Consumers Wield New Found Power – Is it Being Abused?
I have always been an advocate for listening to the voice of the customer. In the eighties I was the GM for a bookstore chain. From time to time I would receive letters from customers who had an unpleasant experience with a staff member, or felt our practices, or title selection, was not acceptable. I would answer those letters personally and would spend time with the store manager discussing how an associate could be coached to ensure a better customer experience was waiting around the corner.
On one occasion someone went so far as to write a letter to the local newspaper to complain about certain magazine titles that were on display. The paper published the letter on their opinion page. I was a businessman and those magazines sold well so I didn’t want to give up that revenue. But the community got behind this person which meant I had to find a solution that worked for consumer as well as commerce. I instructed the store to remove the magazines from the rack and put up a sign that listed the titles available and informed the customers they could be purchased by asking any clerk at checkout. We did lose some sales, but I think that was more than made up in political capital with the community for seriously listening and taking action.
While in that store a short time later I overheard customers talking about the incident and noted what we had done in response. Their reaction was very positive. I immediately went back to my office and took it a step further by adopting this policy across the chain. Certainly many people did not have an issue, but it was a public store and as such, part of my job was to create an environment that was comfortable for as many people as possible. That was how community played out in the 1980’s. You wrote letters; yes on paper with envelopes and stamps. My customers taught me an invaluable lesson early on in my career; listen to them. A side note. That year we set a sales record and crushed the competitor, Walden Books, who had a much better location in the mall.
Fast forward to the digital age
One of the first things I do every morning these days is read customer comments submitted through the web site. I read them on my Blackberry at home while eating breakfast. I want to know what my customers are saying before I get to the office. It’s a sobering, enlightening, humbling, frustrating, humorous and an interesting experience. The Customer is Always Right is the classic phrase. Perhaps a more appropriate modern take is The Customer is the Customer. No ridiculous notions here. Businesses need customers, but consumers need and desire the products and services brands offer.
Enter Social Media
It has been perceived, in my opinion, that brands have enjoyed an advantage in the relationship with a consumer. Social media has for some consumers been a way to level that playing field. All well and good, but I have been observing some interesting data over the past few months directly related to all the talk about customers controlling brands and using social media as a bully pulpit to right the wrongs that businesses foist upon them. Just click on customer threads from almost any industry and you will see it. Customers want to tell the brand when they feel they’ve been wronged. Getting in touch with company people, not just the call center reps, is difficult and time consuming. Thanks to social media technology it’s much easier to write a blog post, comment on a conversation some one else has started or upload a photo. Consumers have expectations they expect brands to meet. I’m also a customer and couldn’t agree more. But if consumers decide to go public they need to exercise the same amount of care and honesty that they expected from the brand. If you don’t want your son to turn out like Bart Simpson, don’t parent like Homer. The visual below depicts how consumers move through the expectations / perceptions cycle in the world of social media, as well as what socially aware brands are doing in this new era.
Recent observations
Much of what I read from my customers is anonymous, but sometimes they identify themselves because they are looking for help. It’s fascinating what you find when you tie back detailed customer comments to their actual business records. What consumers write in public does not always reflect what’s on the private record. It’s not surprising. Anger and emotion can frequently overwhelm calm, fact-based thinking. Especially when there have been repeated attempts to solve the problem. This puts the brand in a difficult position. They can’t call out the customer, or argue. The best they can do is apologize for problems and take the conversation off line. My point is that if you find yourself with a new power, use it wisely. Exercise the same honesty and genuineness that you expect from your brand.
How Many Agencies Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?
I recently sat on a panel called Managing Multichannel Agency Relationships at last week’s Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago. Sean Corcoran the panel moderator and Forrester Analyst took an interesting approach. He passed across a short list of questions for us to ponder a week ahead of time, but did little else to help us prepare. It was a pre-mediated strategy to spur more spontaneous dialogue. The two clients on the panel were myself and Tracy Benson, Senior Director of Interactive Marketing and Emerging Media at Best Buy, The two agency representatives were Chris Miller, Senior VP, Group Management Director, Digital with Draftfcb and Ian Wolfman, CMO at imc². It was quite an honor to be on the same stage as these accomplished professionals. The teams were even with Tracy and me sandwiched in between the agency guys.
What is a digital agency’s role in today’s multi-dimensional landscape? Is it more important or roughly the same as it’s been?
