Magnosticism

An About Us page is a checklist item for any business’s website (and many personal blogs, in its more informal About Me variation). Here’s what NOT to do on your “About Us” page:

• Don’t put your “About Us” page in the “Past News” section - this implies that, well, you are old news.  
• Don’t put embeddable ads in the text. That tells me a lot “about” you - all of it negative.
• Don’t say you have an experienced staff, but then provide no information about or access to those people.
• Don’t post text with numerous typos (and compound the oversight by calling yourself an “award-winning” media publication).

If you don’t think any established website could possibly allow any of these egregious errors to go unchecked, think again: I found one that features ALL of them. And I’m sad to say I used to work for them. What a disturbing decline for a once-great publication.

“Feeding frenzy” takes on a whole new meaning with 7/24 news cycles. Witness the Eliot Spitzer scandal. This guy was buried in a New York minute. My favorite tabloid covers:

You can even write your own NY Post headline.

Google News search results for “Eliot Spitzer” for March 11: 16,199

Google-indexed blog posts referencing “Eliot Spitzer ” on March 11: 2,160

Best jokes, compiled here.

Even advertisers are getting into the act.

Nothing’s more tasty to media folk than a holier-than-thou public figure caught with his pants down. The Steamroller gets steamrolled.

From a spam press release I received today:

David Hancock of Morgan jams Publishing offers the advantages of a New York Publisher without the drawbacks. His entrepreneurial publishing model gives authors control over their own books, influence over cover design, and most importantly, his authors retain full rights to their books and earn a 20 per cent commission on each sale.

Hancock teamed up with Glenn Dietzel of AwakenTheAuthorWithin.com, whose Entrepreneurial Authoring Program teaches clients to write a money-making book in 12 hours of actual writing time<emphasis by Magnostic>. Clients who complete the program discover how to write a book that is “entrepreneurially sound” and are guaranteed acceptance with Morgan James Publishing, without writing a book proposal or going through years of submission and rejection.

Dietzel’s Entrepreneurial Authoring Program and individual business mentoring teach clients how to create a book that is an entrepreneurially sound lead generator for a well-structured business. A book that is entrepreneurially sound naturally leads readers to interact with the author and continue to do business again and again. The book is specifically designed as an invitation to take part in the author’s other services. Special offers and free gifts of value to the reader are tucked into the pages of the book.

I once aspired to write a novel, but an “entrepreneurially sound lead generator” sounds much more romantic.

Lately, I’ve been categorizing my editorial consulting work as “corporate journalism” - the practice of creating balanced, fact-based content for marketers. It’s a more authentic alternative to the usual PR drivel and marketing fluff that companies have traditionally used to annoy customers, journalists and other target groups. The content can take many forms: white papers (reported with real-person interviews, not made-up quotes), articles, blog posts, video, etc. - all the stuff you’d see on a typical media site. The content development work is also similar to traditional journalism: understand the target audience (customers vs. readers), identify the experts (internal and external), and get them to help you tell the story (through interviews or direct contributions). The result is more engaging, more believable marketing communications. (And it’s a good next career step for disgruntled, aging journalist types.)

I take no credit for coining the term. I first heard it from David Churbuck when talking about the time we spent together at McKinsey helping to re-do the company’s knowledge management platform (a Herculean task). He may or may not have borrowed the phrase from the 1999 book “Beyond Spin.” From the publisher’s description:

In Beyond Spin, three experts detail the techniques of corporate journalism–an ingenious communications model that hinges on open, accurate, and strategically weighted reporting inside a corporation.  

I wouldn’t go so far as calling the practice “ingenious,” but corporate journalism is an important step away from traditional PR/marketing. Churbuck takes a broader view of the concept than the book’s apparent (I never read it) focus on internal mar-com; he uses the phrase to refer to the lens through which companies must view external communications as well:

Organizations need to report upon themselves with the objective eye of a journalist, holding any statement or action up to the same skeptical, unconflicted scrutiny that an outsider would hold, to determine how it will sit with the most important segment of its public - its customers.

I found another good post on the topic at Contentious.com, this one dating back to 2004:

It takes courage on the part of the corporate communications/PR people to step beyond the simplistic goal of persuasion – to acknowledge and address controversy, shortcomings and skeptical or critical perspectives without being dismissive. In short, to try to fairly present more than just the preferred corporate view.

