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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27947381532816470602014-11-25T10:48:09.415-05:00Scott MontyThoughts and insights on the changing landscape of business, technology, communications and marketing, and what it means for tomorrow's leaders. Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-59621734192647647762014-11-25T10:48:00.001-05:002014-11-25T10:48:09.436-05:00Don't Quit Facebook - What Forrester Got Wrong

Earlier this week Forrester analyst Nate Elliott released another one of his bi-annual "Facebook is failing marketers" reports that takes aim squarely at Twitter and Facebook when it comes to marketing tactics. In our experience, these so-called reports have been overly broad generalizations with questionable advice and based on sampling, statistical and analytical foibles, according to statisticians.

Last week, Facebook announced that beginning in January of 2015, it will be cracking down on purely promotional content coming from brands; with limited real estate in the News Feed, Facebook realizes that people want meaningful content, not sales-y product pushing.

In an incendiary blog post (not their first - see Commentary section here), Forrester falsely claimed that "Facebook has finally killed organic reach," in an effort to gain publicity for its report. It worked, as a number of outlets – including the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company – picked up on it. The report noted the flagging organic reach of Facebook posts, which has been a real concern, but the latest move by Facebook certainly does not "kill" organic reach. If you read about the changes closely, it simply penalizes brands that are using Facebook incorrectly.

While this may seem extreme, it's been required because of so many brands posting promotional content; i.e. Facebook isn't failing marketers - marketers have been failing Facebook.

When content aligns with what consumers want to see, organic reach can go through the roof. And then, material that is proven to be contextually relevant organically can be promoted with paid media to expose it to an even wider audience - something we recommend and help execute for our clients at SHIFT.

Forrester's report, "Social Relationship Strategies That Work," warns brands away from Facebook and Twitter, based partly on its survey results in which Forrester asked 4,529 online adults, "In which of the following ways to you keep in touch with brands that you like or that you purchase from regularly?"

While the report suggests putting more effort into your own website and email (owned media), it also suggests giving up Facebook (rented media) - or at least not making Facebook the center of your marketing efforts. Looking at the above numbers and using Forrester's logic, one might wonder why a brand would want a mailing list, mobile app or SMS.

At SHIFT, we're fully committed to an integrated approach that includes multiple aspects of communications and marketing and the digital and social media that connect them. To completely ignore any segment - particularly a significant one - is to have an incomplete strategy.

We share Forrester's notion that a web presence must have more social integration to make it effective and that you should exert as much control as you can over your own properties. Here are our recommendations:

Understand your audience
It's absolutely critical to know who you're reaching or who you want to reach, as well as the platforms on which they spend their time. Having a fine-tuned analytics backend (such as Google Analytics or Omniture) baked into your site is a first step to understanding where they're coming from. It's equally as important to be up to speed with the various changes that Google makes that affect search results to your site as well.

The Forrester report notes that a branded community is a better solution because a Sony Playstation microsite gained 4.5 million pageviews (an outdated metric, perhaps?). However, they don't manage to explain exactly where those views came from. A quick glance shows that Sony Playstation's Facebook page has over 4.7 million likes. Were those Facebook fans partially responsible for the eyeballs on the site? Perhaps. But a comprehensive audit would be more telling.

Focus on quality content
You're not going to get eyeballs (if that indeed is your metric of choice) if you don't know what people want. Whether you're posting on Facebook, your website or a branded community, content matters. Storytelling, emotional connection with your readers or viewers and the ability to develop relationships with them over time are the hallmarks of the progressive marketer. Yes, you'll want to customize that content for the unique audiences on each platform, but without a story that matters to them, you'll be dissatisfied with every platform you're on.

This whole "dump Facebook" mantra is a red herring. It's a tendency to throw Facebook under the bus because of poor quality content created by marketers. Facebook is constantly developing products and tweaking the News Feed to benefit users, and marketers hold some accountability in that formula as well. If the lazy brands want to reuse content from other sites, post it and run away without engaging or gleaning insights from the data, then they deserve the paltry results they get.

Know your goals
No single site or platform is a panacea; each has its own purpose, just as a press release, launch event and Sunday circular have their uses. The tools and platforms you select should match your needs, whether it's brand building, awareness, reputation, lead generation or sales. For most companies, social networks have been much better at assisting with the upper funnel - awareness and brand communications. But if done correctly with the right content and other integrated owned properties, they can be shown to work.

Integration counts
In our experience, using each platform in a silo will yield limited results. If you know what you're doing and can derive insights from your data, you can achieve a greater outcome. For example, combining your email database with Facebook or Twitter for more targeted audience opportunities will result in fewer wasted marketing dollars. An audit of all of your activities - online and offline, paid, earned and owned media - is a powerful way to glean data and develop insights that can lead to more intelligent ways to assign your resources.

As with everything, moderation is key. Knowing what you're trying to achieve and who you need to reach is a first step in developing a comprehensive and integrated strategy in paid, earned, owned and rented media.

This post originally appeared on the SHIFT Communications blog.

Image source: Hillary (Flickr)
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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-76658805725246221722014-11-21T09:06:00.000-05:002014-11-21T10:40:48.042-05:00This Week in Digital - November 21, 2014

An Uber-mega PR crisis that takes on a life of its own, the continued importance of mobile, global internet growth numbers, Facebook continues to cut down on spammy posts, clean up your Twitter history, Snapchat gets into payments, Amazon books some travel, Spotify inks a deal for ridesharing music and hints at a future of podcasts, when it's time to invest in measurement tools, how Google judges quality content, what's affecting global payments, the best business books for 2014 and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, business, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Just a note: we'll be on hiatus next week because of the Thanksgiving holiday.

And if you wouldn't mind answering a simple, one-question survey about this weekly update, it would be greatly appreciated.

Industry

It's never a boring week at Uber, whose culture has been called into question in recent months. And this week it was like a soap opera, as an Uber executive suggested that the company should hire researchers and investigative reporters to get personal information about any journalist who writes negatively about the car service company. (re/code)

And lest you think it's just a Silicon Valley spat between a tech company and an insider publication like PandoDaily, the New York Times has picked up on it and the Pentagon distanced itself from the Uber executive who made the comments. (Bits Blog and BuzzFeed)

You know you have a reputational issue to address when a leading venture capitalist notes that Uber's culture is driven by "ruthless execution combined with total arrogance," while a widely-read digital publication states that Uber has an a-hole problem. (Business Insider and Vox)

You definitely have a problem when you get a letter from Senator Al Franken, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Technology, Privacy and the Law. (U.S. Senate)

The latest development was on late Thursday - somehow - a confidential deck of Uber's finances were "leaked" to the press. (Business Insider)

Given the hiring of one-time White House advisor David Plouffe as head of policy and communications, and the talk of "oppo" researchers, a so-called leak such as this is very reminiscent of controlled leaks that are fed out in political campaigns to distract from the main issue.

Is bad brand behavior out of control? Gawker sets up a dedicated page for bad brand tweets rather than having to write a new article for every one. (Gawker)

Mobile is overtaking television as the primary screen for time spent per day. (Flurry)

Mobile growth isn't only limited to smartphones: in New York City, old phone booths will be converted into "Links" that will feature touchscreens, wifi and charging outlets. There will be 10,000 hotspots eventually. (AdWeek)

2015 will be a big year: we'll surpass 3 billion people online, and by 2018 over half of the world's population should be online. (eMarketer) Other notable highlights:

2014: Brazil will supplant Japan as fourth-largest internet user population

2015: Mexico will settle firmly into the eighth spot, eclipsing Germany

2016: India will jump the US as the second-largest internet user population

2017: Indonesia will reach the top five, overtaking Japan

2018: China will eclipse three-quarters of a billion users, after showing accelerating growth in each year in our forecast

Platforms

Facebook

Last Friday evening, Facebook announced it will be reducing overly promotional posts from brands in your News Feed. (Facebook)

Get ready for Facebook in the enterprise. Long the mainstay of solutions like Yammer, Jive and Chatter, Facebook is working on its own solution for internal social networking. (Mashable)

Related: IBM is launching Verse, a cloud-based email and social collaboration tool. (WSJ)

Conscious of the limitations of its main app when it comes to specialized needs, Facebook has released the Groups app for better control and connection. (Facebook)

Forrester is back again with a report with limited research, claiming that brands are wasting their money on Facebook and Twitter. Claiming that brands don't have relationships with customers on the platform, analyst-lite Nate Elliott seems to miss the point that most brands haven't taken the proper step to build relationships because they've been too busy advertising at consumers. Of course they're not seeing ideal results. While we agree that it's important to have a strong owned media presence, any marketing strategy should contain a variety of platforms and tactics. (WSJ CMO Today and SHIFT Communications)

As usual, Forrester does a bang-up job of determining the what, but not the why.

Twitter

Twitter is now indexed for search all the way back to 2006. Time to double-check for any embarrassing tweets from the early days. (Twitter Engineering Blog)

You can now share public tweets via direct messages - most certainly a useful feature to customer service reps who need to take public conversations private to protect personal information. (TechCrunch)

Snapchat is getting into payments with the ability to send money to friends in a partnership with Square, calling the new service Snapcash. (re/code)

And speaking of e-commerce, Ello has taken to selling T-shirts. While not their core funding strategy, the no-ads-here network may turn to selling goods as its business model - a move that may not entirely square with trends toward the sharing economy. (re/code)

Yahoo has forged a partnership with Mozilla, wherein it will be the default search engine for the Firefox browser for the next 5 years, replacing Google in an effort to promote "choice and innovation." (The Mozilla Blog)

Amazon is about to launch Amazon Travel, a booking service for hotels, in select cities. This suddenly puts TripAdvisor squarely in Amazon's sites. (Skift)

Collaborative Economy

Airbnb is creating a print magazine called Pineapple, named after the famed fruit of hospitality in colonial New England. (New York Times)

Spotify is collaborating with Uber to allow riders to choose their music during a ride. (The Next Web and Spotify)

Here's a listing of collaborative economy funding to date. (Jeremiah Owyang)

Whttl is a browseable and searchable database of sharing economy companies. (Whttl)

Audio

Some enterprising reporters caught a mention of "magic" and podcasts in Spotify's updated code. Could the personal music giant be prepping to include podcasting in its streaming next? If so, this will give iTunes some reasonable competition, although it has the advantage of coming installed on iOS devices. (TechCrunch)

Look out, Spotify - Google has just released YouTube Music Key, which gives music lovers another streaming option - with video. (Gizmodo)

Is radio about to fall off a cliff just as newspapers did, because of the rise of podcasting? (Seth Godin)

Metrics / Measurement / Big Data

There are three telltale signs when it's time to invest in measurement tools. (SHIFT Communications)

The future is now: Nielsen is finally getting into measurement of Netflix and other streaming video services. (TIME)

Content

As you go into 2015, you might want to consider five content marketing strategies to guide your efforts. (School of Content)

Patagonia serves as a shining example of using values-based marketing for storytelling. (Fast Company)

Quality content (or at least talking about it) is all the rage. But how does Google judge for itself? Relevance, length, readability, the amount of advertising and the presence of images. (Econsultancy)

When You Have Time: Essential Reading / Listening / Watching

We'll be off next week for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, so here's a story we hope isn't a turkey: how constantly connected cooks get ready for Thanksgiving. (Think with Google)

Believe it or not, the government is a hotbed of social innovation. They may be worth a look. (HBR)

Read this on your mobile device - or at least at your standing desk. Thoreau on the art of walking and the perils of a sedentary lifestyle. (Brain Pickings)

If the developments of Snapchat interested you above, you might want to take a look at the future of global payments, where digital transformation, non-card real-time payments and data insights will have a large impact. (McKinsey)

Here are the best business books of 2014. (strategy+business) Our top picks:

Marketing: Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers by Niraj Dawar

Strategy: Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity and Enterprise by J.-C. Spender

Innovation: Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread - The Lessons from a New Science by Alex Pentland

Image source: Jesus Solana (Flickr)

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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-57572697357848513932014-11-14T06:45:00.000-05:002014-11-14T06:45:00.041-05:00This Week in Digital - November 14, 2014

Landing a rocket on a comet, being single in China is expensive, picking sides on net neutrality, Facebook updates privacy policy for humans, Twitter announces native video, Yahoo buys a video ad platform, Instagram evolves, CMO tenure is growing, Uber is getting richer while attempting to prohibit Lyft from doing the same, podcasting is in vogue with a $1.5 million for a new podcast and a database of marketing podcasts, Amazon settles with Hachette and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, business, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

And if you wouldn't mind answering a simple, one-question survey about this weekly update, it would be greatly appreciated.

Industry

The European Space Agency (ESA) celebrated this week as craft Philae landed on a comet after a 10-year journey. Livestreams, photos, tweets, media outlets and drone lovers everywhere followed the historic event. (Rosetta)

In China, 11/11 is known as Singles Day (because of the four lonely 1's that make up the date) - it's the Chinese equivalent of Valentine's Day. And it blows away Black Friday in terms of sales. (eMarketer)

In fact, last year, Alibaba did $5.75 billion that day; this year they surged to $9.3 billion. (Yahoo)

But at least you weren't the guy who spent $82,000 on 99 iPhone 6s, arranged them in a mall in the shape of a heart, proposed to his girlfriend - and she said no. Ouch. Someone's got a broken heart. On the plus side, does anyone need an iPhone 6? (TheNanFang)

Inside the wild, wacky world of Shinghy, AOL's in-house "digital prophet." It's amazing that a network that's so downtrodden has the luxury of employing such an…individual. (The New Yorker)

Forrester has noted that the average CMO tenure will rise to 60 months by the end of 2015 - a significant bump from the 45 months cited earlier this year by Spencer Stuart. It's likely that with more attention to digital and data, they need more time to make progress on these significant fronts. (WSJ CMO Today)

Legendary racing establishment Churchill Downs (home of the Kentucky Derby) has acquired gaming company Big Fish for $850 million. (re/code)

Net neutrality was in the news this week, as President Obama threw down the gauntlet. (USA Today)

Naturally, the opposition was there to poke and prod (Twitter), but others provided perspective and humor. (The Oatmeal)

To boil down the issue, we give you one of John Oliver's usual scathing videos that explains it in more understandable terms. Cable companies have been focusing on regulations and the FCC code and other arcane policy areas, because "If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring."

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Platforms

Facebook

Facebook's mandated use of Messenger has netted it over 500 million monthly users of the app. It's still less than half of the total Facebook population, but it just goes to show you what a forced implementation will do. (The Verge)

Facebook began taking a stand against Ebola with a banner atop everyone's News Feed that asked if they wanted to help to eradicate it. When a user asked what Facebook itself was doing about it, Mark Zuckerberg himself jumped into the thread with the retort courteous. (AdWeek)

Twitter

Big product news: users will now be able to record and upload video natively on Twitter beginning in 2015, making it a rival of YouTube. (Variety)

Twitter also announced they're working on an instant, personalized timeline for new users who don't want to spend time cultivating one on their own, and the ability to make public conversations private - something that might come in handy for customer service teams. (Twitter)

With recent high-profile departures of its VPs of product and engineering, heads of media and of news, creative director and others, some ask why do Twitter's executives keep leaving? (Slate)

Bill Cosby misjudged his Twitter audience when he asked for a meme to be created of one of his images. The public responded with references to some unsavory allegations in his past. (NY Post)

Instagram

Instagram made some changes this week: the Explore function opens up discoverability to allow users to search people as well as photos; and users now have the ability to clean up their typos with edits after they post. (Instagram blog)

In addition to discoverability and accessibility, Instagram is working on measures such as "time spent." (re/code)

More top brands are gravitating to Instagram, with 86 of the Interbrand 100 having accounts. (MarketingCharts)

Yahoo! is expanding its video footprint with its purchase of video ad company Brightroll for $640 million. The move also gives them an opportunity to close the gap in advertising revenue with Google and Facebook; Yahoo's share of the $43 billion digital advertising market has dropped to 5.8% this year. (The Guardian)

Pinfluencers - excuse me, Pinterest Influencers - now have talent agents. (re/code)

Had we known that bookmarking was a skill, we would have sought out representation for our Delicious feed years go. We'd settle for a Flipboard broker at this point.

