Content summary: Shel’s in Atlanta for the Ragan conference; a different procedure for recording today’s show; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on authoritarian capitalism; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: journalists conducting research via social media, Apple’s Wikipedia page most effective of Fortune Global 500, did Twitter topple Toyota?, bloggers to be given privileged access to UK parliament; listeners’ comments; Neville’s in Belgium on Thursday so guest host Mark Story will join Shel; music from Lily Sparks; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (27.8Mb, 69:18)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for February 22, 2010: A 69-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #528 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday February 25…

I wasn’t sure what would happen when I got 80 people in a room in NYC to talked culture, about being a Chief Culture Officer and showed them 320 slides over 6 hours.

Dreary?

Tedious?

Just not very interesting?

I am probably not the most credible source, but I think it went really well. 

The audience was really listening. Questions and comments were superb.

The evaluations coming back are really positive, including "It was worth the trip from Amsterdam."  That’s a good sign, right?

So we have proof of concept and want to stage the thing again relatively soon. It sounds like there may be interest in Austin, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, possibly.  We shall see.  

And then it was straight out of the Boot Camp classroom onto the train to Providence.  We did ethnographies on the street, in book stores and in coffee shops.  Then to Cambridge, Boston and Jamaican Plains.  Then we came back to New York City talking to people upscale bars in Soho and speakeasy places and other bars in Brooklyn.  I’m sorry not to have posted for the week. But it really was that absorbing.  It was 16 hours a day flat out.  

I can’t talk about the details.  But what made the week especially interesting was a really smart client and his consultant, also very smart.  The model was roughly: client at the center, his consultant in tight orbit and me in a looser orbit.  Data poured in from the outer ring.  Intelligence radiated out from the inner ring.  It’s a good way to study culture.  And, man, are things in play out there.  

I am hoping that one of these days, the client, the consultant and I can give you a fuller glimpse of how this worked. 

A couple of weeks ago I gave Jessica Stouder, a student at Boulder Digital Works, a copy of Baked In.

Yesterday, received a real, live Thank You note from Jessica. I was so excited. It's amazing how we've gone from being overwhelmed with mail in the US Postal Service mailbox to being overwhelmed in our digital communications.

An example would be Dwight Schrute’s blog. Schrute is the character played by Rainn Wilson on “The Office” (a show I don’t watch, by the way). Posts are written in character. None of the readers of the blog actually believe a ficitious character is actually writing it. (At least, that’s my fervent hope.)

The argument against the character blog is simple: Wouldn’t it be better if Rainn Wilson blogged?

The fact is, he does. He has Posterous blog and a Twitter account (with nearly 2 million followers). If it’s authenticity, you’re after, Wilson makes plenty of it available.

Why do these concepts need to be mutually exclusive? People don’t read Schrute’s blog (originally penned by Wilson himself but now in the hands of ghost writers) to interact with the actor. They seek a means of staying connected with a favorite TV show in between episodes. And it works.

I have frequently noted that I’d become a loyal reader of any blog under Eric Cartman’s by-line. I got the same argument in response: Wouldn’t it be better if “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone blogged? It would be good, yes, and I’d probably read it. But I’d still expect to laugh my ass off reading a Cartman blog.

The debate seems to have shifted from blogs to Twitter. A number of experts dismiss what they call “logo accounts,” tweets sent under the brand name and not associated with a specific individual. Twitter, they argue, is best when it’s personal.

My answer shouldn’t surprise you: It depends.

The vast majority of the Twitter accounts I follow are individuals because, it’s true, I’d rather hear from people than brands. But I do follow a handful of logo accounts. With those accounts, I honestly don’t give a damn who’s writing it. My motivation for following in the first place was the timely receipt of information.

CNN is one example. I follow the account because I want to get headlines fast. I’m a news junkie, always have been, and getting a tweet that notifies me of the latest events satisfies my craving. I have no interest in what reporter wrote the story or what he thinks of it. I want the 140-character news hook.

Nearly 1 million people are happy to get the tweets from CNN without that personal touch.

The Dell Outlet is another example, with nearly 1.6 million followers who want only the latest deal they can get. There is a name attached to the account—@StephanieAtDell can be reached with questions or problems. But the account itself serves just one purpose: notification of special offers on “refurbished, scratch-and-dent and previously ordered new Dell product.” Would it be a better account if it were named @StephanieDellOutlet?

I don’t think so. First, who cares? The personality just isn’t an issue if my goal is simple notification. Second, what happens when Stephanie leaves? Yes, I know the account can be renamed while maintaining its followers, but some degree of confusion would surely follow.

At Intel, two employees are identified in the profile as the handlers of the account. If those responsibilities change, the account stays the same while the profile gets updated. Why not just give each Intel tweeter their own account? In fact, several Intel employees do tweet. In fact, both of the employees currently listed on the @Intel account are identified by their Twitter handles, and the company actively encourages employees to connect with each other via their Twitter accounts. But @Intel is the official, authoritative account that serves as the corporation’s statement of record. That’s an important distinction.

And there’s no reason—none at all—that Intel can’t benefit from adopting both approaches.

When discussing Dell, the example of the dozens of employees with NameAtDell accounts is usually presented. I agree that there is huge opportunity in having real people like my friends Lionel Menchaca (@LionelAtDell) and Richard Binhammer (@RichardAtDell) building relationships and personifying the Dell brand.

But there’s no denying the power of 1.6 million people anxiously awaiting the next notice of a special deal compared to the fewer than 2,000 to 10,000 people following the average Dell employee.

One of Twitter’s strengths is its flexibility. It can be used for just about anything you can dream up for it. In mosti instances, I agree that the authentic human touch is important. But to suggest that it’s a requirement, that every branded logo account would be better if it contained a real person’s name and avatar, is a mistake. It locks organizations into an approach that may honestly not be the best way to achieve their particular goal.

