finance

The SEC, Twitter, and unknowable ‘known knowns’

April 6, 2013 – 11:13 PM

From MKHMarketing on Flickr

Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of ‘known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns’. That clip is at the bottom, a famous moment of international political hilarity. Until this week, the financial world had a few of its own ‘known knowns’ that traders had to officially ‘unknow’, until they were known in an official sense.

Confused?

Welcome to the world of material non-public information and insider trading. The concept of insider trading was initially designed to level the investing playing field. No longer would the rich, the powerful, well-connected ‘insiders’ have better information about publicly traded companies than the typical retail investor. By insisting that trades could only legally be made based on public information that was accessible by all, any misuse of information asymmetry would become punishable by law.

That imbalance of power (information is power, remember?) was facilitated by a lack of technology. In the pre-mobile days of Gordon Gecko, information from the inside of a corporation was hard to come by and harder to verify than it is now. Unless, of course, you were an insider or had one in your back pocket. You had to have a leak, and the means to confirm that leak, before making a trade on the back of it. Imagine that in a world without mobile phones. Unless you had a watertight source of information, you had to receive information in some other form (fax/landline, perhaps) and then locate someone who could corroborate that for you. That meant getting them on a landline, which (remember this?) wasn’t always guaranteed. Not everyone was right by a phone all the time.

Because information was far harder to share, you could reasonably infer intent or recklessness if that sort of valuable information was shared and then traded upon at a profit before anyone else had a chance to do likewise. The phrase ‘insider trading’, in those days, made sense.

The SEC, in the Netflix case, found itself in a ridiculous situation, the opposite of what the insider trading regulations were designed for. When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings posted on his public Facebook stream that Netflix’s monthly online viewing surpassed 1 billion hours, it became public knowledge. However, because it wasn’t released through official investor information channels, this information was classed as ‘material non-public information‘, and not legally tradable. The law which was meant to prevent Joe Punter from an imbalance of information was being applied to protect the class of investor who used to be on the other end of the see-saw. The institutional investor, who would once have had access to more information is suddenly at a disadvantage.

What’s more, all class of Joe Punter, technically, should not have been trading on this new information. It was unofficial – material, but non-public. Not. Tradable. Effectively, Joe Trader was being asked to ignore, or ‘unknow’, this information until the institutional trader could catch up via a traditional release on a traditional channel. It was, for a short time, an unknowable known. The desire for level playing fields aside, this is crazy. It is not ill-gotten information, it is relevant, accurate, and, above all, PUBLIC.

Mobile, instant communications have turned companies inside out. An ‘insider’ is just as likely to be an outsourced consultant, working remotely, as they are a wonk sitting in the centre of HQ. Hell, it could even be a CEO who has pinged his Facebook followers with a relevant update. We all share content dozens of times a day and companies, inadvertently, wear their insides on the outside, courtesy of their employees.

The ruling from the Securities Exchange Commission tries to bring things back to the centre. It says that it’s okay for corporations to share material information via social media now, and for that information to be considered tradable.

The line being jumped on by most people is:

‘Most social media are perfectly suitable methods for communicating with investors, but not if the access is restricted or if investors don’t know that’s where they need to turn to get the latest news.’

The most important lines come in the final paragraph of the SEC release on April 2, most of which is pure caveat:

“[D]isclosure of material, nonpublic information on the personal social media site of an individual corporate officer — without advance notice to investors that the site may be used for this purpose — is unlikely to qualify as an acceptable method of disclosure under the securities laws. Personal social media sites of individuals employed by a public company would not ordinarily be assumed to be channels through which the company would disclose material corporate information.”

What the SEC is saying is that it’s okay for a company to release info via nominated accounts, but only those which are flagged to investors. But if there’s a disclosure from an employee’s twitter account, not flagged to investors in advance, and you trade on the back of that, it’s still insider trading, even if the name of the crime doesn’t really fit.

It’s not going the whole way to opening up social media as an insider information free-for-all, but it is redressing the balance again. Only this time, it’s not in favour of the masses, because the masses already have the upper hand. It’s almost like the SEC read the last line of this Forbes article entitled ‘It’s time for the SEC to join the digital age’ and implemented every word.

There’s further to go, of course, and it will be interesting to see what the SEC does next. Will they wait for another loose, stock-surging tweet or make a pre-emptive move to define in greater detail how companies should regulate information disseminated by their people? Will it lead to even greater restrictions on social media use in publicly-traded companies? What of the non-nominated channels in the interim, the coder who hints at a shipping date on Twitter and just happens to be followed by Joseph Weisenthal from Business Insider who blabs it to the entire financial world? It’s like chaos theory. If a geek tweets in China, what happens when it causes a financial tornado in Texas?

And, wrapping up, hats off to Netflix. Not alone are they disrupting the TV & movie industry distribution model, they’re doing the same for distribution of financial information.

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Advertising Content marketing

Simple stories strike home

March 15, 2013 – 2:27 PM

I’ve been involved with creating some small-scale storytelling projects for non-journalistic ends in the last few years. All of them have had two things in common – zero budget and, as a result, forced simplicity. If you have budget, good for you. Spend it wisely, and you have the luxury of options. But if times are tight, fear not. Simplicity can be your best friend. Simplicity means focus.

Once you figure out the true purpose of what you’re trying to communicate, the most direct route to that message is often the most effective. Take, for example, our recent promo video for Storyful. We wanted to communicate that there were great people behind what we do. Storyful is a journalism-as-a-service kind of business, we are largely b2b and thus don’t typically provide our staff with exposure via bylines, but they are the heartbeat of our organisation. Our business is inherently human.

We produced an in-house movie, scripted by myself and Mark, to highlight the human factor of Storyful. It was shot on my own gear – the same equipment that I used to film this short doco for the Red Cross back in 2010 – against a white wall in the breakout room. Canon 7d, Zoom H4n, and, quite literally, the shiny backside of a whiteboard as a reflector to even out the shadows cast by downlighters in the Storyful breakout room. We knew what we wanted, we had Ed Rice cut in some video from material used over the past two years, and hey presto:

Likewise, when we needed to post a job opening last week, we knew that we’d want something that would get traction pretty widely with the right readership, but which wouldn’t cost us anything, ideally. I wrote up the job description on a Google Doc and made it public.

