Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

Industry events need to get more social

Posted on | March 2, 2010 | 5 Comments

If we think publishing is turmoil, why not take a look at traditional live industry events?

I thought of this after spending part of the day today at one of my favorite annual events, Semico’s Summit, this year called the Semico Outlook because they held it for just one day and founder Jim Feldhan and crew flew up from the warmth of Arizona to present in rainy San Jose.

No Power Point Slides Allowed, Boys

Events like this are increasingly anachronistic. It’s sad in a way because it’s a reflection of a changing, consolidating, maturing industry, but it’s also an opportunity–an opportunity to do things differently to bring new value to an old audience.

Panels and speeches at events are the live equivalent of newspaper publishing: We talk, you listen. Newspapers and magazines have been pounded for the better part of a decade that the we-say, you read model isn’t what people want in the age of ubiquitous and constant information. Why should it be the same for live events?

The electronics industry is in a state of constant change. Semiconductors in particular are forecast to have a very healthy year after several lousy ones, but everyone understands they can’t rest on their laurels. How do we prepare better for the next phase of that constant change?

The presenters at these events are telling people about problems they’ve already solved and that virtually everyone in the audience knows they’ve solved (or propose to solve).

Two questions today gave me a glimpse of how these interactions could change for the better, for both presenter and audience.

  • First Ron Wilson of EDN asked a panel of hardware guys that if we’re all on track to connect a trillion devices together in the coming years, isn’t software the fly in the ointment? Software’s increasingly complexity threatens to become the industry’s Achilles Heel. That’s a potential problem, no?
  • Another gentleman asked whether calling vast portions of the industry “consumer” is correct when some devices, such as smart meters, are not being demanded by consumers but instead are being forced down the food chain by government regulators. It’s a great question because it ponders indirectly the future drivers of the industry (and its potential growth or lack thereof).

The answers to these very intriguing questions were very unsatisfactory; each defaulted to individual company messaging. OK. Fine. That’s what they’re trained to do. And it’s easy to do that when you hold a commanding position on an elevated stage with amplified sound in front of rows of listeners all facing up at you.

So here’s my very simple suggestion:

Array the chairs in the room in a great circle around the presenter(s). Everyone has to look at everyone else;  no one hides; everyone’s forced to be attentive and stay off their laptops and crackberries. The circular set-up makes conversation easier. Up the ante by removing microphones from the speakers and panelists. Make sure the moderators really know how to facilitate a conversation, even if it means calling on people in the audience. Phil Donahue meets sub-threshold leakage.

I’m not picking on Semico (and frankly the Semico gatherings themselves, as opposed to individual panels, do foster industry conversation). This is a larger industry challenge you encounter at virtually every live event.

With the exception of presentations like technical tutorials, there’s no reason why this industry can’t start changing the live event paradigm. We can’t solve our problems by laboring over and staring at Power Point slides.

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Category: Electronics, journalism

What would Al Haig do?

Posted on | February 21, 2010 | 1 Comment

Alexander Haig died yesterday, probably overcome by years of government sclerosis.

It’s amusing that Haig will always be ridiculed as the guy who, as secretary of state, claimed “I am in control here” when President Reagan was hospitalized just after he was shot in downtown Washington.  Haig wasn’t legally in the line of succession (a former staunch segregationist was). He was, however, trying to control a chaotic situation.

He did the same thing in the waning days of the Nixon White House, when he was chief of staff.

As The New York Times pointed out in its obit today:

All this, in the course of a few weeks in the fall of 1973, fell on Mr. Haig’s head:

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to taking bribes. The next man in line under the Constitution, House Speaker Carl Albert, was being treated for alcoholism. The president himself, by some accounts, was drinking heavily. War broke out in the Middle East. When the president tried to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, rather than surrender his secret White House tapes, the attorney general, Elliot L. Richardson, and his deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus, resigned. Impeachment loomed.

Today, we have a president who defers to Congress; a Congress that creates “bipartisan” commissions to tackle the problems Congress is supposed to tackle. California, the seventh-largest economy in the world, is literally paralyzed by indecision. Things aren’t likely to get better. A woman who ran eBay but never really voted is dumping her millions into the race for governor; she talks of solving the state’s problems as if it is as easy as putting in a bid on eBay.

Tom Friedman, for whom hyperventilating is not an uncommon response, opines today that the fat lady has sung for the United States. Our country is run by cartoon characters.

