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July 25, 2008

Industry Leaders

I recently sat down with Doug Simon, President of DS Simon Productions, as part of a series of conversations he is having with “Industry Leaders.”

Posted by Edelman at 1:57 PM |

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Posted by: Doug Simon at July 29, 2008 10:38 AM

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July 24, 2008

BANANA and Other Little Known Truths: The Fortune Brainstorm on Technology

I am returning from the Fortune Brainstorm on Technology at Half Moon Bay, California. The general mood was upbeat, with large and small companies reporting good customer demand and ambitious new product pipelines. The technology sector is now playing in so many more sectors, from energy and environment to health (nanotechnology) to Web 2.0 applications to consumer products; it does not rely on the success of enterprise computing.

Here are a few of the most interesting observations from speakers:

1) BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) has replaced NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)-Howard Morgan, IdeaLab, described local opposition to wind mills, solar mirrors and other alternative energy sources.

2) Locate new global R&D centers near great universities- Sean Maloney, INTEL. You cannot count any longer on immigration of skilled talent to the West. You do better by having a R&D projects focused in one lab than trying to collaborate across borders.

3) Cyber-genic Presidency-Paul Saffo, the futurist, predicts that Obama would offer a wholly different sort of consultation with his constituents via the Web.

4) Cross Platform Marketing-Robert Scoble, Fast Company-When Scoble posts, he also Twitters about his subject and posts on FriendFeed. No wonder, given that 16,000 people follow him on FriendFeed and 30,000 on Twitter. While Scoble is interviewing an executive, he is even getting questions on Twitter from his readers for the interview so that he is listening in a unique manner. Verizon runs ads on Facebook to drive users to its Facebook page, replacing the bizarre ritual of brands asking teens to be their friends.

5) Clients Fear Uncontrolled Editorial Environment-Andrew McLean, MediaEdge-There will be addressable audiences for television. There will be engagement collaboration, not interruptive marketing.

6) It Is All About Creative- Dave Poltrack, CBS-The rate of fast forwarding on DVRs is four times higher on poor advertisements than for engaging ones. The line will blur between content and ads, which we’re seeing with the introduction of product placements in newscasts.

7) Visual Networking—Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco--Communications, computing, content are merging. Video will no longer be passive. Good example is tele-presence, a new generation of virtual meeting service.

8) Technology Accounts for 2% of Carbon Footprint-Jonathan Schwartz, SUN-PCs/printers are the largest part at 50% of total, followed by telecom at 33% and data centers the balance (note this is fastest growing segment, given cooling needs).

9) Separation of Church and State-Cheryl Sandberg, Facebook-She suggested separating your work/volunteer and personal friends lists. Both are valid but should not overlap.

10) Hunker Down for Seven Years—Andrew Braccia of Accel Partners-He said that his companies, shut out of the IPO market for now, are not green-lighting projects over $80 million. The entrepreneurs are reconciled to a longer time frame for monetization.

11) Users Demand Aggregation-Peter Chernin, FOX-He said that his network decided to pair up with NBC to launch HULU because consumers wanted more content in a single place. He noted that traditional media has a long life as long as individual brands have #1 market position.

12) Structured and Unstructured Influencers-Mike Mendenhall, CMO, HP (disclosure: an Edelman client)-It is no longer sufficient to place stories and buy ads in mainstream media. You need to reach out to the passionate consumers, employees and other stakeholders with views that add substance and texture to the conversation. As my friend Paul Bergevin of Intel said, there is a continuum from control to credibility; advertising is the controlled message, PR and social media provide the credibility.

Living in New York City, surrounded by the doom and gloom of the financial services industry, it was a welcome tonic to go the Left Coast, where all things seem possible and even likely. The PR business will play an even more important role in earning tech companies the license to operate as the new product stream moves to confront the most pressing challenges of our society. The jobs of PR tech companies must morph from product publicity to policy development and third party advocacy, as new ground rules are created by government. I would appreciate your views as always.