The job posting has since had more than 3,600 views, and we have had nearly 200 responses – but it was also a fantastic bit of PR for us, due in large part to a little kicker at the end of the job posting:

Applications to Storyful’s Head of Content. Yes, their email address is omitted on purpose. Finding news is all about finding the right person to talk to. It starts …. now.
UPDATE: 4.30pm GMT: If you’re calling the office to ask for our Head of Content’s name, we’ll be asking for your name and why you can’t work Google. =)

Putting a little related challenge into the job posting got people chatting, and even though it was only a tiny barrier for anyone who was remotely qualified, it served to weed out the candidates. We didn’t need to run any paid-for ads, we didn’t need to promote the ad anywhere, the twist in the application process did the legwork for us. It’s a scaled-down version of what Pizza Hut are doing at SXSW, where they’re asking candidates to pitch themselves in 140 characters – only we didn’t have to pay to produce an animated YouTube video, or hire any space in the Hilton for the interviews. For us, in relative terms, the return on investment was just as good.

Irish website Broadsheet.ie picked it up instantly and ran it as a story in itself, and the ad even got some international attention:

Back when I was recording in Kenya for the Red Cross, I also did some training with a Kenya-based, but Irish-founded NGO called Moving Mountains. The goal was to teach the team how to tell their own video stories in a simple way using Kodak Zi8 cameras, and leave them with some good introductory videos for the project in Nairobi and around. The key barrier to break was that the team had to relax, allow their true personalities to come out and be a bit creative with how they illustrated themselves on video. It was a fun process, with the results in a playlist below. The key message that unifies all these examples is this: Don’t stress about production values or the equipment you have. Worry about the purpose of the content you’re creating, and the simplicity of your message. Get that right, and it’ll all work out fine.

 

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Advertising Content journalism marketing

Should you really hire journalists for your company?

March 10, 2013 – 3:31 PM

from sskennel on flickrJournalism jobs are under threat and being lost by the score every day. So with the rise in demand for sponsored content and brand newsrooms (See what Forbes and WaPo are doing), are the laid-off masses going to fill the seats in these new quasi-journalistic enterprises?

I’m not so sure about that.

If you’re hiring, you will find many people with the skills to do that kind of job in journalistic circles.  As Chris Hogg says in this Digiday piece:

Agency copywriters take days to write what a seasoned journalist would produce in a matter of hours, and they don’t process data and editorial insights in the same way a journalist would.

Decent journalists can knock good copy out in their sleep, and marketeers hoping to build a team would (should) be scrambling to get their hands on them. But it may not be that easy. I’d wager that one of the greatest challenges for any company hoping to create a brand newsroom is going to be finding the kind of journalist who blends creativity, intelligence with an ability to understand and willingly speak from the brand bible – and have a business brain between their ears. As it was put to me recently by one journo-turned-comms person (who’s doing pretty well, post-transition):

That’s the problem with journos turned social media hacks. We’re too embarrassed by bullshit to be really successful.

Say ‘brand newsroom’ to a seasoned journalist who hasn’t considered the concept and you’re likely to provoke a curling of the nose. It’s seen as a PR gig. For anyone who has worked a newsdesk, digging through an inbox polluted with PR stink to find news items, a step into communications is a step out of supposed objectivity, and credibility.

Many among the old-fashioned herd of journalism are intensely non-commercial. Editorial sovereignty and a Chinese wall between the journalism and the commercial were always taken as writ on editorial floors. I’ve been in newsrooms where a creeping merger between the two has led to ructions, and tanking morale.  Even where journalists are largely shills for a particular sector (I’m looking at you, music and fashion journos), many will still insist they are incorruptible pillars of objectivity. Working as part of the marketing machine for a brand is a philosophical anathema to them.

Whether they realise it or now, even those pillars of journalistic salt are already articulating a clearly defined brand, merely by doing their job. The editorial tone, house style, accepted ‘vibe’ of whatever outlet you work for? That’s your employer’s brand. Your byline/twitter persona/personal blog? That’s your personal brand.

Charlie Brooker is as perfect an example of the Guardian’s brand as CJ Chivers is of the New York Times.  The New York Times, lofty, sophisticated and international, is particularly interesting, because it is in the middle of one of the biggest media brand redefinitions in recent years. It is shedding the Boston Globe, which it currently owns (too regional an attachment for a global player like the NYT) and renaming the musty-sounding, shields-and-trumpets International Herald Tribune as the ‘International New York Times‘. News organisations are brands. And every journo knows what the brand they work for stands for. Journalists are naturally brand-conscious.

As journalism continues to fragment and search for new business models, the jobs in pure editorial will continue to drop away, most likely, and those in more commercial forms of journalism-slash-content-creation will multiply. That doesn’t naturally mean that those who lost their jobs will be able to make a straight swap. Any news organisation that’s cutting staff will try to retain the people who have the right blend of future-proofed skillsets – i.e. the very same people brands will want to scoop out. These are the people for whom snappy copywriting is second nature, who are immersed in social media, and who have an innate understanding of netiquette and how the web works.

If you’re building a brand newsroom from scratch, you’ll be looking to take some young, malleable minds and train them in journalistic workflows and thought processes. That includes all the skills in monitoring, parsing of information, contact hoarding, doubting and checking of facts and experimentation in storytelling that good journalists do naturally. So while there may not be a role for journalists in the newsrooms themselves, there’s an opportunity for them to market their knowledge in setting them up.

 

 

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Aid/Development Content marketing media

A year after Kony2012, five non-profit wins

March 5, 2013 – 7:25 AM

Screen Shot 2013-03-04 at 20.34.25

March 5 marks the one-year anniversary of a film that blindsided everyone who has an interest in NGO communications, or how narratives emerge from developing countires – Kony2012. The video defied all logic for web videos. It dealt with a complex and obscure topic, lasted a half hour (most ecof the popular web videos are under a minute long) and had a heavy, moral message. I won’t go into the amazing story of Kony2012, there’ll be enough column inches written about it on Tuesday. But one passage from this excellent Observer piece stood out, describing a a report on the film’s impact, which concluded:

 ”[T]he way in which charities communicate has to change in the wake of it”. It was, he said, a “game changer”, “for all of us to hear about it from our kids. That’s how I heard about it, from my teenage son, 48 hours in. I was like, ‘How come you have heard about a Kony video and I haven’t and it’s my job? And I haven’t ever heard you talk about Africa before.’

“They reached young people in a way no charity has been able to do before. They connected to people’s stories. It wasn’t snazzy or trendy. It was just good old-fashioned story-telling.”

Despite Kony2012, many NGOs are still trying to peddle the old press-release (and sometimes video) email to journalists, effectively begging for coverage, when it’s been demonstrated time and time again that you need to push the boat out to get cut-through. Kony2012 changed the game entirely. This video has more than 96 million views on YouTube. That’s unheard of, and it’s proof of concept that if you do something different and connect with people on a human level  your message takes on a life of its own.

So here, in no particular order, are my top five favourite comms projects from NGOs and non-profits, people who really thought differently about how to tell their story. Some are expensive and involved, others cheap and engaging. But all are game-changers in a way, and should serve as models for emulation.

1. Médecins Sans Frontieres – Premium Publications

MSF are consistently courageous with how they tell their stories, blending multimedia with that French bravado that serves them so well. The two books to the right, Writing on the Edge and The Photographer, don’t follow the usual formula, rather they are by-products of them. The Photographer is the story of a snapper who went to Afghanistan in 1986 to observe the work of a team of doctors. After the trip, he and two artists blended his work with a graphic novel describing the trip. The result is a wonderful, human narrative that tells a woven story which separate words & pictures cannot achieve.

Tom Craig’s ‘Writing on the Edge’ is another image-led collection with the photographer again as the constant. Craig was accompanied on a number of trips with MSF by his pick of great writers, AA Gill and Daniel Day-Lewis among them, resulting in an expensive, experimental and richly-produced book that is visually halting and riveting to read. Both are examples of how thought and freedom can create something that endures for a NGO’s brand. I bought copies of both – they’re stunning.

2. Wikileaks

OK, so it descended into farce, with Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy, after hosting a

Wikileaks

Russia Today chat show and being defended publicly by George Galloway, but as far as non-profit comms projects go, Wikileaks blew everything else out of the water. They acquired some phenomenal content and made it public in a very creative way, by drip-feeding it to the world and seeding it via a safety-in-numbers network of global media houses, who had the power to visualise and manipulate the data and make it come alive. Would you know about Anonymous or Lulzsec were it not for Wikileaks? Would the occupy protests have happened? Arguable points, but a watershed nonetheless.

3. Shave or Dye

A local one. This initiative from the Irish Cancer Society has raised more than €4.5million for the charity, by getting people to raise money by either shaving or dyeing their hair. It has it all. A macabre play on words in the title, a playful way to make light of one of the worst stigmas associated with cancer – hair loss – by co-opting the healthy into mimicking the worst effect of the illness, or making the hair they still have seem ridiculous. It is fun, and it has the backing of a national broadcaster. A superb, simple success.

4. Mapping @fieldproducer in Burkina Faso

When Neal Mann was between his jobs with Sky News and the Wall St Journal, he was drafted by Save the Children for a trip to Burkina Faso to cover a looming food crisis in the country. They approached me to help them document the trip in a new way. At the time, we were in the habit of using maps to contextualise stories at Storyful, so I suggested we do the same for Neal’s trip to Burkina.

While he pinged back pics and audio from BF, I got busy embedding and arranging them on the Google Map to make the journey come alive. The map ended up attracting 26,000 views, with one of Neal’s audioboo reports getting the same again after it was promoted on Audioboo’s front page.

The engagement was genuine, from fulsome praise to the debate it generated around Neal’s use of Instagram  in some of his reporting. But it was all unfiltered, unmediated, and in real time. Neal had the freedom to respond to users in real time, just as they watched him upload content items and spell out the context around what he was seeing. The trip, it was claimed, generated five times the traffic of a long-form piece from the Guardian from a similar trip to Mozambique.

It took a leap of faith from Save the Children, but it cost them little more than the airfare for a high-profile online newsmaker, and the gains in terms of engagement and understanding of the crisis were manifest.

View Burkina Faso Trip in a larger map

5. Kony 2012

One year, 96million views. Whatever your thoughts on how they went about it, it is a phenomenon, and it should redefine non-profit comms for the future. NGO folk still understand that they struggle to get beyond the ‘black babies’ or ‘eyes ‘n’ flies’ narratives, but this film blew through those stereotypes, for better or worse. It stands alone.

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Advertising Content journalism marketing

Journalism closes a door, brands open a window

February 27, 2013 – 10:41 PM

via noodlepie on flickrI got involved in a tete-a-tete over the concept of journalists as entrepreneurs on Twitter on Wednesday. The essence of it was the question of whether or not journalists should stick to journalism, and not worry about the selling/entrepreneurial part of things. If they stick to journalism, the argument went, they will be better placed to maintain the quality of their work. I disagreed (you can read the whole thing here).

That discussion was about individual journos, selling their own wares, largely in the news sphere. We didn’t tackle the broader ‘grand repurposing’ of journalism. Marketeers have come to realise that rather than trying to convince journos to ‘print their stuff’, they’re going all in and hiring them to do what they do naturally, then piggybacking on it and basking in the reflected glory. They call it brand journalism. Bizarrely, it often offers journalists, photogs and filmmakers the freedom to do the stuff they’d desperately love to do. For money. I know.

This repurposed journalism, in which journalists are hired to create great content for magazines, websites and even TV channels conveniently  owned by brands, is on the rise. It’s the advertising world’s rising MO and an area in which smart companies are willing to invest heavily and build big, creating talented teams to turn out top-quality content.

They’re hiring, and hiring fast. (Net-a-Porter are hiring right now, so are Patagonia). Take Patagonia. They now have a team of ten journalists, developers, designers and an editor-in-chief creating their blogs, websites and tumblrs. It seems to be working.

From Digiday:

Patagonia does not rely on outside agencies for any of its marketing, another unique aspect of its approach. “By doing things ourselves, we are just removing the layers,” Boland [Bill Boland, Patagonia’s digital creative director], said.

“Proving ROI isn’t a big challenge,” he said. “Our biggest challenge is that we have more content than we could possibly publish, which makes it hard to figure out what gets in and what does not.”

The whole project, every fullstop and pixel, exudes ‘Patagionaness’. They even take counter-intuitive environmental stances against their own product from time to time. Damn hippies. Minor scuffles aside, it’s clear that Patagonia’s editorial team are advocates for the company and its philosophy – they speak the language of their customers, they are wholly into it, which is why the whole thing works, and why they have become magnets for relevant content.  And that’s crucial if brand journalism is to to be practical, and credible. Jez Frampton, CEO of Interbrand, spoke of the importance of that in the content marketing context. It’s essential that everything that emanates from a brand newsroom is in tune with that company’s ethos.

