Web Ink Now

Real-time journalism means new opportunities for PR pros

Freek Janssen writing for Lewis PR in a blog post Why Real-Time Journalism Requires Newsjacking provides us with a terrific expansion on the ideas in my Newsjacking book.

Freek writes: "Reporters are constantly looking for context and insights for their stories – newsjacking allows PR to become a source, not just for the benefit of being quoted. This is profoundly changing the world of PR: we are there much more to help clients become sources than to just communicate news or a message – brands are increasingly using their own channels for that."

In his post, Freek shares a link to an excellent video from the UK's Guardian newspaper on how their journalists cover stories in real time. The video shows what goes down in newsrooms by imagining how reporters might cover the story of the three little pigs in print and online. It is definitely worth a watch.

Note: The video may open with an advertisement.

Direct link to Guardian open journalism: Three Little Pigs on YouTube.

Real-Time Public Relations

Today's real-time journalism means there is room for anybody to add their take to breaking news stories simply by blogging or tweeting or commenting.

But you've got to be quick. Review cycles usually mean failure.

For PR pros, this is not endless pitching on your timetable. It means turning the PR relationship around and providing information at the precise moment that journalists are looking.

Communications revolution means Encyclopaedia Britannica print set discontinued after nearly 250 years

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in production, was first produced in Scotland in 1768.

The company announced it is going completely digital. If you want to pick up your very own copy, the final 2010 print set edition is available at The Britannica Store for USD $1,395.00.

Everywhere we turn there is evidence of the communications revolution.

I've often said the revolution of Web content and social media is the most significant communications revolution since the invention of the printing press.

It took centuries for the world's population to become literate. But in just a few short years, of the 6 billion people on the planet, 4.8 billion have access to online information in the form of mobile data. In fact, there are more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes.

I've been talking about the importance of online information as a tool of marketing and PR for nearly 20 years now. For the last decade I have run my own business focused on helping companies make the transition from traditional offline marketing to online marketing and PR strategies.

In 1998, people thought I was insane to argue that marketing & PR is going to the Web.

In 2002, I was that weird Grateful Dead listening oddball insisting that the revolution is coming. That's the year I got fired from my corporate VP of marketing job partly because I insisted on the Web and didn’t agree on investing in print direct mail the way others in the company did. In 2002 I started my own company to develop strategies and write and speak about what the communications revolution means to marketing & PR.

In 2005, others began to realize we're at the cusp of a revolution. These pioneers fought the bosses and the entrenched powers and started to create content on the Web as a form of marketing.

In 2009, many people saw the power as hundreds of millions gravitated to social tools like Facebook and Twitter.

Now, in 2012, while over a billion people are engaged via social media and tens of thousands of organizations have a dedicated online content effort for marketing purposes. However, there are still many holdouts resisting the revolution.

Encyclopaedia Britannica print set discontinued after nearly 250 years

In a New York Times blog post, Jorge Cauz president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. was quoted as saying: "It's a rite of passage in this new era. Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia."

Exactly.

So here are a few questions for you:

• How much effort are you putting into producing brochures and other print materials?


• How about those print advertising efforts?


• How's that print direct mail campaign going?


• What's the budget for Yellow Page ads?


• What about your resume?

We're in the middle of a profound communications revolution.

Are you on the leading edge? Or are you clinging to the way we communicated in 1768?

Images via britannica.com

How to create and edit articles for Wikipedia

Wikipedia is among the top ten most visited sites on the Web. When there is a Wikipedia article on a topic that you search on, I'm sure you’ve noticed that article usually appears as one of the top few results, frequently in the number one position.

There's no doubt that Wikipedia is important.

However there are few people who understand the inner workings of Wikipedia and how the more than 3.8 million articles in the English language (and millions more in 282 other languages) are created.

Sure, Wikipedia is an open platform and anybody can create or edit an article. But it's more complicated than that. A lot more complicated.

I asked my friend Colin Warwick to help us out. Colin is a Product Marketing Manager at Agilent Technologies. He writes the popular Signal Integrity blog and tweets at @SignalIntegrity.

David: How did you get interested in contributing to Wikipedia?