Putting advertising aside, there are more digital channels used by consumers than analog channels today (see graphic below). And the digital channels are newer, richer, more interactive and can be easily shared. This means your digital agency’s role is increasingly more important than ever before. The fact that technology powers the new digital channels has actually hindered exploration and adoption among the big firms. That’s because traditional marketers don’t fully understand these new channels and can easily become infatuated with the technology. Suddenly their cry becomes about the technology and that drowns out strategic conversations. “We need a Twitter stream! Get me an iPhone app, now!” Oftentimes these take the form of demands of traditional agencies or even interactive agencies who have no real depth of experience in either mobile or social.
Marketers should be engaging in proactive discussions with their current interactive agencies about emerging trends, and ask the tough questions about their on-staff talent, capabilities and experiences beyond standard web development. If they don’t have much, but you are not doing much, maybe it doesn’t matter. But I can guarantee you that some day someone in the C-Suite will be sending you an e-mail or dropping by asking you what your plans are in new areas of mobile and social. If you don’t know and your agency doesn’t know you are officially behind and your job and your business may be at risk.
The role of a digital agency in this ever-changing landscape should be a shifting from single threaded projects to multidimensional marketing ecosystems. Here is a list I think great digital agencies must be doing to meet this new challenge.
- Expand the use of Personas, layering on mobile and social attributes
- Move away from single-threaded design projects into a marketing and communication ecosystem
- Fold in analytics and data more deeply and earlier on in the process
- Use more iterative design, not an assembly line approach. More sketches before the formal design process begins
- Help the client do something, not just say something
- Constantly seek to get closer to the client’s marketing and brand strategy
- Build out new skills within the agency team
Push your current agency to further educate and expand their staff skills. But you have to be committed to this new world as well. Learning and growing together can be a very good thing. If you are about to change digital agencies, include the topics of mobile and social skills, as well as channel integration experience and the points above high on your discussion list.
MCD Partners in New York. I work closely with these guys.
What makes a successful interactive agency-marketer relationship?
The same thing that makes any relationship successful; working hard at it. I had my first encounter with an agency when I was running a chain of bookstores in the 1980’s. I have always viewed my agency as an extension of my own staff. That mindset alone puts everyone on a better path. Make them a partner. Bring them into your strategic discussions and connect them with other key players around the company. Some feel that if others around the firm are going directly to the agency, then somehow control is being lost. Not true. It probably means overall that more is getting done. If you have interactive agency responsibility at your firm you need to provide guidelines and standards to both the agency and your company peers. Use the agency as outside validation to help elevate the digital IQ in your own company.
Have relationship reviews twice a year and make them frank discussions. I have three big buckets; efficiency, style and vision. Most things will fit nicely into one of those. Identify issues, but bring solutions yourself, and keep an open mind.
What are the pros and cons of working with one consolidated agency vs. several specialist agencies?
If you are a big brand you will absolutely have multiple agency relationships, no doubt about that. There is a need for big firms to get lots of things done in many areas, and the communication across departments is still sorely lacking (yes, as shocking as it may seem, silos still exist). People will go to all the trouble and work to get a new agency before they go around the company to see if an incumbent can do the job; amazing. It’s about the number of agencies, although I think fewer is better, it is about who you select.
- Choose agencies that compliment your business and other agency models and cultures
- Provide guidelines to everyone and be crystal clear who is leading
- Have them present together so no one over reaches on credit
- Connect agency personnel up and down levels and across disciplines
One thing I would steer away from are very small, specialist agencies that will struggle to hold their own in the C-Suite or with high-powered talent from the big guys. If you are hiring an agency for one small, unique initiative and don’t plan on introducing them to other external partners, think again. The interactive marketing world is highly integrated today, so if your project isn’t connected it will probably fail. Don’t create more silos, we have enough thank you.
How has social media changed the landscape and what is the role of agencies in this space?
So much has been written and said about Social Media the past year or so that I am not going to address any of that here. If you are reading this you are fully aware of how Social Media is changing things. Whether or not your company is taking is another matter entirely. When it comes to the digital agency and Social Media my position is that they should be learning and doing side by side with you. Social is about being transparent and genuine, it is intimately linked to your brand. There is no better way to get started than with the agency that knows your brand, understands digital and can execute on technology (See the answer to the first question above). I would give your current digital agency a try before looking for a specialist.
