From the desk of Patrick Ward… This year, I am lucky enough to support the future of the technology industry by joining the advisory board for the SXSW Accelerator. As part of the board, we are helping to showcase new products, in front of a live audience, to the prestigious SXSW conference.
The SXSW Accelerator is a wonderful prism through which we can glimpse the next great ideas in technology. I am humbled to be working with some of the industry’s brightest and most progressive minds participating in and supporting this event.
We are currently building the panel that will judge the new product demos and are excited about some of the guest judges that are going to be part of this year’s event. Stay tuned for more updates leading up to, what looks like, an exciting event taking place during the interactive portion of SXSW March 11-15, 2011 in Austin, Texas.
We are excited to announce the expansion of the 104 West client roster with the addition of ClickBank and Evolv.
ClickBank a secure, online marketplace for digital product vendors and active affiliate marketers, chose 104 West after a competitive review to specifically leverage the agency’s deep roots in communicating innovation.
Evolv is a leader in science-based, on-demand talent matching and intelligence solutions, enabling companies to make better hiring decisions using their web-based platform.
Also to help support this growth we are proud to announce the promotion of Ben Johnson to Account Executive and new hire Kristen Winzent as Content Associate. Both are graduates from our internship program.
When they are not talking to reporters or growing our clients’ presence on social networks, Ben and Kristen spend most of their time with their personal obsessions. For Ben that’s any gadget from Apple. For Kristen, it’s preparing for her holiday trip back to China...she’s teaching Ben how to say iPod in Mandarin. He’s hoping she brings back a picture of the Apple store in Beijing...they work well together.
From the desk of Patrick Ward... I have been an agency guy for 20 of my 25 years in PR, the last eight of which I have been an agency owner. I think that’s why I am drawn like a moth to the flame called “Mad Men,” AMC’s sleek and irresistible drama about an ad executive in the 1960s. I find myself at times thinking ‘what would Don Draper do?’ less as a decision process and more as an intellectual exercise.
Anyone who has followed the show — and if you are an agency person and you don’t watch it, you need to, right now — knows Draper is brilliant, but mostly he is impetuous. He is an impetuous philanderer, liar, drinker and parent. Last night, in another seemingly impetuous move that infuriated his partners and may imperil his agency, he took out a full page ad in the New York Times denouncing big tobacco, which he and his firm had represented for decades. There goes Don.
I found myself thinking, what would this guy do with social media? Would he be tweeting about how hung-over he was, posting Facebook photos and status updates about his many romantic indiscretions, joining social networks as Don Draper or Dick Whitman? If he capriciously takes out a full page ad in the New York Times, then keep him away from a blog!
But the beauty about Don Draper is that with his work, few things are under-calculated. In last night’s episode, he talks, perhaps anachronistically, about driving the conversation and that his provocative stance on tobacco was more strategic than anyone thinks. He gets a call from the American Cancer Society to engage him in a public service campaign, which to us today seems normal, but in an era when the ink on the Surgeon General’s warning was still wet, no one had heard of the ACS. Who won that public opinion war over time?
Now Don Draper can be as pragmatic as the next Mad Man, once admonishing his protégé, Peggy Olson, that she is not in the business of advertising auto parts to black patrons of their client, so why should she care whether the client hires them or not; a repugnant opinion in the throes of the civil rights era or anytime. But Don is strategic and I think he would look at typical corporate blogs and their all-too-common happenstantial content as wasted words. He would appreciate the opportunity social media communities provide as a direct channel to a consumer or corporate buyer and cherish it and its potential impact.
When Don Draper fires off a full page ad to the NY Times, or throws a potential client out of his office because they have no creative vision, or tells Kodak that their new slide wheel projector technology is really about memories and lifestyle, he has full strategic intent. Sometimes I wish more people would ask, ‘what would Don do?’ before they hit send or save.
Peggy
Orenstein’s insightful piece in the New York Times Magazine yesterday (I Tweet
Therefore I Am) examined the narcissism of Twitter from a
psychological perspective. In the piece, she recounts her struggle to
refrain from tweeting while enjoying a quiet family moment and extrapolates
that anecdote into a full reflection on one’s desire to create personas in
modern life and how Twitter is a near-perfect medium for perfecting one’s
assumed presence in the world.
She also reflects on the issues with creating these masks as potentially
negative, wondering aloud if Twitter is in fact adversely affecting some coping
mechanism by further shrouding our true selves in a 140-character spurts of who
we want to be.
Ironically, it seems to us that Orenstein’s concerns about Twitter’s ability to
offer neat affectations is what we see as the actual benefit for businesses. We
often talk to clients about the issue of controlling market reputation, as I am
sure most PR and communications firms do. We talk about defining that
reputation before it gets defined for you; simple but important ideas.