And what about all the people following brand accounts? Are we to assume they just don’t get it? That every time someone reads a tweet form @Starbucks they’re thinking, “This would lock me into the brand more if I could see the face and read the name of the person behind it?” Somehow I doubt it.

Besides, a logo account is often the means by which companies take their first tentative steps into Twitter. Nervous, they set up an account to which a number of authorized employees can post. When the sky doesn’t fall on them, they screw up their courage and let a few employees open personal/business accounts.

So don’t be too fast to dismiss logo accounts on Twitter. If they serve the purpose for which they were created, there’s no reason to fall victim to the punditry that suggests they’re some kind of misguided, clueless mistake.

Here are three excellent new resources to add to your library of useful information to help you understand how social media fits into your overall business plans:

1. A CMO’s Guide To The Social Media Landscape

A well-designed chart (PDF download freely available) from CMO.com who say that social media marketing is expected to dominate this year with 81% of CMOs in the US planning to link their annual revenues to their social media investment.

2. The Corporate Social Networking Manifesto

Twenty-two credible suggestions from entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, one of the early-adopter pioneers of social media and an indefatigable champion of the value social media can bring to an organization, especially a start-up. Inspired, Loic says, by Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto from 2003.

3. Digital Marketing Guide: Social Media

What’s the next Twitter, do I have to follow Shaq and who should tweet for my brand? Some of the questions in a credible collection of FAQ from AdAge.com that will provide you with some helpful information as you try and figure out where social media fits into your planning.

© 2010 - visit the author for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.

Just like many other people, I watched Tiger Woods on live TV on Friday as he made his public apology for the revelations that emerged about his sex addiction following the car crash he was involved in outside his house last November.

I didn’t see all of the eight minutes or so that he spent speaking in front of a controlled audience and the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people tuned in to live TV broadcasts around the world, just a few minutes of it in the middle as I watched the live broadcast on the BBC News website.

I read the transcript subsequently, and watched the recording from CBS’ broadcast posted on YouTube. The whole speech is well summarized in this update in Woods’ Wikipedia entry:

[…] He admitted that he had been unfaithful to his wife. He said he used to believe he was entitled to do whatever he wanted to do, and that, due to his success, normal rules did not apply to him. He said he realizes now that he was wrong to have had extramarital affairs, and apologized for the hurt his behavior caused to his family, friends, fans, and business partners. Woods also stated he had been in a therapy program for 45 days, and would be returning there soon. He stated he planned to return to competitive golf in the future.

A masterful performance, undoubtedly. Well scripted, well rehearsed, well managed. Is it believable, though? I think it is. I believe Tiger Woods is genuinely sorry for his behaviour and the effects it has had on those close to him, and he genuinely does want to make amends to everyone he mentioned, from his wife and family right through to his professional colleagues and others.

Shel and I discussed Woods’ plans for this apology in the FIR podcast #527 last Thursday, the day before it was done. I was extremely sceptical in our discussion, saying that Woods would be better keeping out of the limelight and that it would no doubt be purely a PR stunt. I take the sentiment of those words back having seen the event.

Yet I wonder what real difference any of Friday’s stage-managed event will have made. What would have happened had Woods eschewed Friday’s tightly-controlled event and instead just sat down in front of a camera, looked directly at the lens and spoke from the heart rather than read a prepared statement with the inherent cringe factor as he paused in just the right places, looked humble from time to time, hugged his mum at the end of it all, genuine though it may well all have been.

No, this had to be an event. It was designed for consumption on a mass scale, both live-as-broadcast – not just traditional TV but also online via Ustream and others – as well as the search-engine friendly longevity of recordings posted on YouTube and other video-sharing places on the web.

Speaking of TV and YouTube, the first video link I went to because it came up high in the search results was CNN’s recording of their live transmission. Yet I couldn’t watch it: it said it was blocked on copyright grounds.

So I went and watched CBS’ recording instead. How dumb is that? Such a block might work if you’re the only content to be found. Hardly the case these days. CNN might have taken a leaf out of CBS’ book: wrap the recording with ads. I don’t mind that: being exposed to an ad is the price for access.

One final thought is forget about video, forget about the stage-managed flavour of it all. Just read Woods’ words. He actually did apologize. He said he was sorry. He reads as though he meant it.

That counts for a lot, no matter how it was all presented.

Related post:

• The $220m effect of Tiger Woods’ fall

© 2010 - visit the author for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.

When I was in journalism school (California State University Northridge, 1972-1976), the inverted pyramid was a staple of newswriting classes. The way it was taught to me made perfect sense: If somebody reads only the lede paragraph, they should walk away knowing the most important information in the story, the typical assembly of the who-what-when-where-why information. If she reads through the second graph, she’s now consumed content that is almost as important for the understanding of the story. As she reads more of the article, the information gets increasingly detailed. Wherever she chooses to stop, she’ll have absorbed the most critical information and left less important content unread.

The inverted pyramid is ideal for a linear print world. As the practice of public relations became more common, press releases adopted the inverted pyramid so editors could drop the release unchanged into their publications, chopping off as much of the end of the article as necessary to accommodate the space available.

As publications concentrate on web platforms, however, the linear approach doesn’t work, although it makes more sense than ever to lead with the five Ws. Adding link curation to the mix, being cognizant of ads appearing alongside stories that create unintended context, the use of other web-based content in pursuit of a balanced story and a host of other factors all need to be stirred into the mix.

It turns out that the journalism department at Rutgers has been teaching a new pyramid for the last seven years, an approach that could easily find its way into other journalism schools. Benjamin Davis—a new media news professor who was part of the MSNBC.com launch team—explained the pyramid in a piece he wrote for the Online Journalism Review.

