More often than not, clients of inmedia will set their sights on coverage in a flagship business publication like the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s or Fortune. Sometimes a client has a story that would appeal to such a prestigious publication, other times they do not. There is also the matter of whether such publications fit the bill as Tier One media targets for a specific client, but that’s a different post.
Regardless of the respect commanded by such publications, their writers and editors, struggling with fewer resources and tightened budgets, are as prone as anyone else to occasional inaccuracies and errors in their work. Perhaps they even, on occasion, fall prey to temptation and give their copy a little extra sensationalist spin to grab the attention of fickle readers.
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.
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.
Wednesday of this week marked World AIDS Day and although the pace of this pernicious destroyer of lives, families and entire national economies seems to be abating just a little, the numbers continue to be startling. More than 60 million people have contracted AIDS worldwide. The disease has killed more than 25 million. More than 14 million children in southern Africa alone have been orphaned. Nearly 35 million people around the world live with AIDS today.
The beautiful, tiny, mountainous African country of Lesotho, called “The Kingdom in the Sky” because it is the only country in the world that is entirely above 1,400 metres, is one of the hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic. Nearly one in four people in Lesotho has AIDS and, perhaps even more tragically, one in three children has been orphaned by the disease.
Some of the best work to help combat this situation has been done by a Canadian charity founded right here in Ottawa that we at inmedia have been proud to support for several years now. Help Lesotho, now nearly six years old, works at a grassroots, community-based level to tackle the pandemic with awareness, education, empowerment and practical support of the grandmothers and young people, usually young women, who have been left with the task of raising families.
For most of its six years, Help Lesotho has lived its own hand-to-mouth existence, cobbling together the resources, facilities and personnel necessary to deliver its ambitious, multi-dimensional and hugely impactful programming. For the past few years, the charity’s Lesotho headquarters has been the ramshackle little cottage you see below, with its many program directors, volunteers and participants shoe-horned into this woefully inadequate space. With its heavy emphasis on educating and empowering a new generation of young people in Lesotho who will be the catalyst for change in their own country, Help Lesotho has struggled since its earliest days to find the space to bring these young people together while the challenge of housing them for what needs to be weeks- and months-long programs is even more daunting.
All that is about to change when Help Lesotho moves into two amazing new buildings that are almost ready for occupancy in Hlotse, the administrative centre in the region of Leribe in Lesotho’s remote northwestern corner where Help Lesotho is based. (In sharp contrast to most NGOs that prefer the relative comfort of the country’s capital city.)
While in Lesotho in October, I had the privilege of seeing the new Seotlong (Sesotho for “A place to share ideas.) Centre when Help Lesotho’s resident Canadian, gender program manager Gillian Walker, was gracious enough to take time out to bring me and my wife up the road a bit to view the final frenzy of activity as the new buildings are made ready.
The building on the left is a Support Centre that will house Help Lesotho’s local staff as well as its rural outreach programs in support of grandmothers, orphans and schools. The larger Graff Leadership Centre on the right has a dormitory on the top floor that will eliminate one of the biggest hurdles faced by Help Lesotho’s most significant program by providing a comfortable and secure place to live for the 40 young women who spend their full school year taking classes and participating in a leadership program. Offices, meeting rooms and an industrial-scale kitchen occupy the lower floor.
It can be difficult for any charitable organisation to justify spending large sums on buildings rather than on human support programs. In Help Lesotho’s case, it had become impossible, even counter-productive, for the organisation to continue trying to deliver its programs out of inadequate space. These new buildings make it possible for Help Lesotho to accelerate its work, an effort that in just six short years has directly assisted tens of thousands of rural people in this beautiful but challenged country.
For the past five years at inmedia, we have opted not to send Christmas cards or baskets to our clients, suppliers and friends of the agency. Instead, we have made a cash donation to Help Lesotho, over and above the pro bono media relations work we contribute to help them get their message out. We will be doing so again this year and thank you all for your continued support of this worthwhile cause.
