of the words.

 I’ve stopped reading sites like Buzz Feed, Gawker, Motley Fool and TechCrunch because of their dependency on hyper headlines. The trustworthiness of the content generally drops the more breathless the headline. And now I guess I need to add VentureBeat to that list.

 I would read an article under the headline Brian wrote, even if he didn’t write it because I am interested in learning about new startups. I don’t need to be pushed and I don’t need my expectations set high and then dashed. Most people feel that way, which is the reason Google and Facebook are constantly adjusting their algorithms to keep this crap out of our feeds.

 H.L. Mencken once said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public and that is still true today. Click-bait tends to attract rather stupid people who might actually do business with the company. The intelligent person who is brought in by the headline, generally loses respect and grows distrustful of the source. But it is the former that joins the class action suits.

 The question you need to ask yourself is: Do you want stupid people suing you, or intelligent, trusting customers?

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Your thoughts are more important than your words.

Your thoughts are more important than your words.

Words are not important in and of themselves. The ideas and concepts they convey are important.

Several years ago I had a very difficult client who had a hard time understanding that.  We would put together a press release that described the benefits of a technology breakthrough in plain terms. The goal was to establish why this breakthrough was important. The CEO read it over once and said, “It needs more adjectives.”

Three hours later we had sprinkled in enough adjectives to meet the CEOs requirements and the release was virtually unreadable. 

This is a basic problem with all marketing material: An attachment to unsubstantiated superlatives bury the real content.

A couple of decades before that, as a technical editor for Lockheed, I ran across the following phrase. “The RB impacts on the geoid, rather than the ellipsoid sphere.” I had a vague understanding of what that all meant, but I also knew that impact was a noun, not a verb. So I went to the engineer who authored the paper and asked, “Does this mean the warhead explodes on the earth rather than in the air?”

He said after a bit of thought, “Yes.”

“Can we just say that?”

He thought a bit more and said, “No.”

This is the problem with all technical material: An attachment to academic terms obscures the real content.

It is no better in the Internet age.

We are all taught how to do research papers in college in specific formats because it makes it easier for the professors to grade objectively.  That does not mean that the structure is the best form of communication. We are taught in our jobs to stick to “the message” established by a committee of people who are engulfed in the products, but that does not mean people “unengulfed” know what the hell we are talking about.

Words are not important in and of themselves.  The ideas and concepts they convey are important.  Too often, however, we become so enamored with “our” words and how we structure them that it obscures the goal of conveying our thoughts and concepts. Don’t fall in love with words that make you comfortable.  Be sure that what you are trying to say is understood, even if it is not the way you want to say it. That is the path to success.

Corporate media supplants independent journalism in semiconductor market

Corporate websites in the semiconductor industry provide the information that customers trust and go to, over the sites that identify themselves as “independent journalism.”

As I wrapped up the old year, a trend I’ve been watching since 2000 finally came to a conclusion: Media as we have defined it for the past 50 years is dead in the semiconductor industry.  It has been replaced by Corporations as Media. 

Some may think the beginning of this trend was when Paul Miller, then CEO of UBM Tech, announced to the EDAC member meeting that EE Times was dropping coverage of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry.  It really began in 2000 when the three large EDA companies — Synopsys, Mentor Graphics and Cadence — began slashing their advertising budgets with the express design to reduce the number of print pages in the robust media industry.  The plan was to limit the amount of “free PR” smaller companies were getting thanks to the advertising dollars from the big three.  This affected all of the electronics industry because, at the time, EDA companies wire pretty much the primary advertiser for all publications (semiconductor companies slashed ad budgets a decade before) 

The fatal blow was when John Blyler left Extension Media in the last quarter of 2014 to do his own thing, a la Ed Sperling and semiengineering.com.

Over the past 10 years, companies have been slowly developing and distributing their own content and, in fact, competing with independent media that remain dependent on sponsorships and advertising from the companies they compete with.  Looking at the worldwide ranking on Alexa shows that EE Times still leads in unique visits compared to the EDA companies, but not by much, even though EE Times actually provides more content on more industries than EDA.

Alexa Worldwide Rankings

1. EETimes 31,399


2. Cadence 39,964


3. Mentor Graphics 51,088


4. Synopsys 68,913


5. SemiWiki 313.173


6. EEJournal 435,641


7. Semiengineering 648,837


8. Chip Design 714,638

(Note: I also reviewed the rankings of Electronic Design and Electronic Products, but their coverage is broader than semiconductors and EDA and they ranked within spitting distance of EE Times)

Cadence comes in a solid second in the rankings, but note the places of the remaining players.  SemiWiki.com leads that group, but at a far distant 4th place behind the corporate trailer, Synopsys.  But then, lets take a look at the US ranking where most of the world traffic comes from.