Social Media is not a project, it’s an interactive marketing tool that can influence brand perceptions, and it’s too new for anyone to claim deep expertise. I know many will disagree with me on that point, and that’s fine. In fact I would argue that the most effective Social Media can only be done by the brands themselves. Think about it. Would you offshore the essence of your brand? Wouldn’t you want to be the ones talking about your brand? But first we have got to get the silos talking.
So, how many agencies does it take to screw in a light bulb? Probably not as many as you think. More on this later.
Please chime in on this topic.
Read my summary of the 2009 Forrester Consumer Forum here.
Multichannel Mania at the 2009 Forrester Consumer Forum
Just back from the Forrester Consumer Forum. I say just back, but actually it took place in my hometown, Chicago. There was a great turn out and some very engaging keynotes. One of the major benefits of attending a Forrester event is the quality of presenters and attendees. I had lunch with Brad Brooks, VP of Consumer Windows Marketing at Microsoft and got to question him on their new retail store strategy. He was very engaging and open, and if this is a harbinger of things to come from Microsoft, it will be interesting to watch them. The forum theme was The Three Dimensional Consumer: Creating Breakthrough Multichannel relationships. Forrester defines the three dimensions through the lens of the consumer; their needs, interests and questions. Not a groundbreaking thought by itself, but the way in which Forrester shaped the content with context and examples was very effective and useful.
Consumers are becoming more digital, more mobile and more social. These stats were presented in an opening day Keynote by Henry Harteveldt, a VP and Principal Analyst with Forrester.
- 79% of US consumers are online and 75% of that number have high speed Internet access
- 18 – 43 year olds spent 20% more time online in 2009 than they did in 2007
- 62% of US online consumers who purchased a financial product in 2009 researched it on the web first
- 46% more people belong to social networking sites compared to a year ago
- Twitter grew 1,382% year over year, registering 7 million new users in February of 2009 alone
- 97% of phones are data devices
- 36% of smart phone users and 63% of iPhone users access the web every day from their device
At Forrester everything comes in threes, so Mr. Harteveldt laid out a framework depicting the three things digital consumers expect from brands; information, transactions and help. Information = engagement, transaction = interaction and help = deliver great service.
Information, Transactions, Help
He offered some great advice on how to excel in satisfying the needs of the digital consumer across all channels.
- Offer channel appropriate communications
- Match the task with the channel/device
- Use social media (if relevant to your customers)
- Replicate off line processes online
- Extend digital channels into the off line world
- Provide relevant tools, forms, payment options, etc.
- Excel at service (make it easy, channel-agnostic and utilize social media for immediacy)
Harvey was humorous, bright and on target. Right out of the textbook for Forrester; a balanced mix of facts and vision.
One of the most entertaining and genuine presenters of the forum was Virginia Suliman, VP of Digital Design and Development for Hilton Worldwide with Hospitality is All Around You: How Hilton Delivers Consistently Good Multichannel Guest Experiences. I’m a Hilton Honors member and have been for a while. It’s a brand on my personal watch list. She began with a nod to a world gone by, a nostalgic look at Conrad Hilton’s original vision for the hotel chain. Mr. Hilton wanted there to be a Hilton on the moon. Connie, have you taken leave of your senses? it’s location, location, location. The moon is not on the way to any place.
A look back
Ms. Suliman observed that the hotel experience and the home experience have begun to converge. Hotel furniture, bedding, beds and flat screens are easily attainable and affordable for millions of consumers. The cocooning of the early 2000’s and the current economic downturn have caused personal and business travel to slow. She spoke of how her biggest challenge is getting staff to be genuine to customers across all their brands, even the limited service properties. She said, “Hilton is not a technology company, it’s a hotel company.” I really respected her approach to solving the multichannel, multidimensional problem. She attacked the customer experience with a framework that is essentially a usability model.
Hilton's framework for delivering a great customer experience
But the real solution was in fact technology, despite her downplaying this aspect of the firm. Hilton built an integrated infrastructure platform connecting consumers to all properties so employees at any of the hotels would have access to the same master database. It’s called OnQ and provides a 360 degree view of the customer, including preferences, but is optimized for profitability. This is a reminder that if you are a big brand (like mine) with lots of customers, outlets and channels, you can be as genuine as pie, but you won’t fully excel without strong technology skills.
