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June 29, 2007
The Chris DeWolfe Perspective
At the Edelman Annual Leadership meeting this week in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to interview Chris DeWolfe, founder and CEO of MySpace (disclosure: Edelman client). Here are a few of his key comments:
1) We are aiming to involve our members in important issues of our time. There was a period when parents discussed the issues of the day with their kids over the dinner table. That does not happen now, so we feel we should initiate these conversations. We are encouraging the US Presidential candidates to utilize our platform; we do not endorse any views, simply to engage them in the dialogue. We are going to sponsor offline town halls, hosted by celebrities, so that our members can see and question the candidates in person, then put the content on line. We will also be initiating a global effort to raise money for malaria control called Malaria No More, to fund the purchase of mosquito nets for African communities. Our members want to shape a better world.
2) The social platform is multi-local, not multinational. There are important local customs, such as the buying of gifts in Cyworld in Korea. MySpace is already localized in 18 countries. There will only be a few social networks in each country. We localize our product when we go into a new market.
3) The social network user is moving from digital photos to digital video. MySpace is doing a beta test with a video platform that will enhance sharing of consumer generated content.
4) We are building custom communities for our advertisers, premised on discussion. As PR counselors we need to persuade companies to let go; to give up control of the message; to learn from consumers who want to co-create the brand. The Axe promotion with Unilever is a good example of how this can work.
5) The mainstream media will have to go where the users are. That means publishers will have to make their content available on mobile devices, in short form, with compelling video and photos.
6) My vision for social networks is participatory, visual, based on dialogue. It is not quantitative and targeted per the search engines. It is spontaneous and constantly inventive. We will see an even greater blurring of the offline and online worlds.
Chris is an amazing guy, utterly unaffected by his great success in business, determined to keep his entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity and optimism. I thoroughly enjoyed our time together. He is pointing the way for the PR business, to incorporate video into our work, to appreciate the power of the horizontal axis of communications which is premised on the voice of the people and to look for causes that allow our clients to get involved with projects that have a larger purpose. I would appreciate your comments as always.
Posted by Edelman at 10:55 AM
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| TrackBackJune 21, 2007
The Great Experiment
I just finished lunch with my old friend, Steve Shepard, now dean of the new journalism school at the City University of New York (www.journalism.cuny.edu). Steve stepped down as editor of Business Week magazine about two years ago to take on this great experiment in public education.
One of the major challenges to media companies is to create a diverse work force, journalists who are of color and who come from modest means. According to Steve, this problem comes into sharp focus when you consider that the cost of a Columbia Journalism School degree is about $85,000 for two years, versus $11,000 for a CUNY degree over three semesters. At present, at major business publications, only five percent of the reporters are of color, he said.
Shepard’s first class of 50 students entered last fall. Another complement of 50 will begin in September. About 40% of the students are of color and most are from working class backgrounds. Shepard placed every one of his students into media company internships over this summer. For those who are at companies that do not pay interns, he is offering a $3,000 stipend from his school as compensation.
He has raised $8 million from private sources to fund full-time professors, including $4 million from the NY Times Company. As befits an entrepreneurial enterprise, much of the teaching is done by volunteer lecturers from major media companies such as Forbes, the NY Times and McGraw Hill.
We reflected over lunch about state of the media business. Shepard believes that newsstand prices for quality publications will continue to rise, because circulation will have to offset declines in advertising. He noted that revenue from on-line units of mainstream media should benefit from increasing ability to deliver results in reaching specific audiences; prices of on-line ads will firm over time. He believes that there is a real demand for quality journalism, a price insensitive niche in the market.
It occurs to me that the PR field should make a similar attempt to guarantee access to quality education for students of modest economic means. I suggest that we emulate Shepard’s model, guaranteeing a certain number of paying summer jobs at PR firms or in PR departments at major companies for those PR students who are seeking experience while earning part of their tuition. In this way, we facilitate the diversification of our work force while ensuring the quality of our future creative product. I would appreciate your views as always.
Posted by Edelman at 3:07 PM
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Richard,
I really took this blog post to heart, and asked for opinions from PRSSA members across the nation what their thoughts were. The responses were overwhelming. Check out what students and young professionals are saying about this same topic at www.prssa.org/blog.
