July 11 (Bloomberg) -- Media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Howard Stringer attend the annual Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to kick the tires on new businesses. This year, they didn’t find much.
Murdoch, chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp., and Stringer, his counterpart at Tokyo-based Sony Corp., said separately at the conference this week that they won’t bid on Twitter Inc., the Web messaging service, signaling Internet businesses have become less attractive to media companies stung by the recession.
That’s a departure from recent retreats sponsored by the New York-based investment bank. In 2007, CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves held talks that led to the $1.7 billion purchase of CNet Networks, the online technology news company. Sling Media founder Blake Krikorian said he started discussions in Sun Valley that led EchoStar Corp. to pay $380 million for his company, which lets users watch their home TV services online.
“It’s not a club I’m looking to join,” Stringer, 67, said in an interview. “A lot of people are doing well making very little money.”
Slumping advertising sales are overshadowing the usual interest traditional media companies show in acquisitions, David Winters, CEO of Wintergreen Advisers LLC, in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, said at the conference. The company managed $1.03 billion as of June 30, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Murdoch, 78, and Stringer told reporters in Sun Valley this week they are interested in companies with profit and growth potential.
“I don’t see an end to the downturn, and I can’t predict when we’ll start to see a rebound,” Murdoch said in an interview.
Cash Hoard
New York-based News Corp., owner of the Fox network, Wall Street Journal, cable channels, film studios and satellite broadcasting interests, will hold on to its $6.05 billion in cash until the recession ends, Murdoch said.
News Corp. fell 6 cents to $8.17 yesterday in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The Class A shares have declined 10 percent this year. Sony’s U.S. traded shares lost 60 cents to $23.85 on the New York Stock Exchange and have gained 9.1 percent.
Traditional media companies and newer Internet businesses face a similar dilemma, trying to get online users to pay for their products, cable billionaire John Malone told reporters at the conference.
Television, film and publishing companies must find a way to charge Internet users for content they provide, said Malone, 67, the chairman of Liberty Media Corp. Some are running out of time as they struggle to generate online sales, he said.
Paying Customers
Internet companies including San Francisco-based Twitter and Google Inc.’s YouTube will need to sell subscriptions to make money, Malone said.
Without new pay models, the Internet will drain profits at media conglomerates as it has at newspapers, said Malone, who runs Liberty Media from Englewood, Colorado. Companies must find ways to be compensated, just as cable operators convinced consumers to pay for TV after decades of free broadcasts.
Mountain View, California-based Google is looking for acquisitions, CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview with Bloomberg television.“We have talked a lot with Twitter,” Schmidt said at a press conference in Sun Valley.
Remember when you could buy barbiturates for the baby? Cover your house with asbestos? Or get heroin from the doctor? Okay, probably not, but thanks to the immortal beauty of advertising, you can take a trip back in time. Here's our pick of some of the most ironic ads in American history.
UNION CARBIDE "Science helps build a new India"
Ah, the innocent days before a Union Carbide plant in India obliterated everyone in sight. In 1984, Union Carbide's plant in Bhopal released 42 tons of toxic gas into the air, ultimately killing about 25,000 people. The stench of this "new India" remains to date, in fact, as the Yes Men have duly pointed out.
The Corvair in action! Impaling drivers with steering wheels! Leaking oil! Spiraling out of control!
You may remember the Corvair as the focus of Ralph Nader's classic book Unsafe at Any Speed. (This, before Nader had grown senile and was busy saving the country from itself.) If your family had a Corvair and didn't die in it, please be sure to go on about that in comments because that disproves everything. Considered one of TIME's 50 Worst Cars of All Time.
ASBESTOS (1981) "When life depends on it, you use asbestos"
Okay, sure, when you need to get out of a burning building fast, asbestos may give you a few extra minutes. But you better be wearing a respirator because when that fucker collapses, that asbestos is getting in your lungs, where it will fester for years before killing you mercilessly. (Wait, did we mention 9/11?)
DISTAVAL (Thalidomide), circa 1960 "This child's life may depend on the safety of Distaval"
Who says advertising doesn't tell the truth? Sadly, this slogan was more true than anyone expected at the time. Distaval was a brand name for thalidomide, a drug that causes serious birth defects. Think flipper babies and death. This sedative-hypnotic, commonly prescribed to stressed-out moms, was advertised as "especially suitable for infants" as well. (On a side note, am I sick for longing for the days when it was okay to sedate your baby?)
Parents who tired of drugging their babies could always turn to cellophane to keep them quiet. Permanently quiet, in fact. In 1959, Life and other media sources scared readers with "the latest household peril" — plastic dry cleaning bags — so we're betting this ad dates prior to that.
DUTCH BOY LEAD PAINT "Where your dream house comes true, don't let cheap paint make it a nightmare!" You want to hear my nightmare? How about spending nearly a year stripping lead paint in my dream home, wearing a gas mask and gloves and keeping the bedroom in lockdown so that toxic dust and muck doesn't spread everywhere?
BAYER HEROIN
Not only did Bayer once own the trademark on Heroin, it promoted it to doctors as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. For a while, doctors took the bait. "It possesses many advantages over morphine," wrote the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1900. "It's not hypnotic, and there's no danger of acquiring a habit." The American Medical Association approved the use of heroin in 1906, but by then the "junkies" foraging scrap metal to feed their habit were getting hard to avoid. Bayer stopped making heroin in 1913 when prohibition seemed inevitable, and its use without a prescription was banned in the US the following year.
When it first released Rebel Without A Cause, Warner Brothers was concerned that kids would ape James Dean's character and wind up driving off cliffs. (A problem, of course, because the kids' relatives would likely sue the company.) To distance themselves from copycat incidents preemptively, Warner Brothers had Dean film this public service announcement urging kids to "Take it easy driving out there. The life you save might be mine." Alas, the clip was never used because Mr. Dean was killed in his speeding Porsche shortly before the movie was released.
As predicted, a number of teens copied Dean's "chicken" game and died while racing over cliffs. (Boston Globe, October 20, 1993)
THE FORD PINTO "The little carefree car"
Carefree? Hardly. Ford's Pinto was designed in such a way that rear-end collisions could cause the car to catch fire and blow up. An internal memo revealed that Ford execs were well aware of the problem, but determined not to fix it. Why? Ford's cost-benefit analysis showed that paying off potential law suits from deaths was cheaper than a redesign. Another one of the TIME's 50 Worst Cars.
CAMELS "More doctors smoke Camels..."
Ironic old cigarette ads are a dime a dozen but we figured we should include at least one, if for no reason than to call this post an even 10.
We just talked about this at class on Tues evening - what are the ethics of using photos you find online AND what do you do about it? Here's a news story that will be of interest:
ST. LOUIS (AP) — It's an international mystery: How did a Missouri family's Christmas card photo end up in the Czech Republic, splashed across a huge storefront advertisement?
Danielle Smith said Wednesday that the photo taken of her family last year got sent to family and friends, and was posted on her blog and a few social networking sites. The photo showed her and her husband Jeff holding their two young children.
About 10 days ago, one of Smith's college friends was driving through Prague when he spotted their huge smiling faces in the window of a store specializing in Europeann food. He snapped a few pictures and sent them to a flabbergasted Smith.
"It's a life-size picture in a grocery store window in Prague — my Christmas card photo!" said Smith, 36, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of O'Fallon.
Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, said the photo was from the Internet. Details were sparse, but he said he thought it was computer-generated. When told it was a real photo — of a real family — he said he started taking steps to remove it.
"We'll be happy to write an e-mail with our apology," said Bertuccio, who said he would send the Smiths a bottle of good wine if they lived in his eastern European country.
The Smiths and photographer Gina Kelly hadn't authorized anyone to use the pictures. Kelly said she has asked a professional photographers' organization to help figure out how her image wound up in Prague.
Smith has gotten 180,000 hits to her Web site since she recently posted the story about the well-traveled snapshot. She said the photo wasn't used in an unseemly manner, it was just used to tell potential shoppers about the store's delivery service.