Alexa US Rankings

1. Cadence 7,303


2. EETimes 14,246


3. Synopsys 26,404


4. Mentor Graphics 29,405


5. SemiWiki 101,181


6. EEJournal 148,721


7. Semiengineering 150,574


8. Chip Design 329,445

Cadence tops EE Times by a clear margin, Synopsys sneaks by Mentor for third and the outliers stay in the same place… far in the back.

We should note that this is the measurement of “unique visits” which are actually meaningless.  It means that either a human being or a spiderbot grabbed a page listing on a search, not that they actually went to the site and looked at anything.  They are slightly more valuable in measuring the most important aspect of content: Engagement.  Looking at those numbers changes everything.

Alexa Page View Rankings

1. Cadence 5.5


2. Mentor Graphics 3.4


3. Synopsys 3.2


4. SemiWiki 1.9


5. EETimes 1.9


6. Semiengineering 1.7


7. Chip Design 1.6


8. EEJournal 1.3

Cadence leads the pack with an average of 5.5 pages viewed.  Those are real people looking at content, not just search terms.  Mentor and Synopsys are virtually tied. EE Times and SemiWiki are in a dead heat with 1.9 page views.  This is a crucial differentiator.  When people are looking for something specific, say an article about them, they will look at two pages.  The front page of the site and the link to the article.  These people are typically marketing, sales and C-Level executives.  When they get to a third page, they are more likely a customer.  Still, you could argue that the go to the article page and then to the corporate site via the link.  You might think that until you look at the most crucial measurement: Time spent on the site.

 Alexa Time Rankings

1. Cadence 7.30


2. Mentor Graphics 5.59


3. Synopsys 4.58


4. Chip Design 2.58


5. Semiengineering 2.47


6. SemiWiki 2.38


7. EETimes 2.23


8. EEJournal 1.43

 Cadence is a clear winner here.  Of the three corporate sites, they are the only one to employ a former journalist, Brian Fuller, as an editor in chief.  That decision has proven to be extremely valuable to Cadence when it comes to grabbing the attention of their customers.  Cadence even ranks bigger than its own customers, including ARM, TI and TSMC.

 Just to be fair, I also looked at several other ranking sites, including compete.com and quantcast.com. However, outside of the three corporations and EETimes, none of the other sites had enough traffic to generate a ranking.

 So, what does this all mean?  Corporate websites in the semiconductor industry provide the information that customers trust and go to, over the sites that identify themselves as “independent journalism.”  The audience for those latter sites are primarily the people that pay them money to cover their news, not the customers the corporations want to reach. What is truly bizarre is that the data the corporations are gathering about these customers is not being measured or used as well as what the independent publications could do because the corporations are measuring data the same way as the publications publicly state.  The good stuff they keep to themselves as proprietary.

This doesn’t mean that the publications are not doing worthwhile work, but they are not reaching the people they hope and claim to reach and while corporations are reaching the customers, they are not giving them valuable information.  What to do about that problem is another issue for discussion.

Dr. Dobb's closes ?! Say it ain't so.

Yesterday came the news that UBM is shuttering the venerable Dr. Dobb's Journal as the Brit-based corporation continues its inexorable exit from technology journalism. I know it shouldn't be surprising but this one hits close to home... literally.

I was out of J-school for about a year, working part time for a local daily newspaper and desperate for a full time gig.  I heard about this new publication started by some Stanford geeks that was just a short walk from my parents house, so I decided to go down and put my resume in. Of course, I had no idea what computer programming wa so there wasn't a chance in hell of getting a job there, but I walked my resume through the door anyway.  I never did get a call.

But through the years, DDJ grew up with me in the world.  I learned alot about technology through its pages, both in print until 2009 and then only online.  When they were acquired by UBM, though, I knew it was only a matter of time.

As Andrew Binstock, the last EiC, stated, UBM isn't in the business of running publications for the sake of informing the world anymore.  Publications are for supporting events and tradeshows in the UBMirverse.  DDJ becomes obsolete in that world.  Sorry to see it go.

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Click-bait strategy is losing traction, but not soon enough

Tom Foremski's Silicon Valley Watcher blog took a look at InPowered (you can read more in the link) this week and it gave me pause to rejoice that someone gets that click bait is a horrible strategy in the 21st century. I'm less than sanguine, however, that the move to engagement as a primary measurement of content success.

Sales people get that clicks and unique visits are useless.  That's a good thing.  CEOs and marketing executives still haven't read the memo(s).  That's where the break in the chain is and that's why click-bait companies are still wildly profitable.

A company like InPowered has the right approach: charge only for engagement.  But that means the cost per engagement is going to be huge compared to the pennies charged for clicks.  The executives in charge of the online marketing aren't making the case to the CFO that while clicks cost a lot less than engagement, they make a lot less money.  What's even sadder is that most companies already make the investment in SalesForce, Hubspot and other sales and marketing automation tools, but few are actually using the technology that will help them measure content engagement and adjust what isn't working.

