Getting It

Big questions. Are we brave enough to look for answers?

Six days on, I'm still working my way through my notes from last month's IABC World Conference.

I keep saying (and thinking) that none of these are new ideas. Smart communicators have seen them coming for at least the past five years. Smarter ones, even longer. But what is new is that we're now starting to see the case studies emerge from this new consumer/communications environment and evidence around what's working - a world where:

- 'us to them' and 'them to us' is no longer enough - 'them to them' is an integral component of any successful communication effort

- authenticity rules

- you can't capture minds without first capturing hearts

- content comes first, channel second

- content holds the key to connecting with the ideas that you and your customers/staff etc care about, and holding their attention

- a changing media landscape means content has to be sharper, smarter and savvier than ever to cut through the babble and make a connection

- your key influencers may well no longer be the people you thought they were

- a realisation that your greatest competition for slice of mind isn't information from the rest of the organisation - it's what's going on 'out there'. 

- conversations are the point of story telling

- finally, we get it that staff are people too, and communicate with (not just to) them as respectfully and strategically as any other audience whose slice-of-mind and commitment we're looking to win. 

What does it mean for you as a leader, a communicator, a business person, or all three?

What new skills/tools/resources do you/I need to bring ourselves up to speed with the new consumer and how they're connecting? These are just some of the questions we all need to be asking ourselves right now - whether we class ourselves as communication professionals or not. 

The death of print mags. Really.

Day 30 of post op recovery, and I'm more feral than Crazy Claire huntin' down her baby.
Only 3 more (real) episodes to go, and it's all over for the Losties and the rest of us.
And just when I could have done with an entire season of something decent to vege out in front of, too...
So imagine my delight when Dug discovered the Vanity Fair app for ipad last night...and my giddiness to find a special iPad-only Lost feature, complete with video.
Bringing other media into the print experience is nothing new - it's been happening, albeit in clunky ways, since mags ventured onto the web. But the ipad takes it to another whole level, both in terms of readability and portability. The touch screen makes the experience so much more intuitive, and the brightness and crispness of the screen (my pitiful iphone snaps don't anywhere near do it justice) take layout, photos and illustrations to some place altogether new.
No, you can't read it in the bath or loan it to your mum, but it's not gonna clutter up your coffee table or cost a rainforest, either. And at US $4.99 it's a steal, compared with the NZ$25 or so you'll pay for the airfreighted version. I'm sold. Now it's back to my castaway friends...

Getting even and getting it straight

Loving Air NZ's response to the Listener in this morning's major dailies and via You Tube.

Faced with assertions that service downgrades are inevitable in the face of a Pacific Blue alliance and questions around its motives, the airline obeyed the first and most salient rule of  issues management today: get your side of the story out, and get it fast. 

The temptation might have been for the corporate comms folk to spend the week thrashing the issue around and respond to the publication direct, but that would have lost them a great deal of valuable time, made the response look stiff and contrived, and left a window open for other media to have a field day. 

The Air NZ response is knee jerk, for sure, but it's part of its power. We just don't expect corporates to behave this way, which makes it refreshingly different.

I'm also a great fan of using controlled media when you're in this sort of situation. Sometimes the only thing to be done if you really want to get your point across clean, without reporter filtering or angling, is to buy the space and tell it how (you think it) is. 

Content was good, too. I loved the straight-forward, decorporatised language. Rob Fyfe at his best. 

Be interesting to see what the deaf community has to say, though...

The changing face of bad news

For New Zealanders of a certain age, the evening of November 28, 1979 is our version of 'where were you when...' and it's a strong, visceral memory that's still vivid in our minds.

It's almost unthinkable that, 29 years down the line, to the day, local lives look likely to be scarred irrevocably yet again by an aviation tragedy so far away, yet so very close to home.

Back in 1979 when TE901 ploughed into the side of Mt Erebus there were no cellphones, no text messages, no emails. Just sitting and wondering and waiting.

More on the evolution of television

Check out Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape for more on the take-it-anywhere telly trend.

Networks are losing their grip not only on content delivery but also content generation, opening the doors for a whole new generation of indie producers, and importantly for those of us in the commercial messaging game, for anyone to  experiment with using content as a Trojan horse for messaging.

It's not just an online trend, either. Flick to page 52 of this morning's Sunday Star Times mag for a great example of the use of content to carry commercial messaging (ok, so it's an ad for k-y jelly, but if you can get over that, still a credible example of the genre).

And in case you missed it a few months back, Proctor and Gamble, who pioneered this approach by bringing soap operas to radio and TV way back when, have created Crescent Heights an online soap opera in 3 minute episodes (perfect for the Ritalin generation) featuring  'brand appearances' from one of its washing powders.

What does it all mean for communicators?