Smith said next time she posts a photo on the Internet, she's going to lower the resolution or add an electronic watermark to make it hard to reproduce."This story doesn't frighten me, but the potential frightens me," Smith said. Associated Press Writer Karel Janicek in Prague contributed to this report.
Good roundup of information on a topic we've discussed in class - the power of MommyBloggers! We'll view this tonight - both for the content AND as an example of how AdAge is using video podcasts to get information out.
Ad Age NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Despite their lightweight moniker, mommy bloggers have become marketing business heavyweights. Now said to number in the millions, these online women have cobbled together content networks that rival some mainstream media companies. And they're clearly a force that retailers underestimate at their own peril. In this "About Digital" report, we talk to a retail giant, an analyst, major publisher and a PR agency to better understand how various segments of the industry are adjusting to this phenomenon.
Who doesn’t know about the “Will It Blend” series on YouTubeCreated by George Write, the marketing director of Blendtec, the campaign was low cost and instantly became a hit. In the video, Tom Dickson the CEO of Blendtec, attempts to blend objects in their blender. This simple idea led to a “five-fold increase in sales”.
Blendtec leveraged YouTube’s subscriber base and tried something fun and original. The campaign was a success and continues to entertain and sell.
Lesson: Social media marketing doesn’t always need to cost a lot of money. Creating funny, original video and leveraging an already large user base can be used to increase sales.
2. Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application
Recently, Burger King has really been pushing the envelope with their marketing. They first started with whoppervirgins.com, then entered the social space with the “sacrifice ten friends” facebook application. The campaign quickly went viral and was adopted by over 20,000 users, sacrificing 200,000 friends for free whoppers.
Sadly, the application was shut down as quickly as it started by Facebook, citing privacy concerns. Regardless, the application was beautifully built and the idea was perfect. Burger King built in the ability to share it, the incentive to use it, and added just enough humor to make the campaign a hit.
Lesson: Successful and viral campaigns don’t just test out social media, they jump in it. Pushing the envelope can create the buzz that makes your campaign memorable.
3. Starbucks Asks for Your Advice
Social media isn’t only about using existing websites, but sometimes creating your own. To get a better handle on consumer feedback, Starbucks did just that with “My Starbucks Idea.”
The site allows users to submit suggestions to be voted on by Starbucks consumers, and the most popular suggestions are highlighted and reviewed. Starbucks then took it a step further and added an “Ideas in Action” blog that gives updates to users on the status of changes suggested.
By empowering their exceptionally web savvy consumer, Starbucks strengthens their campaign to add a personal touch to coffee.
Lesson: Thinking of ways to build your company are great, but directly asking your consumers what they want, is better. Acting on that information and doing it publicly is key to the success of this campaign.
Starbucks has also embraced Twitter, you can see their stream at @Starbucks.
4. Sun Microsystems and the CEO Blog
Want your blog to really make a splash? You could learn a lot from Sun Microsystem’s CEO blog. Jonathan Schwartz’s blog received about 400,000 hits a month (in 2006).
It’s not the number of hits that make his blog a social media success, but the openness on it. Positive and negative comments are allowed, and even the most inane are approved. Transparency from the highest position in a company trickles down and increases trust from consumers.
Lesson: Social media is a culture of transparency and honesty that must be embraced, leading by example is one of the best ways to introduce it to a company. Few things are better than a CEO that blogs or uses twitter.
When IBM decided they wanted to start using blogs, they didn’t just create one blog, they created an entire network. IBM created a way and allowed their employees to write about their experiences, what they’re working on, or any other topic of choice.
IBM capitalizes on the intelligence of their employees to give consumers insight into what happens behind the scenes. By giving the industry experts they’ve hired a voice, IBM is able to highlight the people behind their products. Users get to see how IBM operates, and are given a direct connection with IBM employees.
Lesson: Having a CEO that blogs is great, but increase the number of blogs and you increase the number of connections. Leveraging your employees to write about what they love conveys the corporate dedication to the industry.
You can also find IBM on Twitter giving updates on events from their calendar.
6. Zappos on Twitter
Obviously we had to talk about Twitter, this is a social media post after all. The most obvious of companies to make Twitter work is Zappos, an online retailer that has really led the way in corporate Twitter use.
