Monthly Archives: December 2013

December 20, 2013 · 9:55 am

Kitchens Without Garbage

It’s the last Foodie Friday before Christmas and this week  I want to talk about garbage.

Garbage

(Photo credit: Editor B)

It’s on my mind because last night I watched an interesting episode of Chopped, the Food Network’s show where cooks have to use a basket of ingredients that don’t seem to go with one another to make great dishes in 30 minutes.  The baskets last night all consisted of “garbage” – food that most home cooks often toss out.  Herb stems, bread ends, fish heads and other generally discarded items made up the ingredient lists.  The cooks did well and as food professionals they demonstrated the principle that nothing should be wasted by  a professional.  Or as The Dead would say, “one man gathers what another man spills.”

Jacques Pepin has said this for years on his TV shows – use everything, throw nothing out.  He even takes leftovers and turns them into new dishes.   Which of course is an excellent thought for all business professionals, especially as most businesses move into content creation (surely you’ve heard that everyone is a publisher, haven’t you!?).

Some of my clients fail to observe the immutable law that there is no garbage can on the internet.  While something shot for a TV commercial may not be usable in that 30-second format, the web has no such time constraints.  The speech given at a small conference to an interested audience of a hundred people can become a blog post and then summarized for inclusion in an email newsletter (talk about making something new out of the leftovers!). The audience of a hundred can now be thousands with very little extra effort.

Everything we create in our business lives has some value.  Perhaps that value isn’t to us in the moment but tossing anything of value out when there are so many ways to slice and dice it into something quite tasty is more than a waste.  License it out, recut it, format it for another channel.  The trash bin is the last place anything ought to go.  Agreed?

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December 19, 2013 · 11:42 am

It’s The Pipe, Stupid

Any of us who consume content via the Internet are aware of how profoundly that consumption has changed over the last few years.  The advent of smart mobile devices and tablets has freed that consumption from the tether of the desktop computer and has started to fulfill the promise of “always on, anytime, any place, any screen.”   From a marketing perspective that has been incredibly frustrating as brands try to keep up with the ever-changing consumption patterns of their intended customer bases.  From a user perspective, it’s gloriously liberating.

From eMarketer.com

Some statistics from the good folks at eMarketer with respect to that change are over there on the chart.  You can see online – desktop – time spent dropping even as consumption of video and social increases.  Look, however, at the rapid growth on mobile devices.  There is a similar pattern to the type of content consumed but the time spent has gone from negligible to half of that on desktops and laptops.   But I don’t think that’s the real story.

Just as important – maybe more so – as the growth of these mobile devices is how all that content gets on those devices.  In other words, the pipe.  For tablets, a lot of the usage is in the home where it’s reasonable to assume the pipe is the home wi-fi network that’s drawing from the basic internet connection – the cable or DSL provider.  For phones and some tablets, it’s the mobile network.

The issue in my mind is that usage of these devices is artificially depressed by the usage constraints placed there by those carriers.  It’s hard to get an unlimited data plan with many carriers and those of us who have those data plans grandfathered in still get hit with bandwidth caps – usage points at which the data gets slowed down.  The carriers often say it’s about managing network capacity.  Which means, of course, it’s about money.

Building a wireless data network is a huge, expensive undertaking.  The carriers have every right to earn back that investment and have an obligation to do so to their shareholders.  The wireless business defends itself from undercutting by municipalities that attempt to install free public wi-fi.  Google, however, has proven it’s possible to roll out an uncapped very high-speed network at reasonable prices.  Admittedly so far this is not a wireless network.  Does anyone think it won’t be at some point?

If not Google, something else will break the dam of bandwidth restrictions.  That’s when the world really changes.  Just as improved cable networks have made HDTV ubiquitous (something like 75% of all homes have HD now), and just as that same bandwidth into the home has made cord-cutting a growing trend, a freed-up, uncapped pipe for mobile will drastically change the landscape.   You agree?

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December 18, 2013 · 11:08 am

Has Facebook Played Marketers For Suckers?

Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Fr...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nearly every client I have worked with in the last few years has had a presence on Facebook and the few exceptions have felt as if they should have one. As you can tell from a number of my posts here on the screed, I’m generally a skeptic of any medium over which a marketer doesn’t have control. Today’s news just reinforces that and makes me wonder if Facebook has been playing the marketing community for suckers. Let’s see what you think.

Facebook puts a fair amount of energy into recruiting brands and other businesses to set up pages.  Once those pages are established, anyone who does it right can tell you that supporting the pages is like the plant (Audrey II) in “Little Shop Of Horrors”: a constant refrain of “feed me.”  Where does that content reside?  Facebook.  Who controls how much of it your “fans” see?  Facebook.  In fact, Facebook themselves said a year ago that pages organically reach about 16% of their fans on average.  Yep – 84% of the people who like a page won’t generally see it unless they take a specific action to seek it out.  In their words: “Newsfeed uses an algorithm to rank content based upon the likely interest to a user to help deliver the most relevant and valuable content.”

That was then.  Facebook recently changed how that algorithm works (which is, obviously, unknown to the brands making investments in the platform and totally out of their control).  Here is one what study found:

Facebook’s December News Feed algorithm change is so far punishing brand pages, regardless of how interested fans are in that page’s content, according to a new analysis by Ignite Social Media. Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

So the 16% has dropped to around 3%.  Of course, Facebook is more than happy to have brands pay to promote their content, the very content that keeps the platform interesting and vital.  Many studies have shown that organic content drives better results than paid yet organic is almost impossibly hard to get front and center.

My take is this.  Facebook may just be playing a con where the mark doesn’t want to give up the investment they’ve already made.  Even if unintentional (BIG stretch there!), they seem to be finding ways of restricting the reach of page fans by page owners as a way to force them to advertise.  These same owners already had to spend money with campaigns to build up fan bases.  Now you want the brands to pay again to reach an audience that has already said they want to receive page updates by “liking” the page.  Put yourself in the place of the social media person at a business who has to explain that one.

People are not the customer on Facebook.  Paying brands are.  As with any business, Facebook won’t be around for the long haul if their priorities are making a buck rather than serving their customers’ needs or by playing them for suckers.  That’s my take.  What’s yours?

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