Johnson calls the Digital Media Pyramid an enhancement rather than a replacement of the inverted pyramid:

It provides for the traditional brief introduction of facts (the five Ws) which are boldly separated from all supporting details. Yet the Digital Media Pyramid also addresses the need to surf the Internet for additional supporting information by permitting and explaining cut-and-pasting rules.

The pyramid covers the use of multimedia, interactivity and other non-text elements of a news story and creates awareness of ads that could be inappropriate beside the article. It also “encourages the self-eductaion of ‘users’ or readers, enabling them to quickly seek out balanced information on a news story through the use of embedded links, social neetworks and other resources.”

The Digital Media Pyramid should, Johnson argues, “find a place in the newsrooms and journalism classrooms around the globe.”

If it does, PR practitioners employing the Social Media News Release will be in good shape. The elements of the SMNR lend themselves nicely to this news-production model, with tags and links designed to assist a report conducting research, digital assets available to incorporate into a story and news facts ready to be turned into a solid 5W lede. One more compelling reason to start using the SMNR as the population of employed journalists begins to skew younger.

Does the Digital Media Pyramid work for you?

In the 20th century we witnessed a deep split in our professional and personal identities. The quest for scalable efficiency in all of our institutions required us to conform to highly standardized organizational routines. To do this, we had to sacrifice much of our individuality, which was compartmentalized into “after hours” time. While passions in this domain were certainly acceptable, we were increasingly encouraged to seek status and expression through consumption... [I]dentity in the 20th century increasingly took two different forms – we were company men (and as the century progressed, company women) and consumers.

which integrates at last our professional and personal identities into one primary source of meaning and fulfillment.

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Luck is one of the most powerful and accessible currencies in networks and, as luck would have it, it happens at the intersection of (network) consciousness and being transparent about one’s gifts and passions.

His second law is "Innovation = learning x diverse connections". I suppose most of us would take that to mean knowing lots of people from diverse fields. I'd add that it could also be about opening up our existing relationships... for instance, work teams are often surprised at how productive conversations are when they stop talking about work and get to know more about each other as people.

I like his advice that applying his third law, "Influence = credibility x location", means

Your voice can soften and you can put your spam weapons down

You can quibble with these laws but I think what matters is that we're moving away from hierarchy to networks (or wirearchy). A vast amount of management literature, as Harrison Owen points out, is based on false assumptions of closed systems.

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By “sunset,” of course, Sprout means “kill.” For a startup, they’ve certainly learned the corporate art of doubletalk.

I’ve been raving about Sprout Builder since its debut. Before Sprout Builder, dynamic, multimedia widgets were a costly undertaking requiring programming expertise. Sprout Builder made it drop-dead easy for anybody to create one and deploy it. I got myself a free account and created two for my podcast, For Immediate Release. Fans of the show were able to copy the embed code and add the widget to their own sites where any visitor could click the “play” button and hear the latest episode. All I ever had to do was log in after posting each episode and update the link to the podcast MP3 file.

Creating the widget was a simple drag-and-drop exercise, thanks to the AJAX-enabled website. The process went like this:

• Create a box to contain the widget, setting the size I wanted.
• Upload the graphics I want to use, pretty much the same way you upload a video to YouTube.
• Drag the graphics into the box.
• Drag an audio player from among the various assets Sprout Builder provides into the box.
• Link the audio player to the online location of the podcast MP3 file.
• Save.
• Publish.
• Copy the embed code and put it on the FIR site and my own blog so others can get the code for their own sites.
• (The service also let you create multiple tabs for a widget, link to video and do all manner of other very cool things.)

One version of the FIR widget was for websites. It’s a bit wider than the one I created specifically as an app for Facebook. I’ve also recommended the service to more than a few people and suggested to Dominic Jones that it would make it simple for companies to provide updated investor information.

I whined a bit when Sprout decided to start charging for the service, but opted to pay the lowest fee since these were the only two widgets I planned to create. (The fee ratchted up based on the number of widgets you wanted to maintain.) I felt I had little choice since the widgets already existed on other people’s sites.

I don’t have any idea how many people have added the widget to their sites, but I’ve seen it in at least a couple dozen places.

Then came word a few days ago that Sprout was abandoning—er, sunsetting—the service, opting to focus solely on its enterprise solution, which runs $2,999 per year. The email from Sprout CEO Carnet Williams begins:

One of the toughest decisions that a start-up faces is where to focus its efforts and resources. Sprout Builder was our first product and has always been near and dear to our hearts. More importantly, we value the customers who have gotten us to where we are today. However, we have made the hard decision to shut down the Sprout Builder subscription service to focus on our enterprise product lines.

So, on March 14, all those widgets fans and friends of FIR have put on their websites will vanish.

I said I was conflicted by Sprout’s move. On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the fact that businesses need to make business decisions. And I certainly understand that the same outcome would have occurred had the company run out of money or if it had been acquired by another organization that wanted Sprout’s assets and talent, but not its service.

On the other hand, the company sought customers who built widgets that have been deployed to many other sites. All of us are left high and dry. Depending on what shows up where the widget is supposed to appear on those sites, we could all wind up being the target of some anger (or, at least, some eye rolling). More to the point, if I offer something like this in the future, who’s going to trust me? My credibility will suffer because Sprout didn’t keep its implicit promise to its customers.

Sprout also seems not to have opted for any actions to minimize the impact. They haven’t offerd to open-source the code for Sprout Builder. They haven’t pointed customers to an alternative. And if they tried to sell the service to somebody else, they haven’t said so.

I’ve tried finding a comparable service. Whoever staffs Widgetbox’s Twitter account provided half an answer to a question I posed, but never answered my follow-up question, even when I sent the query a second time.