The idea of micro-blogging and the sense of exceptional customer service is ingrained in the corporate culture. Most Zappos employees have an active account, and the Zappos site has a page that aggregates all the streams.
The reason why Zappos stands out on Twitter is because of their ability to bring the company to life. The Zappos CEO has lent his personality to the company brand, a personality that is friendly, helpful, funny, and trustworthy. They use Twitter to highlight interesting facts, and to talk to their consumers. Talking to Zappos is like talking to a friend that happens to sell shoes.
Lesson: Take a CEO that twitters, add in a great personality and you have a recipe for social success. Ingraining social media into the culture of a corporation means that every consumer interaction is personal.
Zappos also does a great job of using their blog and Facebook to engage their avid fanbase.
7. Comcast on Twitter too
I never expected to be writing good things about Comcast, but because of Frank Eliason things have changed. Frank is the man behind @comcastcares, a Twitter account setup to help Comcast users in need.
Comcast has found a way to offer exceptional customer service to their consumers, but the thing that really makes them stand out is how well they monitor discontent. Complain about Comcast and you can bet you’ll hear from @comcastcares to see if they can help.
Lesson: Being active on Twitter is great but tracking and seeing who’s mentioning you, is the next step. Social media allows for the possibility of great customer service, and with it, better brand loyalty.
8. Ford and Social Media PR
You’d think I’d talk about how Ford uses Twitter (they use it well), but the thing that makes them really shine is how they did a great job quelling a would-be public relations disaster online with the use of social media.
The basic story is that there was an internal gaffe where Ford’s legal department sent out cease and desist letters to forum owners using Ford trademarks. Obviously the story was twisted and changed, and in the end people were outraged.
What makes this a success story for social media is that Scott Monty (Ford’s community manager) was quick to find out what happened and let us know the true story. Not only that, but as things were being fixed and a compromise was ironed out, the public was informed every step of the way.
Although we don’t know if social media has shown a direct return on investment for Ford, the public relations fiasco it helped avert (think Motrin) should help make the case for more funding for social media.
Lesson: Social media can be used to inform consumers in real-time of how a corporation is reacting to events that affect the customer. Transparency in the process and access to constant information can help stop a negative story from going viral.
9. Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr
Social media is about sharing all types of content, including photos. Facilitating the sharing is easy, but gaining something from it requires a sound strategy. Graco did just that, by building a community around their product using Flickr ().
Flickr isn’t the center of their campaign, but they promote it heavily with the Graco blog which also creates an incentive for others to submit pictures. The photographs help highlight the people behind Graco and the consumers using their products.
Graco takes their strategy one step further by introducing offline marketing in the form of community gatherings. The pictures from these meet-ups are posted to the Flickr page, further humanizing the community around the product.
Lesson: Social media doesn’t have to exist wholly online. Blending offline marketing with online efforts can build a community around a brand.
Graco has a blog and leverages Lindsay Lebresco (the corporate blogger for Graco) to be active on Twitter.
10. Dell Doing it Everywhere
Embracing social media is a huge undertaking, and involves a large investment. Dell didn’t shy away from these obstacles, instead they’ve gone above and beyond, truly cultivating a cross-platform community. They’ve created multiple Twitter handles, a network of blogs, and are very active on Facebook.
Dell is also one of the few companies to publicly state that they created a return on investment from Twitter. Apparently, Dell’s social media efforts help create “$1 million in revenue“.
Lesson: Social media isn’t all about ROI, but it is possible. Creating cross-platform strategies can lead to the most success, especially when your demographic is already Internet and technologically savvy.
Other Brands
We’ve explored 10 companies and picked out 10 lessons we can learn from them. As social media evolves, we’ll see how many of these are replaced by new innovations in marketing. Is there a company you think evolved the industry, that deserves to be on this list?
Very often, when I’m engaging people on Twitter (), I think of my undergrad journalism professor, a crusty but kindly man named Charlie Ball.