Footwasher Media has partnered with a couple of automation tool providers and we've been surprised to find out how their customers underutilize their features, basically because they can't seem to understand that the tools don't measure clicks.  Sales execuives are one of the few corporate people that understand how useless clicks and unique visits are and they've become use to the data marketing people provide them being only clicks and unique visits, so they dismiss data from automation tools as being only that.  It isn't though.

One of our partners has modified its tool with unique technology to filter out useless data and return only interest from live human beings.  One client switched over to the partner recently and was stunned at how "little" traffic they were getting... until they realized that they were getting actual business leads.

We are entering a brave new world of marketing and customer engagement, but we're still in the trailblazing portion of the age.

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Using technology to create a new generation of leaders

Uber is not an isolated issue. Every business is vulnerable to stupidity.

This thing about the Uber executive drunkenly suggesting digging up dirt on journalists is an interesting observation point in the evolution of journalism in the 21st century. But rather than get into the issue of ethics and gender issues in the Silicon Valley, I’d like to point out another issue that this brings up.

It is important that companies, now more than ever, get trained and effective communicators on staff. I’m not talking about marketing executives. I’m not talking about engineers who understand how to string a sentence together. I’m not talking about some sweet young publicist (be it male or female) that can charm people at industry events with their dazzling smiles and impeccable fashion sense. I’m talking about people who know how to tell the truth even when it isn’t pretty.

Emil Michael, why are you smiling?

In all this foofarah over Emil Michael’s sexist pseudo threat, and the on-going sexism of the Uber culture, I’m wondering where the chief communication officer is. The answer is: they don’t have one. I also note they have dozens of junior level job openings in which communicating with the public is a PART of what they are supposed to do. So there is no one at the company whose job it is to fix problems like this and none of the senior executives have a clue about how to do it right.

They invest in lobbyists to grease politicians. They invest in advertising. They invest in “community management.” But outside of that… nothing.

It would be completely understandable if Uber was an outlier, but the reality is that they are the norm, and this week, it’s their turn to demonstrate their incompetence in just having a conversation with the public.

Recently I met with a company outside of the "Silly Con Valley" who offers products and services for creating and distributing content over social media, a practice also known as content marketing.  But in meeting with the C-staff I learned that not a single member of the team believes in content marketing.  They believe their technology is so great that all they have to do is offer it and people will beat a path to their door. 

This is why 95 percent of companies are struggling to succeed.  They don’t know how to tell a story and when things go bad, they can’t figure out how to right the ship.

Get help before it goes bad.

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Video (and other tech) doesn't have to be expensive.

I’ve done several posts on both the value and process of creating video content, but it was pointed out recently that some people have misunderstood my position on investing in high quality equipment and professional videography services. So I thought it would be a good idea to clarify my stance.

There is nothing wrong with making a significant investment in equipment, professional service and personnel. It will make your videos look great. However, if your investment comes before you make a budget for the creation of what you put in the video and how you measure its effectiveness, then it’s going to be a big expensive mess.

When it comes to content development, most companies approach from a “fire, ready, aim” philosophy. It is both backwards and inside out. I’ve talked with dozens of potential customers over the last year, and in nearly all cases these companies have seen a competitor using a particular delivery technology and decide to look into doing the same thing, rarely looking to see if the competitor’s effort is accomplishing anything positive. This has been true in the area of websites, blogs, podcasts, social media, and now video. 

The providers of these technologies and services are more than willing to provide glowing case studies to the efficacy of the technology. They will tell you only if pressed that if the content sucks, the tech won’t achieve its desired goal of increasing engagement. While it looks flashy and beautiful, if your content is bad, you can not achieve your goal.

The companies we've talked to rarely understand that the process always begins with an investment in content, in conjunction with measurement.  What is left of your budget can go into the the tech, and only then. Most companies, however, have very limited budgets and are so enamoured of the tech (fire), that they want to skimp on or eliminate content (ready) and measurement (aim).  So when the issue of video comes up, they immediately want to hire or build a studio, get $10,000 in cameras and lights and film their CEO reading from a marketing brochure.  When they finish with that, they lack the budget to do more than one or two videos, poducing poor results.  In the end they decide that video (or whatever tech they invested in) doesn’t work.

So here’s me making my position clear: if you don’t have the budget to do the first two steps (content and measurement) along with massive investment in tech, then back off the tech investment.  Get a good content provider, a reasonable measurement tool, and then create content to be captured on an inexpensive HD camcorder.  Use a good mic. Shoot in natural light or get an inexpensive lighting system. Focus on what the customer needs to hear, not on the bells and whistles.  It will pay for itself quicker and give you more budget for something shinier down the road.

Content comes first.

Using technology to create a new generation of leaders

A couple of weeks ago I was tooting our horn about winning a Customer Experience Recognition Award (CERA) at Information Development World (IDW), but a new video interview popped up last week from the conference that I thought rated another blow of the horn.  

I'm being interviewed by Al Martine, Director of Operations & Business Development at TechWhirl and the manager of the awards program.  We talk about the unusual nature of the program at first, but then we get into why the project that won the award is important.

