Monthly Archives: November 2013

November 6, 2013 · 10:43 am

Newsflash: They’re Alive! Newspapers Are Alive!

The folks at comScore released some information about newspaper readership the other day that might just be of interest.

Newspaper colour

(Photo credit: NS Newsflash)

The interwebs are filled from time to time with headlines blaring about the death of newspapers.  As it turns out, not so much.  As Media Post reported:

September was the busiest month ever for newspapers in terms of digital traffic, with 141 million U.S. adults visiting a newspaper Web site or using a newspaper mobile app.That figure is up 11% over June and represents 71% of the country’s total online adult population, defined as the total number of adults accessing any type of digital content.

I’m a believer in the “content is king” theory.  Great newspapers are content generation machines.  Besides developing their own reports on events of the day they commission other content – reviews, feature stories, etc. – that can be what’s lovingly called linkbait here in cyberspace.  That content is often circulated beyond and by the initial audience, furthering the reach.  What crappy newspapers do is cut and paste wire copy after gutting their content-generating capabilities.  I don’t know that those sort of newspapers are dying; it sees more like suicide.

What’s also suicidal is an insistence by any business on preserving a business model that is ceasing to work.  We saw it in the record industry and in many cases we’re seeing it with newspapers.  Smart newspapers jumped into digital with both feet.  Admittedly, many of those are still struggling with the appropriate business model: subscription vs. metered pay wall vs. ad-supported vs. some hybrid.  The formation and implementation of whatever the right model is get slowed down by the constant shift of technology and platforms.  As content consumption shifts to mobile – and the total mobile audience for U.S. newspapers was 77 million U.S. adults in September, or 55% of the total audience – the model needs to be thought out again.

What this research demonstrates again is that we need to emphasize business over tools.  Newspapers do an excellent job of using all the latest tools.  The best ones continue to produce great content, the core of their business.  What still needs work is the business model, which was stable for almost 200 years and has changed forever.  They’re not alone:  it could happen to your business in a relative instant.  Are you ready?

Enhanced by Zemanta

2 Comments

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , , , ,

November 5, 2013 · 10:43 am

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

It’s an Election Day edition of our TunesDay screed.  You might think this is the one day of the year when things get political in this space and you’d be wrong.  However, one thing that culminates on this day is campaigning.  No matter which party you support or on which ticket you’re running, the last few weeks have been about communicating and that’s what led me to this week’s tune.

Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood was written in for Nina Simone and came out in 1964.  A year later, the song was released by a British band that sped up the tempo and added a signature riff throughout.  This was the result:

I’ve loved this song since then and it’s been reinterpreted by dozens of artists since its release by The Animals.  To me, it makes a great point both for Election Day as well as for business.

Baby, do you understand me now?
Sometimes I feel a little mad
But don’t you know that no one alive can always be an angel
When things go wrong I feel real bad.

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

We live in a time when communication has never been easier.  Explaining how one feels or where one stands on an issue should be simple – much more so than 30 years ago when there were no digital communications.  Ironically, both for politicians and for businesses, it’s exactly the opposite.  The tools have made communication so simple that the noise level is almost impenetrable.  There are thousands of voices competing for attention where dozens competed not long ago.

The result is that customers – and the electorate is a customer base – tend to listen to a very limited set of information.  They tend to hear what they want to hear from sources that they’ve chosen out of the morass.  Businesses – and political messages – get misunderstood because their messages are either unheard or undermined by competing signals (and that seems to be where our political system is these days – “gotcha” over substance).

As businesspeople we ought to be focused on not being misunderstood as much as we are on the getting a message out at all.  After all, one misinformed customer can spark a firestorm of social media backlash.  Election results are when we see how well understood candidates are.  Every day is when you find that out about your business.

Did you vote yet?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media, Music, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , ,

November 4, 2013 · 11:29 am

Will Rogers

Let’s start our week with a business point from the great American humorist Will Rogers.

Will Rogers

Will Rogers

For those of you unfamiliar with him, he’s best known for saying (in reference to Leon Trotsky) “I never met a man I didn’t like.”  I’ve always considered him the successor to Mark Twain in many ways in that he often made very pointed remarks in a gentle, funny manner.  That didn’t make his humor any less barbed, however.

You might think that I want to use that to make a point about business behavior.  That’s not a bad notion but not where we’re heading today.  Instead, let’s think about something he said that was brought to my attention via a fortune cookie.  A reader sent me the contents of the cookie (and I do hope that you will feel free to send in ideas, questions, or even rants) and when I read it I just knew it had to be a topic.  It said:

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

For a man who died even before commercial television began, Will certainly gets business today.  No business can afford to rest on its laurels.  Market conditions change, consumer preferences change and of course technology has changed everything.  Take, for example, a huge company like Microsoft.  They built up large, profitable markets for their operating system and their Office products and those were cash cows.  Sure, there were constant upgrades but mostly they just “sat there” enjoying the stream of profits.  Suddenly, Google and Apple are cleaning their clock and those cash cows are in danger.

I take the statement on a personal level as well.  We all need to keep learning.  Much of what I do today is built upon the base of 35 years of business experience but it also requires me to have kept up with changes in the media and tech worlds.  I submit that none of us can be effective at our jobs or personal lives if we don’t make a constant effort to keep growing, no matter how successful we’ve been to that point.

Any thoughts?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Helpful Hints, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , ,