"We have been fortunate enough to have worked over the past nine months with Francis Moran and Associates to deliver virtual CMO services for our company, and so far it has been highly effective. With this relationship, we get access to a level of experience and expertise which would be unaffordable to us if we were to hire a full-time equivalent." Dave McIlhagga, Founder and CEO
"When I hired Francis Moran to lead our marketing efforts in 2011, I had very high expectations. We needed to completely rebuild our marketing from the ground up. Francis and his team not only met those high expectations but exceeded them. He brought a very high level of strategic thinking, professionalism and creativity to our organization that will be felt for many years to come in our quest to build a successful IT company."
Marty Hilsenteger, Founder and CEO
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.
Some people have called me the Grinch because I wait until December before I start getting all Christmassy. I don’t buy a tree, string lights, buy presents, play Christmas music, eat pumpkin pie or drink eggnog until the 12th month dawns. I’m sorry if I sound like a downer, but Christmas decorations look depressing when they droop outside in November rain and hearing songs like, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” and, “Have a holly jolly Christmas,” playing in shopping malls as early as September drives me crazy. (It’s a short drive, I know). I’m not saying that I don’t like Christmas. In fact, I love Christmas. I just think that everything has its time and place and getting fanatic about our biggest holiday before its time has come dilutes its marvel and meaning. It’s curious how the one-day Christian holiday and the gathering of friends and family became an excuse to produce lame Christmas albums and go on three-month-long shopping marathons.
However, my Grinchy heart grew three sizes yesterday as December 1 chimed in the time to be festive and trumpet my Christmas spirit. I’m an arts and crafts nut with an assiduous sweet tooth so my beau suggested we build a gingerbread village as a merry display for our dining room table. We ate candy and built, licked icing glue from our fingers and designed for hours, until we created the vision you see alongside.
Naturally, the creative process of building this gingerbread village got my mind churning. I thought to myself time and time again, “Wow, building this gingerbread village is so similar to building an online community!” Here’s why:
Patience and practice equal perfection
As I said, this gingerbread village took us hours to create. We considered what candy would be used for the rooftops, skating rink, pathway and ground; where they would go and in what combination. Each piece had to be held in place for a number of minutes to dry.
Building an online community through social media takes a lot more time than just a few minutes. It can take months and even years. You have to put a lot of thought and consideration into each person with whom you connect, how you will engage them and how you will strengthen your relationship to them. This process is ongoing, and so requires a great deal of patience. Connections can grow slowly when you are new to social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn, but if you put in the time and social effort, you will grow a good community. The key is to never give up.
Real is always better
We used dark and white chocolate almond bark from a local chocolatier to build the pathway and rock gardens. All the candy was selected to be as fresh as possible. Sadly, we didn’t have the resources at hand to bake our own gingerbread, but it’s something I hope to do next year, because real is always better.
It is important to remember this while you build your communities. Discover your own voice and be loyal to it to show others that you are a real human being. People are naturally attracted to others who are genuinely interested in the conversation so be personable and express real life experiences and opinions that bring value to the subject matter.
The best bring together a mixed bag of colourful and fun flavours
We used 14 different kinds of candy to bring this gingerbread village to life, including liquorish, gummies, multicoloured and multiflavoured chewy and rock candies, crystallized white, red and green sugar, and dark and white chocolate. Yum!
When socializing in online networks, always keep an open mind and open invitation to people with various perspectives, opinions and backgrounds in order to grow a dynamic community. Diverse voices drive great conversations as they can offer perspectives others may never have considered otherwise. As in any social situation, you are bound to cross paths with a bad apple. While criticism is vital for personal and professional growth, harsh language and personal attacks should never be tolerated. Keep your community clean and fun by packing it with constructive people.
They are both gifts to be shared
I’d likely end up very ill or in hospital if I tried to eat this whole gingerbread village alone, so I plan to share it with company later in the month.
In social media, you will be most successful if you share intelligence, advice and experiences with others in a reciprocal manner. Talking solely about yourself is not social. Instead, ask others their opinions on certain issues to drive discussions. Acknowledge others when they have accomplished something and share information about happenings in your marketplace or in your community. You will have a much easier time growing your community when others see that you are sharing the space.
Those are my observations. Do you have any other ideas, or perhaps gingerbread tales of your own?
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.
There are many people out there “doing Twitter” for business which is encouraging other people to “do Twitter” for business too. As Twitter is still relatively new, a lot of these people don’t have the slightest clue of what they should really do to grow a community that is engaged around their brands. To get some help, they turn to a snake oil marketer who sells them a “secret formula for Twitter success.” The package includes an automation system equipped with full spamming capabilities, auto-follow and sure-fire steps for shameless self-promotion. They are instructed to blast hyperbolic, unsolicited promotional material, use @Reply and Direct Messages to spam their following and otherwise demonstrate to the Twittersphere that they are, beyond any doubt, anti-social robots.
Want to get people to click the “unfollow” button fast? Want a short-term, low-interest Twitter following? How about a very bad reputation with little chance of recovery? Follow these simple unsteps from the snake oil marketer.
1. Be an anti-social robot spammer
Nothing screams, “I’m anti-social” like an automated Direct Message. If you’re really keen on putting off your followers, construct an automated Direct Message like, “have a Rockstar Day, drink Rockstar,” or “check out my Facebook marketing page.” These are both real messages sent to me by followers that resulted in instant unfollows with no chance of refollowing. For an extra layer of spam jam, you could also send untargeted DM’s of links to your products and services.