I have two short articles in the current issue of 1to1 magazine. One is on some of the new metrics that marketers are adopting to help them measure the performance of their online and offline programs, as well as the value of their customers. It includes a sidebar on the impressive results that Petco is seeing after adding user-generated content - a.k.a. customer product reviews - to its website.

The second looks at the expanding skill set that today’s CMO needs to survive. The big three: General management experience, a deeper grasp of new media, and an eye for talent.  

Both require registration to view.

Back when I had a corporate job, we used to tell employees, Don’t put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t want forwarded to another person. The blog has streamlined that principle: no one has to forward your blog posts, because they’re already there, naked,  for anyone and everyone to see (and possibly take offense to). David Churbuck reminds us of this in a post about his interactions with a journalist; even though he did a phone interview with the reporter, the scribe found a juicier quote from is blog and chose to use that in the upcoming article. David’s conclusion:

Hence, if I continue to blog in the same voice and tone, I can expect to get quoted saying that things bluntly suck or rock, or that  the best use of Second Life is trying to get virtually “laid”, or that X is a moron, Y a frigtard, and Z a knuckle-dragging mouth breather. This gives me pause, particularly since I tend to put a different filter on my spoken utterances in the presence of a reporting reporter. 

The concept of blog as public record also should give pause to nitwits like this guy, who was blogging anonymously (or so he thought) while he was a defendant in a medical malpractice suit. Apparently he was providing a running commentary of the trial:

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff’s case and the plaintiff’s lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

Nice strategy. After admitting under questioning that he was the blogger named Flea, the defendant settled the case the next morning - for what the Boston Globe reported to be a “substantial” fee.

We’re just beginning to see the courts address the issue of libel as it relates to blogs. The Media Law Resource Center is keeping a tally.

Libel, slander, disclosure of trade secrets - those are the things that corporate marketers and lawyers freak out about when deciding whether their executives or other employees should launch a blog. Traditionalists will no doubt use any news of blogger lawsuits as proof points against unfettered corporate blogging.

That’s an overreaction. The spontaneity of blogs provides a refreshing departure from heavy-handed oversight from marketers who expect everyone to stay “on message” and from corporate lawyers who see potential lawsuits around every corner. But bloggers - regardless of whether they’re on their own or representing their company’s brand - have to be smart about what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. In other words, don’t expect that no one will notice or care about what your write because it’s “just a blog.” 

David Meerman Scott has just published his latest book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and was kind enough to include me on his list of acknowledgements. In Blogistan, that means I am required to link back to his post and also publish the list of all the other bloggers to whom he gives a virtual shout out:

As I told David, I look forward to reading the book and will post my thoughts about it here once I’m done.  

Proponents of editorial integrity are claiming victory following the reinstatement of PC World Editor in Chief Harry McCracken, who had resigned two weeks prior in a dispute over a cover story that PC World CEO Colin Crawford apparently ordered McCracken to kill. Um, make that former CEO, as IDG Communications President Bob Carrigan abruptly shuttled Crawford back to the company’s online group after just three months as head of PC World and Macworld, clearing the way for McCracken’s return. [Disclosure: IDG was my employer between 2004-2006.]

As David Churbuck notes, trade publications have always been beaten up over their close associations with advertisers and the perceived impact of those relationships on editorial coverage. Churbuck says he never experienced any such pressure during his days in the newsroom at PC Week, and neither did I. In fact, PC Week’s publishers, particularly the legendary Don Byrnes, went to bat for me more than once against advertisers who were outraged over some perceived slight in our coverage. The pains we took to maintain the church-state division never lessened the hue and cry of the Mac zealots (followed by the Linux zealots) who were certain we were on Microsoft’s payroll.

That was years ago, when publishers still had some leverage and could afford to play tough when vendors threatened to pull their ads. Now, with ad dollars at a premium, it’s particularly satisfying to see the edit guys win one. It’s even more refreshing to see PC World’s bloggers discuss the situation so openly. That’s something that would not have happened five or 10 years ago.  