Hilton has realized positive business impact as a result of the OnQ effort. They track revenue per available room as a key metric and grew it by 6.2% after OnQ was installed. They have also extended this platform into Hilton University for training.
Virginia Suliman, VP Web Design, Hilton Hotels
CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge gave a talk a talk called Blurring the Lines Between Customer Service and Marketing. Barry and Best Buy really get the social media concept. I had the privilege of sitting on a panel with another Best Buy executive, Tracy Benson, Senior Director of Digital, also of Best Buy. She told me they set up a monitor in Barry’s office years ago that was tuned to the social media channel. A rolling screen of direct customer conversations; irresistible. Soon he was asking for it to be available on his mobile device and then began responding to customers directly. He also started a blog barryjudge.com.
Key messages in Mr. Judge’s presentation were:
- Talk with customers, not at them
- It’s about customer 2.0 – not just keeping the doors and phone lines open, but proactively going out to look for customers to serve
- The best marketing is when the consumer doesn’t even know it’s marketing (candidate for best forum quote)
- Their mission – Buyer be Happy
Their Twelpforce (Twitterers) are licensed to help customers. Best Buy employees who want to Tweet for customer support have to take a test and receive a badge, official deputies of Twelpforce. Best Buy’s experience and learnings in this arena have led them to create a Social Shopping Facebook page with over 1 million fans. It will be followed up with a new web site premiering on Christmas day that has the objective of helping consumers get the most out of their electronics purchase. Tips, tricks, user-generated content and experiences.
Their mobile iPhone application allows consumers to see products, reviews and prices; full transparency. This shows that Best Buy has moved beyond the fears of Social Media that paralyze most firms, and into a brave new frontier. This kind of courage will pay handsome dividends. One more note on their mobile efforts. You can text a short code related to products and immediately be sent all the reviews.
No consumer forum would be complete without Harley Manning making a plea, a begging plea in fact on one knee for marketers to embrace the multichannel customer with his presentation Designing a Multichannel Customer Experience in the Real World. His presentation was a mash-up of personal experiences, stories, Forrester frameworks and very sharp new ideas. Hard to keep up with him sometimes, but therein lies the fun. Here are some of his insights.
- Design with channel pairs in mind. Most projects are single design projects, but channel transition is likely in almost any interaction, so plan for it
- Pay attention to the most connected channel. Where will the consumer learn about the message first?
- Solve the small problems first and build allies in the organization. This will enable you to bridge the the channels in bigger projects later on
- Use research, especially ethnographic research
- Create multichannel customer experience maps and multichannel management platforms
Getting executive buy-in is compulsory, so Mr. Manning provided a test sheet you can self-administer that will help you determine which category your executives fall in related to digital and multichannel design. You will find out if they are passive, willing or engaged. Once you type the executive you can tailor your discussions and presentations to that style with the objective of moving them along the path to engaged.
If you attended the forum, I’d love to hear your reaction to this post and get your own observations.
Economy Impacts Internet Trends and the Result is Mobile
Every year, Mary Meeker, one of Morgan Stanley’s most seasoned analysts posits her Internet predictions. I wait on the edge of my chair for this moment. This year she calls it Economy + Internet Trends, which once again reminds us how much the economy, or lack of it, has influenced everything, including the Internet. Her presentation was given at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Unfortunately I didn’t see the presentation, but I snagged a copy to read. Lots of the usual slides on key indicators and charts on progress, or lack of it this past year. The big theme for 2010 is mobile, mobile, mobile. It’s big, and not only big, but bigger than we think it is.
According to Ms. Meeker, mobile Internet will be the next generation computing cycle. largely driven by a 10x growth in hand held devices that connect through the cloud. Real time wireless remotes control everything these days and location based services are the secret sauce. But the carriers could be their own worst enemy. AT&T is already struggling to deliver the messages and e-mails within the expected SLA. Mobile services add real time to relevance but not if it stops being real time. Carriers take note! You can download her presentation here .
I have seen an amazing uptick of visits to web sites over the course of 2009 and believe that trajectory will continue. Leveraging this in-pocket or in-purse device will be an important part of anyone’s marketing and servicing strategy for 2010 and beyond. Ignore at your own risk.