The latest missive from Gawker Media’s Nick Denton has brought all kinds of potential blog post topics to the front of my mind, which I’ll attempt to cover in one post. In his long piece about the hows and whys of the changes coming to the company’s online properties in 2011, he touches on the following topics: scoops still matter, the role of modern media as an aggregator, the importance of being well-rounded, the rise of video, constraints and benefits of editorial calendars, and real estate lessons that online properties are adopting from their older brother, television.
It’s a fascinating read and speaks not only to Gawker’s response to the ever-shifting realities of media production and consumption, but also to some larger issues that should be compelling to B2B marketers as they search for ways to create and leave an impression in today’s fast-paced media marketplace.
Scoops matter
This is true in the publishing world, in terms of being the first to broadcast a breaking story, and also for marketers looking to edge out the competition in being first to market with a new product. One of our clients, Touch Bionics, was first to market a fully articulating bionic hand with its i-LIMB Hand in 2007, conscious of the fact that its competition was also planning a launch and that being number two was not a viable option. So successful was the i-LIMB Hand media launch that Touch Bionics’ competitor cancelled its plans.
The role of modern media as an aggregator
There was a brilliantly funny Tweet a few months ago (from whom I sadly cannot recall or I would reference them here) that said Huffington Post planned on starting a print edition that would consist of clippings from other newspapers taped together. While cheeky, this does raise a point about the media outlet as content aggregator, a model that many publishers are increasingly adopting based on the mercurial success of Huffington Post, deemed to have the 38th highest traffic volume of all US-based sites. Marketers can tap into this shift by building out effective social media programs and also by offering well-rounded content to the media.
The importance of being well-rounded
In a world where social media is wildly popular, the news cycle is infinitely shorter than it was even a year ago. That’s where the media’s role as an aggregator comes into play most effectively; rather than spending time crafting their own take on every story they want to cover, savvy outlets have an editorial mix that contains both brief, perhaps rebroadcast, news from disparate sources alongside more in-depth, exclusive content generated by the outlet itself.
If marketers want to tap into the myriad media opportunities that exist with target outlets, they need to provide the media with the proper materials in order to cover them. This means not only effective background materials, but also photos, videos, links to your owned online media properties, your social media coordinates, and a steady stream of content – bylined articles, customer case studies, surveys, and other outbound news that ranges in size and scope – so that the media can cover you when and where appropriate.
The rise of video
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving picture in today’s multimedia media climate is surely worth much more.
Here are some great examples of how our clients Xsilva and Touch Bionics are using video assets to their great advantage:
LightSpeed Mobile – Meet Your Customer
ProDigits: the world’s first bionic finger
Constraints and benefits of editorial calendars
Forward planning was essential and easy to stick to with print-only properties in years gone by. With online media, it’s less important and more difficult to stick to a planned coverage agenda. One of the primary advantages that modern media has over its predecessors is its ability to react immediately, to publish news instantly without having to wait for ink to dry on paper. This immediacy has made the news cycle almost non-existent, but intelligent outlets recognize the need to develop a brand for themselves defined by the scope and depth of their coverage, the topics that they cover, the journalistic integrity of the editorial team, and other choices that outlets make.
Advertisers can rely on these plans to ensure that their paid space is complemented by editorial that’s covering the same topic areas. Media relations consultants can pitch editors on coverage that fits within the target outlet’s editorial plans. Because you have many arrows in your marketing quiver, the effective practitioner can provide the right materials in the right format at the right time, regardless of if it’s paid or earned.
Real estate lessons
There is almost infinite real estate online, which subsequently lowers the value of the space. As Denton said on the matter, “There is no future in low-end web advertising, at least not for a media company with any aspirations.”
Marketers need to carve out effective real estate on the marketing channels of their choosing. This may mean owned channels, product placement, sponsorship programs, or other marketing vehicles that are new to your marketing mix. Are these activities impacting your bottom line? There’s only one way to tell: measure them.
Now more than ever, it’s integral that marketing programs are reaching the right eyeballs. With endless analytics mechanisms for online media, marketers can effectively measure and evaluate the elements of their programs. Benchmark before you begin, and evaluate regularly to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your marketing investment.
By Leo Valiquette
