Grounded In Reality

Social technographics®–a coin termed by Charlene Li at Forrester Research in a new report about how companies should start thinking about their media campaigns by understanding their audiences rather than beginning by considering the different digital channels and technologies available.

Like all things PR: hello common sense! I mean in a social setting, surely, you wouldn’t talk about the same things, or even use the same language while speaking with your parents as you would with your friends, right? Then why do the same with a media campaign?

It’s interesting to see how the communication strategy roadmap is constantly morphing. In school I was taught, don’t start thinking with the execution. First, think about what you want to achieve and then about what you want to say in order to achive the goal. Now, with the exploding societal effect of Web 2.0, you first start thinking about who your niche audiences are, and then you decide what you want to say to them and finally the how you’d do it.

Just as Steve Rubel mentions, it’s fascinating to see how applicable and appropriate this breakdown of communication strategy can be for a PR professional. Advertising is all nice and entertaining like during the Super Bowl half-time. But, it’s not about engaging your preferred audiences in a conversation as only PR professionals are trained to do.

The tricky/challenging part of this approach however, is that there is no one “right” way of achieving and measuring success. Although personally, I think this, by itself, is a reward on the job! How exciting is it that with a smart and thought out new media campaign we can impact not only perception of our audiences, but also the way they interact and experience these brands!

This constantly changing social technographics® landscape pushes us to think differently not only of the message and the product but also helps us to factor in how our key audiences will use these messages.

A call to action is no longer as simple as “please respond to this email.” It’s more like please respond to this email, post it on your blog, then add a widget about it to your social networking page and then finally discuss it with your family over the dinner table! (or not!)

I’m a Heroes fan and, in my recent talks with students, have cited NBC’s embrace of digital media as a prime example of traditional media “exposing” itself by providing a 360-experience that taps into the fan network.  What’s neat about Heroes?

• Heroes Rewind: Free, full online videos available five hours after broadcast; entire season is posted online for free (ad free!)
• Commentary: Full-length cast commentary for each episode
• Novels: Online graphic novel (PDF and Flash) that runs concurrent with the broadcast; new characters are introduced and plot lines intertwined and enriched
• Blogs by director Greg Beaman and most the popular character, Hiro (each post gets hundreds of comments, not bad for a fictitious blog)
• Wiki that captures episode guides, mythology, art, trivia, predictions and speculations, etc.
• Theories: User submitted videos about what happens next in the storyline; available as a widget.  (Top Five Theories)
• On the go: Heroes on your mobile device

Kudos to NBC for generating this rich, engaging content.  As it matures, I trust that the layout and navigation will get cleaner and slicker.  I’m eager to see and learn from the upcoming NBC Social Network.

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UPDATE:  USA Today posted a blog entry saying ‘When bloggers are silenced, the world must speak for them.’  The article focuses on Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman’s jailing for blogging about attacks he witnessed by Muslims on Coptic Christian establishments and the extremist views taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

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Everyone is reading blogs these days. In one way, shape or form, we all read blogs of all different shapes and sizes.

From American Idol to ESPN, there are millions of blogs with many different levels of authority. But why?

The blogosphere is getting interesting in the area of covering world events. Newspapers, television stations, and radio stations all have blogs of what’s going on in the world as it happens.

In the New York Times yesterday, a great article ran on Matthew Lee, a blogger that covers the United Nations and has credentials to go to everything and anything about the United Nations.

It begs the question, why does Lee get credentials and since he does, who else should have them? It’s a very fine line that is going to be defined as time goes on.

From my past life at USA Today, I covered sporting events, and there’s not enough room half the time to accommodate the working media. When USA Today went online - we could’t get credentials to most of the major sporting events - now there’s not a major event that isn’t covered by the online news sites.

How and where can you even begin to draw the line if you start letting bloggers get credentials? And who decides which bloggers are credible and which aren’t?

The line is fuzzy for now, but over time, it will hopefully get defined.

The revenue model for traditional media needs fresh thinking.  Mentioned in today’s Journal (subscription required), “Papers’ Web Hopes Dim a Bit: Ad Growth Online Slows as Sources for News Burgeon.”  Highlights below:

• Online ad spending for newspapers will likely fall to a percentage in the low 20s this year from 28 percent last year, Borrell Associates estimates.
• Primarily, it seems that marketers need more convincing when it comes to moving their ad dollars online.  A survey of 273 U.S. advertisers last year found that 67 percent of the companies with annual revenue of $500 million or more will dedicate less than $1 million to online ads, according to Jupiter Research.
• Media buyers also indicate marketers are beginning to look beyond traditional journalism sites, realizing many news junkies go elsewhere, too.