Posted by Edelman at 1:02 PM |

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Posted by: Jeffrey Klonoski at July 24, 2008 5:13 PM

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Posted by: Kyle Austin at July 26, 2008 11:35 AM

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Posted by: Johanna Fry, Cisco at July 28, 2008 12:52 PM

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Posted by: Richard Edelman at July 28, 2008 2:24 PM

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Posted by: TravisV at July 31, 2008 12:44 PM

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July 17, 2008

Serious Works

I had lunch on Tuesday with Jim Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs, the monthly review of foreign policy issues published by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. The headline from the lunch is that the serious minded readers of this publication are growing in number and are engaging with both print and on-line versions. Here are some of the highlights of lunch:

1) The publication now sells approx. 200,000 issues per month globally, up by five times since Hoge took over as editor ten years ago. About 15% of those issues are sold on the newsstand, for the fancy price of $8 a copy, versus $30 for a full year subscription.

2) The average reader is college educated (97%), has a graduate degree (61%), and has high income ($1.3 million mean income, $555,000 median income indicating a few really rich people at the far end of the spectrum!). More than 80% of the readers hold professional and managerial positions.

3) A recent study indicated that there are four million Americans very interested in foreign policy, so Hoge is bullish on the prospects for his magazine.

4) The average reader spends two hours with each edition. There is a very high correlation between readership of Foreign Affairs and the Economist.

5) Hoge is hiring a separate staff to bolster the on line version, ForeignAffairs.com. His goal is to become a focus of discussion on foreign policy matters. If Senator McCain issues a policy pronouncement on Iran, then ForeignAffairs.com will cover it and offer a discussion aggregator function for others to chime in. Context is provided in the Background section, which offers articles from past years on the specific policy. A new version of the on-line product goes live in September.

6) The future of the magazine also depends on going global. The Indian edition, published with the Times of India, has some content from the US edition but is largely focused on Indian issues. Both Chinese and Middle Eastern versions are being contemplated. There are Japanese, Russian and Latin American editions as well in local language.

7) The top source of new subscriptions comes from a small box on the top of the on-line edition’s home page that offers a year-long print engagement. Hoge said that he is getting 3,000 new subscribers a month from the online offer.

8) The magazine is attracting advertising from financial services, high end products (auto) and corporations seeking to enhance their reputations. Unlike many publications, the magazine has not organized conferences to bolster revenue.

The success of this magazine is further proof of dispersion of authority from traditional mainstream media such as newsweeklies toward specialized enterprises that focus on niche markets.

For us those of us in PR, we should recognize:

• There is growing desire among influentials for quality – evidence by growth of credible media brands like The Economist and Foreign Affairs

• To reach opinion leaders today we need to engage specific media with substance and data, while attending key forums events such as Davos, which provides the opportunity to engage and critique ideas in person.

I would appreciate your views as always.

Posted by Edelman at 3:40 PM |

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Posted by: Jessie Paul at July 22, 2008 10:36 AM

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Posted by: Linda Margaret at July 24, 2008 4:54 AM

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Posted by: JamesBruni at July 24, 2008 9:57 AM

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Posted by: Richard Edelman at July 25, 2008 2:37 PM

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July 10, 2008

The Newseum

I had a private tour on Monday night of the Newseum, the shrine to news, which opened four months ago in Washington DC six blocks from the Capitol. As I moved around the impressive facility, I was reminded again of the centrality of the media in provoking change and safeguarding democracy. Consider the following quote from former Attorney General John Mitchell, recorded by the secret White House taping system, about the Washington Post’s pending publication of a story on the Watergate break-in. “Katie Graham’s going to have her tit in a ringer if she goes with this story.” This threat to the paper’s owner is hung just above the Woodward and Bernstein article that did run in the Post, with the actual door to the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex.