Before Twitter or other social media, the idea of persistent contact with core
audiences or communities was real work. You picked your spots in news
releases, ads, publicity, speeches, etc. Find the message. Craft the
delivery. And then hope you had enough opportunity to make it stick.
Twitter turns that on its head. Orenstein’s observations have legitimate
insight for individuals, but Twitter’s ability to communicate often and
directly isn’t all bad. What she suggests are masks and personas, we
contend are brands. If pre-Twitter marketing was about well orchestrated and periodic
blasts, then Twitter collapses the interim. A series of messages can
follow each other so closely that it’s now a stream. For a person to fill
that stream would almost by definition require some embellishment which can
easily lead to Orenstein’s premise that your Twitter-self and true self are
diverging. But the wealth of Twitter-able information about a brand is
much richer, and brands almost by their definition are embellishment.
We continue to advise our clients to think about new ways to look at Twitter
and all social media. We are inviting them this week to read Orenstein’s
piece with their brand as the protagonist and the piece now starts to read like
an opportunity instead of potential admonition.
In this
space, we have spent some time describing the shift in traditional news
consumption and the impact of new and social media on traditional journalism. Both are well-discussed
concepts and, while important to note, they are familiar to all of us.
The question then becomes, now what?
We noted somewhat in passing that there has been a dramatic increase in the
number of news sources people routinely consume; and that increase has undermined
the traditional news brands. And we truly believe that. But, we also
believe that brands consequently have a new opportunity to become their
own media company.
A startling story made this clearer to us than ever. Last winter, a friend
and colleague told us about an experience that succinctly related the dynamic
relationship between the media, social media and critical audiences. His
company, GoodData, is one of the hot ones, sporting all the ingredients for
a successful start-up. Its CEO, Roman Stanek
is a serial entrepreneur with a great reputation having sold a previous company
to Sun and another to HP, by way of Mercury Interactive. The company
boasts people like Esther Dyson and Tim O’Reilly as individual investors and Andreesen/Horowitz, the ‘it’ VC of the moment, led a
round of financing last year. Oh, and their business plan has the word
‘cloud’ in it. Enough said?
So, when Bob Evans at InformationWeek published a glowing success storyon one of GoodData's customers, no
one was surprised, except the VP of Marketing, our friend, Sam Boonin, who waited to see that story translate into web traffic
and potential leads. Neither happened. And this was a big story.
To give it some legs, the management team, all with healthy personal and
professional social networks, started to push the story out to friends,
colleagues and gawkers through Twitter et al. That’s when the traffic began
to come and in bunches. In fact, traffic from Tweets and re-Tweets was 10
times higher than direct web traffic from InformationWeek.
We don’t think that means that these executives’ personal brands are more
influential than InformationWeek’s brand that has been built over 30 years.
Or do we? It’s probably not an either/or, but more of a complementary
relationship. We can’t deny that the magazine’s brand helped when people
read the Tweets. But, there is a clear argument to be made that GoodData’s brand and Stanek’s and other execs’ personal brands offered
significant credibility.
The other thing we noted about this story was that content was a driving force.
True, the content was promotional (not in intent, but in practice) and so
it should drive people to the site. But, a series of Mashable pieces last month extolled the promise
of content as a marketing vehicle and we think the preceding story
bears that out. We had a client last year, Daily Makeover that used content as a way to attract users to its online try-on tool
which women used to sample virtual cosmetics. Tips about spring looks,
easy ways to look natural etc. filled their site and got four million women to
that site monthly, giving Daily Makeover one of the richest databases of
personal cosmetics preferences in the world.
But most business-to-business companies don’t have content as part of their
everyday outreach to customers. In a world where people are so
starved for information that they have an incessant parade of alerts, and where
news organizations are losing their audience daily, why shouldn’t companies
fill the void with interesting and entertaining content. We think they
should and content gives PR firms, like ours, a formidable tool to advance
client’s positions and/or opinions.
We are advising clients to start thinking more like media purveyors and rely
less on intermediaries — from analysts to reporters — to tell their
stories for them. That’s a radical shift for some to grasp, but in a
forthcoming post, we’ll offer some insight into how that can work.
Recently we explored the current state of news
consumption in print. We did
that – as we said then — mostly as a way to wrap some perspective around where
news consumption appears to be headed.So now we’d like to turn our sights on that perspective.
Worldwide usage of social networking is plainly on the rise
with both Facebook and Twitter experiencing dramatic increases in membership.