There is a serious impediment to growth across all organizations that comes from the legendary "but we've never done it that way" crowd, but also from the attitude of "this is how we've always done it" crowd. They aren't always the same group of people.  The team at the Cultivate the Call had to overcome both in bringing the program to life.  That took some guts.

Here's the interview.  Click on the interactive links below the vid for more information.

Dylan McGrath leads an army of UBM exiles

Went to ARM TechCon to connect with a few fans and meet some new people (certainly wasn't to find some news because there wasw very little of that, although I did find a few nuggets).  I was pleasantly surprised to see Dylan McGrath stroll by and learned he is now managing edityor and Electronics 360 at IHS, which is fast becoming the new UBM for tech news.  I've been reading some of their pubs the past few weeks but never really paid attention to who was writing the stuff.

So I got home and looked up the staff masthead and was knocked backward to find almost all of the veteran EE Times editorial team there. In addition to Dylan there's Bruce Rayner, editorial director; and contributing editors Peter Clarke, Rick DeMeis, Tam Harbert, P.B. Hyman (the first EiC of EBN), George Leopold, Bill Schweber and Nic Mokhoff.  It's like a freaking reunion of the Golden age of CMP!

And that explains why it's such a fun publication to read.  Check it out.

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Publitek, Footwasher Media find the good and bad news in Semiconductors

If one company finally decides to go strategic, it will dominate not only their niche, but will be come the de facto thought leader.

Publitek recently released its second annual report on “Who’s winning the social media battle in the Semiconductor industry,” with an expanded list of selected companies.  The good news is more companies are getting into the social media game with vigor. 

Even better news is the amount of primary engagement (likes and follows) obliterates the belief that engineers don’t use social media with more than 30 million Facebook likes of posts in one month for the top five companies alone.  You could discount as much as half of that as bogus traffic from clip farms and even a significant number of corporate hacks boosting their numbers, but that means millions still are attributed to customers.

The bad news of that last point is companies are still, by and large, ignoring that potential channel of conversation with the customer.  One company was able to gather more than 1000 likes on Facebook and doesn’t even have a Facebook page.

 The even worse news is that the industry is still measuring the wrong data.

The report measured six channels this year: Blogs, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, Twitter and Youtube.  So far, so good.  Next, it expanded its list from the top 25 semiconductor companies to 39 semiconductor companies and one EDA company.  Not exactly sure what the selection criteria were, but it was good for the one EDA participant, Cadence Design, who ended up third overall.  The report looked at only a single month, August 2014, to gather its data, which is also a little suspect.  Most companies in the sector effective shut down over the summer which could depress the numbers significantly.

Publitek based it’s ranking on the numerical size of their audience (likes, followers, etc.) multiplied by the engagement the company had with comments (it was a bit more detailed than that but that’s essentially the criteria) and I’m not sure how valuable those metrics are.  Recent studies show that people who like and share content are unlikely to have actually consumed the content and the numbers can be easily fudged, as I mentioned earlier.

Footwasher Media did its own study earlier this year.  Data was gathered over 8 months (November 2013 to July 2014, ignoring activity during December 2013) from a selection of 95 Semiconductor, EDA and Embedded software companies.  Half the companies were selected from the top public companies according to industry reports and half from nonpublic companies who were within the top five of Google searches using the terms Private semiconductor, EDA, and Embedded software.  Rather than look at whether a company respond to comments, we measured the average number of comments from customers, subtracting comments from company employees.  And rather than measure the sheer volume of connections over all channels, we looked for companies with a documented strategy for using communication channels as the multiplier.

The results for our survey were so disappointing we never published them.  What we discovered was that only two companies had strategies beyond a list of tactical channels: Intel and Qualcomm, and less than half of the companies had significant engagement from their customer base.  Almost all comments and interaction came from employees or business partners of the companies.  Moreover, all embedded and EDA companies landed in the bottom quartile. 

The two surveys demonstrate the rather large gulf that exists between the semiconductor industry and the new-media-savvy world.  To be fair, more than 95 percent of US industry has yet to truly embrace “best practices” of social media and are still measuring success with outdated SEO standards involving sheer volume of statistics.  Likes, followers, the number of posts and even shares are less likely to produce an ROI. More valuable is the time spent, on average, consuming the content; time spent on the site; and conversion to sales or qualified leads 

But there is good news over all.  What both surveys demonstrate is that no company in the semiconductor sector is doing modern marketing right.  They still don’t understand content, engagement or their audience.  That means if one company finally decides to go strategic, it will dominate not only their niche, but will be come the de facto thought leader.  Won’t take much but a little willpower.

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Yelp is taking on water fast.

Read a great story in the SF Chronicle today about a restaurant that has decided to go all guerrilla on

Jerry Stoppleman, why are you smiling?

Yelp by rewarding customers for giving bogus one-star (i.e. "bad") reviews.  It is working so well that they've received a threatening letter from Yelp about posting false reviews and "paying customers for reviews."