I was a guest speaker last night at Emmanuel College in Boston, asked by a friend to talk to her feature-writing class about B2B publishing (hey kids! consider a career writing about refrigerated transport, microprocessors or food service!). One of the things we discussed, in the context of the print-to-online overhaul of the industry, was how trade publishers are in a great position to take advantage of social networking on the Web. When you think about it, the concept of community is nothing new to trade magazines; they have been engaging with highly targeted groups of readers for decades, first through controlled-circulation print magazines or newsletters, then through their websites. 

In the print world, the cycle went like this: reporters would interview readers, distill their thoughts, pick the best quotes, and write a story reflecting their views, which then would be slotted, packaged, printed and disseminated in magazine form to the rest of the community to consume, passively. The Internet introduced the concept of instant feedback, in the form of a comments or “talkback” box at the end of a story.

Now, next-generation tools and Web 2.0 concepts such as RSS, tagging and user-generated content allow communities of like-minded individuals to connect and interact more freely, effectively flattening out the publishing model.  While that scares the bejeezus out of some editors, it also creates an amazing opportunity for trade pubs to really get to know - and interact with - those readers they’ve been serving all these years. In general, I think the community play of the future will revolve around these types of smaller, targeted groups, as opposed to the YouTubes, MySpaces and other mass-oriented social networking sites.

The benefits of smaller sites are that members will be more willing to participate, instead of just watching others. Communispace addressed this issue in newly released research in which it looked at behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities. From its press release:

Results indicate that 86 percent of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities (average community size: 300-500 people) made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos and more. Only 14 percent merely logged in and observed, or “lurked.” In contrast, on public social networking websites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, i.e., the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In fact, in a typical online forum (e.g., wiki, community, message board or blog), one percent of site visitors contribute and the other 99 percent lurk. (Source: McConnell & Huba, 2007. Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message. Chicago: Kaplan Publishing). This disparity suggests that the more intimate the setting, the more people will participate and get involved in the community.

Community development holds potential not just for publishers, but for any company that wants to organize groups of individuals - customers, suppliers or employees - in order to share ideas and get feedback. Online community platform providers like Communispace and Leverage Software are gaining a lot of traction with corporate clients eager to dip their toes into the social networking waters.

Paul Dunay addresses the topic with a post and a podcast on building a B2B community. He interviewed Mukund Mohan, CEO of the Canvas Group, who cites InfoWorld as an example - an indication that trade publishers are indeed warming up to the idea of full-on community as a way to stay connected, and relevant, with readers.

The news that IT trade pub InfoWorld is ending its nearly 30-year-old print publication (while continuing its online and events properties) is not a wet blanket over the entire print publishing world. It’s more of a long-overdue nod to the bloated state of the tech publishing industry. When dozens of IT publications - three within IDG alone targeting senior IT execs - are competing for ad dollars in an industry that has gone through massive vendor consolidation (meaning the ad pie is shrinking), you have a problem even before what’s left of your print revenues start flying over to the Web.

I haven’t read the print version of InfoWorld for years, but I have fond memories of the publication from my days at PC Week - InfoWorld’s bitter rival during the ’80s and ’90s, aka the tech journalism boom times. We competed fiercely for every piece of breaking news. Outside my office in the newsroom of PC Week (now eWeek), we kept a “Scoop Scoreboard” to track our wins vs. the competition. Our receptionist, the legendary Betty Edwards, would call me every Tuesday morning to let me know when the stack of InfoWorlds had arrived, and reporters held their breath as they scanned the front page to see if they’d been scooped (and would soon be answering questions from cranky editors as to why).

Both publications would both send massive news teams to Comdex - I once had an $11,000 bill from the Vegas hotel where we housed our newsroom - and, after we launched our respective Web sites (PC Week’s crude 1994 implementation, built by our lab rats, was one of the first news websites) our goal at PC Week was twofold: to post every bit of breaking news from the show ahead of InfoWorld, and to beat them with exclusives from the event in the following week’s print mag. 

Jim Forbes, a former colleague of mine who worked for both publications, has a great look back at InfoWorld’s storied run. I will never have as much fun as I did in the PC Week newsroom during the late ’80s and early ’90s. It’s too bad that the leaders of great publications like PC Week and InfoWorld let new competition (CNet), new media (the Web) and a paryalyzing unwillingness to embrace new publishing models pull the rug out from underneath them. The writing was on the wall for print rags like InfoWorld long ago; look for others to follow.