Collaborative Economy

Peers.org was recently rebranded as a site that makes it easier for workers to find, compare and manage work in the sharing economy. (Peers.org)

Quirky and General Electric are showing their vision for the connected home. (TechCrunch)

Uber is on its way to raise between $1-2 billion, meaning the company could be valued at close to $30 billion. (WSJ)

Whether they get there unscathed is another question. Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson took note of Uber trying to sink funding for competitor Lyft [noted in our last issue], saying that it's not only "unethical and unsavory," but also ineffective. (A VC)

And it looks like Fred is right: Lyft's rides and revenue grew five-fold in 2014. (Fast Company)

See last section below for a longer read about taxis and GPS

Uber's intention for the taxi industry

Metrics / Measurement / Big Data

You've heard the expression "correlation does not equal causation," right? It means that while things may be related, they are not necessarily ordered action/reaction. But flip it around and you might be surprised to learn that causation can exist without correlation. It might be a bit mind-boggling, and therefore the full article is worth a read. TL;DR version: it's the data equivalent of saying "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you." (Awaken Your Superhero)

It's always been difficult to reach employees that aren't deskbound. And how would you measure it, even if you were able to reach them? Red E App has it figured out. (Cite World)

Legal / HR

Facebook's privacy policy has always been long and difficult to understand (ref. John Oliver quote above). But the social networking giant has crafted a shorter and easier to read version of its privacy policy. (The Verge)

Content

The banner ad was born of necessity, in a rush, and not because anyone thought it was a particularly good idea. The story of the rise of native content. (New York Times)

10 charts that every content marketer needs to see cover the dominant social sharing sites, the reasons people use social media, the impact of long-form content, metrics for content and more. (Contently)

When You Have Time: Essential Reading / Listening / Watching

This is a good sign that podcasting is continuing to catch on: a producer from This American Life raised $1.5 million for a new podcast startup he's calling Gimlet. We'll drink to that. (WSJ Digits blog)

"Serial" is one of the fastest-growing podcasts, according to Apple. It's so popular, there's a podcast about it. (Forbes)

It came as a pleasant surprise to find MarketingPodcasts.com, a searchable database of ranked marketing podcasts.

A fascinating look at the future of strategy from the founder of McKinsey's strategy practice, a London Business School professor and a former corporate strategist. (McKinsey)

Amazon has long been an ally of the publishing industry; after a long feud with Hachette, the two have finally reached a deal on ebook pricing. (NPR)

So just how did Amazon get on the wrong side of Hachette and a number of authors? (Vanity Fair)

When you pit GPS against London's legendary taxi driver test The Knowledge - a weird city's weird solution to the riddle of itself - how does it fare? (New York Times Magazine)

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-66398989203345268682014-11-07T10:35:00.000-05:002014-11-07T11:00:05.845-05:00This Week in Digital - November 7, 2014

It was an election week but #AlexFromTarget trended, a major digital marketing acquisition, teenagers have a more nuanced view of privacy than you might expect, Millennials are set to dominate the workforce, a look at listening habits, Zuckerberg comes clean on Messenger, BuzzFeed DIY quizzes, another week of the soap opera behind the scenes at Uber, the use of small data, deciding what to measure, the best branded content of October and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, business, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

US midterm elections were Tuesday; the Empire State Building, with its sophisticated lighting system, teamed up with CNN to light the building with the election results throughout the evening. (Twitter)

PHOTOS: @CNN lighting the #EmpireStateBuilding with midterm Senate election results! #CNNElection pic.twitter.com/Y7HXcQa4xC
— Empire State Bldg (@EmpireStateBldg) November 5, 2014

Ad conglomerate Publicis, still stunned from the failure of the Omnicom merger, is acquiring digital marketing powerhouse Sapient for about $3.7 billion - and the odd man out throws some barbs. (WSJ and Business Insider)

Social media influencers are often misunderstood - and in some cases are resented - by their non-digital colleagues. If you really want to understand why these influencers are valuable to your company, take a look at six traits they share. (Inc.)

The truth about teenagers, the Internet and privacy: to put it in Facebook's terms, it's complicated. (Fast Company)

And just like that, productivity plummeted. The Internet Archive now has 900 classic arcade games available on your browser. Chalk one up for cultural heritage in the digital world. (PC World)

Longtime platform and network BlogHer has been purchased by SheKnows, a female-centric platform. (AdAge)

According to Edison Research's report The Infinite Dial 2014, 39 million people listened to a podcast last month. What's with the renaissance of podcasting? (Edison Research and New York Magazine)

 The Infinite Dial 2014  from Edison Research

Platforms

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg offered an explanation as to why Messenger was pushed as a standalone app. The bottom line: apps can - and should - do only one thing well. (The Verge)

Facebook is Preferred Marketing Developers program is now known as Facebook Marketing Partners. Substantial changes include dividing up teams based on what objective they specialize in (ad technology, media buying, small business solutions and content marketing) to allow clients to focus on different objectives such as awareness, content optimization, lead generation, etc. (Inside Facebook)

SnapChat is incorporating brands into its "Our Stories" collections - an advertising type that's similar to TV - particularly around live events. (AdAge)

Could LinkedIn beat Salesforce at its own game? Some think so, particularly with the amount of thought leadership currently exhibited within the platform. (TechCrunch)

Microsoft has fired its global advertising team as part of a larger plan to eliminate some 18,000 jobs. (Business Insider)

The cloud is getting crowded. Move over, iCloud, Flickr, Google+, etc.: Amazon now offers unlimited photo storage and backup to Amazon Prime members. (The Verge)

You know those ubiquitous BuzzFeed quizzes? You're about to see more. BuzzFeed announced that users can now make their own quizzes. Sorry, brand publishers. You have to pay for that feature. (BuzzFeed)

Collaborative Economy

A 26 year-old woman took Uber home on Halloween after her birthday celebration. When she awoke the next day, she was greeted with a $360 bill, which she promptly crowdsourced payment for. (Business Insider)

Airbnb needs to figure out how it will evolve its relationship with cities. An interview with CEO Brian Chesky examines that. (McKinsey Insights)

Kara Swisher takes a look at the Uber Man himself, CEO Travis Kalanick - and his fiery temper that is directed at regulators, the taxi industry, competitors (attempting to hamper Lyft's fundraising), and even customers. To quote one of Uber's early investors, "It's hard to be a disrupter and not be an asshole." (Vanity Fair)

It looks like the culture is working: Lyft is suing its former COO, who they claim stole confidential documents before departing to become the COO of Uber. (TechCrunch)

Metrics / Measurement / Big Data

It's indisputable: of the 50 most innovative companies of 2014, strong innovators are three times more likely to rely on big data analytics. (Forbes)

Big data is like being at a cocktail party with hundreds of people and being unable to hear any of them. What about using small data? (Holmes Report)

Contrary to popular belief, everything is measurable in PR. The question is, what's worth measuring? Before doing creative work, it's important to determine how to measure what matters most. (SHIFT Communications and Think with Google)

Legal / HR

Not only did hackers get 56 million credit card numbers in the recent Home Depot security breach, but they also made off with some 53 million email addresses. (ZDNet)

2015 marks the year when Millennials will become the majority of the workforce. This study takes a look at the collision course of cultures between Millennials and traditional employers. (Elance-oDesk and Millennial Branding)

Content

Content marketing is experiencing something of a crisis of confidence. Is it worth it? The key is to match what you spend with areas where consumers spend time. (Venture Beat)

A new twist on content: storytelling within gaming platforms. Kevin Spacey addressed this in his keynote at Content Marketing World in September, and now he debuts in Call of Duty. This portends an opportunity for brands as well as actors. (New York Times)

A roundup of the best branded content in October includes:

A series of short holiday videos from Sofia Coppola for The Gap.

Honda's double-sided story with an extraordinarily creative use of video.

A captivating story with original content, multimedia elements and interactivity for Cole Haan by the sophisticated content studio at the New York Times.

Twitter's mapping of NFL fans across the country

An extraordinary 46-minute documentary on the future of fashion from Electrolux.

Netflix's outdoor GIFs.

Ouija's 20-second Snapchat ad.

When You Have Time: Essential Reading / Listening / Watching

Lewis Carroll, in his mathematician and logician life (before he wrote Alice in Wonderland), wrote an essay called "How to Learn," in which he outlines four rules for digesting information and mastering the art of reading that still resonate today. (Brain Pickings)

Cutting across the digital divide between the CMO and CIO in four steps. (Econsultancy)

Sometimes the Internet is a strange place. This week, for seemingly no apparent reason, #AlexFromTarget started trending. Less than 24 hours later, the unsuspecting cashier had over 330,000 Twitter followers (nearing 700K at the time of publication) and was the top trending topic, and later in the week, he appeared on Ellen.

It turns out the joke was on us, as 48 hours later, it was revealed that it was a stunt - one that proved the power of the teen social media machine. Or was it? The Twitter account that posted the first image of Alex is now locked down. (GigaOm and Mashable)

Image credit: TechCrunch (Flickr)

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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-54269623627581596252014-10-31T11:36:00.000-04:002014-10-31T11:36:10.966-04:00This Week in Digital - October 31, 2014

It was a social earnings bonanza this week, no Apple Pay for CVS and Rite Aid customers, a data breach for alternative payment system CurrenC, when real-time isn't really real, personnel changes at Twitter, a major overhaul for Flipboard, the disruptive and economic impact of the sharing economy, your analytics lesson of the week, taking brand publishers seriously, optimism and ignorance, getting others to listen to you and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, business, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the all-new This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

While Apple Pay launched last week, CVS and Rite Aid wasted no time in opting out of the system. (USA Today)

It turns out that they and a number of other retailers were prohibited from accepting Apple Pay because of their long-standing contract with the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) and its QR code-based system called CurrentC. (Fast Company) [QR codes? That should work out swell.]

And then CurrentC was hacked, with email addresses of its members acquired by third-party hackers. (Business Insider)

Taco Bell decided to go dark on social media this week in an effort to promote its new mobile app. It was wildly successful, as it hit the top 25 most downloaded apps on Tuesday. (Marketing Land)

Audio continues its rise as Deezer buys Stitcher, adding some 35,000 radio talk shows and podcasts to its network. (TechCrunch)

Harvard Business Review has been highly successful with social, often beating larger rivals. It's proof that social can be a strong tool for a targeted publication. (Digiday)

Keep watching, as HBR.org has launched a rebranded site. (HBR)

It's funny. As brands continue to focus on real-time marketing (and here are some tips on rethinking real-time from Think with Google), they're missing the opportunity to engage, such as JetBlue helping a customer like locate a lost book (Ann Handley). With social messages to brands increasing by 77%, some five out of 6 messages go unanswered. (AllTwitter)

Kind of ironic, with so many brands focusing on real-time, isn't it?

Platforms

Facebook

On its quarterly earnings call, the social giant declared its most successful quarter to date, with $3.2 billion in revenue, including a 64% increase in advertising revenue. Mobile also played an important role, with mobile daily active users seeing an increase of 39% and mobile ad revenue accounting for 66% of the overall ad revenue. (Inside Facebook) [IMAGE]

Shares fell in after-hours trading because of something Facebook said: "We plan on 2015 being a significant investment year." (Quartz)

According to Shareaholic, in Q3 Facebook drove the most traffic to sites, accounting for 22.36% of overall traffic referrals. (AllFacebook)

Facebook is increasingly becoming to the news business what Amazon is to publishing. And rather than sending traffic to news outlets, Facebook might be looking to host the news on its own site, with a revenue split with the publishers. (New York Times)

Twitter

Twitter reported Q3 earnings, showing a 114% increase in revenue to $361 million against a subscriber growth of 23%. (Twitter)

Despite meeting Wall Street's expectations, the market still wants more. (MSN Money)

As one might expect, there were some management changes to affect that: Jeremy Gordon, Twitter's head of product engineering, and Adam Kinney, head of the analytics group have left; and VP of Product Daniel Graf has been demoted after 6 months on the job. (re/code)

IBM and Twitter are teaming up to incorporate Twitter data into IBM tools, solutions and consulting services to help businesses make more informed decisions. (Twitter blog)

Twitter launched business.twitter.com to help brands grow on the platform. (AllTwitter)

The TwitPic saga is over, as the mother bird has brought them back into the nest. (Business Insider)

LinkedIn reported Q3 earnings, showing a growth of 45% in revenue, 28% user growth, and integration of B2B advertising platform Bizo. (AdExchanger)

Instagram is increasingly important to marketers - their video ads debuted this week, with entries from Disney, Activision, Lancome and Banana Republic. For added measure, here are 14 facts every marketer should know about Instagram. (AdWeek)

Tumblr - no stranger to looping animated gifs - is taking a page from Facebook and has rolled out video ads that autoplay. (Read Write Web)

This is huge: Flipboard has launched the third generation of its popular digital magazine app, with over 34,000 topics and a 7 a.m. curated update called The Daily Edition. (Inside Flipboard)

Related: follow me on Flipboard or subscribe to my magazines.

Collaborative Economy

Uber, Airbnb, Lyft are names that are now mainstream. How did we get here? A look at the timeline of the collaborative economy. (Web Strategy)

The challenge for traditional companies is that people don't want as much "stuff" around anymore. (Wired)

Amazon has opened Kindle Scout, a crowdsourced publishing program. (The Next Web)

The Internet of Things may seem like a fanciful world of talking toasters and smart refrigerators, but there are sectors where the Internet of Things really matters. (Harvard Business Review)

The technologies and mobile apps of the social media and digital world that make up the collaborative economy are slowly but surely disrupting traditional revenue. Here are the data. (Jeremiah Owyang)

Metrics / Measurement / Big Data

Content powerhouse BuzzFeed is beefing up its already strong data team with the acquisition of Tornado Labs, founded by the co-founder and former CTO of Bit.ly. (GigaOm)

There's a whole world of downstream engagement with your content that isn't being measured. It's known as dark social. (Digiday)

Your analytics must-read of the week: understanding position, velocity and acceleration. The three will allow you to turn data into insights. (SHIFT Communications)

Legal / HR

AT&T is being sued by the U.S. government for reducing the data speeds of certain customers with unlimited data. (Huffington Post)

Here's one HR leader's thoughts on why people leave your company. (Quartz)

If that's the case, you might want to look at the list of the 100 most desirable employers. (Business Insider)

Content

Thought leadership is important. But there's no need to be pedantic. So how do you write thought-leadership pieces that get published and don't make editors want to cry? (Fast Company)

Brand publishing doesn't get the attention it deserves from the journalism industry. The Columbia Journalism Review argues that it's time to start taking brand publishers seriously. (Contently)

When You Have Time: Essential Reading / Listening / Watching

In a bout of serendipity with the Apple Pay launch, Tom Webster and Tim Hayden have released their book The Mobile Commerce Revolution (Amazon). It's an incredibly insightful dive into the behaviors and societal changes that led us to where we are. (Brand Savant)

And in case you'd like more hard data, here are the numbers behind the world of mobile. Most interesting is the time spent across devices, as seen below. (re/code) [IMAGE]

Marc Andreessen on the power of optimism. (New York Magazine)

But don't let that optimism turn into ignorance. According to psychologists, the trouble with ignorance is that is feels so much like expertise. (Pacific & Standard)

Julian Treasure is a five-time TED speaker and is well versed in the art of speaking and sound. In this 10-minute talk, he has simple tips to help you talk so that people want to listen. (TED)

 Photo credit: Scott Swigart (Flickr)
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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-59328328795133776992014-10-29T07:54:00.000-04:002014-10-29T10:55:43.907-04:00Analytics and The Limits Of Knowledge

Have you seen the More Cowbell sketch (alternative link for non-US readers) from Saturday Night Live? It's more than just funny. Believe it or not, it's a powerful metaphor for a successful work life. And it provides insight into the kind of people you need on your team, and what makes an effective team.

Everyone has at least one cowbell — it's your unique, profitable talent people pay you for or your company's unique offering. It's something people have a fever for. When you discover it and give those people a ton of it, you gain success and happiness for both yourself and others. It's a win-win.

A cowbell is simultaneously something you love doing and something other people really want as well (although, as we'll see, you still will have detractors and critics). A cowbell creates joy for you and other people. It makes them yell for more. They can't get enough.

Computers And Big Data Are Awesome
The Internet has given us great ways to learn more about the world and what people want and what the trends are. We love Google Trends and the Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Facebook's Audience Insights and Graph Search. We've never known this much about ourselves and each other. We've never had more information to go on.

When you first discover these tools of Internet marketing and social media, you're astounded by the possibilities. Theoretically, we should be able to understand our audience, reach the right people, convince them more effectively, get people what they want at a better price, and so on.

But…

There's No Such Thing As Perfect Knowledge
Brian found that in using website analytics for 15 years to try to track what businesses do online, there was never perfectly accurate knowledge. There were always discrepancies and questions. If you have two web analytics programs on one site, you're going to get data that disagrees. How is that possible?

There's a lot we don't know. Not everything in the world is tracked. We can't really see into people's heads. Even MRIs don't tell us exactly what everyone is thinking. And surveys of people reveal that they often don't know why they do what they do.

As humans have had to since the beginning, we still must make decisions without all the facts. We have beliefs, best practices and theories. We have our intuition. We have big data and surveys. But we're still guessing.