Facebook has over 400 million users, according to its own statistics.Not only are users increasing (Facebook
alone had 130 million unique visitors in May 2010) but the time spent on these
web sites now also averages over six
hours per month. With such a large captive audience, social networks offer
a multitude of opportunities, from making new contacts to sharing news and
information.
Social network users are not merely connecting statically.
In fact, many people who initially create a connection through a social
networking medium are likely to follow up and maintain that
relationship through the use of email, phone conversations, or in-person
meetings.
A PEW Research Center report
points out that news is increasingly becoming a social activity.The report tells us that:
·75%
of them say they get news forwarded to them through email or posts on
social networking sites
·65%
of Internet users say they read at least some of this forwarded content;
and more than half of those say they read all or most of that news
Of
those adults who receive news through social networks, many say they pass it
along. Social networkers are more likely to select a news source based on how
easy it is to share that source’s stories through social networks. Of all social
network users, 51%
report that on a typical day they receive news from social networks, like
Facebook and Twitter.
With the rise of social networking, users are becoming
increasingly reliant upon these networks as trusted sources of news and
information. This has obvious
implications on traditional news organizations but also portends the
opportunities for other ‘brands’ to become sources of news and news
content.At present, the vast
majority of the ‘distributors’ of news on social networks is comprised of
individuals.But, as more and more
commercial
social network pages emerge and attract supporters, those companies will
certainly become sources of news and other information -- both their own and
curated from other places -- for their communities.
For some, the idea of individual companies circulating news
directly to the public without the traditional filter of a news organization
smacks of self-promotion.It may
also undermine journalistic efforts. And certainly some might take
advantage-- an iPhone gaming
company was accused of pumping up supposedly independent reviews last
year.But, let’s not throw out
the baby with the bath water.There
is no inherent ethical issue here, so long as companies exercise intelligence
and judgment in what they share with communities.There is a growing sentiment that content
may define the next era of the Internet.If so, then companies have an emerging opportunity to turn
the growing affinity for online news into an opportunity to evince their market
perspectives forcefully and effectively.
In a recent discussion, we looked at the role that news plays in a world where people consume content through multiple channels. We think there are new and growing opportunities for companies to become their own media channel.
This is the first discussion in a series about that opportunity. But before delving into the future, we thought it might be useful to understand the massive shift in news consumption and revisit the precipitous decline in the market share of traditional print media. Now, we understand that, for most of us, this isn’t news and most of us can intuit the dire condition of the daily newspaper and weekly magazine (alas, poor Newsweek, I knew you well) just by our own reading habits or the obvious emaciation of newspapers and magazines. But, nonetheless we thought it warranted some detail.
The Decline of the Newspaper Newspaper readership has rapidly declined since the rise of online news portals. Ranked only behind local and national television outlets, online news sources have become the third most popular news source. A March 2010 report by the PEW Research Center found:
78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station.
73% say they get news from a national network such as CBS or cable TV station such as CNN or Fox News.
61% say they get some kind of news online.
54% say they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car.
50% say they read news in a local newspaper.
17% say they read news in a national newspaper such as the New York Times or USA Today.
With dropping print readership, more people are turning to online news sites that offer news on demand.
Who gets their news online? Clearly, this trend is along generational lines. Younger people, of the GenX and Millennial age groups, are most likely to receive their news from online sources. This group is often more connected to mobile devices than their older counterparts, so getting news on-the-go is increasingly important. Although television is still their primary source of news, 53-59% access news online and only 24% read traditional newspapers. Again, that’s not news, but as companies examine how to reach that demographic or how to prepare for them as they age, it’s worth revisiting.
So where is the news coming from?
Whether on television, online, or in print, 92% of American adults say they access multiple sources for their news, with many accessing four to six sources per day. Online news readers are no different and often seek out news from multiple sources. Unsurprisingly, among online news sources, the most popular are aggregated news sources, led by Yahoo, CNN, and Google.
The consumption of news has not decreased, but transformed. The way in which people access the news is changing. With the convenience of laptops and mobile devices, many more readers are getting the news online and on their own time.
As consumer preferences for news organizations declines and sources become more proliferated, the power of the news brand has become compromised. Consumers are becoming less interested in the source of the news, so long as its credible. Much of that credibility is coming from friends who alert them within social networks, a trend we’ll examine in our next missive. But its also an opportunity for brands which consumer already trust to become direct source of information, a more interesting concept we’ll explore in a later installment.
104
West is growing and we are looking to hire an account executive/senior account
executive to help support our growth. The full job description is below.
104 West Partners is
seeking a strong account service-oriented professional with 4-5 years of PR
experience, including agency experience. The candidate must have a strong
technology PR background and be well versed in social media tools and
techniques. Proven media relations expertise is required. The candidate will be
responsible for hands-on operations of multiple accounts. The position is based
in Denver and some travel may be involved.