‘Every message from a brand is viewed in the context of that brand: its market position, personality, values, competitive stance etc.  In other words, it shapes the way we interpret the message, and in a world where our communication with brands is increasing exponentially, a clearly articulated and defined brand becomes even more important.’

Translation: If there’s a sniff of your team being false, or trying to be something you clearly don’t believe in, the reader will shred your credibility in a bloody marketing pogrom. The media houses with a strong brand and who understand their brand, are the ones that are surviving, and that’s not restricted to fashion houses or FMCG entities. The FT and the Economist are thriving. Al Jazeera is spreading like nits in a kindergarten. They are all well-defined brands. And then there’s Red Bull. Originally a fizzy drink made (so the urban myth goes) with the stimulating freshness of a bull-testicle extract, Red Bull is now a global media empire (which just happens to sell a beverage).

From Mashable:

‘Lately, every conference PowerPoint on the future of advertising or PR seems to mention Red Bull as a — if not the — shining example of a brand-turned-publisher, what every future-leaning agency encourages its clients to emulate.’

Red Bull has gone from emblazoning other people’s events with extreme soft-drink bunting, to running the events, ending at a point where it producing high-grade expeditionary documentaries, magazines and the rest off the back of their extreme lifestyle advicates and has become a global leader in content marketing. They sell drinks on the side. No-one would question the quality of the film, photography and interviews they produce. Their team are outstanding. The content they create is stunning.

‘It [the Red Bull behemoth] recently released a feature film, The Art of Flight. The movie cost a reported $2 million to make, but when it hit iTunes in 2011, it parked atop the charts for more than a week — bringing in $10 per download.’

Remember a time when brands used to pay for ads in the traditional media? Step through the looking glass into the Red Bull content pool. It’s a place where the traditional media can go to pay for professional content produced by people who once tried to sell you fizzy can of caffeinated cough mixture which they advertised in the traditional media. Dizzy? You should be, particularly if you work in the traditional media. Former advertisers selling you the content you once used to use to sell them advertising? It’s like someone invited you to dinner, got you drunk, and then stung you with the bill. Red Bull describe their content pool thus:

‘A one-stop gateway to our full media catalog: plug-and-play web clips, documentaries,news pieces, photo shoots, the latest interviews, and accompanying editorials. With over 50,000 photos and 5,000 videos, the Red Bull Content Pool is the finest dedicated global content source in existence for sports, culture, and lifestyle material.’

Red Bull are streets ahead of most brands looking to get into this game, and there’s a frantic game of catch-up being played.  Everyone wants in, but the road to creating a newsroom from scratch is daunting.. In a Harvard Business Review blog post, Newsweek/Daily Beast CEO Baba Shetty said brands need to be more like newsrooms:

For messages to be heard in 2020, brands will need to create an enormous amount of useful, appealing, and timely content. To get there, brands will have to leave behind organizations and thinking built solely around the campaign model, and instead adopt the defining characteristics of the real-time, data-driven newsroom — a model that’s prolific, agile and audience-centric.

That’s easy to say, but not easy to do. Agility and timeliness are particularly challenging, because it means your creative wordsmiths also need to be skilled at monitoring all the relevant incoming news and/or social media signals to find whatever it is they should be reacting to. Digiday provide a dose of reality.

Any publisher will tell you that operating a newsroom is an expensive, arduous task. It’s also incredibly difficult to do well, especially if it’s not your business.

Amen, brutha. (Sorry, SISTA). It’s tough. Say you’re a clothing retailer, your core competency is, well, clothing. Not editorial (exceptions aside). There’s an enormous skills gap. It’s a gap into which journalists should be leaping to make a buck. Some are – in the form of companies like /Newsroom and networks like Contently, springing up to fill the content gap. As newsrooms shut their doors, there are windows opening in the world of brand journalism. But journalists may be reluctant to break in. In fact, they may board up the holes. Why? More to follow.

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Advertising Content marketing video

Discontent in a world of content

February 2, 2013 – 7:42 AM

Guinness’s October ‘cloud’ ad floated softly near many of the YouTube videos I’ve been watching lately. It’s a 30-second version of a TV ad which has been sliced down for the web. It normally appears with the option to click out after five seconds and go through to my chosen video (what YouTube call a TrueView in-stream ad). Like any of those ads, it has five seconds to hook me, five seconds to pique my curiosity before I can escape.

In those five seconds of mandatory viewing, there’s no reference to Guinness. We see a cloud moving over sea, its shadow moving onto a quay and then over a slightly confused chap under some girders, at which point, BAM, I’m bored and I’m definitely clicking out to see the video I came to YouTube for, and Guinness has had ZERO brand impact on me.

Granted, I’m a curious person, and because we work with YouTube it pays for me to understand how ads get served, so I’ve watched the ad through – but purely for that reason. It’s a nice ad, it’s a pretty ad. It’s been well-received as a creative puff piece in the advertising world, as you’d expect from one of the world’s strongest drink brands, (although unnamed critics have said it fails to link to the brand). But it hasn’t been thought through for YouTube. It’s a simple case of someone not understanding the platform. It’s the online equivalent of having 14-point font on a ten-foot billboard – it just doesn’t make sense.

And let’s be clear, this is not a case of where creating a ‘viral’ ad that, shareable for its own content alone (á la Dollar Shave Club), has missed the mark. Nor is it a case of understanding just the potential for reach of a platform (staying with Gillette, as we’re talking razors) but falling short. It’s a misunderstanding of the fact that content AND platform TOGETHER are far more than the sum of their parts. Publishing content that is tailored to get the most out of the given platform has the potential to deliver multiples of the expected impact. This is about having your agency, and your marketers understand the potential, and the constraints, of the platform on which you’re placing content. Get that wrong and you may as well sit on the toilet ripping up €50 notes, throwing the shreds between your legs.

But I’m not a marketer, I’m a journalist. Right?