Love, Marriage And Drunk Surgeons
You fall in love with someone based on who you think that person is - maybe who you wish that person was. Inevitably, as the years progress, you find out who he or she really is. Then you have to ask yourself, "Can I live with this? Is it good for both of us?" If so, you can be married a long time. If not, divorce can be very expensive.

We like to think we listen to our hearts. Or our guts. Brian likes to say, "Listen to your gut - unless you just ate Taco Bell." The truth is it's an effort even to truly know our own hearts. Sometimes gut feelings are wrong. Sometimes we're in touch with intuition and sometimes we just think we are. We're frequently wrong.

A drunk surgeon on a plane once told Garrison, "Half of surgery is exploratory. Those anatomical drawings are a lie! They're an approximation, at best. You open people up and they're different in there, so you have to change your plan."

Equally perplexing is the fact that people have vastly different immune systems. One guy is allergic to shrimp and gluten, and another guy can eat out of a garbage can in an alley and never get sick. We're not the same. Because of this, knowledge is only half the battle. The other half is effort.

Effort Is The Great Equalizer
We humans all have different compositions, capabilities, mindsets and intelligence levels. Effort is the great equalizer. We have the ability to apply what we do have, as much as we can apply it. Who's rich and successful? Usually the ones that make the effort. Why are some less athletically gifted athletes doing better than #1 picks? They're willing and able to apply more. Good motor. Hustle.

Urban Dictionary defines hustlin as "havin [sic] the ambition and drive to do everything and anything to make mad money."

In the More Cowbell sketch, Gene Frenkle, a guy who'd eaten too many burritos and bought too small a shirt, put the effort in. He played the hell out of his cowbell. Bruce Dickinson says, "I gotta have more cowbell!" Together they increased Gene's opportunity because Dickinson fueled Gene's effort.

When a Bruce Dickinson (a producer, mentor or manager) sees your enthusiasm, your opportunities increase. Every manager wants more employees who work hard.

Garrison once won employee of the month, although other coworkers were more productive. Why was he singled out? He worked until 10pm every day, and management noticed. It was really because he was bad at time management, and he just couldn't get a days's work done before 5pm. He wouldn't leave until he got it done. But his effort and persistence were noticed and rewarded.

Brian's favorite time to work is Friday night into Saturday and Sunday, because no one else is working, so no one interrupts him- and he feels like he's getting ahead. Workaholism is bad if you're a bad husband or a bad parent, but Brian and his wife don't have kids and both love to work- so it's perfect!

Hope Can Be An Obstacle
Would you rather be hopeful or successful? Would you rather have something good in your life now, or the possibility that something good might happen in the future? Do you prefer achievement or potential?

It's easy to unconsciously choose hope in ways that keep you from success. If you are content with hope, you might not finish something. You might go off and relax or entertain yourself instead of pushing through to success.

Those who succeed are impatient for achievement. They make it happen sooner. If you want to be more successful, you cannot be satisfied with hope or potential. You must push to get your results now. You must feel like you deserve more — now.

What this means is that when the "hope" type of person sees someone who's discontent or impatient or pushy, it could mean the latter person is a "success" type. Success types can be irritating, no question. But they are often leaders for this reason. They make sure it gets done. And execution is critical to success.

This post is an excerpt adapted by Brian Carter from the forthcoming book The Cowbell Principle: Career Advice On How To Get Your Dream Job And Make More Money, by Brian Carter and Garrison Wynn. Brian and Garrison will be giving away a limited number of digital copies at launch time. To get notified when they're available, sign up at:
 http://thecowbellprinciple.com/getnotified

Lead image source: Wikipedia

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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-14029602342103273602014-10-24T07:45:00.000-04:002014-10-24T09:19:44.595-04:00This Week in Digital - October 24, 2014

Apple Pay and Google Inbox launch, John Oliver calls for more interesting Supreme Court coverage, Facebook goes old school with Rooms, Twitter wants your Digits as part of its Fabric, audience ages across social networks, Uber has (another) PR problem on its hands, ROI metrics require math, The Guardian builds out editorial teams while the Mail Online makes its editorial staff moonlight as ad creators, Microsoft is the sheriff of the Internet and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

This week, we're pleased to feature a new section that acknowledges the growing importance of brands, start-ups and consumers joining forces to create new business models and solve problems. We're calling this section Collaborative Economy.

Industry

The Guardian is reorganizing to form new editorial teams to boost digital output. These include visual journalism, data journalism and audience development. (Journalism.co.uk)

The ad industry is coming to grips with crowdsourcing. (Mashable)

To wit, on Last Week Tonight John Oliver bemoaned the dearth of Supreme Court (SCOTUS) media coverage because the important content is less than exciting. So, he took matters into his own hands and has challenged viewers to take video clips of dogs and use SCOTUS audio clips with them. And The Verge took him up on it. (The Verge)

A report from E&Y finds that CMOs and chief sales officers need to accelerate change. Of particular interest: "CMOs focus too little on understanding the customer or enhancing their experience, while many CSOs emphasize short-term targets to the exclusion of strategy, innovation and longer-term connections." (MediaPost)

Apple Pay launched this week, meaning that thousands of hipsters can leave home without those pesky wallets. (New York Times)

The joke will be on them when the Apple Watch launches, requiring them to don yet one more thing. Is a wallet really that much trouble?

Platforms

Facebook

After changing its stance of not allowing drag queens to use their stage names, Facebook has told federal agents that they can't use fake profiles on the platform. (Venture Beat)

Which is completely fine, since now they'll be able to set up Rooms, a pseudonymous app that lets users create pop-up forums on any topic. (Techcrunch)

Rooms is a vintage/nostalgia play; it seems more like the IRC and Usenet forums from Web 1.0. (New York Magazine)

Popular marketing blog Copyblogger is saying goodbye to Facebook because of lackluster results with its audience. (Copyblogger)

When considering a paid strategy for Facebook, should you boost your posts, your profile, or both? SHIFT did the research and has your answer. (SHIFT Communications)

Twitter

Twitter held its Flight developers conference on Wednesday and revealed its new software development kit, Fabric. (Twitter)

Aptly named, as Twitter intends for its service to be woven into the fabric of the mobile apps whether or not the service makes use of Twitter, with tweets simply being a part of the user experience and developer experience. In addition, the Digits update means that social logins are unnecessary, with mobile phone numbers substituted for login. (Wired)

[NOTE: both of the above pieces are lengthy, but deserve the time spent with them, due to the importance and depth of this development.]

Travel site Splendia is partnering with high-volume Instagrammers to create crowsourced city guides with their images. (Marketing Land)

Snapchat has released its first ads. This is what they look like. (BuzzFeed)

Is the future of email here? Google's new Inbox may be just the thing to herald its arrival. (The Verge)

Rainn Wilson - best known as Dwight Shrute from The Office - is developing a new television show starring Vine celebrities. (Engadget)

A look at audience ages across a number of social networks. If you're into teenagers, be sure to pay attention to Snapchat, Tumblr and Vine. (eMarketer)

Collaborative Economy

Crowd Companies is a brand council that allows large companies to tap the potential of the collaborative economy, sharing economy, maker movement and co-innovation. (Crowd Companies)

Uber France tried a promotion that was quickly yanked - pairing riders with "hot chicks," if you can believe it. (BuzzFeed)

And one commentary linked it to a more pervasive corporate culture. (Pando Daily)

Metrics / Measurement / Big Data

Tracking the correct metrics for the ROI of your public relations efforts means (gasp!) using math. (Spin Sucks)

I was at the board meeting of the American Marketing Association in Chicago this week, and while I was there, I learned about how Chicago is piecing together big data for the Array of Things. (Techcrunch)

Legal / HR

Remember the case in which the appellant claimed that Mark Zuckerberg gave him 84% of Facebook? Well, now Facebook is suing that guy's lawyers for fraud, claiming that they should have known that his documentation was forged and dropped the case. (WSJ)

Content

There's no fear of the so-called church and state divide of journalism and advertising at Mail Online. They contend that journalists are the best equipped to cover in-depth content. (Digiday)

The key to sponsored content is to determine the intersection relevancy and transparency. (Econsultancy)

Trends in content marketing continue: new titles such as "Director of Content" are emerging; mobile optimization is critical; guest video posts are becoming more common; the use of visual platforms such as Google+ and SlideShare. (The Next Web)

Related: 6 ways that content marketing has changed PR.

If you think of your content like a bedtime story, it should be obvious what your audience wants. (SHIFT Communications)

Essential Reading / Listening / Watching

Well worth the read - Microsoft goes to great lengths to ensure that the Internet is safe. (Wired)

Maria Popova, proprietor of Brain Pickings, sat down with Tim Ferris to talk about writing, workflows and workarounds. Listen to this episode for insights on how a hyperproductive person does what she does. (Four Hour Workweek)

Email marketing still works. And here are 13 tips for increasing your response rates. (Hubspot)

The celebrity nude photo scandal that broke a few weeks ago has a lead suspect. And his story is more interesting than the original subject matter. (BuzzFeed)

Image credit: Wikimedia

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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-19682712121666786402014-10-17T10:36:00.000-04:002014-10-18T01:28:50.197-04:00This Week in Digital - October 17, 2014

HBO Goes digital in a move that may presage wholesale change in television, McDonalds gets more vocal, LEGO ends promotion after Greenpeace protests, Stickers are all the rage on Facebook, Twitter explains its suggested tweets strategy, social login rates across the web, improving how we value data, Whisper tacitly admits it's not so anonymous, Uber and Lyft claim another victim, the power shift between CIO and CMO, crafting a global digital strategy and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

Last week, we saw digital go traditional with Amazon's foray into a physical storefront. Now we see the opposite, as HBO will offer a web-only subscription option in 2015. (re/code)

How much things have changed in a year and a half, when HBO originally said it wasn't ready for web subscriptions. (Deadline)

As we were editing this edition, we were prepared to say that other networks would be looking at their models, and lo and behold, CBS announced that it will be creating an online subscription service, called CBS All Access. (TechCrunch)

If social media doesn't tie well to the objectives of marketing departments, then maybe it's time to stop social media marketing and give others in the enterprise an opportunity to leverage it. (Experience: The Blog)

Email marketing, search and webrooming are all forces to take into account as you think about targeting customers and beating the competition in mobile commerce. (Econsultancy)

In an attempt to turn around lagging sales and boost its brand image, McDonalds is taking to social media to directly answer questions about its food. (Bloomberg)

The company has even released a McDonalds Ambassador app for anyone who wants to be more informed about the company or its products. The app includes the ability to submit questions and search through answered questions. (iTunes)

Speaking of ambassadors, here's a quick summary of what life as a brand ambassador is like. I can attest. (Seth Godin)

LEGO has announced it is ending its 40-year co-promotion deal with Shell following an extortion effort a PR campaign by Greenpeace to ban Arctic oil exploration by attacking firms associated with such activities. (Science 2.0)

Nestle has traditionally had one of the best digital immersion plans of any global company. Now 4 years in, here's a look at how some of its digerati - and the program - have fared. (AdAge)

Platforms

Facebook

Facebook's app strategy has been less than a home run so far. Will their anonymous app change that record? (Digiday)

Not to worry; the social network rolled out Stickers within comments this week. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse were not in the Sticker Store. (AllFacebook)

Facebook IQ, the company's insights unit, has released a study that indicates marketing to millennials is flawed and fails to acknowledge the vast differences in this group. (Brand Republic)

Twitter

The latest available Twitter card for media integration is for audio, beginning with SoundCloud and iTunes, in which users can play audio directly inside of tweets. (Twitter and The Verge)

Twitter is finally explaining why they're placing suggested tweets in your timeline. Bottom line: they'd like to keep users more engaged, so they'll include content when your feed is slow or with related material that you might like. (re/code)

10 Twitter tips, hacks and tricks that you probably didn't know. (AllTwitter)

Marketers are spending more time wooing top Instagram photographers to cover their events. (NY Times)

A platform-by-platform look at what works and what doesn't work in social media. (The American Genius)

YouTube videos on Facebook are lagging as Facebook's own video platform is taking a lead. (Mashable)

Social logins across the web are tracked in this study, and it looks like Facebook is taking the lead, with 46% of sites preferring it; Google is second and is leading with B2B site logins. The study also looks at sites from other verticals such as media, entertainment and gaming, retail, music and more. (Janrain)

Metrics / Measurement / Big Data

All that data that you throw off every day: the groceries you buy, the places you go, the people you interact with - what is it worth? At this point, companies have better accounting for their office furniture than their information assets. (WSJ)

If you'd like to get better at understanding what to do with all of that data, here are four options at your disposal to get benchmarks that will give you invaluable context. (Occam's Razor)

The convergence of physical and digital is inevitable, and the data that comes with it is extremely valuable - hence, Amazon's decision to open a store in Manhattan and the need for retailers to pay closer attention to what matters. (Twist Image)

Smart marketers like Ditto are already figuring out how to use the images you take that include brand logos. (WSJ)

The excellent CMO and the Cloud series continues with Part 5 and Part 6. (Olivier Blanchard)

Legal / HR

Red Bull is paying a $13 million penalty in a class action lawsuit because of false advertising. The charge? Its popular energy drink didn't provide health benefits as stated. In other words, they didn't actually give customers wings. (The Week)

The Guardian revealed how "anonymish" app Whisper actually tracks its users, which Whisper called "not true" and "false." And then Whisper suddenly changed its terms of service and privacy policy. (Guardian)\

Content

Want a winning headline strategy? Try a little empathy. (The Next Web)

Yahoo and Tumblr have learned some lessons from working with branded content, including the importance of not talking about yourself, scale, consistency and mobile optimization. (Contently)

Hubspot's recent IPO was significant, in that inbound marketing - backed by content generation - is a key aspect of the future of marketing. (Venture Beat)

If you're trying to ascertain your investment in and impact of your content, the ebook The ROI of Content Marketing is a must-read. (SHIFT Communications)

Essential Reading / Listening / Watching

The Collaborative Economy continues to make inroads into traditional business. Hailo, the cab hailing app, is leaving North America, citing competition with Uber and Lyft. (Valleywag)

And for a tale of Shakespearean proportions, check out the disruption that the taxi industry in San Francisco is suffering because of a business model (and customers) that have been neglected for years. (Web Strategy)

The shift of power from CIO to CMO is under way as CIOs begin to be relegated to a supportive role rather than a strategic role. A look at how we've arrived at this juncture and where things are headed. [Spoiler: if you're a CIO, it doesn't look good.] (CIO)

If you'd like a lesson in how to build a global digital strategy, Johnson & Johnson's example is a fine one to study. (McKinsey)

The latest study from ShareThis indicates that timeliness around events is critical, as consumers are 5X more likely to share content within 24 hours of an event. Also worth noting is that channels are context-dependent, mobile is an early driver of engagement and that tablets are the true second screen. The report is embedded below. (ShareThis)

 Q3 2014 Consumer Sharing Trends Report  from ShareThis

Image credit: Ruocaled (Flickr)
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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-75433115098107379862014-10-10T09:55:00.000-04:002014-10-10T11:09:17.185-04:00This Week in Digital - October 10, 2014

Amazon goes brick and mortar, New York's quick takedown of ad executions, Comcast gets a customer fired, music listening habits of Americans, Facebook gets into geofenced advertising, anonymous apps and healthcare, fired Reddit employee gets owned by Reddit CEO on AMA, how to combat "content shock," the ice cream principle of search and social, marketing skills of the future, global digital statistics and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

Clicks, meet mortar: Amazon is opening its first physical store in Manhattan. (WSJ)

As the collaborative economy grows, when things occur like a hammer attack in an Uber car, who is ultimately responsible? (Forbes)

Are CIOs driving digital leadership? A Gartner survey says that 47% of CIOs think so, but only 15% of CEOs agree. (WSJ CIO Journal)

Outdoor media company Titan placed hundreds of advertising beacons - to beam messages and advertisements or to track consumers' whereabouts - in payphones in New York City. Then, almost as quickly as they went up, they were removed. (BuzzFeed)

Related: adult website PornHub somehow decided a billboard in Times Square was a good idea. It was erected and removed in a single day. (PornHub - SFW link)

Cookies are getting stale; here's how Facebook, Apple and Google are tracking you now. (VentureBeat)

Comcast, one of the least trusted brands, stepped in it by providing less than acceptable customer service and getting a customer fired from his job. (DM News and The Consumerist)

Charlie Herrin, SVP of Customer Experience at Comcast (a newly created role), offered a very public apology to the customer and promised to make improvements. (Comcast)

Where do the majority of Americans listen to music? By a wide margin, it's in the car. (Nielsen)

Related: Podcasts are back (did they ever go anywhere?). And they're making money. (Washington Post)

Platforms
Facebook

Facebook is getting into the healthcare business, focusing on online support communities and preventive care. (Reuters) [Related item below in Essential Reading]

Ads are getting smarter: Facebook is basing ads on where you've been recently. (Mashable)

And for small and medium businesses, Facebook's local awareness ads provide geofenced targeting and even include the ability to get directions. (AllFacebook)

Facebook is preparing a standalone app that will allow users to maintain anonymity, which we first reported on back in April. This is likely gaining traction as the competition for Whisper and Secret heats up and as the drag queen kerfuffle heated up leading to Ello defections. (NY Times Bits)

Twitter

Twitter is suing the US government over the Justice Department's gag orders on what the microblogging platform can say about data security requests. (Wired)

Google+ is now giving users an option to insert polls in their updates. (The Next Web)

Yahoo! is putting its new Alibaba money to good use, making a $20 million investment in Snapchat on a $10 billion valuation. (Mediapost)

Pin Picks is Pinterest's weekly update of examples of how they're working with content partners. (Pinterest)

You knew it was coming: how publishers are crafting their Ello strategy. Too soon? (Contently)

Metrics / Measurement / Big Data

Here's a great post on sources of intelligence as you're looking to determine objectives and ROI. (LinkedIn)

Big data is big. How big? Try 2.5 exabytes a day. So what are marketers to do? Four applications of big data for marketers - and we have a way to go before we get there - include:

Improved forecasting and planning

More granular audience targeting

Optimizing campaigns in real time

Moving to multi-touch attribution

Legal / HR

Marriott blocked guests' wi-fi and the FTC fined them for $600,000. (Gizmodo)

A former Reddit employee took to Reddit to criticize his former employer in an AMA. And then Reddit's CEO chimed in with the official word on why the employee was fired. BURN! (Daily Caller)

Advice: don't criticize your employer (current or former) on their own platform.

