“A business model in decay”

“…the creation of content that will be supported by ads is a business model in decay. Abundance isn’t the problem; it’s that the advertisers are now in the content business themselves, and this is a rapidly-growing sector of the advertising world. Advertising is in a full-blown revolution, as company after company discovers they don’t need media the way they used to, because they’ve become media companies themselves.”

Terry Heaton says there is no “content business” anymore and that’s not the business we (his clients) were in anyway.

“We’ve always been in the advertising business, although it sure looked and felt like we were in the content business. Our bottom lines were/are determined by advertising, and that’s the real business we’re in. Media companies need to accept that and move on to finding creative ways to enable commerce in our markets.”

Since posting the excerpts above, I’ve been remembering my days in small-market radio during the ’70s and early ’80s. I was an announcer and program director, but never in sales. We thought of ourselves as “talent.”

It was clearly understood by us that the advertising was the means to the end of creating the information and entertainment (mostly recorded music). We had to pay for all this wonderful stuff we were doing.

What the sales people believed –an management knew– was the news and music and all the rest was merely a way to attract ears for the commercials we sold to advertisers. We were not in the music business or news business… we were in the advertising business.

If you doubt that, go back and listen to this interview with Congressman Paul C. Jones to built the radio station. Or read the recollections of Joe Bankhead, who was one of the stations first salesmen. It was clearly about serving the businesses in the area. They were more than willing to put on any kind of programming that would attact enough listeners to satisfy a sponsor.

Top Ten Mistakes Managers Make With Email

1. Using vague subject lines. “Meeting,” “Update,” or “Question” provide no value as subject lines. Maximize the subject line’s message. PDA users will get the message quickly; everyone will appreciate the clear summary. You can communicate plenty in a five to 10 word subject line: “Your Action Items and Minutes from Last Week’s Meeting” or “Sam: See You at 10:00 Tuesday with Report In-Hand?”

2. Burying the news. Convey the important points first: put dates, deadlines and deliverables in the first one to three lines of the message (if not also in the subject line). PDA limitations, time pressures, cultural distinctions and value judgments keep many readers from reading further.

3. Hiding Behind the “BCC” field. At best, the ‘blind copy’ field is sneaky and risky. At worst, it’s deceitful or unethical. Plus, blind recipients sometimes hit “reply all,” revealing the deception. Instead, post the initial message and BCC no one. Then forward your sent message to others with a brief explanation.

4. Failing to clean up the mess of earlier replies/forwards. Few readers will wade through strings of previous messages. State your position clearly, even if context follows below in the email string. “Yes” helps less than “Yes, you can have the extra funding to hire 5 temporary workers.”

  • Summarize the discussion to date: “See below: R&D is looking for more time but Sales risks losing customers if we don’t act now.”
  • Force focus when necessary: “Let’s focus on cost now and revisit the morale and equity issues at our staff meeting next week.” Change subject lines cautiously.
  • Tighter, more relevant subject lines work best, but even one letter’s difference upsets inbox sorting mechanisms.
  • Cut extraneous or repetitive information.

5. Ignoring grammar and mechanics. PDAs have granted us certain sloppy flexibility, which means you’ll impress readers even more when you write precisely.

  • Follow standard punctuation, capitalization and spelling rules.
  • Think carefully about the tone different punctuation conveys. “Dear Betty,” is standard, neutral; “Dear Betty:” is professional, perhaps distant; “Dear Betty!” is personable, perhaps excessively so; “Dear Betty.” prefaces bad news.
  • Avoid over-stylizing with high-priority marks, disorienting color or complex backgrounds.
  • Avoid all-caps and excessives (like “!!!!” or other strings of punctuation).

6. Avoiding necessarily long emails. Longer messages sometimes work best; they can help avoid attachments’ hassle and security fuss. Don’t fear long emails but outline your structure and motivate reading up top.

  • Provide a ‘mapping statement’ to allow readers to skim for key information: “I’ve included information, below, on the background, costs, implementation schedule and possible problems.”
  • Emphasize the specific response you seek: “Please let me know, before Monday, how this project will impact your team.”
  • Indicate an attachment’s presence and value: “I’ve attached slides that I need you to review before our meeting; those slides identify total costs and break down the budget.

7. Mashing everything together into bulky, imposing inaccessible paragraphs. Length does not discourage reading; bulk does.