Haig was a bit of a scary dude, but he — and many others of his generation — were unafraid to confront problems and try to solve them.

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Category: economy
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Respect the Sabbath

Posted on | February 7, 2010 | No Comments

Summary: Longtime cries for a digital Sabbath are getting louder, but we think more broadly as humans become cogs in an increasingly pervasive, pernicious 24-hour multimedia marketing wheel.

Tom Mahon is one of the most thoughtful guys I’ve ever encountered. In his own quiet way, he’s long championed the notion that people need to take a digital Sabbath and unplug from our silicon-enabled toys.

I’ll take it a step further: I think we need a marketing sabbath.

David Shenk in 1997 published “Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut.” In it, he wrote that the average American encountered 560 daily advertising messages in 1971. By 1997 that number had increased to over 3,000 per day.

I would venture to guess that number is at least tripled in the past 13 years. We spend increasing amounts of time online (Facebook just totted up its 400 millionth user). License plate holders, billboards, promotional pencils, the backs of taxi and movie-theater seats, coffee cups, T-shirts… it’s hard to think of an object you encounter during the course of your day that doesn’t have a marketing message on it. (We can’t build anything any more in this country, but we sure as hell can market crap better than anyone).

The good old days of the Sabbath

The good old days of the Sabbath

If the number has tripled, then we’re getting hit with a marketing message every 6 seconds of our waking day. Orwell predicted a world in which Big Brother was a dictatorial government that owned the message. Big Brother is here, and his home is on Madison Avenue.

Waiter, There’s a Tag Line in My Urinal

I once stood in front of a men’s urinal in Boston staring at a TV screen on the wall in front of me (get those messages out anywhere, anytime, all day, all night). I looked into the urinal to see one of those plastic screens that keeps gum and cigarette butts from gumming the plumbing, and it too was a marketing message (”a publicly traded company”) for the company that makes the screens.

Digital technology has evolved to where billboards are now LED-enabled static or motion picture advertisements, glaring at everyone who passes.

There’s one such enormous digital billboard on the east end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (photo). Its hideous glow can be seen from the Marin Headlands, miles away. It’s not Ginza or Shanghai, but it’s a start.

We legislate sound levels in communities; we should be able to force advertisers to turn off lighting on billboards and buildings, streets and alleyways after 10 p.m. And while we’re at it, maybe there should be a moratorium on Internet advertising during certain hours of the day. (Suggesting that in a blog might just get this entry dropped somewhere deep down in the Google search-rankings hell).

As a culture we need to start talking about this more seriously because the inundation of marketing messages will only continue.

Avoiding the unavoidable

You can choose not to open your laptop or turn your TV or radio on, but it’s hard to avoid a garish LED-bright billboard; it’s hard to take a bus or ferry home at night and try to admire the city lights without getting “messaged.” Online, it’s increasingly hard to engage with content without advertising messages joined at the hip. And given the importance of online engagement for most people, simply pulling the plug for great swaths of the day is less and less practical.

Am I tilting at windmills? Probably. I’ve long bemoaned public lighting which blocks the stars for a majority of people living in North America. There’s the Dark Sky movement but it’s not taken as seriously as it should be.

The International Dark-Sky Association features a quotation on its home page:

“Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.”

Today, during the Super Bowl’s orgiastic celebration of advertising, we might want to think about how marketing darkness should be increasingly essential to our emotional and intellectual well being.

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Category: advertising, marketing, social media
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EDN closes the audience gap with EE Times

Posted on | February 5, 2010 | 2 Comments

EDN (blue line) has closed the unique visitors gap with EE Times in North America

EDN (blue line) has closed the unique visitors gap with EE Times in North America and moved ahead.

Update: Note that the Compete.com data cited in this post and the chart come from 2 million Compete.com users in North America. The numbers are not represented as absolutes of EE Times or EDN actual traffic, which a subscription company like Omniture can provide, but as projections. These numbers are only used to show a possible trend.

So many rumors have been circulating in recent weeks about the future of EDN, which is on the block with other Reed Business Information titles. Canon Communications, which has pharma and medical design publications, is said to be interested in the venerable electronics design publication, and it’s a safe bet that the folks at EE Times Group kicked the tires at some point.