Ultimately, then, I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated by the situation, the inability to find an alternative, the requirement to put the word out to bloggers and site managers who are hosting the widget, and the fact that I’m aggravated even as I recognize Sprout’s right to manage its business.

Is my aggravation justified? And if you ran Sprout, how would you have handled a decision like this?

I know TMZ may not be The New York Times, but it’s run by Harvey Levin, an attorney and former legal correspondent for the news operation at KNBC, the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. TMZ may be filled with sleaze, but it doesn’t report unconfirmed stories as fact.

Mainstream media confirmation tends to be my benchmark. Far too many death rumors have circulated on Twitter (Jeff Goldblum, for instance, and Johnny Depp), only to be revealed as hoaxes that well-meaning people were all too ready to amplify through the retweeting process.

Professional journalists, on the other hand, verify information—usually from multiple authoritative sources—before publishing it.

After today, however, I’m rethinking my policy. Not that I’ll retweet reports of celebrity deaths the instant I receive one. No, I’m rethinking my reliance on traditional mainstream media for validation of the report’s accuracy.

As I watch Tweetdeck update, I see Twitter teeming with reports that iconic Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot is not dead. There’s radio audio available of the singer himself confirming his continued presence among the living, along with stories in publications like The Globe and Mail noting that earlier reports of Lightfoot’s death was a hoax.

I did retweet the first message I saw, which came from a trusted friend. I retweeted it because of my friend’s source. It wasn’t Twitter. It was The Vancouver Sun, where the story appeared along with a Canwest News Service copyright notice. The story has since been removed.

It’s too easy to accuse the Sun of rushing the story in order to get a scoop. I suspect budget cuts have more to do with it. As newspaper budgets decline, fact checkers are among the first to be let go. Reporters are being laid off, too, creating a burden on the staff that remains, especially given the demand they already faced to produce more copy to accommodate the online world. Some reporters are expected to crank out three or four articles a day.

Or it could be that most of the Sun’s reporters are too busy covering the Olympics to verify information like this, which Lightfoot’s manager says began with a tweet originating in Ottawa.

The Sun isn’t the only media outlet to repeat the story. Evidently (according to Lightfoot himself in the audio interview referenced above), he was getting calls from people who heard it on the radio. (The radio stations were citing reports from “out west,” which may well have been the Sun.)

Comments left to the Sun’s report before it was taken down were savage. Here’s a sampling:

Gordon now task of phoning his family members to tell them he is not dead before they read a garbage story like this. Gord heard he was dead driving in his car.

Canwest is probably sending Kevin Newman over there to whack Gordon right now, to maintain the journalistic integrity of the story.

Unbelievable! If I did my job as poorly, I’d have been fired long ago.

Nice to know you guys are such a reliable source. Someone needs their arse kicked over there and then send an apology or at least flowers of condolences to Mr. Lightfoot.

There is one silver lining to the story: Lightfoot’s music is suddenly in rotation; he’s getting more airplay, he says, than he has in years.

But that’s little comfort to me. If I can’t trust the mainstream media to get this stuff right—and the wrong information is originating in The Crowd—who can I trust?

Content summary: Three Canadian PR grads launch the Coming Up PR podcast; FIR Interview with Marc Wright is coming; Dan York reports on Facebook, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; Eric Schwartzman reports from Los Angeles on social media and the US military; News That Fits: Kevin Smith’s Twitter kerfuffle with Southwest Airlines moves up a level, ‘Please Rob Me’ and location-based networks; Marko Minka reports from London on Jupik, a virtual world that eliminates barriers between kids from three Slavic nations; music from Soul of The River; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (26.2Mb, 65:26)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for February 18, 2010: A 65-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #527 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday February 22…

Content summary: Three Canadian PR grads launch the Coming Up PR podcast; FIR Interview with Marc Wright is coming; Dan York reports on Facebook, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; Eric Schwartzman reports from Los Angeles on social media and the US military; News That Fits: Kevin Smith’s Twitter kerfuffle with Southwest Airlines moves up a level, ‘Please Rob Me’ and location-based networks; Marko Minka reports from London on Jupik, a virtual world that eliminates barriers between kids from three Slavic nations; music from Soul of The River; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (26.2Mb, 65:26)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for February 18, 2010: A 65-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute – see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #527 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday February 22…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

© 2010 - visit the author for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.

If you have an interest in how the mainstream media is evolving and how it hopes to remain relevant to consumers, as I do, there is some new reporting and metrics on what 30 publishers in the USA, Canada, the UK and continental Europe are doing in the key areas of charging for online content or consumption and implementing paywalls and subscription services.

Alastair Bruce, content manager for MSN UK, has produced this analysis that considers bundling, micropayments, metered systems, freemium and subscription models, across consumer/specialist titles as well as national/local newspapers.

Charging for content

View more presentations from Alastair Bruce.

(Via Journalism.co.uk)

Related posts:

• Will news be free forever?
• Finding a viable pay-for-content model
• A greyscale view of chargeable mobile content
• Is this a future for the newspaper business?
• The news is dead; long live the news

© 2010 - visit the author for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.

I want to explore the growing malaise around business, in particular in widely-held, publicly traded corporations. I believe we have migrated — quite by accident — to a set of conditions such that in order to operate their corporations, senior executives are pressured toward a form of existence that is substantially inauthentic.

He also points out that big corporations have become much bigger over the years.

GM, the behemoth of 1960, pulled in revenues that would in today's dollars ($66 billion) put it behind Archer Daniels Midland, 2009's 27th placed company, way below number one Exxon Mobil with $442 billion...In fact, only ten companies in 1960 were bigger than regional power utility Pacific Gas and Electric (#176) in 2009. This meant that executives could have a relatively intimate relationship with their customers, who were mainly located in their company's home region or at least country.