The Newseum, built by the Freedom Forum, makes an important distinction between democracy and Communism by displaying eight sections of the Berlin Wall and a guard tower that stood in Potsdamer Platz. On the Western side of the wall are colorful hand drawings condemning tyranny and hoping for reunification. On the Eastern side is blank concrete, a stark reminder of the totalitarian state. Just above the Berlin display is a full broadcast studio that is home to ABC’s Sunday morning program, This Week with George Stephanopoulos and a control room with two hundred broadcast news feeds, that punctuates the difference in governmental systems.

There is a powerful memorial to 9/11 in the display of the broadcasting antenna that stood atop the World Trade Center and somehow survived the 110 story plunge on that awful day. The twisted structure once provided the TV signals for New York City’s stations. It is set in front of headlines from newspapers from September 12 (my personal favorite: BASTARDS). One is similarly affected by the tribute to fallen journalists, murdered in pursuit of the truth. My host, Fred Kempe, former editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, paused at length in front of the exhibition case that contained former colleague Daniel Pearl’s laptop, passport and guide to Arabic language (he was killed by Al-Qaeda operatives in 2002 while researching a story on future plane hijackings by terrorists).

The symbiotic relationship between news and government is reflected in the current exhibition on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. The “Ten Most Wanted” list of criminals came from an innocent question from a Washington based reporter, leading to a front page article with ten photos. The FBI’s PR department, recognizing a good idea when they saw it, institutionalized the list. The moniker “G-men” for FBI agents came from a cornered criminal, “Baby Face Kelly,” who used the phrase as short for Government men while asking for clemency (they shot him dead in a gun fight). A photo of Walter Cronkite, anchor man for CBS News, during a visit to the battlefields in Viet Nam is posted next to a comment from President Lyndon Johnson, who said, “If I have lost Walter Cronkite, then I have lost the American people.”

There is a full floor of newspapers that report on important events, from the sinking of the Titanic to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The masterpiece of understatement goes to the Wall Street Journal, reporting on the stock market crash in October, 1929, with a headline, “Record Drop in Stock Market; Trading Remains Orderly.” The New York Post immortal headline, “Headless Man Found in Topless Bar,” actually exists! The museum has a special area for children, who are asked to play reporter and editor, filming original content, creating short form video or print content that can be posted on their MySpace or Facebook pages. Kids have a conference room to decide whether or not to use content for the paper, including a picture from the Civil War that has clearly been staged by the photographer, and letters from the Unabomber who sought coverage in the Washington Post and NY Times.

Neither business news nor social media is given any space at the Newseum. It seems a very odd omission that will need to be fixed in future plans for the facility. The Newseum is a must for all of us in journalism, public relations or other communications disciplines.

The Newseum in Washington, DC

Posted by Edelman at 11:04 AM |

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Posted by: Bill Hobbs at July 10, 2008 5:47 PM

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Posted by: Marilynn Mobley at July 15, 2008 10:51 PM

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July 1, 2008

Tectonic Plates Shifting

I was one of the speakers at the second New Media Academic Summit hosted by Edelman and PRWeek last week in Chicago, which was attended by 70 leading US and Canadian academics. Here are some of the most compelling insights, specifically about how media and companies are adopting social media:

1) Media must become comfortable with the economics of fragmentation, not scale, according to Troy Mastin, media analyst for William Blair & Co. “We will see hyper-local products, targeted at specific suburban populations. Young people will associate based on personal interest, passion and professional affiliation.” Mastin was very bullish on community newspapers, particularly those smart enough to be open to consumer generated content, as “the cross-roads for rural areas.”

2) Advertising will be the primary revenue source for media, not subscriptions. Mastin contends, “There was great resistance to putting all content on-line because we don’t get paid as well to do it. But now it is clear that we will have an advertising supported media model; you cannot charge enough on the subscription side to have quality.” Mastin cited a 2007 William Blair study which said that 81% of college students in the US prefer ad supported to paid content, up from 73% in 2006.