Content

The top 10 corporate blogs of 2014 are not necessarily well-known brands. (Social Fresh)

Combatting "content shock" with a simple framework for content marketing. (SHIFT Communications)

Essential Reading / Listening / Watching

The Ice Cream Principle of search and social is brilliant in its simplicity. (Social Media Explorer)

Do you have a lot of followers? Hotelied.com would like to put them to use by giving you a discount. (Daily Mirror)

Related to Facebook's healthcare news above: What can social media offer healthcare organizations? (SHIFT Communications)

I'm convinced that Christopher Penn is a borg: he unlocks the secrets of what you'll need to succeed in The Marketing Skills of the Future. (Awaken Your Superhero)

We Are Social are always good for in-depth statistics and reporting. They continue this trend with their Digital Statshot 001: A Compendium of Global Digital Statistics. (Slideshare)

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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-41755628071903934882014-10-08T22:46:00.002-04:002014-10-08T22:50:10.124-04:00How The Atlantic Devalues Social Media

The Atlantic doesn't know who's running its Ello account.

While that's slightly amusing, it's not the point of this post. There's a more insidious undercurrent in the Atlantic article - one that isn't quite accurate and misses a point. But in two paragraphs, the article does an excellent job of summing up nearly everything that's wrong with social media.

Here are the paragraphs in question:

Firstly, brands...will always stampede towards the Next New Network. Most companies (including ours) now pay people to focus entirely on social media, whether in-house or through a variety of third-party firms. The dirty secret of social media work, though, is that it often doesn't take up a lot of time, the metrics (pageviews, sales conversions, newsletter sign-ups, et cetera) are squishy, and many social media managers are under the gun to prove to execs that they are worth whatever the organization is paying them. One of the easiest ways to prove your worth is getting your organization on a shiny new platform. Attract or buy a few thousand followers and you have a lovely graph to show off to the bosses.

Secondly, this early gold rush rarely pays off. Many brands and publishers are early adopters of networks like Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, App.net and now Ello. In a few cases, like Facebook, Twitter, or (for some companies) Pinterest, these networks can become vital for business. In most other cases, the social network never develops enough users to have any ROI for brands, or it's too difficult for organizations to convert social media traffic into sales or pageviews. After claiming their initial stake, the brand will then usually wander off to pan for nuggets elsewhere.

So once again, we're focused on the failure of social media to deliver on sales when the majority of brands are treating it like a glorified billboard or TV spot. We're talking about platforms that were designed for people to talk to other people and share things that matter to them, and the myopic metric is sales? That's like giving you a screwdriver to use to hit a golf ball and then scoffing because you can't play scratch golf.

Aside from the need to understand which department should be held responsible for which metric -- or the lack of accountability of the performance of actual billboards and TV ads with regard to sales -- there's a huge point that's missed.

The challenge behind some of the measurement woes is that social media is better used as a branding tool than as a sales tool. Yes, it's possible to determine the change of sentiment toward a brand or to measure reputation. But it's not as quick and as definitive as ROI that is centered around sales.

The assumption that social media types are trying to justify their existence is both inaccurate and off-putting. If they are, then they deserve to be categorized as above. But the smarter ones are aligning efforts to overall communications and marketing goals, as well as business objectives. And it's highly unlikely that businesses have objectives that include "get more likes."

If done well, social media work is extremely time-consuming. This assumes that one is treating the considerable audiences on these platforms like a community: answering questions, searching for mentions of competitors and products, jumping into conversations and generally adding value.

But of course if one is simply creating posts, hitting "publish" and then running away, expecting magic results that never seem to appear, then the above is correct.

Let's hope the industry isn't quite as desperate and facile as The Atlantic is making it out to be.

What do you think?

Image credit: Nicholas Eckhart (Flickr)

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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-22665891779727954742014-10-03T08:15:00.000-04:002014-10-03T08:15:00.073-04:00This Week In Digital - October 3, 2014

A short history of marketing, Advertising Week summed up, job cuts at the New York Times, the seven deadly sins of social media marketing, the world of Facebook is on Atlas's shoulders, Twitter partners with MIT, getting out of the measurement rut in digital, tips for keeping your great employees, TV secrets to inform your content marketing, PR should stand for people and relationships, a review of the crowds on El Loco and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. And now you have the option of just subscribing to this newsletter if you wish.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

The marketing industry has a rich history. But here are 13 seminal moments that stand out. (iMedia)

Advertising Week has wrapped up in New York. In case you missed it, here are the 5 hot trends in advertising. (Mashable)

Four native ad campaigns that are worth looking at include Orange is the New Black, the Church of Scientology, Gap, and Game of Thrones. (Mashable)

The New York Times has announced that it is cutting approximately 100 jobs in its newsroom staff. (NY Times)

People are tired of the advertising mindset that so many unimaginative brands bring to social media and that a new network like "Ello won't change the bad habits of brands in social media." He summed it up in a brilliant cartoon and blog post 7 deadly sins of social media marketing. (Tom Fishburne)

Platforms
Facebook

As expected, Facebook has launched Atlas, with the goal of reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases. (Atlas Solutions)

In case you were wondering, Atlas Solutions is an anagram for "Lo, it's Satan soul."

Facebook has launched a mobile Like button. (Techcrunch)

Taking the time to explain its "real name" policy, Facebook apologized to drag queens. (re/code)

But the question still has to be asked, "Who is real enough for Facebook?" (The New Yorker)

Twitter

Twitter is investing $10 million in the Laboratory for Social Machines at MIT. The lab plans to build a system to enable "large-scale analysis of content, and implement pattern discovery, data visualization and mobile app technologies to analyse patterns in social systems." (AllTwitter)

Twitter is getting friendlier with app developers as it opens Twitter Fabric, giving them ability to sign users up via mobile, incorporate CrashLytics for analytics and MoPub for an ad network. (Marketing Land)

Measurement / Metrics / Big Data

If you wonder why your social metrics stink, maybe it's because you're not being social enough. (Awaken Your Superhero)

Here are five unique ways to measure and evaluate a social media campaign. (The Next Web)

Are you stuck doing things the same old way when it comes to marketing and metrics? It's time to change that. (Forbes)

Legal / HR

With talent wars in software development, digital analytics and other hot fields, it can be tough to find the right people. And once you have them, you should know about ways to stop great employees from leaving. (Ragan.com)

The FTC isn't kidding around. With Operation Full Disclosure, they sent 60 advertisers warning letters claiming that they did not provide satisfactory disclosure to consumers. (AdAge)

Content

Video content is as important as ever for brands, as discussed at the IAB MIXX conference this week. (Smart Brief on Social Media)

But creating video doesn't have to be expensive; here's how one entrepreneur created a full-length documentary for just $11,000. (Medium)

And here's a site that's well worth spending a good deal of time with: 7 TV Secrets You Can Use to Make Killer Content (7secrets.com)

A new report on B2B content marketing is out, produced by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs: B2B Content Marketing 2015: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America. (Content Marketing Institute) Some highlights:

Most B2B marketers have a content strategy, but only 35% have documented it.

60% of content marketers with a documented strategy say they're effective versus 32% who have a verbal strategy.

Search engine marketing tops the list of paid distribution methods.

2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends - North America by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs from Content Marketing Institute

Essential Reading / Watching / Listening

Mitch Joel interviews marketing legend Tom Peters, in which they discuss the state of business, brands and marketing. (Six Pixels of Separation)

Great discussion about ello.co (that's El Loco to you), Facebook's mobile ad platform, microsites and other marketing topics on this week's Beancast episode. (The Beancast)

Did you ever want to be on television? Here's a sure-fire way to do that. (Peter Shankman)

Don't let email rule your life. Google's Eric Schmidt has 9 simple rules to email. (TIME)

If you've ever wondered what a truly luxury-class plane trip would be like, Derek Low describes the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suite Class experience, with plenty of photos. (Medium)

With all of the focus on marketing technology and automation, here's a novel thought: what if PR stood for People and Relationships? Brian Solis and Hugh McLeod took a stab at it with Vocus. (Slideshare)

 What If PR Stood for People and Relationships By Brian Solis  from Vocus

Image credit: Tom Fishburne
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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-82358526431488160832014-09-29T11:38:00.000-04:002014-09-29T11:55:30.608-04:00Negativity and the Competition

With all of the recent chatter and excitement about Ello, it's been a great opportunity to pause and consider the business strategy.

As a review, Ello's manifesto states that the site will not be ad-supported and will not share users' data. Those are the two main points of its strategy.

Many are welcoming this (although a number of people are skeptical about the likelihood of that business model being sustainable and even dismissive of the founders' efforts), as the presence of brands on certain sites (most notably Facebook) has been of concern of late.

Whether or not Ello is here for the long term, we'll have to see. It's awfully difficult for an upstart to combat a well-established site with billions of users.

The Real Issue
The point is not to discuss the merits of this specific business model (whatever it may be), but rather to look at the business strategy - the reason it exists.

On its @wtf account, Ello states:

We built Ello because virtually all the other social networks were cluttered, ugly, and full of ads. We began to feel manipulated by the networks themselves — many of our posts were never seen by our friends at all, because ads had taken priority.

We came to realize that a social network that has ads is a social network created for advertisers, not for people. Every move we made was tracked and recorded, and every post we made was read and sold to other companies so they could show us more ads.
It's pretty clear that they're trying to be the anti-Facebook.

But let's consider this question: is it wise to create something solely based on what a competitor is not? It seems rather foolhardy to state outright that you want to be the opposite of everything your competition is.

Now, before you say, "Well of course you should try to be what your competitor isn't," there's a difference between owning a segment of the market - in this case, let's say it's simple, beautiful and transparent design - versus playing on an emotional disdain for the current favorite.

The reason we're seeing so many people flock toward this upstart with a questionable long term plan is because there's an emotional element to the positioning. You know how brands have been ruining your favorite social networks? And how the networks are running away with all of your data? (Set aside the fact that you voluntarily share your data.)

They've already set you up to hate the status quo. That raw emotion feeds into the desire to find something different, something better, something more pure. Which works until their site gets overcrowded and popular.

Not to mention the ultimate rub: if the competition decides that it wants to change course and be exactly what you accuse it of not being, there goes your business model.

Instead, why not focus on what you are, what you do and how you provide value?

It's easy to put others down to make yourself look better. But in the end, you only make yourself look small.

Or, in the words of Henry Ford:

"The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time."

Note: this was cross-posted to the SHIFT Communications blog.

Image credit: someecards
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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-24949048018268864152014-09-26T15:57:00.002-04:002014-09-26T16:41:41.661-04:00This Week in Digital - September 26, 2014

The magic bendy iPhone, how to get the most out of iOS 8 (when it's working), ad dollars versus time spent on Facebook, Ello says hello, the logic between the disparity of increased TV viewing and decreased ratings, measurement is as easy as apple pie, legal considerations in socially-driven engagements, the sports network for the YouTube age, over 30 predictions on the future of B2B marketing, how to freak out a friend online and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in your job. You can subscribe here.

If you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

Apple's new iPhone 6 is thin - maybe too thin. So much so that it bends in your front pocket. On a sartorial note: if you're wearing a suit, why the hell are you putting a phone in the front pockets of your pants? #thirdgrademove (Macrumors)

Apple has responded, saying that its famed Genius Bar would handle any issues that arise. (The Verge)

Kit Kat gets points for a real-time marketing win with its response. (@KitKat)

We don't bend, we #break. #bendgate #iPhone6plus pic.twitter.com/uippCg4kCi
— KITKAT (@KITKAT) September 24, 2014

Lots of tips abound for those getting iOS 8: 6 helpful tricks, top 10 secret features, 15 insanely great tricks to master iOS 8 and 25 things you can do on iOS 8 that you couldn't on iOS 7. (The Week, Lifehacker, Wired, Gizmodo)

Recommendations for getting out of the glut on social channels include directing consumers to your good old website. (AdWeek)

Google has listed the top 25 search advertisers. Holding the #1 spot: Amazon. (AdAge)

The industry is overspending on Facebook advertising, compared with time spent on the network. (eMarketer)

Platforms
Ello

The newest social network on the block is Ello, driven by "beauty, simplicity and transparency," started gaining significant traction this week.

Seemingly set up as an anti-Facebook network, its manifesto states that it is ad-free and that your data will remain private ("you are not the product"). (Fast Company)

As one might imagine, the skeptics are lining up to critique it. Even on Ello itself. (Wired and Ello)

Oh, and if you'd like to follow me, I'm at ello.co/scottmonty

Facebook

Next Facebook will unveil a retooled version of Atlas, an advertising platform designed to improve how marketers target and measure the advertisements they buy across the Web. (Inside Facebook)

Some businesses are becoming more wary of Facebook sharing data and are blocking access to their sites. (WSJ)

Facebook opened Facebook Media, a site designed to show how public figures and media entities are using Facebook (and ostensibly to encourage more of the same). (Facebook)

Twitter

Twitter's audience management tool is more powerful than ever, with the ability to target by phone number and app ID. (Marketing Land)

We had announced that TwitPic was being shut down over an intellectual property issue, but the latest news is that they're being acquired. (Engadget)

Measurement / Metrics / Big Data

TV viewing is up, but ratings are down. What gives? It turns out that the television industry is reluctant to lump television, online and mobile viewing audiences together. (WSJ - paywall)

Perhaps they could start by reading Avinash Kaushik's explanation on how to measure mobile. (Occam's Razor)

The latest in a series on the CMO and the Cloud - looking at the alarmingly low use of analytics by marketers. (Olivier Blanchard)

Is measurement hopelessly convoluted and complex to you? Here are some tips for navigating the measurement maze. (Media Bistro)

One of the best analogies for measurement responsibilities we've seen. (SHIFT Communications)

Legal / HR

If you host a Twitter party or Twitter chat, you need to be aware of the legal risks. (Social Media Explorer)

As the Ice Bucket Challenge raged on, there were opportunities for brands, media and entertainment personalities to get involved. Here are some of the legal lessons from the #icebucketchallenge. (Maximize Social Business)

Content

'Storytelling!' It's up there with 'big data' as a phrase that's kind of annoying but has yet to be improved upon by a better alternative. So what is brand storytelling and why do you need it? (Econsultancy)

The Whistle is building a sports network for the YouTube age. What exactly does that look like? They've got their own studios, as well as partnerships with major sporting leagues and teams, and arrangements with individual content creators. (Contently)

Essential Reading / Watching / Listening

This report on how social media is shaping the news is worth a deeper dive. Particularly of note is that direct visitors to news sites spend more time there than those referred by social platforms. (Pew)

Just for fun: here's how one person pranked his roommate with eerily targeted Facebook ads. (My Social Sherpa)

Be careful what you wish for. The New York Mets started a hashtag campaign #ImAMetsFanBecause and you can imagine how quickly that devolved, due to the team's constant struggle with losses. (NY Post)

Lots to think about in Google and the Right to Be Forgotten, including this gem: "Requiring Google to be a court of philosopher kings shows a real lack of understanding about how this will play out in reality." (New Yorker)