Platform consciousness is as crucial for journalists as it is for advertisers. Not all content is suitable for all formats. Where, say, video is shoe-horned into a page thoughtlessly, it fails to have the desired effect. Where a longer article is copied from a blog to newspaper site without the links, it is weakened. On both fronts, journalism and advertising, the ones who understand the relationship between platform and content will win the battle for eyeballs. This isn’t knowledge confined to the web-native hipster ‘generetion Meh’, either – the old guard are catching on.

I gave a presentation to Metro International’s annual gathering of editors last week and we discussed the importance of knowing your platforms, knowing your readers and their behaviours, and knowing what to put where, and when. During that talk, we discussed how the Financial Times are going digital-first. More than simply promoting digital, the FT boss Lionel Barber is beginning to realise that you have to look at each piece of content and wonder where it is appropriate to post it, and that may not be in the pink paper, straight off. A few select quotes from Lionel’s email to staff set the tone for the paper’s new direction:

We need to become content editors rather than page editors.

We must rethink how we publish our content, when and in what form, whether conventional news, blogs, video or social media.

We need to ensure that we are serving a digital platform first, and a newspaper second

The New York Times are clearly doing something similar, although Jill Abramson’s memo was a little more person-focused and a lot more vague on the details. They get that when you mix content with platform sharply, it works.

Journalism, or at least part thereof, finally realises it is in the business of content marketing, competing for attention with brands that are motivated to produce great content in huge volumes. The very advertisers that used to subsidise journalism have decided that traditional advertising has a limited potential for engagement, so they’re creating the editorial themselves and hanging their product loosely on it. Content is king. Red Bull know this, which is how a fizzy drink has become a global media brand. Independent beer-peddlers (with a £20m turnover) Brew Dog know this. One of their biggest brand recognition wins was to blow a conversation about a Diageo-controlled prize wide open, positioning them as the dog biting at Diageo’s hefty ankles. Now, their boss has said that he would ‘rather take my money and set fire to it’ than invest in traditional advertising, so they’re putting together a TV show about craft beer.

And that brings us neatly back to Guinness. I’m not about to claim that one of the world’s best-known brands don’t know what they’re doing. The people behind the black stuff clearly understand the black magic of advertising, and the crowd behind the cloud have a full trophy locker. But everyone makes mistakes. Their pretty cloud and its poor fit with the platform shows that the ground under our feet is constantly shifting. As you dance from platform to platform, you must be sure your content is content in its surroundings.

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Should the C-suite learn to tweet?

December 28, 2012 – 7:47 PM

CEOs of big, successful corporations largely don’t tweet. Fact. And that’s probably not going to change. Anyone who tells you that they should be active and public on social media probably has a vested interest in them doing so.

Does that mean that CEOs and senior execs shouldn’t understand the medium and what it offers? Hell no – McKinsey’s report on the social economy brings big-buck, bottom-line evidence to the table, showing that companies can unlock billions of dollars in value & productivity from effective use of social media, both internally and externally. But actively using social platforms, responding to it, scanning it constantly – that’s something a CEO or senior executive could probably do without.

Advocates of social media have taken a crowbar to the boardroom door of late to see if they can smuggle social media into the C-suite, armed with reports and opinion pieces all bent out of shape to show the world’s most successful businesspeople why they should use social media personally. An article by Ryan Holmes (headlined ‘The $1.3trillion price of not tweeting at work‘ – headline may not be his) bemoans the fact that of the Fortune 500 CEOs, only 20 (sic. – it’s 19) are on Twitter. Of those, nine are ‘active’ – i.e. have tweeted in the last 100 days. The article leans heavily on (but skims only a few tidbits from) that deep, analytical report from McKinsey which outlines untapped billions of value that could flow from the ‘social economy’.

Holmes says that the boardroom doesn’t want to know about social media:

As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom. Within the C-suite, perceptions remain that social media is at best a soft PR tool and at worst a time sink for already distracted employees.

Maybe. Do they need to? Also maybe. The McKinsey report figures suggest that 53% of senior executives, at the level of vice-president or above, are using web 2.0 tech. In another McKinsey survey of executives at 4,200 companies around the world, 70% said that they were using social technology in some ways and 90% of those said they were seeing some degree of business benefits.

The management team is on board, and the benefits are likely to be rolled out through their teams and entire companies, so why are we still cribbing that the very tippy top of companies aren’t tweeting madly? Is it just that high-performing top-tier execs don’t use social tech in the platform-promoting way that the social tech world would like them to use it?

Granted, personal Facebook & Twitter use is low among Fortune 500 CEOs. Just 3.8% of them are on Twitter, a tiny sliver when compared to the 34% of Americans who use the platform. But then, that 34% of Americans aren’t running the world’s most successful businesses. Another ‘social CEO’ survey in CEO.com said ‘CEOs lagged far behind the general population in terms of social media participation’. But then, the general population lag far behind CEOs in terms of career progression, don’t they? So why worry?

What the figures for CEO Twitter usage may also fail to take into account is that any CEO who guards his or her valuable time would arguably be best served by ‘lurking‘ on social media platforms rather than actively engaging. Could it be that @SlickLover45 is actually the CEO of ExxonMobil, the world’s second-largest company, just hanging out on Twitter, silently watching and absorbing during thin slivers of available time? When one’s time is so valuable, how that time is used becomes increasingly important, and the most effective CEOs are often the ones who manage their time best. To this end they have PAs, secretaries and team leads who redirect low-level distraction away from the chief. Focus is everything.

Adam Brault is not a Fortune 500 exec, but is the founder of a software company &yet, and he gave up Twitter for November 2012 to take time out and reappraise his relationship with the platform. The key takeaway from his time off? The value of uninterrupted thought.

I used to believe that time was the most important thing I have, but I’ve come to believe differently. The single most valuable resource I have is uninterrupted thought. That’s how everything I’ve ever felt was meaningful about my entire life came to be—either people I’ve come to know, things I’ve learned, or stuff I’ve created.

I’ve realized how Twitter has made me break up my thoughts into tiny, incomplete, pieces—lots of hanging ideas, lots of incomplete relationships, punctuated by all manner of hanging threads and half-forked paths … I’ve found that my greatest joy, deepest peace, and most valuable contributions come from intentionally choosing where to let my focus rest.

Don’t think that Brault is a good enough example, when we’re talking about bigshot executives? Fine, but it’s a mode of thought put forward by former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel, who advocated ‘extreme focus’ when he was the boss there:

Thiel developed an unorthodox, extreme philosophy on focus and prioritization. Instead of focusing on five things, or three things, the magic number is one. You only focus on one singular thing. As PayPal executive Keith Rabois recalls, Thiel “would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative.”

