Our round-up of interesting links this week:
Missed anything?
Continuing misfortunes suggest its not a great time to own a newspaper.
The New York Times continues to suffer with the slump in advertising really hitting home.
Marketing guru Seth Godin has posted a great blog article looking at the ways in which a newspaper could turn itself around in the current climate.
As Seth mentions (and I have highlighted before) the mindset of a newspaper organisation is defined by the daily news cycle which in itself is defined by “cost of paper, the finite nature of paper, the cost of delivery and the cycle of a daily paper. You run enough articles to fit as many ads as you can sell. These are artifacts of a different age, one that today’s consumer doesn’t care a whit about.”
So Seth puts forward some great suggestions for newspaper organisations, mainly focused around understanding and utilising the assets the brand has at its disposable in the digital environment.
This is all about not standing still. Moving with the times and realising that a business has changed or the society in which the business operates has changed.
There is great, practical advice here for any business or start-up: build and optimise your best asset and build value around that. Then don’t rest on your laurels. Stay ahead of the game and develop new ways to grow new assets or develop existing ones. For anyone marketing or publicising a brand, identifying these assets is vital. And an asset could be a great number of things, from the brand itself to a product, service, specicialism, thought, customer, idea, person, supporter….
It is a theme that Seth also explores in his book, Purple Cow, which I also highly recommend.
Another week, another Twitter related post, this time a little closer to home.
Last week, I started following @LitmanLive on Twitter and was delighted to get a private message informing me that I was his 500th follower and he would like to send me something to celebrate.
I was intrigued!
I admit that I had more-or-less forgotten about the incident when on Monday morning a big Waitrose box arrived on my desk with a very chocolatey cake inside [goes without saying that I immediately became the most popular person in the office, at least for the day!].
Michael has written about the episode too and I agree with his sentiments. I started using Twitter just to see what all the fuss (the fuss was relatively quiet back then) was about. Like most, I initially struggled to either the difference to Facebook and/or why the service was apparently so addictive.
However, as I used it more and built up relationships with people, as a networking tool, it has become invaluable. Through Twitter I have formed relationships with more people in a short space of time than through all the networking events I have ever been to! [Granted, I use this mainly as a business tool within a corner of a profession that is very tech, web and social media savvy.]
Michael is doing a bit better than me on the follower-front obviously [congratulations again btw :)] but he too obviously values and appreciates the bonds that he has also formed.
So please do follow me on Twitter and check Michael out as well and hopefully we can get networking! You never know - one day - you may get rewarded too.
A new Ofcom report reveals that the UK is leading the way in the take-up of digital services including broadband, digital TV and mobile.
The UK now has the highest rate of online ad spend (19%) and is the third ranking country for broadband connections (26%) behind the Netherlands and Sweden.
Writing for the Guardian, Charles Arthur argues that despite this rosy picture, our future will be less positive unless we find a way to quickly upgrade our ailing telephone system, bringing speeds of nearly 100Mb/s. Speeds that would radically change the way we work and play:
It means that you wouldn’t have to travel so much. And in a world – which is coming, never doubt it – where oil costs $300 per barrel, not travelling will seem like a good idea. It will mean that anything that doesn’t require actual atoms to be moved around will become possible.
But as Charles says, who is going to pay for this?
I’ve said before that as a country, we are in danger of lagging behind. At a time when economic considerations might make thoughts about upgrading internet connections seem slightly irrelevant, we would do well to consider how even better and faster broadband connections could really change the way the country operates and communciates, building a stronger economy and global position.
Bits and pieces you may have missed this week:
Missed anything?
Twitter’s never-ending rise in popularity has been growing in recent weeks with Prime Ministers, tv shows and developers all looking to get in on the action.
Here at Wildfire, we have been monitoring this new social media tool for a while now and are active users. Indeed, we have our own agency feed (@wildfirepr) and are embarking on a number of campaigns for clients involving Twitter in the next few months.
Last week, our interest was rewarded in a list of PR Tweeters [those who Tweet] and in the PR agency league table generated from the list.