Managing Multi-Channel Relationships
Next week I will be on a panel with three distinguished industry professionals from Best Buy, Draftcb and imc2. The event is the Forrester Consumer Forum held by Forrester Research at the Fairmont hotel in Chicago. I get quite a few invitations to either speak or be on panels (not bragging, just a fact) but I’m very selective on where I spend my time. Forrester has an amazing track record on delivering great content and they have gotten their chops back on being provocative (full disclosure, I am on their Interactive Marketing Leadership Board). This year’s Consumer Forum theme is The Three-Dimensional Consumer: Creating Breakthrough Multichannel Relationships.
I will be on a panel discussing how to manage multichannel agency relationships. Today firms are tasked with managing a variety of online channels; web, e-mail, chat, social and mobile. No one person company or agency can be an expert in all of them, but our customers expect us to deliver a great experience and value at every touch point. I view this as an exciting challenge. The agency landscape has expanded to fill this gap. But adding more agency partners complicates things. Here are some of the questions that will likely be thrown at the panel.
- What is a digital agency’s role in today’s multi-dimensional landscape? Is it more important or roughly the same as it’s been?
- What makes a successful interactive agency-marketer relationship?
- What are the pros and cons of working with one consolidated agency vs. several specialist agencies?
- How has social media changed the landscape and what is the role of agencies in this space?
- What can marketers and/or agencies do better to improve relationships?
Looking forward to a lively discussion and voicing my opinion. Check back for a wrap-up after the event.
Lessons Learned from Two Years of Blogging
“Today is my second anniversary of being a blogger,” he said, as the neon applause sign over his head lights up.
October 13, 2007 was the first day I set-up this WordPress blog. Social Media was growing fast and I wanted to learn more about it for business as well as personal reasons. I have always liked to write so it didn’t seem like that much of a stretch. Biggest challenge was what to write about. I felt it was important to have a theme, and so after dozens of tries I came up with “Tracking the convergence of society, media and technology.” A friend who now resides in California made her way back to my blog a couple of weeks ago. She tagged me and my writing with a label; postmodern. I feel it’s a fitting description that I want to spend more time pondering. Hey another idea for a post!
Looking back over these two years I’ve learned some things, I think. Here’s the short list of lessons learned.
- Blogging is hard. You get out of the blocks fast, but the longer you do it the tougher it becomes to maintain momentum. Don’t stop. You started for a reason.
- You become obsessed over the stats. I found myself clicking back to see if I gained any more readers in the last 10 seconds. This goes away over time with therapy sessions.
- There is a temptation to find a new theme or redesign every six months. Evolution is normal. Have at it as it’s your time. But people come for the content not for the design.
- Cadence is only mildly important. Believe it or not, no one is waiting for your every Monday, Wednesday and Friday 7:15 am post.
- Don’t manufacture posts to stay on a schedule. If you have nothing meaningful to say, you won’t say it and no one will read it. Save everyone the trouble. People can be harmed by careless posts.
- Read other bloggers you admire and learn from them. Style, topics, use of images and stats, etc. But don’t develop Blogger Envy.
- For the most part stick with your theme, but it’s not taboo to veer off-road once in a while.
- Challenge yourself to write better. If you put in the time you will improve, and it will show. Ask an editor to review your work occasionally.
- Stop obsessing about the stats. You’re not doing this for the fame or fortune. Really, you’re not.
- Above all, be passionate. Boring is boring. Don’t be boring.
Here's my study, where most of my writing is done. Nice bright space.
Finovate. Worth the Wait
I attended Finovate 2009 (Financial Innovation) in New York on Tuesday, September 29th. I love this format. Thirty-two companies show-up to present their next generation releases and try to convince banks and credit card issuers to buy their solutions and embed them into their online environments. Here’s the really cool part. Each firm gets only 7 minutes on stage and must demo their wares, no PowerPoint allowed.
You don’t want to go first or last here, but in my opinion the pre-lunch slots were the best in terms of keeping the audience’s attention and avoiding the numbing blur of one demo after another. There were a lot of mobile solutions, particularly for payments, as well as personal financial management applications and a sprinkling of social/community. Needless to say I won’t be summarizing all of them, but I want to make mention of the ones I found most interesting based on the following criteria.