2. Show people how much you don’t care
If you really want to limit your chances of socializing, chose an avatar that says, “I’m a weirdo.” If you’re using a picture of your face, make sure it looks tired, crooked and uninterested. Having the eyes half closed or the mouth frozen in mid-sentence can go a long way in ranking you at the top of the anti-social list.If you’re using a business logo, stretch it till it’s fuzzy and then crop it poorly to make it seem like you don’t know what you’re doing, and therefore by default, what you’re talking about. Also, always use the default Twitter background. Using services such as Themeleon are a waste of time.
Build up a really bad reputation for your brand by Retweeting the same poorly-crafted automated messages on a time schedule. If you’re Tweeting a sponsored link, be sure to not tell anybody as to increase the chances of them clicking on it and bouncing back from the site. After all, nothing says, “I’m a thought-leader who cares about your business” more than sharing generic information and leading your followers to spammy or unsecure sites.
3. Tout your own horn like you’re a one-person marching band
Talking solely about yourself is repulsive in any social situation, so what better way is there to turn off your Twitter following than to shamelessly talk about yourself? Talking to people about their interests doesn’t sell your products and services, right? Neither do pointing out or promoting interesting advancements and achievements of other businesses and individuals in your marketplace or community. So why bother? Your marketing dollars should be spent wisely on packing your Twitterstream with automated messages about your own business’s achievements. Every nice Tweet written about you should also be Retweeted so it shows up in your Twitterstream so you can trick your followers into thinking you’re popular.
When you talk about yourself, don’t ask questions or offer advice. Only talk about your products and services. If you absolutely must share something personal, make sure you take up space in the Twitterstream with something boring like the weather in your city, what you had for breakfast or a generic greeting like “good morning Twitterverse!” Personable messages take time and engaging your following is never worth the ROI. If you come across some good information from another source, Retweet it without giving credit. The person will never know you stole their material anyways.
4. Ignore people if they reach out to you
If someone reaches out to your business on Twitter about a problem with your products or services, you should ignore them and pretend it never happened. If you further the discussion on Twitter, others will know that you acknowledge that your business is having problems. If you ignore it, people will stop talking about it completely. If the regular person who answered Twitter messages is away sick or on holiday, it offers you justification to ignore it until he or she gets back. If you are forced to respond, it is wise to spend a few days choosing the exact words to craft the perfect answer to the problem. Say something like, “we are looking into it,” or “call our toll-free business number for service,” or “visit our website for answers.” Never say you are sorry because you will admit fault. Never offer a discount or a refund because you will lose money.
Of course, as I said at the beginning of the post, this is advice from the snake oil marketer, not inmedia. Here, we advise our clients to do the exact opposite, to reach out to their followers, build communities and engage them daily with interesting information from their marketplace, other Twitter users (with credit), and only occasionally from their own businesses. However, businesses are really following the snake oil marketer’s advice! I see it every day and am repulsed by it, which is why I felt it necessary to write this post. I’ll write up another about what business should really do if they want to be successful on Twitter at a later date.
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.
By Linda Forrest If there’s one sure way to turn prospects off, it’s to oversell. This is true in sales and in marketing. If you overhype something, you’re sure to disappoint. Case in point, last week’s iTunes announcement from Apple. When Apple told the market that November 16 would be “a day you’ll never forget,” hopes […]
By Alexandra Reid My colleague Linda turned me onto an excellent PR blog called the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog where I now spend a considerable amount of time reading up on news, tips and opinions about our industry. Yesterday, while scrolling through the feed, I stumbled upon some astonishing news that LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner […]
By Leo Valiquette “If you are going to have an online presence in 2010, you just have to be on Facebook,” a royal official on the staff of Queen Elizabeth II told the media recently. Really. Why? When embarking on any kind of social media strategy, the rationalization for engaging with the online community must […]
By Alexandra Reid It takes humans many years to learn the intricacies of how to be social. We are not born knowing that it’s inappropriate to put our elbows on the table at dinnertime, talk back to our elders or utter the word “neato” in any party setting, lest we set ourselves up for mocking. […]
By Linda Forrest Let’s face it: there’s a delicate balance between cool and commerce. New media arrived on the scene like an irreverent, insouciant prat, thumbing its nose at the “old” way of doing things, and this includes marketing. That new media would spell the end for traditional media has been a much ballyhooed topic […]
By Alexandra Reid To everyone who stopped by on Tuesday to read part one of this series, welcome back. For those of you who are just jumping in, you can read part one here. In summary, I examined how social media could benefit the entire B2B revenue cycle by enabling businesses to attract and nurture […]
By Linda Forrest Comedian/talk show host Jon Stewart recently established his Bartlett’s entry in his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity when he said “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” We as B2B marketers can take good counsel in the core message of this quote, even if his intention was to calm […]
By Alexandra Reid As online activity rapidly moves towards social media, it seems that B2B is beginning to catch up with its B2C cousins in getting onboard. According to a Forrester study, 77 per cent of B2B technology decision-makers are now active in social media. With the immense opportunities that social media provides businesses for […]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]
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It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]