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Finding a support system is not just helpful but can be critical to expanding your network and providing emotional support. Recently, my friend Linda asked if I would talk with the amazing women of C3G - an Atlanta suburb networking group - about using social media to support a job search. 

 I wanted to frame social media in a way that most women could relate to .. so Girlfriend, I built our conversation around .. shoes! Talking about social media should be fun .. don't you agree?

We spent some time discussing how social media tools can be used to create a digital bio that can represent you far better than a static paper resume. In the digital world there is a greater opportunity to leverage your special style that distinguishes you from others in the same field. 

We talked Jimmy Choos to help determine digital personality. Try it! 

• Question 1: What type of shoe fits your personality? 
• Question 2: How will your "shoe image" influence 4 elements of your digital style: Content Direction.Tonality. Expectations. Boundaries?

Thanks to everyone including @cbsongbird @irishgal11 @pmurrey Linda and Sharen for coordinating!

Using Social Media To Put Your Best Foot Forward For Your Job Search

View more presentations from Toby Bloomberg.

Good luck to all who are on the job search .. All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them. ~ Walt Disney

As an actor Clint found a director's call to 'Action' off putting. He was immediately reminded that he was an actor, acting and his performance suffered. Instead Clint calmly and quietly says things like, "OK, in your own time ..." or "when you are ready ..."

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This vid has been getting lots of hits on YouTube lately:

I checked out the original song it's based on. Turns out to be Dust in the Wind by Kansas. Here's one of several versions on YouTube:

I love this song, and the paradox that something so melancholy can also be inspiring (check the YouTube comments). Feeling our insignificance makes us feel... significant.

Also relates to stuff Harrison Owen has to say about death and grieving... something he relates to organisational life here:

Harrison Owen - Talk II - Leadership in a Self-Organizing World from Harold Shinsato on Vimeo.

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It's so often quoted as some kind of exemplar of innovation but I've never really felt comfortable with that bit of conventional wisdom. Mostly because the examples given strike me as pretty banal.

Jeff Stibel has a post relating to this at HBR: Gillette, Razor Blades and Creative Destruction. The gist of which is: is the latest overengineering of a razor really that innovative? Jeff draws a distinction between innovation (which he suggests is incremental) and creative destruction (rather more radical).

A lot of conversations that appear to be about innovation seem to me to be more about: how can big clumsy organisations get control of innovation to perpetuate their existence?

Mostly, I think rigid hierarchy is the number one innovation killer.

PS Jeff links to this Onion classic: Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

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I’ve decided, reluctantly, to simply delete them all.

I’m happy to connect with people whose names I don’t instantly recognize as long as I know what the link is. Of course, I can follow the link to each individual’s profile and see if I can tease the connection out of the information they’ve offered. On Facebook, I can see the friends we have in common to see if I can figure out the connection from there.

But I don’t want to.

The folks with whom I have connected took one simple extra step that made the decision easy for me: They added a note telling me who they were and why they wanted to connect. “I was in your workshop in Chicago last week and wanted to connect,” is really all it takes.

But the default request to become friends on Facebook doesn’t cut it, nor does the default “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”—unless it’s accompanied by the connection you’re able to indicate (“Mary Smith has indicated you are a person they’ve done business with at Acme”).

So if you tried to friend me or connect on LinkedIn and never heard back, and you’re still interested in the connection, try again just a bit more socially. Thanks for understanding.

The document is designed to enhance rather than replace the rules that may already exist in your organization. And it’s WOMMA’s intention to continually update the guide given the ongoing evolution of social media.

The guide covers the most commonly used social media channels, including blogs, Twitter and other microblogging tools, social network status updates, video and photo sharing sites and podcasts.

The microblogging hashtag recommendations could be problematic, given the number of similar proposals that have been introduced over the last year or so. (Here’s one proposal; here’s another, and another.) But if all WOMMA members adopt the tags the guide recommends, we may see some consistency emerge around how disclosure is handled on Twitter. The three tags listed in the guide include…

• #spon—Sponsored
• #paid—Paid
• #samp—Sample

WOMMA advises using the same tags on status updates through social networks should there be a character limit in the status update function.

The best advice in the guide—which applies to all of the channels covered—is to provide a link to a complete disclosure and relationships statement, although recommended language for such a statement isn’t included.

The document does recommend language for disclosure that is

clear and prominent. Language should be easily understood and unambiguous. Placement of the disclosure must be easily viewed and not hidden deep in the text or deep on the page. All disclosures should appear in a reasonable font size and color that is both reasable and noticeable to consumers.

For example, for personal and editorial blogs, WOMMA recommends disclosure like…

• I received ___ (product or sample) ___ from ___ (company name), or
• (Company name) ___ sent me ___ (product or sample) ___

WOMMA went through a deliberate process to develop the guide, including creating a blog, Living Ethics, that served as a forum for comments and questions.

I’ll update this post tomorrow when a link becomes available to the official WOMMA guide.

Oh, and by way of disclosure, I was offered a sneak peek at the guide by WOMMA and was not put under an embargo until tomorrow’s announcement.

One tiny detail made me laugh out loud. You probably know that quote about the future being here but not evenly distributed; I also think our acknowledgement of the speed of change is like that... we can go for months taking it all for granted, and then in a moment we're suddenly surprised at how far we've come in such a short space of time. For instance, when I suddenly recall that growing up, my parents had to book a telephone call to relations in America several days ahead, and it cost a fortune. And now I just take Skype chats for granted.

Anyhow, yesterday was one of those moments. It was triggered by seeing this button:

It appears on Hoist, a rather groovy collaboration space thingy for organisations. (Hoist is the brainchild of another Danish technowhizz, Jon Froda.)