The latter is forbidden by Yelp and could result in them being removed from the system, which happens to be exactly what the restaurant wants.  

This strategy could backfire on an unknown and less than popular restaurant, but this place is generally packed to the walls and has a loyal and vocal clientele and it demonstrates a potential path for getting out from under the Yelp umbrella.  It's also another indication that the review company is heading into serious problems.

This could turn into a new version of the Dell Hell story that cost the computer manufacturer literally billions in lost stock value.  Jerry Stoppelman, Are you listening to your own reviews?  Time to get out of your echo chamber and get some help.

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Strategy is not a tactical plan. Know the difference.

I’ve talked a lot about the lack of strategy in modern communications, primarily because, according to number of current studies, it seems that almost no one actually approaches it strategically.  It’s been a personal frustration in dealing with companies that say they want to go strategic but can’t seem to get there.  So I decided to start writing about strategy.  My first stop was to do a search for a definition of “strategic plan” and found this:

“A strategic plan is a document used to communicate with the organization the organizations goals, the actions needed to achieve those goals and all of the other critical elements developed during the planning exercise.”

I shook my head reading this and looked for something else, because this was the wrong approach, but I found that every definition said, essentially the same thing.  No wonder everyone seems to get it wrong.  Here’s where we need to change:

First, we need to edit the first phrase to, “A strategic plan is a document used to communicate with the organization the organization’s current status and goals.” Second, stop there.  The last part about “actions and all other critical elements” does not belong in a strategic plan.  That is the tactical plan and that’s where companies constantly get hung up, especially when it comes to communication.

The strategic plan needs to be separated from the tactical because it becomes the measuring rod for every tactic going forward, which accomplishes two very important goals.

1. It saves money


2. It makes your efforts successful

In any communications program, the actual cost is in the tactics.  Spending time getting an accurate picture of where you are and where you want to end up costs virtually nothing.  But we’ve found that most companies spend all of their marketing budget on tactical efforts before ever setting their stakes in the ground. 

Over the past year, we have surveyed close to 100 technology companies, primarily in the semiconductor, CAD tool and embedded technology arenas — the drivers of the electronics revolution we are experiencing — and found only two with a documented strategy: Intel and Qualcomm.  There are many who claim to have a strategy document, but when they showed it to us, it was nothing more than a timeline of tactics, with unproved assumptions as the starting point and vague goals, e.g. “We are the/a leading provider of blah, blah, blah… we will increase sales/visibility by x.” (It’s not unlike reading the results of a Mad Libs form.)  Most, however, have less than that and have no real idea where they are heading, much less where they actually are, and their communications efforts demonstrates that reality.

Fleshing out the real strategy beyond these simple statements, even if it’s just a single page, and making sure what you are saying is actually true, forces you to question whether the trade shows, social content programs, analytical tools, or press releases maintain the company current status or move it toward the goal.  You end up wasting less money on ineffective tactics and achieving goals faster.

The owner of a small, California auto shop approached us with a very small budget and asked if we could determine a more cost effective way of building his revenue.  We sat him down and asked several questions about his current business including where it came from, what the difficulties were in maintaining it, how he was promoting his business, what he could realistically invest, etc.  Then we asked how much more business he could handle, what his revenue goals were, and whether there were plans to expand services or facilities.  From that information we were able to determine that the best course for him was simply focus on social media at absolutely no cost, other than what he was paying us.  We encouraged him to continue his current promotion programs as a baseline.  

We were able to use the social medium to identify the most likely target customers, where they lived and what they did for a living.  We prepared a document outlining potential customers and where they were using free services provided by a social media platform.  We outlined what he had told us about his current state and goals.  We included an editorial calendar of content to develop and guidelines on creating that content.  Finally, we gave him suggestions on how to establish a tactical plan and spent several weeks working with him to hone his skills.  We then left him to his own devices for three months before we checked in on him.

Within three months he had increased revenues from new business 600 percent, quarter to quarter.  Since then he has semiretired from the business which continues to grow.

Now you might think that is an isolated case, but we did a similar plan for a billion-dollar multinational electronics company that produces a 1000X return on the program investment, using the same protocol.

Don’t get lost in the tactical weeds.  Think strategically and then move forward.

Like some help determining if your current plan is strategic or tactical?

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Yelp "victory" will sink the company

In the past, I’ve advised several business on how to deal with negative reviews on Yelp and the damage can be fixed with proper content and engagement, but based on what I’ve seen, I can’t advise any business to engage with them.

Yelp’s recent court victory is was the worst possible outcome for the company.  I’m not sure it’s going to survive. 

(Wait! But they won!  How can that be bad?)

 Glad you asked.  There were three potential outcomes for this trial.  The best outcome would be the judges finding that Yelp does not, in fact, alter reviews to favor advertisers.  But that didn’t happen.  The second best would have been a finding that they actually did and were guilty of extortion for advertising.  The worst possible outcome would be what was actually ruled: that there is nothing wrong giving advertisers an edge on the site.  The court said, tacitly, that it was pretty obvious that is what was happening but there is nothing illegal about it.