Colin: "Around 2004, a colleague at MathWorks - Ned Gulley - gave a talk on the crowdsourcing phenomenon: What it was, why it was happening, and Wikipedia was his prime example. His point was the success of Wikipedia is surprising. How can a bunch of unmanaged volunteers compete with the resources of, say, Microsoft (who had Encarta at the time) or the venerable Britannica. There's that famous quote: 'The problem with Wikipedia is that it works in practice, but not in theory'."

David: So why does it work then?

Colin: "It's true that a naive application of a theory like the tragedy of the commons would predict failure. But in the case of Wikipedia we get the inverse outcome because the cost of a contribution is much less than its value over time. For example, it costs very little for a contributor to enter knowledge from their experience into the servers, and very little for Wikipedia to serve that information over and over again to readers, generating great value over time. Unlike the pasture of a physical commons, information isn't degraded much by use. So the value of Wikipedia increases over time attracting more readers, some of whom become contributors, forming a virtuous cycle."

David: So you got sucked into the vortex?

Colin: "Yes. I became intrigued and started to add little facts I found here and there. The interaction with other contributors was startling at first but I began to realize that in questioning my assumptions I was not only contributing but pushing my own understanding to a higher level."

David: Give us an example.

Colin: "In my work, I had to learn about a new technology we wanted to enter called ODB++. I started researching it and gathered and read a ton of web links. But I noticed there wasn't a Wikipedia article about it. So I started one."

David: Just like that?

Colin: "Just like that. The best way to start or add to a Wikipedia article is to gather good web links first. Web-based versions of newspaper and magazine articles. Books. In Wikipedia-speak, it's called reliable sources."

David: What about blog posts and other social media?

Colin: "Ironically for a user-generated content site, Wikipedia looks down on user-generated content. Blogs can be a reliable source if the blogger is notable for something other than blogging."

David: Interesting. I didn't know that before speaking with you. So what happened next?

Colin: "Other editors started contributing to the article as I was writing it. At first it was really irritating to have some unknown person editing 'my' article as I was writing."

David: Wasn't it your article?

Colin: "Technically, no. If you contribute to Wikipedia, you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the Creative Commons license. And they warn you 'If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here'."

David: That seems harsh. So what's the value for contributors on Wikipedia if that's the case?

Colin: "Well, once I got over the irritation, I began to see a benefit: I learnt whole new perspectives from the other contributors that I didn't even know existed. There's a discussion page behind every article where you can ask: 'Why did you delete what I wrote?' It's kind of addictive. Who's going to end up right or wrong or what compromise will be reached? You can see why Wikipedia contributors give each other virtual barnstars as a token of appreciation in at those moments. It's evocative of communal barn building in certain rural communities. I had my barn-building moment on that article!"

David: The article you wrote wasn't directly about your company. Many people want to know if they can create an article about their own company or its products and sevices. I'm asked that a lot. Can you do that?

Colin: "You can but it's very difficult to not run afoul of Wikipedia's conflict of interest rules, COI in wiki-speak. Other editors can smell marketing puffery a mile way and will delete it as advertising in a heartbeat. The only workaround is to put Wikipedia's goal of a neutral point of view (NPOV in wiki-speak) first, and then either proactively seek what's called a COI review, or simply let nature take its course. As with all articles, you have the best chance of your edits 'sticking' if you come armed with reliable sources: don't simply add your opinion."

David: Cool. Finally after many years of using Wikipedia I feel like I know a little about how it is put together and how someone in business can benefit from contributing. Hey Colin, you should write a book about all this stuff.

Some smart editor or publisher who is watching this blog should cut a deal with Colin to do a book.

MYTH: "My buyers are not on the Web"

I frequently hear from people that their buyers are not on the Web. This myth is used an excuse not to create a valuable Web site and to avoid creating content.

Sorry to deliver a reality check, but the truth is that very few people are offline, particularly when you include lower cost mobile technology.

In fact, there are more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes. Of the 6 billion people on the planet, 4.8 billion have access to a mobile phone.

I saw this phenomenon in action this week while on a one-week expedition in the Panamanian jungle. Together with seven other international business executives, plus guides, and support staff on a trip organized by Earth Train, we hiked and kayaked the Cangandi River in the autonomous indigenous region called Guna Yala, traveling from the Pacific side of the continental divide all the way to the Atlantic ocean. What an amazing trip.

Even though I was "off the grid" for the vast majority of the time, I ran across people in some of the most remote parts of the world connecting to the Web.