Wildfire is currently sitting in a highly respectable joint 11th with seven Tweeters in total so far in our ranks. Not bad Tweeter-employee ratio!
You can follow Debby, Sarah-Anne, Kate, Gabi, Claire, Louise and Danny (and of course Wildfire) on Twitter now.
Our round-up of interesting web-based content:
Missed anything?
I must say, I’m impressed.
Whilst I still appreciate that it is slightly ironic to have a magazine dedicated to digital media, the revamped Revolution really seems to tick all the right boxes.
Revolution lost it’s way somewhat when it changed from a weekly to a monthly title and was unable to properly differentiate itself from rival title NMA.
This has now all changed.
The new magazine perfectly positions itself. It’s not a simple news delivery vehicle; this is never going to work for a monthly, with so many websites doing a better, more immediate job (and with NMA doing its best to pick up the rest). Nor it’s it going to be able to compete with blogs and industry opinions formers; it is not immediate enough to be able to respond. What it can do however, is take a step back. Properly analyse, predict and report on longer term issues, strategies and trends.
And this is demonstrated in the launch issue. The first 14 or so pages are dotted with short, sharp news items (not the same predictable pieces you have read throughout the month), including the innovative ‘world-wide web’ double-page looking at digital stories throughout the world.
A few pages of good quality opinion pieces gives way to a number of feature-like pieces, centering on a longer section looking at Google’s 10th birthday and ’search’ in general. The content isn’t trying to be blog-like, but neither is it page after page of arduous text - effective design and fresh page layout plays a key role here.
The magazine ends with a section entitled “The Work” - a series of case studies and examples of real digital work and innovation in practice: a great addition (if still predictably dominated by the usual big brands and big agencies - when some of the real innovation often occurs lower down the food chain).
Both NMA and Revolution plan to redevelop their websites [long overdue in my humble opinion] and it may be that this is where their future really lies [although they better get a move on as they will soon be eclipsed IMHO].
But Revolution deserves credit for bringing in a new team and working hard to create a publication that stands out from the crowd and fills a niche and a need, that readers (and no doubt advertisers) will welcome.
Tomorrow the FT will launch a new homepage on its FT.com website.
It is quite hard to review the developments in detail until the site is live and can be used, but the screenshots released today show a few interesting changes. Firstly the use of the FT’s iconic ‘pink’ as a background colour (this will apparently be rolled out site-wide in due course). Also, the title is now Financial Times rather than FT.com.
The header also looks very ‘Newspapery’ in design. Indeed, speaking with paidContent:UK, FT.com editor James Montgomery suggests that increasing the parallels between print and online is deliberate. He adds that
“We think the Financial Times is a very strong brand and we want the website to have that core brand identity, not be some separate distant thing that it has been in the past.”
This adds to the online v print debate.
I don’t have a problem with a website trying to look like a newspaper per se and I can understand the thinking behind it. The FT’s brand image is very closely aligned with the print version - I always think of the pin-striped suit/FT-pink combo!
I can remember the Independent trying a similar layout in the past and it never seemed to gel properly. It will be interesting to see how the usability of the homepage works when it is launched tomorrow.
I will also be intigued to see how the ‘incremental’ development process works throughout the rest of the site. This is the route that the Guardian and BBC both adopted for their recent redesigns and, whilst I can see the obvious benefits, with the Guardian in particular, I couldn’t help but feel that the whole site became disjointed and lacked cohesiveness throughout the transitional period.
Journalism.co.uk has an interesting video interview (see below) with Kate Mackenzie, interactive editor for the FT, who describes how the new content management system will help to define the editorial decisions made: “At the moment we have a fairly old-fashioned approach to organising the relationship between stories online, but it’s going to become a lot more dynamic and tag driven.”
This is a more interesting development and embraces the unique ability of a website to help users discover information that is of interest that they might not have discovered otherwise.
There was really only one topic worth talking about this week, so here is our final round-up of technology-related election twitterings:
Don’t forget our own US election coverage on the blog.
Missed anything?