- Utility
- Uniqueness
- Innovative
- Good user experience
- Helps financial firms solve problems
- Presentation quality
BrightScope – They had a mission statement. “Help Americans Retire in Dignity.” Their research showed a large percentage of Americans rely heavily on their 401k to support them after they stop working. Their online application rates over 10,000 plans with a simple score and shows you where yours stacks up vs. others. If your plan isn’t there, you can request it be added and in most cases it’s up within two weeks. It has a neat projection tool that calculates shortfalls in money, or additional years you may need to work. They also have a solution for plan advisors as well. I mention them because retirement is being re-thought by almost everyone in the wake of the downturn. Also for their focus on trying to do one thing and doing it well. Visit them here.
BancVue/First ROI - I know, not a memorable name, but their product is called Kasasa (new day). It’s a turn key co-op solution that helps smaller banks come together and at least have some way of competing with the mega-banks. They focus on the younger market by offering a rewards checking program that pays them in iTunes cash. Spending is only part of the solution. The program encourages saving and giving to charity. The marketing is really crisp and encompassing. They seem to have thought of everything; advertising, customization, all the way down to email reminders. Great presentation and the only firm to bring a customer on stage for a testimonial. This one was my choice for best in show and I found out later, that it actually won it. Visit them here.
TILE Financial – Their observation is today’s wealth is sandwiched between the aging population and their financial advisor. When the inevitable time comes, that wealth, about $1 trillion according to TILE, transfers to survivors and the advisor and her firm loses it. Their solution, The Investing Learning Environment (TILE). It helps manage the shift in assets from one generation to the next while keeping the funds and investments at the firm. Three modules in the application, Spend, Grow and Give help young and old make decisions together as well as reinforce the practice of giving back to the less fortunate. They have an elegant user-interface and a strong feature set that seems usable for seniors, but cool enough for their children. The spend module captures where spending occurs and presents company stock price and carbon footprint adjacent to the transactions, expanding the potential horizons. I spoke with them afterwards because I was curious as to how they were selling the product. It needs to travel from advisor to client to their family in order for the relationship to take hold. They didn’t give me a satisfying answer apart from saying this would be most effective to newer wealth. Visit them here.
Yodlee – In the past Yodlee has always been strong in functionality, but not always the most easy to use UI. This time around they clearly focused on the user experience and presentation layer in their upcoming release. Their MoneyCenter product accounts for 90% of their use cases onto one widgetized screen, eliminating pop-ups, glides and page reloads. These widgets can be dragged around the screen to create a personalized environment. The window is framed off with the ability to house critical stats you always want front and center. And oh yes, it’s now blue. These changes are big moves. Viewing, tracking and paying are all here. They have an interesting feature that shows good and bad days to pay based on your cash flow. They announced a partnership with UltraSoft that will come to the rescue of soon to be abandoned MS Money users. Your data will be fully importable to Yodlee in the near future. Visit them here.
iPay Technologies – The women who presented really made their product come alive with the use of personas and storytelling. Tops here. They took us inside the world of a small business owner and their back office assistant as they demonstrated the product. Take away here is, the owners are too busy to bother with the office, and the office managers need help getting direction from the owner. Their solution gives business owners a customer database, online invoicing, online payments and choice of templates for easy personalization. Their get paid faster functionality allows business owners to email the invoice and their customers can click into the iPay site and pay right there. An email summary is produced at the end of each day so keeping track of your money is easy. Nice interface. Clean, feature-rich, but not confusing. Visit them here.
That’s my short, short list. I thoroughly enjoyed the day and got some great ideas to bring back to the office. Would consider returning next year.
The Power of a Human
Hans Gedda / Sygma / Corbis
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison on trumped-up charges. After his release in 1990 he continued on his tireless task against Apartheid and helped create a multi-national democracy in South Africa. He was elected president in 1994.
I have read a number of interviews with Mr. Mandela but there is one that stands out in my mind. Unfortunately I didn’t save it and looking through thousands of search results has proved daunting. Oddly enough it wasn’t the interview content that impressed me so much. It was the interviewer’s description of the situation. Mr. Mandela was president and there was nothing but chaos swirling around outside. Violence, unspeakable acts being carried out by humans; a grim atmosphere. Mr. Mandela was observed in the midst of all this data being reported by his advisors who were swarming about. He calmly left what seemed like pure mayhem and entered a small room where the interview was to take place. According the the reporter, Mr. Mandela seemed to throw a switch in his mind, completely shutting out everything he had just been thinking of and provided complete focus to the interview. Amazing.
