Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

September 12, 2012 · 10:58 am

What’s In A Name?

A friend asked me the other day why my brand is Keith Ritter Media when most of what I do is in digital and/or sports.  Not a bad question and since I’m always using the screed to encourage everyone to keep rethinking the business world around them, I did the same about his question.

Choosing “Media” instead of “Digital” was not an accident.  Having spent most of my formative professional years in what is now called “traditional” media (local and national TV), my approach is less focused on the technology and very focused on the business.  Here’s the bulletin:  it’s all media.   Sure, it’s also getting to be all digital but these technologies are nothing but other channels of communication that can be used in a smart marketing/business mix.  They’re other tools in the box.  The business and all of the relevant best practices remain pretty much the same.

I’m not sure that’s what some of the charlatans out there want to hear.  I’ve had clients hand me stuff from other digital specialty shops (most of whom are run by folks with all of 5-7 years in business) that was very tool-intensive but missed the entire reason of why those tools should or should be used.    Think about it.  Have you only heard of a “print” or “TV” or “radio” ad agency?  Sure, some folks focus on the various types of creative but your better shops take a 360 degree view of media because THAT’S HOW YOUR CUSTOMERS INTERACT WITH THE MEDIA WORLD.  Sorry for shouting but the notion of a digital or social agency bothers me.

“Digital” can be anything.  Website development to content creation to hardware to mobile and social applications. I don’t think it’s precise enough.  After all, we call them “carpenters”, not “hammers”.  It’s not about the tools – it’s about the business.

Am I thinking clearly about this?

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September 7, 2012 · 8:14 am

Doing Something

I had breakfast the other morning

Eggs

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

with a friend I’ve known and worked with for 20 years.  No, breakfast isn’t out Foodie Friday theme but something he said while we ate is.  We were talking about our work – what he does, what I do – and he was discussing a rather large deal of which he had been a part.  After describing his role he summed it up by saying “I didn’t really DO anything – I just helped things along and brought people together.”  My immediate reaction was that he sounded like a chef.

Chefs don’t create the raw materials of their work.  They don’t grow vegetables, catch fish, raise cattle, or mill flour.  Many of them don’t even cook any more once they’re figured out the recipes to be used in their kitchens.  They hire cooks to do that and after teaching them how they want things done they step back.  Once in a while they taste what’s leaving the kitchen for quality control but mostly they do what my friend did – they make connections.

I’ve been a facilitator for a few brainstorming sessions.  We’re always supposed to be content-neutral.  The idea is to help the group reach their goals without imposing our own positions on the ideas being discussed.  We help with structure and process but the participants do the heavy lifting.  It’s important that the group knows that the facilitator is in charge, but that authority is never supposed to be the focus of anything.  Frankly, it takes a bit of effort to get one’s ego out of the room, especially when you believe you can solve the problem.

The point is that my friend behaved like a great facilitator.  He brought people together around an idea and helped them bring that idea to fruition.  I think that’s doing quite a lot, just as it’s the big-name chefs who get the credit for the food, not the line cooks.  It’s what great managing is all about and it’s absolutely doing something!

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September 4, 2012 · 8:59 am

Fake Traffic

You probably have read about fake Twitter followers.  Most people have some (1% of mine are), famous people have lots (Justin Bieber has 14%).  You can check out the fake or inactive counts at Status People.  Obviously I haven’t gone out to acquire fake followers but like every part of the interwebs, Twitter has its share of  spammers and other flavors of cretin and they leach on to legitimate folks all the time.

That’s very different from folks who create fake accounts to add to their follower totals and very far removed from folks who go out and buy followers.  I suppose that the quantity of an audience is important to some people who market themselves based on their Twitter base or Klout score.  It’s been interesting as I pitch new business to have potential clients ask about that and how their minds change a bit after they understand how the system can be gamed.  Caveat Emptor if you’re hiring based on that and not on business acumen – it’s much harder to buy!

One way a system is gamed that I find really disturbing is the sale of web traffic.  No, I don’t mean impressions being sold to advertisers as ad space but the sale of bulk traffic to websites looking to increase their numbers.  There are a number of firms – I’m not going to plug them here – who will generate visits to your website for a fee.  Need 100,000 visits quickly?  $250 will get them for you.  Obviously for sites that sell based on rate bases or on impression guarantees, this is a form of fraud.

How do they do this?  Some companies use bots – automated scripts.  Others pay people to do nothing but click on the list of pages they’re given.  Still others push pop-unders which display the purchasing site when a user hits some other site the vendor controls.  Others use redirects from abandoned domains.  Pretty questionable stuff.

I’m told that some rather prominent sites use these firms near the end of a month when their traffic is kind of light.  I sure hope not.  This is exactly the kind of thing that will set back digital advertising 10 years just as it’s getting a fair amount of traction.  I can’t imagine what these folks are thinking.  Like the lightweight consultants who buy followers and game the reputation system, once this found out, those same systems will be used to spread the word about their duplicity.  Skeevy, right?

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