For some of us, the opportunity to combine the commercial realities of what we do nowadays with a return to our roots in radio, telly or press.  Those amongst us with a yen for the creative have opportunities to get back into the thick of it, thanks to the upsurge in demand for us to create content that sells. Podcasts, vidcasts and informational and educational approaches are rich with opportunities to dust off those old radio production skills or really throw yourself back into some juicy writing assignments - without having to knock at the door of media gatekeepers to get published.

The rise and rise of own-channel marketing means that so long as an organisation can entice an audience, they can move the playing field out of mainstream media and onto their own ground. An enticing and liberating thought.

Be warned, though, that this is a different style of content altogether. More discerning and demanding consumers are demanding a whole raft of new conditions in exchange for their attention - and are not afriad to vote with their ears and eyeballs if they feel 'sold' without their permission.

Connecting the dots

Four seemingly unconnected but interesting-when-pulled-together bits of tech news this week nudge us closer to a true anywhere, anytime telly news environment.

1) Apple announces  newer, faster 3g based phone for next year
2) The three main British broadcasters announce plans for a web-based on-demand TV service
3) Telecom promises us faster broadband within three years.

There are stories like this ever day, and none of these on its own is groundbreaking news. What is interesting is that the investment in and development of three strands necessary to take mainstream television out of the box and onto the street seems to be happening in parallel leaps and bounds.  Interest in - and actual evolution of - hardware, content and channels are evolving and maturing  almost daily, with enormous investment from the very media companies the nay sayers were confidently sounding death knells for not even a year ago.

The curse of the early adopter

No sooner had my latest 'gotta have it now' gadget lost its new iphone smell (you can get one of your very own at parallelimports.co.nz, just don't tell Steve Jobs), my heart's beating ever so slightly faster at news of Amazon's Kindle e-reader - and not just because it'll put an end to my bookshelf management issues.

While e-readers have  been around for a while, they've never really taken off.

What's new about Kindle is its connectivity: other e-reader devices depend on tethering to a computer. Kindle works all on its own and on wireless technology, meaning you can download books, blogs or newspapers anywhere, any time (within the US: read on for more on that one).

Kindle is designed to read like the printed word  (something to do with its 'electronic paper' technology, which is, they say, closer to the real thing that it is a computer screen), hold up to 200 books at a time (more with a memory card), weigh less than a paperback.

It'll be a godsend for those of us who routinely lug half a library of books with us on a trip out of town then fill up with more from wherever we are. But the really interesting thing about it (in addition to its potential to reduce my excess baggage bill) is how devices like Kindle and the iphone are changing the way we get, use and share information and our every day  interaction with the sellers of goods and services.

It's breathtaking how fast technological hot-new-things become just another part of life - and how quickly our expectations or every other aspect of life are ratcheted up as a result. "Why can't they just text the cancellations?" I hear another parent mutter under his breath as confusion reigns over Saturday morning sport. "Why can't they just keep the bloody website up to date?" responds the other.

We're irritated beyond reason when we can make an airline booking online but can't change it that way. Don't understand why the doctor's receptionist can't at least let you know he's running late when even your hairdresser keeps in touch via text messaging. Can't bring ourselves to trust the organisation that doesn't pop up on the first page of the google listings - or worse, isn't there at all.

The more these devices become a part of real life, the more they also need to play a part in organisational crisis management plans. Just where are all these news outlets going to get the content they need to run the 24/7/365 online breaking news outlets they're all firing into, anyway? Expect a massive upsurge in consumer-generated content - it's easy, it's cheap, it's quick (it looks like crap, but hey, it's a YouTube world) it fills pixels. And there's nothing like it for a truly breaking story.

The rise of the citizen journalist is upon us. Still and video cellphone cameras provide the means to capture things faster than ever before - while devices like Kindle (it connects users to blogs and news outlets constantly, as well as providing a handy repository for books) provide yet another way to remain always on and always connected.

The rise and rise of electronic communications channels (yes, folks, your mobile phone or PDA is your very own personal channel, like it or not) means communicators need to take yet another philosophical leap in how they present organisational information - as well as how they interact with those who matter to them.  These new media (plural of mediums, as well as the stuff that shouts headlines at us) are competing in a very noisy, information overloaded world. So style and written discipline matter.  Meantime the spoken word and visual tools are becoming just as - if not more important - than the written word.  And in a world where everybody wants a slice of our minds, there's never been a more important time for permission-based marketing.

Technically you can't get a Kindle in NZ, and Amazon seems to have the US shipping/credit card requirement sewn up by making it impossible to buy the books on an ongoing basis without US plastic.
I guess they are wrestling - along with so many other industries - with the copyright implications of a world where all the walls have come down.

The same world communicators are grappling with as the technology continues to outdo itself at a dizzying rate.