Who, What, When, Where, Why
As someone who reads newspapers, printed on paper thank you, I’ve been intently following the downward spiral of this industry over the last several years. I acquired the habit of reading the paper from my father and there was a point in my lifetime when nearly every adult read the daily newspaper. It wasn’t a question of whether or not you subscribed, but instead we debated about getting the morning or evening delivery. Yes newspapers used to be printed and delivered twice a day. If you didn’t get it in the morning you couldn’t enjoy it with your coffee. But if you got it early in the day you would miss the latest breaking news. We couldn’t afford both so we took the morning delivery. There has always been a desire for fresh news.
This year many storied papers have either closed their doors or moved distribution entirely online. Falling readership is closely followed by evaporating advertising revenues, so the math problem is difficult to solve. Popular thinking says newspapers are old media and are being slowly killed by the online household penetration of PC’s and broadband connections. Consumers can get their news instantly for free online, so why pay to wait for old news? It’s also said that this death rattle has been hastened by the explosion of blogs and microblog services. But newspaper readership was declining well before the Internet became a mass media as we can see from the this graph depicting average daily newspaper audience readership from 1990 to 2008.
But there is something else at play here. From 2000 to 2003, right in heart of online growth, readership remained steady. It has tailed off significantly since then but it took a while. Why? Perhaps because old habits are hard to break, perhaps it’s just a lagging indicator of the dawning of the digital age. Maybe Gen X and Y prefer bite-sized and instantaneous updates vs. more thoughtful, in-depth coverage that takes longer to produce.
Newspapers are handicapped in that you can’t really do anything else, except sip coffee, while you read them. If you commute by train, it’s fine, but you can’t read while driving. Once you are at the office we immediately log-in and assume our digital identity, probably eating at our desk over lunch while surfing… I mean working. No time for the paper there. That leaves home as the place where you read the paper where there can be even more things vying for your attention. Dinner, family, chores, even more work. I know in my home there is always a week’s worth of New York Times waiting to be read.
In contrast, National Public Radio has experienced steady growth in their audience. NPR reports that in 2008 they had 20.9 million listeners during their fall quarter, up from 14.1 million in 2000. Most of this growth came in their flagship assets, Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. NPR is in depth news and they tackle the tough stories. Not just sound bites or tabloid bait. Their quality is second to none, but I believe some of t his growth is due to their strong interactive efforts and the fact that when you drive you can listen to NPR. Is it the paper medium that is losing favor or is it the effort and cost that is killing it? Listening is easier and when done well, more entertaining than reading. So people still like to go deep with their news.
Current Situation.
PC penetration and high speed Internet access is accelerating, newspaper readership is declining and NPR audiences growing. Online newspaper views are not tanking, but they are not soaring, and the experience is overrun by ads and annoying interruptions.
What is driving this fundamental change?
I believe it is the convergence of news, information, multimedia and portability that we have been experiencing over the last few years. On NPR broadcasts they often say, visit our web site to see… Not hear, but see. Online newspapers have interactive graphics and video to supplement their reporting. They even drive readers online for more information or to see a richer display of photos or charts. And of course it’s the ability to carry this around on your smartphone or see it from any web browser that is beginning to make online the spontaneous channel choice.
Older consumers are still holding on to their TV and newspapers for news (80%+ and 60%+ respectively). But the Internet is only at 40% as this slide from Forrester Research shows.
But clearly Web 2.0 is not for 65+ no matter how point and click it becomes. This is where Google comes in. They have been accused of hastening the death of the paper with their black box search algorithms and zeal to digitize all the books on the planet. But they have said that it’s not their fault that papers are failing, or that their online efforts are not catching on. Google contends that online papers are slow to load and difficult to scan on their native sites. To prove their point Google Labs has launched Fast Flip. Their stated objective in about Google Fast Flip is to combine print and web news in an online application that is easy to scan. They have also added community features like voting and the ability to follow topics and interests of friends.
It is a very interesting experiment but users can’t really customize the content. Google has a pre-set list of publishers and your content changes based on, guess what, web searches you perform when you a logged into Google. The idea of making traditional news as easy to browse as the simple magazine wrist flip. Or, fingering through CD’s in the virtually extinct music store is a good one. But this execution needs more refinement.