“Class!” Charlie would bark at all of us, and our fingers would collectively pause over the keyboards of the electric typewriters that passed for a journalism lab 20 years ago. Charlie would wave an unfortunate someone’s liberally marked-up news manuscript in our direction and bellow, “This is what I mean! Never use a 10-cent word when a nickel word will do!”
What Charlie meant by that is that news journalism works best when it’s simple and direct, at least in the story’s lead sentences. And simplicity (and other tenets of good journalism — like brevity, and clarity, and immediacy) are now cornerstones of how many businesses, brands and individuals communicate on Twitter.
Here’s how some of the mantras from my undergrad days now inform the best tweets.
1. Make every word count
In traditional news journalism, and on Twitter, you only have so much space. On Twitter, of course, it’s a mere 140 characters. As I learned in journalism school, writing short is a lot harder than it looks. It’s a lot more work to choose your words wisely, and be concise, than it is to ramble on luxuriously. For example, I love how Tim Siedell communicates so much in a single tweet:
Keeping a tweet really short – like close to 85-100 characters – also makes your tweet more “Retweet Friendly,” since it allows a little wiggle room for forwarding.
2. Keep it simple
Like Charlie’s directive to avoid “10-cent words,” the best news reporters tell a story simply and clearly. Similarly, don’t try to cram too much information into a single tweet. On Twitter, less is often more.
Also: Link directly to blogs or other online sources, and always link to the full story, rather than trying to juice up page views by, for example, linking to the home page. Shorten URLs through bit.ly or similar services. Most Twitter clients will usually condense your links, but I like bit.ly’s rich click-through and retweet stats.
Finally, avoid the temptation to fit more into a tweet by the liberal use of abbreviations. Such shorthand might maximize your character count, but they make your tweet read like a teenager’s text message.
3. Provide context
News reporters do this by plugging in some of the back story on any given news item. On Twitter, offer context by using keywords and hashtags, when appropriate, so that readers can more easily get the gist of a conversation, thread, or topic. Like this:
Or this:
4. Lead with the good stuff
In journalism, the “inverted pyramid” style places the most important information at the top of any story, and then the ensuing narrative explains and expands on it. In other words, the first paragraph should contain enough information to give the reader a solid overview of the entire story. Approach sharing links or information on Twitter in a similar manner, giving the strongest and most compelling bit in the tweet, and then link to the rest of the story elsewhere.
5. Write killer headlines
Headlines “sell” a news story or a blog post much like a great tweet invites a reader to click. Author tweets that are short, punchy, and are compelling, either because they tell the reader precisely what you’re offering (”How to…” or “27 Ways…”) or because they’re clever or funny.
I like how John Haydon tweets a punchy headline and then adds his take on why it’s a good read:
…or because they are clever or funny:
6. Graphics expand on the story
A good image or graphic complements a news story. Similarly, a picture on Twitter tells a story with far more impact:
7. People make things interesting
News reporters often focus on how people are affected by a given situation or event. On Twitter, it’s also the people that keep it interesting. That means talking to (or “@ing”) folks liberally, as well as adopting a conversational tone and community spirit.
And this applies even when you are representing a brand:
8. Consider the reader
Journalists spend a lot of time coming up with the right angle for a story. On Twitter, be similarly thoughtful in your approach. The immediacy of Twitter might tempt you to dash off a tweet with little forethought. But if you respect your audience of followers similar to the way journalists consider their readers, you’ll spend more time thinking about what to tweet, than you will actually doing it. Believe me, your followers will appreciate your efforts.
This is a very good article from the NYT describing the new 'state of advertising' today as it relates to metrics. I like the quote: “It forces marketers to stay on their toes and think of thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one."
ON a recent Thursday, Darren Herman, the president of Varick Media Management, was sequestered in his SoHo office. He wasn’t scrutinizing a television ad or images from a photo shoot. He was combing through graphs and Excel spreadsheets.
Executives at Cadreon, the data practice of Mediabrands. From left are Brendan Moorcroft, Quentin George, Michael Brunick and Nicole Craine. "The data game right now is a little bit of the Wild West," Mr. Brunick says.