Lee Odden gives readers 31 predictions on the future of B2B marketing. (Top Rank Marketing)

Future of B2B Marketing - MarketingProfs B2B Forum eBook  from TopRank® Online Marketing

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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-24220606419871603612014-09-05T11:00:00.003-04:002014-10-07T10:29:47.730-04:00This Week in Digital - September 5, 2014

Leaks from iCloud and Home Depot show cracks in security, the newspaper industry continues its slide, social acquisitions continue, Twitter maps out its product offering, Facebook patent acquisition hints at new developments, why listening matters, the gaps in cross-channel marketing, how to stand out in a boring industry, social media strategy in one slide, the updated CMO Survey and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below. And if you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

It should be no surprise that newspapers are dying. (Boing Boing)

Case in point: USA Today announced this week that it is laying off 60-70 people due to a slowdown in print advertising revenue. (USA Today)

A look at Will Steacy's project Deadline, with some stark photos from inside newsrooms. (Esquire)

With its acquisition of Brightkit, a solution for creating customized social marketing campaigns, social media platform management system Hootsuite announced Hootsuite Campaigns based on the Brightkit solution. (Hootsuite)

Enterprise social media platform Sprinklr has acquired Branderati, a social media toolmaker, marking its third acquisition this year on its way to an expected IPO next year. (WSJ Digits)

Home Depot is the latest victim in a widespread data breach that may affect all of their stores. (ComputerWorld)

Online and mainstream media alike were abuzz last week with the news of the hacking of celebrities' iCloud photos, resulting in leaks of nude photos. (The Verge)

In response, Apple's new iPhone 6 will be complete hack-proof. (Funny or Die)

Apple's Hack Proof iPhone from Funny Or Die

Platforms

Twitter:

CFO Anthony Noto gave clues to Twitter's product map at an investors conference. These include better search results, an improved algorithm and group chat, in an effort to make Twitter more relevant and sticky with users. (WSJ Digits)

Want to make purchases directly from a tweet? Twitter is working with payments startup Stripe to let you do just that. (re/code)

Twitpic will be shutting down on September 25, citing a trademark dispute with Twitter. (Twitpic blog)

Facebook:

How cost effective is Facebook advertising? Better than ad networks, portals and exchanges, in terms of reach efficiency and average cost. (Inside Facebook)

Facebook is rolling out Privacy Checkup, in an effort to let users have better control over who sees their content. (AllFacebook)

A look at recent patent acquisitions by Facebook indicates a move toward digital printing of images, personalized content delivery and interactive wearable devices. (Envision IP)

Google:

Here's a handy guide for getting your business up on Google My Business. (Telefunction)

Listening matters: 6 benefits of paying attention to your community. (The Next Web)

Southwest Airlines saw immediate results of their new listening center. (Ragan.com)

Measurement / Metrics / Big Data

A study by Econsultancy and Oracle Marketing Cloud shows that while cross-channel marketing is viewed as a priority, few marketers are doing it and even fewer are measuring it. (eMarketer)

Legal / HR

Legal departments have traditionally put the "no" in innovation. But that doesn't have to be the case. Here's how to work with your legal department to ensure your brand publishing efforts go smoothly. (Contently)

Content

Do you work with clients or in an industry that's "boring"? Well, here are three examples of brands in "boring" industries that are great storytellers. (Contently)

Good content should provide value to the reader. Considering a simple framework for five different kinds of content should give you ideas on how to do just that. (Content Marketing Institute)

Essential Reading / Watching / Listening

You use a number of social media sites every day. But were you aware of these 30 features that can help you be more productive? (Buffer)

An in-depth look at the celebrity photo leak and the security issues behind it shows just how pervasive this type of activity is and why you should be aware of it. (New Web Order)

"What we see in the public with these hacking incidents seems to only be scratching the surface. There are entire communities and trading networks where the data that is stolen remains private and is rarely shared with the public. The networks are broken down horizontally with specific people carrying out specific roles, loosely organized across a large number of sites (both clearnet and darknet) with most organization and communication taking place in private (email, IM)."

Social media strategy in one slide. (Christopher S. Penn)

The August 2014 update to the CMO Survey from Duke's Fuqua School of Business is out. Prof. Christine Moorman comments on some of the highlights in a video below. (CMO Survey)

Spending on social media is high, but like branding, its value is difficult to prove.

Currently 9% of marketing budgets are allocated to social, with 13% expected next year and as much as 21% within five years.

The growth is likely being allocated toward infrastructure and technology rather than human capital.

Still, social media strategies remain only loosely connected to companies' marketing strategies.

Next year, traditional marketing budgets are expected to drop by about 3.6% and digital marketing budgets will increase by 10.8%.

 The CMO Survey Report: Highlight and Insights August 2014  from christinemoorman

Image credit: Aaron Escobar (Flickr)
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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-43774295631732217372014-08-29T00:05:00.001-04:002014-08-29T00:05:35.940-04:00This Week in Digital - August 29, 2014

After a two-month hiatus, This Week in Digital is back.

The numbers behind the #IceBucketChallenge, the value of inbound marketing, Amazon loves Twitch, Uber hates Lyft, Facebook cracks down on click-bait, Twitter opens the analysis floodgates, Hyperlapse speeds up Instagram's video, companies are still trying to figure out ROI, your brand may not own its Facebook likes, native advertising developments, a slew of ebooks for Content Marketing World and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below. And if you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

The #IceBucketChallenge has taken the world by storm over the past few weeks. Here's a nice analysis from Jeremiah Owyang, along with a deck on the cold hard facts. (Web Strategy)

Inbound marketing company Hubspot filed an S-1 in preparation for their IPO. And Tom Webster initiated an intellectual exercise on evaluating where the inbound marketing industry is with regard to maturity. (VentureBeat and Convince and Convert)

Amazon is buying video site Twitch for $970 million in an effort to slow down Netflix and YouTube. (WSJ)

We all know how hard it is to reach millennials. But what about Generation Z? (Mashable)

Marketing and technology are on a collision course. So what's it going to take for the CMO and CIO to work together? (McKinsey)

Emotional triggers for the Internet this week: Uber allegedly has a playbook for sabotaging Lyft and Hello Kitty isn't really a cat after all - she's a human. (The Verge and The Wire)

Platforms

Facebook

Facebook went on the offensive against click-bait and image-based posts. The algorithm will show fewer of the "you'll never guess what happens next" posts in response to user frustration. And they are recommending that brands refrain from posting an image with a link to a story; instead they recommend sharing a link directly and allowing the image to get automatically pulled in through the link. (Facebook Newsroom)

Consistent and high reach can be difficult to attain on Facebook. It turns out that your industry matters. Take a look at this analysis and discussion to determine where you fit on the scale and this companion piece on chasing the alpha that is reach. ({Grow} and BrandSavant)

Twitter

Twitter analytics are now available to everyone at analytics.twitter.com. (TechCrunch)

The company is comfortable with many users not tweeting, seeing it as a news gathering and dissemination platform. (AllTwitter)

Instagram

Instagram released the new Hyperlapse app, allowing users to create simple time-lapse videos with image stabilization. (Wired)

Here's an early collection of 25 of the most amazing Hyperlapse videos so far. (The Verge)

Google has ended authorship for search results. (MarketingLand)

Ditto Labs has partnered with Tumblr to identify how brands are perceived based on image analysis. (Mashable) [Disclosure: Ditto is a SHIFT client.]

Measurement/Metrics/Big Data

In When Big Data Is Dumb, Michael Allenson finds that when it comes to customer experiences that leave customers feeling like they are just a number, few industries can top automotive dealerships and retail banks. The challenge: how to make customers feel valued. (CMO.com)

The #1 reason that PR gets no respect? Stupid metrics. It's time to put ad value equivalency (AVE) to bed and speak the language that senior management speaks. (Paine Publishing)

And here's an opportunity: half of corporate executives still haven't figured out how to effectively measure social media's ROI. (eMarketer)

Legal/HR

Do you really need a social media policy? (SHIFT Communications)

If you do, here's a lawyer's perspective on creating a social media policy. (CMO.com)

Here's a fascinating subject to debate: does a company own its Facebook likes? A recent ruling indicates that likes belong to the users, not the brands. But the precedent is far from established and this cautionary tale is well worth reading. (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Content Marketing

Marketing needs to make room for communications in brand publishing and newsrooms. You don't send a copyrighter to do a journalist's job. (Contently)

Want to understand native advertising better? Here's a comprehensive infographic to sum it up. (The Content Strategist)

GE thinks of itself as a diversified media company. (the Media Briefing)

Speaking of native advertising, re/code has kicked off its new sponsored content look. (re/code)

And if you haven't yet seen it, take a look at this gem from John Oliver as he skewers the native advertising business, and in particular how it intersects with news. (Last Week Tonight)

Essential Reading/Watching/Listening

The Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) is just as important as ever. And here are four tips on how to gain a competitive advantage on that moment when consumers make a purchase decision. (Think with Google)

The latest global social media report takes a look at the 6 Cs of global social media. (We Are Social)

Conversation

Culture

Content Neutrality

Country Needs

Cellphones

Communities

In preparation for Content Marketing World (September 8-11, 2014), a quartet of ebooks has been published: Building a Content Marketing Strategy, Building an Audience Development Strategy for Content Marketing, A Visual Content Marketing Strategy and Showing Real ROI for Content Marketing. (Slideshare)

Bonus
If you're at all interested in attending Content Marketing World, there's still time to register. Click here to learn more about one of the largest gatherings of marketing professionals in the world and sign up. [Disclosure: the following are affiliate links.]

Or if you can't make it, then perhaps the Content Marketing Institute Online Training and Certification program will work for you. There are more than 18 hours of online education that help you build a strong foundation for your content marketing efforts in seven key areas: Planning, Audience, Story, Channels, Process, Conversation and Measurement. And additional classes are on the way.

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Image credit: JD Hancock (Flickr)

Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-72466704180132424412014-07-22T08:12:00.000-04:002014-07-22T11:12:47.002-04:00Shifting into Gear

It's been a few weeks since I left Ford, and since that time, many people have inquired about my next move. I've been deliberately quiet on that front as I spent more time offline, enjoying the summer with my family, doing a little consulting and just generally soaking in a less frenetic pace. It's been refreshing.

I initially had a direction in mind, but after I made my announcement I received a number of inquiries from a variety of companies, giving me an opportunity to reflect on what mattered most to me personally and professionally, and how I wanted to approach the next phase of my career.

For me, it's not simply about having a job that's mentally stimulating and work that is professionally challenging and satisfying. I'm moved by the core values of a company, how it treats its employees, how it views itself within the market and the level of contributions it makes to an industry and customers alike.

That's why I have decided to join SHIFT Communications as Executive Vice President of Strategy.

The company
SHIFT is a progressive integrated communications agency, with some 140+ employees in Boston, New York and San Francisco and has a roster of impressive clients that range from large multinational companies like McDonalds, Whole Foods and Toyota, small to mid-size consumer goods companies, and plenty in the tech industry. In 2012, SHIFT was named the digital/social agency of the year by the Holmes Group; in 2013 it was awarded the SABRE Gold Award for small agency of the year.

I'm excited to be part of a team that's poised for growth and that is constantly out to improve itself and what it does for clients. When I decided to join Ford in 2008, I was asked, "Why not one of the leading car companies?" My response was that Ford had something to prove and that I wanted to be part of a comeback story, not simply keeping an already successful enterprise on a steady course. Throughout my time there, I was able to be an intrapreneur - having an entrepreneurial spirit within the confines of an established institution.

The same can be said for SHIFT. Recently, it was named as one of the top 10 fastest growing agencies in the U.S., and I can feel the momentum and passion for growing the business, helping clients achieve success, and telling the SHIFT story that the rest of the leadership team feels. Working together with the SHIFT team on innovative programs and blazing new trails in an entrepreneurial way, I'm confident in the impact we can make for clients, the business and the industry at large.

The people
Speaking of innovation, last year SHIFT brought Christopher Penn on board to lead the firm's marketing practice, with a particular focus on analytics. For many communications practitioners (aka people who don't like math), analytics and measurement have long been a strange and frightening area of the business, and marketing departments are often viewed as "the other guys."

But as communicators increasingly rely on digital technologies for storytelling, building relationships with customers, and even influencing sales, analytics is an essential skill that communicators will need, and the practice must be done in conjunction with marketing. SHIFT sees this as a white space for communications firms and I'm excited about helping to lead the efforts in that direction in conjunction with Chris and his uber-smart team.

In a way, joining SHIFT is a bit of a homecoming. It's headquartered in Boston, my beloved city of some 20 years. Plus, I've known SHIFT's CEO Todd Defren for nearly 10 years, and he's always been someone I've admired and respected. He was at the forefront of the intersection of PR and social media as he and his team developed the industry's first Social Media Press Release template that began to transform how communicators took into account digital and social assets.

Aside from being a great innovator and thought leader, Todd is simply a good human being. I've seen how he looks after his own family, and he's extended that same level of care toward his employees with an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (if you're not familiar with the concept, here's how an ESOP works). That means that every single person at SHIFT owns a piece of the company. Not to mention that the company has a culture that is incredibly cool and fun - tangibles and intangibles that contribute to the overall well-being of its employees.

The other stuff
I'm very excited to be able to reconnect with Boston and to be able to spend time with SHIFT team members there, as well as in New York and San Francisco. The great part of this new role is that I can still be based in Michigan for the foreseeable future, as family priorities require us to be there for now.

Speaking of Michigan, it's where I've met many wonderful, creative and talented people. Some of those fine folks are at RPM Ventures in Ann Arbor, a venture capital firm that invests in start-ups in the following areas: automotive/mobility, social media & cloud infrastructure, marketplaces, and mid-market SaaS. Last month, I agreed to become an Advisor for the firm and some of its portfolio companies, and I'll continue in this capacity as time allows.

I'll also continue my commitment to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where I serve on the Digital Advisory Committee and as a member of the Board of Trustees. As the "most accessible orchestra on the planet," the DSO has many firsts to its name, including livestreaming performances on a regular basis, among other things. It will be an honor and privilege to continue to be part of such a forward-thinking group and to bear witness to the inspirational Maestro Leonard Slatkin on a regular basis.

Similarly, earlier this month I began a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association. The AMA was established in 1937 by visionaries in marketing and academia, and today the AMA has grown to be one of the largest marketing associations in the world, with over 30,000 members who work, teach and study in the field of marketing across the globe. Along with other professionals and academics, I'll be serving to help with innovative and evolving digital knowledge, training and tools to enhance lifelong learning of AMA membership.

So there we have it. A summer that's been packed with plenty of activity at home and on the road, personally and professionally. And now I get to surround myself with some fabulous people at the home office and the SHIFT offices beginning on July 28.

You can also read SHIFT's announcement on their blog and check out all of the assets on the microsite they created.

Image credit: Viktor Hanacek
Note: Apple, the Apple logo and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries
--

Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-22379719179183970442014-07-19T11:10:00.000-04:002014-07-21T15:42:19.453-04:00Weird Al Is a Marketing Genius With #8videos8days

I have a confession to make. I'm huge fan of Weird Al Yankovic. Or, I'm one of what he used to call his fanbase: the Close Personal Friends of Al.

Like so many others, I first heard his music on The Dr. Demento Show. Then, I bought all of his early albums, from his eponymous debut up until Running with Scissors in 1999. I even saw him in concert during his Dare to Be Stupid tour in the 1980s. Hey, what did you expect from a fan who was trained classically on the accordion?

(I'll bet you didn't see that one coming, did you?)

Weird Al has made a living out of what had once been a hobby; he is synonymous with music parody genre. Of course, he's well known for hits like "Eat It," "My Bologna," "White and Nerdy," "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi" and "I Love Rocky Road," but in addition to song parodies, he also does parodies of styles of music, writes his own original songs, and polkanates medleys of popular tunes. And he's been doing it consistently for 35 years.

What's the secret to Weird Al's success? Weird Al Marketing Rules. [Tweet this]

Unlike a typical musical act, Weird Al doesn't rely on his own musical sensibilities for his bread and butter. He's a parodist, which means that with a little talent, luck and a great deal of intuition, he can select the songs that are part of (or about to become part of) the cultural zeitgeist and create funny versions that will engage his audience. If he's fortunate, he goes beyond just his fans and touches the mainstream.

One way that this is possible is through regular or recurring subjects that include Michael Jackson, Star Wars, food and television. Such topics are universally recognized, and when it comes to humor, the more broad an artist can be, the more likely he is to reach a wide audience.

Weird Al Marketing Rule #1: Understand your audience and create content to suit their tastes.

Working with artists
For every song and video that is a parody of another artist's work, Al seeks their blessing for his work. Because parody is protected under the "fair use" provision of U.S. copyright law, he does not need permission in order to produce his work. However, in the spirit of creating good relationships with musicians, Yankovic has always made it a point to seek the personal permission of stars before publishing his parodies.