 Now, no matter how many times they say otherwise (and they now have a disclaimer on every page), the customers and the businesses have been convinced by this ruling that Yelp is running a legally sanctioned protection racket.  

And that spells the death of Yelp.  They’ve lost the once intangible: the possibility that they were telling
the truth and that they were not gaming the review results in their system.  this ruling confirms that they do which means their service can’t be trusted.

Yelp claims their algorithm does not differentiate between advertisers and non advertisers and I am ready to believe them.  But a simple review of their site shows their algorithm is pretty screwed up.  

I use Yelp often, mostly to find restaurants.  I looked up barbecue restaurants last week, five total near me.  At three of them, all which had advertising packages from Yelp, the reviews were in chronological order so you could trace how they did from when they opened to the current time.  It’s a good thing to do it that way because you can see if they get better or worse over time.  At the other two, who do not advertise, the reviews are jumbled and, amazingly enough, the most horrible reviews are at the top, most of them from when the restaurants first opened and were still getting their act together.  One of them I was well acquainted with and I found the negative reviews at the top not the least accurate.

I also decided, just to check, to do an average of the review stars on the business I knew.  Adding them up, I found they came to three stars.  But Yelp had it at one and a half.

 So, giving Yelp the benefit of the doubt, I’ve come to realize that if they are not extorting businesses, then their algorithm is crap.

 This will not last long.   The wolves are circling. I’m already reading posts by influential people about how bad Yelp is, even if you buy the advertising.  In the past, I’ve advised several business on how to deal with negative reviews on Yelp and the damage can be fixed with proper content and engagement, but based on what I’ve seen, I can’t advise any business to engage with them.

The problem can be fixed… but fixing that kind of thing is what I get paid for.  I’d rather not go down with the ship for free.

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Paul Miller out at UBM Tech. UBM Tech rolled into UBM America

What does this mean? With the DesignWest/EmbeddedSystems/EELive (or whatever it called this week) conference in decline along with all the other high-end, electronic focused conferences UBM sponsors, we can probably expect the publishing arms of the organization focused more and more on the consumer side of the business. Marketing and advertising budgets continue to shrink and large corporations are investing more of those srhinking budgets into being their own publishers. They aren't doing it very well, but they are investing in it.

Yesterday I saw the announcement that UBM completed their annual reorganization and about three hours later got an email from Paul Miller that he was shown the door.  

Miller was the CEO of the UBM Tech division that has been around for a couple of cycles at the ever-morphing British corporation, and has been a senior executive all the way back to the CMP days.  He survived several putsches and has been central in redefining the organization from a "publishing" company to a "marketing" organization.  That brought a great deal of derision his way but he is to be credited in at least keeping the journalism part of the organization alive even as it shrunk in importance to the UBM bottom line (the last I say, print and online advertising represented just 7 percent of the company revenues).

Under his direction, the division saw increased profitability and was beginning to coalesce into something that might be easily defined.  This new reorganization throws all that definition into a cocked hat.  UBM Tech, UBM Medica, UBM Canon (explaining why Rich Nass left for Open Systems Media), UBM Mexico and UBM Connect (the division that covered everything NOT tech) have been merged and will soon be joined by UBM Brazil as a single entity.  That means another CEO is about to go.  That would be Jean-François Quentin who was named CEO just in March.  Sally Shankland, the CEO of UBM Connect replaces them all.

What does this mean? With the DesignWest/EmbeddedSystems/EELive (or whatever it called this week) conference in decline along with all the other high-end, electronic focused conferences UBM sponsors, we can probably expect the publishing arms of the organization focused more and more on the consumer side of the business.  Marketing and advertising budgets continue to shrink and large corporations are investing more of those srhinking budgets into being their own publishers.  They aren't doing it very well, but they are investing in it.

I'll have more later. but this is a very interesting evolution.

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To be a leader, engage your employees.

If your company does not have an active employee engagement program, you’re missing out on so much more than you realize.

By Joe Basques
Vice President, Footwasher Media

Most managers we come in contact with on a daily basis tend to think they have a relatively happy workforce, but according to a recent survey 87% of global employees are not happy to come to work.  That’s almost 9 of 10! You may not want to believe it, but your employees don’t like coming to work.

Llya Pozi, in a recent post to LinkedIn discussed some of the reasons workers give for hating their jobs.  I thought I’d list a few of them and add my insight on how to solve these problems.

The old “grass is greener thinking”

Social media has made it easier for people to share when things are going good at work, while most people who are not happy tend to keep it to themselves.  The unhappy ones see friends at other companies doing well and they get unhappier with their current job.  If your employees aren’t telling people how great their job is in social media, you may have a problem. Don’t attribute their silence as happiness. The interesting thing to note here is that even though the grass may seem greener on the other side, it’s clearly not in many cases, or the worker dissatisfaction survey numbers would not be so high.