Jack Dorsey, former Twitter boss and CEO at Square, breaks his week into focused days, with each day taking a particular theme.
Naturally, he and current Twitter CEO Dick Costolo are both on Twitter. Twitter, however, isn’t in the Fortune 500. Yet.

While they largely shun Twitter, CEOs are above-average users of LinkedIn, the global professional network, with 129 of the Fortune 500 bosses boasting active LinkedIn profiles – 25.9% of Fortune500 CEOs, compared to just 20.2% of the general population. Making and maintaining a walled garden of valuable personal connections is seemingly of greater benefit to them – which would lend you to believe that if a CEO wanted to use Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and wanted to mimic the utility they saw from LinkedIn, they would be best served by a private, locked account. High-level executives do not, as a rule, crave the intrusion that comes with public profile. In a lengthy interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, he said that he couldn’t even identify the CEO of Exxon Mobil, who has a negligible profile in comparison with that of Steve Jobs’ high-profile successor. Exxon Mobil is number two in the Fortune 500. Would you suggest that the lack of a social media presence is impeding Rex Tillerson from doing his job effectively? Hardly. For some CEOs in some sectors, being in the public eye will be beneficial. For others, it’s counter-productive. There are plenty of CEOs who choose to be online, and visibly so. Others will shun it, personally, and yet run companies which have an effective and useful social media presence, and whose business development teams roll it into their research and outreach programmes.

Holmes again:

Without a push from the top, many of the biggest companies have been slow to take the social media plunge.

McKinsey again suggests otherwise. Their report showed 62% of Fortune 500 companies as active on Twitter. In fact, the same report says that only 31% of the Fortune 500 had no social media presence in 2011. In contrast to the perception, it’s the world of small business that is lagging behind. Only 31% of America’s SMEs were on social media in 2011.

One thing that Holmes, CEO.com and McKinsey agree on is the value of social media to large companies. Ditching email in favour of social internal comms networks like Yammer, mining social media for data, customer insights , sales routes and feedback can deliver directly to the bottom line. Nielsen know it’s valuable. Harvard know it’s a source of competitive intelligence. The McKinsey report is a chunky one (160 pages before you hit the bibliography), and it’s worth reading in full. It avoids the pom-pom hyperbole and superficiality of many pseudo-surveys which offer paltry insight and serve as attention-getting PR cannon-fodder.

Of course, if as a CEO you’ve frittered away the time you’d spend reading an insightful report updating your status on social media, you can just read the executive summary.

Before signing off, here’s a real-world example of how having the fop floor office fully connected to the outside world is a double-edged sword. Dan Cobley, MD of Google in the UK & Ireland, racked up 411 comments on one post on his Google+ profile over the botched delivery of Google’s Nexus4 phone. It’s an example of how customers were able to give direct (and vehement) feedback directly to the top tier of management, but also an insight into how distracting that direct connection could be.  Is it the MD’s job to be dealing with customer dispatch gripes? Answers on a tweet.

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internet video

Turn on, Tube in.

November 11, 2012 – 6:14 PM

Ever wonder what a day of YouTube uploads would look like if you recorded them on VHS and stacked them on palettes? I did. Here it is.

Last Wednesday I told a TED audience of 250 people that the YouTube video platform was becoming the most important repository of documentary evidence about humankind in existence. It’s a bold statement, but I think it stands up.

YouTube is now becoming a real-time window on world events through live streaming. It is already the host of the world’s biggest, most accessible video archive of life on earth – from the mundane to the spectacular. Some of that is real-time documentation, and some of it is retrospective material. And it is growing at a phenomenal rate. Every minute, 72 hours of video is added to YouTube. By the time my short TED talk ended on Wednesday, there were 864 more hours of video on YouTube than when I started.

Three things this year changed how I view YouTube.

The first epiphany was the Democratic conventions in the US. I wanted to watch the event unadulterated, without commentary, without the partisan hackery or faux-objectivity of the networks. YouTube had a page dedicated to the conventions, where I could browse in and out of the live action as it happened, or, when things became a little dull, review videos from speeches I had missed.

What startled me about my own behaviour was that I hadn’t checked the TV stations to see how they were covering it and subsequently dismissed them, but that I made an innate choice that YouTube would be my first stop. I didn’t even consider Fox or CNN – YouTube was naturally the first place I went to watch the elections. I didn’t reach for the remote, I grabbed the iPad. That was a big shift. YouTube had always been the first place I’d go to for footage in retrospect, but for it to be my instinctive choice for ongoing news, as it was happening – that was HUGE.

Felix Baumgartner’s edge-of-the-atmosphere parachute jump was the second. Eight million people logged on to watch that little hop live via YouTube. News channels couldn’t devote the adequate time to it and would skip in and out, but Red Bull’s YouTube channel streamed the entire thing. The last minutes of the ascent were mesmerising. Joe Kittinger’s halting instructions to Felix in his pod were endearing and highly stressful. I hooked a laptop up to the TV to super-size my YouTubing, and watched the plummet, wondering if TV coverage of live events was on a similar, plunging trajectory.

The third  is the ongoing war in Syria.  Footage from Syria and the Arab Spring in general falls into a different category to most YouTube uploads- it is, arguably, evidentiary material. An entire war, to which external media were NOT welcome, has been documented via the clenched, phone-holding fists of citizens, soldiers and activists. And last week, the UN said that one particular event could, if validated, be considered a war crime. The evidence lay largely on YouTube servers.

We are now the most-chronicled generation in history.  There has never been a greater level of unfiltered documentation of humanity (caveats coming) in history. It also gives us a window into countries that old-school news would never have shown. Through YouTube you get to see past media stereotypes to get candid glimpses from Saudi Arabia, central Russia, caucus states, Pacific islands and elsewhere. It must be said, however, that documentation falls short of being global. Swathes of the planet are not represented for reasons of culture or connectivity. We know, in Storyful, that there are ‘black holes’ for YouTube footage, due to connectivity, etc.  Coverage from certain countries in Africa is abysmal. When we’ve gone looking for footage of news events in Congo, Mali or anywhere in the centre of Africa, it’s simply not there. Iraq is a dead zone for YouTube content. On the other hand, I’ve been involved in helping Google curate video from elections in Nigeria, Senegal and currently Ghana, all of which have been very active, and creative, in how they cover news. Given its need for decent upload speeds, a per-country/region comparison of video footage tallies could very well be an interesting benchmark for a global connectivity study.