What typically happens - particularly with up and coming artists - is that they perceive such a request to be an official indication that they've reached a pinnacle in their career. In other words, when Weird Al wants to cover your work, you know you've made it.

Now, while this makes great sense from a personal/professional relationship building perspective, there's another force at play here as well. In addition to having the legal angle covered, Weird Al essentially has gotten the attention and trust of these well-known personalities, and if they approve of his lampooning of their work, they're likely to help promote the parody (because in a sense, they're legitimizing and promoting their own work as well).

Weird Al Marketing Rule #2: Create strong relationships with key stakeholders and give them something of value.

Adapting to the times
We're all familiar with the plight of the music industry. It was completely disrupted in the digital era with the advent of iPods and other mp3 players, as well as YouTube, and has resulted in artists seeing a decline in the money coming in from their album sales. Attention and time are being spent on a variety of other screens - mobile, gaming, online video, etc. and not on pure music. In fact, a recent piece on Vox noted that Aerosmith has made more money from Guitar Hero than it has from any one of its albums.

So it's not surprising to see that Weird Al Yankovic - the musician who has managed to remain relevant and capture the popular anthems of the day for three decades - is able to understand and adapt to the changes around him.

On July 15, his latest album, Mandatory Fun, went on sale. But this was anything but a cookie-cutter launch plan when "there's a pretty good chance this is the last conventional album."

Available on Amazon

The earned media blitz began with a number of features and interviews, including the New York Post and NPR on July 12 and Grantland and the LA Times on July 15, among many others. At last glance, there were over 3,600 results in a Google News search for Weird Al and Mandatory Fun.

But some of the most significant efforts came from Weird Al himself, namely on his @alyankovic Twitter account:

It begins… pic.twitter.com/LfirCw8QTg
— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) July 12, 2014

I'll be premiering 8 brand new music videos - one every single day for 8 days - starting TOMORROW MORNING. (11 AM Eastern, 8 AM Pacific)
— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) July 13, 2014

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it yet, but I have a new album coming out tomorrow.
— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) July 14, 2014

With over 3.3 million fans on Twitter, a YouTube account that he's had for nearly 5 years, and yes, a Facebook page, Al has a direct connection to his fans - something that every entertainer must have these days. Recently, Taylor Swift noted the changing times and how she finds that fans are less interested in an autograph than they are in a selfie with her or a tweet back to them.

Putting those channels to work during a launch is key. Weird Al realizes that he needs to be everywhere, so he's putting each of those channels to use in a launch that takes place over the course of eight days. Using the hashtag #8videos8days, he's been amping up the effort all week long to drive curiosity and attention around his new album.

It's been working: the album landed the #1 spot on iTunes just a day after it went on sale and is currently ranked as the #1 pop album on Amazon.

#MandatoryFun is the #1 album on iTunes??? This is insane!! You guys!! http://t.co/m3aK3uztSj
— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) July 17, 2014

Weird Al Marketing Rule #3: Create anticipation for your product/event/announcement

Each day during the #8videos8days promotion - you guessed it - a new video was revealed. But it wasn't simply Yankovic posting something on his YouTube page. In a creative and collaborative push, he took a different turn that was born out of necessity. From the Grantland interview, Al notes:

"The budgets have kind of dried up," he said. "Back in the day, record companies were rolling in money and MTV were the kingmakers. I mean, people spent half a million dollars to do a music video. That is not happening anymore."
Creating a music video is big business, and the way Weird Al approached it this time around was to partner with a number of sites that have been Al-friendly over the years. It's not clear if these sites provided the budgets to make the videos possible, but they've certainly served themselves up as destinations that will be a Hanukkah's-worth of viral videos.

Accordingly, the first video in the series was "Tacky" (a parody of Pharrell's "Happy") and it was launched on July 14 on Nerdist. The video features cameos by Jack Black, Eric Stonestreet, Aisha Tyler, Margaret Cho and Kristen Schaaled, who together have 1.8 million Twitter followers.

That was followed on Day 2 with the grammarian's national anthem "Word Crimes" on Weird Al's own YouTube channel:

[Personally, this is my favorite song of the entire album.]

In addition to launching the new video, Weird Al hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over on reddit. As a side note, he's not just creating an account to host an AMA; "alyankovic" has been a redditor for 3 years. He participates as a regular user of these platforms.

On July 16, we were treated to "Foil," a takeoff on Lorde's "Royals," with an exclusive from College Humor. A cameo by Patton Oswald, who with his 1.8 million Twitter followers is another comedy sensation on social media. Next, Yahoo Screen was given the chance to shine with "Handy" to riff on the seemingly mindless Iggy Azalea hit "Fancy."

WORLD PREMIERE! New music video #Handy up now!! #8videos8days http://t.co/LBdVEH2aKs http://t.co/HNgyXHaL51
— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) July 17, 2014

As the weekend drew near, Friday's feature was "Sports Song," a college fight song that could ignite the passions of band geeks and athletic supporters near and far. That was featured exclusively on Funny or Die. In conjunction with that, Yankovic answered 11 Questions on A.V. Club, a regular feature in which the site asks interesting people 11 interesting questions—and then asks them to suggest one for the next interviewee.

Weird Al Marketing Rule #4: Find the right partners to help your message reach their audiences as well as yours.

As the three remaining videos are released over the weekend and into Monday, we'll be intrigued to see how Weird Al manages to continue to use all four of his rules of marketing to have Mandatory Domination over the charts as well as our hearts and minds. For someone who has dared to be stupid and run with scissors, you're pretty smart in the marketing department. We can think of many who are even worse.

Now go buy that album!

And rock on, Weird Al.

--

Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-8513307122678982812014-06-29T02:51:00.000-04:002014-07-02T15:46:42.749-04:00Facebook's Trust Problem

We're all aware that Facebook doesn't allow us to see all updates from all of our friends or the brand pages we like in our News Feed. It's simply not feasible, given the amount of content that is shared by those to whom we're connected. The decline of organic reach of brand pages is a result of this phenomenon.

But to some, Facebook may have overstepped the boundary with the revelation of certain research practices. This weekend, the public was informed of a research study at Facebook that was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" by Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory of UCSF and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell University.

The study analyzed posts on the feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users that had been tinkered with - to show either positive or negative emotions. The goal was to determine if the emotions shared over a social network were powerful enough to cause similar emotions to be shown by those who saw them. In other words, they were testing if happy posts made users feel happy and post happy things in response, and similarly with negative posts. You can read more about this on Forbes, The Atlantic, the A.V. Club and elsewhere.

The problem is, no one knew this was going on.

Read Facebook's Terms
"This kind of thing is covered in Facebook's Terms," I hear you saying. You're correct; it is covered. In fact, here's the specific section - although, it's not in the Terms, but two clicks down in the Data Use Policy > Information we receive and how it is used section. [You'll have to forgive me, as the 9,000 words in the combined documents are a little difficult to sort through for this professional.]

Here's what the relevant section says:

How we use the information we receive
We use the information we receive about you in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, our partners, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use. For example, in addition to helping people see and find things that you do and share, we may use the information we receive about you:

for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement. [Emphasis added]

[UPDATE: the word "research" was added to the Data Use Policy in April 2012, four months after the research study began.]

Interestingly, that very same section also contains this phrase:

Your trust is important to us

We'll get back to the issue of trust in a moment.

The Ethics of Researchers
The 20th century saw the greatest advance in science and understanding, but it also held the distinction of being an era during which many human experiments were conducted that were illegal or unethical, and without the consent or knowledge of the test subjects. One of the most notorious is the Tuskeegee syphyllis experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932-1972.

The ethics of modern medicine, public health, psychology, marketing researchers and the like have come a long way since those comparatively barbaric times.

Whether we regard the Facebook study as one in the field of psychology or market research, there are ethical standards that each requires of its members. Let's take an in-depth look at each. For the purposes of brevity, only the relevant sections have been included.

Marketing Research Association Code of Marketing Research Standards

General Conduct
2. Protect the rights of respondents, including the right to refuse to participate in part or all of the research process. Researchers must respect the bounds of cooperation set by respondents, who control the parameters under which information is given. In practice, this means all of the following:

Respondent agreement to participate in research must be obtained upfront, rather than after the fact.

Consent must be granted freely, without coercion.

Consent may be withdrawn by the respondent at any point during the contact.

Consent must be granted expressly for participation in any subsequent studies.

An explicit opt-out request for any future contact or participation at any point during the process will be honored.

All reasonable precautions are taken so that respondents are in no way adversely affected as a result of their participation in a marketing research project.

Exceptions: In limited circumstances of passive user data collection, no opportunity may exist for respondents to refuse to participate.

Purpose of Use
6. Obtain consent from respondents prior to utilizing their data in a manner materially different from that to which the respondent has agreed.

Transparency
8. Make factually correct statements to secure cooperation, including for database/sample development, and honor all promises made to respondents including but not limited to the use of data.

Exceptions: In limited instances, bona fide research projects may require, as part of their design, that respondents remain unaware of specific details such as in message testing. In such cases, upfront instructions to respondents should be truthful and furnish as much information as possible for a respondent to provide informed consent and they should be fully debriefed upon conclusion of contact, when applicable.

One could argue that an up-front agreement to terms - terms in which the research clause is buried - does not give users a chance to refuse to participate or the ability to opt out. One could argue that the research could be considered a "subsequent study" and thus be held separately from the initial consent granted in the Terms/Data Use Policy.

Similarly, the American Psychological Association has a set of standards as well. If we take the research as a grand psychological experiment (which isn't too much of a stretch, as they were studying moods and emotional reaction to stimuli), it's logical to apply the APA's ethical standards to the effort. Incidentally, some psychologists have found a flaw in the research.

APA Ethical Principles of Pscyhologists and Code of Conduct

Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence
Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.

Principle B: fidelity and Responsibility
Psychologists establish relationships of trust with those with whom they work.

Principle C: Integrity
Psychologists seek to promote accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness in the science, teaching and practice of psychology.

Principle E: Respect for People's Rights and Dignity
Psychologists respect the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals to privacy, confidentiality and self-determination. Psychologists are aware that special safeguards may be necessary to protect the rights and welfare of persons or communities whose vulnerabilities impair autonomous decision making. [such as Facebook users?]

While the study may pass the sniff test for legal, regulatory, and perhaps even some ethical purposes, it's particularly instructive to note that Susan Fiske, the editor of the PNAS paper, thought it was "creepy."

Trust
When a professional who regularly grapples with ethical issues thinks a practice is creepy, you can imagine what the public thinks.

This is, of course, a public that has lived through a variety of missteps by Facebook - missteps that are typically backtracked after initial public outrage, and then slowly but surely incorporated as users get used to the new world order. Examples of criticism of Facebook include:

Beacon

Privacy policy complexity and changes

The listening feature that would tap into users' microphones

Incorporating users' browsing history for advertising purposes

With such a track record with the public, one would think that Facebook would need to be particularly vigilant about anything that would violate the public's trust at this point. But perhaps Facebook is confident that it has the attention and commitment from its 1.2 billion users - so much so that it needn't worry about angering some or losing their trust.

My contention is that most of the trust issues people have with Facebook could have been handled with better communication.

A number of companies in the digital realm make product changes first and communicate them later - in some cases, only when they're called on it by irate users. Of course, the nature of product development in these organizations is that features need to be tweaked and new releases need to go out in advance of the competition discovering them, for the lead time is very short.

But this cycle of abusive behavior (infraction, emotional response, apology, reaffirmation of commitment) will continue to go on as long as consumers allow it to.

Meanwhile, perhaps some forward thinking communicators can get out in front of some of these instances and offer up some transparency and leadership in how companies work hand in hand with their users for better experiences.

If they don't, they're at risk of letting their users simply feel used.

UPDATE (7/2/2014): Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, even admits that "it was communicated poorly." (via WSJ)

Image source: imlsdcc (Flickr)

--Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-72046079297099877912014-06-20T23:55:00.003-04:002014-06-21T12:20:38.803-04:00This Week in Digital - June 20, 2014

Amazon releases more than just a phone, brands question the value of large agencies, Facebook puts ad choices in users' hands, Twitter makes a critical decision that may single-handedly doom the platform, Tumblr ads join Yahoo, PR tech is the future, two data points that demonstrate what's wrong with marketing, the changes needed to better serve consumers and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below. And if you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

The biggest news this week came from Amazon, as they released their Fire Phone. Taking a closer look, MG Siegler notes that what's most remarkable about this device is not that it's another smartphone, but it's a smart camera. (Medium)

Wikipedia has strengthened its rules against undisclosed editing, which means that if you're in the reputation management business, you should make Wikipedia editing part of your core competency. (WSJ Digits & Holtz.com)

As communications technology continues to develop, more brands are questioning the value of large agencies or holding companies, in favor of smaller agencies' abilities to get the job done. (Holmes Report)

Platforms

Facebook

Facebook is putting the power into users' hands by giving them the power to make ads better by having some say over what they see. (Facebook)

Of course, this means that good advertising will be rewarded over bad. So what does this mean for brands? (Digiday)

Here are 25 pieces of advice you need to build an awesome Facebook page. (Socially Stacked)

A recent report shows just how precipitously organic reach has fallen on Facebook. (Contently)

Twitter

Twitter now has the capability to support animated GIFs on their website, iOS and Android. Don't say we didn't warn you. (The Next Web)

Bio Is Changed is a service that will alert you any time someone you follow changes his/her profile photo or bio on Twitter. Sneaky. (re/code)

Continuing down the path of social TV, Twitter has acquired SnappyTV, a service for sharing video clips from broadcast. (Twitter blog)

YouTube is requiring independent musicians to sign up for its subscription music service, or they'll risk being removed from YouTube altogether. (The Guardian)

Ensuring integration, Tumblr native ads (or "sponsored posts," as Yahoo calls them) will be appearing across Yahoo properties. (Mashable)

Measurement/Metrics/Big Data

With more demand for data, performance numbers and ROI, PR tech is the future. (Mashable)

But be careful not to chase numbers; editorial judgment is still necessary. (Contently)

The good news is that the data and analytics options are wide and varied, and by using an integrated approach, marketing analytics can help drive growth. (McKinsey)

The Financial Times is ditching CPMs for time spent as a metric. (Contently)

Legal/HR

In the United Kingdom, it is completely legal for British spies to monitor citizens' social media activities. (CNBC)

Content

The single best indicator of valuable content -- you might be surprised. (SHIFT Communications)

Content is one thing. But when combined with trust and influence, you've got something. (Spin Sucks)

Essential Reading/Watching/Listening

A fascinating long read: Facebook's plan is much bigger than its eponymous app; Facebook wants to own your phone. (Fast Company)

Mitch Joel reflects on the two data points that demonstrate what's wrong with digital marketing today, which essentially say that branding doesn't work with digital. He rightly states and asks: "…we confuse advertising with marketing. We don't count websites, social media, apps and more as part of our branding experience. Why? Why don't we do this?" (Twist Image)

And almost as if to answer this lament, in Mastering Digital Marketing, McKinsey's David Edelman explains what companies get wrong when it comes to digital marketing and the changes needed to better engage consumers. [If you cannot see video, please click the link.] (McKinsey)

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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-47202920114013648742014-06-14T23:19:00.000-04:002014-06-16T15:02:11.981-04:00Military Strategy and the Collaborative Economy

By now you're likely aware of the multi-city battles that are waged between the traditional taxi industry and upstart car service Uber. Medallion holders and legislators in cities such as Chicago, New York, Austin, Washington and more have dug in their heels in favor of the status quo over innovation when it comes to mobility and transportation.

And just last week, a number of cities in Europe - including London and Madrid - staged a massive protest during which they withheld taxi service from consumers, with a "we'll show them" attitude designed to demonstrate the superiority of the traditional cab service over an app.

The problem is it backfired.

The exact opposite happened. Rather than commuters, tourists and citizens being up in arms about a lack of cabs, they turned to their smartphones (let's not forget that in 2013, smartphones accounted for more than 50% of global phone sales) and downloaded the Uber app. And they did so to the tune of an 850% increase over a typical day.

[Aside: if you'd like to use my promo code m8m99 on your first Uber ride, it will save you $10.]

With the advent of more companies like Airbnb, Uber, Feastly and others, it should be clear that protesting is not a business strategy; Jeremiah Owyang founded Crowd Companies to bring together big businesses and the emerging startups that are disrupting traditional models.

Some Military Perspective
I just returned from vacation with my family, during which we drove to Washington, DC. While we were there, we had an opportunity to visit Mount Vernon - George Washington's estate - where we learned about some of the battles he was involved in during the Revolutionary War.