Hoist comes with lots of simple apps to add functionality... so you can set up a space and very quickly organise loads of stuff. For instance, you can just click a button to add CRM.

Just a few years ago, all this functionality was only available to big corporations. Now anyone can have it. As I've said before, a lot of the best technology is easier to use if you're outside a corporate firewall.

And if dinosaur organisations aren't delivering? Well creating a new organisation to challenge them starts with just a click.

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Content summary: HAPPO is this Friday; FIR Interview with Marc Wright coming soon; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on the Year of the Tiger, and a Rio Tinto update; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: you really do need a Facebook page, confessions of a real-life Twitter squatter and HJ Heinz, Inc 500 social media use 2009, Southwest Airlines and Paperchase embroiled in Twitter kerfuffles, PRSA Advisory on expropriation of intellectual property; listener comment discussion; music from Omar Kadir; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (27Mb, 67:24)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for February 15, 2010: A 67-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute – see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #526 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday October 18…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

© 2010 - visit the author for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.

Posted via email from johnwinsor's posterous

Posted via email from johnwinsor's posterous

Posted via email from johnwinsor's posterous

Content summary: HAPPO is this Friday; FIR Interview with Marc Wright coming soon; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on the Year of the Tiger, and a Rio Tinto update; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: you really do need a Facebook page, confessions of a real-life Twitter squatter and HJ Heinz, Inc 500 social media use 2009, Southwest Airlines and Paperchase embroiled in Twitter kerfuffles, PRSA Advisory on expropriation of intellectual property; listener comment discussion; music from Omar Kadir; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (27Mb, 67:24)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.0

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for February 15, 2010: A 67-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #526 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday February 18…

I love business analogies. Connecting familiar, yet very different, concepts helps to bring about greater understanding to complicated topics. For example, I compare my marketing services of “Second Opinions” to that of a doctor. I’ve also compared the growth problems Starbucks is having to that of a garden needing weeding and pruning before it can achieve healthy growth again.

A credit union I know uses an interesting analogy to describe how they prep for future growth of opening new branches by saying, “Before we put up branches, we put down roots.” In other words, they lay down a foundation of community involvement long before they build a new branch of their credit union.

Interestingly, at the time I heard that branches/roots line, I was reading THE BUSINESS TREE written by Hank Moore. In this book, Hank makes the analogy of growing a business to growing a tree.

It’s a smart perspective and perfect for inclusion in my on-going series of business book summaries under 300 words.

A business is like a tree. The roots of a “business tree” symbolize the strategic focus and future direction the organization is designed to grow. The trunk stands for the entire body of knowledge a business possesses. Branches stand for each department within a business. Twigs represent outside suppliers. And leaves on each branch symbolize employees.

With proper nourishment, the “business tree” will achieve healthy growth by growing steadily, optimally, and profitably. With neglect, the “business tree” will never reach its potential and eventually die.

To “weather the forces of change” that naturally occur in the marketplace, the healthiest “business trees” have a management culture that takes the time “to understand how the company has grown” and analyzes “the relationship of each branch, twig, and leaf to the others.”

Healthy, nourished, and growing business trees always:

1. Give customers products/services they cannot get elsewhere

2. Offer products/services at reasonable prices

3. Have leaders whose can-do spirit seeps throughout the total organization

4. Create an employee culture based upon trust and empowerment

5. Respond to the always-shifting winds in the marketplace

6. Foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing between all departments

7. Realize success is not an entitlement, but rather the by-product of smart and ethical growth strategies

Just like all healthy trees grow, all healthy businesses will grow. Proper nourishment is the key and companies that “plan to grow and grow by the plan” will build strong roots with a dense trunk, creating a regenerative and expanding system of branches, twigs, and leaves.

WORD COUNT: 250

This odd assumption crossed my mind to me as I was reading last night. In the he book I was reading, the author argued that, thanks to the Internet, geography doesn’t matter any more. Under Newton’s law, this makes sense:

Action: The Internet has given us access to everybody everywhere all the time.
Reaction: Geography is no longer a factor in our interactions.

In truth, though, our complex and messy world does not abide by such clear-cut rules. Without question, the Net has certainly broken down geographic barriers beyond the extent to which the telephone (and the telegraph before it) did. But on the other hand, the geography has everything to do with the relationships I have established with people who belong to the same synagogue I do. My wife and I are still friends with parents of kids who went to school with our daughter. And I have strong ties to some of the people who work in stores where I shop (notably the local computer repair business).

It’s not likely I ever would have met any of these people online. And if I hear someone breaking into my house at 2 a.m., I expect I’ll get much better results calling the local police than I will jumping into an online law enforcement community.

The exaggerated death of marketing and advertising

The same book also argued that traditional marketing doesn’t work any more now that people are able to engage one another on the scales afforded by Facebook and Twitter. Yet many of the same people who decry the ineffectiveness of traditional marketing can’t wait to see the next “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercial. (Super Bowl Sunday represents the height of the “reverse-TiVo” phoenomenon, when people record the game so they can fast-forward through the football and watch just the commercials.) Denny’s drew 2 million people to its restaurants for their free Grand Slam breakfasts on the strength of its Super Bowl commercial. And who hasn’t heard of Las Vegas’ marketing campaign, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”?

Give it a few minutes and you can probably come up with a dozen advertising or marketing campaigns that captured your imagination—or at least your attention.

Good marketing and advertising are still good. The fact that they’re not as effective as they once were is not a sign that they don’t matter any more. Rather, the increased number of channels available means consumers have more options. A marketing campaign is no longer the sole source of information about a brand, product, service or company. Because we tend to simplify things, viewing them as black and white, many social media purists fail to see complexities and intricacies of the media landscape in which each piece plays its role and supports the others. In this environment, the role of marketing and advertising has changed more than it has diminished.