Misaligned values

Few companies make the effort to explain corporate values to their workers, assuming

Gallup poll results

they even have them.  Employees need to know why they are there and what they are contributing too.  There may be employee newsletters and memos flying around, but few companies have the means to determine if they are even being read and engaged with.  This is particularly worrisome in an age when the means to maintain a back and forth communication exists with very little investment.  That lack of investment usually creates the next problem:

Workers don’t feel valued

Recognition gives birth to feelings of value and loyalty and that goes beyond monetary rewards.  Successful companies regularly ask employees what they value and base their rewards on their response.  If the employees asks a particular insightful question or makes a constructive remark, posting it in a company newsletter makes ALL your employees believe that the company knows, understands, and VALUES them. After all, a company is only as good as its employees.  Besides, it costs nothing.

Job insecurity — This one isn’t rocket science, but it seems to be foreign territory for most companies.  Most employees feel they are just a hair breadth from losing their job, and they are out looking for their next one as a result.  If you don’t feel stable in your job, you won’t be happy.  The company that lets them know exactly what is going on when it is going on makes them want to stay engaged as a team.

Mediocre Management

In a recent interview, famed investor Carl Ichan said he believes mediocre management in many businesses is a major problem today.  It’s such a problem, he believes, that it’s actually holding the economy back.  As with most problems, the solution here is to ask your employees (and managers for that matter) if they think this is a problem.  I’m not talking about once a year for the annual performance review.  With the technology available today there’s no reason this can’t be done on a quarterly basis and at the employee’s speed and in the channel they prefer.  Doing so in the employees preferred channel of communication encourages engagement.  

There is one element that mitigates each and every one of these challenges and makes you a leader employees are happy to follow - It’s an active content program specifically tailored to your employees.  

When most companies are developing content programs, it’s to sell goods and services, and find new customers. A strategic content program will do all that, but it is best at helping a company redefine itself and become a better business. And that starts with employees being a part of the program. It’s pretty simple really.

The first step of developing strategic content is listening.  Why do your employees think the grass is greener somewhere else?  What would make them feel valued?  Do you know if their values line up with the company’s?  Ask them, not a committee.  Acknowledge their input just as you would a customer when you are looking to make a sale.  Your content for them and, amazingly enough, for your customers will start to flow out of that conversation.  Wish your managers were better trained?  Roll out some content just for them.  A training protocol can be rapidly deployed and included as part of your content program.  If your managers are trained those under them will be happier to come to work. 

The Reward

If you’re not engaging your employees, you’re missing out of so much more than sales.  The benefits of employee engagement are too numerous for this blog post.  Here is just a quick sample from 28 different research studies that all (without exception) point to the benefits of engaged employees. 

If your company does not have an active employee engagement program, you’re missing out on so much more than you realize.

For a free consultation on creating an employee engagement program click here.

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Nine words and phrases that kill your content

Avoid these words at all costs. And if you discover that by removing them your content ceases to be interesting to you, imagine how little it means to your customer.

There are lots of lists that identify words, phrases or concepts you should avoid using in your content, but I've had a list of nine for several years that I've never seen included in those lists.  Joe Basques and I went over a few of these in a Hangout (that you can see here).  The full list follows.

Leader/leading

There's an old Afghan saying. “If you think your are leading, turn around.  If there is no one there, you are just taking a walk.”

Everyone who claims to be a leader in this world is really following after someone else.  They’re probably far behind the pack and everyone knows it.  If you want to know who the leader is, look for the company that never uses the term to describe itself.  Leaders don’t have to say it.

Key

This actuality means “of crucial importance” but if it really was important, anyone who doesn’t have it will fail, and since many have succeeded before you, they know your stuff isn't "key." It is so overused that it has lost all meaning and can be replace with “Blah.”

First/only

Lots of companies say they are “the first” to do or provide something and they are usually wrong.  A VC once said in a meeting with a client, “If you are the first/only company to do something that either means no one thinks it is worth doing or you have not done proper market research.”  Then there are those companies that actually were the first to do something but no one remembers because someone came along and did it better.  GO was the first company to come out with a tablet PC.  But they are gone with the dinosaurs now.

Solution

This means either how a problem was solved or a stable amalgamation of multiple components.  But most companies describe neither the problem, nor the components so no one knows really what they are talking about.  An engineer once told me that whenever a scientist designates something as a “field” it means they know something is there, but they don’t know what, why, or how it exists; only that it exists.  (Electric fields, magnetic fields, etc.)  Complete mysteries.  A solution is the same thing in marketing.  It would be more interesting and accurate to call it a Felgergarb. (No, that isn't a word, but it would create more intereste than "solution.")

Seamless

This is as useless a term as saying “I breath air.”  Every technology should interact seamlessly with other related technologies.  No one is going to say their product doesn’t interact with anything else, even if it doesn’t.  Someone out there is going to find the seam and call you out on it, and then you will be in CYA mode.