  • Keep your paragraphs short, ideally no more than three to five lines of type.
  • Open each paragraph with a bottom-line sentence.
  • Use section headings (in all-caps) to facilitate skimming.
  • Include blank lines between paragraphs and section headings.
  • Avoid italics, boldface and other typeface changes which do not reliably carry across email systems.

8. Neglecting the human beings at the other end. Email travels between actual people, even though we don’t see or hear each other directly.

  • Praise, precisely. “Great job” takes little time and space but can work wonders. Quickly wishing someone a good weekend, at the end of an email, might perk someone up without cluttering your message.
  • Avoid conveying blame or delivering negative feedback over email. Talk to the person instead.
  • Avoid sarcasm, caustic wit, off-color humor and potentially inappropriate remarks —all of these elements tend to confuse, disorient or fall flat over email.
  • Consider using emoticons and exclamations (“!” but also “ha, ha” or “just kidding”) when they convey useful emotional context.
  • Adjust your style to suit your audience. For people who don’t know you, a terse style might seem rude; a wordy style might seem unfocused.

9. Thinking email works best. Email is not always the best way to communicate.

  • Need a quick answer from someone nearby? Stop by for a visit.
  • Want a reply to several unanswered emails? Pick up the phone.
  • Looking for more gravitas? Mail a letter.
  • Need to explain a complex or sensitive situation? Arrange a meeting.

10. Forgetting that email last forever. Most of us read, send and discard emails at lightning speeds. But don’t forget that emails remain on a server somewhere as easy-to-forward proof of any error, offense or obfuscation we made.

Source: Wall Street Journal

How flat is your organization?

This interview with Cristobal Conde, the president and CEO of SunGard, is a good example of why I’ll be willing to pay for the New York Times, when that day comes (couple of weeks?). The Q & A covers several very basic and interesting areas and I encourage you to read the entire piece. Here are a few bits to whet your appetite:

“You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

On leadership:

“I think too many bosses think that their job is to be the leader, and I don’t. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

On micromanagement:

“If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Instead, the trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them.

PowerPoint:

“I actively despise how people use PowerPoint as a crutch. I think PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. I would much rather have somebody write something longhand, send it in ahead of the meeting and then assume everybody’s read it, and then you start talking, and let them defend it.

Advice to young people:

“My advice to young people is always, along the way, have a sales job. You could be selling sweaters. You could be selling ice cream on the street. It doesn’t matter. Selling something to somebody who doesn’t want to buy it is a lifelong skill. I can tell when somebody comes in for an interview and they’ve never had any responsibility for sales.”

Print this interview and slide it under the bosses door. Wear gloves and don’t get caught.

Newspaper ads: Bought or sold?

I don’t think I’ve ever met a newspaper advertising salesperson. Given that (until recently?) newspapers are jammed with ads, doesn’t that seem odd? During my Radio Years, I wrote countless commericals and it was common to start from an ad torn from the local newspaper.

My sense back then was that businesses “bought” newspaper ads rather than having to be “sold.” A grocery store HAD to have the weekly specials in the local paper.

I suspect far more time an effort went into the layout of the ad than the selling.

If we have any current or former newspaper sales people reading this, leave us a comment. I’d love to know more about the sales process and how it has changed or is changing.

“A luxury we can no longer afford”

“New Business Models for News” was the title of a conference held by the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. You can read the full post by Dorian Benkoil at E-Media Tidbits but the goal of the (3rd annual) conference was “…to try to find ways that the news business can survive.”

“The 150 to 200 people there were a diverse audience — local bloggers and independent journalists trying to make a living, reps from big media companies like The New York Times and Gannett, venture capitalists, foundation funders, educators, consultants, students, technologists, advertising salespeople, ad network experts.”

“You’d better take an interest in the spreadsheets that represent your income and expenses, and cash flow statements that will determine if you can meet payroll every week — even if that payroll is just you, working alone. You may even have to consider, in the words of NYU’s Jay Rosen, that “there may be no business model to replace the old business model” — but you’ll still have to find a way to pay for it all.”

“But being unaware of anything having to do with the cash flows that support the news operation is a luxury we can no longer afford.”

nama-trends-nafb-09-7Reading and thinking about this conference brought to mind my many chats with Chuck Zimmerman, a former Learfield employee who struck out on his own (with wife Cindy) and has created a small but successful business as an ag journalist (specializing in agriculture marketing).

Over the course of the last several years, I’ve heard Chuck talk about dealing with finances, ad sales, server problems, and a bunch of other stuff that had not much to do with reporting a story but a lot to do with putting bread on the table.