More at paidContent.

As one that used to work in a newsroom, the old saying that, “Bad news is good news for us” makes me a bit ill, but it’s true. Problem these days in the 5-second news cycle is that newsrooms aren’t the only places to get information these days. If you go to YouTube and search Virginia Tech Shootings there are a few videos already up and more to follow.  Technorati says that there are over 15,000 blog posts from the incident and there are 444 tags out there on it including videos and photos.  If you have turned on your TV for five seconds in the last day, you couldn’t have missed it … never mind the fact that every famous news person from around the globe made it to tiny Blacksburg ASAP.  Make time to surf the web for 15 minutes and check out what’s going on … Facebook and MySpace I am sure are going to be lit up with this topic over the next few weeks as well.  And when you get home, I know it’s rare to take a second to be thankful for what we have, but stop and think about it. I was numb to all of it in my newsroom days, but these days I say often, “But for the grace of God go I.”  Here’s wishing for no more days like yesterday and that a wonderful college town gets back to where it was.  

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4/12 UPDATE:

MSNBC pulls the Imus in the Morning show, and it replaces with news. Imus pushes forward with Radioathon; what happens with CBS to be determinedafter his 2-week suspension, which starts next week.

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For those of you who follow the news on a regular basis, the names of Don Imus and Katie Couric need not be explained. They are two of the biggest names in radio and television and this week they are linked together for things gone awry.

Imus got himself in trouble when the now-suspended radio show host called the Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos” on his April 4 show. He’s lost sponsors and has been on every news show from coast-to-coast and on the web. He’s number two (Imus) and number five (Don Imus) on Technorati top searches and there are 20,913 results on blogs with any authority.  April 8-10, his name was getting mentioned in 500+ blogs a day, and as of April 11, he’s over 4,000 mentions. Mind you some folks are mentioning that it’s all getting blown out of proportion, but most are calling for his head.  

While Imus is dealing with his fun, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is putting out her own fire for a producer who plagiarised from a Wall Street Journal column on the fading allure of library books.

 Newsweek has a great piece on the story where they say:

The problems began when an April 4 installment of  “Katie Couric’s Notebook”—a daily essay by the anchor that appears in video and audio form on CBS News’ Web site, among other places—was uncomfortably close to musings by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow on the fading allure of library books.

Newsweek’s story goes on to say that the story came to light “when a Wall Street Journal reader who’d read, heard or saw “Katie Couric’s Notebook” alerted the newspaper, according to an insider at the Wall Street Journal.  Zaslow, the author, said two CBS officials phoned him to express regrets.”

What’s incredible is how the web plays a role in both of these cases.

Imus has been spouting off about all kinds of issues for years. He’s crossed the line many a time, but the world we live in isn’t the same as when I was growing up outside of New York City and he was just on WNBC-AM (you younger folks, you know what AM radio is, right?). 

Couric’s issue is deeper in the sense that plagiarism is deemed “journalistic suicide” and the producer in charge of the ‘Notebook’ has been fired. But once again, it’s an issue that can explode because of the mob on the web. 

 The sad part about Couric’s problems are that, I think, CBS News and Couric have done a wonderful job embracing new media into their broadcast and into their site. If you haven’t checked out their site, I recommend you do at: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/eveningnews/main3420.shtml 

It will be interesting to see when Imus comes back in two weeks if he has any sponsors left and if he will still have a job. The Couric issue will be gone in two weeks. It will be talked about, but they have fired the producer and now onto bigger and better things. The one interesting factor in my mind about CBS News is that they brought in Rick Kaplan to be the Executive Producer.

From Wikipedia entry for Kaplan:

Kaplan was at the helm of ABC’s Prime Time Live in 1991, when they aired an expose against the Food Lion supermarket chain using undercover producers who falsified their resumes and staged events. Food Lion was awarded $5.5 million by a jury in 1997. The award was later reduced by a judge to $316,000. The verdict was then overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA. According to the court, even though ABC was wrong to do what they had done, they felt that Food Lion was unable to show that they had been directly injured by ABC’s actions.

Just something to keep in your mind as CBS News tries to move out of the number three spot. They wish people were watching their televisions instead of watching the people and things that they do wrong.