Morale’s not flying high at EDN, needless to say, but there is some blue sky amid those dark clouds: The magazine’s site is neck and neck with EE Times. The chart nearby shows how in December EDN actually surpassed Times in unique visitors; take that for what the time frame was: December, a notoriously low month for gauging audience (in online or in print).

A snapshot of a snapshot

I need to point out that this is North America traffic, and Times has at least twice as many views if you factor in its global audience and its international titles. These numbers don’t factor in the techonline.com domain either, which is the design-centric cousin of Times. That said, the Times-EDN delta just a few year ago was 3x. EDN’s traffic has remained flat, while EET’s traffic has slipped steadily. Is it because EDN has maintained a focus on designers while Times offers a lot for a lot of different audiences within electronics B:B?

It could be that EDN’s content presentation is just more engaging. Its content seems to draw much more comments per story than Times (see Ron Wilson’s latest, great post on embedded software and the Prius for evidence of engagement; he got 25 comments in a single hour, all of them legit).

Even then, it’s hard to say.

At the end of the day, this may mean little. Advertisers are buying lead-generation programs and other interactive content and buying less of the banner ads that generate microscopic audience pull-through. EE Times Group is overhauling its Web sites in April (see A Peek at the New EE Times), an endeavor that propels its franchise cogently into a new space, beyond just news.

If you’re in this space and looking to maximize your messaging spread, what are you buying today? And why?

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Category: Electronics, journalism
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A peek at the new EE Times

Posted on | February 3, 2010 | 3 Comments

Come spring, EE Times will be reborn, and Electronic Buyer’s News will be resurrected. That was the message EE Times Group CEO Paul Miller delivered last week during meetings in Irvine, Calif., and Santa Clara, Calif., as he gave audiences a sneak peek at the new network’s look, feel and value propositions.

New EET HomepageIt’s a bold, smart redesign and rebranding of an goulash of mini-brands, and, he’s admitted privately, something that should have been done at least five years ago. (Fair disclosure: I worked for EE Times for many years and currently, in my day job as director of communications and community for Numetrics, am working with EET Group on a business partnership).

The redesign falls broadly into several categories, including:

  • Better navigation and organization (gone is the eye-smarting, impenetrable site of today).
  • Single branding as EE Times (the former EE Times DesignLines, which for the past several years were branded under TechOnline are transformed into design channels by application)
  • Better product information presentation and search
  • Social functionality (a new “EE Life” section that aims to be a commodious plaza for engineering communities within the network and outside as well).
  • User control of content filters
  • Multimedia
  • Better integration of the company’s events business into the network
  • Web-enabled education components

What else?

The resurrection of Electronic Buyer’s News. This venerable title was the first ever created by the Leeds family (which founded CMP in the early 1970s). It spoke to purchasing managers, and, a year later, EE Times was created to speak to design engineers and engineering managers. EBN was put on a ventilator a decade ago, moved online and given morphine shortly thereafter, as purchasing functions seemed to be subsumed by engineers.

Miller claims research suggests that purchasing is regaining importance within technology organizations. Engineers are increasingly concerned about supply chain issues, pricing and availability, according to the survey. So, there will be an online role for a revitalized EBN. Details TBD.

What else?

Print’s alive. EE Times’ print edition may add a little to its 18-20x / year schedule. In addition, a long-studied move to a paid model for some or all of EET’s print content is closer to reality.

Bottom line

This transformation reflects as much the changing realities of today’s engineering world as it does the transformation of EE Times Group. Recall that EE Times Group emerged Jan. 1 out of the old TechInsights, which itself was an updated version of the old Electronics Group within CMP, which was a unit of UBM. Miller built TechInsights as a marketing-services company, and the acquisitions he helped engineer (such as Semiconductor Insights and Portelligent) went off when TechInsights and the EET properties were cleaved.

That left Miller (left, personal blog: Would You Adam and Eve It?) holding the publishing bag at the worst time in publishing’s history. Nice. He prevailed on UBM CEO David Levin to cut him some slack for a while, made a few really interesting hires (especially in audience development and IT) and will unveil the new look to the world, sometime in April. Skeptics will say the good folks at EE Times Group have always had a good vision and talked a good game, but execution’s been spotty. This time could be different, and a lot of people are counting on that.