In the village of Cangandi, with about 250 inhabitants, I saw dozens of people on mobile phones. This village has no running water (they drink from the river), they build their own houses from local wood, and they grow their own food. There is no electrical power, so they use solar panels to charge their mobile devices. They built the community on the top of a hill partly to take advantage of a distant cell phone tower.

If you are still clinging to the fiction that your buyers are not on the Web, you might want to ask if they own a toothbrush. I think you're living a myth.

Image: Photos of Former Secretary General of the Kuna General Congress (and Earth Train board member) Enrique "Kike" Arias while in Cangandi, Guna Yala, Panama.

Stop SOPA Silliness

It didn't work with music: The music industry killed Napster and sued 16-year-olds to protect their dying business model of selling "albums" via top 40 radio. Instead of understanding the immense power of social media like YouTube as a marketing tool to sell single songs (iTunes) and streaming subscriptions (Spotify), the music industry honchos preferred to destroy in a ridiculous attempt to save the status-quo. Listened to top 40 radio recently?

It didn't work with email: I get many times more unsolicited (and illegal) email than I did prior to CAN-SPAM. Tons of it from legitimate companies that should know better. How's that email legislation working for you?

It's not going to work for movies: Now the silly politicians who wouldn't know a social network if it bit them in the ass are at it again with SOPA & PIPA that are trying to legislate "protection" for their friends in the movie industry.

SOPA legislates censorship (yes censorship – like in North Korea) in an attempt to get legitimate businesses like mine to stop linking to pirate sites. As written, the regulations suggest that if just one of the nearly 10,000 comments on this blog point to a URL that allows illegal downloads that I could go to jail.

Just like with CAN-SPAM, these bills won't shut down pirate sites. They bad guys will just set up shop at another URL and continue their criminal activities, while law-abiding companies will be on the hook and every information consumer will suffer.

SOPA & PIPA are not about copyright. It is about protecting a dying business model.

I'm a content creator too. I get it. I support my family by being able to sell content and I certainly don't want my books stolen on the Web. I've found hundreds of sites with free pirated copies of The New Rules of Marketing and PR and my other books. But that doesn't mean I want to shut down the search engine that led me to those sites.

This isn't about stealing for the movie industry bigwigs and their high priced lobbyists. It's about desperately trying to maintain the old familiar business model that afforded them a lifestyle of Armani suits, lunch at Nobu and limos. It didn't work for music and its not going to work for movies.

The winners in technology transformations are those who embrace change, not the old-guard that tries to legislate protection for their dying business model.

Today Wikipedia is dark. Google has their logo blacked out. Many other sites are protesting by curtailing service for a day. Here is a link to Wikipedia's SOPA informational site and here's link to Google's SOPA / PIPA microsite.

Image credits:
Wikipedia English homepage from January 18, 2012 which links to here.
Google SOPA site

Content Arbitrage

When I worked my first job on a Wall Street bond trading desk, I was fascinated by financial arbitrage, one of the ways that traders made money.

This technique involves taking advantage of a temporary price difference in two or more markets and is usually executed by simultaneously buying and selling the same security. A pure arbitrage involves nearly zero risk.

For a simple example, imagine the price of gold is at $1,600 an ounce in London and at the exact same time it is $1,620 in New York. A trader could simultaneously sell in New York and buy in London to lock in a $20 profit. (This simple illustration ignores risks and transaction costs).

Content Arbitrage

I've used what I sometimes call "content arbitrage" for years. Adapting the definition from the financial markets, content arbitrage involves finding information in one place and revealing it in another to take advantage of temporary differences in the knowledge level of people in those two markets.

We've all experienced content arbitrage in action. You're at your desk when somebody walks in and says: "Did you hear...?" and proceeds to tell you about the competitors' new product, or the CEOs resignation, or an earthquake, or a some other important information. One person learned the news and told another.

Content Arbitrage and Real-Time Marketing

But when it involves publishing that content as a form of marketing then content arbitrage gets really interesting. Here are some examples:

You're quietly checking out Google News while at a conference and some breaking news about your industry crosses the wires. You immediately grab the URL to a story and post it on Twitter using the conference hash tag. You "buy" the content on Google News while everyone else is paying attention to the speaker and then "sell" it by tweeting it to those who do not yet know about that news. The benefit for you is that you're seen as knowing things quickly and you'll get noticed (and re-tweeted).It's great for your personal brand.