Mr. Herman had run 27 ads on the Web for his client Vespa, the scooter company. Some were rectangular, some square. And the text varied: One tagline said, “Smart looks. Smarter purchase,” and displayed a $0 down, 0 percent interest offer. Another read, “Pure fun. And function,” and promoted a free T-shirt.
Vespa’s goal was to find out whether a financial offer would attract customers, and Mr. Herman’s data concluded that it did. The $0 down offer attracted 71 percent more responses from one group of Web surfers than the average of all the Vespa ads, while the T-shirt offer drew 29 percent fewer. And Mr. Herman didn’t just compare the messages in the ads — he also looked at the sites where they ran, when they ran and what groups of people responded.
From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tagline, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.
“It’s putting numbers to an industry that never had numbers before,” says Mr. Herman, 27, who started and sold three media and technology companies before founding Varick last summer. “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.”
This approach turns marketing “upside down,” says Ron Proleika, the vice president of marketing communications at Windstream Communications, an Internet service provider and a client of Mr. Herman’s. “It forces marketers to stay on their toes and think of thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one."
Major advertising holding companies like WPP, the Publicis Groupe, Havas, MDC Partners and the Interpublic Group are starting data practices, hoping to latch onto what is expected to be the fastest-growing category of online advertising in the next five years.
Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, now they are at the core of the online strategy. What’s more, they can help advertisers save money in traditional media by testing different phrases or images online to see what works before producing an expensive television commercial or magazine ad. Who attracts more clicks in a grape juice ad, for example — the blond girl or the brown-haired boy?
The shift to data-based campaigns is forcing marketers to learn new skills and drawing a new breed of worker to Madison Avenue. While most data executives now in the field came from media backgrounds, they are recruiting Wall Street math geniuses because the job requires hourly adjustments in strategy based on numbers.
Mr. Herman is trying to hire people from Citigroup and Bank of America, and he hopes that the layoffs in the financial industry will help him do it on the cheap.
“It mirrors the financial markets in many ways,” he says, so “that’s where we go."
Still, getting advertising agency employees to rely on data is difficult, agencies say. And as people trained on Wall Street migrate to Madison Avenue, executives anticipate battles between creative types and wonks.
Traditional ad agencies still don’t have budgets that allow for a lot of digital experimentation, Mr. Herman says. He notes that most traditional agencies “make the bulk of their money in print, radio and television.”
So even as this area becomes increasingly technology-driven, old ways of doing business and clients reluctant to embrace radically new approaches mean that the advertising culture won’t change overnight.
“At the end of the day,” Mr. Herman says, “the entire process isn’t digital because our clients aren’t.”
UNTIL the Internet, advertising required heavy research at the front and back ends. Millions of dollars went into television and print ads, so the advertisers had to get the idea right before they produced one. Determining the effectiveness of those ads was hard. It required follow-up surveys and interviews. And once advertisers began a campaign, they were locked into it — they usually booked TV spots four months before the season began, for instance, and even if a show tanked, they couldn’t always abort their plans. more
Thanks for visiting Teaching Social Media at UCLA!
I have been teaching Marketing classes for the UCLA Extension since 2001. I love sharing the knowledge and passion I have for Marketing and Technology with the business community. I want to thank Karl Kasca, who's been my co-instructor since 2003, for the marketing and research expertise he brings to the classes as well. In addition to co-teaching Social Media, Karl teaches New Media and I teach Global Marketing for the Extension as well.
Social Media Marketing is our newest class. We put this together, with the encouragement of the Business and Management Department at the Extension, to meet the growing need in the business world of understanding these new tools and how they fit into traditional marketing. I started this blog as a way to demonstrate the power of social media tools to students. Turns out, the class is generating buzz from all over. We welcome that and hope you'll pass it on.
In addition to teaching, I am the CEO of Y&M Partners LLC, a strategic advisory firm in Beverly Hills. We do business development, consulting, capital raising, etc. for the healthcare, energy, and technology industries. I also speak on industry panels, keynote for professional organizations, and am an accredited business writer.
UNION CARBIDE
DISTAVAL (Thalidomide), circa 1960
DuPONT'S CELLOPHANE BABIES
BAYER HEROIN