Thanks,
Dwayne Waite
Vice President of Professional Development
2007-2008 National Committee
Public Relations Student Society of America
Posted by: Dwayne Waite at July 5, 2007 9:30 AM
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| TrackBackJune 15, 2007
Media Panel at Yale CEO Summit
My friend and former classmate in college and business school is Professor Jeff Sonnenfeld. Twice a year, he attracts chief executives to a one day event which covers issues relevant to the CEO, including leadership, governance, compensation and working with the media. Yesterday evening, Jeff had Joe Nocera of the NY Times plus Alan Murray and Tom Herman of the Wall Street Journal for a sparring session that contained some important information for those of us in PR. Here are the key points:
1) Unbiased news —Herman made a strong plea for reporters to keep EDGE out of stories. “I prefer stories that present both sides and allow the reader to make up his own mind.” The panel agreed that the trend is toward editors wanting more EDGE, or opinion, in the articles as readers increasingly gravitate to those media that present a like-minded approach.
2) Context—Nocera, a veteran of FORTUNE and now at the NY Times, said, “If newspapers really understood how to create context, magazines would go out of business.” The reporter may be well served to go back to previous pieces on the same subject to create a link for the reader. Herman warned that adding too much context can shift easily into bias.
3) Trust in Media—Murray noted that the Pew Foundation study of last year showed that the Wall Street Journal was the most trusted of the major media at 29%, down from 50% trust only 10 years ago. He believes that it is easier than ever to check on veracity of stories given the proliferation of media. He added that he basically believes stories he reads in his own paper, plus the NY Times, Washington Post and Financial Times because he knows many of the reporters and is aware of the strict editing process.
4) Truth in Media—Nocera talked about the tale of Rashoman, the Talmudic tale of inability to find real truth because of a contradictory set of facts. He suggested that there is no single truth.
5) Essence—Nocera added that the reporter’s job is to distill a problem to its simplest form and to take readers where they don’t expect to go.
6) Why Speak to the Media—Murray made a strong case for CEOs speaking to reporters. “People want us to publish what we know.” He suggested that CEO interaction with media is often over managed by PR people.
7) Value of Beats—Herman noted that he had been at the Journal for nearly 30 years and on the tax beat for the past 15 years. “I do know how to get information out of the IRS if need be!”
I found it quite remarkable that many of the CEOs in the room are still hesitant and reluctant to deal with the media. There were a few caustic comments about erroneous reporting, lack of understanding of a category by inexperienced reporters, and excessive speculation in the absence of facts. My view is that companies will always do better by laying out the facts and allowing stakeholders to process them. That includes a robust interaction with the business media, still the most credible source of information according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Posted by Edelman at 3:42 PM
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| TrackBackJune 8, 2007
New Media Academic Summit Day One
Edelman and PRWeek Magazine have organized a day long conference for US professors of journalism and mass communications. Last night I joined a distinguished group of media executives, including Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Pat Mitchell, CEO of the Paley Museum of Media, Nick Lemann, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School and David Kirkpatrick (moderator), senior editor of FORTUNE, to discuss the changing media environment. You can see the full discussion via streaming video by going here (www.edelman.com/summit07/). Here are some highlights from the discussion:
Crovitz—Digital changes the print product. Newspapers have been great repositories of events that occurred the day before but this cannot work in the digital world. Our readers of the print product want more understanding and interpretation. They want what were second day stories on the first day. Commodity news will be reported by our news service, Dow Jones, and taken up by our on-line reporters. Our reporters have a better chance than ever to tell the full story because we have no space constraints on-line. We are trying to become more vertically targeted. Our blogs in specific industries such as health give us a chance to target the younger readers who are more specialized. We are now doing co-ventures with certain journalists, such as the D conference with Walt Mossberg. There is tremendous value in established brands such as the Wall Street Journal. The most popular recent piece of video on wsj.com was from Toyota; it was a Lexus that parallel parks itself.
Lemann—Citizen journalists contribute snippets to the larger matrix of a story. They are an additional element to reporting by trusted news organizations. The editing function of mainstream media is the key difference. The Web actually allows mainstream media to be more trustworthy because it allows you to annotate, to show the underlying data, to offer the uncut TV footage and to use links. The future of newspapers is to deep local reporting and to use citizen journalists to fill holes in permanent staffing, while magazines will continue to dominate affinity verticals. Traffic is bunching up around mainstream media web sites based on reporting, not opinion. We are experimenting with new non-linear ways to present journalism. Non-profit entities will be increasing their participation in media (example is PBS). The job of our recent graduates in many large media companies is to post eight times, use a camera and a microphone, to be like a wire service reporter.