The problem with YouTube being a gigantic and ever-growing haystack of video is that most people approach it looking for needles, and the means by which you find what you’re looking for haven’t matched the pace of the growth in volume. Organising the stack is crucial to make it navigable, useful, and potentially, to allow it blast a lot of TV into insignificance by making more content accessible to everyone, everywhere. he greater focus on channels, much vaunted of late, will hopefully begin to make this a reality.

How does this relate to the mainstream media? The media houses that recognise that organising YouTube into usable channels early are the ones will thrive. You can already see how some are adapting. Check out the New York Times, with their Timecast videos and wall-to-wall election coverage. See how the Weather Channel delivered non-stop Sandy via YouTube for the duration of the storm & aftermath. And look at the Wall Street Journal which has succeeded in integrating relevant, timely web video reporting seamlessly into what was a traditionalist financial newspaper.

News orgs can’t think of themselves as TV channels, or newspapers (with website) anymore. They have to think of themselves as content generators, connecting with the audience via whatever format people makes sense for them as they go about their daily lives – and with the access to more and more newsworthy video content ON YouTube (72 more hours of it every minute, remember) it’s cheaper than ever to package news with video. Being successful in news in the next five years probably means having a sensible video strategy, re-skilling journalists to tell their stories using multimedia – training an old-school subeditor to think of 15 selected seconds of amateur footage in the way he might once have thought of formatting a pull-quote.

To do all that, the haystack has be organised. At TED, 15-year-old Jack Andraka drew a standing ovation as he described how he, effectively, Googled his way to means of detecting pancreatic cancer. In doing so, he had to find the one protein of more than 4,000 in the cancer which would help him in his bid for early detection. He described it not as finding a needle in a haystack, but as finding a needle in a stack of needles, which is probably just as accurate in this case. Without the means to find the needle you’re looking for, your fingers are going to get pricked thousands of times. And that’s no fun.

UPDATE: YouTube recognised by the ICFJ with an ‘Innovation in News’ Award:

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journalism

Go long, journalism. Go long. Just not every day.

October 15, 2012 – 8:10 AM

Pic by starmanseries on Flickr

If working in social media news has done one thing to me, it has done its best to screw my attention span. It has been comprehensively obliterated. (Thankfully it’s not irrevocable – I prescribe a long-form article a day). Going by the umpteen laments and half-assed social media rehab attempts by prominent tweeters, I’m not alone.

Joe Weisenthal, known as @TheStalwart on Twitter, confessed that he can’t sleep at night due to the fear he might miss something which he should be writing & tweeting about.

In a New York Times profile which described Weisenthal’s ADHD work-day, it says that his 15 or so daily articles are paralleled by a constant presence on Twitter (88,723 tweets and counting). He seems to work 17 hours in a non-stop frenzy of three-way communication.

[A]ll the while he holds a running conversation with the roughly 19,000 people who follow his Twitter alter ego, the Stalwart. He spars, jokes, asks and answers questions, advertises his work and, in the spirit of our time, reports on his meals, his whereabouts and whatever else is on his mind.

Weisenthal’s profile was held up as describing what real-time journalism has become, a mind-bending, frenetic, sleep-deprived hamster wheel. Weisenthal recently profiled another speed-news freak, Kevin Reynolds, who runs Bloomberg’s ‘speed desk’, which doesn’t take its name from amphetamines, at least not officially. Reynolds runs what is considered the world’s best smash-and-grab news filtering operation in the world. They offer the quickest turnaround, the most market-moving nugget of news in any given situation, and they jangle their nerves in the process. As Weisenthal explained:

“[I]f you think that the internet has killed your attention span, then feel pity for Reynolds: ‘I have no attention span… by the time I leave here, someone has to explain comic books to me.’”

If you’re a thumb-twitching social media junkie, the chances are you’re consuming your news in a headline-chugging way, downing intro paras like a frat boy downs Jagermeister shots. That’s the way that Weisenthal and Reynolds churn it out – at a livid pace. The antithesis to this staccatoed news consumption is good, long exploratory hunks of journalism, the kind of thing that sticks with you for days. People would like to think they want to read that every day, but the analysis doesn’t bear that out. At News Rewired on February 15 this year, there were two standout observations from a panel on paid-for content models (read: the alchemy that is making actual money from journalism). One came from François Nel, an academic who made one wager in the middle of his meandering presentation that struck a chord. He bet that within five years the New York Times would abandon paper on weekdays and only print a real inky paper on the weekend. The likelihood of this hypothetical, based on new reading behaviours and time poverty among readers, was backed up by stats presented by Tom Standage from The Economist. Standage said that The Economist’s guilty secret was that ‘the main reason people cancel their subscriptions with The Economist is that they don’t have time to read it, and it just piles up and they feel guilty’. That’s print subscriptions, by the way, not digital. Magazines piled unread in a corner exert shame in a way that the iPad has yet to mimic. Standage followed up his comments on The Economist’s time-poor customers by saying those who consume the magazine through their app tend to take between one and three hours on the weekend to sift through its content at length, getting through a staggering volume of content. That behaviour is at odds with weekday interaction, which is largely via web and much more fleeting. It’s that lean-back phenomenon you don’t get Monday to Friday. You don’t lean back at your desk, where you’re meant be looking busy, and you don’t lean back during your commute.

The weekday/weekend divide is getting deeper and deeper, which tallies with my own loosely scientific (i.e. not at all) surveys, which I nearly always take when I speak on panels or at conferences. It tends to go something like this:

Audience: Is social media killing journalism?

Me: Um, well let’s do a survey – how many of you buy a paper during the week? Hands up, please.

[No Hands]

Me: How many of you buy one or more papers during the weekend?

[Lots of hands]

Me: So none of you get any news during the week apart from the evening news when you’re finished work?

Audience: Duh, we get it on the internet

Me: And do you pay for any of it?

Audience: Eh, no.

Me: Do you see a connection between you not paying for news during the week and journalists losing their jobs, and the standard of journalism falling?

Audience: Oh. Yeah.