Where is it gong?
The digital march can’t be stopped. It can’t even be slowed. Paper newspapers are fading away and will be gone soon. But journalism and good reporting will remain. This country was built on Free Press and many countries throughout the world still don’t have that benefit, even well into the 21st century. It is one of our hallmarks and will continue to be. The form may change but the function will not. Consumers need to exercise good judgement on what they listen to, click, read and most importantly believe. The medium has evolved, but the who, what, when, where and why of ethical and responsible journalism has not. Let’s keep that beacon shining bright. More from me about newspapers in a past post here.
Sources:
- Medimark Research and Intelligence, LLC., via Nielson Online
- National Public Radio
- Forrester Research
Appreciation: The Art Institute of Chicago
I first visited the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1960’s as a young boy. I ascended the great staircase and entered the Impressionism gallery and was absolutely blown away. Instantly I was transformed into a hardcore museum goer for all time. I’ve done a rough calculation and believe I’ve visited the AIC about 250 times. Of course I’m a long time member and frequent contributor to this storied (over 130 years) institution. At times I’ve shared more about my personal life with certain paintings that adorn these gallery walls than I have with many of my closest friends. Occasionally I sketch them (badly), write about them (somewhat better), and photograph them along with the building (best of all). View my AIC flickr gallery here. Many times I would visit alone and spend time trying to understand the art and artist and ask them to understand me. They always did.
That experience given to me by my father was a rare moment, and so I felt strongly about returning the favor to my first son, Julian. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at age 2, and as such processes information much differently than neuro-typicals. That’s a fancy word for people whose brain functions normally. For context, here’s the best definition of Asperger’s I’ve ever run across.
The dominance of specialized thinking and ability that prioritizes doing one task, one way, one step at a time with limited flexibility. This occurs to various degrees and results in strengths in the areas of focus (especially in the area of specialization), honesty, detail orientation, logic and original thinking. This tendency toward specialization also often results in challenges developing more generalized and complex skill sets such as conventional socialization and communication.
He was four years old when I first took him to the AIC and he had a perfect photographic memory as a result of his condition. His focus at that time was Impressionism paintings. He took ownership of my prized Big Book of French Impressionism and set out to memorize all the artists, their birth and death years and all the canvases they painted. He was a walking encyclopedia of the facts of this body of at the age of four!
In April of 1985, not long after we had moved to Chicago, we made our first AIC visit together. We entered the classic Beaux Arts building, climbed the grand staircase and immediately saw Gustave Caillebote’s Paris Street, A Rainy Day. There it was, bigger than life in the middle of the gallery. I’m a little fuzzy on this detail, but I think we both said “wow” at the same time. He too was instantly hexed with museum-going for the rest of his life.
Needless to say year after year we visited, taking in the traveling exhibits and re-connecting with our favorite masterpieces.
Fast forward to the year 2004. After a new offspring drought spanning 23 years I was blessed with a wonderful second son, Connor. Completely normal in every way, and turning into quite a negotiator. Last weekend was his first visit to the AIC. We took the same path that I took when I was a lad, and again when Julian was four. Photos from both moments were captured. The juxtaposition of these images solidifies my connection with the Art Institute.
Me with Julian in 1984 and again with Connor in 2009
The AIC is a priceless gem as well as the second largest museum in the country, thanks to the opening of new Modern Wing. You can read my impressions of this new showcase here. Year in and year out, despite challenges in my life or the mood of the world, the AIC is a constant. Always there for me, for us, whenever we need to escape the press of the day and roam the boundless spaces of creativity.
Here is a select list of exhibits that have stood out in my memory and hold a special place in my heart.
- Edward Hopper – 2008
- William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes – 2000
- Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman – 1999
- Charles Rennie Mackintosh – 1997
- Degas: Beyond Impressionism – 1997
- Claude Monet – 1995
- Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist – 1995
- John James Audubon: The Watercolors for The Birds of America – 1994
- Magritte – 1993
- Marc Chagall: The Jewish Theatre Murals – 1993
- Master European Paintings from the National Gallery of Ireland – 1992
- Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany – 1991
- High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture – 1991
- Andy Warhol: A Retrospective – 1989
- John Singer Sargent – 1987
If you have never visited the AIC, do so as soon as you can. Get information from their web site here. Follow them on Twitter here. Fan them on facebook here.
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