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Category: Electronics, journalism, semiconductors
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National Enquirer Schools Mainstream Media; Film at 11

Posted on | January 23, 2010 | 2 Comments

In times as weird as these, it’s perhaps not surprising that one publication doing real journalism is — gasp — the National Enquirer. Ok, maybe its former editor in chief, David Perel, is a bit defensive this morning, but his point is well taken.

Perel writes about his publication’s tireless efforts to break former presidential candidate John Edwards’ affair with an aide and his subsequent paternity of her child. The publication’s efforts were confirmed this week when the truth-challenged Edwards finally answered the question “who’s yer daddy?” Edwards screen capture

I’d like to say the “old media” dropped the ball on the Edwards story for years, but the Enquirer is the old media. The “mainstream media” then dropped the ball, and the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz offers a flaccid apologia:

When the Enquirer first reported in 2007 that Edwards had had an affair with Hunter, the former North Carolina senator dismissed the account as tabloid trash. The rest of the media, having no independent proof, steered clear of the story, even as Edwards, aided by his cancer-stricken wife Elizabeth, was mounting an aggressive campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

It’s come to this: So-called fringe publications are teaching The Post, The New York Times and other big-city dailies how to do their jobs. That’s just laugh-out-loud funny….until it makes you cry.

Here’s a selection of headlines from the lead pages of this morning’s big-city publications online:

And the beat goes on. There’s not an enterprising story among ‘em. To this day, 90 percent of everything you read in the morning paper you already know about. Still. I keep waking up thinking this morning, it’ll be different, but it never is.

Many of us may associate the National Enquirer with sleaze, but its editors haven’t forgotten how to sink their teeth into a story and stick with it. The Enquirer, by the way, thinks it should be up for a Pulitzer Prize. The deadline to apply is Feb. 1.

Wouldn’t THAT be something?

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Category: journalism, newspapers
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Dear Trade Press Editors: Get with the Program

Posted on | January 20, 2010 | 4 Comments

This is an open letter to members of my favorite guild, the trade press.

Ladies and gentlemen: Please get with the program. It’s 2010 and it’s time to morph your tremendous skills into the modern age, where social media is keenly important to your medium.

This is not just about creating a Twitter feed and setting up the auto-tweet feature every time you post a story. It’s about getting your adorable selves in the pool and starting to interact with engineers, with the audience that’s online, with other reporters, and build an new audience, a more intimate engagement. Hell, you’ll even get story tips. But, you say:

  • Our sector (electronics) is a lagging adopter of new media;
  • Engineers only a few years ago started commenting on your stories (after you anguished over whether that should even be allowed);
  • The number of engineers on Twitter every day pales in comparison with your audience, which is still robust.

To which I respond: Time doesn’t stand still.

In the saddle

Dan Holden wrote recently on his Siliconcowboy blog (Is journalism in control of its own destiny?):

If you know how to use the tools of the new media environment, you can stay in the saddle.

Dan’s an ex-trade pub editor who’s in the saddle over at Cadence. He knows time doesn’t stand still.

It’s time for the trade press to really get moving and expand its horizons beyond its walled gardens. There is a robust engineering, media, marketing and communications conversation going just outside publishing’s walls that you should be a part of.

(One of the most entertaining to date has been about the very state of media we’re discussing here. John Donovan of Low-Powerdesign.com was the subject of the latest of Rick Jamison’s great series of interviews (Great Insights From Five Social Media Studs) with new media types. The comment discussion is worth the price of admission.)

Bottom line

The trade press is cranking out good content, but that’s half the equation. You have to dive into the conversation with both feet. Some of the most enthusiastic, by the way are ex-editors: Lou Covey, Loring Wirbel, Holden, Richard, Wallace, Donovan, Jamison.

There was a time when the hot stars of the silent-movie era who never had to speak their lines tried to make a go of it in the talkies. Most washed out unless they took lessons, improved their diction and learned the nuances of the moving picture medium with sound.Those who did became the stars of the new era.

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Category: journalism, newspapers, social media
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In search of the blogging voice

Posted on | January 19, 2010 | 2 Comments

Loring Wirbel (Icono-Curmudgeon-Clast) has a characteristically insightful post today that speaks to social media and the role of the blogger’s voice. It references My New Year’s Blogging Resolution about changing frequency and length of posts. He uses it as a lever to talk about the larger issue of self-marketing SEO. In a word, he argues, don’t.