If you're at all familiar with the series of battles that culminated in the United States winning its liberty from Great Britain, you'll know that the Redcoats assembled for battle in their very traditional European formations:

Of course, the rebels, fighting for their lands, took a less traditional approach and used an unexpected strategy in doing battle with the British:

Need I remind you who won that war?

Bill Cosby had a bit called "The Coin Toss" from his first album that illustrated this lopsided contest:

At the beginning of every football game, a referee comes out and he introduces the two team captains and he flips the coin...
"Call the toss there Captain Harbers. Capt. Harbers calls heads; it's tails - you lose the toss, captain. Captain Solbers, your team wins; what will you do?"

Now, he'll do whatever is to his advantage:
"We will receive, we will receive."
"Alright, this team here will receive, they will receive. And what will your team do?"
"We will kick off, we will kick off."
"Alright, this team here will kick off, they will kick off."

What if you can a referee before every war and he called the toss? Let's go to the Revolutionary War:

"Captain Solbers of the Settlers, this is Captain Harbers of the British. Captain Harbers of the British, this is Captain Solbers of the Settlers. Call the toss there, British. British call heads; it's tails. You lose the toss, British; the Settlers win - what will you do Settlers?"
"Alright, the Settlers say that during the war, they will wear any color clothes that they want to, shoot from behind the rocks, the trees and everywhere; and says that your team must wear red and march in a straight line."

Those who cannot learn from history...
While driving on our vacation, I caught an episode of NPR's "Fresh Air" on which Scott Anderson was interviewed by host Dave Davies about his book Lawrence in Arabia. I was struck on how little the British seemed to have learned from their American experience over 125 years earlier:

[Partial transcript from "Fresh Air"]

ANDERSON: Lawrence had an innate understanding of how to wage war in the Middle East that a regular military officer at the time who had studied Napoleonic wars or even trench warfare, it would have been utterly alien to them.

DAVIES: Right, and this of course stood in sharp contrast to mechanized war as it was fought in the First World War, where there were machine guns, heavy artillery, you know, caused enormous loss of life and were run by highly regimented armies.

ANDERSON: That's right, that's right, and they even brought that concept of war, these frontal assault attacks, against entrenched men with machine guns, which was so disastrous all across Europe, but it was also disastrous in the Middle East. And on three different occasions, the British army attacked a vastly smaller and disorganized and ill-equipped a hungry, starving Turkish army and were slaughtered.

Just the lack of imagination of - the lack of coming up with any other sort of tactic in which to wage this war, it was stunning how long it took the British military hierarchy to start adapting. [Emphasis added]

If you've read this far, you'll probably have already made the connection between the Collaborative Economy and historic British military strategy. The traditional companies that wish to keep on with business as usual - or even worse, by protesting the changes afoot - face the same level of futility and defeat that the British faced in unfamiliar overseas territory.

Image credit: Wikipedia (the HMS Inflexible)
--Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-89890279236688499302014-05-23T14:09:00.000-04:002014-05-23T14:17:17.506-04:00This Week in Digital - May 23, 2014

The week after the New York Times report sees more discussion on tensions and duality, including the divide between journalists and marketers, the soft skills marketers need most, a major deal between Facebook and Publicis, the majority of marketers think Facebook is ineffective, Twitter has a perception problem, LinkedIn and Twitter using peer activity to spur action, Pinterest opens its data feed to marketers, why you need to hustle content, what makes videos go viral, negative online reviews and the law, the announcement that shook the social media industry and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below. And if you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

As digital ad budgets grow, spending on direct response digital tactics is outstripping branding objectives. (eMarketer)

There's overlap, tension and duality everywhere in marketers' and communicators' worlds. According to Nestle digital chief Pete Blackshaw, the key is to manage that duality. (AdAge)

While it's clear that more analytical skills are necessary in marketing leaders of the future, which soft skills are the most important for marketers? (MarketingCharts)

Platforms

Facebook

After missing the opportunity to buy them, Facebook is reportedly building a Snapchat competitor. (The Verge)

Not resting on its failed merger attempt with Omnicom, Publicis Groupe has struck a major deal with Facebook. Recall last year that Publicis and Twitter made an ad arrangement for TV. (AdAge)

While marketers put a lot of effort into Facebook, it turns out that 57% of them think that effort is ineffective. (Mashable)

Twitter

Twitter's problem is not growth; it's perception. (Quartz)

In an effort to get back into the music business, Twitter was in discussions to buy SoundCloud, but now that deal is off. (Mashable)

But Twitter isn't giving up on TV; it's turning on features that notify user when their friends are watching various programs. (re/code)

Here's a map that charts the emotions of the world in real time via Twitter. (AllTwitter)

LinkedIn

Appealing to psychology and attempting to urge action, LinkedIn is showing users how they rank with respect to their peers. (Slate)

Pinterest has raised another $200 million and is now valued at $5 billion. (Forbes)

Anonymish app Secret is now global on Android and iOS devices. (re/code)

Measurement/Metrics/Big Data

The floodgates are open - Pinterest is opening its data firehose to marketers.(WSJ CMO Today)

Legal/HR

KlearGear.com has been trying to collect $3,500 from a customer because it included a Non-Disparagement clause in its Terms to prevent any online complaints about its products. A court has ruled in favor of the consumer. (Consumerist)

Content

Journalists tend to be storytellers and marketers focus on product details and business goals. With that contrast, here's a lesson on how to ease the journalist/marketer tension inside brand newsrooms. (Contently)

As a follow-up to last week's New York Times report, here's something that many content teams might need to consider: why you need to hustle content. (Super Hype Blog)

A look at just what makes videos go viral. (NY Times)

Tom Fishburne reminds us exactly why it's important for brands to understand and use the language of the platforms they're participating in, or to put it in the words of Hugh McLeod, "If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they'd punch you in the face." (Marketoonist)

Essential Reading/Watching/Listening

It's university commencement season, and to celebrate that occasion, NPR has an app/site with some 300 great commencement addresses, going back to 1774. (NPR)

The New York Times isn't the only organization that needs to think digital first; the public relations industry could use a jolt as well. (SHIFT Communications)

The ebook Social Brands: The Future of Marketing looks at some key elements that help brands to be social, not just do social. The full report is embedded below, but some top-level takeaways are worth noting as well. (We Are Social)

Social equity drives brand equity

Communities have more value than platforms

All marketing must add value

Go mobile or stand still

From selective hearing to active listening

Experiences are the new products

Civic-minded brands are best placed to succeed

Bonus Content
I generally don't like to focus on myself too much; my goal with these updates is to provide value to you in exchange for the time you spend here. The exception is when something profoundly significant in my personal or professional life happens that can be useful.

In this case, as you've probably heard, I left Ford Motor Company. It has provoked some great discussion out there, but there's also some hyperbole and overreaching. For my money, there are two extremely thoughtful and thorough articles about where the industry is heading: Brands Should Bring Their Social Media Home by Frank Eliason and Social Media Road Trip: Right Turn at the Sign by Richard Binhammer.

And if you'd like to read a more in-depth view from me, AdWeek ran a quick interview with me with a couple of worthwhile quotes that have been getting shared widely:

Q: Where do you see social media heading after these last six years?
 I think it's at a critical juncture right now. With all the commentary that's been going on about Facebook and the loss of organic reach, obviously, how the paid component to social evolves is critical. Outside of Ford and looking at the industry overall, it saddens me how social has been co-opted by marketing to become just another mass advertising/marketing channel. I think the promise of social is about relationship development, and I have always said that. All the talks I've given about Ford's progress has concentrated on attention and trust. While advertising can get you the attention by interrupting people, it's more important to build relationships with customers and other people you want to reach. And I think communications and marketing and customer service have to band together around social.

Q: So are you, in part, saying earned trumps paid in terms of effectiveness? When we think about our platforms, we always think of paid, earned, owned and—a new term we have started to use—rented. Sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube—we don't own those. We are using other people's property. So how we bring them all together and make them play appropriately is important. It's not about putting all of our eggs in one basket. And it's going to continue to get more complex before it gets easier.

Image credit: Gabriel Villena Fernández (Flickr)

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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-69320987769573707242014-05-19T21:31:00.001-04:002014-05-20T09:57:50.356-04:00Driving Into the Sunset

This may come as a bit of a shock in some circles, but I've left Ford Motor Company. After nearly six years with the company, I will be pursuing something else - the subject of another announcement that I'll make soon.

During my time at Ford, I've had the pleasure of working with some of the most talented men and women not only in the auto industry, but in the communications and marketing industries as well. Together, we created a presence for a 110 year-old company that has given new audiences and new customers a different view of what it's like at a manufacturing and technology leader.

I've been in the presence of great leaders like Alan Mulally, Jim Farley and Mark Fields. I've had colleagues like Karen Untereker and Craig Daitch who took a fledgling digital team and made it stellar. I've been part of award winning work that goes beyond the contributions of any single individual - certainly myself included. We've been the first brand to reveal a vehicle on Facebook, the first brand on Google+, and our work continues to be celebrated by many.

 Much speculation has happened over the eventuality of this day, and I've always been confident that the team and the Ford brand are much stronger than any single individual. While I've been the online face of Ford, interacting with people on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, websites, traditional media and elsewhere, the operation is bigger than me, and we have a cadre of people who will do just fine. I'm flattered to receive such attention and credit, but I'm far from deserving of the accolades.

As for what's next: that's the subject of another announcement that I'll make soon. I'd just like some time to reflect on the work that our team has done and take pride in a job well done.

Image credit: bradleypjohnson (Flickr)

--

Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-80052998304293557512014-05-16T16:21:00.000-04:002014-05-16T16:23:40.054-04:00This Week in Digital - May 16, 2014

The FCC wants your Internet, the New York Times fires its editor and gets reflective with a major report, the maturation of Facebook on Zuckerberg's 30th, brand tweets cause actions online and offline, deleting Google results in the EU, the state of big data, a social media law final exam, the shortening of wire stories, corporate blogs making a comeback, the marketing funnel is dead and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below. And if you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

The FCC voted to adopt a new net neutrality proposal for so-called "fast lanes" of content online, opening the rules for public debate. (The Verge)

Native advertising claims a victim. The New York Times fired Jill Abramson, its executive editor, reportedly over her opposition to native advertising as one factor. (Silicon Valley Watcher)

But the leaked innovation report from the Times itself is the most fascinating document of our age. (Nieman Journalism Lab)

Bonus: see what brands can learn from the New York Times report.

Which online content categories are mostly consumed on mobile? Streaming radio, games, social media, weather and retail. (Marketing Charts)

Platforms

Facebook

Brands can learn more about who they're targeting with ads by using the new Audience Insights tool on Facebook. (Inside Facebook)

Mark Zuckerberg turned 30 this week. And Facebook continues to mature with him. (Guardian)

Twitter

In a study with the ARF, Fox and DB5, Twitter found that exposure to brand tweets drives consumers to take action, both on and off Twitter. (Twitter)

Twitter has introduced the mute feature on mobile and web platforms, giving users more control over their content stream by allowing them to silence other users. (The Next Web)

You can now target users by language on Twitter, which offers 20 different languages in its Promoted Tweets and Accounts. (Twitter)

In a move that will transform its platform, Vine redesigned its website and introduced search. (GigaOm)

Yahoo launched mobile-first native ads with larger photos that will be clearly marked as sponsored content. (The Next Web)

The EU's top court has ruled that people can ask Google to delete sensitive information from its search results. (CNBC)

Please disperse. Nothing to see here. On Pinterest, 92% of pins are made by women. The platform maintains 84% of its user base from four years ago. (VentureBeat)

Foursquare has launched Swarm, it's check-in app that helps you meet and make plans with nearby friends. (The Next Web)

Measurement/Metrics/Big Data

Last week, we looked at rebooting your social media program by discussing customer acquisition. Part 2 covers customer development and retention. (Olivier Blanchard)

Metrics to understand that will help drive your communications efforts. (SHIFT Communications)

Big Data can be confusing; to sort things out (?) here's the state of big data in one chart. (Venture Beat)

Why rely on the same three tools for every social initiative? Here are 21 of the best hashtag tools out there. (SteamFeed)

Legal/HR

Social media can be too self-serving. Here's how to use social media to advance your career. (WSJ Experts)

For any aspiring legal types, you can try your hand at the final exam for the University of Texas Law & Social Media course. (SoMeLaw Thoughts)

2014 Law & Social Media Final by Ryan Garcia

Content

With more and more content flooding the Internet, it's no surprise that content shock is looming. But what will happen to society and its literacy as we increasingly rely on visual communications? (Geoff Livingston)

Similarly, let's hope you don't have a long complex story to tell. The editor for Reuters America tells staff that most stories need to be shorter than 500 words. (Talking Biz News)

But not all is lost: consumers do appreciate original content from brands, and the corporate blog is making a comeback amid a push to build a direct relationship with consumers, according to a WP Engine study. (Twist Image)

46% of consumers read the blogs of their favorite brands

40% believe there are negative effects if brands do not provide up-to-date content on their blogs.

40% prefer to read content directly from a company blog rather than a news magazine or website.

If you're curious as to the next phase of viral headlines, check out these lessons from the most popular headlines. (Contently)

Essential Reading/Watching/Listening

Consumers are more connected than ever via multiple devices; therefore, marketing can no longer rely on a linear funnel. (Harvard Business Review)

Instead of messaging, pitching and marketing all of the time, try providing value. Chipotle recently did something like that and the effect of unexpected value was impressive. (Twist Image)

The digital age has carved out winners and losers. In this talk in New York, Scott Galloway of digital innovation think tank L2 outlines his conclusions based on the data. (DLD NYC 14 Conference)

Image credit: Lotus Carroll (Flickr)
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Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-65162022530347003492014-05-16T13:35:00.001-04:002014-05-19T11:56:11.430-04:00What Brands Can Learn from the Bombshell New York Times Innovation Report

This week, an internal report on the digital health of the New York Times was leaked. While many may write this off as an analysis of modern journalism or media companies, there are themes that may be more broadly applicable than scanning the headlines might make you believe.

Put another way, how much of the New York Times internal digital report could apply to communications and marketing professionals within companies?

Joshua Benton, editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, called it "one of the most remarkable documents I've seen" in his years running the Lab.

The deep problems are cultural, according to a Buzzfeed exclusive (quotes below in red), as the digital team is slowed by "a cadre of editors who remain unfamiliar with the web." Indeed, according to some staffers interviewed by Benton, the report "surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types have been struggling to overcome for years."

It's not our intention to completely dissect the report; if you'd like to read it when you have time (highly recommended for any digital professional), please do so. But we hope to pull out the salient points that can apply more broadly to the companies you may be working for today.

The Full New York Times Innovation Report by Amanda Wills, Mashable

Taken directly from the document above, the company's goals are stated in such a way that they might apply to a number of businesses or industries: Strategy for Growth, Speed and Agility, Unlocking the Power of Data, and One NYT.

Clearly, these are four major challenges and opportunities that are common to most businesses today. Let's take a closer look at some of the challenges as identified by the team in their document. For our purposes, we'll be drawing parallels between the newsroom and communications staff, and the business side and marketing staff.

The report is divided into two sections: Audience Development and Strengthening Our Newsroom. The first is a core part of the newsroom team (journalists), while the other is a more broad effort that includes imperatives for business units and the newsroom alike.

Audience Development
This section starts out with a recounting of the Times' original distribution process: from printers to trucks to kids on bicycles and news racks, it's the story of "the most sophisticated consumer-outreach operations in history." But it's not enough to rest on that history, as the Internet is getting more crowded, content is difficult to find, and mobile is becoming increasingly important.

The report defines audience development as "the work of expanding our loyal and engaged audience," and breaks it into discovery, promotion and connection. While this is a central role for the newsroom, audience development is the responsibility of every individual.

In helping to define the changes afoot in the industry - particularly that there is no central, all-encompassing destination any longer, the report includes a quote from Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of The Guardian's website:

The hardest part for me has been the realization that you don't automatically get an audience...that you have to go find your audience - they're not going to just come and read it - has been transformative."
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are becoming more of the norm for story discovery. Even text, email and phone alerts have been worked into various news organizations. It's just as important to pay attention to each of these as it is to focus on Page One or a homepage online.

Discovery
It is not enough to assume that people will find your content. Whether you're the New York Times, Coca-Cola, an insurance company or a small business owner. If they do happen to make their way to your page, it's equally as important to think of their ability to navigate and find what they need with the least hassle. Design for the web, not for print.

With more then 300 URLs produced every single day and over 14 million articles that date back to 1851, the Times is a goldmine of content. But can you find what you're looking for? The Times thinks it can help by surfacing evergreen content on a regular basis. As Henry Blodget, founder and CEO of Business Insider said to the Times,

You have a huge advantage. You have a tremendous amount of high quality content that you have a perpetual license to."
While the focus of the newsroom may be on current events and stories, sometimes it's important to provide context to what's happening. And evergreen content can help do just that.