Or you're watching television and an industry expert says something remarkable or controversial. If you blog about it right away, you're the first to share with the wider marketplace who had not been watching.

Content arbitrage, by definition, exploits temporary differences in knowledge levels. So you've got to be really fast when you jump in. Soon everyone will know the big news and if you wait too long to blog or tweet you look silly if people already know.

It's all about real-time. The more you dilly-dally the more the market for that information becomes stable again (when everybody knows the news already).

Straying into someone else's market

Content arbitrage also occurs when people stray into each other's territory on purpose to exploit simultaneous differences in information markets.

How about this: Ask kids what's hot in school and why. Listen carefully to what bands, movies, social networks, and other things are all the rage. You may have information that you can exploit in another market.

Or this: Watch for news releases from government agencies. You can sometimes spot an important development in your market that people aren't yet aware of. If you're first to blog it or explain what it means on a short video, you can effectively newsjack that release and have your industry's media quoting what you said in your blog or video. Not to mention the positive exposure you get to your existing and potential customers.

Content Arbitrage in the Financial Markets

Bringing this idea back to the financial markets, smart traders use content arbitrage to read beyond the financial newswires on their workstations, looking for emerging trends within publications read by the general public.

By the time news appears on the wires it's already too late. They might read Seventeen Magazine to learn about a hip fashion craze or Shape for the diet trend of the month. Even more interesting are those who lurk in chat rooms and read blogs for the nuggets of information that haven't yet hit mainstream publications. If you were the first to buy beef futures because you spotted an emerging low-carb diet trend before the financial wires wrote about it, you cashed in big time. Any time one information market (say the financial newswires) says one thing about a topic and the blogs and chat rooms reveal something completely different someone can profit. Cool—people actually get paid to do this.

But there's a catch. With all forms of arbitrage, the potential to profit only exists as long as there's an exploitable difference between simultaneous markets. It is a real-time idea.

Any great examples of content arbitrage for content marketing purposes out there?

Trader Image: Jefferies & Company
Network Image: Shutterstock / improvize

Social Media ROI Hypocrisy

New research - published here for the first time - proves that executives who demand that Social Media ROI be calculated are hypocrites.

HYPOCRISY

It's ridiculous that executives require marketers to calculate ROI (Return on Investment) on one form of real-time communications: Social media like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. Yet they happily pay for other real-time communications devices for employees like Blackberrys, iPhones, and iPads without a proven ROI.

Often, the first question I am asked at my talks is about ROI. So I turn the question back to the audience as you will see in this very short video shot on location at recent gigs in Amsterdam, Bahrain, Baltimore, Barcelona, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Istanbul, Miami, Rotterdam, Stockholm, and Washington DC.

Direct link to Social Media ROI Hypocrisy on YouTube.

My recommendation to you when faced with executives who demand that you prove social media ROI is to point out the hypocrisy by asking them to show you the ROI of their Blackberry.

I conceived of this video and shot the location scenes myself at my gigs. The final video was produced and edited by my friends at Rewatchable.

Please share. Especially with those in your company who demand that ROI calculation.

Qantas Airways Twitter #fail

This morning my Australian friends lit up Twitter talking about an epic Twitter #fail from Qantas Airways. I saw messages from Trevor Young, Jim Stewart and others pointing me to what was the top trending topic in Australia today.

Turns out the Australian airline announced a contest on Twitter.

Most times a contest like this would be just one of thousands that populate Twitter at any one time. Normally there would be no backlash.

Timing is important

The reason this blew up is due to terrible timing. In the past month, Qantas had faced a major strike, which grounded the fleet and has experienced ongoing disputes with the unions that represent pilots, mechanics, baggage handlers, and caterers.

The travelling public was greatly inconvenienced during this period of turmoil and cancelled flights. I had friends who couldn’t make it to America for long-planned meetings because of the strike.

Qantas offering this frivolous contest struck people as insensitive.

The frustration was taken out by people who used the #QantasLuxury hashtag to vent their frustrations. Here are a few I found:

@2FBS: #QantasLuxury is dressing your staff in t-shirts that say "We're Sorry" and believing that makes up for missing a friends funeral.