The point is write what you want and the audience will follow. Tailor your content to what you think the audience wants, and you’re doomed.

In linking to a New York Times interview with virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier, Wirbel makes the point that a ringing, authentic voice does much to counter the sheep-spawning effect the Web tends to have.

It’s an uphill battle, to be sure, but we’re got to start somewhere.

This devil-may-care voicing, however, is why corporate blogs really haven’t taken root as touchpoints of provocative conversation. And maybe that’s just OK.

For those of us individual bloggers, though, the education and evolution continues apace. And that’s half the fun.

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Category: social media, writing
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Marketing old-school

Posted on | January 12, 2010 | 1 Comment

Fujitsu's 2010 Calendar In All Its Glory

Fujitsu's 2010 Calendar In All Its Glory

Summary: In building marketing and communications campaigns, great companies don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The great thing about immersing yourself in social media is that it’s a fantastic, real-time, global source for information especially pertaining to using social media for marketing purposes.

The bad thing is it functions as an echo chamber. Voices that might give balance to breathless conversations about the wonders of social media can’t contribute because they’re not there for the most part. Lacking any balanced perspective, we tend to think the wave we’re riding is all consuming.

That’s not the case. The audience is increasingly online but also where it’s always been: everywhere.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that companies that still employ (gasp!) snail mail marketing are enjoying success with some campaigns. One company that saved money by halting personally signed mailers saw a portion of its business drop off. One of its marketers

“…at first blamed the economy for the dropoff, until she ’started hearing from customers that they never got their ‘reminder’ in the mail.’”

We spend an increasing amount of time in front of the computer, but there are other hours in the day too… hours when go out to fetch the mail, look at TV, drive past a billboard, walk (gasp) somewhere, listen to the radio. These are all marketing touch points that tend to get overlooked in the social media orgy.

I thought of this over the weekend when I got a surprise gift in the mail: A 2010 calendar from Fujitsu Microelectronics. Fujitsu gives these out to customers and media every year. They’re enormous calendars with stunning photographs of railways and trains from around the world. I always looked forward to getting one each year. Some years I would cut out the photograph from an older month and tack it up on my cubicle just to continue admiring the image.

The calendar represented a soft but consistent touch on Fujitsu’s part: “We’re here and we we appreciate beauty in the same way you do.” Fujitsu was never a huge media generator, and its products were never really sexy. But you never forgot they were selling components. Other factors go into this brand recognition of course; but sending out an old-school calendar by old-school mail with pictures of old-school transportation was an important one.

Firms Hold Fast to Snail Mail Marketing

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Category: Electronics, marketing, semiconductors
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Has the advertising free-fall slowed?

Posted on | January 7, 2010 | 2 Comments

Don’t break out the Champagne just yet, but signs are emerging that perhaps the advertising collapse for newspapers and magazines is slowing and leveling off. Still, publications have a long way to go to get with the program.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week:

A year-end flurry of ad spending helped moderate steep declines at some newspapers and magazines, and has fueled an uptick at others, raising hopes for a recovery in 2010.

John Janedis, an analyst with Wells Fargo securities, upgraded several publishing houses with the optimistic note:

“Given current trends, we now expect approx. high single digit decline in overall newspaper advertising in 2010.”

I suspect two main factors are driving this cautious optimism:

  1. As the economy recovers overall ad spending is coming back (slowly). Printed publications aren’t dead yet.
  2. Marketers realize the integrated campaigns means integrated campaigns and that there’s still life in the old printing press.

Still, marketers, are wary of print’s future, and who can blame them after decades of watching print’s ostrich-like reaction to market changes and lame early responses to clever digital competitors? They’re shells of themselves and the gutting of newsrooms has yielded not just thin editions but thin reporting.

That said, there’s some bright spots.

  • SeeClickFix is a new site that, in part, builds conversation about community issues and is being used by citizen media to bird-dog and fix non-emergency problems, like graffiti pot-holes and malicious homeless folks.
  • The New York Times Magazine reported on the “existential angst” of online magazines. Interesting read and one that might be printed out and posted on the walls of print magazines trying to create their own future. Your day will come though when e-readers hit their stride later this year. I’m frankly looking forward to that.

So perhaps the free-fall is slowing, but it’s certainly not over, and print franchises online have much work ahead of it to make itself useful in the digital age.

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Category: advertising, economy, journalism, newspapers
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