Flipboard and Pinterest have been helpful in the Times' assessment of another important concept of discovery: packaging. By bundling stories together in magazines or boards, we're able to curate content into collections for readers and consumers. If you package stories for readers or customers, you provide value by making the process of discovery that much easier for them.

Personalization is an opportunity to put content out in new and smarter ways. Whether it's how the stories are delivered to them, showing them a suggested article based on what they just read, localized stories or offers based on their IP address, etc. And by giving consumers/readers a chance to follow the stories, authors or feeds of the content they care about, you give them the chance to personalize their experience themselves.

Finally, the staff realized that they need to invest more in some of the guts of the operations: the tagging and structuring of data, so search results are more robust and that adhere not to the Times Index, but to Google's and others'.

For anyone involved in content creation and management, these tenets should be universal. Whether you're in the news business, the entertainment industry or selling shoes, the principles remain the same.

Promotion
This should be a wake-up call for anyone managing content:

At the Times, we generally like to let our work speak for itself. We're not ones to brag. Our competitors are doing a better job of getting their journalism in front of new readers through aggressive story promotion. They regard this as a core function of reporters and editors, and they react with amazement that the same is not true here."
I've often heard the argument that the story should stand on its own or the brand should be the star, but as you'll see in the next section ("Connection"), people want a two-way relationship, and there's no way to do that without interacting with a human being.

The competition has teams dedicated to promotion inside their newsrooms, expect their teams to be fluent in social media and expect them to promote their own work and mine traffic numbers to look for best practices. And much of this happens in real-time: it's not about throwing out a link and walking away. The best teams help "desks take steps to draw more traffic and to keep visitors on the site longer."

The Times is taking a dual approach: institutional promotion, in which the official accounts on Twitter and Facebook are responsible for promoting content, and front-line promotion, whereby editors and reporters take initiative for advancing their work publicly.

Connection
The Times has identified its single most underutilized resource: its audience. This could likely be said of many brands as well.

Nor is it an easy task:

Of all of the tasks we discuss in this report, the challenge of connecting with and engaging readers - which extends from online comments to conferences - has been the most difficult."
As the Times struggles to grapple with this, they've come to realize that transparency may play a role in making a deeper connection with their audience: "pulling back the curtain and providing readers a bit more insight into how we do our work."

Evidently, their reporters and columnists are happy to connect with readers, but are doing so on other sites or platforms to talk about the behind-the-scenes approach, rather than on Times properties. This leads to a fracturing of attention and platforms.

Additional opportunities under this section include user-generated content and events, where the voices of readers can be more clearly heard and where the Times team can have better interactions with them.

Strengthening Our Newsroom

Another quick history lesson from the Times: the print and digital teams were housed in separate buildings until just seven years ago. And while the institution has been known for quality of its journalism and the support system in place for journalists, the digital side has not kept pace.

In this bastion of venerable tradition, it is refreshing and eye-opening to see the Times acknowledge:

To become more of a digital-first newsroom, we have to look hard at our traditions and push ourselves in ways that make us uncomfortable."

This is exactly what brands need to do if they espouse a newsroom mentality. The traditional roles of communicators and marketers may not fit with the way the world is changing. And making tweaks here and there is not going to suffice. Wholesale change is needed.

The Times proposes: better collaboration between newsroom and business sides, the creation of a newsroom strategy team, and mapping a strategy for digital-first.

Collaborate with Business Side
This is probably the most controversial of the sections, as traditionalists will gasp at the thought of journalism mixing with advertising. But it's been happening for years, albeit under different names or executions, and for purposes related to reader benefit, not one influencing the other. The NYT admits in the report:

The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times well for decades, allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers."

Now, the newsroom and business side are both focused on readers and any deviation from that strategy will not fit with the view of the Times. In fact, one of the elements that led to the firing of executive editor Jill Abramson was that she opposed native advertising.

Not that there's any danger of advertising influencing journalism; the report indicates that no one interviewed "ever suggested tinkering with the journalistic values and integrity that make the Times the greatest journalistic institution in the world," and that the advertising arm "should remain walled off."

Here's the thing that many of us miss when thinking of "The Wall," "Church and State," or "Communications and Marketing" - readers/customer don't care. They don't discern a difference between which department is surfacing and sharing content or ideas. To them, it's one entity. So enough of the squabbling over who "owns" what. The "One NYT" vision (or similar ones at any number of other companies) should make that clear.

The Buzzfeed piece noted:

The paper's Twitter account is run by the newsroom. Its Facebook account is run by the paper's business side.
More broadly, the newsroom has "abdicated completely the role of strategy," a masthead editor is quoted, speaking of their digital strategy.

Here's where better collaboration and shared goals would come into play. More often than not, I hear from colleagues who say that their communications teams have given up on digital/social strategy because of the budgets that marketing departments wield. Done well, it shouldn't be an either/or position, but a collaboration.

In addition, the report noted that developers, designers and product managers are on the business side at the Times (sidebar from the report: "the perception that their roles were 'on a different side' was a source of confusion"), while at competitors, they are part of the newsroom or report to both teams.

These colleagues have specialized skills that most editors simply do not possess and they are trained in the processes of turning ideas into successes."

Designers seem particularly ostracized and in need of connection to the newsroom:

...newsroom editors needed to be more engaged when designers are wrestling with major questions about our digital future, like experimenting with personalization, rethinking how we organize our content, and even changing the architecture of stories to meet new needs."
 The recommendations that are guiding the way at the Times should serve as a recipe for any brand trying to tackle a newsroom/content culture:

Clarify which reader experience units should be interacting with the newsroom.

Ensure the newsroom is working collaboratively with reader experience.

Hire collaboratively and encourage employees to move freely between the newsroom and reader experience.

Communicate the new message for collaboration broadly.

Strategy team
The NYT recognizes that most of the newsroom leaders are too focused on delivering content, so there's little focus on the overall strategy.

"...strategy is becoming such a pressing need at this juncture that it should become a permanent newsroom function, with dedicated staff."
By creating a small advisory team to watch the competition and give feedback on readers' habits, the newsroom team could be kept informed of developments outside of their purview and the approach could be kept fresh. Interestingly, the backgrounds of those selected is to include journalism, technology, user experience, product and analytics.

The strategy group will have a leader who will report to a single person in the newsroom who is senior enough to implement the recommendations from the team. Ideally, the team will serve as a grooming ground for future leaders and will foster the culture of collaboration that is so urgently needed.

When you think of those who are responsible for content in your organization, how much of your communications or marketing team is focused on the creation and delivery of content versus the strategic, experimental and analytical work to help drive the strategy? Are you a slave to your content demands and constantly trying to meet your metrics? It may be time to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Old-school goals and metrics have driven the focus at the Times:

including a sense that the Times will simply serve as a destination — leading to a neglect of social promotion. One factor is an obsessive focus on the front page of the print paper, with reporters evaluated in their annual reviews on how many times they've made A1."

How many of you are judged on traffic to your company's home page / shopping site or by how many top stories you've generated via pitches to major reporters? Or that you have colleagues that seem to be blissfully ignorant of how the digital space is evolving?

Summarized, the responsibilities of the strategy team are:

Build a strong team

Tracking the media landscape

Assessing needs and setting priorities

Running experiments and sharing results

Digital First
While it can be argued that the digital progress at the Times has been extraordinary, it's incredibly informative to know that they're still being held back by their traditional processes and thinking: filing stories by print schedules, organizing apps according to print sections, traditional skills being prioritized in hiring.

They admit:

The continued profitability of this newspaper has bought us time. But that head start is eroding. Several billionaires have pledged parts of their fortunes to creating digital newsrooms. Start-ups, backed by venture capital, are redefining digital media. And traditional competitors, have moved aggressively to remake themselves as "digital first."
In defining what digital first means, they note that it's more than simply publishing to the Web before print; it's an all-encompassing strategy. And the transition "requires rethinking staffing, structure and work processes from top to bottom."

To date, changes have been incremental and there has been a great deal of frustration internally. While having an "integrated" newsroom was a step, some argued that it isn't enough: "We need to become a digital newsroom, a small subset of which produces a print product."

Think of that with respect to your own teams and the priorities placed on traditional placements or advertising. We'll wager you could replace "Snowfall" below with any successful initiative or campaign:

While we receive accolades for our digital efforts like Snowfall, we nevertheless are at risk of becoming known as a place that does not fully understand, reward, and celebrate digital skills."

The challenge presently is that the leadership lacks the ability to effectively evaluate talent: journalistic skills are overvalued for digital hires and digital skills are undervalued for journalistic hires. And the complaints of the digital employees are well known:

...their expertise isn't put to good use, [they] have few growth opportunities and believe their bosses do not understand their skills."
Those who recently left the Times did not see opportunities for growth, as newly open positions were more frequently given to traditional journalists; there seemed to be no career path for digital types. Without more digitally savvy members of the senior leadership team, there is trouble understanding the potential or new career paths for digital team members, and the digital staffers are forced to accept a more traditional role or path.

There is a danger, according to the report, of continuing the time-honored succession process of leaders. They admit struggling "to groom our digital journalists for leadership, in part because we don't know how to use their skills," and they move traditional journalists into leadership roles - including digital leadership roles. There simply doesn't seem to be any room for helping their digital talent succeed.

This pattern of promotion risks, among other things, sending the message that the only way to move up in the company is through traditional journalism, even on digital career paths."

Putting in place leadership that understands digital, its role and its future, will ensure that the fossilized hiring patterns are kept more fluid.

Beyond cultural and leadership change, it is likely that the very structure of the organization will need to change. An editor of a competing publication said,

You can't take new talent and put them in old structures where they are second-class citizens. That' is not real change. You must change the structure of power."
But anything that's built will likely be built for a snapshot in time, rather than built for the ages. Strategy, products, platforms, audience development an analytics are key elements to any newsroom.

Wanted: Makers, Entrepreneurs, Reader Advocates and Zeitgeist Watchers
The company also acknowledged the need to win at talent wars with a tally of skillsets that any business would be fortunate to have in its communications and marketing team members:

The only way to ensure that [we keep] pace is to build a newsroom with a deeper and broader mix of digital talents: technologists, user experience designers, product managers, data analysts and, most of all, digitally inclined reporters and editors."

...we want makers, who build tools to streamline our newsgathering; entrepreneurs, who know what it takes to launch new digital efforts; reader advocates, who ensure that we are designing useful products that meet our subscribers' changing needs; and zeitgeist watchers, who have a sixth sense for the shifting technology and behavior. Most of all, we need those rare - and sought after - talents who can check off many of those boxes."

How the Times plans to focus on its digital first imperative:

De-emphasize print

Shift away from Page One, creating additional measures of success

Ask editors to read more like readers

Rethink the competition

Make digital a key part of evaluations

Assess digital needs

Assess capabilities of each group

Make the newsroom flexible and responsive to the developing industry

Add digital specialists to staffing committee

Maintain a list of the best digital talent and court them

Acknowledge that digital talent is in high demand and be prepared to accommodate that with more money, persuasion and freedom

Find ways to empower current digital staff

Let employees transfer between newsroom and operational units

Identify rising stars, show them they're appreciated, help develop their careers

Make a star hire

Explore more serious steps

Task force on digital-first excellence

Digital fellowship program to attract new talent

Conclusion
On the one hand, it may seem jarring that so venerable an institution as the Grey Lady is undergoing such self-scrutiny. However, the fact that they're taking the time to assess and address the issues themselves - and quite deeply, we might add - is encouraging.

While the Times may not have all of the answers, we think that they raise the appropriate questions and chart a course that is bold and different, rather than the tweaks here and there. Will it be successful? On behalf of journalism and brand newsrooms, we certainly hope so. The Times is a leader and will be viewed as such for a long time.

Brands should pay close attention and give the report a full read. While we live in the era of tl;dr, it's essential reading for anyone who thinks of himself or herself as a digital leader.

Image credit: Alex Perkins (Flickr)
--Scott Montyhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2794738153281647060.post-58705759458923066132014-05-09T16:23:00.000-04:002014-05-09T16:23:25.582-04:00This Week in Digital - May 9, 2014

The merger that wasn't, the ads that Facebook doesn't want you to see, the importance of video and the rise of podcasting, from hashtag to shopping cart, hooking up or linking in, Tumblr needs traction with Madison Ave., the FTC cracks down on Snapchat, the NLRB may have something to say about your social media policy, Kevin Spacey on storytelling and more, it's This Week in Digital.

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, digital communications and marketing in order to keep leaders up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below. And if you're on Flipboard, you can get these links by subscribing to the This Week in Digital Magazine.

Industry

The Omincom / Publicis merger fell through amid complexities. (AdAge)

Audio and video content are becoming a more significant part of publishers' evolving strategies.

Slate will start two new daily podcasts next week - one financial in nature, the other centered on news and commentary.

Both the Wall Street Journal and Time, Inc. will build standalone video portals. (NY Times and Capital New York)

Stitcher has created a Listen Later playlist feature with its "Instapaper for audio" function. (Fast Company)

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba filed for an IPO in the US. Some are positing that it may be the largest IPO ever seen. (The Guardian)

Amazon launched Amazon Cart, which will allow customers to reply to a tweet containing an Amazon product and use the #AmazonCart hashtag to automatically place that item in their shopping cart. (Amazon)

Platforms

Twitter

Last week, Twitter was supposedly dying. This week it's not. Its MoPub acquisition last year is poised to make mobile ads much more lucrative and the company is finding new ways to capitalize on its vast audience. (Slate)

Another look at the numbers puts it in perspective: 16% of the market is not too shabby. (Convince and Convert)

Google

A new feature in Google Now will alert you if you're near a product you've researched online. (Mashable)

LinkedIn

LinkedIn's challenge ahead in China: not censorship, but culture. The Chinese are not given to as much sharing and transparency as Western business culture. (Tech in Asia)

Did you know that now you can do more than just link in? LinkedUp! is an app akin to Tinder that allows you to check the professional credibility of your date by syncing with LinkedIn. (WSJ At Work)

Weibo's CEO has a Twitter-like vision for his company. Hopefully without Chinese censorship. (The Next Web)

Tumblr is having difficulty convincing advertisers of the benefit of its platform. (Digiday)

Delicious has been sold again, this time to Science, Inc., which plans to use it as an anchor to a portfolio of mobile content companies.

Ads for underwear manufacturer MeUndies have fallen under intense scrutiny by Facebook because of their risqué content. Their creative director is having the last laugh, though. (All Facebook)

Measurement/Metrics/Big Data

From the guy who literally wrote the book on Social Media ROI, here's a chance to reboot your social media program, from likes to ROI. (Olivier Blanchard)

Never a shrinking violet, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is pushing for governing authority to improve media measurement. The justification: "we're spending the money." (AdAge)

Optimizely uses data to help test versions of websites, moving away from HIPPO-based (highest paid person's opinion) decision making. (re/code)

Legal/HR

The FTC ruled that Snapchat violated its own privacy policies and as a result must submit to monitoring for 20 years. The messaging platform will not have to pay any fines. (NBC News)

Google, Facebook, Twitter and AOL are teaming up to help protect consumers from deceptive advertising online with TrustInAds.org. (re/code)

The NLRB has struck down some provisions of employee communications policies - particularly those requiring disclosure of affiliation with their employer. Related: here are four core elements of your social media policy that may be illegal. (Mondaq and Holtz Communications)

Want to know how much information you're giving away on Facebook? A new app called Digital Shadow will tell you. It was launched as a promotion to the upcoming video game Watch Dogs. (Search Engine Journal)

Content

Kevin Spacey continues to dazzle everyone with his keen understanding of storytelling and disruption. (Millennial CEO)

Scribewise thinks that brands have an opportunity to succeed with explanatory journalism. (Contently)

Here's how one publisher got 300% more people to read their content. (Buffer)

Real-time marketing is overrated. A better approach? Content strategy. (Logic + Emotion)

Essential Reading/Watching/Listening

This week at a lecture at Harvard, Andrew Sullivan tore up the earned media world with a controversial talk: "How Advertising Defeated Journalism," in which he opined that because journalists haven't figured out how to drive subscriptions to their content, sites that rely on advertising are more successful. He also has some choice words for native advertising, sponsored content and branded content, calling it "naughty." (Digiday)

David Armano takes another angle, arguing that the average person doesn't discern between paid and earned media. To them, it's about content, and it's the responsibility of journalists (and brands) to burnish their reputation. (Logic + Emotion)

For a look at how we got where we are, a look at two decades of warning from a former P&G CEO reflects on how tech took a bite out of the advertising industry. (AdAge)

Image credit: Thomas Hawk (Flickr)
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Scott Montyhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com