@GrogsGamut: #QantasLuxury - when the passengers arrive before the couriers delivering the lockout notices do

@mrpaulb: #QantasLuxury is having gold plated taps in the bathroom where some poor qantaspr person is throwing up right now

@indednsible: #qantasluxury is when they enforce 11 hours of artificial night on the MEL-LAX flight, and hand you a plastic bag full of junk-food.

@Ivalaine: #qantasluxury having your bags "misplaced" not just at arrival after 28 hours of travel. but then "misplacing" them again when you get home

I've learned a bunch of things from this.

1) Timing is important. If you are dealing with sensitive corporate issues, you should think carefully before implementing a fun campaign.

2) When you offer people a chance to use a Twitter hashtag, they will. But you don’t have any control over what they say. You need to be prepared for negativity.

3) The prize in this contest was lame. You get the amenity kit that first class passengers get. Big deal – some PJs and a toothbrush. If you want to do a contest right, offer a really valuable prize.

4) As I’ve talked about many times, in a real-time world news jumps quickly from social media to mainstream media. As of this writing, there are well over 100 mainstream media stories about this. I’m sure there will be many more.

5) Anyone seen a newsjack of this story yet?

Kindle Fire delivers a new kind of business book

Today the long awaited Kindle Fire is released. I am looking forward to getting mine.

The Kindle Fire is the new full-color tablet from Amazon. It is part of the Kindle family, which I've continually upgraded upon new releases. I take my Kindle on all my air travel, for me it is the ideal way to consume content on the road.

The Kindle Fire (as well as the Apple iPad and Barnes & Noble Nook) bring a non-linear experience to reading a book. You can instantly jump from one part of the book to another. And it is in full color.

Kindle Fire delivers a new kind of business book

I specifically wrote my new book Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage to take advantage of these full color interactive components. Newsjacking was conceived, written, and published as an e-book only publication.

Amazon leads the way in this marketplace for one simple reason, content. Amazon is a content company that happens to create technology. The Kindle is built to serve the content, not the other way around. For that reason, I predict it will become very popular.

Most tablets are just technology. The computer is built because every company needs a tablet but it is not purpose built to drive a content experience. Apple (with the iPad) and Amazon are both pioneers in this new world of optimized electronic content.

As an avid reader, one of the most compelling aspects is interactivity – you can instantly link from the book to external content. It means a book read on an iPad or Kindle Fire is like reading a blog post with links to valuable content from other places. It means you can check out the Twitter feed of the expert cited in the text or watch a video that provides context to a concept.

As a content creator, it is fantastic to work within these platforms. Readers get a terrific experience.

Incidentally, I'm not advocating that print is going away. Heck I read a daily print newspaper, many print books, and a bunch of print magazines. But strongly believe there is room for both print and optimized e-content.

Another important aspect of the Kindle Fire and iPad is the instant nature of content consumption. I’ve heard from about 50 people who, in less than a day, saw my new book, downloaded Newsjacking, read the entire thing (which takes about an hour) and wrote reviews, blog posts, or tweets about the book.

Now that's real-time.

Are you getting a Kindle Fire? Do you read books on an iPad?

The transformation of books

What is a book?

Seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? Everyone knows what a book is.
Or do they?

Books used to be made out of dead trees. Lots of paper and ink.

Then we had audiobooks.

Ebooks became quite popular first as PDF style documents and later via readers like Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and a few others.

I see a new transformation happening right now.

It was started last year with the iPad. And from next week's release of Kindle Fire, Amazon jumps into the world of interactive books.

Interactivity means business books come alive! As an author, that is a terrific opportunity.

The Apple iPad and Kindle Fire bring a non-linear experience to reading a book. You can instantly jump from one part of the book to another.

Of course it is in full color.

Better yet, now you can instantly link from the book to external content too. It means a book read on an iPad or Kindle Fire is like reading a blog post with links to valuable content from other places.

The new book experience means watching the video the author mentioned with one click. It means you can check out the Twitter feed of the expert cited in the text. You can see the cool picture that was once worth 1,000 words.

I'm convinced that this new business book paradigm will aid anyone in learning. It means university curriculums will need to adapt. Textbook authors must scramble. It is a new world.

Watch this space. There is more to come.

Images:
Old books via Shutterstock / Ferenc Szelepcsenyi
Kindle Fire via Amazon