Standage’s observations, Nel’s and my own haphazard surveys are actually fine behavioural analysis for a long-form, lean-back perspective. The way people consume news corresponds directly to how much competition there is for that time. During the week, most people have capacity to ingest the what, where and when of the news before their attention spans burn out with all the other options available to them.

They’re commuting, worrying about that damn spreadsheet from the Indian tech team, thinking how Roz from HR is stiffing them on holiday entitlements and checking whether Saturday night’s photos made it onto Facebook. They might skim some news, but that’s it. At the weekend, they’ll sit back and get into the how and why of a story, and luxuriate in the features section. Their mind is less cluttered. There’s less competition for their attention.

What does it mean for journalists who want to do long-form? It just means that the journalism has to be even more stand-out than ever to coax someone to either commit to it on a weekday or save it for later via Readability, Instapaper or something else. As an aspiring long-form journalist, you have two days in the week to get a reader to invest time in your material (Saturday and Sunday). So, be awesome, and be creative about distribution. Like, say, Marc Herman, one of a growing batch of journalists who are taking all those leftover words in their notepad and Twitter-addled brains and selling them as ebooks. Herman’s ebook from his trips to Libya during the revolution paid him more than the original commission. (It’s damn good – get it here).


The problem is, good long-form reporters are increasingly rare, particularly among the junior ranks. In the same way weeds can choke the good bits of a garden, the proliferation of less honed writers writing more often online has meant that the skills needed for good narrative writing have died off. It’s a lot easier to spit 250 words and a few embeds onto a webpage than it is to construct a proper story that will keep a reader hooked, paragraph after paragraph, for 3,000 words. Sarah Lacy, founder of Pando Daily, says that they are committed to mentoring the young would-bes, but it ain’t going to be easy.

[U]nfortunately the last six years or so of commodity free content on the Web and shrinking newsrooms in old media has conspired to destroy the bench of good, investigative journalists and long-form storytellers. These simply aren’t disciplines you’re born with and there hasn’t been a demand to train people in it.

I hope Lacy, and whoever else is still bankrolling good in-depth reporting can pull it off. Like most people, I don’t do in-depth during the week, to a large extent, unless I really need a switch-off. But on a Saturday and a Sunday I’ll buy the papers for a handful of heavy feature articles. I’ll lean back with a coffee in a comfy chair and soak it up. I’ll scour my Twitter list of longform sources, pick one and immerse. Longform is for weekends, holidays, commuting delays and bouts of insomnia. The format doesn’t matter. It might be an article on the design of the human penis that I’ve stored on Readability, or a new Gonzo journalism project from Greece that I’ve downloaded via Kindle, or just a hefty piece on Hipstamatic’s hipster panic l that Flipboard spat out at me. It just has to be good enough to hold my attention. Because if it fails in the first 4oo words, there’s another half dozen things queued up on my phone ready for reading.

But here’s the thing. The two days a week where I sit back and hoover up lengthy news truffles are the minority. The rest of the week I’m in search of the subtle skim, the best-curated bit that helps me digest news in a time-efficient manner. The profile of Joe Weisenthal, insomniac newsaholic, mentioned at the start of this piece spawned a lively debate when the NYT published it. A journalism professor from Florida called Weisenthal’s modus operandi out on several footings. He said that Weisenthal’s work was too short, too prolific (and inaccurate at times) to be something to aspire to, and that Weisenthal was on a short path to burnout and had no life. Students should aspire to be more like the late Anthony Shadid, he said, who immersed himself in his topic and wrote at length. Weisenthal’s boss backed him to the hilt in response, saying that Weisenthal (best business journalist of the year in 2011, by the way) was not trying to be an Anthony Shadid. He was fulfilling his brief: provide a rolling, non-stop index of need-to-know info for Business Insider’s readership, presented in entertaining form. And his boss agrees that he’s insanely good at it. One can assume that he is paid commensurately.

The world needs Weisenthals and Shadids to fill a news week, probably in a 5:2 ratio. To be a Weisenthal or a Shadid means being gainfully employed, producing consistently top-quality journalism in your chosen sector bar none, and breaking your ass to do it. All of those items are things to aspire to. And depending of the day of the week, both are worth reading.

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blogging

Put a little birdhouse in your soul

October 3, 2012 – 7:35 PM

Birdhouses by See-Ming Lee

“It’s crazy. I would consider it one of the worst photos I’ve ever taken, but it has become the most popular photo on my stream.”

As someone who ends up reading a lot about journalism, online communities, Twitter and social media in general, this pic has cropped up regularly in the sites I tend to scan. It’s a pretty easy image to link to the bird-icon behemoth of Twitter, itself a huge flitting community of twittering folk. The more I saw it, the more I wondered about it, and where it came from. Part of the joy of social media is the shrunken proximity – you can generally find someone and reach out directly to them incredibly easily. And so I got in touch with See-Ming Lee.

See-Ming is a particularly forthcoming and chatty bloke, with numerous presences on Twitter and elsewhere online to support his design business, which he operates from Hong Kong.

He posts a lot of pics on his Flickr stream, allowing most of them be used widely via Creative Commons. I’ve posted about that aspect of things over on Storyful. He’s earned cash and profile from the use of some of his pics – this one being an unexpected success. He was planning to erase it, having taken the shot to test a new Canon 70-200mm f4 lens he had on his camera. He snapped a pic of the community garden near where he was living in New York (mapped below) to see how the lens performed, back in December 2007. The birdhouses can’t be seen from the Google Earth view (he shot with the lens zoomed at 126mm, according to the EXIF data - perhaps from outside the fence) but you can see where the blue paint stops at the north-east corner of the garden. A dust spot nearly persuaded him to deleted, but instead he stuck it on Flickr and intended to forget about it. Until it got picked up and went gangbusters.


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If you recognise it, you might be surprised as I was to hear that no-one has ever asked See-Ming about the genesis of this photo, despite its ubiquity. It’s been used widely in the 4 1/2 years it’s been on the web, its birdhouses and bright colours making it an easy target for people looking for something to loosely tie to Twitter, or community, or whatever. Most people have credited See-Ming Lee for its use, as asked. But no-one ever wondered who he was, or how his photo ended up on Flickr.

So now you know.

It’s just one example of how there’s a story behind every piece of content unleashed on the web. Sometimes the story is inordinately dull. Sometimes the content is posted with a purpose, and sometimes it’s an act of serendipity that finds it ending up online. It’s often worth probing, though.

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