3) News will move from being at the very core to become the supporting element to products and services. Dick Tofel, former associate publisher of the Wall Street Journal, suggested that sports sections of local newspapers could be supported by advertising from fantasy sports leagues or that the local newspapers could run those leagues. “Sports news then becomes the necessary adjunct. We need to stop thinking of news as the core product. In fact, newspapers will have to offer products and services supported by news.”

4) Newsrooms continue to separate digital and print products. According to Jim Kirk, business editor of the Chicago Tribune, this is a “crucial disconnect.” Newspapers are losing the 38 year old mother who is dropping frequency of reading from four days a week to Sundays only. He cited the revamping of the real estate section to include school test scores, crime statistics and Google Maps, leading to a 10% jump in traffic in the first weeks, as proof of the success of an aggregated product.

5) The skill set for journalists must evolve. To cover the recent shootings at Northern Illinois University, the Chicago Tribune sent reporters to the scene but found crucial facts on Facebook and MySpace. “Journalism graduates must be creative and powerful in both written and video formats,” said Kirk.

6) Evolution from top-down to open dialogue model—Steve Grove, political director of YouTube, said, “The Hillary Clinton campaign was very much top down communications, with controlled messages. The Obama campaign moved toward a next generation approach of innovation driven by the crowd, such as the Change video produced by Will.i.am.” He noted that 50 million people have watched the 1,100 videos up on the Obama YouTube channel, compared to 4 million who have watched the 200 videos on the McCain YouTube channel. The Fight the Smears site put up by Obama’s campaign to combat rumors about the candidate “shows that you must combat falsehoods aggressively and quickly,” Grove said.

7) Content is still king and mainstream media, particularly cable TV, is a powerful amplifier for new media. Grove said that “the influence of cable is critical; you get a 10x increase in YouTube traffic if (for instance) Keith Olbermann uses a piece on MSNBC.” This same philosophy was echoed by Dan Bracken of Church & Dwight, reflecting on the Trojan Evolve campaign (disclosure; Edelman client), which had an article in the NY Times, then became the most blogged item on the NY Times web site, then moved into social media.

8) Companies are embracing the open dialogue model, but slowly and carefully—At the vanguard is Starbucks’ with www.MyStarbucksidea.com (disclosure: Edelman client), where customers can make suggestions and get an update on the companies response and action to their ideas. Alix Wheeler of Starbucks spoke about creating a “seeing culture” with visibility through consumer input. “We add to the dialogue by putting in features such as Most Popular Idea or Most Recent Idea. We change policy based on feedback, such as availability of bold coffee any time of day in 800 stores. We have 50 employees from across different groups in the firm, who are ‘idea partners’ who contribute and respond to story threads. Our Ideas in Action shows how we are putting consumer generated ideas to the test.” Drew McGowan of Clorox (disclosure: Edelman client) noted that 75,000 people have taken the pledge to stop buying water in plastic bottles through the FilterforGood.com site, which connected with their audience through a partnership with mainstream media specifically NBC’s Biggest Loser show.

9) Social media requires a continuing dialogue -- Several panelists made the point the traditional campaign approach that has a start and end date is now moot because once you begin the social media conversation around your brand, you have to continue and maintain the relationships.

10) Blogs are not the most popular method of social media communication worldwide-- popular social media forms of communications, like blogs, Facebook, etc. varies per country. For instance, in China, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) are the preferred medium, while mobile is key in communicating in lower-income neighborhoods.

I am more confident than ever about the role of public relations in the evolving communications world. We have to improve our game--to inform the conversation while listening and learning from all stakeholders. At the heart of our clients’ PR programs must also be public interest, solving problems that matter. I’d also encourage of all us in professional life to continue to send along case histories to academic institutions that demonstrate these attributes.

We blogged live and extensively from the Summit, and I encourage you check out the content. Your views are appreciated as always.

Tags: Public Relations, Academic Summit, Brita, Journalism, Social Media, Trojan, Starbucks

Posted by Edelman at 4:47 PM |

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Posted by: David Mullen at July 3, 2008 11:30 AM

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