Working closely

This is a synonym for seamless. The opposite of the term is, we really don’t work well with those folks, but that’s your problem.  No one is going to say that, either, but it is probably what your customers believe because all marketers are lying rat-bastards, you know.  Why stir up bad thoughts.

Easy to use

Speaking of lying…  You should never EVER say this.  You should let a customer say it.  And if you can’t find one that will, then you aren’t.

Powerful

This is often used as a qualifier for “solution.” What you mean is that it actually accomplishes a task that you said it would accomplish within the parameters you define.  More simply: Hey, this thing actually works! That reality, in itself is a major accomplishment, but, then, most customers don’t believe you when you say it.  So, again, it’s something a customer should say.

Exciting

An earthquake is exciting.  A walk-off home run is exciting.  Shakira doing a belly dance while singing is exciting.  Your “powerful, easy-to-use, seamless solution” is not exciting.  Neither is your recent partnership with a “leading” company.  No one but your CEO is excited about this.  And no one cares that he is excited about it, nor that he is “pleased” about it.  In fact, unless he is a hatchet-wielding maniac, no one cares about his mental state.

Avoid these words at all costs.  And if you discover that by removing them your content ceases to be interesting to you, imagine how little it means to your customer.

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Our crisis of confidence and what to do about it

Our economy is struggling for a lot of reasons, but one reason that seems to get almost no practical discussion is the lack of trust.  Everyone knows it exists but very few believe it is their problem because, after all, each of us knows we are trustworthy.  Right?  Lawyers, corporate executives, politicians and journalists know their poll numbers are in the tank collectively, but individually they all believe that they are, somehow, different than everyone else.  What’s more, individually, they are appalled when they find out that, no, few people trust them.

“That’s their problem, Not mine!”
I understand that position and, personally, I believe most people are trustworthy and act ethically most of the time. Yeah, I’m naive, but if find that to be true more often than not.  What I also find, however, is that very few people invest any effort into presenting themselves as trustworthy and put no thought into how they present themselves. They merely assume people trust them.  What's more, they are not at all creative in how they present themselves. They just use what they have heard everyone else say about themselves… which means they don’t say things that are trustworthy.  The result is the only people that trust you are those that have invested the time and effort to get to know you. Your customers are not likely to do that and that's how we get into the economic problem.

Statistically, various polls have shown that less than 1 of 7 customers trust what any company says to them. And that’s current customers.  Imagine how few potential customers distrust companies trying to sell them something.

Corporations are spending an enormous amount of money on technology to distribute their current content to more people, faster and with greater efficiency.  Venture capitalists are investing 75 cents of every dollar into companies making technology to advertise to the customer base.  But they are using all these vehicles to say the exact same thing they have always said to their customer bases, which is the same thing that every competitor say, that most of the customers don’t believe. Why? Because it costs nothing, which is what it is worth. Moreover, the investment of nothing results in nothing.

A good example of this is the semiconductor industry.  Annual reports from SEMI have indicated that while more chips are being delivered than ever, overall revenues are down and multiple companies are entering into the second year of layoffs and consolidation.  Revenues are down because the companies have not provided enough differentiation or built enough trust to drive customers to do business with them on anything other than price.  The companies with the lowest price always win. Only 10 percent of the companies are reporting revenue growth, though not necessarily profit growth.

Our recent independent survey of 100 leading semiconductor-focused technology companies found only two companies with a documented content strategy: Intel and Qualcomm.  The rest had only invested in distribution means and more than 90 reported less than satisfying results.  Do you see the correlation? Ten percent with growth, 90 percent dissatisfied.

Let me spell it out in even more direct terms.  I’ve written extensively in the past about how the McLuhanesque paradigm of media was dramatically supplanted by social media; that the audience now controls the message, not the messenger.  I’ve also written about the almost absolute absence of strategy in corporate communications.  I’m not alone.  The Altimeter Group and the Content Marketing Institute have issued extensive studies on the success of strategic content programs, but pointed out that less than 5 percent of all businesses are adopting the strategies.

If you are one of the companies that have not invested in strategic content, you are probably among the 95 percent that are not seeing results from content distribution tactics.  Your customers don’t trust you and your potential customers can’t tell why they should choose you over anyone else, so they will always choose the least expensive alternative.  It doesn’t matter if you have superior technology.

Trust is the currency of modern business and you are broke.

It’s time you started building trust.  Shel Israel and Gale Porter are working on a book about how companies have lost trust are rebuilding it and it cannot come out too soon.  In the meantime, give us a call.  You will not succeed until you do.

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Case study in development of a rapidly deployed training program

A few months ago I boasted about a program Footwasher Media directed and provided a few links, but hadn't really provided much detail.  The partner companies involved in the project decided I was far too humble and actually financed the development of content and promotion.  This link will take you to a full-sized video interview of one of the team members, Josh Herndon, talking about the genesis of the Cultivate the Call Initiative.  There is a link in the video to download the PDF of the complete case study.

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