Multiple relevancies and the media ecosystem

Communicators and marketers have to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world of multiple relevancies. It’s not a zero-sum game. The rise of the Net doesn’t automatically signal a decline in the value of traditional channels.

This represents more than just an additive situation in which new media get piled onto old media. The media ecosystem that has evolved. In an ecosystem, the organisms within the environment interact with and are dependent on all the other habitat’s occupants. In the business-consumer ecosystem, advertising and marketing often create the awareness that fuels the conversation within the social media space.

That’s not to say organizations shouldn’t engage with customers and other stakeholders at an organic level. Companies need to already have a trusted presence, such as the one Dell has established with its cadre of tweeting communicators or the Comcast customer service team that finds and responds to online complaints. No marketing is required to initiate these conversations. But the organic presence of company representatives engaged in conversation with customers kicks into higher gear when an advertising or marketing campaign creates broad, simultaneous awareness of an issue about which customers want to talk.

Domino’s Pizza provides an excellent example of this ecosystem. The pizza chain’s decision to put its vulnerability on display by discussing consumer criticism in a series of television commercials gained widespread attention. Table Group founder and president Patrick Lencioni discusses the power of these ads in the current issue of BusinessWeek:

...the most fascinating application of volunterability is in marketing and advertising. It’s so rare that it packs a strong punch, as long as companies mean it. Go ahead and try to think of other corporate examples of humility and naked honesty. There aren’t many to choose from.

But advertising and marketing campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum and Domino’s—a company that learned the harsh reality of social media the hard way—was prepared for the conversation that ensued. On its Facebook page and on Twitter, the company engaged in conversation prompted by the advertising and marketing. The company added a four-minute video to YouTube that went into greater detail about its turnaround and invited comments.

Of course, Domino’s could have tackled the issue one customer at a time, but kick-starting the conversation with commercials and other ads makes far more sense. Domino’s—utterly clueless when it came to social media a short time ago—has come to understand the media ecosystem far better than many of the pundits who insist there is no longer room for traditional advertising and marketing.

BestBuy is another useful example. The consumer electronics retailer used traditional marekting and advertising techniques to build awareness of its Twelpforce, the thousands of employee volunteers responding to customer queries via Twitter. It would have been a much longer process to create that awareness at the organic level. (To date, the Twelpforce has sent nearly 23,000 tweets, virtually all of them responding to mostly technical questions about the consumer electronics products it sells.)

John January, senior vice president and executive creative director at Kansas City-based ad agency Sullivan Higdon & Sink (and co-host of the all-too-infrequent podcast, “American Copywriter”), told me a couple years ago that advertising is evolving into a gateway to social media activities. Based on this understanding of multiple relevancies, I would argue that Pepsi made a mistake reallocating every nickel of its Super Bowl ad budget to social media. How many more people would have participated in Pepsi’s social campaigns if they had learned about them on Super Bowl Sunday?

Smart marketers will figure out how to take advantage of the interdpendencies that exist in the media ecosystem. Figuring out how multiple relevancies can improve the outcomes of your social media efforts will take a lot more work than simply shrugging off traditional marketing and advertising as outdated techniques displaced by social media.

For outsiders, it may be heavy going but it's clearly got industry insiders excited (the President of the American Psychoanalytic Assocation calls it an intellectual feast and I agree).

It's been written in the context of some long-standing turf wars between competing models for psychotherapy - in this case the focus seems to be on comparing psychodynamic methods with cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT).

There are several reasons I found it fascinating. This is just a hasty summation and I'm conscious that I'm trying to simplify a fairly complex topic.

First, Shedler identifies a lot of painstaking research that has been done over the years to establish whether psychotherapy works, and what it is that works when it does. I think a lot of people dismiss therapy as hocus pocus and don't realise that there's reasonable evidence to the contrary.

Second, Shedler's work conveys to me that it's a very complex business measuring effectiveness in psychotherapy and it's very easy to misinterpret the evidence - for instance, when he looked at the apparent success of CBT. Researchers found that people practising apparently different therapeutic approaches often, probably unconsciosly, actually practised stuff from other schools. He suggests that a lot of the apparent success of CBT comes when its practioners deviate from the CBT rule book and implement what he argues are actual practices from the psychodynamic model.

He also points to interesting work showing how research into these areas is usually biassed by the researchers' personal preferences for treatment techniques.

We hear a lot about the importance of "evidence-based" approaches and I think it's important to see here just how easy it is to interpret or misinterpret the evidence.

Third, notwithstanding those caveats, I like seeing CBT put in it's place, even if I should be wary of turf wars. Shedler identifies what separates psychodynamic approaches:

The psychodynamic prototype emphasized unstructured, open-ended dialogue (e.g., discussion of fantasies and dreams); identifying recurring themes in the patient’s experience; linking the patient’s feelings and perceptions to past experiences; drawing attention to feelings regarded by the patient as unacceptable (e.g., anger, envy, excitement); pointing out defensive maneuvers; interpreting warded-off or unconscious wishes, feelings, or ideas; focusing on the therapy relationship as a topic of discussion; and drawing connections between the therapy relationship and other relationships.

The CBT prototype emphasized dialogue with a more specific focus, with the therapist structuring the interaction and introducing topics; the therapist functioning in a more didactic or teacher-like manner; the therapist offering explicit guidance or advice; discussion of the patient’s treatment goals; explanation of the rationale behind the treatment and techniques; focusing on the patient’s current life situation; focusing on cognitive themes such as thoughts and belief systems; and discussion of tasks or activities (“homework”) for the patient to attempt outside of therapy sessions.