Required Qualifications
Bachelors Degree from an accredited four year
institution
Prior PR agency experience, preferably with
tech related accounts
Exceptional written and verbal communications
skills
Proven ability to pitch stories that garner
noteworthy placement
Demonstrated understanding of social media
tools and techniques
Superior client service skills
Positive attitude and a team-oriented
personality
Interested candidates
should forward their resume and up to three references to hr@104west.com.
We received word recently that our work last year with the online virtual
makeover service, Daily Makeover, had been nominated for a national SABRE award. That’s a nice accolade in the PR industry, especially
considering we are competing with sizable brands and other agencies that dwarf
that program and our shop. It is a testament to our account team
that worked on that program. We plan to attend the gala in NYC with fingers
crossed.
It is also a ringing validation of the strategic work behind the Daily
Makeover program, which we called “Beauty is Only Screen Deep.” When we
started working together, we huddled with the CEO and management team to ensure
the communications efforts reflected the true value proposition of the
company. That value proposition was pointing more and more toward the
underlying technology in its virtual reality tool that invited millions of
women a month to see how cosmetics, hairstyles and other products looked on
their uploaded photographs. The strategic objective of the program was to
drive more engagement, which we achieved by curating and developing content
like a survey which asked consumers whether
Scottish singer and YouTube sensation Susan Boyle should have a makeover.
That effort alone garnered thousands of unique visitors through social
media, national press and original online editorial on dailymakeover.com.
Daily Makeover represented to us the first implementation of a theory
that my old friends Sam Whitmore and Steve Wildstrom volleyed back and
forth recently, calling for brands to understand that they have to develop their own
content as a means to communicate with communities. There is a new
journalism emerging that may be considered promotional by some or perhaps
simply a recognition of how topsy-turvy the world has become.
Journalists don’t own journalism anymore, just like brands don’t own
their brand anymore. The community owns it all.
For us, this contemporary reality compels the development of a new marriage
between content and the myriad of channels reaching our clients’ communities.
The persistent channels of social media must supplement the consistent
channels of traditional media. But that is not a fresh concept. The
question revolves less around the distribution cart and more around the
content horse. We have been counseling our clients, as we did with
Daily Makeover, that curating meaningful content – both external and
original content – translates into a new corporate asset that can contribute to
the brand, attract and build critical community members and even provide
new revenue opportunities.
We knew that our work with Daily Makeover represented an evolution of how
we devised, developed and distributed content. But we were unaware at the
time how it reflected broader new approaches to communications that have
since been recognized by SABRE and by our other clients.
The VCIR Winter 2010 conference was definitely a success,
bringing venture capitalists, service professionals, and innovative companies
together to represent the great things coming out of the Rocky Mountain region.
Last week we shared with you, two companies, Grogger and BlipSnips, who are
helping to make the information on the Web easier to manage. We thought we
would share with you the other conservations we had with companies doing really
cool things in the clean technology, education, and video archiving spaces.
During the time Elaine and I spent at the conference we spoke primarily with
presenting companies, but did have a chance to talk with Mark Solon, managing
partner of Highway 12 and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association.
Being from outside of Colorado, Mark gave us another perspective to why the
Rocky Mountain region is such a great place to live and work.
As we said before, clean technology was a huge focus at the
conference, with 50 percent of the companies presenting. Elaine and I spoke
with Sue Kunz, CEO of BioVantage Resources about how the company is utilizing
algae to reclaim water in a way that uses less energy and produces a cleaner
version than today’s systems.
Since college, Sue has held various positions in
early-growth companies with BioVantage Resources being her fourth. She spoke
about her experiences with funding along with why companies should attend VCIR
Winter 2011.
Zettasun, a Boulder-based company produces a high-efficiency
solar panel that uses their proprietary “embedded concentration” technology.
Elaine spoke with serial entrepreneur and CEO of Zettasun, Paul Berberian about
the challenges of solar energy and how Zettasun’s panels will cost less and
provide more energy.
It seems parents only communicate with their students
university through a tuition bill. Sarah Schupp, founder and CEO of University
Parent Media, saw that problem and created University Parent to bridge the communication path between parents and universities by providing information
about the city the student will be living in.
Of those that remember, video and pictures didn’t always
exist on our computers and mobile devices. iMemories is changing the way we
store and share our memories by converting our analog video to digital, but
it’s real business lies in online video sharing, permitting families to store
videos online and share through Facebook, blogs, email, and even their home
television. We sat down with Mark Rukavina, founder and CEO of iMemories to
discuss how video is about to take flight.
