By Leo Valiquette
First up, a very happy New Year wish from all of us here at inmedia Public Relations.
Many of you were no doubt in the same boat as my wife and me over the holidays, at home with one or more young ones to entertain for two weeks during their break from school. Santa’s leavings only keep energetic rug rats occupied for so long. With various cousins in the west end of Ottawa all six years of age and under, the challenge for the parents was to find fun activities all could enjoy that did not involve exhaustive car trips or aimless visits to toy stores and pet shops.
So, given the vast expanse of Ottawa’s Countryside, what could we do that was easy, convenient and fun in the days leading up to Christmas Eve? Answering that question yielded an interesting example of how a business can position itself in its market niche and build goodwill with potential customers.
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By Leo Valiquette
Regular readers of this blog will recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about the U.K. court case of Meltwater vs. the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), an ongoing story that spotlights the challenges of traditional media outlets to maintain control of, and monetize, their content in the age of Web 2.0 and news aggregation/media monitoring services such as Meltwater.
In that post I made passing reference to the dire straits of the overworked journalist, faced with staff cuts and diminished resources, who slogs away day after day trying to produce relevant and insightful news content that digs deeper than the headline and the news release. For these folks, the fiscal challenges of their corporate overlords have translated into longer hours, poor job security and loss of benefits.
Gawker.com recently published a hilarious animated short in which a seasoned journalist crushes the idealistic ambitions of a naive wannabe who wants to work for the New York Times, do important journalism and make a difference, oh, and meet the President, too.
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By Leo Valiquette
For those of you who may have missed it, London has been a battlefield between police and tens of thousands of hostile student protesters over the past week as Britain’s coalition government targets higher education with its austerity measures intended to help with economic recovery.
Now, I don’t claim any deep knowledge of British politics, or more than a layman’s understanding of economics, but I couldn’t look at this powder keg situation without thinking that it is a sterling example of focusing too much on a short-term fix at the expense of long-term gain, a trap that can snare the management team of a company as easily as a government in power.
Despite campaign promises to the contrary, both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Britain’s coalition government are voting through legislation that will allow university tuition to be as much as tripled and other support programs, such as teaching grants, to be canceled.
While this may put money in government coffers in the near term, I find it difficult to understand how making it more difficult to obtain an education serves the best long-term interests of the British economy, or any industrialized economy. I tend to agree with the general sentiments that Ian Parkinson, president of the Bolton branch of Britain’s National Union of Teachers, expressed in an article last week. Talented youth will be priced out of higher education, making it that much more difficult to find gainful employment in a tight job market, he said. And if the next generation of workers cannot secure well-paying jobs and are saddled with huge student debts, what impact will this have on overall consumer spending?
While the immediate economic pressures cannot be ignored, what happens five, 10 and 15 years from now, as baby boomers retire and shortages of skilled labour in key sectors of the economy become more acute? How can a nation innovate and be competitive on the global stage if its young people can’t afford the education that will prepare them to take up the torch?
It is an approach that attempts to fix an immediate problem without giving sufficient consideration to the future. Janice Calnan, a specialist in organizational change with whom I have worked, asserts that any organization in need of change, regardless of whether it is a government, a publicly traded company, or a startup trying to bring technology to market, must focus on a vision of where it wants to be, rather than on the immediate problems it faces. Focusing on the problems, she says, only begets more problems.
My interpretation of this is that focusing too much on your immediate challenges and how to resolve them will cause you to lose sight of the big picture. It is tactics in the absence, and at the expense, of strategy.
At inmedia, we have seen numerous companies fall into the same trap. When times are tough and key stakeholders, such as shareholders and investors, want to see results to improve fiscal performance, out comes the axe. Unfortunately, PR and marketing activities are often viewed as areas of business that don’t have enough impact on the bottom line and take the first hit.
But when the volume of leads filling your pipeline is in decline, the marketing machine must become that much more aggressive. We have consistently advocated that companies that maintain — or even increase — their marketing presence during a downturn emerge from the downturn stronger than their competitors since they are in a position to springboard into the new opportunities as they arise.
One way to prime the pump and differentiate your brand from competitors is to employ a highly consultative approach, rather than market yourself based on cost and features. In this way, you develop a thorough understanding of the prospect’s pain and the willingness of the prospect to address that pain. They will come to see you as a trusted partner who is eager to serve their best interests. Having established this kind of relationship, where do you think they will turn when they are ready to spend again?
While reducing cash burn and improving cash flow are, of course, paramount when times are tough, austerity measures must be implemented as part of a long-term strategy. Don’t axe those activities that are vital to your ability to act when opportunity comes knocking. Without such vision, your organization may find itself too weak and forgotten by the market to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.
Picture: The executioner’s, or “heading,” axe on display at the Tower of London.
By Leo Valiquette
There has been no shortage of commentary on the ethics and relevance of WikiLeaks’ recent dump of politically embarrassing diplomatic cables and its threat to target Corporate America next.
To which I say, who cares?
Now don’t get me wrong. This is without a doubt a serious matter that warrants grave consideration by anyone with secrets, or a brand, to protect. But philosophical discussion around the “ethics” and “relevance” of such unauthorized disclosures is missing the point.
Bernie Charland at Public Relations Rogue wrote a great post last week about why WikiLeaks’ actions have “little in common with the ethos of Web 2.0, and it certainly doesn’t represent the best of social media.” He concludes his post with the valid point that the question to consider isn’t whether WikiLeaks can make this kind of information public, but whether it should.
However, I contend that the real crux of the matter is that, barring some heavy-handed government or court intervention, WikiLeaks will. And even if the Powers That Be were able to shut WikiLeaks down tomorrow, the path has been laid for others to follow. WikiLeaks, like Napster, will be paid that greatest of compliments – others will attempt to duplicate, or even improve upon, its model for disrupting the status quo.
Which means that for anyone who is sensitive about how they are perceived by the public, partners, associates and other stakeholders, the best defence is a proactive, rather than reactive one.
Here at inmedia, we regularly preach the merits of being engaged with the online community as a means to build brand awareness, engage with customers, and keep tabs on what is being said about your products and services and those of your competitors. (See Alex’s Part 1 and Part 2 on the subject from the perspective of the B2B revenue cycle.)
For everyone out there who remains leery, skeptical or scornful of social media, I have only one thing to say. WikiLeaks demonstrates that the decision whether or not to engage with the online community may be made for you by a third party who is external to your organization, a third party who may not be acting with your best interests in mind. In essence, Web 2.0 and social media are of vital importance to you whether you want them to be or not.
It therefore behooves any brand to have in place a strategy for crisis communications, a key part of which is building a vibrant online community that allows for interactive engagement with key stakeholder groups. Far too few organizations, however, have taken this proactive step.
In an article last week, E.B. Boyd at Fast Company cited a Harris Interactive poll in which only nine percent of respondents said they have crisis protocols in place.
Boyd spoke to several crisis communications experts who agreed that disclosures of the WikiLeaks sort are more likely to hit an organization’s reputation rather than reveal confidential corporate information. However, this can be just as damaging. Boyd pointed to the example of Bank of America, rumored to be on the radar as WikiLeaks’ first Corporate America target. Just the rumor of this hitting mainstream media was enough to cut three percent from the bank’s stock price in a single day.
At one time, the best defence against seeing anything embarrassing about yourself or your organization in print, on TV, or on the radio was to live by this simple rule of thumb – if you don’t want it out there, don’t write it down and don’t say it. “Burn the tapes!” But today, with disgruntled employees able to so easily hit “send” on a damning email, or walk out the door with a whole encyclopedia of embarrassments on a thumb drive that can suddenly appear on a Facebook page, this is no longer enough. You have to accept that dirty laundry of one sort or another is going to get out there, sooner or later. Just because your organization or brand isn’t big enough to warrant the dubious honor of a WikiLeak, that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone else out there, empowered by Web 2.0, with the means and the intent to do some serious damage.
In today’s Web 2.0 world, you can no longer rely on simply keeping the leak in the dike plugged with your finger. You have to develop a strategy for crisis communications that levers all of the tools at your disposal, including social media, against that inevitable day when the dike breaks.
By Leo Valiquette
As a journalist and newspaper and magazine editor (and I still serve in these capacities from time to time), I’ve written my fair share of headlines. Thousands of them, in fact. But I would never have thought to label such creations, no matter how long I spent trying to come up with something catchy and engaging that would break nicely over two decks, as a “separate literary work.”
But that is exactly what has occurred in Britain in the latest ruling to come out of a legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), which is owned by the U.K.’s eight largest newspaper groups, and Meltwater News.
Meltwater is a media monitoring, news aggregator and clipping service that we subscribe to at inmedia. It is one of many such services available that constantly scour the web for mentions of our clients or of subject matter in which they have an interest. While such services are not 100 per cent effective, they are much more comprehensive and feature-rich than free monitoring services such as Google Alerts.
As a Meltwater client, we of course pay a subscription fee for regular reports on media coverage of our clients and their respective industries. It is this fee-for-service model that has raised the hackles of the NLA and led to the current dispute. A U.K. court has agreed with the NLA’s assertion that the act of copying an article’s headline and a short extraction of the text, and submitting this in the form of a report to a Meltwater client is a form of copying that infringes copyright. The most damning part of this judgment is that an article’s headline has been deemed a “separate literary work” on the basis of the time and creative effort that often goes into crafting it.
The NLA therefore expects Meltwater and its kind to pay licensing fees to copy headlines and submit them as part of a report to its clients. This is not in dispute. Most services already pay licensing fees to the NLA. The issue is that the NLA also wants the clients of Meltwater and similar services to pay additional licensing fees for receiving and viewing a media monitoring report.
It should be noted that the NLA’s claims do not apply to free services such as Google Alerts, but only to the Meltwaters of the world that charge money for their services.
In an article published by the New Statesmen, David Pugh, managing director of the NLA, welcomed the ruling.
“We hope this ruling will help ensure a fair share of web monitoring revenue for publishers and a fair media monitoring market,” he said. “Creating news content for the web is a substantial investment for publishers – it is therefore only right that they take a share when others are profiting from it.”
For Meltwater CEO Jorn Lyseggen, however, this sets a dangerous precedent that undermines the basic principles of the operation and use of the Internet. In theory, it means that users of the Internet must obtain a license from the NLA to view copyrighted material, even if that copyrighted material can be viewed freely on a newspaper’s website without having to pay a subscription. The other irritant is the amount of the licensing fee that the NLA wants to charge to end users, relative to the small amount of material included in a Meltwater report.
“We will appeal this verdict, we think this verdict is a misinterpretation of copyright law,” Lyseggen told the New Statesman. “If this ruling stands it will be a significant step back for the U.K. Internet ecosystem. … If the court upholds this decision then we think the courts need to take a closer look at copyright law and see if it needs to be more up-to-date for today’s world.”
Who is right and who is wrong here?
This isn’t the first incident of “Big Newspaper vs. The News Aggregator.” Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch’s News International blocked web aggregation service NewsNow from linking to stories on Times Online on the grounds that such services make money from journalism without contributing anything in return.
However, as the New Statesman’s Jason Stampers observed in his story on the subject, “newspapers don’t have to pay anything to brand owners when they write about them, of course. Which means Nike may have to pay to see where its name is used in newspapers, while newspapers can use Nike’s brand for free to help drive readers, web traffic and hence advertising revenues.”
Take it from the guy who has written his share of headlines and edited other journalists’ work to achieve maximum reader eyeball traction – the creative process of not only writing an enticing headline but also crafting the top paragraphs of a story to suck the reader in, is an unapologetically exploitative process. Newspapers try to profit from what could be someone else’s “copyrighted” material all the time, without paying any licensing fee or even obtaining permission. If there is a big name involved in a particular story, we are going to take advantage of that in any way we can if we think it will increase the story’s appeal.
And let’s look at this through the PR lens, since PR shops are the common end-users of Meltwater’s service faced with the prospect of paying these new licensing fees. I challenge anyone who would claim that there is any less creative effort involved to develop a strong headline and lead paragraph for a news release than for a news article. Does that mean that a designation of “separate literary work” and a licensing fee should also apply here?
Let’s not hold to any illusion that Meltwater is anything but a for-profit business trying to achieve a healthy margin with a fee structure of its own. But what is the NLA’s true motivation here at a time when traditional daily media continues to struggle to remain relevant in the age of social media and citizen journalism? And what of the overworked journalists who create all this content in this first place? Somehow I doubt that any additional licensing revenue charged by their corporate overlords will find its way to their pockets.
An online presence opens up a far larger advertising and reader base for a newspaper than was ever possible through print alone, without the costly overhead of newsprint and ink. No matter how much the world has changed, one fundamental thing remains the same — newspapers still need strong circulation numbers and click-through rates with which to impress potential advertisers.
So one would think that it behooves the industry to make it as easy as possible to drive more eyeballs to a newspaper’s website. And yet, newspapers by the score have put up paywalls around their content that require readers to pay a subscription for access in an effort boost flagging revenues. And if the NLA has its way, it will set a precedent where readers can be charged to be linked to content they may not otherwise been aware of, even if that content is available for free on a newspaper’s website.
The dispute between the NLA and Meltwater is the latest example of how newspapers are desperate to find new ways to monetize online content. The question, however, is whether or not they will ultimately end up stabbing themselves in the foot.