(And I may have a further post about the whole business of exploring fantasy for what it is, versus the taken-for-granted future fixation of CBT and related models.)

Fourth, we're talking here about therapy, where one person tries to change one other person, or help one person change, usually where the changee has volunteered, to some degree or another to participate. It turns out that it's not a simple process.

You might think, then that changing whole organisations - where there's rather less voluntary participation - might be regarded as a bigger challenge. Yet it seems to me a lot of business writers and thinkers present it as just a matter of following a few basic steps.

I'm rather conscious of the challenges of evaluating complex things at the moment as I'm looking forward to being at this event in Melbourne in early May: Show me the Change.

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Today I was going to ask you to Be My Valentine. I was going to send you virtual hearts and chocolates to let you know how much I care. 

Oh sure .. The Suits are loosening their ties and opening their hearts beyond corporate talk. The playing field is leveled for small businesses and non profit organizations to tell their stories without huge budgets. Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn and more offer ways for people to reach out to people to express opinions and passions. 

This morning, as I was about to create my ode to you social media, I received an eMail from my friend Kate with a link to a New York Times article about the Victorian Era. How quaint is that I thought. It was more than quaint .. it was a dose of reality from circa 19th century. In the age before a tweet people were using newspapers ads to find love. You created an illusion that if it weren't for you dear social media we would not find ... love, happiness, business, friendships or even our newest, favorite restaurant in town.

 We don't need you social media to send Valentines. We don't need you social media to connect to people. We don't need you social media to build relationships or sell our products or find new friends. We don't need you social media to find the humanity in humans. 

No we don't need you dear social media but ..

Dear social media I must admit you have given us new ways to build bridges that sometimes span oceans of geography and opinion. 

You have given us new opportunities to meet people who might have never come into our worlds. 

You have given us avenues to tell the stories of the people who are the heart of our organizations and those who use our products and services. 

 You have encouraged us to be more of who we are in our transactions with customers and that courage to be ourselves often spills into our relationships with family and friends.

Perhaps this Victorian Valentine is just the right way to say Will You Be Mine? While reminding us that what you offer complements what we already have. 

One business story that seems to be a permanent feature in the news headlines around the world is the crisis confronting Toyota and the car maker’s product recalls.

The assault on Toyota’s reputation is undoubtedly a matter of grave concern to the company’s leadership, although some critical analysis of how Toyota is dealing with this suggests deep-seated Japanese business/cultural behaviours and traditions may not be helping Toyota at a time where transparency and nimble actions, among other things, on a global basis are needed.

Indeed, one current talking point is whether or not the company – the world’s largest car maker – can actually survive this global crisis, intact.

Of the many media and other reports I’ve been reading today, this analysis in yesterday’s Telegraph Motoring in the UK summarizes the picture for Toyota pretty well:

How is Toyota reassuring current and future customers that its products can be trusted?

The company’s US arm has decided to get its message across via a series of expensive television advertisements. But at the start of this week Toyota GB was refusing offers by at least one television station to appear on screen.

Could sales of new and used Toyotas be affected?

Yes. Glass’s, the motor-trade prices bible, admits motorists will now be "wary" of the brand. The price of a new Prius is set to drop by up to £2,000. Buyer caution could make Toyotas old and new more difficult to sell.

How badly is Toyota being damaged and can it recover?

The brand is being damaged, not because of the recall, but because of the way the company has handled it. It’s the car world’s biggest consumer debacle for a decade.

Brand Finance, a global brand consultancy, named Toyota the most valuable car brand until recently with a value of $27bn (£17.2bn) and a triple A rating.

It now values Toyota at $24bn with a single A rating and says: "A drop to $20bn or below is quite possible if the crisis is not brought under control… Terminal damage could be inflicted."

Related post:

• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #523: February 4, 2010 with discussion on Toyota’s recall crisis, starts at about 21:40.

© 2010 - visit the author for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.

He suggests that a future focus provides a good excuse to avoid dealing with the drudgery of reality:

Present possibilities are rarely as compelling as future visions... visionary journeys through the silvan forests to the land of milk and honey that lies beyond is much more fun that dealing with the harsh reality of the present.

Bonus link: Jack Ricchiuto wonders about using the future as a lens through which to better understand the present. I think I understand what he means but I'm not quite sure!

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It will be if you read Le Figaro, according to PaidContent UK as the French newspaper prepares to launch its new content-access service on Monday.

[…] instead of hoisting up a paywall around all its news content, Le Fig is going for a freemium model, charging only for extras like newsletters, a digital copy of its printed edition, social media features – and booking you a dinner table. The new features come in three tiers, but spokesperson Antoine Daccord tells paidContent:UK: “News will be free forever…”

It seems similar to the Financial Times’ model of free access to some content but you pay for what the FT considers as premium content. One difference the FT has is that you have to register after a certain number of accesses during a month, although some content is still free, notably news content.

The FT is going deeper with different approaches including a micropayment system as part of its plans to introduce day passes for content access, according to managing director Rob Grimshaw in an interview with Journalism.co.uk last month (and there’s additional commentary about the FT’s pricing model plans by Judith Townend).

All this is an entirely different model to that of The New York Times and News International (publisher of The Times and The Sun, among others) with their uncompromising you-pay-for-everything approach to getting at the content they publish online, including news.

Freemium works well if the FT is any indicator (I’m a paying subscriber, incidentally). But if people are willing to pay for access to all the content they want, including news, you might build a viable business if all your numbers add up.

Isn’t it that simple?

Related posts:

• Finding a viable pay-for-content model
• A greyscale view of chargeable mobile content
• Is this a future for the newspaper business?
• The news is dead; long live the news

© 2010 - visit the author for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.