Check out Newsweek reporter Steven Levy's review of the Kindle, his story about the future of reading   or visit Amazon's home page if you want to get sold on one.

Sign of the Times (2)

There were two 'blink and you could have missed them' bits of news from the Technology section of the One News site today - and I might have missed them myself if the boys from E2  hadn't been late for lunch and left me alone aimlessly surfing news sites on my Treo (whatever happened to the days of waiting til the top of the hour for the news, anyway? Will our kids ever believe us when we tell them about how we had to wait til 6 at night and then sit passively while it was spewed out at us, story after story, whether we wanted it or not?).

The first to catch my eye was a piece about  The New York Times ending its paid subscriptions service. They've finally realised that the traditional offline revenue model is holding them back and have gone free-for-all - just another step in the whole open-access culture that's developing as fast in media circles as it is in the world of software development, were open-source has been king for some time. Mix that up with Google's new  let-the-spokesperson-respond  capability (check it out here), and it's obvious that we won't be referring to institutions like the NYT as 'old media' for too much longer.

The second piece of 'it was only a matter of time' news was about Tourism NZ's YouTube campaign. That they are launching a YouTube channel is hardly surprising. The budget they're allocating to it is the eyeopener - at an estimated $4m, that's serious moolah - the sort of dosh more akin to supporting a mainstream media campaign than a social media experiment or your standard web campaign. Can only wonder how long it's going to be before we stop differentiating 'mainstream' media at all - and new media is accepted by serious players as just another channel.

Managing the mashed-up media monster

So our MPs are finally clicking that the media scene is changing (faster than they can imagine, judging by the whole Greta Garbo photo/satire thing) and looking at how regulation works in a digital media world.

The rapidly growing monster that is the online/offline mash-up (newspapers running digital content, TV networks running press copy etc etc) changes the landscape in ways bigger than any of us can grasp right now, and it certainly does need for regulators to take pause and consider the implications.

It won't be as easy as it might look, though. There'll be no simple transfer of the rulebook from an IRL to an on online environment - that'd be like trying to reason with a tantrumming toddler. Rather, they're going to have to accept that so much of the future is going to be about less, rather than more, control. And that in in the flat-land that is cyberspace, hierarchy and authority mean little to the emerging power generation whose online world self-organises like the living, breathing, evolving organism it is.

Applying right-way-up thinking to this issue just won't cut it in an upside-down world.

Will be watching that space.

Making connections in a disconnected world

Posted by Robyn MacDonald, Optymise.

Every now and then something comes along in the world that turns it upside down. We have words for this - divorce, childbirth, adolescence, - you name it.   They are usually events in a life time that are associated with a great deal of disruption and possible social disconnection.

You see it all over the place - young people disconnected from their families, single parents experiencing a schism between them and the community they should be a part of. People feeling disenfranchised and devoid of connection.

Now we’re seeing a creeping sense of disconnection beyond the social and into the corporate world. New Zealand exporters, for example, are fast discovering they’re marooned off on some island at the bottom of the world if they don’t make very real and tangible efforts towards connection (there’ll never be a better time to get connected, by the way. If you don’t have good search marketing advice get some - now). And organisations are increasingly finding themselves isolated from their customers who have mysteriously disconnected themselves and now appear to be frustratingly unreachable.

Eight years ago I started a connection business. Search Marketing was voodoo and it seemed incomprehensible to most people - one of those things that was very simple if you hadn’t ever tried it or very tricky if  you had.

It’s not until now that I really fully understand what it was that made me so passionate about this business, and what kept me connected to it all these long (in web terms) years.
As social media continues to cast its tendrils through every aspect of life it’s starting to make sense. Search marketing isn’t about search at all - and even though selling ‘stuff’ or ‘ideas’ is what it ultimately does, that’s not all it is, either. It’s about  connecting people.

I had the belief that if you are in business to stay in business you have a responsibility to be found. That always used to mean an ad in the yellow pages (the bigger the better) and a listing in the white pages. But  all that has changed in the Google era. That little rectangular box holds power like nothing before it.

But how many business really get that? How many  make the connection between their own behaviour as consumers and how their customers are likely to behave? How many businesses have really had their websites connected to the lifeblood of their business - their clients.
Consider this, from Yoshio Ishizaka, executive Vice president, Member of the board, Toyota Motor Corporation.

“ I have learned, based on my experience, that everything is dominated by the market.  So when ever we are struck with any obstacles or difficulties, I will always say to myself:” Listen to the market, listen to the voice of the customer.”  That’s the fundamental essence of marketing.  Always, we have to come back to the market, back to the customer.  That is the Toyota way.

So many New Zealand businesses have forgotten the importance of listening to the customer. And the great irony is, with social media and the new tools of engagement, it’s never been easier to do.