Media Room Etiquette

Fellow-blogger Chuck Zimmerman (the KING of the event bloggers) is covering the Commodity Classic in Grapevine, TX. It’s a big farm show (for lack of a better term). So big, in fact, they had to post some rules for “Media Room Etiquette,” including this definition of working meida: “journalists, broadcasters and camera operators.”

“Media company officers, advertising sales representatives, and support staff DO NOT qualify as working media, UNLESS their PRIMARY purpose for attending Commodity Classic is to specifically engage in gathering and/or reporting news about Commodity Classic events, trade show activities, and/or grower organization meetings.

Commodity Classic staff reserves the right to examine recent samples of news work product to determine a person’s qualifications for complimentary registration and media credentials, and at their sole discretion reserves the right to refuse anyone not meeting the minimum qualifications.”

You think the lines between public relations and news are getting a little fuzzy? Sounds like. Would love to know who did not make the cut.

Full disclosure: Learfield (the company I work for) owns a farm network that has reporters covering Commodity Classic.

Does size (of your audience) matter or not?

“What we are going to witness in 2009 is the diminished importance of how large your (radio) audience is and the increasing importance of how effectively you connect that audience, whatever its size, with the advertisers and marketers who have the goods and services that audience craves.” — Mark Ramsey Hear 2.0

For some reason this made me think of Apple. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Apple or Mac or iPod spot on the radio. Lots on TV, of course. And Apple sales are through the roof. I’m trying to think of how I am “connected” with Apple products and how that came to be.

I’m just trying to think of ways radio stations can make –or are making– the connections Mr. Ramsey describes. And what does this trend mean for radio networks?

“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences”

The following excerpts are from an interview Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) did with Tom Asacker, a marketing and branding adviser and author (A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Customers in a Noisy World).

One of the larger challenges facing radio?

“It seems that we’ve got a catch-22 on our hands, right?  We need to get out on the street and keep selling in order to keep revenue coming in, so nobody wants to slow down in order to change the way they’re doing things, to really rethink it, because that might take away from sales time.  I mean we’re putting out fires, and nobody wants to step back and say, “Wait a minute.  Is there a better way of doing this?”

“It’s a difficult thing with an industry that’s been around this long, with people that are well entrenched in relationships up and down the chain.  It’s tough to get people to change — to just say, “Put on the brakes, and let’s rethink radio.”  But I think that that’s what needs to be done:  Let’s rethink radio.  Just like Steve Jobs said, “Let me rethink the MP3 player.”  He didn’t say, “Well, we can do the MP3 player and slap this thing on it”; he said, “Stop, and let’s rethink the MP3 player.”

That’s a tough thing to do.  It takes guts.”

Yes, it does. And he offers this rather brilliant (IMO) insight on creating audiences:

“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences. You can only create larger audiences by trying to get deeper with smaller audiences.

Think about how to get deeper and make more relevant, valuable connections with individuals in a culture or a subculture.

Don’t think about audience size.  Think about the depth of the relationship and how important it is and how valuable it is.  The more you do that, the bigger the audience gets.”

That’s probably true of friends as well. Best way to have a lot is to be a good one. You can listen to the entire interview at Hear 2.0.

More Seth Godin: “Build trust before you need it.”

“The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.” [Full post]

The only sales I’ve ever done was in the form of affiliate relations for our networks. Whenever a new GM took over at a radio station, I felt like the clock started ticking. My challenge was to meet, get to know and earn the trust of the new boss BEFORE I needed something from him/her. There’s just no shortcut to building trust.

Radio owners waiting out “this Internet thing”

“As an advertising medium, the Internet is already larger than radio. It will approach $34 billion this year and is on a trajectory to overtake newspaper advertising within five years. In virtually all markets, the largest local Web site (typically run by a newspaper company) is now grossing more ad revenue than the largest radio station in that market. In some markets, the largest site is grossing more than the largest cluster of stations.”

“Your radio reps have a bounty on their heads. We survey more than 3,000 local Web sites every year about their revenues, expenses, number of salespeople and other revenue-related topics. The ones with the greatest market share and revenue have an interesting characteristic in common: a star-performing “former radio rep” on the sales staff. The word has spread that radio salespeople know how to sell the Internet, and newspaper and TV Web site managers have been recruiting them left and right. Radio reps know how to cold-call, how to generate new business, and how to sell reach and frequency. That’s a perfect match for Internet sales.” — Gordon Borrell, writing in Inside Radio