Mitchell—Radio is having a quiet heyday. It has surmounted its key barrier to distribution, which was geographic license, via the internet. The content is being repurposed for use on IPODs and other platforms. The best radio stories have rich context and sound. This is a format pioneered by National Public Radio. We have now reached the point where if you are in old media and not in new media, you will soon be in dead media. Media literacy is not being taught in schools.
Kirkpatrick—The copy we write for the web is much less intensely edited than the printed product. This will change over time as the web product generates more advertising. There is still a great deal of TV viewing in Western nations, especially by middle aged people. The ratio of TV to web use in the developed world is still 4 to 1.
I made a strong case for an evolved form of public relations, which I termed open advocacy. We cannot claim to be fair and impartial. As my friend David Weinberger has said, while markets are conversations, it is not clear that marketing can be a conversation. There is a role for PR to act as advocates on the basis of total transparency, in fact authentic PR. There can be no effective PR without clear identification of the client, the client’s interest, and funding of spokespeople or institutions. The best PR is straightforward, accurate and respectful. We are paid advocates, whose primary task is to promote the virtues of a product or company. But for us to be credible, we need to acknowledge side effects of a drug or environmental trade offs. We must find credible third party sources to provide factual backdrop for our work. We should make easily available a set of supporting documents that offer a detailed review of the data. There needs to be a place for the community to contribute its own experiences and views, providing real context. We should also be a bridge to multiple stakeholders, listening to their views and presenting options to our clients, who in the end must make the decisions.
Please feel free to post your comments, reactions, contributions on-line at www.edelman.com/summit07.
It was a fascinating first evening. I am off to the event right now for Round 2.
Posted by Edelman at 8:40 AM
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Richard:
How were your comments received? Did these heavy duty journalists agree that PR has a role here, or do they shake their heads and tolerate the PR guy who believes that PR can achieve parity with journalism? Won't PR always be a mettlesome necessary evil to journalists?
Mark
Posted by: Mark Rose at June 11, 2007 10:38 AM
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| TrackBackJune 1, 2007
I Had Fun at MESH
I was a featured speaker yesterday at the MESH Conference in Toronto. I spent about 45 minutes in a discussion with Stuart MacDonald, our former client at Expedia and now an Internet entrepreneur. View the transcript here.
Here were some key points I tried to make:
1) This is a time of great opportunity for public relations. We are now able to compete with other communications companies (advertising, promotion) which have historically had the primary seat at the table. Our big ideas are often the program’s central idea. We are also uniquely suited to the present environment, which depends on dialogue, trust and relationships.
2) The role of the PR person must evolve from a pitching mentality to a listening/learning approach premised on conversations with reporters, bloggers, critics, analysts, employees, and myriad of client stakeholders.
3) The quality of the content we distribute must be high because it is increasingly used as primary source data, without the mediation process inherent in working with a reporter. We need to offer attribution, to give real depth of content and to check our sources, to ensure journalist-level quality.
4) There is no place in PR for spin. To be deemed a spinmeister is the ultimate insult. We are in the business of presenting reality, both to clients’ stakeholders but also to the client. We advise, develop strategy and listen, so that we help to shape the reality.
5) We must dare to be great. We should not settle for being limited to conducting media relations—which will continue to be essential. Our approach is more relevant than any other communications discipline because today everyone has a voice with the means to publish their opinions, and participate in communities. We need to ski the hill hard, to fall a few times in the process, but to get up and ski again.
Here are a few links: to others who commented on my discussion with Stuart (Deep Jive Interests, Behind the Buzz, Web Walker and Globe and Mail). By the way, one questioner asked whether I would debate Mike Arrington (yes, anywhere, anytime) and said that I seemed calm, cool and smart. I accept that description with alacrity.
I am off to Chicago for my brother’s wedding tomorrow night. A small family anecdote is necessary. At my wedding, my brother John, my best man, was charged with placing the glass covered by a napkin under my foot so that at the conclusion of the service, I could stomp on it and declare my marriage. Whether it was his placement of the glass or my ineptitude, I completely missed on the first try. I will be sure to position both him and the glass properly for his big stomp tomorrow.
Posted by Edelman at 1:11 PM